WED 11/5 You already know the little yellow mousecar. The VW Beetle with attached ears and tail? It was likely the first car you ever wanted to drive until you reached puberty and realized it was only an ad for pest extermination. Thankfully, postmodern irony allows you to fall in…
FRI 10/31 With all those swanky condos on Miami Beach, it’s hard to believe the million-dollar sandbar can offer an affordable place to reside. But two years ago Fernwood Apartments, a housing project for low-income people living with HIV/AIDS, opened. That building is just a small piece of progress in…
SAT 11/1 Are dub-tango experiments like Gotan Project and Bajofondo your kind of thing? Then the sounds Argentine bassist Federico Aubele spins will be music to your ears. His chilled-out combination of downtempo hooks and classic tango pieces like “Malena” can be heard tonight at 9:00 at the Marlin (1200…
Thursday 10/30 Here’s a shocker: Over the next three years, Verizon, BellSouth, and Sprint want to raise their basic local residential rates, single-line business rates, and connection charges too. They’re also determined to lower the fees they charge long-distance providers to access their networks. Feel free to pick yourself up…
Whew! Be careful what you wish for. If you have seen as many bland South Florida shows as I have, you may start hoping to find something really provocative, something so mind boggling you won’t forget it ten minutes after you leave the theater. If that is your quest, prepare…
Craig Robins, a native Miamian and CEO of the development firm Dacra, has been a force in the transformation of South Beach and the Design District. His most ambitious project to date is Aqua, a “neighborhood” built from scratch that may become a model for mixing New Urbanism with contemporary…
Just what is it with movies about men in dresses? Sometimes they’re brilliant (Some Like It Hot, Tootsie), sometimes they’re weird (Glenn or Glenda?, Flaming Creatures), sometimes they’re utterly conventional (Charlie’s Aunt, Mrs. Doubtfire), and sometimes they’re truly “outside the box” (Trash, The Rocky Horror Picture Show). But whatever the…
“I really like the cold — it makes me feel really alive.” There are few more attractive things a woman can say, and when wunderkind Sarah Polley says this in My Life Without Me — to a gullible dork she is seducing with totally unconscious malice, no less — thinking…
Question: What’s that 5000-pound vegetarian doing frolicking in my swamp grass? Answer: Surviving. The vegetarian in question is not Kirstie Alley, it’s the greater one-horned rhinocerous: a solitary creature, often called a unicorn, which was pushed to near extinction but has been on the rebound as of late. Today the…
While instruments may vary from culture to culture, the human voice is music’s common denominator. It’s the only instrument that we carry within us, and even today the power of the live voice may still move further than the fastest DSL network service, especially when it comes to delivering messages…
THUR 10/23 Picking up its cues from the civil rights movement, the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride, organized by a broad coalition of union-friendly groups and one cerebral celeb, recently launched a reform campaign targeting laws hurtful to new arrivals. Three weeks ago dozens of activist-laden buses departed from various American…
THUR 10/23 “Jeter — Cheater,” a woman shrieks as golden boy Derek bats in the final inning of Game 1. The Fish are winning, but there are two Yanks on base. The woman screams like a ditched girlfriend on a bender. “Jeter — Cheater,” her voice rises an octave, “Piece…
FRI 10/24 1970s B-movie queen Linda Blair got her start modeling as a baby. Who would have thought that some years later she’d be spitting up torrents of green puke and pulling a 360 with her cranium? Brooke Shields, eternal starlet, also began her career as the Ivory Snow baby…
SAT 10/25 For years you’ve lusted after that Eames lounge chair. All sinewy white fiberglass, the piece begs — no, screams — to be in your living room. But at $6000-plus, you’d have to sell your firstborn to afford it. Yet there’s a way around your dilemma without resorting to…
SAT 10/25 Beneath the layers of makeup and industrial-strength anti-aging remedies, Cher is a pickled old hag. Yet for some reason, middle-age gym queens jump and yip like chihuahuas whenever the old broad is brought up in conversation. Perhaps it’s a Pavlovian reaction reinforced by prime-time TV. Or maybe Cher-mania…
Thursday 10/23 Setting the table can be easy unless you’re one of the 40 local architects, fashion designers, florists, or interior decorators participating in this year’s Dining by Design. Then the pressure is on. The creative types will be dreaming up outrageous and elegant tablescapes at this exclusive event devoted…
The Actors’ Playhouse has a serious personality conflict. The Coral Gables company is known as a purveyor of cheerful, lightweight entertainment that’s rather like the upscale chain restaurants sprouting near its Miracle Mile location: The fare is uncomplicated and consistent, no challenges and no surprises. AP has had considerable success…
Miami is in the news again! We have become one of the top five cities for worst traffic congestion in the nation. A report published by the Texas Transportation Institute, which covers 75 urban areas, also reveals the price Americans pay for their congestion: $69.5 billion in wasted time and…
If you lie down with dogs, you’ve got to expect to get up with fleas. And when you go to a movie about a coked-out former porn star who was implicated in the grisly murders of four lowlife drug dealers — a case that remains “officially” unsolved to this day…
Watching Hollywood’s endless stream of John Grisham adaptations — The Firm, The Chamber, A Time to Kill, etc. — it would be easy to assume that Grisham is the worst sort of hack writer, with simplistic morals that usually overwhelm logic and come close to contravening the very law the…
Veteran stand-up comedian Bobcat Goldthwait may have gigged at just about every Los Angeles comedy dive, but one joint you can bet he won’t be hanging around these days is the Twisted Balloon, the mythological respite for washed-up clowns in his 1992 film Shakes the Clown. “It would be hypocritical…
To folks with an Eastern European background and a knowledge of Yiddish, the word “klezmer” literally means “musician.” To folks who are clueless about Eastern Europe, Jewry, or Yiddish but claim a little knowledge of music, the word “klezmer” means the dynamic clarinet-led and violin-embellished style of song that itinerant…
