Quintron and Miss Pussycat

These past few years, the term garage rock has been bandied about in the mainstream press and on music channels in a way that could make one think there’s some sort of revival going on. You know the names and the videos, but if you think a couple of Stooges…

Make an !-ful Noise

Next time you’re at a religious service and the choir begins to belt out a song, remember they are there for more than entertainment; where mere words might fail, a great singer’s voice can illuminate the meaning of God’s message. Yeah, attending a spiritually themed concert is probably a sneaky…

Stage Capsules

Up Wake: The stage is set: three blank walls, one actor, and no script. For this performance be prepared to go on a sensory journey. Natasha Tsakos’s show synchronizes the disciplines of animation, music, and acting, exploring a completely original style of theater that integrates technology and performance. As the…

Azalia Snail

The early 1990s belong to the silver age of the American do-it-yourself music scene. By the time the new decade dawned, the ability to record, print, and distribute a record or CD was well within the reach of practically anyone in the States, and the amount of product in stores…

Gray Matter

Shortly after winning a 1992 Tony Award — or so the story goes — composer William Finn found out he had a brain tumor. Despite his having just received the top award in his field for the Broadway musical Falsettos, the bad news inspired Finn to write a new semiautobiographical…

Head in the Stars

The space cadets from the Southern Cross Astronomical Society will be orbiting around a couple of Earth-bound events today. This morning they’ll land at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden (10901 Old Cutler Rd., Coral Gables), where they’ll introduce guests at the 66th annual Ramble Fundraiser to the joys of looking directly…

Out of This World

The year 1966 was big in space exploration. Among other fun stuff, an unmanned Earthship made the first soft landing on the moon, and the Enterprise’s maiden voyage was documented on prime-time television. But for Miamians the biggest leap into the cosmos happened at the Miami Museum of Science when…

Trans-Siberian Orchestra

In late August, the New York Times identified a South Korean man as the star of a YouTube.com video. In it Lim Jeong-hyun (calling himself “Funtwo”) played Pachelbel’s Canon on his electric guitar. The axe wizard has mad skills, but what really sparked the media investigation is that the video…

That Is Just Super!

If you happen to drive by the Miami Children’s Museum tonight and notice Batman cavorting with the Green Arrow in the parking lot, don’t worry: Those “hallucinations” belong to Halloween Miami 2006, SAVE Dade’s annual costume party. (SAVE Dade was formed in 1993 to protect gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender…

Dancing with Windmills

For the past 401 years, people have fawned over Miguel de Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote, but for the past hundred or so they’ve also enjoyed watching the tale of the senile Spaniard unfold in dance. This weekend the Miami City Ballet opens its 2006-2007 season with a full-length production based…

Freaky Film Fest

So are you going to spend October just shoveling candy corn down your attractive … long … exposed … neck, or would you prefer to let out some bloodcurdling screams at the month-long Gialli and Beyond: Italian Horror Masters festival instead? Gialli is a genre of both literature and film…

Party at the Planetarium

Go ahead and admit it. The last time you were comfortably numb at the Planetarium’s Pink Floyd laser light show, you thought it would be sooo cooool if a live band were playing in that reverb-heavy dome where the stars twinkle in the daytime and weird images dance among them…

The Vibrators

What constitutes punk rock? Is it a squad of Beach Boys fans donning leather jackets and crooning about drugs and fascists? A bunch of shabbily dressed sods cribbing their poorly executed licks from the New York Dolls catalogue? Sound? Attitude? Timing? What is that indefinable property of punk rock that…

Stringers with Pluck

Worried those childhood violin lessons might have put a cramp in your cool? That fear didn’t stop David Harrington from forming the Kronos Quartet in 1973 and turning the group into the bad boys of new music. Iconoclastic almost to the point of being contrarian, the quartet isn’t the kind…

This Jazz Freakin’ Rocks!

You knew that many of those noodly thrash-metal virtuosos from the Eighties would stick around in other genres, didn’t you? They’re still out there in jazz combos or writing excessively baroque numbers for symphonies, but the king of this segue is perhaps Alex Skolnick. The brilliant guitarist began his career…

Writing While Intoxicated

What do you do with a drunken sailor? Although Natalie MacLean might not know exactly what to do with an inebriated seaman, she likely has a funny anecdote about one. Honored in 2003 as the World’s Best Drink Writer by the World Food Media Awards, MacLean has penned numerous articles,…

Make Nice with the Noles

Lest anyone forget: Florida means football, dammit. Those basketball championships won by the Miami Heat and the Florida Gators this past spring — though we are pleased as punch with them — were aberrations. Now it’s autumn and time to direct our attention back to the sport where the state…

Cowboys and Carbonara

If you want to give your noodle a treat, let it boil at the Sergio Leone Retrospective this month at the Miami Beach Cinematheque. Named so because of the Italian studios that extruded them during the Sixties, spaghetti Westerns are often regarded as corny or tastelessly violent, but the off-putting…

You Can Hear Him Play

You can call him Ray, or you can call him Ray Ray, or you can call him Raymond Ray, but the one thing you don’t have to do is pay to hear Ray. The Ray Ray Jazz Mix will perform tonight as part of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Jazz…

Rock Out with Your Art Out

Submitted for your consideration: several rock stars, one restaurant/casino chain, a good cause, and enough dramatic irony to make Rod Serling crack a smile. Rock and roll is a funny little industry that sells not music but attitude. Sometimes, though, the attitude gets in the way of business. For instance,…

Jazz for Nothing

The old joke goes, “It’s called free jazz because nobody in their right mind would pay to hear it.” But does that mean when regular jazz is free that nobody in their right mind would listen to it? Well, you don’t have to be in your right mind to enjoy…

So Freakin’ Special

Don’t tell Mama you will be at the Psychobilly Spookshow in Little Haiti tonight — that sounds suspicious enough already. You might have to admit you’ll be bopping to rockabilly greasers the Van Orsdels. What’s she gonna say about that slick-backed hair, those punky tattoos, and the fact they’ll be…