Friday January 18, 2008
Deco weekend
Tonight
- Boyz of Bazel opening at Carol Jazzar.
- Begins your Art Deco Weekend.
Saturday
- Check out Upper Eastside green market.
- Sometimes the name of something clues you in to how clued in the event is. Um, the Beaux Arts Festival of Art . . .
- Finishes the South Beach Comedy Festival.
- Martin Luther King Jr. Day soul food cooking demonstration, but before you get too exited, it’s at Aventura Mall Bloomingdale’s.
- 10th Annual Medical Marijuana Benefit at Tobacco Road. $10, a million bands, community speakers, and “live painting.”
- Artopia, the name New Times has given to their 20th anniversary celebration. Not going, but congrats, folks.
- Today and tomorrow, the South Florida Folk Festival: like 30 performers, but you have to really want it. It involves things like camping, and expensive tickets.
Sunday
- Bill Cosby at the Hark Rock Live
- Marilyn Manson at
Jackie GleasonFillmore Miami Beach.
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Thursday January 17, 2008
Some current estimates on the cost of the Metrorail expansion: $57 million+ for planning/consulting, $290 million+ for construction of a line between the intermodal center and Earlington Heights, $2 billion+ for a northern extension into Broward and the east/west line.
The Miami Herald has launched miami.com beta, a city guide-cum-shot at internet relevancy, and it looks promising. There is great content, including a listing of artist with studios open to the public, a collection of old-Miami attractions, and a guide to the best of the food trucks. Most interesting though is the social-networking overlay, which allows the creation of MySpace-like profies, commenting, and whatnot, all tied to a point system that rewards active users.
Map of celebrity houses in Miami. If you know of any others, drop a comment here.
Wednesday January 16, 2008
Last Friday, a guy got rowdy at a UM house party. The police were called, and they tased him to death.
A set of images from vintage Florida postcards.
Plans are taking shape for Miami Circle. Not sure why this project is happening on the scale of decades.
January artwalk
Aramis Gutierrez’s sensational painting show at Castillo. Across the street at Gallery Diet, Richard Höglund’s installation had folks scratching their heads. Like a parody of contemporary art, it took a simple geometric shape and threw it at everything — small drawings, big drawings, installation, video, paper stacks — and nothing stuck.
Christina Pettersson’s eye-popping drawings of bricks stolen from writer’s homes. This one is Jack Kerouac. It’s unfortunate that these are only ever seen as details — the bricks are drawn life-sized, centered on massive pieces of otherwise-blank paper.
One of Steven Gagnon’s car projections in front of Locust, which includes the audio and video of a man describing his illegal entry into the US.
Bethany Pelle shows off one of her immaculate little kitchen sculptures. This one comes apart to function as a tea strainer.
Between two buildings on North Miami Avenue sit five of these huge aluminum 80s-looking palm tree sculptures. I mean, people are wasting their time making stuff like this? With world hunger, war, and disease, and you’re going to make huge palm tree sculptures and finish them off by drawing lines on them with a drill? Wow.
Kevin Medal’s at Twenty Twenty. A tour de force of a video created with thousands and thousands of drawings, stop-motion play-doh, and computers. Stunning, and . . .
. . . some of the cells are displayed in a tiny space adjacent to the projection room. Click the image above for full-size, and find the image from the still above.
Missed the Jordan Massengale show show at Tachmes, but luckily it will still be up in February.
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Tuesday January 15, 2008
Hofbräu München
We don’t need to keep talking about the lamentable closing of Eidelweiss, now going on two years ago, but the fact is that authentic German food is hard to find in Miami. You would not expect a Lincoln Road joint to be much more then a stopgap to this problem, and in fact when it first opened Hofbräu München had a Latin section on its menu, some vestige of the Cuban restaurant that previously occupied the premises. Well, a year on, Hofbräu has established itself as a perfectly wonderful spot. It’s much more casual then Eidelweiss, and in fact is sometimes listed as Hofbräu Beerhall. A few niggles aside, is a great place for food and beer.
