Cuts Like a Knife

The story is simple enough: Sometime during the dying days of the Tang Dynasty in China, though it could really be any time and any place, two cops named Leo (Andy Lau) and Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) sit in a station house drinking tea. They decide one of them will go…

Down with the King

The plan to celebrate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with an annual holiday was almost as controversial as his truncated life. Senators, most notably North Carolina’s Jesse Helms, opposed the concept. “What about Abraham Lincoln Day? What about the high financial costs?” detractors wondered. Kansas Sen. Bob…

Big Deco Deal

The Miami Design Preservation League celebrates its 28th annual Art Deco Weekend with the theme “Art Deco and the New Deal.” The event was created to raise awareness of the Art Deco era (roughly 1925-1945) and attract visitors to Miami Beach’s historic district. South Beach no longer needs any added…

Stimulating Spirituality

A rainbow of positive energy TUE 1/18 Develop insight. Learn about yourself. Be powerful. It’s easy to say, but we often need a push to realize what we already know. Jamaican-born Chet Alexander, age 50, is the founder of the Rainbow Belt School of Insight and teaches Shamanic Kabbalah classes…

Rings of Desire

FRI 1/14 A gas giant with rings of ice and rock, Saturn has been the object of NASA’s and the European Space Agency’s Cassini-Huygens Mission. The Huygens probe has detached successfully and should reach Saturn’s largest moon Titan any day now. While you’re waiting for the photos from space, you…

Iconoclastic Ichaso

Cuban cinema at the Tower FRI 1/14 In a review of Leün Ichaso’s innovative biopic Piñero, Lynn Geller came up with this line that neatly encapsulates the current state of cultural affairs: “[He was] a true artist whose disinterest in ömaking it’ stands in stark contrast to today’s crop, many…

Great Hair

Rapunzel is revisited SAT 1/15 Rapunzel, Rapunzel, throw down your underwear? A fractured version of the classic fairy tale (Falling for Rapunzel by Leah Wilcox) has the long-haired beauty unable to hear the prince, which adds a hilarious twist to the story. “No, Rapunzel, your curly locks,” he yells, but…

Night&Day

THU 13 For those who seek a little action with their art, “She Sank on Shallow Bank” is an exhibition that cannot be missed. This film, dance, and photography installation is a collaborative display of stop-motion animation and sculptural sets that visits the dreams of a girl who has washed…

Everything’s Coming Up Poses

One of the offbeat charms of Jim Tommaney and his rough-and-tumble EDGE Theatre is trying to figure out where they’re going next. Not just aesthetically but literally. The peripatetic producer, playwright, performance artist, and poet has staged shows in fifteen locations in less than ten years, pinballing around South Florida…

Feminine Projections

Three exhibitions of recent work by female artists deal with projections into time and space. Wendy Wischer, Jiae Hwang, and Hung Liu apply the medium of light in different ways, to diverse effect. Through their work, each artist grapples with her individual place and moment along the temporal time line…

Current Art Shows

The Gifts I Could Never Give You: In this show Bert Rodriguez shelves the “conceptual prankster” tag and wears his heart on his sleeve. You can’t help but share his lament. The work delves into the detritus of failed relationships, shifting perception from visual displays of marketing props, mannequins, neon…

A Few Dollars Left

Clint Eastwood began digging into the third act of his career — the one that reveals the mature, deep-thinking artist … with a little jazz piano on the side — a dozen years ago, with the discomfiting anti-western Unforgiven. Since then, he’s hardly come up for air or given himself…

Blade Runners

Over a three-month period in 1994, machete-wielding Hutu tribesmen in Rwanda hacked to death 800,000 Tutsi men, women, and children. News reports, including film footage of the unfolding carnage, were broadcast around the globe. In the face of such unremitting acts of inhumanity, the world community did nothing. It wasn’t…

Soulful Food

Surrounded by crumbling stores with newspaper-covered windows stands a teal historic landmark. A glowing sign in the window reads “A Nice Place for Nice People.” Entering Jumbo’s, you’re greeted with the same welcoming smile and attentive service that have made this restaurant thrive for the past fifty years. Robert “Bobby”…

Night&Day

THU 6 VW Beetle owners will travel around the country to hang out at Bug Jams with other Beetle drivers. A biker who loves his Harley-Davidson would rather see his sister in a brothel than his brother on a Japanese crotch rocket. And don’t even mention a PC around Apple…

The Other Art Fair

With the art market hotter than Las Vegas asphalt in August, Art Miami is celebrating the fifteenth edition of what organizers and local participant galleries are calling “Miami’s hometown art fair,” citing the presence of Art Basel last month as more of a boon than threat to its stability. Ramon…

Wild Things

Wolf suits and mischief-making Ask children’s librarians to name their most requested picture books and you are bound to hear the 1964 Caldecott Medal Winner Where the Wild Things Are rattled off again and again. Maurice Sendak’s classic story is about a sassy boy named Max who is sent to…

Horse So Fine

SAT 1/8 Paso Fino horses are born with a unique and graceful four-beat lateral gait which is smooth for the rider and beautiful to watch. See the pretty horses walk this way beginning at 9:00 a.m. today and Sunday at the Tropical Park Equestrian Center, 7900 Bird Rd. Free. Call…

Coagulated Canvas

Blood, paint, and hairs SAT 1/8 Anthony Spinello is trying to make a name for his handsome little Wynwood Arts District digs, Liquid Blue Gallery (3438 N. Miami Ave.), so he wants to feature artists who think outside the palette to attract thrill-seeking art crowds. “Organic” is a two-person exhibition…

Supersized Tales

Big opera for the little ‘uns SAT 1/8 Paul Bunyan, the hunky lumberjack who could fell 23 trees in a single stroke, is pure Americana: ridiculous, annoying, glorious. And loaded with camp possibilities: In the late 1930s, two gay British expats living in New York, poet W.H. Auden and composer…

Bugging Out

Ringing in your year FRI 12/31 2004 was the year of the bug. Hans Blix and Kofi Annan had their phones tapped. Commuters on San Francisco’s Muni trains learned their intimate chats were picked up on high-tech audio equipment. There were critters in our touch-screen voting machines. That mysterious lump…

Melting Ice

Several questions are raised in Florida Stage’s Ice Glen, but not ones the theater likely intends. The first is why this underrealized world premiere was pushed into production before its time. Veteran playwright Joan Ackermann’s work offers poetic sensibilities, but it trickles its watery way to a tepid conclusion, and…