At first glance it looked like the everyday scene in the lobby of Havana’s stately Hotel Nacional. Foreigners in khaki shorts and sundresses were standing around the buzzing high-ceilinged hall or loading up at the vast breakfast buffet in the cafeteria. But during the third week in March, the crowd…
The drive from Miami to Meridian, Mississippi, takes fourteen hours, but Tag Purvis doesn’t mind. He likes to make the trip to his hometown behind the wheel of the baby-blue Lincoln he has on long-term loan from his father. When he passes the Alabama border into Mississippi, a place he…
Weekday evenings, Al B. Sylk hosts the most effective ten minutes of urban community radio in Miami. During Sylk’s nightly “roll call,” teenagers from Kendall to Opa-Locka phone in to rap about their names, their neighborhoods, their friends, and whatever else they think identifies them — a kind of on-air…
If any Cuban musician is poised for stardom among Latin audiences in this country, it would appear to be Adalberto Alvarez. His music is already familiar to Spanish radio listeners, though they probably don’t realize it. Alvarez’s work is the most widely recorded of any contemporary Cuban songwriter. Salsa luminaries…
A picture, as the saying goes, speaks a thousand words. Sometimes the same is true of reactions to pictures, like the brief notes written in the visitors’ book at Jill Freedman’s exhibition of photographs, Resurrection City: A Look Back, currently at the Miami-Dade Public Library. “I’m very sad how whites…
thursday march 18 Before men started marching into delivery rooms videotaping the births of their babies, before TV commercials and music videos appropriated the shaky-camera technique and quick-cut style of editing, there was the work of acclaimed avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage. He did it first. In the mid-Fifties Brakhage began…
thursday february 25 The New World Symphony’s tribute to Finland’s most famous composer, Jean Sibelius (1865-1957), ends tonight as conductor Michael Tilson Thomas leads a rehearsal of Sibelius’s Symphonies no. 4 and 5. The conductor will also deliver “live” program notes from the stage. A key figure in promoting Finnish…
For film buffs it’s two weeks of sheer pleasure: the sixteenth annual Miami Film Festival, featuring 31 pictures from fifteen countries. Naturally Spanish-language features abound, from opening-night dance-fest Tango, courtesy of Argentine director Carlos Saura, to the kinky Spanish thriller Between Your Legs. There are also intimate looks at Cuban…
The day before the Esperanto music store opened on Lincoln Road this past month, Carlos Suarez set about making a sign to put in the window. Because he expected European tourists to visit the store, he began by printing No Smoking. Then, because the store is located in the center…
thursday february 11 In the real world, erstwhile supermodel Kate Moss (for those of you living in a cave, hello, the whole supermodel thing is over) spent a month recuperating from exhaustion in a London clinic. In the imaginary world of author Bret Easton Ellis (Less Than Zero, American Psycho)…
Joseph Carlin sits behind the bulletproof glass of the walk-up window at Buddy’s Bar, staring out at North Miami Avenue and absently stroking the head of his guard dog, a sweet German shepherd named Nick. Also near at hand is the semiautomatic handgun Carlin keeps tucked in the waistband of…
thursday january 28 Fans of offbeat independent cinema take note. John Waters, the man who brought you the wonderfully heartwarming flicks Ping Flamingos, Polyester, Lust in the Dust, Hairspray, Cry-Baby, Serial Mom, and most recently, Pecker, is the subject of a documentary to be broadcast on cable’s Independent Film Channel…
It is late afternoon, Christmas Eve, in Havana. While many of the city’s residents are gathered in living rooms and on patios, awaiting a holiday meal of roast pig, a hearty group of musicians and sound engineers are spending the day at work. They have crowded into the small sound…
thursday january 21 You don’t have to be Jewish to appreciate klezmer music. The bleating, high-energy sound that was once the province of Eastern European Jews is now being embraced by a variety of listeners. Witness the popularity of bands such as the Klezmatics, the New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars, and…
With the countdown to the millennium under way, those looking for a place to ponder the ebb of the Twentieth Century would do well to visit the Rubell Family Collection, where a new exhibition by some of the most important modern and contemporary artists is on display. For its congruence…
thursday january 7 Just what we need: another immensely bloated art event featuring more canvases and more sculpture than anyone has wall or floor space for. Really, how many Ertes can one person own? Find out when miles of art go on display today through Tuesday at Art Miami ’99…
As Okeechobee Road winds north through the city of Hialeah it offers a hectic panorama: neon hotels, boxy stucco houses, car repair shops, and cavernous discount stores. But just a bit further on, past Hialeah Gardens toward the Broward County line, the landscape suddenly calms. The sky grows wide and…
Old Cuban music never dies, it just gets reissued. Blame it in part on the success of the 1997 Grammy Award-winner Buena Vista Social Club, but remastered or re-recorded CDs of all manner of Cuban oldies keep on coming. In 1998 record companies strip-mined the seemingly infinite mountain of Cuban…
thursday december 17 Paulito Fernandez Gallo is the most versatile of Cuba’s young singing stars. A true sonero in the tradition of Benny More, he can render a ballad as suavely as Frank Sinatra. He even sounds great rapping in Spanish. The mix of romantic salsa and aggressive Cuban timba…
Growing up in the historic Old San Juan section of Puerto Rico’s capital, Giovanni Hidalgo didn’t dream of becoming a musician. He didn’t have to. “I’ve been playing since I was three,” he explains. Hidalgo was one of the founders of the groundbreaking Puerto Rican group Batacumbele, and he has…
thursday november 19 Unlike most photographers, Cindy Sherman spends a lot of time in front of, as well as behind, the camera when she works. Sherman is her own best model. In the late Seventies she made her name with “Untitled Film Stills,” a series of photos that depict her…
thursday november 12 In 1934 Joseph Stalin attempted to give Jews in the Soviet Union a permanent enclave by creating a Jewish Autonomous Region, the capital of which was dubbed Birobidzhan. In conjunction with the exhibition “Stalin’s Forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the Making of a Soviet Jewish Homeland,” Nikolai Borodulin,…
