Blog

The transgendered nature of art

April 30, 2015

Bruce Jenner’s transition to womanhood and the profile of transgendered model Andreja Pejić in May Vogue have got me thinking about the transgendered nature of art.

Consider Thomas Hardy – whose “Far From the Madding Crowd” has been made into a new film starring Carey Mulligan, the sensual Matthias Schoenaerts and the estimable Michael Sheen. For him to create some of fiction’s greatest romantic heroines, and heroes, he had to understand a woman’s mind and heart as well as that of a man. For George Balanchine to create some of ballet’s finest works, he had to know a woman’s body as intimately as a man’s.

Art has also long been preoccupied with hermaphroditism – the condition of having the physical attributes of both sexes. In ancient Greek mythology, Hermaphroditus – son of Hermes, the messenger god, and Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty – was a beautiful youth beloved by the water nymph Salmacis, who embraced him against his will in her pool and prayed that the two would become one. ...

The ‘Pretty Woman’ theory of customer relations

April 1, 2015

The hullabaloo over the new crop of RFRAs (Religious Freedom Reformation Acts) raises an interesting question about what we owe ourselves and others in the workplace, a subject that figures prominently in “The Penalty for Holding,” the upcoming second novel in my series “The Games Men Play.”

Granted, the workplace there is the NFL, a far more specialized and glamorous environment than most of us will ever know. But whether you work at the local Starbucks or for an NFL team, the questions ignited by the RFRA debate in Indiana and Arkansas remain the same: To what extent may I impose my personal beliefs on others? To what extent may I find offense in theirs?

The answers are actually simpler than you would think if you keep one thing in mind: A business or a corporation is a public entity, emphasis on the word “public.” If someone plunks down a Ulysses S. Grant on the counter of my bake shop, I owe that person $50 worth of baked goods. Period.

Of course, I should present the baked goods with a smile and a good attitude. I might even offer more in the way of sample cookies on the counter. But I must in any event give value for value, regardless of what I perceived the person to be.

Otherwise, we would spend our days in knots about each person we encounter. Chances are very few people are going to share the same values you hold. ...

Tom Brady, the Roger Federer of football (in more ways than one)

March 2, 2015

It’s football’s off-season. Let the games begin.

First, it was something called “Aaron Rodgers Week” on the NFL Network. (Is that like “Rita Hayworth Week” on Movies.com?). So this engendered an article on whether Tom Brady or Andrew Luck is a better quarterback than Rodgers.

Really, I’m no fan of Brady, but you have to give it to him for leading the New England Patriots to four Super Bowl titles. He’s the greatest quarterback in the game today, just as Roger Federer’s 17 Grand Slam titles make him the greatest tennis player today. Yes, there are other measures of an athlete, and anyone can beat the best on any given day. But it’s hard to argue with the Super Bowl and the Slams as the measures of the players in football and tennis respectively. ...

A-Rod, Ray Rice and the game of ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’

February 18, 2015

Cue Connie Francis. In this “the winter of our discontent” – the season of 90-inch snowfalls, Southern ice, broken water pipes and equally shattered hearts – the lament of the woman with the catch in her voice and a torch-song life to match would seem most appropriate.

Really, it’s as if we’re all stuck in “Dr. Zhivago” – without Omar Sharif.

In this “region of ice” – thank you, Joyce Carol Oates – everyone is sorry. Ray Rice is sorry for cold-cocking his then wife-to-be, Janay Palmer, issuing an apology almost a year to the date of his Valentine’s Day (image) Massacre. (Could the holiday of hearts have been the inspiration?)

Hot on Ra-Ri’s Achilles heels comes A-Rod and his handwritten apology for steroid abuse and – the thing that always does you in more than the transgression itself – lying about it.

And speaking of lying, opprobrium and ridicule continue to snow down on disgraced anchorman Brian Williams for aggrandizing his role in the Iraq War – although Jerry Seinfeld’s line on the SNL 40th anniversary show about Williams being part of the original “Saturday Night Live” cast was one of the subtler digs. The irony is that the talk show-minded Williams probably counted as friends many of the people now making fun at his expense. Ouch.

Let’s just say Williams should be glad that he’s not A-Rod. The disdain heaped on him by The New York Times’ columnist Tyler Kepner is typical of the way in which the once and apparently future New York Yankee is now viewed. There are two schools of thought on this. One says that justice is justice and compassion, like patience, has its limits, particularly as said limited patience is often accompanied by the sneaking suspicion that the contrite are not all that contrite but actually seeking something less noble than the epic redemption found in Joseph Conrad’s “Lord Jim,” say like a return to the Yanks or the NFL. (It reminds you of the moment in “Gone With the Wind” in which Rhett Butler tells Scarlett O’Hara that she’s like the thief who isn’t sorry for what he’s done but is awfully sorry he got caught.) ...

