Celluloid Time Capsules

Birthdays, vacations, family reunions. These are the occasions that Barron Sherer and Kevin Wynn watch over and over. As co-curators of Cinema Vortex, a nonprofit organization dedicated to collecting and screening Florida’s old movies, Sherer and Wynn have seen thousands of children blow out birthday candles, a ridiculous number of…

Banned in Tampa

Gay pride is bookin’ south FRI 8/12 There wasn’t much to be proud of in Hillsborough County this past June. That’s because County Commissioner Ronda Storms shockingly revealed her homophobia by proposing a ban of Gay and Lesbian Pride Month displays in the area’s public libraries. To show solidarity and…

The Aqua Boys

Stroke with the gay swim team SAT 8/13 What’s the difference between a gay-lesbian-bi-transfriendly swim team and any other swim team? Right. Nothing. “It’s a group of happy athletes, I can tell you that,” says Roberto Ferreira, whose GLBT-Friendly Website and GLBT-Online magazine are helping raise funds for the South…

Fresh to Death

Subversive urban art at Diaspora THUR 8/11 So you sit down one morning for a bowl of cereal and notice the Rice Krispies elves have turned wanksta and are sporting iced-out chains and shiny gold-toothed grins. Is corporate America swapping its brogans for Timberlands? “There is a definite assimilation,” observes…

Vaselina Smiles

All hail Miss Hispanidad SUN 8/14 Ahí está, it’s Miss Hispanidad! It’s time to crown the new queen of the Hispanic Heritage Festival. Since 1973 this multiday extravaganza has been celebrating and sharing Latin culture. This year it begins in late September and continues through October, with various happenings throughout…

Viva Video

Within a year, Miami Art Central (MAC) has presented two interesting shows dealing with media art. The first was “The Last Picture Show: 1960-1982,” and now “Irreducible: Contemporary Short Form Video.” This exhibition, curated by Ralph Rugoff, takes us back to the beginning of video art, not chronologically but stylistically…

Current Art Shows

Fuzzy Was He? Once upon a time, before psychedelic Sesame Street of the Seventies turned into Elmo Street (the fifteen-second-skit show of the Nineties), there were Bert and Ernie, Oscar the Grouch, and Big Bird. Perhaps red furball Elmo was nice at first, but he pushed old favorites into the…

White Trash

And so, once more, the cineplex emits the stink of the network rerun, this week offering yet another worthless big-screen take on small-screen detritus. As Hollywood wonders — cries, actually, over spilt spoiled milk — why audiences are staying away from theaters, offering theories ranging from the absence of such…

Puppy Love

Must Love Dogs, it should be clearly stated, is not the greatest romantic comedy ever made about a quirky couple who meet at a dog park. That honor goes to Dog Park, the oddball 1998 flick starring Luke Wilson and Natasha Henstridge, written and directed by former Kids in the…

Unracked

For local food lovers Miami Spice has been an exciting, much-anticipated event. And for good reason — restaurants that typically charge a pretty penny for fancy dishes offer prix fixe menus which allow diners on a budget to feast in fine style. This year the culinary program is bigger and…

Selected Calendar Events for the Week of August 4, 2005

THU 4 Monday: Party. Tuesday: Party. Wednesday: Party. If that looks like the entries in your datebook, be sure to add tonight’s Ketel One Party at Doraku, Benihana’s boutique sushi lounge (1104 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach). From 10:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m., you can savor five-dollar Ketel One vodka cocktails…

Girls on Film

Alabao! From bongo-banging bathing beauties to piquant pistoleras in their birthday suits, Leo Carbajal’s Cuban women are a mouthwatering draw. One of the top fashion photographers of his era, Carbajal is celebrating the first retrospective of his work during “Cuban Women of the ’40s and ’50s: A Photographer’s Perspective,” at…

That’s Racin’!

Learn to slingshot without trading paint SAT 8/6 NASCAR is hotter than the sizzling asphalt it drives on, and the Petty name is legendary, dating back to the inception of Lee Petty Engineering in 1949. Lee’s son Richard sped onto the scene in 1958, and the following year he won…

Ballin’ with Your Buddies

Get served on the court SAT 8/6 he Heat may have lost to the Detroit Pistons, much to the dismay of the majority of us sports fans, but we, the people of Miami, still have a chance to show off our mad b-ball skillz and possibly bring some glory to…

Who Wants Short Shorts?

FRI 8/5 Filmmakers produce a vast number of short films and videos each year, but opportunities to see them are rare. That’s why the Museum of Contemporary Art (770 NE 125th St., North Miami) is presenting the seventh installment of “Optic Nerve,” its annual festival of short videos and films…

Miss Misery

Stephen King’s thriller comes to town SAT 8/6 Literary types love to dis Stephen King. Maybe it’s because the famously prolific horror writer has produced more stories and novels than just about any other living author. King has written genre schlock, as well as some remarkably good books, such as…

Current Stage Shows

Matt & Ben: Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers’s little comedy receives its Florida premiere in this Mad Cat Theatre production. It’s a cute fantasy about talent, male bonding, and fame, based on the real-life story of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s overnight rise to stardom when they won an Oscar…

Current Art Shows

Florida Artists Series: Tori Arpad and Kate Kretz: The Frost Museum’s current exhibition showcases two FIU associate art professors’ works combined to create an aesthetically and emotionally dramatic tone. Through her paintings and mixed-media textile creations, Kretz confronts and embraces themes of anguish, vulnerability, and female intuition. Although what’s described…

Steel Wheels

Hit me,” says Mark Zupan — begs, actually, like a child clamoring for a new toy. “I’ll hit you back.” He means it too, and his ripped pecs and buzzed scalp and tattooed back and arms and bushy gangster goatee promise just as much menace. The dude is bad and…

Could Be Verse

British indie filmmaker Sally Potter, a former dancer, lyricist, and performance artist, clearly has a taste for adventure. In 1992 that led her to Orlando, a screen adaptation of the experimental Virginia Woolf novel about an Elizabethan nobleman who hangs around for 400 years, eventually morphing into a hip twentieth-century…

She’s a Cool Mom

She was lost in experiencing the hugeness of the National Museum of Natural History with her five-year-old daughter when she missed our scheduled phone interview. “My senses were so overloaded,” says Hollis Gillespie, author of Confessions of a Recovering Slut. Fans of Gillespie’s “Mood Swing” column in Atlanta’s Creative Loafing,…

Homespun Art

Behind her loom, shoehorned into an area the size of a phone booth, artist Frances Trombly weaves sculptural gems that celebrate the wonders of childhood. Trombly’s “studio,” a retrofitted closet in her Edgewater apartment, literally spills over with spindles, brightly hued bundles of yarn, and the sundry boxes of media…