Who ever heard of a vegetable oil-aholic? "We have a saying in our company: "Our competitors are our friends. Our customers are the enemy." -- A comment made in the early 1990s by Archer Daniels Midland (ADM)’s then-president James Randall, as quoted in Fast Food Nation The Archer Daniels Midland...
Watching Gordon Ramsey is making me violent. The three-Michelin-starred Scottish chef of the Fox reality show Hell's Kitchen is the foulest-mouthed, most evil-tempered brute in a business with more monsters than a Ken Russell retrospective. Ramsey has the same effect on my testosterone as too many hours glued to the...
Otaku, beware! Manga and anime are acknowledged only on a placard in "Pastimes and Amusements of the Japanese," and that is just a passing mention. Perhaps that's because obsession doesn't constitute an amusement? To those less-hardcore fans of Asian culture, sure, a recreational exhibit during summer sounds like more of...
Marisela Verena Marisela Verena has never sat down to compose a song – or sing one for that matter – with the idea it’s going to climb the charts or end up getting regular airplay. It’s the message she’s trying to convey to the masses that concerns her most. “I...
It's an unusually breezy Thursday afternoon on Hollywood Boulevard. The vintage shops and restaurants that line the old district are mostly empty, and Latin music sensation Sito Oner Rock — or just Sito to his fans and friends — is doggedly trying to choose a restaurant for an interview. The...
The latest comic meteorite to hurtle forth from the galaxy of producer Judd Apatow, Superbad is about a couple of chronically unpopular best friends who, after four years stuck on the lowest rung of the high-school social ladder, find themselves invited to a legitimately cool party. Goodbye, Friday nights chugging...
It's a Freakin' Show I like it like that: Michael Mills' "Texting Nature" regarding the exhibit "Tigers of Wrath: Watercolors by Walton Ford" (August 9) is a well-written explication of Ford's pictorial intent and symbolism. My reaction to Ford's work: an artistic freak show with grandiose verbal accompaniments. Famed psychiatrist...
“There are some adventurous librarians out there,” reports Josh Malerman from his Motor City home; he’s the giddy frontman of Detroit’s The High Strung. The three-piece of storytelling rockers has been leading an unlikely crusade – not to expand drinking laws or revise public noise violation guidelines, but to topple...
Finally, it's here in all its two-disc, 29-track, guest-star-studded, double-album glory: Underground Kingz, the most anticipated album out of the South this year and the most eagerly awaited Texas rap album since Scarface's The Fix back in 2002. Not since 2001 have we heard a whole album's worth of "country...
The hard part of being a musician in love is choosing between making music and making love. One wins at the expense of the other. If you're lucky, like Jeff and Christine Maldonado, you'll never have to make that choice. For the Hollywood-based singer/songwriter couple, music and love are like...
Last night, Mayor Mouth got some time on The Factor with Bill O'Reilly, who is one of Jim Naugle's idols. Not surprisingly, it wasn't exactly a hardball interview, nor was it fawning, though the title was spinned in favor of the Mouth: "Mayor working against gay behavior." In the middle...
Training Day It's hard being a police officer in Hollywood, and Tailpipe's not even talking about the shaking down of pimps or the pocketing of bribes from FBI agents posing as drug smugglers or any of the other questionable deeds with which the department has recently been linked. No, the...
"Planning" the life out of Las Olas: What really irks me about the city planning commission and the commissioners who voted on the proposal of an "isolated" condominium on the most prominent downtown Fort Lauderdale commercial/retail street ("Towering Rage," Amy Guthrie, July 26) is that they granted permission for this...
Dear Mexican: Why don't Mexicans ever drop their Spanish? Even third- and fourth-generation Mexican-Americans still speak the language to some degree or another. I speak Japanese, but I'm losing it quickly, and when my mother passes on, so will my language. The typical Asian-American kid may attend Chinese, Korean, or...
Listen up, gents, and listen good: Women are taking the pole back. As in stripper pole. That’s right; those buffed, metal pillars are no longer phallusized representations of sexual oppression. Now they’re sources of exercise (Carmen Electra, eat your heart out), self worth (Freud would have a field day), and...
It´s important when discussing albums of unique provenance to distinguish those that are novel from those that are novelties. A sophisticated-sounding pop album from a man who conducts voodoo ceremonies may sound like the sort of thing that would fall into the latter category. The music of Erol Josué, however,...
On a crisp February morning in 2003, Dr. Evan Zimmer, dressed in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt, rolled up to work at the Oakland Community Health Center in Fort Lauderdale. "I see this guy in Dockers hanging around the back door," Zimmer recalls. The man seemed to be guarding the...
Six days a week, the curse follows Rick Stembridge. On any one of those days, he's liable to receive a nasty letter demanding payment or else. He may be compelled to appear at a hearing or sit for a deposition across a table from a snarling attorney. And one of...
The PostmarksMore than two years of fine-tuning and detail work went into creating this slice of mopey melancholy, and the results speak for themselves. Charting overseas and winning plenty of domestic college-radio airplay upon its February 2007 release, The Postmarks bore as much resemblance to a lowly local release as a cello does to a kazoo. […]
Calle 13 crashed its way into the reggaeton party in 2005, coming seemingly out of nowhere with its hard-hitting eponymous debut. Booty-shaking though it was, the Puerto Rico-based duo´s album offered a much-needed respite from reggaeton´s seemingly nonstop party antics. So it really wasn´t a great shocker when Calle 13...
Apparently, reggae and dancehall music are nothing alike. This might sound confusing to casual fans of the genres, but international reggae star Freddie McGregor says a line needs to be drawn in the sand — and he's not just talking shit. McGregor, a prominent member of the reggae community who's...
Take a look at the media coverage of the past few weeks and it's evident that hip-hop is in the midst of a midlife crisis. Typical of these sorts of life-altering events, the results are not pretty. The genre is facing the same dilemma as a lot of American men,...
