thursday june 3 Most people admire Jennifer Lopez for her sizable butt and her stellar acting skills. (Who can forget that performance in Anaconda? Okay, she did do alright in Out of Sight.) But now her adoring public can learn to love Lopez for her voice. (Not that it’s anything…
Ahhh, summer in Miami: stifling temperatures, overwhelming humidity, daily deluges, and a dearth of cultural activities. Enough to drive many people north for the season. But not everyone. Local art enthusiast Rosie Gordon-Wallace is one who sticks around this sticky town and is glad most folks have no choice but…
thursday may 27 Remember Gino Vannelli? The hunky Canadian singer with the powerful voice was best known for “I Just Wanna Stop” and “Living Inside Myself,” his Top 10 hits from the late Seventies and early Eighties. The aptly named tunes mirror Vannelli’s career, which, as far as we know,…
“I saw Tango Argentino [the musical] ten years ago and I just fell in love with it. I knew I had to do it,” says Lydia of the first time she witnessed the smoldering moves invented in the brothels of Argentina. The one-name dancer and her partner Randy Pittman, a…
thursday may 20 Yet another Cuban-themed movie has washed up on our shores. This time it’s a documentary about female Cuban dissidents and their hermanas in exile. Written and directed by New York City-based journalist and former television producer Mari Rodriguez Ichaso, Branded by Paradise offers interviews with former political…
thursday may 13 Established in 1985, the Louis Wolfson II Media History Center had a mission: to collect, preserve, and catalogue film and video that reflect Florida’s history and culture. Fans of their regular weekly programs at downtown’s main library know they’ve been doing just that very successfully. In fact…
When actress Pamela Anderson Lee — the closest thing we have to a walking, talking Barbie doll — recently downsized her bountiful chest, the globe was left wondering. Why would anyone want to look less like the tiny toy that so many little girls around the world own? Are standards…
thursday may 6 It’s not over yet. The (Anti) Film Festival wraps at 8:00 tonight at the Alliance Cinema (927 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach) with an animation segment cosponsored by Imagine That Productions. Entries have been submitted from all over the world and reportedly the first-prize winner will be the…
thursday april 29 Miami’s historian in song Grant Livingston belts out tunes with a Florida theme tonight at one of Miami’s oldest hot spots, the Barnacle State Historic Site (3485 Main Hwy., Coconut Grove). The Barnacle isn’t a nightclub, but rather a charming little Florida vernacular-style house built in 1891…
Along with a powerful sound, drums can deliver a compelling message. Slave owners in America knew this and made sure to rid laborers of their instruments. Slave holders in Haiti were not as savvy, or slaves there were more resourceful. When brought to the island, scads of African tribes (Yoruba…
thursday april 22 With 23 musicians and seven singers, the University of Miami’s Latin big band is large enough to merit the moniker the University of Miami Salsa Orchestra. UM’s spacious Gusman Concert Hall (1314 Miller Rd., Coral Gables) thus seems an appropriate venue for their performance tonight, featuring Latin…
thursday april 15 You’ve always wanted to dance professionally but you’ve never been given the chance to get onstage and strut your stuff. Maybe the reason has to do with your utter lack of grace. Yes, two left feet can be a major hindrance for those desirous of a career…
For most people the Bay of Pigs, the infamous CIA-backed attempt to oust Castro in 1961 that left close to 120 men dead (4 Americans), 60 wounded, and nearly 1200 imprisoned, is a faint blip on the radar screen of history. To artist George Sanchez it was an epic screwup…
thursday april 8 They’ll be giving out big bills to the fishermen who reel in the heaviest catches at the Miami Billfish Tournament. The competition gets under way this evening with registration and a captain’s meeting. Then anglers hit the high seas from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. tomorrow and…
During the mid-Fifties when Morris Lapidus was designing Bal Harbour’s Americana Hotel, he wanted monkeys to swing from the vines in the lobby’s glassed-in terrarium. The restrained Tisch family, then-owners of the hotel, balked. Ultimately only a few baby alligators got to scamper around the terrarium’s tropical foliage and accompanying…
In a cozy corner theater in the heart of Little Havana’s Calle Ocho (Eighth Street), light shines on the small elevated stage, where the Afro-Cuban experimental band Io performs a percussive interpretation of the theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Behind them a video screen beams footage of…
Classy clothing this is not. Daring, dangerous, downright trashy — vulgar even. Revealing slinky gowns made of gold and silver mesh. Skintight, multicolored sequined hip-huggers covered with Marilyn Monroe faces. A form-fitting black dress precariously held together by a series of silver- and gold-tone Medusa-headed clothespins. Too many studs, beads,…
thursday april 1 TV’s Kung Fu protagonist Kwai Chang Caine battled an array of villains in the Old West, but lucky for him he never came up against a turntable. Yes, a turntable. Faced with juggling beats, scratching, and working a mixer, poor Caine might have resigned in defeat. Think…
thursday march 25 Ambling around in your shorts on an average day in South Beach already makes you feel like a cellulite-ridden whale. Well, thunder-thighs, get ready to feel even worse about your slothful self when the Miami Beach Sports and Fitness Festival comes to town for the next four…
The Y2K bug and its implications loom large in 1999, making people warier than ever that the technological advances of today and tomorrow are going to save us. Cynical and fearful of the future, we think the end of the millennium may mean the end of the world. Almost seems…
In the late Seventies, John Epperson, a native of Hazelhurst, Mississippi, and a fan of the ballet flick The Turning Point, headed to New York City to fulfill his dream of entering showbiz. By day he worked as a rehearsal pianist for the American Ballet Theater. By night he was…
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…
