Today is the 40th Anniversary of Che’s Death

And these photos prove he really made a splash!!! Get it? Seriously. What will the fashion industry think of next? The Saddam sarong? The Osama tube top? Nothing like wrapping a bunch of sexy young things in the faces of tyrants — especially when those tyrants were sooooo kind to…

Antikulture: So Much Fun, Your Pants Will Split

This Saturday night, after I parked my Civic near a strip joint along NW 36th Street, three guys came to warn me that my car would get towed. One proposed a back alley, prompting another to suggest: “Don’t send that nice lady into an alley. She’ll get scared.” They thoughtfully…

Trina Takes a Turn at Rap Redemption

Trina, do-gooder, with do-good-ees You may think that Hip Hop music is nothing more than braggadocious, violent, oversexed anthems created by morally indifferent artists – and judging by the press given to DUI convictions and bullet wound counts, we don’t blame you. But the truth is a lot of rap…

Greil Marcus Talks War

Always thinkin’, that Greil Marcus Greil Marcus — Rolling Stone magazine’s first reviews editor in 1969 — appeared before a crowd of mostly middle-aged smart types at Books and Books late last month in Coral Gables to read from his latest, He leapt to the back of The Shape of…

Art Capsules

False Start: Onlookers can discover rubberneck heaven while gawking at Timothy Buwalda’s large oil-on-canvas paintings of car wrecks. His sumptuous works depict crumpled Beemers and Toyotas, their mangled husks rendered in excruciatingly clear detail. Buwalda’s powerful paintings swing between photorealism and abstraction, delivering a haymaker. — Carlos Suarez De Jesus…

Fist Things First

Caligula: Imperial Edition (Penthouse) (Spoiler alert: Fisting!) One day back in the swingin’ Seventies, somebody mentioned how “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and then Bob Guccione, Gore Vidal, Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, and Peter O’Toole said, “Let’s make a big-budget movie about that, with come shots.” And Caligula was born. Actually…

Wide-Open Spaces

To some, the story of Christopher Johnson McCandless, the 24-year-old Emory University graduate who starved to death in the Alaskan wilderness in the spring of 1992, will never be anything more than a case of a spoiled bourgeois brat with half-cocked survivalist fantasies (and possible suicidal tendencies) who ran away…

La Terra

Thomas Wolfe wrote that you can’t go home again — and for Luigi, the main character in La Terra, why even bother? Home, for the classy Milan professor, is a small town in southern Italy, chock full o’ intrigue, corruption, and dysfunction. When Luigi travels to his hometown to sign…

Party Pooper

Billiards is one of the few sports that’s as taxing on a computer screen as it is in real life. It’s played in pubs, after all, and its legendary star was named “Fats.” Unfortunately most virtual billiard games are behind the eight ball in terms of quality, with poor physics…

Painting Portraits

Edmund Farraday will not sell out. He refuses. He’s young, he’s an artist, he has long hair, and he likes Rousseau. He is a free spirit, the kind of guy who would break ties with his daddy if daddy tried to make him go into the family business. He would…

Our Top DVD Picks Scheduled for Release This Week

The Audrey Hepburn DVD Collection (Paramount) Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Collector’s Edition (Sony) Christmas Television Favorites (Warner Bros.) The Comedians of Comedy: Live at the Troubadour (Image) Criminal Minds: The Second Season (Paramount) Day Night Day Night (IFC) Entourage: Season Three, Part 2 (HBO) Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer…

New Wave’s for All Ages

God bless ’em. Hernando and Sylvia Pineres are both 85 years of age, and they have been married for 61 years. Six kids and 15 grandchildren later, they still go to work every day. They’ve been there almost every day for the past 18 years. The Pineres’s lives have been…

Great Minds Create Alike

When two worlds collide, mayhem or genius can ensue. Consider the freestyle fellowship that has developed between painter John Bailly and poet Richard Blanco, and the latter rings true. “Place of Mind,” an exhibit opening tonight at the downtown branch of the Miami-Dade County Library System (101 W. Flagler St.,…

Contemporary Classics

Damn, Miami really is bursting at its cultural seams. Even without the historical and emotional cachet of last year’s retirement sendoff for Festival Miami founder William Hipp, the — as in the — classical music blast of the region sold out opening weekend. That’s okay, there’s plenty left; the mix…

No Need to Pimp Your Ride

We’ve all been there. The bank account is in the red, so you just bounce … um, write a check. Gas tank on E? Announce you’re going “green” and carpool with your annoying neighbor. You’ve perfected the art of fake-it-till-you-make-it, but today from 8:00 to 5:30 at the Mercedes C…

Just Hoof It

The pastoral critters in literary classics Animal Farm and Charlotte’s Web called meetings and staged uprisings when they had issues that needed resolving. But as far as we humans know, that doesn’t really happen. Good Samaritans like the folks at Farm Sanctuary are left to stand up for our mammalian…

Fete Until You Sweat

A few words of advice for those rare locals who (for God knows what reason) hate to party: Steer clear of downtown Miami today. In fact, if you’ve got an aversion to loud music, allergies to hot women in sequin-glitter-and-feather-festooned bikinis, and no interest in celebrating with Caribbean folks, just…

We Gotta Regatta

There are three ways to commemorate the anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage: (1) Quietly reflect on the resulting world-changing mass migration and the tragic effect it had on millions of indigenous peoples; (2) race your yacht in today’s Columbus Day Regatta, a genteel affair for our city’s many dedicated…

Show Love for Miami Music

Word on the street is Miami musicians are — in addition to being talented, innovative, and dedicated to their craft — haters. In fact, if you listen to the stories told over vodka tonics in noisy clubs and doppio espressos in dark coffeehouses, you might imagine that the industry is…

Spray Something Beautiful

As an artist, you can either wait to be discovered by some rich benefactor who will turn you into his own personal propaganda machine, or you can grab the art world by its balls and show ’em what you got. Graffiti virtuosos Typoe and Murder clearly went with the latter…

Go Ahead, Be a Jerk

In American slang, being a jerk is considered a bad thing. It means you’re idiotic, rude, insufferable, and generally not fun to be around. But to Jamaicans and other Caribbean islanders, the word jerk conjures up delicious images of highly spiced meat dishes. Jerk means lots of thyme, Jamaican allspice,…

Because It’s in a F***ing Cage, That’s Why

If you thought the only rule in cage fighting is “There are no rules,” sadly you are incorrect. Or so says Crawford Grimsley, promoter of Let the Rage Begin: A Mixed Martial Arts Battle of Apocalyptic Proportions. “There’s no eye-gouging,” says Grimsley, “no kicks to the groin, and no head-stomping”…