How many promising young men and women have been lost to the drudgery of a life in journalism because of Hunter S. Thompson? Lured by the good doctor’s lurid depictions of endless travel, hard drugs, and loose fact-checking, many of our nation’s talented top two percent have forgone lucrative careers…
Bebo Valdés’s story is familiar to fans of Cuban music: A great bandleader in the Forties and Fifties who created his own rhythm (in this case, the speedy and complicated batanga), he was forced into early retirement and expatriation by the revolution. Valdés then migrated to the piano bars of…
Everyone is going green now that gas prices are higher than James Franco in Pineapple Express, but how do we shrink our carbon footprints in the place that matters most: the home? Drum roll, please. The Miami Home Design and Remodeling Show is hosting the Better Homes and Gardens Living…
Ways to get ostracized from the Junior League of Baghdad: (1) Wear an abaya made by Z. Cavaricci, (2) table-dance at the annual fundraising dinner, or (3) get a job as an interpreter for the American military. Not sure if anyone has done the first two, but plenty of Iraqis…
Google “randy housewife, pre-1980,” and the first result should be a full-cover shot of Julianne Moore, her red hair feathered and layered, smoking a Virginia Slims cigarette. She’s one of the rare people, like George Clooney, whose beauty only fully emerged after 40, and her timing coincided nicely with a…
The culinary scene in Miami increasingly resembles the economic one: there’s no middle class. While plenty of great options exist for poor journalists and A-list movie stars, there’s a dearth of sit-down restaurants that deliver without breaking the bank. Except for right now. Beginning Friday and running through the end…
Ah, the future! A Democrat is in the White House, American troops are home, and athletes are taking pills to help monitor their internal body temperature. The first two might not be written in stone, but the third is definitely on its way, along with a host of other innovations…
Jazz fusion began with Miles Davis’s heroin addiction in the Sixties and exploded into a full-fledged movement in the Seventies through disciples John McLaughlin, Carlos Santana, Herbie Hancock, and, of course, Scientology’s own Chick Corea. One of the baddest men to ever handle 88 keys, Corea went straight from the…
Though now 55 years old, Gus Van Sant continues to tell stories about the passing of youth. From his first feature, Mala Noche, to network television’s favorite rerun, Good Will Hunting, to the disturbing Columbine fictionalization Elephant, Van Sant consistently sets his films inside the moment when children are forced…
Sixty years after television made it obsolete, radio drama is going strong, surviving purely on the sheer nerdiness required to produce it. Its patron saint, This American Life host Ira Glass, has a voice so perfectly dorky that children get beat up just for listening to it — so of…
On one hand are the Marcel Prousts of the world, sitting in bed and typing their 10-volume novels a couple hundred words at a time. On the other are the people who get married after a one-night stand in Vegas, make minute rice in 40 seconds, and enter the Second…
Brazil’s big moment in the international cultural sun is still ahead of us. Hipsters might resist this assertion; after all, they’ve been onto Brazil since at least 2002, when Fernando Meirelles released Cidade de Deus (City of God), the Southern Hemisphere’s answer to The Godfather. All of a sudden, everyone…
If only high school had been like this: Hollywood actors contractually obligated to not only hang out with nerds but also pretend to like them. Welcome to the idyllic world of the Florida Supercon, where nerds will be disappointed to learn that Oliver Phelps, Devon Murray, and Stanislav Ianevski —…
Bill Maher’s suitcase is full of food. That’s because if he didn’t bring his own, he’d be forced to eat the crap that America serves to out-of-towners, and then his stand-up act — a two-hour boxing match between him and Stupidity (that he always wins, by the way) — might…
Best known in America as “The Man Who Made the Film that Was Remade into Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure,” the neo-realist Vittorio De Sica ranks as one of Europe’s finest directors and a sort of anti-Fellini in the Italian oeuvre. The one exception to his roll call of great tragedies is…
Neither the food nor the scenery at Hooters is certified organic, so downtown workers eager to eat lunch by the bay usually settle for something fried, pesticided, or pumped full of hormones. But not today! The Bayfront Park Farmers’ Market and Lunchtime Experience opens its flaps on the Flagler Promenade,…
One might imagine the Rhythm Foundation is a collection of fortysomething bongo drummers who meet in their parents’ garages Tuesday nights to cover Graceland-era Paul Simon tracks. Wrong. Actually its the nonprofit responsible for bringing to Miami the musicians who inspired Paul Simon, an organization that continually recognizes the vast…
If you don’t know what Blue Man Group is by now, you’re probably the most sheltered kid in your backwoods, apocalyptic Christian militia. The trio of earless, bald entertainers covered in blue paint has infected every major Western metropolis with its charming theatrical routines, but nothing in those shows can…
Mataharis: Three women who work as private eyes at a Madrid detective agency find that their cases illuminate troubling aspects of their own lives. Ines (María Vázquez) goes undercover at a factory and winds up enmeshed in a power play between the company and union workers opposed to its outsourcing…
During one fateful night of insomnia in 1894, Frenchman Louis Lumière invented the cinématographe, a portable, hand-cranked film camera that fit into a suitcase one man could easily carry. Soon he began setting it up in places where people gathered — train stops, busy intersections, and riverbanks — trying to…
La Misma Luna (Under the Same Moon): The festival’s opening-night selection is the feel-good tale of a nine-year-old Mexican boy’s odyssey to reunite with his mother, who has lived in Los Angeles for four years. The film is part adventure story, part study of the hardships engendered by illegal immigration…
“The avant-garde is always just the people with the most energy,” Fairfield Porter once said. If that’s true, Miami’s avant-garde would have to include Lauren “Lolo” Reskin, South Florida’s only record store owner, event calendar guru, DJ, and … book club leader? To each town its own Oprah, and Lolo…
