Wine bars have quietly become big business in Miami. Among the better of our relatively recent arrivals are D’Vine District Restaurant and Wine Bar in the Design District, Vine Wine Shop on Biscayne Boulevard and 77th Street, and the cozy Xtreme Cafe in South Beach (which misleadingly sounds like a…
A night of drinking in Coconut Grove can feel like some kind of extreme sports competition. The rickshaw dudes pop wheelies, testing their passengers’ fluid-retention skills. Down the street at the Tavern, University of Miami students seem to be competing to see how many people can fit into a bar…
Continuing the tradition of bringing the world’s performers to its stages, the Carnival Center presents Yin Mei in Nomad: The River. A dancer and choreographer borne of China’s cultural revolution, Yin Mei combines traditional Asian performance and Western contemporary dance theater to visually re-create societal themes. She has won many…
Eating your way through the creations served in Miami’s restaurants is a lot like picking wild berries. Sometimes what you’re faced with are immature and not ready for consumption. Sometimes they’re plain rotten. Sometimes — Ouch! — they’re surrounded by thorns; just being near them hurts. But other times they’re…
In 1968 it was a movie. In 2001 it became a musical. Now it’s a movie again? Yes, and there’s actually good reason to return The Producers to the screen. The original film, though intermittently inspired, was slow and often boring, and its homophobic, misogynistic humor no longer plays well,…
The gifted Irish novelist and filmmaker Neil Jordan (The Crying Game, Michael Collins) says that his overriding concern is “how individuals work with what they’ve been given.” Case in point: Jordan’s new feature, Breakfast on Pluto. This bittersweet, gender-bending drama takes a page from Candide — its beleaguered hero, too,…
Philadelphia’s The Roots have broken down hip-hop stereotypes. They may not have been the first hip-hop band to employ live instrumentation — that distinction belongs to Stetsasonic — but they certainly made the idea palpable for mainstream audiences. Since emerging in the early Nineties, they have had a long, prosperous…
A few turntablists aside, DJing has always been as much about what you play as how you play it. And Diplo, perhaps more than any other DJ from this decade, is adept at locating the sonic correlations between culturally disparate sounds. His sets effortlessly oscillate between Rio de Janeiro’s favela…
I need variety, which is why I hog the headphones at the Putumayo World Music sampler stand every time I go to Wild Oats supermarket. This year, while everyone else in the store was contemplating low-fat tofu, I was daydreaming of nibbling Serrano ham tapas and sipping red wine in…
My undying love for Dudes with Guitars Who Think Way Too Much About Girls is now a critical liability, for rockism has recently become grounds for public execution. I can only hope my final hours (before I am decapitated by Missy Elliott) are as graceful, poignant, and unabashedly melodramatic as…
This year major festivals like Austin City Limits, Bonnaroo, and the revived Lollapalooza mashed up alt-rock mainstays with a colorful new breed of improv road warriors. These groups share a noncommercial, tour-intensive work ethic that assures grassroots devotion across the country. So get hip, kid. Sound Tribe Sector 9, Artifact…
Exploration and expansion in urban music marked 2005. Against a Matrix-like background of corporate-controlled radio and TV, iPod-enabled consumers demanded more musical choices. For every lackluster commercial effort (like 50 Cent’s The Massacre), 50 superior underground albums stepped up. Meanwhile the global fusion trend developing over the past decade reaped…
These strays are too artsy and meandering for No Dep, too rootsy and plainspoken for Pitchfork, and too concise for the hippies at Relix. My Morning Jacket, Z (ATO): Sure, the lyrics are stupid (burning kittens and babies in blenders, anyone?), and the pub-rock/Hawaii 5-0/carnival-in-Hell middle stretch of the record…
This year’s crop of electronic music seemed more concerned with looking in than locking in. For the most part top producers haven’t seemed as worried about innovation as connotation. It’s been a year of cobbling together old genres rather than molding new ones, and there’s a definite trend toward composing…
Hate it or love it, reggaeton was everywhere in 2005. It became the format for dozens of Latin radio stations across the nation. Two of its biggest stars — Tego Calderon and Daddy Yankee — were the first in the genre to sign with major labels. This year reggaeton faced…
Hip-Hop Hors D’oeuvres There were at least a couple of classic albums (Beanie Sigel’s The B. Coming and Kanye West’s Late Registration) and a slew of great ones (Madlib’s The Further Adventures of Lord Quas, Young Jeezy’s Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101, and The Game’s The Documentary) in 2005…
A Day and Forever: Ali Prosch makes a jaw-dropping statement with this multimedia exhibition sprinkled with witty doses of flair and drama that portray the lifestyles of the young and fabulously dissolute. Trafficking in hyperbeautiful imagery, at times evocatively laced with autobiographical commentary, Prosch blithely chops Miami’s decadent run-amok egos…
Stepping inside Wynwood’s new Hardcore Art Contemporary Space (HACS), one is instantly surprised by an image of a visibly aroused Jesus Christ lounging atop a tattered red upholstered Rococo settee. The piece, titled Ying & Yang, superimposes a lurid thorn-crowned mug shot of Christ, culled from a Cuban grocery store…
Exits and Entrances: When Athol Fugard is in town, he has the well-earned ability to suck the air out of any other plays competing with him on any given night. This snapshot of the mid-twentieth-century crossroads of change in South Africa is no exception. Although the playwright-icon isn’t here in…
Bird Brains Can be enormous, you cuckoo: Just a note to thank you for including my recent winter vacation plans in your column “The Bitch” (December 22). The visit was, sadly, short-lived, but still just the thing I needed to lift my spirits. Ever heard of Seasonal Affected Disorder, commonly…
Stephen Kopczynski’s encounter with homelessness began this past summer as an exercise in self-actualization. The 49-year-old native New Yorker who works in Miami-Dade and Broward counties as an air conditioner repairman enrolled in a class at The Forum, the most recent incarnation of the mind-control indoctrination cult once called est…
On a recent Tuesday evening, Moshe Tendler, an influential Orthodox rabbi and Yeshiva University biology professor, ambled onto the stage at Kovens Conference Center in North Miami. A stately figure with a wispy white beard and heavy glasses, he surveyed the 300-strong crowd of scientists and intellectuals — most clad…
