At first glance, the works of Miami artist Frances Trombly represent a new low in conceptual art. A bunch of scrunched-up Publix receipts? A plank of plywood leaning against a wall? A roll of toilet paper? In a gallery space? That’s not art. Is it? But take a closer look…
A teenaged witch stands trembling behind her unsuspecting mother and father, wand raised. Obliviate, she whispers, and her parents’ eyes go glassy, their memories erased. On the mantel, the girl’s image disappears from the family’s photos. Blinking back tears, she walks into the street, the link between herself and her…
“What if we choose to exist solely in a reality of our own making?” asks Pittsburgh community-college lit professor John Brennan (Russell Crowe) rhetorically to his class in The Next Three Days, Paul Haggis’ fourth effort as director. Like his lumpy protagonist, Haggis, who also scripted this remake of the…
The science of global warming is tough enough to evaluate without the sort of hard sell Ondi Timoner pushes on behalf of her subject, Bjorn Lomborg. Author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and the movie’s eponymous source book, the Danish adjunct professor of statistics became, over the past decade, a thorn…
Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Lixin Fan’s prize-winning documentary is an intimate portrait of an unfathomable immensity, focusing on a single family caught up in the world’s largest mass migration. Opening overhead shots show a huge mob waiting in the rain to push their way into China’s Guangzhou railroad station for the annual…
The theme for the 9th annual Florida Turkish Festival, which will be held Saturday, November 20, is “Istanbul Inspirations,” in celebration of the city of Hollywood becoming the 2010 European Capital of Culture. Festivalgoers will be given the opportunity to treat their taste buds to Turkish delights such as doner…
A city’s opening centennial ceremony sounds like a drab, sober ribbon-cutting or an historian-orchestrated parade, full of crying babies and hot-dog eating. But for Fort Lauderdale’s Opening Centennial Ceremony, our city decided to sanction a pub crawl along Fort Lauderdale Beach, and it threw in a red-and-yellow Sun Trolley to…
No matter what people might say, we’re all a little bit superstitious when it comes to keeping ourselves healthy. We believe in little things, from apples keeping doctors away to wearing the same underwear every game to help our team win the series (OK, maybe that one has nothing to…
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And sometimes it’s an exploding cigar, of the harmless kind with which Ernest Hemingway pranked a Turkish general, or of the deadly kind with which the CIA planned to assassinate a certain communist dictator. One thing’s for sure: Cigar appreciation spans the political…
“We gathered our colored pencils and sheets of paper and drew like wild, feral children into the night, until, exhausted, we fell into bed,” writes Patti Smith in her memoir Just Kids, chronicling her life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. They were the perfect punk-bohemian power couple, and they lived a…
The United States has 2 billion square feet of self-storage space, and the self-storage industry makes more money than Hollywood. Self-storage units have been used as homes, meth labs, and waystations for bomb-making materials — and, in one disturbing case, as a clinic for an unlicensed gynecologist. In Lake Worth,…
Last month, big, muscled men in football uniforms donned pink cleats, gloves, and towels to support Breast Cancer Awareness Month. It didn’t stop there. The Georgia Aquarium lit up pink the entire month, restaurant employees donned pink ribbons, and the world essentially held hands in support of both victims and…
When your kicker is the team’s MVP, you know something’s wrong. Yet it’s been that kind of season for the Miami Dolphins. It’s been that kind of decade, actually. The Fins are ranked 28th in the league in scoring this season. They have no problem moving the ball into the…
The adage that it’s hard for a team to win if it can’t score has become something the Florida Panthers have taken seriously against their opponents this season. Lead by Marty Reasoner, Mike Weaver, and Dennis Widemen, the Panthers’ stifling defense has allowed only four goals on power plays this…
As we prepare to demonstrate gratitude on Thanksgiving Day, let us give thanks for life’s most precious entities. Dear (*insert deity of choice here*), thank you for large charitable block parties featuring live music from Audio Heist, Cypress, and DJ Russ. Let us express gladness for refreshing adult libations, especially…
If you’re among those who cited having a religious experience while watching Jennifer Hudson belt out “And I Tell You I’m Not Going” in the 2006 film Dreamgirls, then hold onto your rosary. Another Effie, now played by Moya Angela, will shake, tremble, and sing her way through that heartbreak…
In the early 1900s, John Storrs, a Chicago sculptor and painter who grew up among the world’s first skyscrapers, traveled to Europe to study, and there fell in with the continent’s avant-garde, befriending Marcel Duchamp and Ezra Pound. By the 1910s, he was making sculptures that, he said, like architecture,…
It’s official. The holiday buildup has begun. And, in America at least, that means only one thing. Shopping. For better or worse, Americans show their love and holiday cheer through mass consumerism. It’s our way. It’s not that other things aren’t important; we just like stuff. Expensive stuff. Cheap stuff…
After a three-decade career providing percussion and other background sounds for iconic artists such as Ike and Tina Turner, Bill Withers, and John Prine, Big Poppa E felt a change coming. Thus, in 2000, he switched tracks, returning to his roots in the blues with the release of his second…
European Renaissance painters, at least on canvas, liked their naked women coy and sumptuous. If those artists were transported in time to the Tom Wesselmann exhibition at the Museum of Art|Fort Lauderdale, would they croak at the violently erotic pop art nudes? Or would they kick themselves and think: “Why…
Florida is not a state with a great literary tradition. The Southern lit writers — Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty — mostly gave it a pass. Playwright Andrew Rosendorf’s Cane is an attempt to redress the state’s literary lack, and it does so by reaching backward for old, old…
Put aside your preconceptions about drawing when you approach “Tom Wesselmann Draws,” now at the Museum of Art|Fort Lauderdale. The artist had his own distinct ideas about what constituted drawing, as he made clear in his introduction to this knockout retrospective, which includes more than a hundred works spanning four…
