The DC Jazz Festival has named Willard Jenkins as its new artistic director, effective Jan. 5, 2015. The writer, producer, educator, and arts administrator has focused heavily on jazz throughout the course of his long and varied career.
OFTEN IN the larger Washington region, such as with the federal corruption case against former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell and wife Maureen, all politics is local, if not sometimes loco. Even when fatal decisions first emerge as systemic symptoms elsewhere, such as “the tragic failings” of veterans’ healthcare, the scandals ripple with massive ramifications and investigations back home.
Are you one of those loyal crime-fiction fans whose good taste and hard cash help propel each new offering from Michael Connelly , John Sandford and Lee Child onto the bestseller lists? There’s nothing wrong with that: They’re talented fellows. Still, after you’ve devoured five or 10 Harry Bosch , Lucas Davenport or Jack Reacher adventures, how much more are you likely to learn about the heroes’ mettle or their creators’ skill?
As self-help maxims go, Shakespeare’s “To thine own self be true” is hard to beat. But Meryl Streep came close, telling a college audience not long ago, “Whatever is weird about you, maybe it’s your strength.”
THE NEW YORKER magazine covers are often topical, of course, but for the two most recent issues, they have particularly tapped the power of polarization.
On Monday, the front of a new issue was graced by “First Thanksgiving,” a Bruce McCall painting that struck a cultural two-fer by spoofing Thanksgiving and satirizing the Redskins naming controversy — deriving pointed humor from the tension between its colonial-era Native Americans and its white, name-appropriating “hosts” in modern Washington jerseys.
Roberto Gomez Bolanos, the Mexican comedian who wrote and played the boy television character “El Chavo del Ocho” that defined a generation for millions of Latin American children, died Nov. 28 in Cancun. He was 85.
The crown jewel of tonight’s programming, “Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever” (Lifetime at 8 p.m.), which is reviewed by TV critic Hank Stuever on Page C1, has the Internet-famous feline with a displeased frown having, well, her worst Christmas ever. Aubrey Plaza of “Parks and Recreation” lends her voice to the exceedingly famous kitty.
The Grumpy Cat TV Christmas movie is here, about a year too late, and it’s as mindlessly soul-sucking as one might expect (hope?) a Grumpy Cat TV Christmas movie to be.
Nevertheless, people are going to watch it in droves and clog up your Twitter feed Saturday night with real-time, “Sharknado”-style responses to the movie in failed attempts to outwit one another, which won’t make you grumpy so much as it might make you clinically depressed. Believe me when I tell you the grumpiest cat in the world is no match for an unhappy TV critic on an off day.
FERGUSON, AS a news story, offers an editorial canvas as wide as the Mighty Mo. The nation’s cartoon commentators can steer to symbols of stark racial divisions, or tack toward the legal and logistic specifics of the case, rife as it with big questions and striking irregularities. The nation’s editorial artists are turning to iconic sights like the gateway Arch and the Martin Luther King Memorial, when not invoking Lady Liberty as both lowly scales-adjuster or victim herself laid low.
