The real Melvin Van Peebles shows up just once in Baadasssss!, a fictionalized account of his making of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song in 1971, and it is at the film’s end; he sits silent, grinning, clutching his ever-present cigar. But he’s all over this movie, in which his son Mario…
A strong toxin requires a strong antidote. In the case of the Bush administration, the cure is being served in significant part by Michael Moore, he of the Peter Jackson Diet (and similar pop culture ambition), who previously delivered the rousing documentaries Roger & Me and Bowling for Columbine. This…
Tammi Terrell, creator of glam darlings at Tammi’s House of Flava, her North Miami salon, will be styling and cutting and throwing attitude as she sculpts intricate designs upon the heads of her models. You could say Tammi is something of a performance artist. When she takes the stage at…
Modern living is great! Or so they say. If some are to be believed, modern living was even better from 1945 to 1965, especially if you lived in a fabulous Florida tropical home. During the sunny post-World War II period, the United States was bursting with optimism. The future was…
Parents who trip over toys scattered on the floor and scream at their children to put them away might not realize that those little doodads could inspire their tykes later in their lives as artists. In the hands of a child, Barbie may seem to be nothing more than a…
A chop is a chop is a chop: chicken chunks and rice and beans and sauce, or some other variation. In the age of healthy fast food, anything devoid of a hamburger bun and lacking mayonnaise makes lunchgoers think they are eating healthily. At Miami-based Pollo Tropical, the Tropichop Summer…
Silent warriors key to peace BY JUAN CARLOS RODRIGUEZ In the ongoing hearings of the commission investigating the September 11 terrorist attacks, one government expert, asked about ways in which to improve sentiment toward Americans in the Middle East, suggested the following: finding avenues for Arabic society to express negative…
Everything you wanted to know about mangos BY MARGARET GRIFFIS Tommy Atkins, Kent, Graham, Haden, and Lancetilla. Lancetilla? These aren’t the names of hunky soap opera studs or zany drag queens. They’re just a few of the hundreds of varieties of mangos cultivated over the last 4000 years. Sweet, fragrant,…
Thursday 6/24 Reports of the death of Coconut Grove have been greatly exaggerated — at least to some people, namely local retailers. That’s why the store owners on Main Highway and Fuller Street have decided to organize a Progressive Evening in Coconut Grove from 7:00 to 10:00 tonight. The public…
Back in 1999, the first time members of the South Beach Gay Men’s Chorus let their voices loose in our midst, the tenors, baritones, and basses were seen on Lincoln Road wearing red Santa hats, handing out lyric sheets, and exhorting passersby to sing along with a multilingual version of…
Movement is life. Motion is everything. To the lovers of dance theater, reality is a grand-scale performance, and Miami takes center stage this week. The Florida Dance Festival returns for its 26th season with a roster of international performers, newly commissioned works, and a series of workshops and classes that…
NOW 24/7 For the homeless, shelter is found in cardboard boxes and abandoned buildings. Meals are scraped from late-night rummaging through restaurant Dumpsters. The summer heat feels twice as hot and the hunger pangs are the only constant company. According to the Miami-Dade Homeless Trust, there are more than 4000…
NOW 24/7 Sue the city. Yes, that’s exactly what you should do if you already were a preadolescent or a teenager when the City of Miami Beach began work on the North Shore Park & Youth Center 10 long years ago. Bureaucrats and their harebrained scheme, er, “vision,” prevented you…
SUN 6/20 Dads and dogs are typically two peas in a pod. They’re both known to urinate wherever they please, sniff the occasional butt, and frequently end up in the doghouse. So why not honor the strong ties that bind them this Father’s Day at the Loews Miami Beach Hotel…
FRI 6/18 Asked how long it took to build a theater for Miami Dade College’s drama program, Prometeo, actress/artistic director Teresa Maria Rojas unabashedly replies, “Thirty-three years!” On the telephone, Rojas’s eloquent and effusive Spanish is suddenly cut short by the dry pronouncement in English that Prometeo’s permanent home was…
All hail irrationality! And Wayne Gretzky too (hold on a minute — we’ll get to that). Irrationality is the only explanation of why the Atlantis Playhouse’s Gary Waldman decided against all logic to present The Life, a stark, gritty musical about pimps and prostitutes that’s a 180-degree change from the…
There are eighteen songs in Songs for a New World, some more imaginative than others but all striking in their deceptive simplicity. The common themes in this revue of composer Jason Robert Brown’s work are life and happiness, or lack thereof. They run the gamut from unabashed optimism to shocking…
In glass blowing, the gaffer shapes a molten mass of glass by blowing air into it through a tube. Around the first millennium B.C., Syrians invented the craft, which quickly became a rich export to all parts of the Roman Empire. These early vessels had a decorative purpose (shaped as…
Summer Shorts: City Theatre’s annual festival of short plays, a highlight of the South Florida stage scene, is back with mini comedies and dramas in all styles and sizes. Twenty playlets from one to twenty minutes long are presented in two separate programs, which can be taken in on separate…
Cakewalk: Aesthetic experience and erogenous pleasure have always been close relatives, to be sure. But rather than any genuine countercultural agenda, artists in 2004 are armed with a stylist’s finely tuned eye for the retro, a fascination with the abject and unlovable, a salacious eye for soft porn, and an…
Ah, the peculiar genius that is Guy Maddin. Who else but the morose Canadian director, born and raised in one of the coldest cities in the world, would marry silent film, 1930s movie musicals, Prohibition, family melodrama, critique of capitalist zeal, and monster-movie gore in a surreal montage about sorrow…
Getting stranded at snowbound O’Hare for the night is one thing. You call home, maybe knock down a couple of martinis, then grab a blanket. A century ago, being quarantined at Ellis Island for eight months because you were, say, a part-time anarchist from Campobasso with a big mustache and…
