Friday May 16, 2008
First of the year ultra-muggy weekend
It’s going to be in the 90’s all weekend, with the humidity to match. You’ll want to get out there and enjoy it, but unfortunately there’s not much going on.
- CubaNostalgia — for those who want to see what this whole “Cuba” thing is all about.
- Big bluegrass festival up in Hollywood, with free admission all weekend.
- Another orchid festival? Yep, this time at Fruit and Spice Park.
- HAHAHAHA!! Whoever’s doing promotion for the JVC Jazz festival is getting their ass fired REEL soon — their website is currently down and showing “This account has surpassed its CGI resources allocation at the present time.” Hilarious. You are welcome to keep clicking the link in hopes that it comes back at some point, but I wouldn’t bother — the biggest “name” on the festival is Sergio Mendez.
- Yee-haw, there’s a Miami International Agriculture and Cattle Show. Bring the kids.
- Tonight: Awesome New Republic at The Vagabond [MySpace].
- Les Standiford’s new book is about the founding of Washington as the nation’s capital. He speaks tonight at Books & Books Coral Gables.
- Cuba Libre block party outside The Globe, w/ live music and good food.
- Saturday: Haitian Compas Festival, but CAREFUL — the website started screaming at me, even with flashblock installed. There is some safe information here.
- Elvis Costello performs, which would be pretty cool, but apparently he’s “special guest” of the Palm Beach Police, which is a little weird (I think — admittedly I’m not sure I understand what’s happening here).
- Wallflower Gallery’s 11th anniversary celebration
- Sunday: The Greynolds Park Love-in, with a performance by the “legendary” Spencer Davis Group.
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Thursday May 15, 2008
Map magazine
Finally, a local magazine that does it right. This is the 4th (quarterly) issue of Map magazine, and the quality has been consistently great, so I’m finally letting myself get attached. Splitting the difference between local and non-local content — this issue’s cover, of the Ravonettes, is the first non-local — the magazine focuses on art, music, and culture.
This issue opens with a story on downtown club promoters, follows with a great interview with artist Aramis Gutierrez, and along the way features Del the Funky Homosapien, Luis Gispert, Dino Felipe, Gustavo Matamoros, the Postmarks, Jaco Pastorius, Paul Auster, and Rachel Goodrich. That, my friends, is a damned good list. Oh, and …
right smack in the middle, an article on Sweat Records. Perfect.
Editor Omar Sommereyns is a longtime Miami journalist, having most recently kicked ass at the Sun Post and Flavorpill. You couldn’t have picked a better guy to head up a magazine, as evidenced by the results.
For the gallery walk this month, Map threw a party next to Snitzer gallery, with a coffee bar, funky user-configurable seating, and a rock concert. They gave away the magazines, and distributed a card that guided folks through a carefully-picked group of the best galleries on the circuit, with step-by-step instructions. A nice touch.
Oh, one other thing I need to gush about — it’s beautiful. Map lets its graphic designers toss visual caution to the wind with each new spread, and you get stuff like the pages above — eye-popping but smart, and complimenting their topic. A series of grayscaled upside-down photos over a color gradient on one page, multi-colored plaid graph paper at 45-degrees on the next. It’s held together by a tight grid for the copy (set in a nice san-serif) and printed on lavish matte paper.
You can pick up Map free at lots of places around town, but why not spring for a subscription — your $25 is well worth it and supports what will hopefully be a long-running institution. Oh, and you can also flip through the magazine on their website and download a high-res PDFs of any of the 4 issues. Go read!
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Wednesday May 14, 2008
May gallery walk
You missed Christina Lei Rodriguez’s show at Perrotin, right? Shame, because it’s gorgeous. By dropping the overt references to natural forms, the new work achieves a sort of post-apocalyptic disco grandeur.
Detail.
Take an exterior wall, paint it flat black, and write something on it in block letters. It’s pretty hard to miss, as Locust has been demonstrating for the last few months.
Amber Hawk Swanson’s sex-doll twin shows off her business end. As you lean in to look, a camera’s watching you, with a live feed showing on a screen on the other side of the wall.
Photos of the doll making friends accompany the installation. These leave something to be desired, actually.
Map Magazine’s coffee lounge. Cold espresso in little cans distributed.
In a trailer at the back of the lounge, Snitzer’s trailer hold’s COOPER’s latest work, ass-kicking as usual.
Gavin Perry demonstrates what happens to artists when their work appears on the cover of a book: you’re issued dress shirts and cigars, and required to sport them when in public.
Robin Griffiths’ sculpture at Dorsch, replete with WWII-era shaving kit and multiple whiskey bottles.
Spinning lanterns by N. Sean Glover at Diet.
At Castillo, Frances Trombly’s latest work, including woven cardboard boxes with embroidered labels.
Meanwhile, palmetto bugs the size of a child’s hand prowled the streets, attacking stray cats and the occasional art collector. Must be summer kicking in.
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Tuesday May 13, 2008
Sassy photos from Miami (NSFW). Chinese food in the belly button: do not try this at home.
Leyden Rodriguez has a twitter. Update: Indirectly via whom, my favorite new twitter acct: Oblique_Chirps.
An interesting article on the discussion about which schools to close due to budget cuts. Sounds to me like low enrollment + crappy school (C, D, or F school) = a good one to close. Of course it gets more complicated, because there have to be nearby schools to absorb those kids. But the worst thing you can do is to have the professional staff figure it all out, and then close all the schools they recommend except the ones where there’s the most complaining. The solution? I dunno, maybe make Rudy Crew school Dictator For Life — did you see yesterday’s post? The school board is nothing but a thorn in his side anyway.
Bulldozed.
The Bas Fisher Invitational just had its last show ever and is closed.
