Hollywood ‘Hoods Show Their Goods

Expo Alfresco takes place from 5 to 9 p.m. Wednesday, May 26, along Harrison Street in downtown Hollywood. Admission costs $10 in advance, $15 at the gate. Children under age 8 get in free with a paying adult. Call 954-923-4000.

Bellies and a Feast

No more sit-ups! SAT 5/22 Contrary to popular belief, belly dancing is not a dance of seduction but instead a dance for women, by women. “In ancient times, it was a method of helping pregnant women get ready for having their babies,” professional belly dancer Dawn Askins says. “The dance…

Fish Photo Op

Take me out to the masseuse, and oh, yeah, the ball game SUN 5/23 If there’s any South Florida team not needing a gimmick to attract patrons, it’s the Florida Marlins. The Fish are still wet from their World Series splash last October, and the team is hot out of…

You’ll Poke Your Eye Out!

Kid’s Xtreme ambition hits the screen SAT 5/22 “How can you mountain-bike in a land without mountains?” That’s what everybody asked John Logan Pierson, a sophomore at St. Andrew’s School in Boca Raton. He answered by filming a 60-minute movie featuring South Florida mountain bikers pulling tricks at Quiet Waters…

Funky Fish

Boners in the Culture Room THU 5/20 Whereas most people fear change, Fishbone hugs it, kisses it, lays it down on a merry-go-round, and makes sweet love to it. Embracing flux has had a mixed effect. The Boners’ fan base shrinks and swells like the tides, and countless record store…

Old Faithful

If the summer movie season is our annual time for escapism, last summer’s audiences escaped most often with the likes of Hulk, Terminator 3, and The Matrix Reloaded. Those titles, respectively, ended in a homeless and penniless hero, the end of life on Earth as we know it, and our…

Brilliant Traces

Two strangers, both weary with life, come face to face with awful truths they’ve tried desperately to hide in Cindy Lou Johnson’s play Brilliant Traces. Rosanna de Luce (Deborah L. Sherman) stumbles frozen-to-the-bone, clad in a wedding dress, into the isolated Alaskan barn of self-made hermit, Henry Harry (Peter P…

Embler-matic Art

It’s easy to miss the relatively new Embler Art Gallery, on the northwest corner of SE 13th Avenue and Las Olas Boulevard. It’s a small space in a larger building, with a color scheme — a warm mustardy yellow with white trim — that’s popular along the boulevard, including at…

Now Showing

The Dining Room: A.R. Gurney’s dissection of upper-crust WASP life is given a fine production by director Bruce Lecure and a nimble acting ensemble of six playing 57 roles in a series of interconnected playlets. The production is graced by gentle humor and poignancy, but the energy tends to drag…

Just Africa

You don’t have to go on a real safari for a taste of Africa. After excursions to Asoka Bali in Wilton Manors and Spirit of Vietnam in Fort Lauderdale, Artbeat recommends a shopping safari at Just Africa, near the eastern end of the East Las Olas Boulevard business district. Cash…

Now on Display

“Michael Joo” — Stripped of all the art babble the artist likes to surround his art with, Joo’s work, though essentially conceptual, often has an amazing visceral impact. That’s “visceral” both in terms of the viewer’s reaction to it and in terms of the subject matter — and sometimes even…

Urban comedy, Italian style

Being ranked 79 out of 100 seems a ways off from head of the class. But when that class is Comedy Central’s “Top 100 Greatest Standups of All Time,” 79 is pretty damn good — especially when you’re still alive. Even more so when you’re asked to be a panelist…

This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks

THU 13 Aphrodite Jones. Sounds like the name of a sexy crime reporter who pores over affidavits, logs hours in courtrooms, and scours grisly crime scenes for clues that others have missed, delicately flipping her raven-like hair the whole time. Well… it is. Jones is a real-life author (and Aphrodite…

Bounty Killer: The Slicker Picker Upper

With an up-from-the-ghetto life story and an ego the size of the Western Hemisphere, the man known as Bounty Killer — a.k.a. the Poor People’s Governor, a.k.a. the Professor, a.k.a. Warlord, a.k.a. Jamaica’s Most Wanted — has ruled the dancehall scene for more than a decade. Bounty was raised in…

No Dockers, Please

Fetish Factory’s ninth-anniversary party FRI 5/14 The dress code for tonight’s Alter Ego fetish party is strict — rubber, leather, vinyl, goth, fetish glam, uniforms. No jeans. No black streetwear. Critics might say this could all just be classified as “drag.” But all dress codes are some form of drag,…

Battle of the Boards

Surf on the big screen SUN 5/16 Good thing the Atlantic Ocean has been wicked flat as of late. Otherwise, you might want to go surfing, not watch a film about surfing. In which case, brahs and bettys, you’d be missing out. Veteran surf filmmaker Jack McCoy — yep, the…

Heeerrrre’s Roger!

“The Rocket” returns TUE 5/18 It was supposed to be a storybook ending last October. Roger Clemens was supposed to pitch his final game at Pro Player Stadium that Wednesday night, game four of the World Series against the Marlins. The Yankees were supposed to win their 27th world championship…

Poetic Justice

It’s all in the delivery SAT 5/15 It’s called poetry slam. Not the other way around. And just because anybody can do it and the judges are everyday Joes selected randomly from the audience, that doesn’t mean it’s not art. It’s performance art, people. More specifically, “spoken word.” Sure, the…

The World According to Ki-duk

Ever-evolving, always changing, the universe nonetheless sustains many constants: Hair metal never really goes away; British women inevitably become besotted grumps; and short men always turn into intolerable control freaks. Another “true generality” holds that males of all statures develop their innate behavioral characteristics within patriarchal cultures that, while aiming…

Kill Wil

Suicide made merry. Brotherly devotion tinged with carnal deceit. Personal tragedy transformed by malicious humor. These are some of the oil-and-water notions advanced by Lone Scherfig’s Wilbur, a mood-switching meditation on love and death that goes out of its way to yank our chains. From the sly come-on of her…

Good Morning, Baghdad

Watching Deborah Zoe Laufer’s biting satire The Gulf of Westchester at Florida Stage is something akin to witnessing a hotshot skier hurtling down an icy slope. Laufer’s topical tale of suburbanites caught up in divisive political debate over the war in Iraq hurtles along with such passion and intensity, it’s…

Sock It to ’em!

Unless you’ve been wearing four-inch thick, rose-colored glasses and have had two pounds of cotton stuffed in your ears, you’re a tad peeved at the state of the nation: mounting U.S. casualties in Iraq, unemployment, and the fancy footwork Bush and his cronies used to dance around the 9/11 commission…