Doctor Botox

THUR 4/3 Too many worries about the war have your forehead in a constant furrow. The perpetual pout deepens your frown lines by the second. Worst of all, your utter disbelief in everything that is happening in Iraq has given you a permanent Donald Rumsfeld-style squint. Hello, crow’s feet!Yes, war…

Soul Con Sabor

SAT 4/5 The best crossbred bands in the city will mix it up at Cielo Lounge (66 SW Sixth St.) with Latin rhythms, funky grooves, electronica, rap, roots revivals, and other refried Afro beats at the Miami/New York Latin Funk Festival. The Spam Allstars, Lee Williams & the Square Egg,…

Ugly Out There

Architecture has become selfish and homogeneous — it lacks diversity and a genuine connection with nature.” — architect Lucien Kroll There’s so much wrong about Miami’s urban fabric: poor design, structural monotony, congestion. And a critical problem is our lack of green areas, for shade, for leisure. Perhaps our politicians…

Right Show, Wrong Crowd

In a hurry? Me too, so I’ll get to the point. This is a review of Floyd Collins, an innovative musical that’s got a week or two left in its run at Actors’ Playhouse in Coral Gables. The story is based on a real incident in the 1920s, when a…

War on War Songs

War, as it turns out, is good for absolutely nothing when it comes to anti-war songs. At the risk of sounding like Bill O’Reilly (who, no doubt, listens only to Wagner), it’s time to protest the protesters, most of whom are blowin’, all right, just not in the wind. The…

Lost Boys

You know how boys love to play soldier? How they get stern-faced and march out to destroy an enemy whom they believe needs destroying? Well, actors are into that too. Sometimes they soldier on even when Bruce Willis or Mel Gibson isn’t around to help them frown determinedly. Such is…

A Horrible Mind

Director David Cronenberg has led his loyal fans down some pretty spooky corridors, including the telepathic netherworld of Scanners, the violent sibling rivalry of twin gynecologists in love with the same woman (Dead Ringers), and the drug-haunted imagination of William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch). So it comes as no surprise…

Bass Ackwards

In nature, living things prey upon each other all the time. Humanity, on the other hand, has a choice. It is flouting this choice that excites director Gaspar Noé. In his latest project, Irréversible, he basically swipes Christopher Nolan’s backward-narrative structure from Memento to tell a lurid tale of rape…

Gal Power

In Ghana, the polyrhythmic drum-driven musical style known as takada is a woman’s cry to freedom. “To be a composer or drummer among the Anlo-Ewe people of Ghana was something reserved for men,” explains Corina Fitch, drummer, dancer, professional midwife, and the director of the Takada Women’s Ensemble. “But in…

This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks

Thursday, March 27 New World Symphony founder, artistic director, and recent Grammy Award winner (for a San Francisco Symphony recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 6), Michael Tilson Thomas welcomes renowned soprano Ying Huang for a little more Mahler. This time the Romantic composer’s delicate Symphony No. 4 is on the…

Pop Crime Scenes

Not long into George P. Pelecanos’s just-published crime novel Soul Circus, protagonist Derek Strange — black, mid-fifties, veteran private detective — and his partner Terry Quinn — white, early thirties, new to the business — cruise the streets of Washington, D.C., in Strange’s Chevy searching for a key witness in…

At the Viral Front

SUN 3/30 Every day, soldiers struggle in the “homeland” to keep a biological agent at bay. The agent is the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) that has infected almost 900,000 people domestically. Although effective treatments have reduced the epidemic to an afterthought in the American psyche, AIDS continues to spread and…

Play Ball!

MON 3/31 Okay, so the Florida Marlins lost more games than they won last year, shed some of their most popular players, and — with the exception of one high-profile acquisition — have done little to improve themselves. And yes, they fired their mascot. But so what? Hope springs eternal…

Les Kids

FRI 3/28 Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, a sprawling novel detailing the cat-and-mouse game played by an ex-con and an obsessed policeman, takes place as a bloody student uprising envelops nineteenth-century Paris. One wonders if the students Hugo had in mind were ninth-graders. Regardless the Miami Children’s Theater production of Les…

Insides Out

WED 4/2 Forty feet long, four feet high, with a porcine pink exterior and a blood-red hollowed interior, and featuring a gaping portal at either end, the snakelike whateveritis on first appearance looks like 1) a grisly, forbidding Claes Oldenburg sculpture, 2) a portion of the disemboweled body of Paul…

Medicinal Metaphors

WED 4/2 Imagine you are something other than a person, something in nature. What would you like to be and why? What would you look like, sound like? Upon reading Charles Simic’s poem “The Stone” to a clinically depressed group, certified poetry therapist Barbara Kreisberg poses those questions. For Kreisberg,…

Grimm Stuff

Sometimes life is like a fairy tale. Not the Teletubbies kind, the Grimm kind. Things are humming along really well, then blam! Something mysterious strikes out of the blue and your sweet reality is suddenly transformed into a nightmare. That pretty much sums it up for Peter Hoskins, the central…

The King Is Dense

Lawrence Kasdan directs and co-writes (with William Goldman) Dreamcatcher, the latest addition to the Stephen King adaptation genre, currently at 74, including film and TV, and counting. Taking the Internet Movie Database as a source, this puts King handily ahead of Michael Crichton (23) and Bram Stoker (38), closing in…

Up Cool Creek

Set among South Beach’s understated Art Deco hotels, the groovy Fifties motor lodge recently rechristened The Creek (as in adjacent to Indian Creek) looks like it may have dropped in from outer space, or at least from Southern California. Formerly known as the Banana Bungalow youth hostel, the site is…

This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks

March 20, 2003 Considered by some to be the world’s greatest rapper, LL Cool J has topped the pop charts for almost twenty years. Hits like “Mama Said Knock You Out” and “U Can’t F**K With Me” have fueled his tough-guy image. But you are bound to experience a softer,…

You Joust, M’Lord

Renaissance festivals allow you to hobnob with the likes of Olga, a fictional farm girl played by Web designer Sarah Hanafourde. Dressed in appropriately sweet garb, toting a yoke with empty milk buckets, and calling out to her pretend cow, Helga, who wandered off, Olga is among the many characters…

Underneath the Bunker

Adolf Hitler killed his own dog. Most of his other evil is well documented now, and words alone are inadequate anyway, so let’s begin by considering this comparatively microscopic offense. For the many who shower their canines with at least as much affection as they offer other human beings (and…