An intellectual snark of the highest order, Christopher Hitchens has been waterboarded by ski-masked U.S. torture trainers for the pages of Vanity Fair. He wrote a book with the very PC title God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. He called Margaret Thatcher “surprisingly sexy” and Ronald Reagan “a…
In 1977, Barbet Schroeder filmed the interactions between a 6-year-old lowland gorilla, Koko, and her teacher, Dr. Francine “Penny” Patterson. After being purchased from the San Francisco Zoo, the ape had been brought to Stanford University, where she was being taught to use American Sign Language and recognize spoken English…
With American withdrawal set to begin in July 2011, President Obama might narrowly prevent the war in Afghanistan from eclipsing Vietnam as the longest military conflict in U.S. history. But given Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s unhinged threats to join the Taliban as well as the Pentagon’s muted skepticism of the…
For the past four years, the members of local comedy crew Model Citizens have been locked in a hot and hilarious three-way. It’s been sweaty, silly, and occasionally skeezy. But now Kimberly Cox, Jason Finkelman, and Michael Murray are breaking up. Why? Well, Cox and Finkelman have decided to abandon…
You’ve already moshed and chugged Busch beer and high-fived with the So Raw crew. But now you can fill your backpacks and shelves and drawers with awesome swank from someplace called the So Raw Store. It’s a rock ‘n’ roll shopping party! Setting up at NDS Shop through the end…
Nobody pimps it harder than Ponzi schemers. Yachts, Bentleys, Bugattis, Waverunners, Ferraris, Corvettes, Cadillacs, Maseratis, Mercedes-Benzes, and Lambos … That’s just a small sampling of the super-expensive stuff that con man Scott W. Rothstein purchased with his 1.2 billion ill-gotten American dollars. Now, you could never equal Rothstein’s extravagance, right?…
If you want to be a jerk about it, summer is still 23 days away. But c’mon … Are we really gonna wait till the sun hits its northernmost point before descending into a serious solstice drunk? Nope. And the Magic Hat Brewing Company isn’t waiting either. The Vermont-based beer…
Six weeks ago, the Sin City’s unelected, unofficial representatives of the undead, Lil Daggers, got blitzed in Brooklyn, made friends with all the zombies there, and eventually returned home a conquering horde full of Bushwick and Williamsburg’s finest booze and brains. The bad news: No one remembers a thing. When…
Hailing from the sprawling South American metropolis of Buenos Aires, multidisciplinary Argentine artist José Luis Landet makes his home in Mexico City while shuttling his work across the globe to cities such as New York and Turin. In a way, this kind of nonstop international crisscrossing and compulsive border-hopping seems…
In 1924, the factory town of Cicero, Illinois, was a corrupt city-state run by mob boss John “Papa Johnny” Torrio. There was liquor and gambling. The cops were on the take. Elections were rigged. The Chicago Tribune even gave the place a nickname: “the Free Kingdom of Torrio.” Naturally, then,…
Even though a million rappers are repping the robo-voice these days, T-Pain is still the reigning king of Auto-Tune. He specializes in futuristic slow jams such as “N Luv (Wit a Stripper),” “Buy You a Drank,” and “Chopped ‘n’ Skrewed” that sound like they were made by a really romantic…
Sometimes we choose to adapt, and sometimes we’re forced by circumstance. This Saturday’s Miami on Stage season finale presents a pair of experimental performance pieces, Hilo and Sipping Fury From a Tea Cup, that trace the ways individuals navigate the internal, the external, and the possibility of transcendence. Written by…
Before getting hooked on fake boobs and Viagra, Hugh Hefner was the coolest dude on the planet. He was packing Playboy with nice, natural American girls who liked to talk pop art, the Rolling Stones, and radical feminism. He was hosting shows like Playboy’s Penthouse and Playboy After Dark, bringing…
You work hard, but you party hard-core. So it’s not entirely uncommon for your weekend to start 24 hours early with a testosterone- and tequila-soaked Thursday full of degenerate gambling, trash talk, and amateurishly applied guillotine chokes. One thing is guaranteed: There will be blood, broken bones, and battle scars…
Here, near the edge of the American continent – latitude 25 47’16″N, longitude 8013’27″W to be exact – the people are always tan, the sun never stops blazing, the hot black streets breed mirages, the water stays perfectly warm, and the beach party is eternal. It’s a subtropical phenomenon called…
At first, the South Florida Boat Show seems boring. But then you imagine cutting waves from the Caribbean to Key West in a cigarette boat loaded with a couple kilos of kush. You’re trolling for swordfish and sharks at 100 mph. There’s a drunk mermaid on the bow and a…
Discovering the Kill Miss Pretty booth at last weekend’s Exxxotica Expo was very weird. It was like wandering half-drunk into Goldrush and getting a mid-afternoon lapdance from a feature dancer who turns out to be your cousin. But once the initial confusion wore off, there were questions: What exactly were…
It was late afternoon on Sunday and the Exxxotica Expo was dwindling toward its end. The porn stars were bored and the cockring salesmen were counting their cash while the rest of us mooks humped along in pursuit of a few final fits of action. We were waiting for some…
Considering the number of times we’ve been mugged while out getting milk, it was a huge surprise to discover Miami has a real-deal superhero policing its streets. His name is the Avenging Avenger. “He’s tired of the crime in the magic city of Miami, so he’s decided to scour the…
Way back in 1897, there was an inventor dude named Thaddeus Cahill who came up with the Telharmonium, a 200-ton electronic tone-wheel instrument whose sounds would warp in response to human touch. Now, there’s no recorded example of Cahill’s sound machine in action, so this little factoid is not entirely…
Historically, the evolution of language moved only as fast as humans could walk. But then came the Morse telegraph, radio, and the Telex, cutting down messaging time from days to hours to minutes. And now, there’s the Internet, a globe-choking network of networks that’s constantly feeding information to billions at…
It seems like the easiest possible way to make art: Draw up a set of exacting blueprints and then hire a bunch of lackeys and gophers to carry out the fine details of your grand plans for dominating the worldwide art system. That’s what Warhol did. And now, that’s what…
