Over on the other coast, in the Collier County commission council chambers in Naples, the troops are girding for battle. The soldiers are white men in their forties, fifties, and sixties, with ample bellies and deep tans. They wear baseball caps, boots, short-sleeve shirts, and blue jeans. Their leather belts...
Flagrant Manipulation: the New Times Crime And it's a felony: Can the editor explain which parts of Jeremy Rose's deliberate act of buying and transporting cocaine and his brother's participation in a gang that deliberately sabotaged a public school are mistakes? That's how writer Roger Williams described them ("One Strike...
Last week's column detailed the ongoing noise problems associated with West Palm Beach's weekend fun destination, Clematis Street. This week Mayor Joel Daves, who lives just blocks from the street's busiest section, details his hands-on involvement in the continuing decibel debate. For the past 20 years, Daves has kept a...
Lori Parrish is a woman who likes to use the phone. So much so, in fact, that her cellular phone bills alone might bankrupt a person of lesser means than the long-time Broward County commissioner and Swap Shop executive. On her pair of omnipresent cellular phones alone, she routinely racks...
The eerie glow that emanates from so many of the canvases in "Kate Kretz: Fate of a Technicolor Romantic" is the result, according to an artist's statement, of being raised "on a regimen of Catholicism and Technicolor movies." It's an odd but apt convergence of influences, with the conflicting impulses...
"Jan and Andi make the most bulbous sounds," once declared Mouse on Mars' record label, and no one has found a better word yet to describe the music of Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma. It's bulbous in the way liquids bubble through the grease trap of a sink; bulbous...
The forms of entertainment competing with live theater seem to grow every year, from IMAXes to e-books to women's basketball. And now there's even a new form on stage. "The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction," wrote Jean Cocteau, and South Florida, being the capital of contradiction and...
Spin City: It's sad, but this very newspaper had the poor judgment to name Best Buy as the best place to buy CDs in Broward and Palm Beach. (Why dontcha just go shoot Mom and Pop in the head, huh?) We all know that saving a few bucks on that...
Let's dispense with the easy digs first: Each member of AC/DC is probably old enough to be your grandpa. And at that age, the schoolboy getup preferred by Aussie axmeister Angus Young is less cute than disturbing, as are the sounds put forth by the presumably scarred mass that once...
Canadian documentarian Ron Mann, who previously examined aspects of pop culture in Comic Book Confidential (1988) and Twist (1992), takes on a broader and more controversial subject in Grass, a history of America's second-favorite smokable substance. As he has done before, he provides a sugarcoated crash course on a huge...
Walking out of the Caldwell Theatre's production of Snakebit, you can be certain that you will not hear a playgoer over age 60 sigh, "Ahhh! To be young again!" This hard-hitting drama leaves no room to fantasize about the potency and possibility of the thirties. Playwright David Marshall Grant's increasingly...
Jethro Tull: Can anyone name a single song these self-dubbed "old farts" have produced since the late '70s? Neither can anyone in this office. But the band (playing in Sunrise on Friday and Saturday nights), still under the stewardship of singer-flutist Ian Anderson and guitarist Martin Barre, keep pumping out...
What if a miracle happened and rap suddenly replaced stupid self-aggrandizement with progressive politics of inclusion and unity? Give praise, for that has finally happened. The party line touted by L.A.'s Jurassic 5 is free of the standard hip-hop trappings of violence, status, jewelry, bad taste, and champagne. In fact...
The release of a career retrospective is a natural time to reflect on one's contribution to the musical landscape. On the occasion of Pioneers Who Got Scalped, the audio résumé of Akron, Ohio's most oddly influential band, Devo bassist Gerald V. Casale ponders the question of the band's high-water mark...
I am Vlad the Impaler, Joe Eszterhas' penis. You know Joe, right? Bigfoot-looking son of a bitch, like Jerry Garcia after he swallowed Brian Wilson on an Acapulco Gold high? The guy who wrote Basic Instinct and Showgirls and Flashdance and a whole lotta crap for which he was paid...
Bless other people's rudeness, for it often sets up an antimodel for our own behavior. Too proverbial a message? Allow me to illustrate. I was witness to an extremely unpleasant scene on a recent Friday evening at a small, perhaps two-month-old South American eatery called Los Andes in Pompano Beach...
Last February, as Chris Hanley rode with his stepbrother to a neighborhood video store, Sunrise police pulled over their white Pontiac Grand Am. Hanley's stepbrother had run a red light, and when the cops ran a background check on the two, they discovered that the 17-year-old Hanley not only had...
As the afternoon sun wanes, F. Lee Bailey squints his light blue eyes and peers from his back yard onto the dazzling Intracoastal Waterway. Seeing him there in his trademark cowboy boots, you understand why he is often described as a legal lion. A short, potbellied man with a large,...
The key to great parody is that it hits home in contemporary society. Although Cuban playwright Rolando Ferrer's play Lila, la Mariposa (Lila, the Butterfly) was meant to be a criticism of Havana and the 1950s when it was first written back in 1954, Teatro Avante's rendition continues the tradition...
The pending move by Fort Lauderdale city officials to ban patrons under the age of 18 from entering clubs serving liquor looks likely to succeed. On June 6 a committee was granted 30 days to draft a proposal, and further discussion will commence at that time. Last Sunday night at...
A Perfect Circle Mer de Noms (Virgin) If Jesus Christ reemerged as a rock singer, he couldn't sound much better than Maynard James Keenan. Best known for his vocal work with the Los Angeles art-metal posse Tool, Keenan possesses a voice that murmurs sweetly one moment and explodes with psychotic...
Many restaurants are like adolescents -- they suffer from identity crises. Who am I? Do others see the "real" me or just what I present outwardly? And while we're at it, who am I going to be when I grow up?Nevis, in these terms, is clearly a budding teen. The...
