Felicia Armstrong knew her son Wesley was a troubled kid. He'd been that way for most of his ten years. At age three Wesley was kicked out of a day care center for biting other children. Two years later he went on Ritalin after a therapist diagnosed him with attention...
Last February New York pianist Lara Downes and painter Kim Ray Krupnick of Fort Lauderdale brought a slice of avant-garde art to South Florida, with Downes playing pieces by Debussy, Gershwin, and Stephen Paulus while surrounded by projected slides of Krupnick's landscape paintings. "That was successful enough that we decided...
Robert Rodriguez had to go to the bathroom. The urge was inconvenient on this late June afternoon, the first day Rodriguez returned to work following an 11-week suspension. Inconvenient because Rodriguez was not on an allotted break, when he might leave the building and walk to his nearby apartment. Inconvenient...
Ever since she emerged in the early '90s, Jill Sobule has symbolized all that is abhorrent about modern girl-pop. Like far too many female folkies, Sobule apparently believes that songs about feminine quirks are empowering. Her irksome approach reached its nadir on the 1995 single, "I Kissed a Girl." An...
For a moment or two, David Lowery -- front man for the band Cracker, and before that, beloved college-radio revolutionary sweethearts Camper Van Beethoven -- found himself enjoying the book. He laughed in the right places, winced in the appropriate spots and thought, for a moment, the book wasn't half...
Apart from mass cultural annihilation, beatniks, Hee Haw, and some dumb-ass sports, most pop-culture trends are not homegrown but imported to America after prolonged cultivation overseas. Take that novelty food tofu, for instance, dubbed le curd du soy by uncredited Belgian sailors exploring China centuries before 1958, when the little...
"Where there's no respect, there's hatred," cautions David Hinds, leader of the indomitable reggae outfit Steel Pulse. "And where there's hatred, there's instant violence, and it leads ultimately to death." Such dire sentiments from Hinds are nothing new; he's spent 25 years using Steel Pulse (performing in Sunrise June 21)...
Here's something new: We have praise for a daily newspaper. But since this is Undercurrents, we just can't seem to let that stand. We must condemn the paper's publisher. We are speaking of The Miami Herald and Alberto Ibargüen. It is amazing to see what can happen journalistically when a...
The stateside release of 1998's Moon Safari generated an instant buzz for Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel, the French tandem known as Air . No one had ever heard quite the sort of music they played -- a canny blend of pop melodies and ambient arrangements, spiced by the occasional...
Early on in Mission: Impossible 2 (or M:i-2, as the confident Paramount now calls it), hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) complains to his boss about his new assignment: "It's going to be difficult." "It's not mission difficult, Mr. Hunt," the boss icily replies, "it's mission impossible. 'Difficult' should be a...
Poor Kim Basinger! In her first role since bagging the 1998 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress (for L.A. Confidential, the film that should have won Best Picture and Best Director as well), the actress positively trembles with what seems to be fear. Notoriously insecure about appearing on camera, Basinger...
There exists deep within any man who once read comic books and collected them--protected them, actually, with plastic sleeves and cardboard backs and boxes that fought off the yellowing of time--the mythical being known as The Fanboy. A long time ago, The Fanboy pored over every issue of World's Finest...
Looking like a battered Spencer Tracy, 49-year-old Julian Jorge Reyes stands beside his 1985 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme in the parking lot across from Domino Park in Miami's Little Havana. At 3 a.m. the bright lights on the marquee of the newly renovated Tower Arts Center theater turn the gray at...
One day 55 years ago in Pittsburgh, a precocious four-year-old named Joel Platt ignored everything his mother had taught him about playing with fire. He dropped a lit match into the gas tank of a car at his uncle's car dealership, and the resulting explosion landed him in bed for...
Can't we all just get along? Not if you look at the demise of Veruca Salt, which went down in flames two years ago, after singer-guitarists Nina Gordon and Louise Post had a major falling out. The band scored big with its 1994 debut, American Thighs, and seemed destined to...
Last November it looked as if jazz musician Turk Mauro's life couldn't get worse. His dad was dying, his career was sinking, he had gambled away what money he had, his marriage was in jeopardy, his health was failing. What else could go wrong? Plenty. Fate seems to have taken...
MDFMK MDFMK (Republic/Universal) Suppose for a moment that, on the occasion of the first departure of David Lee Roth, Eddie Van Halen had announced that he was reforming the band under the new appellation Nav Nelah and that its sound and attitude and execution would be completely different. Would you...
Dirty Three Whatever You Love, You Are (Touch and Go) Post-post-rock, rigorous musicality, and all-instrumental composition no longer seem the indie-scene idiosyncrasies they once were. Now considered neither an artsy-fartsy anomaly nor a novelty act, the violin/guitar/drums trio Dirty Three can be appreciated on their own terms as the leading...
Ice Cube War & Peace Volume 2 (The Peace Disc) (Priority Records) It's been a long time since Ice Cube declared War. With the 1998 release of War & Peace Volume 1 (The War Disc), Cube promised its flip side, slated to be released a year later. It's been two...
Surrealism has wormed its way so deeply into the fabric of contemporary culture, especially pop culture, that it's easy to forget how dramatically it shook up the art world when it emerged in the mid-1920s. That's part of what gives the works in "Sweet Dreams and Nightmares: Dada and Surrealism...
Spring fashions include lots of pastels, of course. But the real key is that they're casual, yet oh-so-sporty. Did you think our mid-May batch of local CD releases would be any different? Sure, these new ones have less chiffon than in previous years, but let's try a couple on and...
His name appears in almost every book written about Groucho Marx, so much so, he has been given the appropriate appellation by members of the Marx family: Wesso. But Paul Wesolowski is of no relation to the famous clan. He's a man in his 40s who lives outside Philadelphia and,...
