Have a drink at the newly renovated Caboose in Ivanhoe Village Loud music, a piecemeal approach to furnishing the space and no-frills ways to get wasted with stiff drinks and domestic pitchers.
Thursday, Jan. 30, Bike Polo Night
Thursday, Jan. 30: Orlando Mix Tape Vol. 2 Bluegrass and Bourbon In 2012, Urban Think Foundation launched their Orlando Mixtape fundraiser concept– folks submitted their favorite songs, and local musicians put together a cover set of hits. Now we’re coming up on the second iteration of Orlando Mixtape, only this time there’s a theme: bourbon and bluegrass. Drinks first: From 6-7:30 p.m., join the VIP Bourbon Trail, a fancy pub crawl through the Woods, the Courtesy and Finnhenry’s. For $75, that gets you a custom craft cocktail at each stop, plus admittance to the Orlando Mixtape Vol. 2 concert at the Social. If you’re not thirsty, tickets for just the show, which features the River Bottom Nightmare Band doing bluegrass covers from 7:30-9 p.m, are $25. Proceeds help Urban Think Foundation continue their tremendous run of cultural events. Here’s hoping there’s a rousing version of “Orange Blossom Special” to chase down your Bullet Train. – Ashley Belanger
Friday, Jan. 31: Cave of Swimmers at Uncle Lou’s Entertainment Hall For such a sunny place, Miami seems to have its phasers locked on heavy music lately, and the latest discovery we’ve made from there is Cave of Swimmers. Their melodic metal is composed by two Venezuelan musicians (stateside now) relying on synths, guitars and drums to back up an ’80s-leaning glam metal with impressively Stryper-esque vocals. If you’re a metal purist, their divergent style might bust a U-turn on your expectations, judging from the title track of their self-titled debut. You’ll have to buy the four-track album to access the three mystery tracks or else show up to hear it live in the proper, all-enveloping sonic context. Cave of Swimmers joins Orlando stoner metal dudes Caribou King and a new noisy force on the scene, the Glorious Rebellion, all for only $3 on everyone’s favorite freak scene stage: Uncle Lou’s. – Ashley Belanger
Friday, Jan. 31: Creative Mornings Orlando Holler at the early birds out there, but some days we’d rather wrap ourselves in a sheet, “borrow” a friend’s HBO Go password and eat pasta from the pot than pull on our socks and play grown-up. Yet, there is one thing that could coax us out of elastic-pants hermitdom: the Creative Mornings breakfast lecture series. Sure, it helps that they provide yummy bagels and fancy java bevvies from the cuties of Lineage Coffee Roasting, but the lectures are consistently mind-bendingly inspiring enough to make us click “yes” to each month’s Facespace invite. The local series of this NY-based phenom has hosted talks from big names like Ian Cummings, Jamie Tworkowski (TWLOHA), Andrew Spear, Craig Ustler, Blair Sligar (Hog Eat Hog), Anna Bond (Rifle Paper Co.) and Benoit Glazer (Timucua White House and La Nouba) – it’s like a cornucopia of Orlando creatives. This month’s speaker is Wyatt Winter from Walt Disney Imagineering, whose past projects include Spaceship Earth and the Big Thunder Mountain refresh, but we’re dying to hear if he’s involved with the Avatar expansion project. The creative juices are flowing already and we don’t even have our coffee yet. – Brendan O’Connor
Friday, Jan. 31: Arctic Monkeys at Hard Rock Live Arctic Monkeys are one of those bands that history will remember as sparking a change, although their mark wasn’t so much about morphing sonic trends as it was about music being carried and sold strictly by rampant, rabid Internet fandom. Their first record, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, is Britain’s No. 1 fastest-selling debut record, so they’re also on the books for more than just web acclaim. On their newest release, 2013’s AM, Arctic Monkeys are poppier than the post-punk riffage that caught web wildfire, but the transition upholds the band’s punk spirit of doing whatever they want and letting us figure out how to party to it. So in place of the upbeat “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor,” we get the draggy balladry of “No. 1 Party Anthem” and all the good stuff in between, meaning for longtime fans, the set grows more diverse and satisfying with each release and subsequent tour. – Ashley Belanger
Friday, Jan. 31: Southwestern Allure: The Art of the Santa Fe Colony Isolated in the dry desert climate of New Mexico, artists silently depicted the harsh realities of life on the coyote-plagued plains by molding their vision of the world around them. An influx of Eastern ethnologists and photographers, painters and sculptors settled into the plains of the Western landscape and from there spearheaded the Modernist movement from 1915 to 1940, abstracting themes of cubism and realism. Witness the works of Gerald Cassidy, Stuart Davis, Carlos Vierra and Marsden Hartley at the Mennello Museum, which wrench viewers out of a digital state of mind and transport them back in time. Pottery molded by the early Anasazi people sits atop pillars, juxtaposed with the textures on raw canvas painted by the art-colony newcomers, all telling stories from decades past that linger on long after you leave the gallery. Come out and mingle with the who’s who of the local art scene at the opening reception; if you don’t, the exhibit remains open to the public until April. – Shannon Scheidell
