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Men – the fairer sex?

October 11, 2014

Boy, nothing gets women piqued faster than telling them that men are the better-looking sex.

I had this conversation with two female friends recently, one of whom skeptically said to me, “Do you really believe that?”

Yes, I do, though perhaps not in the way they might think. Of course, the average woman – with her makeup and her Spanx – might be more gussied up than the average guy. But what I mean is that aesthetically, the best-looking man is better-looking than the best-looking woman, that I would take the Apollo Belvedere over the Venus de Milo any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Blame it on hormones. Male hormones give them bigger, hotter, lusher, more dangerous looks that read easily across a crowded room. Consider Colin Kaepernick, photographed by Bruce Weber on the cover of the new V Man magazine.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, he has a nose like a toucan, closely cropped hair and lots of tattoos, which displease some of the fashion police.

And yet – wow – those eyes, like Cognac in firelight; those long, thick lashes; that cut jawline (to go with that cut body). Ladies, ladies, do you think a woman could carry those off? ...

Michael Sam’s out (of the NFL) – for now

September 1, 2014

So in the end after all the hoopla, Michael Sam – the first openly gay player in the NFL (almost) – didn’t make the cut with the St. Louis Rams.

There are just so many ways to look at this. How convenient for the those who can sigh with relief and say, “Hey, we tried but he just wasn’t good enough.” How vindicating for the skeptics, who will say, “He was such a lightweight to begin with. The only reason he got a shot was because he’s gay.”

But how sad for those of us who’d like to see the Sams and the Tim Tebows of the world find their places in the NFL sun regardless of the imperfections of their (still considerable) skills and their sexual or religious persuasions.

Some day, we won’t have to judge people by anything but those skills and what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called “the content of their character” – which in Sam’s case seems to be class all the way, and which is more than you can say for the Ray Rices of the game. ...

Does this (pants) role make me look fat?

May 27, 2014

“I hate looksism,” I told my friends the other night at dinner, though truth be told, I’m as guilty of it as the next person.

I was reminded of this while reading an article in the May 24 edition of The New York Times’ Arts section titled, “What Matters More, the Singer’s Shape, or Her Sound?”, in which critics Anthony Tommasini and Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim spoke with reporter Michael Cooper about the brouhaha over Tara Erraught’s appearance – emphasis on the word “appearance” – as Octavian in the Glyndebourne music festival’s production of Richard Strauss’ “Der Rosenkavalier.”

For the uninitiated, “Der Rosenkavalier” is an easy-on–the-eyes-and -ears opera about an older woman learning to let go of her young lover. (It has a justly famous waltz that makes gorgeous use of sequential phrases, played by the orchestra’s string section, which George Balanchine used to cap off his glittering ballet “Vienna Waltzes.”)

The older woman, called the Marschallin, is one of those glamorous soprano roles, sung by the likes of Renee Fleming. At Glyndebourne, it was filled fetchingly by Kate Royal. The lover, Octavian, is a pants role in which a mezzo has to pretend to be a handsome youth. Erraught, who apparently sang gloriously, is a woman with a classic pear shape, which neither lends itself to pants nor suggests slim-hipped James Deans. And the (male) critics let her have it, signaling out her “puppy fat.”

Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim’s analysis got to the heart of the problem for those critics...

On ‘Words and Pictures’ – and words and pictures at The Lionheart Gallery

May 21, 2014

We’re all patterns in the universe, swimmer Daniel Reiner-Kahn reasons in my new novel “Water Music.” But sometimes it’s only when we’re at the end of a journey – maybe even life’s journey – that we understand how the strands came together. At other times, we recognize how the strands fit as they’re being woven.

Last week, I had an onstage conversation with film critic Marshall Fine at the Emelin Theatre in Mamaroneck, N.Y. about the relationship between language and images after a screening of “Words and Pictures,” which opens this Friday, May 23. It’s the story of a tempestuous rivalry between a prickly artist (Juliette Binoche) and a showoff writer (Clive Owen). Four days later, the writer (me) and the artist (David Hutchinson) came together more happily at a reading from “Water Music” at The Lionheart Gallery in Pound Ridge. After, I opened up the floor for a discussion about David’s paintings and drawings there, which are based on the perverse writings of Jean Genet.

First, a few words about “Words and Pictures,” a rather contrived but nonetheless absorbing movie about a love-hate relationship that sparks a contest between the artist’s students and the writer’s. It occurred to me after that the only arena in which men and women compete is the intellectual one.

‘Cinderella’ rises from the ashes

May 13, 2014

“In both darker and lighter versions of fairy tales, a woman’s suffering is demanded in exchange for true love and happily ever after,” Roxane Gay wrote in “The Marriage Plot” for the May 11 New York Times’ Week in Review section.

That may be, but not all fairy tales are created equal. Take “Cinderella," on Broadway in its Rodgers and Hammerstein incarnation. She’s not waiting for Prince Charming to rescue her. Rather she goes out to find the man who will appreciate her for who and what she really is.

Rossini’s operatic version, “La Cenerentola,”goes the Brothers Grimm and Rodgers and Hammerstein one better.

Is Christie Coriolanus?

February 1, 2014

Recently, a trio of screen stars has taken to the London stage to portray three of Shakepeare’s greatest characters – David Tennant (“Dr. Who”), Richard II; Jude Law, Henry V; and Tom Hiddleston (“Thor”), Coriolanus. Together they offer a kind of round robin of Shakespearean performance. On PBS, Tennant was a febrile Hamlet, a role that was played with lucent rationality on Broadway by Law, whose Henry V follows hard upon Hiddleston’s charismatic interpretation in PBS’ “The Hollow Crown.”

The three also offer lessons in leadership undone at a time in our history when the systemic failure of Alexandrian leadership – leadership from the front – continues to haunt us. What, for example, would the Bard make of New Jersey Gov. Chris Chrisite? Would he cast him as his blustery Roman general Coriolanus, a man whose skills are undermined – no, doomed – by his own arrogance and blindness to the will of the people? Read more

Scaling “Brokeback” again

January 26, 2014

When people ask me to give them the “elevator pitch” for my novel “Water Music,” I always say it’s “‘Brokeback Mountain’ meets ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’” – not because I would equate my book with those works but because it deals with gay lovers and issues of power and submission. Such is our world – with no time for anything – that we must reduce everything to labels, boxes and clichés.

Everyone who writes about gay men in love today owes a debt, however, to Annie Proulx’s sparely beautiful short story about two 1960s cowboys – shepherds really – whose love is doomed by an inability to communicate, by a closeted world and, in a sense, by the all-consuming nature of that love.

Now Proulx’s short story and Ang Lee’s equally haunting film version – starring the late Heath Ledger as Ennis Del Mar, the more constricted of the two lovers, and Jake Gyllenhaal as Jack Twist, the more expressive – have been turned into an opera by Charles Wuorinen, whose atonal style would seem pitch-perfect for Proulx’s Heminway-esque writing. (She contributed the libretto for the work, which premieres Jan. 28 and runs through Feb. 11 at the Teatro Real in Madrid.) Read more