By James A. Lyons
By arming the rebels, we're aiding al Qaeda
Just when Bubba and the missus get an opportunity to dispense experience unique in American politics, and could tutor two old friends who need help, they retire to the companionable solitude of the family hearth to reflect on the Scriptures and to bask in the piety of each other.
Washington is a one-industry town. The nation's capital has wonderful art museums, concerts and theaters, but they're only supplements to the big story playing out on the front pages - always the government.
The Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald story is well-known. As writer Budd Schulberg observed, its romantic legend is so uniquely American in all its strengths and weaknesses that it is little wonder that the life and work became mythologized.
"The Great Gatsby” is the Hope Diamond of American cinema — priceless, enviable, impossibly tacky and bad, bad luck. Many filmmakers have stepped up to the challenge of capturing its quintessentially American story of self-invention, and just about all have whiffed memorably and expensively. Australian director Baz Luhrmann has broken the curse.
The Cannes Film Festival has an American flavor this year, with a Hollywood icon heading the jury and a quintessential U.S. literary figure opening the event: The Great Gatsby.
Highlights of Hollywood's 2013 schedule (release dates are subject to change):
Listening to Supreme Court justices question lawyers doesn't sound like the stuff of great theater. But somehow it is _ in the hands of one of the city's most acclaimed companies.
This biographical triptych shines a spotlight on the lesser-known lives of three exceptional women in the 20th century. All of them swam in the wake of people far more famous than they were. Esther Murphy's brother Gerald and his wife, Sara, not only inspired some of their friend F. Scott Fitzgerald's more memorable characters, but came to typify the phrase "Living well is the best revenge."
The paper conservator's scalpel picked at the red and black specks, flicking away the fly droppings that had stained Ingrid Bergman's letter to Ernest Hemingway.
The paper conservator's scalpel picked at the red and black specks, flicking away the fly droppings that had stained Ingrid Bergman's letter to Ernest Hemingway.
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously claimed there are no second acts in American life. He never met Lt. Col. Oliver North.
The low-tech Broadway romance "Once" won a leading four Drama Desk Awards on Sunday, including the prize for best musical, adding to its recent haul of theater prizes and giving it momentum ahead of next weekend's Tony Awards.
The low-tech Broadway romance "Once" won a leading four Drama Desk Awards on Sunday, including the prize for best musical, adding to its recent haul of theater prizes and giving it momentum ahead of next weekend's Tony Awards.
In addition to writing in every imaginable medium from poetry to fiction to librettos, Gertrude Stein is well-known for nurturing the careers of some of America's biggest writers. Less well-known is Stein's impact on the visual arts.
Washington Times film critic Adam Mazmanian sifts through the year's releases and offer his 10 favorite movies of 2011.
Fitzgerald wrote, "It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced — or seemed to face — the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor."
