In June, 1934, the Nazis launched the Night of the Long Knives, the Reich’s first-ever purge. In the international press, it was billed as a cleanup of Germany’s “public baths.” Those public baths teemed with the boys and men of the S.S. They were led by Ernst Rohm, a beefy,…

Neil LaBute is not a good Mormon. In college at Brigham Young University, he was given the superlative of “most promising undergraduate playwright.” The Mormon university probably didn’t expect him to run off and write a play about misogynistic businessmen abusing a deaf woman, or another play about a ring…

Revanche has all the elements of a thriller: an ex-con, a prostitute, a bank heist, and a getaway. But this isn’t your typical action movie with throwaway dialogue punctuated by gunfire and explosions. Revanche is an Austrian arthouse film, shot in that slow, considered European fashion that divides American audiences…

Movies about boxers are a dime a dozen. Raging Bull transcends the genre — it’s one of the best movies ever made. Robert De Niro stars as a ring fighter with a heinous attitude problem. He has a teenage girlfriend, a waifish platinum blond whom he could easily snap apart…

Stalked by Jim Crow, the Highwaymen were a band of black artists that wandered and painted Florida in the ‘60s and ‘70s. By some accounts, the group turned out over 100,000 unique pieces, which were sold at malls, doctor’s offices, and roadsides. They painted quickly, in an otherworldly manner. As…

In the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, visitors to monasteries are blessed with a bop on the head from a wooden phallus. According to myth, a long-dead saint cockslapped evil spirits into submission, and ever since the penis has stood, as it were, as a divine symbol. Here in America,…

The Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in Fort Lauderdale kicks off on Thursday with King Size, a French sex musical about polygamy. It dares to pose and answer the million-dollar question: can three people have a happy relationship, or are all so-called “throuples” doomed to dissolution? For a long time,…

Fifty years ago, The Zoo Story premiered in West Germany. As per Theater of the Absurd, the action involved two characters sitting on a bench. One man is Peter, a publisher and bland, bourgeois type. Reading peaceably in Central Park, he’s accosted by a random bum, Jerry, who has just…

If you’re searching for illumination in these dusky times, go to the Kravis Center tonight. There, comedian Mike Daisey will take you on an underground tour of the System. His monologue Monopoly! begins with the saga of Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison — bitter rivals over electricity and both clients…

After 9/11, comedian Bill Maher caused a brouhaha by pointing out on his TV show, Politically Incorrect, that the hijackers weren’t cowards, as it had become vogue to call them. Even Rush Limbaugh saw nothing wrong with the comment. But advertisers pulled sponsorships, pundits whined, and his talk show tanked…

James Cagney was one of the first and foremost gangsters of the silver screen. He started out in drag as a vaudeville entertainer. At the dawn of the Depression, he became a star for playing a bootlegger in The Public Enemy. Then, in a scene that shocked 1931 audiences, he…

In the 1950s, mobsters established the major casinos of Las Vegas. So it’s historically apt that former cast members of The Sopranos – the hit show about postmodern mobsters – should gather tonight at the Seminole Coconut Creek Casino. Corralled to Florida by ringleader John “Cha Cha” Ciarcia (who played…

If you’re gay and Floridian, PrideFest is the place for you. Today’s mammoth parade through Lake Worth will attract up to 10,000 people, a Billboard-ranked pop star, Jenna Drey, and an array of musicians and DJs. 150 local businesses are showcasing a bazaar’s worth of knick-knacks along the route, which…

The last time Maureen Dowd was in Florida, she went to Miami Beach with fellow columnist Alessandra Stanley for a depression-era spa treatment. Writing about it for the New York Times’ travel section, she noted both the city’s economic malaise and the spa’s wide selection of “biodynamic wines.” It wasn’t…

“The Petite Opening” is the epitome of chi-chi. It’s an artsy party happening tonight at a hair salon in West Palm Beach, organized by a trio of eccentric characters: Neil London, an advertising exec and stock-market heavyweight who counts Citibank among his clients and runs a 24-hour Internet news channel;…

Dame Edna Everage is the most notorious drag queen in the Anglo-Saxon world. She’s a hybrid of Lou Dobbs and Ursula (the octopus queen in the Little Mermaid). There are more fake jewels on her dresses than there are grains of sand on a beach, and her trademark cat-eye glasses…

In 1981, Representative John Wilson Jenrette, Jr. (D-SC) fucked his wife behind a pillar on the steps of the Capitol Building. Later in his career, Jenrette was indicted for taking bribes. Today, he runs a firm for public relations – which is appropriate enough, seeing as how public relations had…

Look around any given American road, and you’ll notice at least one quarter of the drivers chatting away on their cell phones. You might even spot a truck driver swerving across freeway lanes, text-messaging. Then there are the hands-free zombies, to be found in supermarkets and malls rambling into ear-mounted…

The origin of life is a mystery. The best guess was given by a Soviet biochemist, Aleksandr Oparin: he hypothesized that lightning strikes and volcanic eruptions sparked life in “primordial soup.” The 1950s Miller-Urey Experiment lent substantial credence to his theory, but it remains speculative. Esoteric debate continues between the…

The downer French philosopher E.M Cioran once remarked that Western civilization has become a mass of listless people, wedged between lonely billionaires and the homeless. That’s something to keep in mind during Sex Drugs Rock & Roll by Eric Bogosian, a new production at Fort Lauderdale’s Sol Theatre that has…

A bunch of ragtag artists in Paris, including Monet and Renoir, overthrew aesthetics and invented Impressionism. They dared to dab their paintbrushes. France’s establishment was unimpressed. Art critics panned the Impressionists’ first gallery opening in Paris in 1874 — the term “impressionism” was actually an epithet coined by one such…