Reading the biography/history section of the Carpetbag Brigade’s website may cause seizures. The San Francisco group puts on visual extravaganzas using improvisation, acrobatics, music, circus antics, and butoh. This Saturday, the Carpetbag Brigade will perform their live show, “Callings,” as part of the much anticipated Sleepless Night, an overnight culturalpalooza…
Sometimes it’s easier for life to imitate art than vice versa—witness French cartoonist Joann Sfar’s first feature, an ambitious attempt to cage the career of legendary French singer-songwriter-scamp Serge Gainsbourg (1928-91), né Lucien Ginsburg, within the confines of a commercial showbiz biopic. Sfar’s Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life is itself somewhat…
The mad-scientist tale has remained more or less fixed since the beginning of sound cinema: From Dr. Frankenstein’s claim to “know what it feels like to be God,” to Jurassic Park’s criticism of “scientists [who] were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn’t stop to think if they…
As Europe deliberates whether to outlaw mosque minarets and women’s burqas, filmmakers are rushing in for a slice of the immigration tension. Enter Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki with Le Havre, a comic and tragic tale of a Normandy town and African refugees. Though only diehard film buffs will recognize Kaurismäki…
The Bible isn’t the only place to read about Christian morals. Sure, the holy book has parting seas and Jesus, but author C.S. Lewis brought Christian philosophy to a whole fantasy series, The Chronicles of Narnia, which includes the popular childhood staple The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. But…
Calling all flour children (pun intended). Get out the tie-dye and love beads for Short Order’s Foodstock: One Night of Peas and Music this Saturday at 6 p.m. at 2100 NW Second Ave. in Miami. Indulge in delights from 30 food trucks and update your hippie-dippy wardrobe with the help…
Remember how great you felt after your first mustache ride? Your heart was pounding, and every inch of your body tingled the way it does after a great workout. You were drenched in sweat and craving food-truck-greasy fare. That’s exactly how you’ll feel Saturday after Emerge Miami’s Mustache Ride. It’s…
In 2007, the Miami Dolphins brain trust used its second-round draft pick to select unknown QB John Beck out of that perennial quarterback factory, Brigham Young University. Undersize, weak-armed, and Mormon, Beck was expected to be the franchise savior and become the quarterback to finally step into Dan Marino’s immense…
Unlike Herman Munster, the Addams Family did not spring to life with a bolt of lightning. They evolved over time from the primordial soup of cartoonist Charles Addams’s imagination. His single-panel comics about the humorously macabre family eventually became an appropriately twisted domestic sitcom in the ’60s and then a…
When Agnostic Front appeared in the early ’80s, the band’s sound helped define what would come to be known as hardcore. If punk was stripped down, Agnostic Front was even more stripped down. There were no artful postpunk leanings here. If punk was aggressive, Agnostic Front was even more aggressive,…
Henry Flagler was a Rockefeller boy with so much Standard Oil money to burn that he paid out of his own pocket to construct a railroad to Key West. Many of his workers were Bahamian fellas who had immigrated to Miami, where they started families and built businesses in the…
Once, while watching a basketball game, Richard Schechner, a Tisch professor and artistic director of East Coast Artists, had an idea. If players could go from total calm on the bench, to completely in the game once on the court, then why couldn’t performers? Schechner devised RasaBoxes as a way…
In Composed, Rosanne Cash recalls folk singers, addicts, preachers, and sex kittens knocking on the door of her childhood home in the middle of the night, looking for her dad, Johnny. The country singer opens this year’s Miami Book Fair International with a reading Sunday at 7 p.m. Tickets cost…
The coolest, edgiest, and hippest graphic novelists will be lurking about the 305 November 13 through 20. There’s Denis Kitchen and his notorious Chipboard Sketchbook, Ben Katchor of The Cardboard Valise fame, and Michael Kupperman, whose graphic novel, Mark Twain’s Autobiography, recounts a “life” of Mark Twain in which the…
On the second page of Birds of Paradise, Diana Abu-Jaber evokes local carpet salesman Don Bailey as that “thirty-foot naked man reclining, selling God-knows-what.” The novel, which is steeped in the visual cues of Miami life, flips back and forth between a wayward daughter’s street life on the pink sidewalks…
If you see bumper-to-bumper traffic on Tamiami Trail heading to the Everglades, it’s because author Karen Russell has made our mucky, inhabitable frontier seem like a thrilling carnival ride. Her debut novel Swamplandia! follows the adventures of the Bigtree gator-wrestling dynasty. Ava takes an Odyssey-like expedition through the swamp in…
Colson Whitehead, best known for his 2009 novel Sag Harbor, recently released a novel about zombies, Zone One. The book challenges literary conventions and may very well represent a change in perspective from the literary establishment toward genre novels. Spanning three days in a post-apocalyptic world, the story deftly handles…
Miami’s real cultural diversity and voice are expressed through dance. The latest example — Cordel, from local troupe Brazz Dance -— takes the stage at the South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center. Augusto Soledade, Brazz Dance’s Brazilian-born director and choreographer, has mixed tango, hip-hop, and a street-literature tradition from his homeland…
The founders of the Miami Short Film Festival (MsFF) have a great idea for combating the overprescription of attention-deficit drugs. Instead of making attention spans longer, just make movies shorter! Though this ingenious solution to one of America’s pill-popping problems hasn’t taken off, the festival has somehow survived and thrived…
Ben Joseph, the lead character in the Caldwell Theatre’s After the Revolution, is a fascinating specimen. An academic, dyed-in-the-wool socialist with a pompous ponytail, Ben continues to raise his tattered red flag, spreading the people’s gospel at a time when nobody wants to hear it. You see, After the Revolution…
At the end of Michael Moore’s remarkable documentary Roger & Me, the filmmaker corners former General Motors CEO Roger Smith and asks him if he’d visit a family who’d been evicted from their home in Flint, Michigan. Smith’s decision to shut down several plants in the city cost 30,000 folks…
If you’ve never heard the word zarzuela, you aren’t alone. But in Spain, it’s a popular (typically satirical) form of opera that alternates between speaking and singing. For the first time in it’s 71-year history, Florida Grand Opera will perform a zarzuela called Luisa Fernanda to kick off its 2011-12…
