FRI 5/14 Curse the dry air that shriveled your phalaenopsis plants’ leaves into raisins! Now 5 are on sphag-and-bag life support and 3 are compost. How to get through this mourning period? Buy more orchids, obviously. How convenient, then, that it’s time for the 8th annual Redland International Orchid Festival?…

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…

Thursday 5/13 Fabulous people, fabulous furniture, fabulous art, and fabulous cocktails. You too can be fabulous at Art and Design Night, a monthly series of faboo block parties in fabulousness central, Miami’s Design District. Best of all, the district’s fabulous restaurants, cafés, showrooms, and galleries provide multo-fabulous settings for you…

FRI 5/7 The last time Fernanda Porto (right) performed in Miami, she wowed the crowd at the awards ceremony of the Brazilian Film Festival with an eclectic mix of bossa nova, samba, drum and bass, and for that extra-special something, Japanese taiko drummers. The crowd was dazzled and the raspberry-haired…

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…

Blood pulses out of freshly hacked flesh in puddles. Bikini-clad girls sip champagne and giggle in high heels as rivulets of the red stuff splatter perfectly on their bitching bods. Fast-cut closeups of their cleavage, their asses, their glam sunglasses, and of the beer-bellied man sprawled in the center of…

Thursday 5/6 Before there was Madonna, there was David Bowie, the true template for pop stars if there ever was one. Sure, Mick Jagger was the bad-boy-pouty-lipped-pretty-boy-devil, but Bowie was the mercurial space freak who morphed identities and crossed synth pop with disco and punk to create a netherworld of…

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…

NOW 24/7 Photographer Rick Cruz looks at his favorite subject, the Florida Everglades, as if the marshland were an emergency room patient left to fend for herself while we watch. “With the Everglades we are witnessing one of nature’s most basic of survival instincts,” Cruz says. “She is maintaining a…

NOW 24/7 Coconut Grove is not exactly Basra. But as ever-increasing numbers of cars compete for ever-shrinking numbers of metered parking spaces (can we say valet parking?), the Grove sometimes feels like something of a gentrified war zone. As the battle for a parking space heats up, all we huddled…

Thursday 4/29 Oh, to sing in a baritone. It’s a powerful thing, to be sure. You possess the ability to make audiences swoon with a range of rich, deep, mahogany tones while impressing all with your high notes. Added bonus: Everybody wonders what you have working beneath your belt. Tonight…

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…

SAT 4/24 At the beginning of the 2003-04 season Miami Heat fans had a serious case of the doldrums. Megamoney draft pick Lamar Odom provided a glimmer of hope, but when the team went 0-7 all bets were off. Soon after, legendary coach Pat Riley threw in the towel, leaving…

NOW 24/7 How do you own the moon? Many have tried; few have succeeded. Lunar expeditions have gotten rockets to land there and astronauts to bounce around in the gravity-less atmosphere. Painters such as Van Gogh, Rousseau, and O’Keeffe, and photographers such as Ansel Adams have rendered the planet in…

He’s a funny little enigma, that Prince guy. You could say he’s the original metrosexual. You could say he’s a religious freak. You could say he’s a sex god and a genius. In his early years, Prince pranced around in lingerie and hip boots, singing dirty lyrics like a nasty…

Thursday 4/22 Whenever your child asks for yet another advance on his allowance, you always throw out the same responses: “What am I, the Bank of America? Maybe if you had to work for a living, you wouldn’t be so quick to blow all your money!” Well, today the little…

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…

Retired lawyer Mervyn Aronoff (above) has painted Asian-inspired canvases for more than 20 years and has rented a studio at the Bakehouse for the last 5, citing the availability of “nice, reasonable space.” Admittedly surprised at the neighborhood’s resurgence, Aronoff is especially glad he joined the community now. “I feel…

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…

SUN 4/18 Wings might be rather useless appendages for chickens, but some humans find the paltry poultry parts especially important. This afternoon those people might be seen red-faced, not embarrassed by their love for the blue-collar delicacy but proudly wearing wing sauce as a badge of honor for participating in…

What’s on your mind, crocodile? Where have you been, Mr. Owl? How’s your cholesterol, Flipper? If your curiosity about wild creatures and their habitats keeps you up at night, you might need to go see them for yourself. Of course, chatting up a croc face-to-face is a daunting proposition. A…