This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks

February 20, 2003 You can live forever. But here’s the deal: You have to spend eternity exclusively on the island of Manhattan. Yikes! The stress of that city might be enough to do away with any immortal, but that is the predicament of reporter/artist Cormac O’Connor, protagonist of illustrious journalist…

Song Life Lines

Last time we checked in with Clemson, South Carolina-based folk singer/songwriter Carla Ulbrich, she was alive, well, and working too hard: touring the country, writing humorous songs about wedgies and such, and presiding over the Difficult Last Name Club. That was all before her first stroke in January of 2002…

Miami International Film Festival

There’s a lot of goodwill out there for this year’s Miami International Film Festival to succeed, and there’s a lot out there this year to see. With 65 features, plus shorts and documentaries — playing at three theaters — you would well deserve an Olympian award if you caught them…

The Bleeding Edge

It was supposed to be make-believe, a disturbing but ultimately uplifting work of science-fiction from a celebrated author of grim futurama and glorious fantasy. The subject matter of Orbiter, a hardback graphic novel about a spaceship that disappears for years and returns sheathed in skin after visits to faraway places…

Classic Comeback

Time was, the great repertoire of classical drama was the mainstay of established New York City and regional theaters. But take a quick look at the season lineups at the nation’s major theaters, and you’ll be hard pressed to spot even a smattering of classics. What happened to the great…

Sounds Like Art

SFCA (South Florida Composers Alliance) is one of the most underrated marvels of Miami. For more than a decade, this organization has presented its annual Subtropics Festival — at number fifteen this year. Artists like Sonny Rollins, John Cage, Don Pullen, Robert Ashley, Pauline Oliveiros, and other nonconformists, electronica mavericks,…

The Doctor is Out of Control

Some filmmakers use documentaries to explore complex subjects. Others use docs to ram home their own agendas. That’s certainly the case with The Trials Of Henry Kissinger, a fast-paced, 80-minute exposé that is more an accusation than an examination. Directed by Eugene Jarecki and written by Alex Gibney, Kissinger lays…

Drag, Man

Be it by a simple pat on the back, a hefty raise, or a shiny award, everybody wants to be recognized in some small way for the things they do, especially drag doyenne Shelley Novak. Known for his perennial five-o’clock shadow, copious chest hair, and ersatz resemblance to hefty actress…

Events for February, 13-19, 2003

Thursday, February 13, 2003 For days you’ve been seeing more boats on land than you’ve ever seen at sea. That can only mean one thing: The Miami International Boat Show has dropped anchor through Tuesday, February 18, at the Miami Beach Convention Center (1901 Convention Center Dr.) and the Sealine…

That Seventies Thing

Part armored military vehicle, part dune buggy, Volkswagen’s The Thing briefly blitzkrieged through American automobile culture in the Seventies, a wiggy antidote to the billions and billions of sensible Beetles sold by the German carmaker in the U.S. during the Sixties. Manufactured in Mexico, The Thing was first introduced here…

It’s Elementary, I Fear

If English mysteries are your cup of tea, you might want to sample Sherlock’s Last Case, now being served up at the Actors’ Playhouse in Coral Gables. Charles Marowitz’s script, a revisionist take on the legendary detective character Sherlock Holmes, borrows both characters and situations from the classic series of…

Quiet Strength

While virtually no one in this country foresaw the American disaster in Vietnam, the late British writer Graham Greene glimpsed it with astonishing clarity a decade before the first U.S. “advisor” set foot on Vietnamese soil. Greene’s 1955 novel The Quiet American, which has now been made into a disturbing…

Hudson Hawked

Astaire & Rogers. Hepburn & Tracy. Heck, Ball & Arnaz, Houston & Washington, or Vardalos & Corbett. Over the decades Hollywood has proved that its romantic comedies needn’t suck. But alas, they often do, as is the case with How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. Clearly, bigwig co-producers…

Voice Not Silenced

Talk about your etiquette dilemmas: What’s the proper way to say thank you to a kidney donor? Do you marry them? Buy them a car? Pay off their house? Send them flowers every month for life? If you’re spoken-word artist Sekou Sundiata, you write a show about the whole harrowing…

Get Sauced

The better a barbecue sauce, the more likely you’ll end up with it all over your hands, says a Southern rule of thumb. If it’s an extremely good sauce, you’ll likely find some smeared around your mouth, giving you that inimitable I-applied-lipstick-while-drunk look. Dirty hands and messy mouths occur because…

The Pain Train

Rawson Thurber has been so busy the past few days that by the time he finally returns a reporter’s phone call, he does so at 1:30 in the morning–and he doesn’t even realize the late, or early, hour till he hears the groggy croak on the other end. He’s sorry…

Your New Friends?

Last October, Sue Vertue found herself in a Los Angeles soundstage watching the filming of a pilot for a would-be NBC sitcom. The storyline of this particular episode dealt, more or less, with the horrific (and, of course, capital-H hilarious!) fallout that comes when a man’s girlfriend finds his porn…

This Food’s Tasty

Some plays don’t just offer food for thought; they serve up fresh ideas, then eat them raw. One such carnivore is Nicky Silver’s The Food Chain, now on display in a tasty production at the Mosaic Theatre in Plantation. Silver’s scabrous wit slices and dices a number of human foibles,…

A Female Perspective

Anat Ebgi and Nina Arias are two young, independent Miami curators who have produced interesting shows in the last year. Most recently during Art Miami, Ebgi put on an all-female exhibit called “Manifest Destiny,” and Arias curated “Drawing Conclusions,” both in the Design District and both critically acclaimed. They have…

Blowin’ Smoke

First off, make no mistake: Biker Boyz is not, and has no intentions of being, The Fast and the Furious on two wheels, which will be considered a serious shame by the twelve-to-twelve-year-old demographic who were hoping to chug a little more Diesel fuel till the official sequel’s release this…

Where the Heart Isn’t

It used to be that the only Korean films to be seen in the U.S. were somber art-house films like Jeong Ji-yeong’s White Badge or veteran Im Kwon-Taek’s Chunhyang and Sopyonje. But as South Korea has developed a more technically sophisticated commercial film industry, these have been joined by hard-edged,…

Shanghai Surprise

Just when a cynic might think there are no more Holocaust stories to be told, yet another undiscovered perspective pops up on local screens. But even if you’ve seen The Pianist and The Fighter and Night and Fog, there is still Shanghai Ghetto, a documentary by Dana Janklowicz-Mann and Amir…