THU 9/02 When one dwells on the masterpieces of the great artists (and surely, don’t we all ponder on this at least two or three times daily?), often the works that spring to mind are the paintings. Picassos, Chagalls, Manets, all beautifully wrought and now the property of the ages…
“I had the carpenters set up the stage in the shape of a womb,” Richard Lewis says. “I asked for the vagina stage.” The prodigal son just made his pilgrimage back to Brooklyn, New York, the place he swears the “accident” occurred: his birth. And while the famously angst-ridden comic…
SAT 10/04 For fans of dance, the summer months are a grim downtime. Like opera, dance generally keeps to a specific season, and anyone who wants to catch professional dancers doing their thing has to wait for the proper time and place. But starting this week, the wait is over…
TUE 10/07 There’s a lot to get excited about this year in Miami. The Heat’s made many positive moves in the past few months. First, they drafted a stud out of Marquette, six-foot-four guard Dwayne Wade, with the fifth overall pick. Next, coach Pat Riley got a top free agent…
FRI 10/3 Being a teenager isn’t so hard. At least, not if you have a good idea, a business proposal, and some financial backing. Teen entrepreneurs are popping up faster than acne these days. No longer are teens concerned with dating and being popular. Not when you’re the creator of…
TUE 10/7 What is it about Mount Fuji? For that matter, what is it about any mountain that enjoys Fuji’s scenic qualities? An air of mystery and grandeur seems to float like so many clouds about the peak of any mountain that rises suddenly from the plains, dwarfing its neighbors…
SAT 10/4 Long before skate-punk took the form of a Canadian Britney Spears look-alike in cargo shorts, there were bands that truly understood the old skate-punk spirit of not giving a shit. These bands are old enough to remember when everyone’s creed was “Skate and Destroy,” not “Sk8er Boi.” One…
Director Richard Linklater’s School of Rock imagines, sort of, what might have become of voluble rock snob Barry the morning after his grand finale in Stephen Frears’ High Fidelity — after his Marvin Gaye impersonation had faded and been forgotten in the daylight hours, after he quit his gig at…
You wouldn’t think it nowadays, but there was a time — not so long ago — when Sam Shepard was the king of American theater. His vision of America as a metaphysical and spiritual desert haunted by dark ghosts of violence was preeminent in the restless 1970s and ’80s as…
To declare Frank Lloyd Wright a great architect is to overstate the obvious — sort of like saying Catherine Deneuve is a great beauty (and actress) or Mikhail Baryshnikov a great dancer or Shakespeare a great writer. How, then, do we approach one of the most famous, occasionally controversial, architects…
You gotta love John Sayles. No, really — you gotta, or else a mob of indie-minded cineastes will club you into submission. Sometimes it’s easy to comply, as with City of Hope and Sunshine State, both astute portraits of uniquely American class, race, and real estate struggles boiling down to…
Movie documentaries can veer in many directions, from shocking investigative reporting, like Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line, to nine-hour Ken Burns indulgences that require more Dramamine than a Yanni concert. Where rock ‘n’ roll is concerned, however, the lens almost always follows the artist, from public to private. So,…
THU 9/25 Whatever happened to the CIA? When the people of Chile elected a Socialist president back in the early 1970s, the CIA gave Chile its own September 11 — President Salvador Allende was killed in a coup on that date in 1973. Thousands more died over the next several…
What people read is their own business. So what if it’s deliciously erotic, politically unpopular, or untraditional and avant-garde? That’s the philosophy of plenty of librarians and other personal-liberties enthusiasts. Freedom from censorship is also the theme of the current “Banned Books Week,” which concludes Saturday. During the event, the…
SAT 9/27 Between the beaches, the rain forest, Carnaval, and bossa nova, Brazil’s sure got a lot going for it. But it’s just so far away! A trip to South America’s largest country would require planning, lots of vacation time, and a pretty good amount of cash. Happily, you can…
SAT 9/27 Are you the outdoors type? You know, the kind of person who loves the smell of charcoal, yearns for the buzz of mosquitoes nipping at your legs, and fancies dressing in flannel? Then you might be interested in the 2003 Toyota Tundra Adventure Racing Series, which is coming…
SAT 9/27 As any diligent multitasker knows, staying busy is good. If you want to prepare your child for the nonstop motion of the “real world,” Richard Scarry’s Busytown exhibit is a good start. Scarry, whose children’s books have sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, is best-known for characters…
THU 9/25 Many artists find themselves teetering on the edge of poverty with a long-shot chance of making it. For such artists, starvation is a real possibility. Miami artist Jane “In VAIN” Winkelman knows these odds all too well. But after years of scraping by, she is poised for stardom…
SAT 9/27 Glancing through the latest issue of any mainstream hipster rag, you’d think there’s been a resurgence in power pop — that late ’70s and early ’80s phenomenon that gave us Cheap Trick, the Vapors, and the Beat, until new wave took over. The original idea of power pop…
The script for The Rundown has lingered for more than a decade and was originally a Patrick Swayze vehicle, well before those wheels fell off. Universal Studios revived it because the studio knows what it has in Dwayne Johnson: a gold mine made of bulging biceps, a man who was…
The dumbed-down movie version of Frances Mayes’ best-selling travel memoir Under the Tuscan Sun is a virtual case study of Hollywood’s irrepressible urge to lower the bar in the hopes of upping the take. Mayes’ 1996 book is a nicely written, carefully observed meditation on buying a decrepit Italian villa…
War may be hell, but we humans love to hear stories about it. Think back on the history of theater, of movies, of literature. The war story is central to them all. The Iliad still stirs the imagination. So do Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and Hemingway’s…
