"Ass Cobra." There's a certain poetry to the phrase. "Ass Cobra." A two-car caravan is halfway through the 1,300 mile trip from Hialeah, Florida, "City of Progress," to Austin, Texas, "Live Music Capital of the World." The vehicles contain the members of Humbert, a pop-rock band named with a louche...
When we first see the protagonist of North Country, a working-class heroine portrayed by a deglamorized Charlize Theron, she's sporting a black eye and a slight limp, the results of an encounter with her abusive husband. We soon learn that Josey Aimes is only now beginning to take her lumps...
Kevin Underwood. Voracious reader. Loved fucking Anne Rice. Claims he can 450 words per minute with an 80 percent comprehension rate, which is ridiculously high. Also claims he scored a 35 out of 36 on the reading portion of the ACT (with a 29 overall score). Had a weird thing...
Old School Square, in the heart of trendy downtown Delray Beach, is a refurbished 1913 schoolhouse that is now an arts center. Amid the Crest Theater, the Vintage Gymnasium, and the Entertainment Pavilion sits the underrated Cornell Museum of Art and History. The small-yet-hearty museum is currently offering two worthwhile...
It's become an annoying trend, the recent attempt by onetime rockers to reinvent themselves and thereby salvage their careers by making albums stocked with standards. If the blame's to be laid on anyone, point the microphone at Linda Ronstadt. After wearing out her welcome on Top 40 radio following a...
2005 was a year of exploration and expansion in urban music. Against a Matrix-like background of corporate-controlled radio and TV, iPod-enabled consumers demanded more musical choices and were rewarded by indie labels that stepped in to provide an alternative to mainstream mediocrity once again. For every lackluster commercial effort (like...
Let's engage in a little free association. I say Whistler and you say — what? The word that springs to mind is most likely mother, as in Whistler's Mother. The formal title of that 1871 painting by American artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler is actually Arrangement in Grey and Black,...
Since it's neither Salvadoran nor Honduran, Fort Lauderdale's Guatemala Restaurant (3673 Davie Blvd., 954-792-9737) is not the first, second, or 19th place that most people would look for pupusas, but the tiny establishment with just five stools and a bit of tiled counter gets them right. Order one as a...
While hip-hop continued to get mo' live in '05 and indie rock further honed post-punk/emo's affectations into something more genuinely affecting, the arch-paradigms from the past 12 months of electronic composition seemed more concerned with looking in than locking in. For the most part, top producers haven't seemed as worried...
As Curtis Armstrong's Miles tells Tom Cruise's Joel in the 1983 hit comedy film Risky Business, sometimes you just gotta say, "What the fuck." In Joel's case, this phrase is employed with a shrug of the shoulders and a sly smile: "What the fuck, let's go for it." In mine,...
The Gallery Center in Boca Raton, housing eight galleries, all respected and known for their expansive and diverse acquisitions, is one of South Florida's top gallery collectives. Rosenbaum Contemporary, a 2,000-square-foot gallery there, opened its 2005-06 exhibition season with major works by abstract-expressionist sculptor Louise Nevelson. One of the most...
Eccentric Julliard dance instructor Tobi keeps his toenail clippings in a jar on a shelf in his living room, along with his books and board games. His cheaply furnished, lonely apartment filled with bric-a-brac lies at a remote northern edge of Manhattan, where he laments he doesn't even have control...
Rogue Wave's Out of the Shadows was last year's great indie-pop debut — a bittersweet album of '60s-inspired pop, ideal for melodists and English-lit students who had gone too long between Shins albums. It was the work of one man — Oakland, California's Zach Rogue (born Zach Schwartz), who recorded...
Just a few hours into the new year, someone turned Broward County's puppy war into an actual firefight. Pembroke Police say that sometime between 3 and 8 in the morning on January 1, 12 rounds of ammunition were fired into the windows of Wizard of Claws, a strip-mall pet boutique...
"I do not want to explain, and I'm not going to/I wanna get high on something/Go dancing with someone/Turn our backs to the battle/I didn't see anything/Nothing worth remembering." — Castanets, "Dancing with Someone (The Privilege of Everything)" Ray Raposa is not afraid of abstractions. "Those are the terms I...
Artists make an impression on Beantown SAT 11/19 Before every piece of art in the world was made perusable on the World Wide Web, the best way for American artists to see what was going on across the pond was to, well, cross the pond. In the mid-19th Century, that´s...
Ever since its Broadway debut in 1996, Rent has generated a loyal, almost cult-like following. Showered with praise, the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical touched a nerve among the young, artistic, gay, urban, and alternatively dressed people who identified as outsiders and wondered how they would make their way in the world...
Two albums and three EPs into his career, the Miami boy known as Iron and Wine is still plucking songs from his original 2001 home demos, and his latest release is further proof that there's not a clunker in the bunch. On In the Reins, Sam Beam realizes his dream...
In 2002, Broken Social Scene didn't have much to prove. Most members of the Toronto collective were already playing in other Canadian indie bands (Stars, Metric, Do Make Say Think), and because they were a ragtag group of relative musical unknowns, their second album was likely to be as forgotten...
First thing to go wrong was the patriotic opening. The flag-waving DVD wouldn't fire up on the projection screen above the arena; then the Hollywood Police Department's Honor Guard came in too soon, plodding in through the wrong gate. Of course, it wasn't like anyone would notice among the folks...
Amid Hollywood's zillion-dollar explosions and computer-enhanced trickery, plenty of quieter, better films sneaked into theaters virtually unnoticed this year. Following are our reviewers' favorite overlooked movies of 2005. Some of them never made it to local screens, but many have since made it to the video store. Balzac and the...
