Waits evolved from the engaging but seemingly predictable barroom growler of 1973's Closing Time to the artistic bomb thrower of 1983's Swordfishtrombones in one astonishing decade -- the rarest sort of creative transformation. Since then, he's grappled with the implications of his innovations, and while the discs he's made of...
In 2004, the line between indie and mainstream rock disintegrated even faster than Britney Spears' quickie Vegas marriage. Vinyl obsessives mingled with white-hat-wearing fratheads at Modest Mouse shows, Taking Back Sunday debuted at number three on the Billboard charts, and Death Cab for Cutie earned O.C.-sanctioned buzz and a major-label...
Last summer, MorissonPoe dropped a record called Leaving It All Behind, and then they did just that. The quartet ditched the South Florida music scene for New York City. But amazingly, they didn't come back. Instead, they recorded an album with Ethology Records in New York, and the result is...
The IndiBoard is the local Internet meeting place for men who spend $600 or $700 a week frequenting escort services. Half the pleasure of sex-for-pay seems to be in the post-coital assessments. At www.independentgirls.com/indiboard, you can learn which escort is tight, who's sweet, and who's just a mechanical $300 an...
Oh, how deceiving first appearances can be. At the start of Tracy Lett's Bug, now in its Florida premiere at GableStage, a leggy redhead stands in the doorway of a battered motel room, sipping some wine and swaying gently to lively Colombian music playing somewhere off in the night. It's...
There is something very important to know about Enduring Love that is not apparent from the title: It's a thriller. More specifically, it's a creepy, twisted, overproduced, and often intelligent psychological thriller with an ending all too loyal to the genre. Director Roger Michell (most recently of The Mother, a...
Some things just don't go together well. Take, for example, liquor and red wine. Ammonia and bleach. Or Jacko and Lisa Marie. However, some things, strange as they may seem, make sense together, like Bowie and Iman, Woody Allen and Soon-Yi... even Martha Stewart and her jail cell. When it...
The official motto of the Coconut Grove Playhouse is "Broadway by the Bay," but its unofficial one should be "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." The Playhouse has featured a string of successful if skimpy "biomusicals" about great American songwriters and singing stars -- Al Jolson, Al Dubin, Alberta...
Gone bad THU 11/18 If your husband (wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever) won't even bring you a stinking cup of soup when you're feeling all pukey, I wonder what he (or she) would make of a guy who was inspired to sculpt when his wife was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Like,...
There is something very important to know about Enduring Love that is not apparent from the title: It's a thriller. More specifically, it's a creepy, twisted, overproduced, and often intelligent psychological thriller with an ending all too loyal to the genre. Director Roger Michell (most recently of The Mother, a...
Our best movies of the year actually may have been anything but the best to a few of our critics -- such is the dilemma of offering employment to writers of dissenting opinion. In other words, the number-one film of 2004 wasn't universally heralded by our team of Bill Gallo,...
The Schmidt Center Gallery at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton has to be one of the most underappreciated display spaces in South Florida. It's not nearly as spacious as the similarly unsung Coral Springs Museum of Art, which at least has the advantage of all that square footage. In...
Checkout lanes at grocery stores are all the same. Behind the rows of gum and breath mints are America's most delicious impulse buys: tabloid newspapers. Cellulite Stars! Drug Collapse! Angelina Rejects Brad! Did Britney's Hubby Cheat? Slater's Stripper Obsession Drove Wife Away! Lisa Marie Presley Engaged! You've thumbed through them...
The rewards for Dumpster-diving are often meager -- loaded handguns, slightly sticky porno mags, perfectly good medical waste, boxes of one-hour-too-old Krispy Kremes. But in this case, trolling for trash can result in a brand-spankin'-new trophy -- provided you build a functional bicycle out of whatever you find. At the...
Himalaya, the West Broward Indian restaurant that opened in the middle of 2001, presents a problem peculiar (and challenging) to food critics and their readers. Three years ago, the small (ten booths, six tables) establishment received the customary rush of reviewers eager to taste and tell. Their opinions, full of...
A nude man coats himself in honey and rolls in birdseed until his entire body is covered. He then enters a large enclosure, a sort of cage made of wood and chicken wire, containing only a bare-branched maple tree and a stacked pair of wooden crates, the top one much...
No woman is an island. But in 1999, New York-based electropunks Le Tigre suggested that one could be. The dance feministas -- fronted by Bikini Kill's Kathleen Hanna -- sounded equally idiosyncratic and didactic at the time, their sole peer being Germany's Chicks on Speed. On Le Tigre's third full-length,...
Though big beat never really exceeded its novelty status, artists like Fatboy Slim helped champion its thunderous dance-funk anthems into mainstream success. Songs such as "Praise You" and "Gangster Trippin'" became such commercial forces that they -- deliberately or not -- added to the soundtrack of our lives. So maybe...
The most shocking thing about Kinsey, the first film from writer-director Bill Condon since 1998's Gods and Monsters, is how shocking it actually is. Within the confines of a standard biopic (A Beautiful Dirty Mind, you might call it), Condon refuses to play it straight -- which is only appropriate,...
Burly hardcore dudes put a hurtin' on Revolution WED 12/8 Their tattoos are older than yours, their T-shirts are blacker than yours, and their music will intimidate you into joining their side or wet your pants wishing you could. It probably wouldn't have been all that hard to give the...
From the moment La Cigale opened in May 2001, foodists have had their tongues out for whatever drips from Executive Chef Jean Pierre Blouin's brandished spoon. Only city ordinances have prevented some lifeguards of the larder from setting up tents under the canopy of this 185-seat jewel box in the...
