Board Silly

Kevin Welsh photographs the world’s top wave-riders for Surfer magazine and catches the action on video at the same time. A senior staff photographer for the surfing mag, Welsh won’t reveal the specifics of his “double trouble” system, but it’s clear he’s getting maximum mileage from each shoot: The glossy…

Theater of the Mind

Somewhere between the club crowd and the couch potato set lies a group that doesn’t mind going out late — as long as the effort results in some form of “cultured” entertainment, according to Cody Thomas. And Thomas, an actor and stage manager at the Academy Theatre in Fort Lauderdale,…

Tuned In

Whether it’s bad or good commercial luck that the thriller Stir of Echoes follows so closely on the heels of The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan’s wildly successful ghost-story sleeper, it’s bad critical luck. The film has some startling parallels with The Sixth Sense: Both concern psychic communication with the…

The Play’s the Thing

As a filmmaker, John Turturro clearly believes in drawing from personal experience: The actor’s directorial debut, the 1992 Mac (which won the Camera D’Or at Cannes), was avowedly based on his father’s life. For his second feature, Illuminata, Turturro takes a look at the theater, showing us the ambitions, fears,…

Harmony Tonight

Somewhere between writing dialogue for the Jets and the Sharks in West Side Story and creating Sunday in the Park With George, the only Broadway show to date based on an impressionist painting, Stephen Sondheim revolutionized American musical theater. Inspired by the elaborate story musicals of his mentor Oscar Hammerstein…

Streetness and Light

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…

Outward Bound

Beneath the dark surface of thigh-deep swamp water in the Everglades grow the roots of cypress trees. They’re all but invisible to hikers until someone rams a tender shin into one. Snakes and alligators inhabit the murky water, too. But, according to Sandy Snell-Dobert, “with the water as high as…

Hard Times

When last we encountered Peter and Bobby Farrelly, they were pelting movie houses with industrial-strength jokes about retarded kids, lost semen, found excrement, and exploding house pets. Good plan. There’s Something About Mary turned into last summer’s surprise hit and catapulted the brothers to the top of Hollywood’s A list…

Falling to Pieces

Like her contemporary, the movie star James Dean, Patsy Cline arrived in pop-culture heaven prematurely, the result of a tragedy. She died in a plane crash in 1963 at the age of 30, leaving behind two small children and the work that resulted from 12 recording sessions, not to mention…

Well Hung

A year ago there wasn’t a gallery at Steven F. Greenwald Design, just a suite of interlocking offices, work areas, and cavernous storerooms. Greenwald was primarily in the business of custom framing, not running an art gallery. All that changed in December. Now a gallery — divided into two sections:…

Old Wave

Duran Duran’s catchy brand of synth-pop and its sexy videos made the band’s members darlings of the new wave scene in the early ’80s. The music and images also sold tons of records: The albums Duran Duran (1981), Rio (1982), and Seven and the Ragged Tiger (1983) each had several…

Calling Mount Olympus

What is it they say — that even a flea can reach Mount Olympus riding in Pegasus’ mane? Well, in the case of the new Albert Brooks comedy The Muse, Brooks is the flea and Pegasus is his delectable costar, Sharon Stone. But I get ahead of myself. In The…

Lesbian Lite

It seems like only yesterday that movies dealing with gay and lesbian life were synonymous with extravagant displays of gloom and doom. From the suicides of The Children’s Hour (1961) and Advise & Consent (1962) to the serial killers of Cruising (1980) and Basic Instinct (1992), same-sexuality was no fun…

Swedish Passion Under a Cuban Sun

The names have been changed and so has the setting, but no one will fail to recognize August Strindberg’s neurotic heroine and her boy toy in New Theatre’s unrelenting and compassionate production of Miss Julie. By transferring it to colonial Latin America, artistic director Rafael de Acha recasts the Swedish…

Live, From Hollywood…

Like many late-night theatrical troupes around the country, Punch 59 presents sophisticated sketch comedy on a variety of odd topics. But unlike most other groups, this one is named for a torn-off section of an election poster urging voters to punch a certain key in a voting booth. Director/ writer/actor…

Cultural Makeup

Her demonstration almost complete, Reiko Nishioka begins taking the pins out of the dolls. No, this is not some kind of voodoo ritual going on here; Nishioka is director of education at the Morikami Museum in Delray Beach, and she’s explaining the cultural underpinnings of cloth dolls to a visitor…

Beetlemania

As a student at the Florida Institute of Technology in the late ’60s, Mark Sivik was interested in biology — especially bugs. And to him FIT’s Colombian exchange program sounded like a chance to collect some exotic insects. So he signed on ostensibly as a guide for a project in…

Blue in the Face

Lo and behold the plight of the American gangster. John Gotti, the Dapper Don, has been sent down the river. His bigtime heavy, Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, is famous and face-lifted for being a no-good-dirty-rat stool pigeon. And Robert De Niro, the reigning deity of hoodlum heavies in films such…

New Rules

If Kevin Williamson has anything to say about it, the good works of noble movie schoolteachers like Mr. Chips and Miss Dove and Mr. Holland will be wiped out in one fell swoop. In their place the creator of TV’s hormonal Dawson’s Creek series proposes an unmitigated horror — a…

Cissy and Harry and Katie and Johnny

Actress Elizabeth Dimon was so delightfully adroit last spring in the Caldwell Theatre Company’s production of The King’s Mare and the Florida Stage’s Quills that it should surprise no one that she walks away with the part of Cissy, the female half of the comic pair of lovers in A…

Antiques Sideshow

Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Jasper Johns’ famous exhortation is one of the most succinct statements of aesthetics in 20th-century art, and the artists included in “Amalgam: Multi-Media Fusions by Four Florida Artists” seem to have taken his advice to heart and then…

A Full Nelson

Charles Nelson Reilly exists in several universes simultaneously — almost all of them in show biz. He was recently nominated for an Emmy for his guest appearance as Mr. Hathaway on The Drew Carey Show, and he played UFO expert José Chung on a popular episode of The XFiles two…