Arts & Culture

In vino, veritas” goes the Latin saying: “In wine, truth” — the idea being that what may be suppressed in everyday life will come to light after a few drinks. The ancient Athenians went so far as to legalize this belief for a time: In critical votes, citizens voted twice,…

Singer Bradley Ditto of Hollywood grabs a grocery bag, toilet paper, or whatever else is handy when he comes up with an idea for fresh lyrics. A performer since fifth grade, Ditto became enamored of songwriting during high school. He’ll bring his guitar and repertoire of tunes, which range in…

My, how times have changed. About two years ago, the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood gave us a wonderfully outrageous group show called “Lowbrow Art: Up From the Underground.” Among the many potentially controversial pieces included was Anthony Ausgang’s Why Walk When You Can Drive? I described the painting…

It should be so easy to hate this man sitting on a couch in a high-priced hotel suite, this man sharing his bottle of Evian. He is, after all, a demon dressed head to toe (or tail?) in slate gray, the Satan of Cinema. Attacking him has long been regular…

While crippled, old horses are usually put out of their misery, crippled, old rock bands never die. Still, it’s strange when the oldsters wind up at a horse track. Gulfstream Park opened its season last week, and, as usual, the horses were only part of the entertainment. Bryan Adams began…

White boys doing reggae can get ugly. Even though white people co-opting black music is nothing new, this latest example seems particularly cringe-inducing. But Princes of Babylon breaks the mold. It takes a primarily reggae sound, pulls it in half-a-dozen different directions, and emerges with something far more original. The…

Now that the holidays have been dispensed with, the South Florida theater scene kicks back into gear with a flurry of new shows and openings. No fewer than 20 productions open this month, and behind them is another truckload of shows rolling up in February. Meanwhile, several intriguing, unique shows…

The Gold Coast Jazz Society has carried out its stated mission of presenting, preserving, and perpetuating jazz over its ten years of existence, and the society gives itself a pat on the back this Wednesday with a Founders’ Dinner and Concert. Having fomented a variety of concerts, a jazz festival,…

Rory Block lived the first year of her life in a cabin in Neshanic, New Jersey, with no plumbing, a well outside, and an outhouse. After moving to New York City as a toddler, she left home at age 15 to start a life on the road, playing guitar from…

The look and feel of Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings have become so deeply ingrained in our culture that it may seem irrelevant to take another, closer look at this quintessentially American painter’s work. Or is it? That’s one of the questions addressed by “Roy Lichtenstein: Inside/Outside,” now at the Museum of…

For many people at this time of year, all of the seasonal cheer and de rigueur bonhomie can get downright depressing. If you’re among this not-so-select group, GableStage may have a holiday show for you: James Joyce’s “The Dead,” a New Musical Play, which is based on the celebrated short…

Normally, these year-in-TV columns are a breezy, easy write–a plea for good shows buried somewhere in an embittered litany of bad ones. In recent years, it has felt as though the proliferation of channels and choices has given us only more of the wretched and less of the watchable; satellite…

Circus ties are ties that bind. The current producer of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, Kenneth Feld, took over from his father, Irvin Feld, who bought the circus from the Ringling family. They, in turn, had bought it from James Bailey, who had taken it over from…

The Beale Street Blues Boy comes to Pompano Beach this Saturday by way of Melbourne, and a road behind it that spans an average of 250 concerts a year for the past 55 years, beginning with a 1956 road trip that included a staggering 342 one-night stands. But it wasn’t…

Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Jasper Johns uttered that famously to-the-point statement of aesthetics, but it could just as easily apply to the work of French-born artist Arman, who’s the subject of the sweeping retrospective “Arman: The Passage of Objects,” now at the…