Thursday 11/20 Imagine this entry from the diaries of Lewis & Clark, trekking their way through our country in 1805: “Dear Diary: We’re itching less; there’s fewer mosquitoes the further west we go. As we make our way down the Columbia River, we’re surprised to find chicks! Tons of them…
Where do ideas for musicals come from? Time was, most of them were adaptations of plays or books (My Fair Lady, Guys & Dolls, South Pacific). Nowadays, though, inspiration for shows comes from all sorts of sources. Take, for example, Bat Boy: The Musical, which began as a “real life”…
There’s a kind of contemporary painting that examines what it means to be making a contemporary painting. Highly recursive, it mines art history and the visual record for intense, sometimes injurious remixing. Its grandpappy is Gerhard Richter, whose 40 years’ worth of paintings were on display at the Museum of…
“We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers.” So said civil rights activist, Gandhi disciple, and all-around troublemaker Bayard Rustin. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, you’re not alone. Although a trusted confidant and mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr., his name is rarely mentioned in the…
Russell Crowe to his agent: “More Oscar-bait. Now.” Agent, considering his cut of Crowe’s $20 million payday: “Yes, sir.” A possible scenario, anyway. Thus Crowe is back in another iconic, self-serious performance, and his beefy mug will stare down upon us from this season’s heroic movie posters until Tom Cruise…
All punk rock ever wanted to do was return music and art to the people. Despite the apparent lack of skills and shocking results, these “musicians” were talented innovators with a desperate need to revolutionize various genres gone static in the 1970s. Too bad only a few enlightened people “got…
Oh, the marvels of a book. From a bound volume of pages loaded with words, comes forth the keys to the universe, the liberation of people, the indoctrination of acolytes, Thanksgiving recipes, and the dirty thoughts of prepubescent boys reading the good parts of a Judy Blume novel. As the…
SAT 11/15 Walking through the tropical hammock of Pinewood Cemetery in Coral Gables, a serene 4-acre site filled with native gumbo limbo, coco plum, palmettos, bromeliads, and orchids, you stumble across the headstone of one of the first recorded burials in the area south of the Miami River: George T…
FRI 11/14 So you want to be a bodybuilder, eh? Okay. First be born with the right body type; genetics are more than half the equation. Then spend hours a day in the gym, working out harder than most people work on the first day of a new job. We’re…
SAT 11/14 Not to be confused with ABC-TV’s lusty horndog Bob the Bachelor is the infinitely handier if less-handsome Bob the Builder, title character of the animated television series on Nick Jr. and star of wildly successful videos like Bob’s White Christmas and Celebrate with Bob. The hard-hatted he-man will…
SUN 11/16 The first and probably last Argentine rock star, the man who reinvented the hotel-trashing role reserved for the very few, Charly García (below), will be in town for Rock En Miami II at noon at Bayfront Park (401 Biscayne Blvd.). He’ll bring his band, which will mean lots…
THUR 11/13 Stupid New York. Stupid Macy’s parade. They get all the fun. Enormous puppets bouncing down the street, in between the Woody Woodpecker and Snoopy balloons. But perhaps Pia Fraus can help. The world-traveling Brazilian theater company returns to Miami to perform Animals of Brazil, featuring Macy’s-sized puppets –…
Thursday 11/13 Kick up your heels for joy. Or maybe you should leave that to the professionals? A good reason to be thrilled is you’ll finally get to see the hallowed Radio City Christmas Spectacular without having to trek to New York City in what could be snowy weather. Yes,…
In Autumn Spring, a bittersweet comedy from the Czech Republic, an aged ex-actor, Fanda, lives in bleak, unfulfilling retirement with his dour, too-careful wife, Emilie; he is forever pestered by the complaints from his hapless, thrice-married son. As he lacks youth, money, and health, Fanda’s one pleasure is to make…
A few words of advice for those among you fortunate and/or dogged enough to have seen the original The Singing Detective miniseries that aired on the BBC in 1984: If you plan on seeing the new movie, also called The Singing Detective and also written by the late Dennis Potter,…
Even the untimely death of Bee Gee and squirt-gun/firearm enthusiast Maurice Gibb could not halt the surging of the upstart gel-sport paintball. The fifth and final leg of the National Professional Paintball League Super 7 World Series will be held in Miami. An avid paintballer in his time, Gibb fielded…
If you’re an avid viewer of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, you already know the name Lewis Black. Wednesday night’s Back in Black segments feature his apoplectic musings on subjects as varied as the merits of monkeys, the mysterious beverage Clamato, and the failings of Bill Clinton,…
THUR 11/6 Cultural wasteland. Culturally deprived. Culturally backward. We’ve all heard the knocks about the level of aesthetic goings-on in Miami. How aware, we wonder, are those naysayers of the fact that in 1973, the county decided to set aside 1.5 percent of the construction cost of all new county…
SUN 11/9 “So castles made of sand, fall in the sea, eventually.” Maybe so, Jimi Hendrix, but that’s no reason not to have another sandcastle-building contest. As part of the nearly month-long American Institute of Architects’ Miami Architecture Week, local firms will compete for best design during Sandblast 2003, now…
THUR 11/6 Mmm, pizza. Thin-crust pizza. Mushroom. Sausage. Pineapple. What do you mean, ewww? All pizza is good — and educational. Want proof? Check out “Pizza: Any Way You Slice It” at the Miami Children’s Museum (980 MacArthur Cswy.). The museum’s first traveling exhibition gives kids ages 3 to 7…
THUR 11/6 It came from Portland. We assume that’s the hip West Coast city in Oregon, not the crusty East Coast bastion in Maine. “It” is something called the Clouds and 3D’s Ril Music Tour starring States Rights Records folkie-turned-electronica-artist Bobby Birdman and labelmates Yacht, plus DJ Maxx Bass, and…
SAT 11/8 Hialeah Rocks! Really. What other municipality in Miami-Dade can boast of its very own festival at the rock and roll holy ground of Churchill’s? Kendall? Ha! Coral Gables? Don’t make me laugh. Now in its ninth year, Hialeah Fest started over a few beers and a bunch of…