Ah, the beer. Three varieties of Hofbräu (plus two seasonal), all of course imported from Germany, are on tap: a lager, a wheat ale, and a dark. The lager is the default choice, as good as anything you’ll find on tap anywhere in town. I like my beer a little more bitter, but it should be just right for an American palette. The wheat beer is for the adventurous, unfiltered (cloudy) and with a distinct hint of citrus. The dark beer is rich and delicious, and unexpectedly easy to drink for anyone expecting a stout. All the beers come in half and full-liter mugs, the latter of which is recommended: if you’ve ever had two pints of beer with dinner, a liter is not much more, and it will make you stronger.1
The food so far has been exceptional. You really want to start with the Hofbräu Wurstplatte, four big grilled sausages of various styles, each more succulent then the last. It’s served with the obligatory sauerkraut and mashed potatoes. And while this is some of the least healthy food you’re likely to find on Lincoln, it’s a necessary occasional cardiovascular-health splurge for any carnivore. For an adventurous snack, split a Münchner Wurstsalat among a few friends over beer — it’s cold sausage and swiss cheese with vinegar, which, well, it’s a thing, anyway. I do have to agree with complaints about the mustard. While Hofbräu has a tasty sweet mustard that accompanies the wurst, I couldn’t really do a whole plate with it, and honest to goodness, the only other alternative is packets of Gulden’s. This actually is not a terrible alternative taste-wise, but it kills the vibe, man, and I hope it gets addressed soon. No excuse, as decent German restaurant is available at Publix, and especially so since they’re already flying in the beer…
Speaking of killing the vibe, let’s talk about the prices. Those liters of beer? $12 a pop. The Wurstplatte? $19. (And so it goes, almost all the prices having been raised from those listed at MenuPages.) Pricey, yes, but not so terrible when you consider (1) the imported goodies, in light of the weak US dollar, (2) exorbitant Lincoln Rd. rents, and (3) that it’s obviously not that easy to run a German restaurant in Miami. Be grateful, and eat your wurst. Less tangible is the relaxed atmosphere of the place, which is also sort of rare on Lincoln Rd. The booths inside have been replaced with real beer-hall style tables and benches, and the wood tables and chairs outside are comfortable and right-minded to the experience at hand, and yet none of this seems fussy or contrived. Well, ok, the waiters’ leather lederhosen pants are a little contrived, but we’ll let that slide.
Hofbräu München
943 Lincoln Rd. (between Michigan and Jefferson)
Miami Beach
[1] I predict that one-liter mugs of beer are going to be the next big thing. In Bogota there are trendy new places, sort of Starbucks-equivalent beer halls, which have been serving them, and the practice has spread to some of the other restaurants. This is a trend that is ripe for introduction to America — you heard it here first!
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Monday January 14, 2008
Gridskipper’s rundown on the Miami dining scene: mostly a best-of in various upper-crust dining categories.
You know how Miami Police Chief John Timoney was driving that free SUV around for like a year? Well, the city’s Citizen Investigative Panel asked him to come before them and testify, and he was all “no thanks,” so they subpoenaed his ass, and he still refused to come, so they went to a judge, who ordered him to show up, and guess what? He still refuses. Dear Mr. Mayor: why does this fucktard still have a job?
Carnival Center renamed the Arsht Center
On Friday, the performing arts center previously known as Carnival dropped the bomb: it had received a $30 million donation from one Adrienne Arsht, and would now be forever after known as the Arsht Center. Well, actually, the official name is the “Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County.” Observations, bullet-point style:
- I think the name is great. The 11-word “real” name is so grotesque that it will never again be uttered, and “Arsht Center” has a nice snappy ring to it, so don’t even go there. (Oops, they went there.)
- There’s the logo, cleaned up as best as I could manage from the photo accompanying the Herald story. It seems to boldly proclaim that the avant-garde implications the first season at the center have been thoroughly and permanently quashed. I actually doubt this is true, and so I hope this is just an ad-hoc logo and they’re working on something a little less generic.
- What’s up with a .com or a .org? If they’ve secured these domains, a nice “website coming” splash would have been helpful, and if not, I’d think that the negotiations would be a lot more, err.. difficult, now: “Hey, we just got $30 million, and we need to buy your domain.”
- It’s very difficult to sound humble on an occasion like this, and Adrienne Arsht didn’t bother trying. Her speech began: “As I look around, it’s clear that I stand here on the shoulders of giants. And what I hope I have accomplished in making this gift is that my shoulders become those which you stand on to take this farther.” Here’s a nice profile on her.
