Piece Of Art

Films have a strange way to foreshadow events. Or at least, the human mind thinks this may be so. No one knows how or why, but the visual component of having a permanent record of a fictional incident collides across time and space, infrequently, with the reality of an unforgettable disaster, tragedy, or assassination. Raymond Shaw ( Laurence Harvey ) in the sniper's nest. In the case of the death of John F. Kennedy, chroniclers, researchers, and theorists have often pointed to the intriguing timing and plot of one specific motion picture, The Manchurian Candidate . The 1962 film directed by John Frankenheimer, stars  Frank Sinatra (a close friend of JFK), Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh and Angela Lansbury.   The central plot of the film is that the son of a prominent, right-wing political family has been brainwashed to be an unwitting assassin for an international Communist conspiracy.  The Manchurian Candidate  was nationally released on...

Beware of the Ides of March Thinking About Being Tapped in Tampa? In modern times, the term Ides of March is best known as the date on which Julius Caesar was killed in 44 B.C. Caesar was stabbed (23 times) to death in the Roman Senate by a group of conspirators led by Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus. The group included 60 other co-conspirators according to Plutarch. According to Plutarch, a seer had foreseen that Caesar would be harmed not later than the Ides of March and on his way to the Theatre of Pompey (where he would be assassinated), Caesar met that seer and joked, "The ides of March have come," meaning to say that the prophecy had not been fulfilled, to which the seer replied "Ay, Caesar; but not gone." This meeting is famously dramatized in William Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar, when Caesar is warned by the soothsayer to "beware the Ides of March." Let me ponder, as a futurist, on this special date, one remote but possible ...