As is often the case with dance music, what sounds so great on Saturday night when pumped through a megawatt sound system, surrounded by dancing lights and throbbing bodies, can get a little dull on Tuesday evening in your living room. Repetitious samples, gradual buildups, and wordless mixes don’t translate…
SAT 11/15 Walking through the tropical hammock of Pinewood Cemetery in Coral Gables, a serene 4-acre site filled with native gumbo limbo, coco plum, palmettos, bromeliads, and orchids, you stumble across the headstone of one of the first recorded burials in the area south of the Miami River: George T…
“We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers.” So said civil rights activist, Gandhi disciple, and all-around troublemaker Bayard Rustin. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, you’re not alone. Although a trusted confidant and mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr., his name is rarely mentioned in the…
SAT 11/8 Hialeah Rocks! Really. What other municipality in Miami-Dade can boast of its very own festival at the rock and roll holy ground of Churchill’s? Kendall? Ha! Coral Gables? Don’t make me laugh. Now in its ninth year, Hialeah Fest started over a few beers and a bunch of…
SUN 11/9 “So castles made of sand, fall in the sea, eventually.” Maybe so, Jimi Hendrix, but that’s no reason not to have another sandcastle-building contest. As part of the nearly month-long American Institute of Architects’ Miami Architecture Week, local firms will compete for best design during Sandblast 2003, now…
FRI 10/31 With all those swanky condos on Miami Beach, it’s hard to believe the million-dollar sandbar can offer an affordable place to reside. But two years ago Fernwood Apartments, a housing project for low-income people living with HIV/AIDS, opened. That building is just a small piece of progress in…
It’s Halloween! Time for trendsetters to be wondering: Whatever can we serve at our “Creepy Creature Feature” parties that, in terms of hideous yuckiness, will blow even J.Lo and Ben’s last flick outta the water? Debbie Fritz-Quincy, director of Hobe Sound Nature Center, has the answer: Edible insects. Homemakers who…
SAT 10/25 Beneath the layers of makeup and industrial-strength anti-aging remedies, Cher is a pickled old hag. Yet for some reason, middle-age gym queens jump and yip like chihuahuas whenever the old broad is brought up in conversation. Perhaps it’s a Pavlovian reaction reinforced by prime-time TV. Or maybe Cher-mania…
THUR 10/23 Picking up its cues from the civil rights movement, the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride, organized by a broad coalition of union-friendly groups and one cerebral celeb, recently launched a reform campaign targeting laws hurtful to new arrivals. Three weeks ago dozens of activist-laden buses departed from various American…
With his crooner’s voice and sociopolitical lyrics, Everton Blender is one of the leaders of a growing trend in Jamaican music: a renaissance of the rasta roots vibration within the island’s dominant dancehall scene. Known as “conscious dancehall,” it’s a sign that the spirit of reggae is alive and well…
On a clear night you could hear a pair of bright, shining voices in South Florida’s vast radio wasteland that reached from Jupiter in the north all the way south to Key West, across the Everglades to Naples and as far east as the Bahamas. And then, suddenly, you couldn’t…
THUR 10/16 Speeding your bike Evel Knievel-style over ramps crudely constructed of plywood planks and concrete blocks. Suffering an assload of road rash after wiping out on the pavement. Jumping off the roof of your house into the swimming pool. Breaking your arms on the concrete patio. Sure, you’re a…
The story goes that Page McConnell, keyboardist for Phish and leader of Vida Blue, was on vacation in Miami Beach when he caught a gig by the Spam Allstars, eventually sitting in with the band for a night. He was so taken with their sound that he proposed a collaboration…
There must be something in the British psyche that compels them, as soon as they’re of age, to trundle off to exotic locales across the globe. Wherever you go in the world, it seems, you always manage to run into a traveler from the U.K. So when a young graduate…
THUR 10/9 Every year when National Depression Screening Day rolls around, your interest is piqued but you just can’t seem to get off your ass and get to one of their free and anonymous screenings. It’s not that you’re lazy, maybe just … depressed? Depression does spread its ominous cloud…
SAT 10/11 Men and women quickly walk from the water’s edge to long, vibrantly colored wooden boats to the beat of pounding drums. On Biscayne Bay, rowers yell as their boats roam in all directions and water splashes. Bienvenidos to Miami’s version of the classic dragon boat race. Two separate…
SUN 10/5 Oye, it’s time for the second annual Urban Latin Music Festival and you know what that means. Lots of rump-shakin’, bass-thumpin’ Latin and hip-hop music. All the musical bases are covered with the bachata band Aventura, Huey Dunbar doing tropical and salsa, the Spanish hip-hop of Majic Juan,…
MON 10/6 Kids, what do you do with a day off school? You sit around the living room playing video games or run around outside wreaking havoc in your hood. No! Take advantage of Florida’s beautiful fall weather and sign yourself up for the Cane Pole Fishing Contest at Bill…
You see them all the time, on the sides of walls and buildings, rectangles a few square feet or more painted a shade noticeably different from the rest of the structure. They’ve become such a part of our urban landscape, like the graffiti they’re intended to cover up, that we…
SAT 9/27 The best thing about Grand Prix Americas is the idea of downtown Miami turning into a stoplight- and speed-limit-free supersonic racetrack for 3 days. Plus, it’s free to stand around the track, unless you’re a serious race fan and enter the infield ($45) or sit in the grandstands…
SUN 9/21 Yeah, baby! She began as an icon in swinging ’60s London; had a nude scene in Michelangelo Antonioni’s controversial film Blowup; lived in Paris with her incomparably hip husband, musician Serge Gainsbourg; and was immortalized as the breathy vocalist in the scandalously sexy song “Je T’aime Moi Non…
SAT 9/20 Go, go, speed racer. Go before the checkered flags fall on the winners in what is fast becoming an annual episode of race fever in the Magic City. Billed as Race Week Miami, an array of activities has been scheduled around the upcoming full-throttled Super Boat International National…
