The best (and cheapest) gift you can give your family this year is time, so call up your mom and bring her to see Pedro Almodvar’s Academy Award-winning movie All About My Mother. Presented by the Classic/Foreign Film Discussion Group, the film traces a mother’s journey to Barcelona to work…
At six feet six inches tall, Olympic gold medalist Gary Hall Jr. is difficult not to notice. Whether he’s donning hipster black-rimmed glasses or mirrored goggles, the record-breaking freestyler commands attention both on the starting blocks and behind a podium. Since being diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 1999, Hall…
A big room full of activity, money changing hands, and hordes of snakes, lizards, and other creepy-crawlies. Where are you? No, not city hall. You’re at Repticon, a good place to be whether you’re an aficionado of the scaled set or a neophyte who still thinks snakes are slimy. Get…
It is now the festive time of year, the time of open bars and buffets, visits and vacations, decorations and decadence. In Phoenix and Houston and Chicago and Atlanta, in the deserts and on the plains, deep in the valleys and up on the mountains, all across the nation the…
Between shooting a Shakira video, posing for print ads, and volunteering at Baptist Hospital, how does a stud find the time for sniffing butts? “I’m a Starbucks fiend, so we spend a lot of time there,” says Mark DeCaterino. No, Mark isn’t the stud — well, he is a cool…
“Ya can’t please everyone, so ya got to please yourself” — at least according to the lyrics of Rick Nelson’s 1972 song “Garden Party.” But the folks at Kafe Gol appear, for better or worse, to disagree. Although Gol’s goal may not be to please diners from absolutely every nation,…
Warner Bros. plunked $50 million into Syriana and allowed writer-director Stephen Gaghan as much time and travel as necessary to research and write his story. They’d be well advised to pony up a few extra bucks to provide filmgoers with a flow chart that connects the myriad, scattered dots that…
You’d think anyone possessed of the notion that “the Jews” collectively think and act alike need only look at, say, wrestler Bill Goldberg, Hollywood hottie Natalie Portman, shock jock Howard Stern, and nebbishy right-wing scold Michael Medved to have that idea instantly dispelled. Yet conspiracy theories persist; you’ve probably heard…
South Florida, if you boil it down, is chock full of enough surrealist bizarr-o-ness that its inherent charms prove a bit much for outsiders. The kids raised in this subtropical environment are subjected to steady if at times disharmonious doses of hip-hop, disco, punk, metal, and jazz. It’s difficult to…
“Hello, this is vocalist Justin Hawkins from the Darkness, here to talk about our amazing, fantastic, unbelievable second album, One Way Ticket to Hell … and Back. [pauses] What? You think the album is way more over-the-top than Permission to Land? You’d call it grossly self-indulgent, plodding in many places,…
Tod Dockstader, America’s long-lost electronic music grandfather, returns after nearly 40 years of silence. In the early Sixties, Dockstader looped raucous tapes to sine-wave shrapnel by night so that they were as whiplash-fast, whimsical, violent, and surreal as the cartoons he edited by day. Early works like Luna Park and…
Lil’ Wayne is the Al Green of rap: He could recite the phone book and have listeners hanging on each of his curvaceous consonants and smoldering vowels. On The Carter II, Wayne more or less does just that, injecting familiar rap tropes (sample chorus: “Get money, fuck bitches, get money,…
How many times have you thought, Oh, that India.Arie — she’s nothing but a bunch of hair? None? Don’t tell her that; she’s convinced everybody’s talking all this stuff about her locks. Her latest takes us on a journey through her past ‘dos via sistah-girl clichés and a gently protesting…
Favela freestyler and producer Edu K re-waxes his baile funk classic “Popozuda Rock n’ Roll.” Rather than merely slurp down the Salt-n-Pepa milkshake that originally shaddupped and pushed it on numerous early-Eighties Favela Booty Beats comps, Edu draws from a chunky metal guitar topped with EZ-Whiz breaks. The ex-punk-funker wears…
Ashanti is not a girl, not quite a diva, and getting better all the time. With virtually no melodic support — just Irv Gotti’s tinny drums and an electrified bass line — she turns in her strongest vocal yet. Meth barely pays her lip service, while Paul Wall champions only…
The problem with “Nasty Girl” isn’t that there are too many cooks in the kitchen — it’s that they’re all standing around a microwave. The song is entirely warmed-over. Biggie’s verse comes from Life After Death’s superior “Nasty Boy” (thought we wouldn’t notice, Diddy?), while producer Jazze Pha recycles the…
Like capitalism with a bass thump, the spectre of Murk looms large over the Miami dance community. Murk members Oscar G and Ralph Falcon have helped define the “Miami sound” with their dark, ominous take on house music. Separately they’ve had residencies at almost every club that matters (currently you…
Ray Raposa is not afraid of abstractions. “Those are the terms I prefer to approach things on,” the twentysomething songwriter says from a tour stop in Arizona. Which is not surprising, given the brazenly diffuse, twilit sound of Castanets. The band’s recently released First Light’s Freeze is a musical scrapbook…
With his furrowed features, weathered grin, trademark fedora, and hands that scurry across the keyboard, Bob Wilder — better known to local music aficionados as Piano Bob — looks like a man who spends his time in dusty dives and dead-end saloons. Tonight is no exception. Like most Wednesday evenings,…
Now onstage at Coral Gables’ Miracle Theatre is Johnny Guitar: The Musical, which respins the tale of when the West was wild, the men were tough, and the women were Joan Crawford. Though the score is surprisingly gentle and its songs don’t match the transgressive thrills of the motion picture…
After ingesting the weird brew served up at the Bettcher Gallery, one is left wondering whether Toc Fetch and Tricia Cline are savant fugitives from Bellvue’s Peter Pan ward or just plain old-fangled eccentrics living off the fat of imagination in their Woodstock Xanadu. “Exiles in Lower Utopia” narrates the…
What’s Right? Klein is right: I read Lee Klein’s article “What’s the Matter with Miami?” (November 24) with the obvious chagrin of a local foodie — because the comments ring true. Miami’s restaurant culture needs to mature if it wishes to be part of the growing food movement taking place…
