Industry Smackdown

Night after night, they fight it out in the war over your hard-earned dollars, but today and tomorrow, April 15, the sexiest servers from some of South Beach’s most popular clubs, restaurants, bars, and hotels will be fighting a different kind of battle. This weekend is the third annual Beach…

Waiting to Exhale

You’ve been breathing for years, routinely inhaling and exhaling like there’s no tomorrow. And you think that you’re doing it right, but sometimes your efforts end up coming out as a gasp or a pant — maybe because of too much puff, puff, pass. So today the people at True…

Good, Sweaty Fun

It’s been some time since you hummed along to “Auld Lang Syne,” yet it might as well be January 1 as far as your New Year’s resolution to lose weight is concerned. Now it’s time to pick up the slack, and you can start by punishing those flabby glutes at…

Art About Town

Although best known for his Buddha Bar compilations, Arno Elias also has a painting pedigree. The artist makes his U.S. debut at the 2300 Studio Gallery as part of tonight’s Wynwood arts crawl, beginning at 7:00. The French funkster’s mixed-media collages twang the chord of the energetic world rhythms heard…

Da Da Da

Back in the Teens, the European Dadaist movement rejected logic, reason, and aesthetics as bourgeois, war-mongering concepts. Dada meant freedom from repressive norms, and the embrace of anarchy. Sort of like opposite day on a grand cultural scale: Healthy equalled sick, traditional beauty was ugly, and old-school concepts of prevailing…

Belly Laughs

It’s Friday night and all you want to do is laugh. Not in your head, and not that breathy cubicle laugh. You want to laugh like there’s no one else in the room; laugh till your sides hurt; laugh till something warm trickles down your leg. If this is how…

Dancing on the Edge

The Marie Chouinard Dance Company has been exciting international audiences since 1990, but the much-discussed Montreal compagnie has not graced Miami stages with its unique brand of modern dance until now. No, this is not your hippie mother’s modern dance troupe, no way, no how. Visually and conceptually, Chouinard is…

Sashay, Chante

Lincoln Road, Ocean Drive, and Washington Avenue serve as impromptu runways for models and wannabes alike 365 days a year. But starting today until Monday, April 16, these guys and gals will have a ton of official places to strut their stuff, complete with bona fide runways for the models…

Dance Fever

Tonight the Momentum Dance Company kicks off its ten-day Miami Beach Dance Festival, featuring dance companies from around North America and beyond. Flamenco, ballet, modern; you can see it all at various locales around town, with most of the action taking place at the Byron Carlyle Theater. Among the performances…

Here to Share

If you’ve never heard of PostSecret, you’re either an internet idiot, or you’ve been hiding in a cave for the past four years. Frank Warren’s community art project began innocuously enough — in 2004, he handed out blank postcards in the hopes that people would anonymously mail him their secrets…

We’ll Always Love Big Papa

The Big Read — a month-long program aimed at increasing the public’s love of all things literary — is currently underway in South Florida. The Florida Center for the Literary Arts at Miami Dade College (MDC) is offering film screenings, open forums, book discussions, panels, art exhibits, and musical and…

Darling Nikki

During the late Nineties, identity clip artist Nikki S. Lee earned herself a spot on the art world’s most wanted list with snapshots in which she flimflammed her way into other people’s lives. In her celebrated “Projects” series, the artist skulked along the boundaries of truth and fiction, disguising herself…

Welcome Robot Overlords!

While great minds of the past set themselves to curing diseases or explaining the laws of the universe, today our best and brightest aspire to another sort of goal: building robots that can fight each other. This year’s BotsIQ National Robotics Competition starts today at the Miami Beach Convention Center…

Billiards and Brew

“Free is a good price for beer; there is really nothing fancy about it,” quips Herb Garfinkle, owner of Sunset Billiards. Every Wednesday night starting at 7:00, patrons can enjoy free ice cold domestic drafts while shooting pool on the Brunswick Gold Crown Tournament tables. Now you can see if…

Hash House Harriers Drink and Run

Drinking and dashing, for the fun of it What’s better than running, then drinking? Drinking, running, drinking, running, and then drinking some more, of course! And that’s exactly what was on the menu last Monday, when I joined the Miami/Ft. Lauderdale Hash House Harriers for their weekly “Wild Card Hash,”…

Susan Seligson’s Stacked: Adventures in Boobland

Vincent Guadazno Despite her breast efforts… With a book title like Stacked: A 32DDD Reports From the Front, author Susan Seligson was already expecting at least a little attention. As a woman with a rack of her own, she’s been on the receiving end of the male gaze for most…

Bikinis and Kicks at Club Mansion

David at upnup.blogspot.com Friday night, Club Mansion; something’s different. Sure there are a million and one people drinking like fish and grinding to beats that don’t exist. But what is that long stretch of stage reaching into the crowd? Suddenly, the stripper-wannabes inhabiting the stage were yanked away, and a…

Stop By!

Stop Miami is coming to a stop When Stop Miami came on the nightlife scene almost three years ago, more than a few hipsters heralded it as a savior. An outpost of understated cool in the burgeoning Wynwood District, Stop was where you went for a glass of good, affordable…

Glittering Hunks of Trash

There exists some debate about audience familiarity with the term “grindhouse,” and even a certain confusion about the origins of the word itself — whether it refers to the movies that comprised a gilded age of exploitation cinema, or to the all-night urban theaters in which they were regularly shown…

Meet the Robinsons

Sharply adapted from the William Joyce book A Day with Wilbur Robinson, this speedy animated film features Lewis (voiced by Daniel Hansen and Jordan Fry), a bespectacled science geek and orphan who, though well cared for by a loving foster mom (velvety-voiced Angela Bassett), is too weird to get himself…

La Cage aux Folles

La Cage aux Folles: This weirdly resonant story began life as a French play, got reworked as a now-classic French-Italian film, was turned into a Jerry Herman/Harvey Fierstein musical that proceeded to win just about every Tony ever invented, and then received a Hollywood face-lift to emerge as The Birdcage,…

Pretty in Ink

In a picture at the Kevin Bruk Gallery, an ostrich-necked geisha faces away from the spectator, her grapefruit-size head almost floating in a creamy buttermilk sky. She wears what appears to be a bearskin frock, cut low to reveal the broad expanse of her back. Two oily plumes of smoke…