Sports as spice

January 7, 2015

I had to laugh when I saw the title of Richard Sandomir’s essay in the Jan. 4 edition of The New York Times: “The Best Sports Films Often Are Not.”

One of the things people ask about my upcoming novel “The Penalty for Holding” – once they absorb that it’s about a gay, biracial quarterback’s search for identity, acceptance, success and love amid the brutal beauty of the NFL – is, How much football is there? Trust me, they’re not hoping that the answer is “a whole lot.”

And that’s as it should be. For a sports story to succeed, sports have to secondary to the story. There’s a practical reason for this. No specialty tale – which is what any sports story is – can rely on sports fans alone. It must also engage those who are mildly intrigued, those who’d enjoy any good story but don’t necessarily know a lot about sports. And to do that the story can’t be too much inside baseball. Sports are the spice. The narrative is the meat. ...

An ‘Interview’ you can skip

December 26, 2014

On Christmas Day, some Americans did what they felt was their civic duty and went to see the controversial new film “The Interview,” which Sony decided to release in select independent theaters and online after being chastised by both liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans – led by President Barack Obama – for initially caving to North Korea and pulling the plug on the Seth Rogin-James Franco starrer, which makes copious fun of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.

You’ll recall that Sony even had embarrassing emails hacked by cyber-terrorists, and North Korea, professing shock – shock, I tell you – that the U.S. would accuse it of such a crime, offered to conduct a joint investigation of the incident.

Which is a bit like O.J. Simpson saying he was going to search for ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman’s killer.

Uh-huh. Moving on, I was among those Americans who spent part of Christmas Day watching the movie with my family at home – thanks to the technical wizardry of my nephew James, take a bow – and may I say that it was two hours of my life that I will never have back.

It’s not that “The Interview” is a terrible movie. It’s just that it’s a terribly mediocre movie that belongs to a long line of turkeys about bumbling Americans mixed up in international intrigue. (“Ishtar,” anyone?) It’s also a road picture and a bro picture, which means there’s lots of 12-year-old-boy humor about urinating, defecating, anal sex, private parts, hot girls, gays, homophobia, drugs, vomiting, breaking wind, margaritas and Katy Perry. I think Kim Jong-un, American pop culture junkie, should screen it, because really he has nothing to worry about. It’s the Columbia J School that should be offended.

At its heart, “The Interview” is the story of the twisted, symbiotic relationship that exists between the celebrated and those who chase them, the so-called journalists. Franco, playing with type, is Dave Skylark, the airheaded host of a magazine show like “Entertainment Tonight” and “Access Hollywood.” It’s a measure of the filmmakers’ real fears that while Rogin and co-director Evan Goldberg apparently never worried enough about Kim Jong-un’s response to change his name or his country, they were quick to fictionalize Franco’s character and show so as not to offend the very programs they’d be using to hawk their pix.

‘The Inteview’ and our obsession with ‘authenticity’

December 19, 2014

So Sony has put the kibosh on “Interview,” the Seth Rogan/Evan Goldberg comedy about bungling American journos attempting to assassinate Kim Jong-un – which, let’s face it, is a lose, lose, lose situation for everyone.

“The bad guys won,” inveterate tweeter Mia Farrow pronounced. But whom is she kidding? No movie theater is going to show a flick that audience members sit through looking over their shoulders – as The Christian Science Monitor shrewdly observes.

Trust me, I know. I went to see “The Dark Knight Rises” with my pal novelist Barbara Nachman shortly after a gunman opened fire at a screening of the movie in a Colorado theater. We spent most of the movie watching every young man who came in or, especially, left and came back. That’s not entertainment.

As with any complex story involving hacking, terrorist threats in a post-9/11 world, freedom of speech and corporate profits, there’s another side to “The Interview” debacle.

What if Rogan and company had simply made the North Korean dictator a fictional character?

Charlie Chaplin did it in “The Great Dictator” (1940), playing both a Jewish everyman through which we see the disastrous circumstances that plunged Europe into two world wars and a certain dictator, one Adenoid Hynkel of Tomainia. Of course, it was Hitler right down to his little moustache. (How any woman ever found him attractive is beyond me.) Of course, it stirred up antifascist sentiments at the time America was not yet in the fight – which was just what Chaplin wanted to do. Still, Chaplin could say, “Any resemblance to persons living or dead,” etc. ...