Mick Jagger doesn't look so hot when he's not on stage. Some photographer caught him unawares outside a shop in freezing London, I think it was, and here was this wrinkled old man, Mick Jagger. I saw that in the New York Post, which, in its caption, also noted the disparity between the Jagger we know, and the Jagger we don't know.
We all, apparently, have a secret half that we conceal from the public? until we're exposed. When a Jewish prime minister says, "I am working on the assumption that in the future there will be no Jews in Gaza," what do I hear instead? I hear the echo of Wannsee: "We are working on the assumption that in the future there will be no Jews anywhere." (Please don't get me started on this.)
Montaigne (1533-1592) reminds us in "Of The Inconstancies of Our Actions" that yesterday's hero may well be today's coward.
Few of us are terrific when we're caught by surprise. I'm no Tom Cruise, either, before I shower and shave, and hey, neither is Tom Cruise, I'll bet.
If you missed Jagger, surely you noticed the mug shot of James Brown after this Godfather of Soul was nabbed for alleged spousal abuse. Brown came off as a surrogate for Saddam Hussein right after Saddam was yanked from his rat hole; and what a switch it is when we behold yet another emperor with no clothes.
By the way, is this true? Saddam has been busy all this time writing novels? Yo, I do the novels, Saddam. You do the barbarity.
Back to the theme that we all have something to hide. Even before we saw the not-ready-for-primetime side of James Brown, we had the oh-my-gawd sight of Nick Nolte when he was stopped for driving under the influence. We saw another side to this movie star. Which brings us to Mel Gibson - but in just a minute.
Some of us were required to read Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray when we were in high school. Here's what I remember, and briefly: Dorian Gray is a pretty boy and wants to remain that way forever, young and handsome. He sells his soul to keep him like that, but a picture painted of him keeps "growing" and shows him as he really is, ugly, corrupt and depraved.
Now we can talk about Mel Gibson.
I can't jump all over the guy because I don't know him, or his movie (timed to open Ash Wednesday, February 25), though given his family ties (parents increasingly on display as clear and present Holocaust deniers), perhaps this is one apple that didn't fall far from the tree. I may have spotted him in LA while Paramount was filming my book Indecent Proposal. We were doing lunch at Toscano's (I think it was) and someone gushed, "Oh, there's Julia Roberts, and oh, there's Mel Gibson. He's so cool!" That's lunch in Hollywood.
I do know this, the damage has already been done. We don't even need the movie. The mobs have been alerted. We can't underestimate the star power Gibson uses to bring on these mobs. Hey, Justin Timberlake says that moment with Janet Jackson was a "wardrobe malfunction," so that's what it was, right? He's a star, so he must be right. Gibson says that's the way it was 2,000 years ago, so that's the way it was. He's a star. (Routinely voted number one.) So it's okay to blame the Jews because who says so? Mel Gibson, and he's cool.
Gibson (as quoted in the New York Times) says we should share love "despite our differences." What differences, Mel? There weren't any, as of late, until you brought it up.
Gibson is guilty of setting a new standard for Jew-hatred, his own, which now goes out to the generations young and old with his undisputable Hollywood stamp and zip code.
What's the real crime? A Hollywood icon trading on his fame to yell "Christ-killer!" in a crowded theater. (More than 2,000 of them for the opening in this country alone.)
Supposedly he's making late scratches and additions to stop the bleeding. Will any of that make a difference in Europe and throughout the Arab world? I don't think so.
The prequel damage? One email exchange tells the story, wherein a leading American Catholic, who claimed that Gibson had the Pope's support, told an Israeli to "take a walk" when the Israeli noted that the Vatican itself came out and said no such blessing had been given. The Israeli asked for a retraction.
"Got your message," wrote back Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, "Take a walk."
Take a walk? That hasn't been part of our Christian-Jewish dialogue for quite some time. We were starting to make amends.
But open this door and all kinds of old goo comes gushing out. That much Gibson has already achieved, and that is near unforgivable.
It is tough being Jewish. We've already got a billion and a half Muslims at our throats, and now this business all over again?
Sometimes life is one bad hair day after another.
I'll let the theologians go back and forth on the Biblical merits of Mel's Passion, which, for the sake of authenticity, is supposedly spoken in the language of the times, but also comes with music. (I doubt that a Hollywood soundtrack came with those events of 2,000 years ago.) The finest book on (and against) anti-Semitism was written by a Catholic priest (I wish I could remember his name) who documented Jewish history year by year, pogrom by pogrom, and so much of it sparked by the Passion. Those were only plays. Imagine what a movie can do!
I caught a snippet of it on Fox's O'Reilly, when Gibson came on to lament that he was being crucified. (The Jews are doing it again, and to me!) I thought it odd (and a sign of deception) each time Gibson's eyeballs rolled into his head when he protested (too much) that his flashback movie was all about "love" and "forgiveness."
Thanks anyway, but I don't need Gibson's love or forgiveness.
As I was growing up, I don't remember being Jewish or my schoolmates and street buddies being Protestant or Catholic. We were too busy being friends.
My sister, Sarah, is just now coming around to finishing up the story of our escape from Toulouse, France. Sarah had a playmate, Incarnation, who idolized her and who would always come knocking - "Can Sarah come out to play?" The day Hitler's Vichy took over, Incarnation failed to show up. So Sarah went to call on her, and this is what her friend said: "I can't play with you because you're a dirty Jew."
Yes, that's what happens when you open that door.
Lenny Bruce called for a moratorium. Back at the Caf? Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, he said: "I confess, Morty did it, now let's move on." Lenny may have been the king of profanity on the surface, but, as I remember him, he was a man in pursuit of justice, a favorable reversal between skin and substance.
