A little more than a year ago, artist William Bock and his wife, Christy, were settling into their new gallery in the Fountains Shoppes of Distinction in Plantation, as well as awaiting the birth of a child. After five years of struggling to survive in the fledgling arts district of...
It's 5 p.m. on a Friday afternoon, prime time for basketball at Hollywood's Jefferson Park. A dozen men are shooting basketballs at two half-court hoops. The players are a refreshingly diverse bunch, running the gamut from middle-aged white men to black teenagers to a young Hispanic dude whose two small...
Because of the addlepated notion that rock 'n' roll is merely the music of rebellion and outrage, the delirious, romantic charms of doo-wop have gone virtually unnoticed among most critics and hipster elites. The music produced countless hits during rock's mid-'50s infancy and through its glory days of the early...
Another damp day in South Florida. The Calibrator cruises slowly down Dade Avenue on the campus of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, searching for the Student Housing Services Building. Two students happen by. "Excuse me," the Calibrator says, rolling down his window, "could either of you two ladies tell...
Steven Soderbergh may have had some rocky times after his 1989 breakthrough with sex, lies, & videotape, but these days he's on a roll. Last year he produced Pleasantville and directed Out of Sight, two of the year's most praised films. This year he has The Limey, a complex, introspective...
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! The repressed Irish Catholic schoolgirl who Molly Shannon plays on Saturday Night Live is certainly not everyone's cup of glee. But there's no denying the tug she exerts on anyone whose past is littered with the dry husks of Latin verbs and memories of nuns swinging...
After circulating several times through the art on display at Gallery 421 in downtown Fort Lauderdale, I began to feel a little like the matriarch in the lavish Martin Scorsese adaptation of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence. Taking to her bed in a swoon, she declares: "A stroke? Ridiculous...
"Pretty fire" is the shockingly inappropriate term the young Charlayne Woodard gave to the sight of a cross burning in her grandparents' front yard. It's also the name of her autobiographical one-woman show, which tells the story of how as a child she witnessed this hateful conflagration while visiting her...
Every Sunday at noon, WPBT-TV (Channel 2) in Miami airs Issues, one of those earnest public-affairs talk shows that you know you should probably watch but never do. One Sunday last month, moderator Helen Ferré presented a panel of two freshly coifed journalists, a toothy young politician, and a bespectacled...
The kosher rubber chicken is down the hatch, and 500 synagogue officers from around the country troop noisily into the convention hall at the Wyndham Resort in Weston for the after-dinner musical treat. All day they have attended brain-numbing seminars on topics like "Can church and state really be separate?"...
Chris Cornell Euphoria Morning (Interscope) Forget the Grammys, the MTV Video Music Awards, and the rest of those jive-ass rock awards shows: The absolute highest honor any pop musician can receive is to be cited in a "musicians wanted" ad. You really know you've arrived when garage bands nationwide place...
The much-ballyhooed video that was secretly shot in the swingers' club Trapeze II was more disappointing than the digitally remastered orgy in Eyes Wide Shut. Three judges watched a matinee screening of the local skin flick at the Broward County Courthouse last Friday. The video was exhibit "X" at a...
With his finely honed senses on full alert, the first thing the Calibrator noticed as he strode purposefully into the maw of the weekly West Palm Beach event known as Clematis by Night was the pungent fragrance of beer in great abundance. The scent hung heavy in the fresh autumn...
Inside room 347 at the Broward County courthouse in downtown Fort Lauderdale, Vicki Lynch curls her arm around her husband Kenny's shoulders, smoothes his blond ponytail, then wipes the puffy skin beneath her eyes with the tips of her fingers. They wait for their names to be called. This particular...
The road signs are blurry but the way is clear in the New Theatre's intimate production of How I Learned to Drive, Paula Vogel's 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama that's wrapped up in automobile metaphors. Set in rural Maryland and unfolding over three decades, the play tells the story of a...
Although nearly 100 pieces of art, some quite large, are on view in the fall exhibition at the Coral Springs Museum of Art, the works have been placed so strategically throughout the museum's 10,000 square feet that there's no sense of clutter or overkill. The spacious, airy, light-flooded main gallery,...
Paul Jones Pucker up Buttercup (Fat Possum) As the blues continues to work its way into the pop mainstream via smoothies such as Keb' Mo', Jonny Lang, and Kenny Wayne Shepherd, artists like Paul Jones are left to maintain the music's brutal power and raw, soaked-sheets sexuality. Pucker up Buttercup...
Filmmaker Bobby Bowfinger (Steve Martin), the lead character in the intermittently funny Hollywood satire Bowfinger, has a dream. Nothing so grand as an Academy Award, or even a table down front at the Golden Globes. No, when Bowfinger allows his fantasies to run wild, he sees a Federal Express truck...
When he was 107 years old, the story goes, Broadway legend George Abbott was asked what he thought was the most important development in the theater to have taken place in his lifetime. His answer: "Electricity." Though his active career as an actor, director, and producer spanned some six decades...
And the winner is… Alberto "the Cuban Crusher" Milian! The hotshot prosecutor, who has a portrait of Rocky Marciano hanging in his office (see "A Pugilist in PinstripesNew Times, May 20, Paul Demko), walked away the clear winner over defense attorney Ty "Punching Bag" Terrell in their much-publicized bout in...
When asked to describe the most precarious position he has been in while taking a picture, photographer Michael Joseph recalls a midafternoon climb up a 50-foot-tall industrial crane. "When you start to climb, you have the feeling of falling backwards," he explains nonchalantly, as if photographers scale cranes every day...
The Pretenders ¡Viva el Amor! (Warner Bros.) Doing the late-night channel-surf thing recently, I stumbled across a broadcast of Hard Rock Live, the VH1 live-performance showcase featuring classic rock acts. The Pretenders were holding court, and the resulting performance was a testament to the talents of singer-songwriter Chrissie Hynde. It's...
