Naked alien goddesses, with big tits and bouffant hair, frolicking in the sun on Super-8 film. Buxom harlots smothering men to death with their breasts and slashing one another. Sordid kisses in wood-paneled rooms and toupéed men spanking creamy virgins on shaggy rugs. Ashtrays, closeups of ashtrays, weird velvet paintings…
This is the time of year when the weather starts to infect everyone in Miami. The city’s tempo slows down and a whole lot of hustle and bustle gets put off till mañana. But here’s a not-so-early warning for you jazz and film fans: Hustle over to the Absinthe House…
Toward the end of Jazz Seen — German filmmaker Julian Benedikt’s hagiographic 2001 documentary about photographer William Claxton — Los Angeles gallery director David Fahey, who has mounted exhibitions of Claxton’s iconic images of American jazz musicians, deftly defines the photographs’ potency: “Viewers are not hearing the music, but they’re…
Most of the politically caffeinated abuelitos loitering around Little Havana have no idea what they’re missing when the Heavy Shtetl Klezmer Band plays Miami Beach. And the typical Ms. Bal Harbour doesn’t drive the Benz to Overtown nearly enough to absorb the seductive rhythms of Afro-Caribbean folkloric dance. That’s because…
Things you will learn from a forthcoming oral history of Saturday Night Live: Dan Aykroyd slept with, among others, Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman and writer Rosie Shuster, the latter of whom was, at the time, married to the show’s producer and creator, Lorne Michaels. To this day, Chevy Chase regrets…
For most South Floridians, late summer means numbing heat, hurricanes, and back-to-school specials. But for those astute and lucky New Times readers, the dog days of August also herald a revived arts scene. Within a month or so, dozens of theater companies up and down the tri-county coast will be…
In life, as in the movies, perspective is everything. Adults often recall their childhoods as idyllic and carefree, but such nostalgia is more fiction than recollection. Children live lives as full of heartache, fear, anguish, and doubt as any adult’s. Perhaps more, for children often suffer the consequences of adult…
Andrew Niccol keeps making the same movie over and over again and dressing it in slightly different clothes: the sleek charcoal Hugo Boss grays of Gattaca, the crisp Crayola hues of The Truman Show, and now the silk-and-satin Hollywood resplendency of Simone. Niccol, writer and director, is obsessed with a…
Just what in the world is a flarb, anyway? Elizabeth Hall isn’t too sure either. “I just made it up,” says the founder and curator of a new experimental art show titled “Flarb2.” Beginning her career as a painter and photographer, Hall quickly developed an interest in video and installation…
Put a bit of innocuous paper in the hands of an artist and God knows what you’ll get. Dolls, confetti, a banal figure study, an oversize book, a giant airplane? Such and more can be seen in ArtCenter/South Florida’s current exhibition “Pa-per-view.” Ostensibly energized by the renovation of the facility’s…
Prerevolutionary Cuban thinker Felix Varela declared that intellectuals should not cloister themselves in an ivory tower. In fact he claimed their primary obligation is to take on society’s most pertinent issues, to act as an illuminator and guide for the people. In 1998 the first independent library in Cuba was…
Out in Westchester in the dentist’s office of Arturo Mosquera, Elizabeth Cerejido has put on a very personal show called “Absence.” In photographs and video she deals with biographic and intimate material — her own experience going through the death of her father and her mother’s diagnosis with Alzheimer’s. A…
If nothing else, give French actor Yvan Attal credit for his faith in domestic bliss. At a time when matrimony has a shorter lifespan than mayonnaise, Attal has sought to mingle the joys and traumas of his own marriage (to actress Charlotte Gainsbourg) with his piquant views on the ambiguities…
The weird thing about Rain is that there’s virtually no rain in it. Characters mention precipitation briefly and metaphorically, but the cloudburst never happens. Fortunately we get light showers of emotion a couple of times, but then — strangely — these wane to an inconsistent and ultimately unsatisfying drizzle. It’s…
When the chocolate on the S’mores has melted and the last round of “Kum Ba Ya” crooned around the fire fades to Lil’ Kim, whose camp is it anyway? Designed to keep the kids inspired and out of others’ hair, summer activities belong to parents. This season one of the…
The Beatles in 1964: young, wild, and not exactly free. (John had already been married to Cynthia for two years.) But gaze at the black-and-white photographs hanging in a makeshift gallery in the Radisson Deauville Resort’s lobby and the world seems transformed to a more simple, magical place — pre-CD,…
A press pass, reporter-turned-novelist Gregory McDonald once said, is good for one thing: It allows the journalist to ask very smart people very stupid questions. Certainly, that’s how it feels after this 45-minute drive from downtown Dallas to the Allen home of Stan Liebowitz, professor of economics at the University…
After two months in chilly London, sultry Florida feels good. And propelled by a notebook full of observations from U.K. theater, it also seems a good time, before the fall season, to reflect on the good and the bad in our own scene. First off, the bad. Like any community,…
The first generation to be labeled with a letter suffered through some serious metaphysical shit in the Nineties (if you doubt this, try listening to the period-specific music — emphasis on try), but now this societal clusterfuck is searching for antidotes to its own pop-culture poison. Evidence of a renewed…
It’s not exactly a good sign when a movie starring Tim Allen, Christian Slater, and Richard Dreyfuss gets dumped into one or two arthouse theaters after a couple years on the shelf. Even if none of them is a guaranteed box office draw (though Allen was, until Joe Somebody and…
Cementing his reputation as one of the most important modern Italian filmmakers, writer-director Gianni Amelio’s latest drama, The Way We Laughed, deals with the plight of two Sicilian brothers who go north to Turin in search of a better life. Luchino Visconti’s 1960 film Rocco and His Brothers followed five…
Tune in to the television news and you’ll hear that Miami is one of the worst places in the country to drive. Take a short ride and find out firsthand. Speeding, running red lights, weaving in and out of lanes, turning without using blinkers, cutting other vehicles off — reckless…
