When I think of O.J. Simpson, who died Wednesday, April 10 of prostate cancer at age 76 in Las Vegas, I think of the short story '“Appointment in Samarra,” often retold in novels. The protagonist encounters the figure of Death, and to elude the dreaded specter, runs off to Samarra, only to find Death waiting there at the place where they were destined to meet. You cannot escape fate — or the consequences of your actions, no matter what else you do in life. Such is the Hindu and Buddhist principle of karma.
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The Republicans fail to move on
As I returned a purchase in a shopping center on a particularly cold Sunday, an extraordinary thing occurred: A flock of pigeons came running up to me in the parking lot as if it were 1964, I were the Beatles and they were a gaggle of teenage girls. One “fan” even aggressively perched on my car roof.
For a moment I was reminded of Tippi Hedren in Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” but only for a moment. Extricating myself and securing the car, I returned the merchandise, wandering around the store a bit. Poor things, I thought of the birds. They were probably only looking for some crumbs. But with several eateries in the center, I was sure they wouldn’t go hungry.
When I returned to the parking lot, the birds were gathered around another car and driver, with a lot more of them perched on his roof. (Adulation is so fickle.) That’s when I realized in Sherlock Holmesian fashion that they were not looking just for food. They had figured out that each new car that arrived offered momentary warmth against a cold, mostly open space.
Nature is so smart. Human nature, not so much. Witness, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Exhibit A — the Republican caucuses and primaries.
Read MoreThe Taylor Swifting of the world
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 MoreThe paintbrush and the gun
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 MoreA gaze of their own: women rethinking art history
In the late-20th and early-21st centuries, an age of cultural appropriation that has seen minorities adapt and reinvent the masterpieces of Western civilization, women artists have reasserted the so-called “female gaze,” not only by creating wholly original works but by reclaiming the art historical canon, either interpolating themselves and women arts leaders into iterations of great paintings or imagining men from a woman’s perspective.
A new exhibit at the Lehman College Art Gallery explores this subject through the prism of 19th-century French art.
Read MoreTo live and die in L..A. -- Greta Gerwig's 'Barbie'
“Barbie” — the billion-dollar blockbuster that has fashion and interior designers thinking pink and movie theaters seeing green (as in dollars) — is a rather deceptive movie. It starts out as a kind of beach blanket battle-of-the-sexes rom-com that quickly builds into a poignant dramedy of what it means not to be a woman or a man but human.
Read MoreMoving forward: the endurance of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
What would Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis make of J. Randy Taraborrelli’s “Jackie: Public, Private, Secret” (St. Martin’s Press, $35, 439 pages) — out Tuesday, July 18, 10 days before what would’ve been her 94th birthday?
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