This month, luxury prefabrication is all the craze at the Hollywood Art and Culture Center. Its latest gallery, “Everyone Wants a Piece of This Cake,” uses as a medium fake cakes on silver platters iced with dazzling portraits of celebrities. Beyonce, Britney, Barack, and the Beatles are there on the…
Taking off in a hot-air balloon’s straw basket is a breathtaking sensation, akin to flying in a dream or pissing yourself. Find out on your own at Hollywood’s Balloon Festival. The beach broadwalk will teem with dozens of DJs and bands playing everything from blues to techno. The Balloon Festival…
Azur and Asmar: The Prince’s Quest is the best thing to come out of French animation since The Triplets of Belleville. It hasn’t gotten a blockbuster promotional campaign, but it was released at the Cannes Film Festival and other international venues to great acclaim. It’s kid-safe, family-friendly, and perfect for…
After stops in New York City and Los Angeles, the 23rd Israel Film Festival has arrived in Miami. More than a dozen fascinating films are showing at the Sunrise Intracoastal 8 at 3701 NE 163rd St. in Miami. The festival coincides with the 60th anniversary of Israel’s tumultuous founding. The…
On Christmas morning, American families will gather in pajamas around their trees and gleefully open presents. Contrast this wholesome ritual with tonight’s “Hardcore Holiday” at the Fred Lippman Multipurpose Center, where wrestlers in spandex will gather around a Christmas tree and attack each other with gift-wrapped weapons (2030 Polk St.,…
The Leather Masked Ball whips into action tonight at Purgatory (1000 W. SR 84, Fort Lauderdale). Proceeds benefit Tuesday’s Angels, a local AIDS foundation, and the Leather Archives and Museum, a compound in Chicago that amasses artifacts from the leather world. Charity and leather-fetishism: that’s the Puritan spirit. Last year’s…
Rosa Byrne makes for a seductive embalmer. In Just Buried, the Australian actress explains how to prepare a cadaver in the husky whisper of Marilyn Monroe: “Suck out all the fluids; And then you inject cavity fluid into the torso.” Just Buried is a Canadian comedy about a young nerd,…
Anita Bryant was a pop singer in the late ’50s who made a name for herself entertaining American troops on deployment; later, in the ’70s, she became a spokeswoman for the Florida Citrus Commission. In 1977, she got riled up about a law that would protect gays from discrimination, and…
The Genitorturers emerged from Orlando in 1993: an S&M band in the shadow of Disneyworld. It’s hard to confirm rumors that “audience participants” at Genitorturer shows get their scrotums nailed to wooden boards. But such activity would be true to their name. In their 15 years, the Genitorturers have prowled…
“Change” by David Packouz: David Packouz talks about nanotech the way 12-year-old girls talk about Zac Efron. In a great, fawning gush of words, he explains it will bring about a technological utopia on Earth. Humans, he says, will interface with computers, replace their bodies with machinery, and become immortal…
Not even rush hour could dissuade Alex Heria from pulling over and taking pictures of brilliant landscapes hugged by freeway ramps. He’s an award-winning local photographer who fixes his lens on the skies, roads, cities, and human beings in South Florida. “Alex Heria: Photographic Works 2000-2008” is open today from…
Communist societies have a custom of embalming their leaders and putting them in glass display cases. Mao and Lenin enjoyed this fate: decades have gone by and their skin still hasn’t lost that shine. (How long is it before nitroglycerine is used in anti-aging treatments?) The play Lying in State,…
In 1929 Detroit, Henry Ford was laying off workers by the thousands. At the same time in Gorky, Russia, he began construction on the world’s largest auto factory. The Great Depression didn’t affect the Soviet Union. During the ’30s, in fact, tens of thousands of Americans (known as “Yanks for…
Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone Wild! will be the campiest spectacle to hit America in 2008 — rivaled only by David Hasselhoff’s looming TV talent show. It’s the long-awaited follow-up to Another Gay Movie, in which four gay boys made a pact to lose their virginity before graduation. Though a…
The 24 Hour Theater Project is an Olympic event for thespians in South Florida, equal in difficulty to the decathlon. This Sunday, a bunch of playwrights will gather at the Miracle Theatre (280 Miracle Mile, Coral Gables) at sundown. They’ll be tasked with writing a play based on a random…
The Bon Festival is a day for remembering the dead and marking their passage into the afterlife, or the Great Beyond, or wherever the hell it is they go. (Nobody knows.) In Japan, it’s a three-day holiday. Here in Florida, it’s a one-day event at the Morikami Museum and Japanese…
Japanese-American relations are the theme of Giacomo Puccini’s masterpiece opera Madame Butterfly, which is being performed tonight, 8 p.m. at the Colony Theater (1040 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach). Sung in Italian, set in Japan, and featuring an American leading man and music in the German dramatic style, Butterfly was first…
Nobody knows insanity like the Scandinavians. Edvard Munch, the Norwegian artist, could only have painted The Scream under the delirium of Arctic days and nights. And Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish filmmaker, dedicated many of his works to human madness. His 1961 masterpiece, Through a Glass Darkly, takes place on the…
You have a problem: You don’t feel nearly bohemian enough. You’ve never smoked Galoises, your existential crises are brief and inelegant, you know little about post-structuralism, and you’re crass. But you want to live la vie boheme. In Florida, where do you begin? You can start today at the Seventh…
Most American men handle mid-life crises in a traditional fashion: a new sports car, a hair transplant, or a catastrophic divorce. In Full Grown Men, a film by David Muno, the 35 year-old protagonist leaves his wife for Diggityland, his favorite theme park. With a childhood friend in the passenger…
House music is so cosmically cool that you can imagine it playing in the background on the International Space Station, while astronauts repair solar panels and piss into complicated bags. Closer to home, the Soba Sushi Lounge (415 Plaza Real, Mizner Park, Boca Raton) is holding “We Love House Wednesdays.”…
What better way to celebrate the birth of the American Republic than with transvestites on a yacht? This afternoon, the Musette sets sail for the Intracoastal in pursuit of happiness and partying. Gay men will throng its three decks under the blasting music of a DJ and the hot, aphrodisiac…
