Taylor Swift at the 2023 MTV Video Music Awards. Courtesy iHeartRadioCA.
When Peggy Noonan, who was one of President Ronald Reagan’s speechwriters, writes in The Wall Street Journal, that Taylor Swift should be Time magazine’s Person of the Year, you know that Swift has captured the zeitgeist.
Read MoreMembers of the grieving Kennedy family at the Nov. 25, 1963, funeral of President John F. Kennedy in Washington, D.C., including from left, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, actor Peter Lawford (behind him), Caroline Kennedy, Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Jr. (saluting). The late Katonah, New York, resident John Shearer, who would go on to a career in photojournalism covering the civil rights movement among other events of the 1960s and ’70s, was just 17 when he took this photograph, despite being knocked down by the Secret Service. It is part of the exhibit “American Moments: John Shearer,” on view at The Capa Space in Yorktown Heights, New York, Dec. 9 through April 7.
Wednesday, Nov. 22 marks the 60th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas.
Those of a certain vintage can remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard the shocking news. In a sense, we’ve never recovered from it.
Read MorePresident Joe Biden, seen here at left with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Oct. 18, is pressing Netanyahu for a three-day pause to secure the release of hostages. Courtesy the White House.
All life is narrative. Control the narrative, and you control public perception and opinion.
At the moment, Israel and President Joe Biden seem to be losing the narrative thread. I say “seem,” because I haven’t interviewed everyone in the world on this, of course. But based on what’s making news, former President Donald J. Trump and the Palestinians seem to be winning the battle for hearts and minds, in large part because the battle is being waged not primarily with words but with images.
Read MoreGordon Parks’ 1946 photograph “American Gothic: Portrait of Government Cleaning Woman Ella Watson” plays off of Grant Wood’s iconic painting of the same name, stating in no uncertain terms that Watson’s contribution to American society was no less important or dignified than Wood’s dour White farmer and his wife. Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs.
Many years ago now, I interviewed Renaissance man Gordon Parks — photographer, composer, writer and film director (“Shaft”), a man whose photojournalism in the 1940s through ’70s captured both the civil rights movement and Hollywood.
Parks had grown up poor and Black in Kansas. I asked him what kept him from being embittered by poverty and racial prejudice. He said something that has stayed with me ever since and that I have thought about a lot in the past few weeks of war and other violence: “It’s easier to pick up a paintbrush than a gun.”
Read More“Achilles in the Court of King Lycomedes“ (marble, 240). Musée du Louvre. The Greeks’ greatest warrior and a king in his own right, Achilles is the main character and antihero of Homer’s “The Iliad.” His rage at his humiliation by Agamemnon, the Greek high king and commander, during a quarrel over women as war prizes sets in motion the catastrophic events of Homer’s “The Iliad,” about a critical moment in the Trojan War.
Do we believe in coincidence or predestination? Is everything happenstance or is it a case that there are no accidents (Freud) and that “God does not play dice with the universe” (Einstein)?
Is that universe sending us a message by releasing a new translation of Homer’s “The Iliad” by University of Pennsylvania classics professor Emily Wilson just as Hamas savagely attacked Israel and Israel responded with a ferocious declaration of war? It would seem so, for the ancient Greek epic has much to tell us about issues that speak to our time, not the least of which are overweening male pride and rage, power as a zero sum game and stupefyingly bad leadership.
Read MoreFormer Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy on the day he was elected speaker — Jan. 7, 2023 — after 15 attempts. Now he is gone after almost nine months, about the time it takes for a full-term pregnancy and with no baby to show for it. Courtesy the former Speaker.
The Oct. 3 ouster of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — a man brought down as much by his own ambition as by the hard right of the Republican Party and the united Democrats, who refused to oppose it — echoes ancient Greek and Shakespearean tragedies, to say nothing of the Hindu/Buddhist principle of karma and Randy Rainbow, who parodied McCarthy’s pathetic groveling for the speakership in a takeoff on “Les Misérables’” “Master of the House.”
Read MoreThis stained-glass window in the chapel of the former Academy of Our Lady of Good Counsel complex in White Plains, N.Y., contains a portrait of foundress Mother Mary Veronica as St. Veronica, the woman who wiped Jesus’ face with her veil on his road to Calvary and received the imprint of that anguished face on the cloth in return. Photograph by Georgette Gouveia.
When Katharine Hepburn made her first and only appearance at the Academy Awards as a somewhat old lady on April 2, 1974, she said, “I’m the living proof that a person can wait 41 years to be unselfish.”
I, now also a somewhat old lady, beat the great Kate by nine years, waiting 50 to be unselfish enough to attend my high school reunion on the former grounds of the Academy of Our Lady of Good Counsel in White Plains, N.Y.. A former classmate and friend who was on the reunion committee told me she had made it her mission to get me there and, not wanting to disappoint, again, I hustled my considerable butt to meet her at the chapel for the Mass that would begin our journey into the past.
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