I don't know Mel Gibson's substance. He does have, the girls tell me, a pretty face. But I suspect that deep inside there is another Picture of Mel Gibson.
We all, apparently, have a secret half that we conceal from the public? until we're exposed. When a Jewish prime minister says, "I am working on the assumption that in the future there will be no Jews in Gaza," what do I hear instead? I hear the echo of Wannsee: "We are working on the assumption that in the future there will be no Jews anywhere." (Please don't get me started on this.)
Montaigne (1533-1592) reminds us in "Of The Inconstancies of Our Actions" that yesterday's hero may well be today's coward.
Few of us are terrific when we're caught by surprise. I'm no Tom Cruise, either, before I shower and shave, and hey, neither is Tom Cruise, I'll bet.
If you missed Jagger, surely you noticed the mug shot of James Brown after this Godfather of Soul was nabbed for alleged spousal abuse. Brown came off as a surrogate for Saddam Hussein right after Saddam was yanked from his rat hole; and what a switch it is when we behold yet another emperor with no clothes.
By the way, is this true? Saddam has been busy all this time writing novels? Yo, I do the novels, Saddam. You do the barbarity.
Back to the theme that we all have something to hide. Even before we saw the not-ready-for-primetime side of James Brown, we had the oh-my-gawd sight of Nick Nolte when he was stopped for driving under the influence. We saw another side to this movie star. Which brings us to Mel Gibson - but in just a minute.
Some of us were required to read Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray when we were in high school. Here's what I remember, and briefly: Dorian Gray is a pretty boy and wants to remain that way forever, young and handsome. He sells his soul to keep him like that, but a picture painted of him keeps "growing" and shows him as he really is, ugly, corrupt and depraved.
Now we can talk about Mel Gibson.
I can't jump all over the guy because I don't know him, or his movie (timed to open Ash Wednesday, February 25), though given his family ties (parents increasingly on display as clear and present Holocaust deniers), perhaps this is one apple that didn't fall far from the tree. I may have spotted him in LA while Paramount was filming my book Indecent Proposal. We were doing lunch at Toscano's (I think it was) and someone gushed, "Oh, there's Julia Roberts, and oh, there's Mel Gibson. He's so cool!" That's lunch in Hollywood.
I do know this, the damage has already been done. We don't even need the movie. The mobs have been alerted. We can't underestimate the star power Gibson uses to bring on these mobs. Hey, Justin Timberlake says that moment with Janet Jackson was a "wardrobe malfunction," so that's what it was, right? He's a star, so he must be right. Gibson says that's the way it was 2,000 years ago, so that's the way it was. He's a star. (Routinely voted number one.) So it's okay to blame the Jews because who says so? Mel Gibson, and he's cool.
Gibson (as quoted in the New York Times) says we should share love "despite our differences." What differences, Mel? There weren't any, as of late, until you brought it up.
Gibson is guilty of setting a new standard for Jew-hatred, his own, which now goes out to the generations young and old with his undisputable Hollywood stamp and zip code.
What's the real crime? A Hollywood icon trading on his fame to yell "Christ-killer!" in a crowded theater. (More than 2,000 of them for the opening in this country alone.)
Supposedly he's making late scratches and additions to stop the bleeding. Will any of that make a difference in Europe and throughout the Arab world? I don't think so.
The prequel damage? One email exchange tells the story, wherein a leading American Catholic, who claimed that Gibson had the Pope's support, told an Israeli to "take a walk" when the Israeli noted that the Vatican itself came out and said no such blessing had been given. The Israeli asked for a retraction.
"Got your message," wrote back Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, "Take a walk."
Take a walk? That hasn't been part of our Christian-Jewish dialogue for quite some time. We were starting to make amends.
But open this door and all kinds of old goo comes gushing out. That much Gibson has already achieved, and that is near unforgivable.
It is tough being Jewish. We've already got a billion and a half Muslims at our throats, and now this business all over again?
Sometimes life is one bad hair day after another.
I'll let the theologians go back and forth on the Biblical merits of Mel's Passion, which, for the sake of authenticity, is supposedly spoken in the language of the times, but also comes with music. (I doubt that a Hollywood soundtrack came with those events of 2,000 years ago.) The finest book on (and against) anti-Semitism was written by a Catholic priest (I wish I could remember his name) who documented Jewish history year by year, pogrom by pogrom, and so much of it sparked by the Passion. Those were only plays. Imagine what a movie can do!
I caught a snippet of it on Fox's O'Reilly, when Gibson came on to lament that he was being crucified. (The Jews are doing it again, and to me!) I thought it odd (and a sign of deception) each time Gibson's eyeballs rolled into his head when he protested (too much) that his flashback movie was all about "love" and "forgiveness."
Thanks anyway, but I don't need Gibson's love or forgiveness.
As I was growing up, I don't remember being Jewish or my schoolmates and street buddies being Protestant or Catholic. We were too busy being friends.
My sister, Sarah, is just now coming around to finishing up the story of our escape from Toulouse, France. Sarah had a playmate, Incarnation, who idolized her and who would always come knocking - "Can Sarah come out to play?" The day Hitler's Vichy took over, Incarnation failed to show up. So Sarah went to call on her, and this is what her friend said: "I can't play with you because you're a dirty Jew."
Yes, that's what happens when you open that door.
Lenny Bruce called for a moratorium. Back at the Caf? Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, he said: "I confess, Morty did it, now let's move on." Lenny may have been the king of profanity on the surface, but, as I remember him, he was a man in pursuit of justice, a favorable reversal between skin and substance.
I don't know Mel Gibson's substance. He does have, the girls tell me, a pretty face. But I suspect that deep inside there is another Picture of Mel Gibson.