On his sixth interview of the day to promote a twenty-city U.S. tour he’s nearly halfway into, John Leguizamo recalls again his first paying acting gig: “I was like nineteen years old. I looked like such a punk, being the villain of the episode, pretty ridiculous.” The show? Miami Vice…

In September 1971 a group of hippie Canadians hired a boat and piloted it to the Aleutian island of Amchitka, hoping to halt a U.S. nuclear test. “They didn’t actually get to the test on time, but that’s how Greenpeace was born — people trying to make a difference,” says…

The revolution will not be clothed. Instead of Glocks there will be glutes. In place of pistols, penises will prevail. Berettas will make way for breasts. Freedom fighters never will have been so … free. Until then, there’s the 26th annual Nude Recreation Week. From Monday, July 9, to Sunday,…

The subconscious mind is a funny thing. Especially if coaxed to the surface to play and prattle and perform onstage in front of an audience. At least that’s what comic hypnotist Flip Orley banks on at each of his shows, which are fueled by compliant volunteers. Given sold-out engagements at…

Bat dance, monkey dance, dance of the little horsemen. Small flutes called pitos and a giant gourd marimba. For the past decade, Grupo Cultural Uk’ux Pop Wuj (“the heart of the writings of the ancestors”), a community of Quiché Maya Indians from Chichicastenango, Guatemala, has actively sought to excavate its…

Sabrina Matthews, a self-professed flannel-shirt-wearing truck-driving dyke who employs the word butcher as an adjective (“If I was butcher….”), and Jason Stuart, a goateed gay actor and comedian from a “very crazy and lovable Jewish family” who has a proclivity for leather and Speedos. Put them together and you have…

Vroom. Vroom. America gets going — by bus, boat, car, plane, and train. Braking, however, is another event altogether. The catchy chant of the winning young imp in the ubiquitous car commercial says it all: We’ve zoom, zoom, zoomed through the past century. Accordingly there are few better metaphors than…

The soothing sweet voices of a dozen women, their skin tones a subtle spectrum from pale bark to shining ebony and adorned by bright fabrics, chant a cappella in Goro, a West African dialect: “Don’t worry…. Welcome…. See everybody…. Say “hi’…. Enjoy yourself.” This inviting community — a mélange of…

“I felt something slam into me … and it spun me around about 180 degrees,” says shark-attack victim Dawn Schauman, who will be among the speakers at the Miami Museum of Science’s glibly named Shark Shenanigans Day. Schauman’s survival story makes reality-based dramas like Survivor look like a day at…

Break dancing is back (minus the parachute pants). A renaissance of popping, locking, uprocking, head spins, robotic jams, phat flips, and contorted poses. Truth be told, the energetic street dance that busted out of the Bronx decades ago never really left — it was shuffled out of the fickle consumer…

On the seventh day God created Mobil. And God said unto Adam and Eve: “I have provided you with enough fuel for your eternity in the garden. I call it petroleum. Use it in thy scooter and in thy compact car. It is clean; it is infinite; it is pure…

Treasure is inside. She’s been in and out of so-called correctional institutions most of her 21 years. Now, on her birthday, she’s moving from a juvenile joint to a tougher state women’s facility, where she hopes to reunite with the mother she’s never met. Without irony she explains the transfer’s…

Denise Duhamel gets things all wrong brilliantly. In her prosey poems, a Barbie doll winds up at a twelve-step meeting — and ends up enjoying it. (“She wished she could clap like the others/when there was a good story about recovery.”) In another the poet mistakenly reads the word Pope…

“For those of you who think feng shui’s easy, it’s not,” said Jami Lin to a crowd of 40 or so professionally attired adults in Miami’s Design District last month. Lin, an interior designer, author, and feng shui consultant who has studied with masters Yap Cheng Hai and Lin Yun,…

In the spin cycle of the universe, days stretch and shrink like laundry. During the astronomical phenomenon known as the equinox, night and day briefly become almost identical parcels of time as the sun traverses the celestial equator. This occurs twice a year with the vernal equinox, signifying the advent…

Butterfly Mystique is not a fancy overpriced attraction but a family-operated farm with an ever-blooming crop of scaly winged creatures and other insects. Owners Matt Bielecki and his mother, Renee, began raising butterflies for pleasure; as the hobby and their friends’ interest in it took flight, they decided to set…

“Everywhere else death is an end. Death comes, and they draw the curtains. Not in Spain. In Spain they open them.” Writer Federico Garcia Lorca — probably most famous for his tragic trilogy that includes the play Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding) and his poetry collection Romancero Gitano (Gypsy Ballads)…

Brazil’s colonial roots date back to the year 1500 when the Portuguese came to town, wreaked havoc on the vast area’s millions of indigenous residents, then began importing slaves in droves from West Africa to labor on plantations. Centuries later, one byproduct of those dishonorable intentions is the fascinating intermingling…

Bare legs splayed, long neck bared, a woman’s body mimics the form of a large block-print capital letter A, onto which her photographic image is superimposed. In a black skullcap with white stripes and a matching Twenties-style bathing suit costume, local choreographer and dancer Elaine Wright brings this 75-year-old vision…

Renowned video artist Nam June Paik describes his first Miami artistic encounter with good humor. Back in 1987 he was invited to create an installation for Miami International Airport. Unfortunately his televisions took wing: “They stole half of my TVs,” he laughs. Eastern Airlines, the project’s original location, crashed financially,…

When Cristina Delgado, founding director of alternative arts organization Miami Arts Project, invited Stalker (an interdisciplinary architectural group from Rome) to explore the Miami River on foot as part of its biannual contemporary arts in urban spaces program, the result was an installation conceived beyond the walls of a gallery…

Masterfully commingling aspects of experimental theater and contemporary dance since the early Eighties, postmodern maverick Joe Goode has used everything in his art — from power tools to Chanel suits, spoken word to singing, film to fables — to peel away the convenient packaging of society’s particular, often peculiar, brand…