MON 6/14 While visiting the Skate Park at Amelia Earhart Park in Hialeah this summer, don’t start meditating at the foot of the 3-sided pyramid. The structure is made to withstand leaps and grinds that make many a skate rat with time to kill salivate. In fact the skate park…
SAT 6/5 The excuses are wearing thin. With 1300 miles of hiking trails that make up the Florida National Scenic Trail, running from deep in the south of the state up through the Panhandle, and under perpetually sunny skies, there’s no reason not to lace up those hiking boots and…
The pedal steel guitar is a thing of strange beauty. Call it a musical contraption: a guitar neck flattened on a board of wood and resting on spindly metal legs, with sometimes a second neck, or even a third. The strings number eight, ten, or twelve, too many for a…
FRI 5/28 Ed has got a problem. He is addicted to his meds, and doesn’t realize those little white pills have turned him from a mild-mannered schoolteacher into a raging megalomaniac with psychotic urges. Sounds like a nifty plot for an HBO special. But the film, Bigger Than Life (above),…
SAT 5/22 You’re no cynic, but you must admit you loathe the song “What a Wonderful World.” And why not? It’s only human to be sick of the Louis Armstrong version of the tune, which has been featured incessantly in movies, commercials, and on easy listening jazz stations. In fact…
THU 5/20 How real is real? This is a question worthy of a poet. Miami spoken-word artist Will Bell is so real, he has adopted “Da-RealOne” as his moniker. Inspiration for his art comes from the six o’clock news, random conversations, or street scenes. Da-RealOne relates all issues and current…
NOW 24/7 In the underbelly of the Dadeland South Metrorail Station the late-night bus riders gather. Dressed in sweaty uniforms from shifts at Publix, or drained from monitoring a lackluster parking lot during security detail, they begin their journey home at the sign that says DROP OFF: 500 Midnight Owl…
SAT 5/8 Boasting the title An American Salute, this concert would surely gain the approval of George Bush. But Democrats shouldn’t fear. The hat will not be passed for the Republicans amid the strains of a John Philip Sousa march. The Americans being saluted at this show are composers, creators…
THU 5/6 Here’s a dilemma. As you were giving birth to your first child, your doctors frantically informed you that they needed to perform an emergency hysterectomy. They took your uterus, but nice guys that they were, they left your ovaries intact. No more bearing children but you could still…
Walk into any jazz show these days and you’re likely to find a crowd of older men sipping Scotch and studiously listening to a horn player’s arcane solo. Then step into a gig by the avant-jazz group Sex Mob and it’s a different story: You’ll find young people, particularly women,…
TUE 5/4 Only one man can spoof Prince as a basketball-playing, pancake-making fop; make milquetoast talk show host Wayne Brady seem insanely edgy (“White people love Wayne Brady because he makes Bryant Gumbel look like Malcolm X”); and single-handedly revive superfreak Rick James’s career with a plethora of punches and…
FRI 4/30 Kangaroo, squirrel, wild boar, alligator. British artist Edwina Ashton is inspired by the behaviors of all creatures, great and small. Whether she’s drawing them or shooting video footage of them, Ashton employs animal instinct, both hers and those of her subjects, to forge an absurd and disturbing body…
SAT 4/24 Fifteen of Miami’s most dynamic street poets face off today, battling in a word-slinging competition for the title of Urban Poet Laureate for South Florida and a $500 prize. Each of the poets competing today is a winner of Lip Tongue Ear Productions’ monthly poetry slam contests, which…
A lot can happen in six years. And it seems just about everything has for the Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. Drama, intrigue, tragicomedy with plot twists and turns to keep followers of the event, especially the internal politics of it, on the edge of their seats, with a…
WED 4/21 Do you hear the thundering horde in the distance? GWAR is coming. Are you prepared to be massacred? Well, not in the way you might think. The GWAR (short for God What an Awful Racket) collective is rock band, freaky stage show, art group, and probably a half-dozen…
NOW 24/7 For the Southwest Miami Senior High School wrestling team, looks matter. In the same way pop stars morph their images to score popularity points, so does the Eagle squad strategize with hairstyles when it comes to postseason matches. Having placed third overall at the recent state tournament, the…
When the lights first flickered on for Cinema Vortex back in 1993, it was little more than a cool name with the occasional screenings to go with it. Repertory and experimental art films were its trade, playing to small audiences of mostly hard-core cinephiles. The event chugged along in the…
THU 4/8 Let’s hear it for the great Italian tenors: Pavarotti, Caruso, Lovano. Huh?! That’s right, music fans, besides the vocal prowess of generations of golden-throated opera singers, the world has also seen its fair share of great Italian tenors of the jazz saxophone variety, for instance Joe Lovano. But…
THU 4/1 Leave it to poet T.S. Eliot to dub April “the cruelest month” in his monumental 1922 work “The Waste Land.” And then 74 years later, leave it to some jokers at the Academy of American Poets to designate April as National Poetry Month. Ha, ha! Did they think…
TUE 3/30 “He is exactly what he says he is: He does it for the money and he gets ’em off,” quips actor Tom Wopat (above) about dastardly lawyer Billy Flynn, a part he just stepped into for a road tour of the hit musical Chicago. (At 8:00 tonight the…
SAT 3/27 March is Women’s History Month. In celebration of females and their accomplishments in the creative arts, St. John’s Church in Miami Beach is hosting the second annual Women and Culture Festival, with offerings in nearly every genre. This year’s all-day affair is heavy on international dance, featuring a…
THU 3/18 It’s a diaspora out there, as in the spread of Asians from the Old World to the New. Several North and South American artists of Asian descent will investigate their cultural roots within a Western context in the Tigertail Asian Diaspora of the Americas. Dancer Mabel Dai Chee…