- $30 million is serious money. Of that, Carnival is taking back $10 million of its original donation (That’s very big of you guys. Carnival still sucks.), and $14 million goes to Miami-Dade county government to repay a loan (so why are they added to the name? And what’s with the huffiness?). But what it does show is that there is serious philanthropic money in Miami, boding well, one would think, for the MAM building.
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Sunday January 13, 2008
Some sort of cool Outlook plug-in. It’s free, and if I refer two people I’ll get access to the closed Beta, so sign up!
Saturday January 12, 2008
Newyear Saturday
- I don’t remember how I found Barrett Emke’s work, but I really like it.
- A few interesting ideas from lifehacker that may or may not be worth getting into: Jott, Sandy, Remember the Milk, Postful (would be cooler if it did 50¢ postcards). I haven’t really done anything with any of these, but as of 2008 I’m on Google Calendar, and my all-time favorite is ringfo. Also, for your computer, there’s Texter and Xplorer2.
- World leaders in youth and age.
- Randy Newman – A Few Words in Defense of Our Country. Also don’t miss Short People.
- Re-interperting the original Star Wars movie on the basis of episodes I-III. I just watched all of these, and I’m not sure I’m going along with all this, but interesting anyway. (And btw, if you don’t watch all six SW movies in the new intended order asap the terrorists have already won.)
- You probably saw this already, or don’t care at all, but crappy logo trends from 2007.
- “[T]he peanut butter, jelly, Bubbies, toaster hash browns, salt and vinegar chips, and chopped microwave sausages spread across a sourdough breakfast baguette that won (and probably nearly stopped) my wife’s heart.” — a celebration of peanut butter.
- Art Fag City’s Worst of the Web, because I don’t want to make the same mistakes.
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Friday January 11, 2008
Redland Festival weekend
Tonight
- New World Symphony’s Musical Xchange. Free, and please go to this: these are always great.
- Begins Fill Our Mouths, some sort of French lesbian hearing-impaired theater production, which runs through next month.
- Tea and Coffee World Cup, a fair dedicated to the warm caffeinated arts. For aficionados only: you know who you are!
- Haitian ≠ Hatian exhibition, all weekend.
Saturday
- Redland Festival at Fruit and Spice Park — today and tomorrow.
- Also, the Redland Riot Road Rallye (possibly very related). (Or, closer to home, the Upper East Side Green Market.)
- Target Globebeat (free).
- Miami City Ballet for adults and for young people.
- Ye olde gallery walk…. do you really need to be told what to do?
- Switch, with Rachel Goodrich and more, at PS14.
Sunday
- Great Taste of the Grove.
- Overproof at Global Cuba Fest, presented my Miami Light Project.
- Battle of the Bands at Churchill’s.
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Thursday January 10, 2008
“I always think, why don’t they just slap pictures of their genitalia on there and be done with it? The message would be the same. Sunny Isles Beach is a travesty of overdevelopment. These four men, Jorge Perez in particular, are responsible for turning a sleepy and dilapidated but charming beach town into a glittering canyon of inaccessible glass and steel.” — From Rebecca Wakefield’s brief history of The Related Group.
A great set of photos from Art Basel. (via Provocateur)
Circa 28 Saturdays and Lolo part ways.
Orange Bowl souveniers for sale
Get your piece of the Orange Bowl here at the official site, or get them cheaper at the Canes shop. Obviously I don’t care, but the framed vintage seats are nice. There’ll be an auction on February 9th for all the bigger stuff (urinals!), including the scoreboard.
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Wednesday January 9, 2008
The water situation, she is not good: Lake Okeechobee at historic low levels, and it’s time for the South Florida Water Management District to take some action. Specifically, they’re spending $1.5 million, of a $25 million emergency fund, to purchase pumps to allow the continued draining of the lake for surrounding farm irrigation (and for the few surrounding towns). I guess you do what you have to do, but this sounds pretty bone-headed to me. The rest of the money will go to fixing up the floodgates around the lake in case, you know, the water ever comes back. [Photo from scouttster’s lakeoceechobee tag. Recommend checking out and reading the captions for some crazy details.] Update: This is more like it: a half million to accelerate the opening of a water treatment plant in Palm Beach. Let’s use the water we already have.