Friday, Jan. 31: Orlando Critical Mass At 5 p.m. on the last Friday of each month, hundreds of cyclists rally to take back the streets. The Mass, a community bike parade/ride to promote awareness of alternative forms of transportation, may seem pointless or annoying to some, but it’s really one of the coolest avenues of political expression in today’s click-and-donate culture of non-participation. The simple act of taking to the streets in large numbers at the exact moment when roads are packed with commuters shifts the power dynamic from the car to the cyclist. But truthfully, the vast majority of the participants are just looking for a way to get out of the house and hang out with some like-minded two-wheelers. It’s fast-paced and full of hipsters on fixies, but if you can keep up, it’s a great way for beginners to get comfortable while riding in traffic, so pump up those tires and polish those rims. – Brendan O’Connor
Friday, Jan. 31: Keb’ Mo’ at the Plaza Live Fundamentally, the blues have long been about making the most of having it rough, what with hard-living guitarists writing about the joys and frustrations that come with their hardscrabble lives. Keb’ Mo’ (aka Kevin Moore) modernizes this thread, with results that are both poignant in their precision and weirdly humorous: contemporary lyrics juxtaposed with more traditional bluesy tunes. On the 2003 album Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: Keb’ Mo’, the LA native and Nashville resident opens “Soon as I Get Paid” with lines that especially resonate in post-recession America: “Ring-a-ling with the telephone/ Is the man of the house at home?/ Your MasterCard is overdue/ We need a payment from you/ Right now.’” On 2011’s The Reflection, the veteran guitarist and Grammy winner’s most recent record retains the same hard-luck perspective by assessing hard work and the burdens of consumption in the weepy “We Don’t Need It.” Although Moore’s overly polished, built-for-low-lit-but-plush-lounges twang doesn’t sport the emotional heft of old-school bluesmen, his words sure keep tradition alive. – Reyan Ali
Saturday, Feb. 1: Vietnamese Lunar New Year Festival of Orlando Cultural diversity isn’t lacking in Orlando, and the Central Florida Fairgrounds is one venue where hard concentrations of it sprout up. We just covered the Spirit of the Buffalo Pow Wow, but now it’s time for the Vietnamese Lunar New Year Festival. Based on the lunisolar calendar, the Vietnamese New Year (also known as “Tet”) coincides with the Chinese Lunar New Year and is a time for family feasts, firecrackers and new beginnings. Martial arts displays, a beauty pageant, dragon dances and a concert of Vietnamese music are just a few activities available at the event, which begins on what many Vietnamese and Chinese folks consider the first day of spring. Much like the Pow Wow, it’s a good, cheap way to spend the afternoon taking in food, customs and souvenirs from a culture that may or may not be your own. – Fred Lambert
Saturday, Feb. 1: 21st Annual Civil War Re-enactment and Battle of Townsend’s Plantation
Saturday, Feb. 1: Trash 2 Trends No matter which side of the orca pen you stand on, SeaWorld is on the right track in backing this event. The marine park is the main sponsor for this fashion show, which features designs made entirely from stuff most people would throw away or recycle. In the fall, designers were invited to submit their concepts for inclusion in the show, and 25 designers and artists who had the best fashion-forward concepts – that’s Project Runway speak for stuff that’s innovative, intriguing and wearable – were chosen to create and show their looks on the green carpet at Trash 2 Trends. The show isn’t just about turning trash into treasure, though. It’s also a fundraiser for Keep Orlando Beautiful, which will use all funds raised to increase public recycling, environmental education and waste reduction. As Tim Gunn would say: Make it work. – Erin Sullivan
Saturday, Feb. 1: Cloak & Dapper Winter Pop Up Shop It’s hard to believe that a store as Brooklyn-cool as Cloak & Dapper exists in Orlando, but with e-commerce, all things are possible. Calvin Cearley’s “gentleman’s general store” offers a tightly curated selection of men’s clothing, accessories and grooming products, all made in America, hand-crafted and closet-worthy of your favorite pompadoured or bearded hottie. Still, sometimes you want to finger that 12-ounce raw denim or sniff that organic mustache wax before you buy, and that’s where C&D’s every-so-often pop-ups come in handy. The winter one is sited, oh so handily, at craft-beer haven Redlight Redlight, because there’s truly nothing better than drinking while shopping. But, pro tip: Don’t let the ABV of your delicious cask ale adversely affect the balance on your swiped-hard-and-put-away-wet debit card. – Jessica Bryce Young
Sunday, Feb. 2, Tattoo Art by Tattoo Artists Show