FRI 11/7 A scruffy bald man chain-smoking. Booze. Swearing. A bespectacled man ranting, sweating. Veins and eyes bulging. Jokes about midgets, homosexuality, George W., and IHOP. Ladies and germs, it's Dave Attell and Lewis Black, and they're spewing a path of expletives out of the windows of their minivan on...
You think you've got job stress? Try this on for size: You work at a Fort Lauderdale sports bar that oozes old South Florida from every warped piece of paneling, it's game six of the World Series, and your hometown team, conveniently named after the stuffed billfish that is the...
On the back cover of the CD booklet that accompanies Richard X's first full-length is an antipiracy statement from EMI Music (Astralwerks' parent), a strongly worded missive reminding listeners about the danger of the Internet. Strange, really, since that's pretty much how Richard X made his bones, back when he...
Steve Rosen owns a motorcycle, a jet plane, and a black Corvette. Even when he is not in a vehicle, the 52-year-old dentist is always moving. On the road, he likes to lead, but he's a bitch to follow. He alternately presses hard on the gas pedal, then forces down...
There's that story you hear every couple of years about how for this or that record, a band moves into a haunted mansion in Tennessee or the Hollywood Hills, sets up some tape machines, microphones, and an assortment of percussive instruments in the basement, and attempts to construct an opus...
Dressed in a faded pair of jeans cut off just below the knee and a clean, white wife beater with a tiny two-piece swimsuit underneath, grooving to a Mudhoney CD spinning in her boom box, Ginger looks more like a student rocker than a part-time hooker. "You could make good...
Given the way the United Nations has been taking a beating in the American media over the past year or so, it may not be a bad thing that the new movie Beyond Borders is at heart a two-hour infomercial for Kofi Annan's organization. As a call to action, the...
Give New Times the key to the public treasury: I want to commend Chuck Strouse and Susan Eastman for their insightful November 6 article ("Bring Us the Ballpark") about the myopia of Broward County leaders. The Marlins are the one team in South Florida that can bring tourists and locals...
In 1988, Metallica made an album called ...And Justice for All, and it was extraordinary, filled with layered lead-guitar harmonies, whipsaw chord changes, near-orchestral structures, and focused ferocity. It was quite simply one of the greatest metal albums ever made. The songs, ambition, and talent could not be obscured. St...
SAT 10/11 A few hundred years ago, after the Renaissance but before the smog, artists were still nailing down important concepts such as the effect of multiple perspectives or the effect of light on a given subject. For a lot of big names in the art world of the 17th...
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 that are sprouting near its Miracle Mile location: The fare is uncomplicated and consistent, no challenges and no surprises. AP has had...
SAT 10/25 Grant is contagious. Not contagious like crabs but more like that Mattress Giant song that gets stuck in your head. When Grant Balfour wants to get that "ooh-ahh" feel, he reaches deep within himself, sometimes three or four times a day. "What inspires me to write a song...
Spearhead's fourth album of beats and socially conscious lyrics accomplishes two rare things: Its moments of protest are eloquent without being preachy; and its elaborate range of styles neither comes up short nor sounds contrived. A band that has remained a staunch supporter of the San Francisco Bay Area music...
Angry industrial rocker spews bile, noise, and venom, blah blah blah... what else is new? Suffering fools with conspicuous ingratitude, KMFDM bassist/vocalist/bandleader Sascha Konietzko seethes with resentment and rage from the beginning bombast of "WWIII," the title track of the band's newest album. It isn't hard to discern the target...
Ann Sparks grabs a nightstick out of her 1995 Dodge Dakota pickup and hooks a leash to the collar of her not-very-nice-to-strangers black rottweiler/labrador mix, Tiger. She leaves her .38 at home. The 47-year-old Orlando-born businesswoman owns a home-cleaning firm with her mother, Shirley. She is dressed in a big,...
You might be confused about Gotham City. To comic book aficionados, it's home to Batman; Yankees believe it to be modeled after and therefore a nickname for greater New York City. Shoppers on eBay, however, have bookmarked "Gotham City" as a dependable site for trendy stuff, where proceeds from the...
Was 2003 a good year for South Florida music? Sort of hard to tell, innit, when we're always worked into a self-flagellating lather over how tough we have it down here? Well, buck up, lil campers! Sure, the radio sucks wet, musky, pachyderm balls, our big concert venue is named...
It's been said that amateurs borrow and pros steal. Very few bands prove this adage as well as professional music thieves the Dandy Warhols, who simultaneously possess one of the stupidest names in rock and an amazing knack for copping a riff and making it their own. The Dandys' albums...
In September, NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory announced that a supermassive black hole in the Perseus galaxy emits B-flat sound waves. That was almost a year after Sune Rose Wagner and Sharin Foo -- a.k.a. Denmark's the Raveonettes -- released their first album, Whip It On, composed entirely in the key...
Anyone who has listened to Cape Verdean singer Cesaria Evora has heard the word sodade. In Creolu, the mixture of Portuguese and West African languages spoken on the tiny chain of islands 300 miles off the coast of Senegal, sodade means nostalgia, yearning, longing for love lost. Portuguese sailors felt...
The work ethic ingrained in Death Cab for Cutie singer/guitarist Ben Gibbard is the sort Sly Stone never mastered. Gibbard, who is 27 years old, is already doing a phone interview at 9:30 this morning, even though he was up well past 3 a.m. Instead of sounding dull or half-awake,...
SAT 9/20 Listen above the din of trendy conversation and obnoxious club jams, push your way through the throngs of silk shirts, and get thee to Dada. Every Saturday for the past two months, this cozy little bar in the heart of Delray Beach has played host to Popscene, the...