“Here, the Mayor [of Miami, Manny Diaz] engaged in ex parte communications with Respondent during the ten day veto period following the Commission’s adoption of the Orders. Petitioners emphasize that to the extent the Mayor believed that there were adverse effects resulting from the grant of rezoning and MUSP that required mitigation through the imposition of additional conditions, the matter should have been discussed within the scope of the public quasi-judicial process and required public hearing and notice. We find that the Mayor’s communications all took place after the hearings had concluded, away from public earshot, and therefore violated Petitioner’s due process rights under the Jennings criteria.” — Good stuff, from the court documents [PDF] pertaining to the torpedoing of the Mercy development. (btw, my version of the PDF has selectable text, unlike the herald’s. It’s all in the details.)
Monday May 12, 2008
How do you increase public transportation use? Well, you wait for the cost of gasoline to go up, and when it does you introduce new routes and lower rates to attract drivers that were on the fence. And since gas prices have just risen, it makes sense that Miami-Dade is cutting 600 bus routes and the South Florida Regional Transportation Authority is considering dropping from 50 to 20 Tri-Rail trains per day. Update: A number of commenters have pointed out that the “600” figure is yet another example of the Sun-Post playing fast and loose with numbers.
“I do not believe that the effort required of my staff to gather and organize the information regarding job descriptions and cost of all board office renovations … is an effective use of their time.” — School Superintendent Rudy Crew, responding to a request for information from the School Board. From Michael Lewis’ column on how the School Board operates, which is a must-read. (Among info Crew is not interested in providing: where the overtime is going.)
Saturday May 10, 2008
Gallery walk tonight
- Frances Trombly at Castillo.
- At Locust, Chicago artist Amber Hawk Swanson and a life-sized silicone sex doll she commissioned in her own likeness.
- Dorsch: big group show with a few of the regulars, a few new names, and Hugo.
- Jay Hines at Twenty Twenty.
- MoCA warehouse has a show of work from their collection up, from last month. Excellent time to check it out, I’d think.
Also up from last month: Gavin’s show at Snitzer .Actually it’s not. Snitzer needs to get on the ball updating that flash thing he calls a website.- Hardcore. Say what you will, but I’ve never stopped by without seeing a few things that rocked.
- Gye-Hoon Park and Jill Hotchkiss at Lowenstein.
- David Shaw at Bruk.
- Cristina Lei Rodriguez at Perrotin
- Kalup Linzy opening at Moore.
- Grab a coffee at Wynwood Art Lounge next to Snitzer. Something Map Magazine is puting together. Live music.
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Friday May 9, 2008
Do-it-yerself weekend
Sorry, rough night last night. If you know of something good, hit the comments. I’ll try to put together an itinerary for the gallery walk by noon tomorrow. Meanwhile:
- New Times — has a pretty good calendar section.
- Sun Post — a very comprehensive list, but double-check their dates before you just show up for something.
- Flavorpill — generally a very good ‘curated’ list.
- Sweat Records — clubs, concerts, and cupcakes.
- Meetup.com — staggering stuff. For example, the bellydancing group is big.
- Theater League — theoretically comprehensive listings of plays and such, though I’ve never been able to figure out their website.
- Miami Beach 411 — sometimes has a ‘I’m Bored, What’s There To Do?’ post, but not this week so far.
- Miami Nights — sometimes they throw you a bone.
- Still desperate? Try the Herald ‘entertainment’ page, but careful — they’ve got people hard at work trying to defeat your popup blocker.
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Thursday May 8, 2008
Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens
Most people have heard of the Morikami but haven’t been there, because it seems so far away. Actually, it’s less then an hour from Miami, and totally worth the trip. Hours are from 10 am to 5 pm, and I’d recommend getting there on the early side, as the highly rated restaurant inside the museum closes at 3 pm. Click the photo above to see a slideshow of what it’s like.
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Wednesday May 7, 2008
The results are in from the Broward citrus canker class-action lawsuit: $11.5 million to be split between several tens of thousand residents. It’s not clear how much each person/tree will get, because some have already gotten money, yadda yadda, but sounds like upper three digits to me. Good news for former citrus tree owners in other counties, where similar lawsuits are ongoing; bad news for the State (uhh, that would be us). Someone should start talking settlement, no?
Shark Valley
23 miles west of the Turnpike on Tamiami Trail (click the map above for Google directions), in the heart of the northern Everglades, sits something rather remarkable — an all-access, super-easy nature trail known as Shark Valley. The trail is paved, and accessible by foot, bicycle (bring your own or rent), or tram tour. By bike, it’s just the right length that just about anyone can sit on a bike and finish it at a leisurely pace. The trail is a loop, so at the end you end up back at the visitor center, but at the far end you’re deep into the Everglades, far from civilization, with the birds and the alligators. It’s sort of a must-do for anyone who lives anywhere in South Florida.
This is what it’s really like in the Everglades. Peaceful, and stretching on into forever with grass, occasional patches of solid ground and a few trees, and swamp (note the water visible at the bottom of this photo.
Bleh, I don’t have a photo of the gators you see hanging out just off the path, but they’re there. (No worries, they’ll leave you alone.) Did get this little guy sunning himself, though.
Mostly what you get is lots and lots of birds, in all different shapes and sizes. Not sure what this fellah was hunting in the muck. Something delicious probably. Previously, we met this guy.
At the farthest end of the loop, you come to a rather improbably lookout tower. The views are fantastic, but again, it’s more about the vastness, not something you can reproduce in a photo. Go check it out for yourself.
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Tuesday May 6, 2008
John Spain explains how to pimp your booze.
Alton Road bike lanes? Weather we like it or not, Alton Road is soon to be torn up. So, Miami Beach commissioners had a choice to make. Look at the two proposals below, and see if you can guess which they chose to recommend to FDoT.
