Archive | May, 2012

Six Cheap, Locals-Only Musical Options for Memorial Day Weekend

Memorial Day Weekend in any major vacation destination is a huge clusterfuck, so bemoaning this over and over again every year is pointless. Okay, so you don’t want to get anywhere near South Beach — that’s fine, what with the current police state there, you probably won’t easily be able to enter the island anyways [...]

Girls’ Club Screens ‘Our City Dreams’ During FAT Village Art Walk (updated)

In the trailer for Chiara Clemente’s Our City Dreams, Kiki Smith says, “I used to always joke when I was younger that most of the representations of women was women lounging about naked. While I would love to be doing that, it wasn’t my reality.” There’s little need to explicate the lack of realism that [...]

Q&A: Ricky Byrd Performs With Rockers in Recovery Saturday

Addiction is the entertainer’s disease. It would seem that just about every episode of VH1’s Behind the Music finds the artist or group in question at rock bottom during their story, generally at the beck and call of whatever vice has ahold of them. Ricky Byrd was one such entertainer: a guitarist who managed to find [...]

Radio-Active Records’ New Weeping Willow Event on Friday Gets Gloomy

Don’t expect anything remotely pretty at Weeping Willow, a new potentially monthly event that launches Friday night at Radio-Active Records in Fort Lauderdale. The performers on the bill boast names like Human Fluid Rot and Chrome Dick, and all of them — including the legendary noise king Rat Bastard — specialize in music that is [...]

Say Hello to Invisible Music, But Goodbye to John Ralston, This Saturday at Bamboo Room

The South Florida artistic and musical brain drain continues with a particularly glancing blow to the Lake Worth mini-scene. This Saturday at the Bamboo Room serves as both a celebration and a send-off. It’s an album release show for Invisible Music, the eight-piece ensemble whose debut LP is some two years in the making. But [...]

On the Horribleness of Teachers and Teaching

Late last year, and not for the first time, the St. Lucie County school system was humiliated when news broke that one of its teachers had bullied a student. In this case, the student was an 11-year-old boy with learning disabilities, who is nevertheless apparently “bright,” can “play Mozart by ear,” and is reportedly an [...]

Danation: Come Senators, Congressmen, Don’t Drop the Ball

The Tea Party’s favorite senator, Florida’s own Marco Rubio, made news over the weekend by demonstrating just why the Obama-is-a-commie-Kenyan-Antichrist crowd loves him. At a fundraising event (Understandably, as at this time in the election cycle, our elected representatives make few appearances other than at fundraising events.), Rubio said of the president, “We have not [...]

Dan Hosker (the Bikes, Holy Terrors) Struck By Car, in ICU

For a while in the late ’90s and early-to-mid-2000s, Dan Hosker seemed to be in about half the bands in South Florida – the Holy Terrors, the Bikes, Harry Pussy, the Laundry Room Squelchers – the list goes on. If it had strings, Dan played it, along with a few instruments that didn’t, and when he wasn’t [...]

Five Schlocky-Awesome Movies For World Goth Day

Today is World Goth Day! Says who? Says, um, various loosely affiliated factions on the Internet. Apparently it all grew out of a UK radio special that aired May 22, 2009, and ever since, various eager promoters, bands, artists, and such have used the day as a reason to organize various events around the world. [...]

Dharun Ravi Has Been Thoroughly Chastised

I came out of the closet during my freshman year at Florida Southern College, an improbably scenic institution erected in the hellish swampgrass between Tampa and Orlando. Some new arrivals at FSC that year referred to certain kinds of locals as “swampcrackers,” which seemed apt. My coming out occurred just after Christmas break. I told [...]

Salty Eggs

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