Surrounded by crumbling stores with newspaper-covered windows stands a teal historic landmark. A glowing sign in the window reads “A Nice Place for Nice People.” Entering Jumbo’s, you’re greeted with the same welcoming smile and attentive service that have made this restaurant thrive for the past fifty years. Robert “Bobby”…
Over a three-month period in 1994, machete-wielding Hutu tribesmen in Rwanda hacked to death 800,000 Tutsi men, women, and children. News reports, including film footage of the unfolding carnage, were broadcast around the globe. In the face of such unremitting acts of inhumanity, the world community did nothing. It wasn’t…
Clint Eastwood began digging into the third act of his career — the one that reveals the mature, deep-thinking artist … with a little jazz piano on the side — a dozen years ago, with the discomfiting anti-western Unforgiven. Since then, he’s hardly come up for air or given himself…
It’s been a long time coming, but Twista has finally been given the resources to generate an album worthy of his underrated talent. Off the momentum of the insanely popular Kanye West-produced “Slow Jamz,” Twista delivers no less than a classic presentation of mid-Nineties Southernesque hip-hop on Kamikaze, giving credence…
This remix compilation is filled with anthems from Osunlade’s Yoruba label that were previously available only on wax. Each single is an orisha for Osunlade, who conducts a spirit-getting service for the songs of Salif Keita, Cesaria Evora, Spacek, Shazz, Erro, and others. He dresses down 4Hero’s “Hold It Down”…
Touring in support of their first album, The Beginning Stages of … , the Polyphonic Spree seemed likely to fall into a novelty-set trap, pushing the flowering, orchestral dream-pop of Mercury Rev and the Flaming Lips to its sweetest extreme. Together We’re Heavy, on the other hand, is more cake…
Whether it inspires you or just leaves you pummeled, Funeral is a staggering debut. Over the course of just one album, The Arcade Fire bursts out of the rigid beats and chopping chords of its postpunk influences and straight into arena-rock territory; lead singer Win Butler’s raw-throated bombast has even…
The whole girl-with-a-guitar genre is like your first “A Woman Needs a Man Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle” bumper sticker: Its overt earnestness is extremely embarrassing once you’ve moved out of the dorm and into the messy, “post-feminist” world full of things like strap-ons and Peaches. So Jealous, the…
Juana Molina is an Argentine singer/guitarist. When she plays live she allows her long brown hair to hang in her face while she picks simple figures on her guitar and overlays them with precise vocal lines; her bushy-bearded partner Alejandro Franov supplies a sticky keyboard goo that lends the music…
The fourth album from Sufjan Stevens is hushed and intimate, as he gently whispers his lyrics while accompanying himself on acoustic guitar and banjo. The music on Seven Swans was originally slated for the 2003 album Greetings from Michigan, The Great Lake State. But it was already spilling over with…
Russell “Ol’ Dirty Bastard” Jones died from a drug overdose on November 13, 2004. This week sees the arrival of his first posthumous release, Osirus: The Official Mixtape. This is not unusual. Tupac “2Pac” Shakur’s Don Killamunati: The Seven Day Theory was released on November 5, 1996, almost two months…
From the outside, Jimmy Eat World’s Tempe, Arizona, studio looks just like another sterile office space in a quiet, out-of-the-way business complex. But walk through the nondescript entrance and the place is a surprisingly cozy rock and roll den. There’s enough cushy seating for a decent-sized party, and instruments are…
Gabriel Fain has a superhuman ear for detail. You can hear it foremost in his euphoric, voluptuous house music sets at Space. But you can also hear it in his speech and in the careful way the Israeli-born DJ uses metaphor to tell a story. “It was like when you’re…
The Gifts I Could Never Give You: In this show Bert Rodriguez shelves the “conceptual prankster” tag and wears his heart on his sleeve. You can’t help but share his lament. The work delves into the detritus of failed relationships, shifting perception from visual displays of marketing props, mannequins, neon…
Three exhibitions of recent work by female artists deal with projections into time and space. Wendy Wischer, Jiae Hwang, and Hung Liu apply the medium of light in different ways, to diverse effect. Through their work, each artist grapples with her individual place and moment along the temporal time line…
One of the offbeat charms of Jim Tommaney and his rough-and-tumble EDGE Theatre is trying to figure out where they’re going next. Not just aesthetically but literally. The peripatetic producer, playwright, performance artist, and poet has staged shows in fifteen locations in less than ten years, pinballing around South Florida…
Not Just Nail-Pounders Navy Seabees can handle bullets as well as bulldozers: First allow me to congratulate Eric Alan Barton on a very well-written and touching portrait of the realities of war in his article “The Deadliest Day” (December 30). However, I feel he failed to do his homework, and…
For the first time in more than twenty years, the 24 hours of Christmas ticked by without a single note of Caribbean or reggae music broadcast by public radio station WLRN-FM (91.3). Instead listeners deprived of even the regular NPR news feed were exposed to the sounds of choirs from…
“Don’t get me wrong, it’s really flattering that so many people have wanted to write about us,” explains Adam Zimmon, guitarist for the Spam Allstars, while furrowing his brow over the barrels of ink that have been expended on his band. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and countless…
The Miami Herald and Knight Ridder executives have closed Street Weekly, the free youth-oriented tabloid that was meant to engage young readers and compete directly with Miami New Times. Late Wednesday staff members were informally told that the issue appearing on Friday, January 7, would be the last. Human resources…
