Resurrection

April 16, 2017

As Lent ends and the Easter season begins today with Christians celebrating Jesus’ Resurrection, TV has once again presented its share of documentaries and films about Jesus’ Passion.

PBS’ “Last Days of Jesus” offers a detailed consideration of what it meant to die by crucifixion. I now no longer watch such scenes, just as I no longer watch horror movies. “Those of us who have more yesterdays than tomorrows,” as President Bill Clinton put it at the Democratic National Convention this past summer, prefer to dwell on happier circumstances. Not that we eschew suffering. Indeed, the surest way to prolong suffering is the refusal to endure it. It’s just that we no longer feel the need to go out of our way to create or endure needless suffering. ...

Of two worlds, belonging to neither

April 15, 2017

Often in life you do something without realizing until later what it meant. When I wrote “The Penalty for Holding” (May 10, Less Than Three Press) – the second novel in my series “The Games Men Play” – I had several goals in mind. Sexy male-male romance? Check. A story that continued the series’ themes of power, dominance and rivalry? Check. A novel about leadership, the workplace and how violence in the workplace spills into everyday life? Check, check and check.

What I hadn’t counted on – what I hadn’t foreseen – was the return of isolationism that ushered in Brexit and Trump and that provides the context for the novel’s theme of belonging. And belonging is one of the great themes of our time. Who are we and where do we belong? For the answer to the first will determine the second. Or at least it should. ...

By Jove! Trump as disrupter in chief

February 4, 2017

God created the world in seven days, the Bible tells us.

It took President Donald Trump only 14 to destroy it.

“Destroy” may be too strong a word. “Disturb,” “disrupt” are better choices. In one of the greatest games men play, politics, he is the lord of misrule, tweeting and executive-ordering us into a new world that may or may not be brave; terrifying the already traumatized “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” and insulting world leaders – with the exception of boy crush Vladimir “Rootin’ Tootin’” Putin – in equal stead.

Australians, refugees, refugees in Australia – is there anyone who has not been blasted by Trumpet? ...

‘America First’ – to serve others

January 22, 2017

I was a selfish child. Make that a self-centered child marked by a self-possession that I wore as a kind of armor against difficult parents and, later, other difficult authority figures. When I was 13, I had a teacher who told us students that selfishness was the root of all evil, the vice from which all others emanate. (She herself was a horror who should’ve practiced what she preached.)

But there is a fine line, I understood, between selfishness and self-possession in service of self-preservation. Recently, one of the columnists I edit wrote a piece in which he observed that there’s a reason that airlines ask you to put on your own oxygen mask first in case of an emergency: You cannot help others if you yourself are in harm’s way.

Which brings us to the new era – actually the cyclical era – of America First. ...

Bosom buddies – art and our breast fixation

November 4, 2016

Freud said there were no such things as accidents so it should come as no surprise that The New York Times would carry a front page story on women who decided against reconstruction after mastectomy – complete with fascinating photographs of their flat, scarred and, in many cases, beautifully tattooed chests – at a moment that The Frick Collection in Manhattan is exhibiting “Cagnacci’s ‘Repentant Magdalene’” (through Jan. 22).

As several Times posters noted, the newspaper would not be displaying those photos had the breast cancer survivors had one or both breasts. And that’s in part because of artists like Guido Cagnacci, the Italian Baroque master whose subjects included Cleopatra and who helped sexualize the female body and female breasts in particular. ...

My big, fat Greek odyssey, Part II: Hello, Thessaloniki

October 15, 2016

Our Times Journey group of Alexandrians no sooner got acclimated to Athens than it was time to bid the city – and its mesmerizing views of the Acropolis – a brief farewell and head north to Thessaloniki, about an hour’s flight, or the distance between New York and Washington D.C.

Named for a younger half-sister of Alexander the Great – his father, the crafty, lusty Philip II, having loved much but apparently none too well – Thessaloniki is the second largest city in Greece but the main one in the misty, highland Macedonian region that was once Philip’s kingdom.

At Athens International Airport, I scored a small, hefty, well-molded head of the Acropolis Museum Alexander in a gift shop, plus a free copy of the “Greece is….Thessaloniki” magazine, with an Andy Warhol Alexander on the cover, so I was pumped. ...

9/11 – a remembrance

September 11, 2016

It was a beautiful day: That’s what I remember thinking. And it’s probably the first thing anyone who is old enough to remember it will tell you about it.

Seamless sky, what pilots call severe clear. Had to be. The men who brought those buildings down didn’t know how to pilot a plane beyond flying straight, so conditions had to be optimal. The day before, Sept. 10, it had rained. The next was a different story.

It had started promisingly enough. I was working on a piece about the 75th anniversary of the Chrysler Building – the favorite landmark of New Yorkers – and had a 7:30 a.m. interview with William Ivey Long, costume designer for the Broadway hit “The Producers,” whose designs for the show included a gown inspired by the building’s diadem top. Long was a terrific interview but soon excused himself for what he said was a busy day. Delighted with his remarks, I wished him joy of it. ...