Anna Netrebko as Leonora in Giuseppe Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” in 2014 at the Salzburg Festival, where she first achieved international acclaim. Photograph by Christian Michelides.
In Bernard Taper’s biography of Russian-American choreographer George Balanchine, he describes a moment of deprivation during the Russian Revolution that haunts me still: A horse drops dead in the street, and the starving populace rushes out to carve it up.
Historically, the Russian people have careened from one kind of oppression to another, from the czars to the Soviets, whose empire Vladimir Putin is now seeking to reconstitute with his brutal siege of Ukraine.
Read MoreThe official portrait of President Volodymyr Zelensky — the defiant, courageous face of Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion. Courtesy the Ukrainian government.
“He is ‘pretty smart,’ Mr. Trump said on Wednesday at a Florida fundraiser, assessing the impending invasion like a real estate deal. ‘He’s taken over a country for $2 worth of sanctions,’ he said, ‘taking over a country — really a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people — and just walking right in.’”
That was former President Donald J. Trump —a former president of the United States of America —in a New York Times article praising Russian President Vladimir Putin in the run-up to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which the former KGB agent instigated to. assuage his ego and bolster his notion of former Soviet glory.
Read MoreOn Jan. 7, 2021, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana posted this picture with these words: “Took these pictures of the damage caused by insurrectionists who stormed our nation’s Capitol yesterday. The physical signs of this siege will only be temporary, and the People’s House still stands. God Bless America.” A year later, many of his fellow Republicans are spinning the event in a different way.
New year, same old crap. Tomorrow marks the Feast of the Epiphany or Three Kings — otherwise known as the Twelfth Day of Christmas or Twelfth Night — a time that should be one of revelry as the Christmas season reaches its climax. Instead it’s also the first anniversary of the insurrection of the Capitol, which from the get-go has been recast as a tourist excursion run amok, a peaceful protest infiltrated by Antifa and bungled by Capitol Police, a riot exploited by Democrats — anything and everything but what it was, which was an assault on the Capitol and our democracy by Trump supporters who bought into yet another fiction, that he had been robbed of victory in his bid for re-election.
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Read MoreEdvard Munch’s “Vampire” (1895), oil on canvas. Munch Museum. Anne Rice’s romantic vampires and witches have resonated with late-20th and early-21st century readers and writers.
It’s a cliché in publishing that writers who are popular aren’t good and vice versa. There’s a bit of sour grapes to that notion, as if it were a consolation for those acclaimed writers who’ve never found a wide audience.
Certainly, there were those critics who pooh-poohed Anne Rice — who died Saturday, Dec. 11, at age 80 of complications from a stroke . Her prose could be purple, while her plots at times alternated between the meandering and the static. But Rice, whose 30 novels embraced the sacred (Jesus) and the profane (an S and M Sleeping Beauty trilogy, an escapist “Exit to Eden”) would create one of the most seminal novels, “Interview With the Vampire,” and characters, Lestat de Lioncourt, in American literature. By her own standards, her best-selling books (more than 150 million copies sold) were great, because they resonated with the tectonic shifts in our perceptions of gender, sexuality and race in the second half of the 20th century.
Read MoreThomas Savage’s novel “The Power of the Dog,” now a major motion picture, asks us where real power lies — in brute force or the brains to overcome it?
Like John Ford’s “The Searchers,” the Kirk Douglas movie “Lonely Are the Brave, “Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove,” Jim Harrison’s :Legends of the Fall” and Cormac McCarthy’s “The Crossing,” Thomas Savage’s novel “The Power of the Dog” — now an acclaimed film starring Benedict Cumberbatch — centers on the American archetype of the solitary, unvarnished cowboy, the outsider who remains true to his wild nature even as civilization encroaches upon and eclipses him.
Read MoreChinese doubles player Peng Shuai at the 2016 US Open. Her disappearance and then sudden “happy” reappearance after leveling a #MeToo accusation against a former Chinese official has sparked international outrage. Photograph by si.robi
When the history of the early decades of this century is written 100 years from now, it will be recorded as a time when those who had power were challenged by those who did not.
Read MoreNovak Djokovic defeats Jo-Wilfried Tsonga in the semifinals of the 2011 Wimbledon to become the No. 1-ranked men’s player, a position he has held — on and off, mostly on — for 10 years. Sourcehttps://www.flickr.com/photos/43555660@N00/5935139063/
On Monday, Aug. 30, Novak Djokovic begins his quest to win the US Open and thus the Grand Slam — holding all four Slams (including the Australian and French Opens and Wimbledon) in one calendar year. Only two other men have done it (Don Budge in 1938 and Rod Laver in ’62 and ’69), along with three women (Maureen Connelly in ’53, Margaret Court in ’70 and Steffi Graf in 1988, the year after Djokovic was born). Graf remains the only person to win the Golden Slam — the Grand Slam and the Olympic gold medal that year.
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