As Sgt. Scott Russell eases the police van into the parking lot of St. Andrews United Methodist Church, a ragtag throng quickly surrounds it. Each Thursday evening, the Fort Lauderdale church, just a half mile north of City Hall, serves a meatloaf dinner for the city's poor and homeless. Many...
The collaboration between French composer/producer Hector Zazou and American vocalist Sandy Dillon is dilletantish musical experimentalism best described as "difficult." Zazou (who has worked with Björk, John Cale, and Dead Can Dance) and Dillon, an avant-pop chanteuse, have teamed up to create a piece that's challenging in the extreme but...
If Troy Weekley hadn't gone to the rodeo in Davie in 1956, his son might not rock at night in a hammock on the porch of a cedar-covered cottage overlooking a rock pit, breed bucking bulls, or stick plugs of Skoal chew inside his lower lip. Troy Jr. has always...
Oftentimes, the people who attempt to turn photos into art fail miserably; witness most attempts at photographic surrealism or abstraction. Instead, it is often the documentarian who, through the perfect vision of hindsight, is revealed as the one who was artsy all along, simply by telling a story. Take the...
Serious theater? In Broward County? Don't chuckle. You've been asleep if you haven't noticed some decided cultural shifts in what used to be the Land of Laughs and Musicals. Broward stage companies have long leaned toward the sweet and silly when programming their seasons, usually top-heavy with musical reviews and...
It should be so easy to hate this man sitting on a couch in a high-priced hotel suite, this man sharing his bottle of Evian. He is, after all, a demon dressed head to toe (or tail?) in slate gray, the Satan of Cinema. Attacking him has long been regular...
"Ooh," recoils the sushi waitress. "That's so ugly!"The offensive item is just a T-shirt -- albeit a very special T-shirt with a representation of a man with a swirl of worms where his eye socket should be. It's being modeled by Gory, guitarist for Death Becomes You, but the abundant...
Scratch a punk rocker and you'll find a metalhead underneath. Scratch Seattle punk superheroes Zeke and you'll get laid out cold for shredding the 15-year-old Iron Maiden shirts its members have been wearing all week. Zeke are Beavis & Butt-Head's big brothers. They sold nickel bags in your high school's...
This is a busy time of the year, so let's get to the point of this review fast. If you want to see a classic example of sitcom at its silliest, get over to Ray Cooney's Caught in the Net at the Coconut Grove Playhouse. No, that's not a sneer;...
Writing reviews of recordings by freshly dead artists is a tricky business that frequently results in overrating, a critical embarrassment that keeps on giving. Think about all those poor schmoes who, rightly thunderstruck by John Lennon's murder, found themselves raving about Double Fantasy, a modest album that's not even within...
1. Macoute Blood Marilise was 18 years old in the fall of 1992 when she boarded a boat leaving Haiti. Her boyfriend, Franfrico, was with her. Maybe a third of the 70 passengers were heading out for reasons similar to Marilise's: The young women had left home, if they still...
Generally, in the realm of motion pictures, producers are evil, actors are pathetic, screenwriters are delusional, agents are bottom-feeders, and true directors scarcely exist. Contrary to the glitzy stories the mainstream media continually jam down your throat, making movies is quite often an ugly, unpleasant business, based on the ultimate...
If high drama is your cup of tea, you should find what you're looking for at theater companies all over South Florida. Just don't look on the playbill. The off-stage news from several local theaters is as full of dire foreboding, narrow escapes, and last-minute miracles as The Perils of...
Is the glass half empty or half full? Thoughtful theatergoers may rue what may be missing on the South Florida stage scene -- classical productions, experimental theatricality, multimedia -- but none can deny the area's strengths, chief among them plenty of entertaining, vigorously produced musical offerings. Any number of musicals...
Delia Judd's jaw visibly grinds as she stands before the Nuisance Abatement Board. The gaunt black woman gazes at the floor, shakes her head slowly, and shifts with agitation. Her face is obscured by wraparound sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled down over her forehead. A tangle of silver necklaces...
Anita's pinpoint passes: As one of the official photographers for the Miami Fury, I have been close to Anita Marks during the last few months ("Bombshell," Adam Pitluk, November 8). There is more to this great lady than just an athlete with a terrific look. Anita has taken over the...
About halfway through the first-floor segment of "Brooklyn!" -- now on display at the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art (PBICA) in Lake Worth -- lurks an uncanny reminder of how art and life sometimes occupy the same territory. It's a two-part 1999 video installation called Crash by Christoph Draeger,...
At the end of August, Fort Lauderdale-based Stuck on Evil (featuring Marilyn Manson's original guitarist, Scott M. Putesky, plus former Basketcase vocalist John Cain Reilly, ex-Mindflower bassist Martin Davis, and drummer Jim "Smoothy" McDonald) bid adieu and set out to conquer the philistines across our great land. But alas, the...
You can't hide from Miss Cleo. The self-proclaimed television psychic's grinning, beturbaned head pops up everywhere, urging viewers to call her now for free foreknowledge of romance, jobs, family matters, and health, all delivered in a vaguely Caribbean accent. Mass e-mails breathlessly urge recipients to listen to her visions and...
Hidden at the center of downtown Fort Lauderdale at 335 SE Sixth Ave. sits the Stranahan House, a green-and-white, two-story, wooden rectangle on the north shore of the New River with massive wrap-around porches ringing both floors. At 101 years old, the oldest residence in Broward County has survived hurricanes,...
Until recently, I couldn't remember the last time I walked out of a restaurant without at least sampling the fare. I didn't stroll out of that little German storefront in Bay Harbor Islands where the chef quit right after we'd ordered and our waiter volunteered to cook our bratwurst. I...
Bonnie Canino, the Women's International Boxing Federation (WIBF) featherweight (126-pound) champion out of South Florida, flew to New Orleans in March 1997 to defend her title against a young Irish puncher named Dierdre Gogarty. This was at the beginning of a huge crest of popular interest in women's pro boxing,...
