An interactive Underground
Last week, our faithful music columnist Bao Le-Huu journeyed to the mystical lands of Texas for a few days of sleepless rocking at South by Southwest Music Festival. He brought back some morsels (J. Mascis!) but more importantly, some great new music that everyone and their mama should hear right now. BEATdown is way ahead…
SWEET EMOTION
Diabetics and the eating-disordered got a little more to love and worry about earlier this year when Patti Schmidt expanded her after-dinner overstatement to the Church Street Station concourse. The Dessert Lady’s original location on South Kirkman Road had already garnered Schmidt a reputation for over-the-top confections in portions larger than most tummies will allow,…
FREE WILL ASTROLOGY
ARIES (March 21-April 19) The Bible says you should kill adulterers, homosexuals and brides who aren’t virgins (Lev. 20:13, Deut. 22:21). But I beg you not to do any such thing. The good book also asserts that it’s OK to beat your servants as long as you don’t go too far and murder them (Exodus…
SAVAGE LOVE
My wife beat breast cancer five years ago. Went through chemo and radiation and ultimately radical surgery. Brave, lovely and lucky woman she is. But after the procedures, she said she was proud of her post-op look and the zigzag scar across her chest. No new boobs for her. Moi? I don’t like going to…
BLISTER
Everything looks better when it’s not yours. Like when you were a ball of pre-pubescent mischief and wished your best friend’s dad was your dad and that made you uncomfortable because you actually wanted to have your best friend’s dad’s good stuff crammed inside of you and that would probably be frowned upon in a…
LIVE ACTIVE CULTURES
A mysterious package recently arrived for me at the Weekly bearing an “ORLANDOWORLD, FLORIDUH” return address. It wasn’t a letter bomb (those usually come to my home), but a beautifully brain-bending book. Strange Rumblings in Mickeytown USA is a slim-but-dense volume of artist/writer/bohemian Morgan Steele’s rambling ruminations on Orlando. During his stumbles around our fair…
HAPPYTOWN
Hey there Orlando taxpayers: We’re about to cost you a boatload of money! Well, OK, not us per se. As you may have read in the Orlando Sentinel, the Florida Civil Rights Association has filed two civil rights complaints against the city alleging that the city violated federal and state civil rights laws by denying…
COUNCIL WATCH
For the love of God will someone please make Sam Ings shut up? I lost 20 minutes of my life listening to the District 6 commissioner drone on about the Saturday morning prayer service he attended and the 279 people who came to some event, each of whom he individually thanked. It’s St. Patrick’s Day,…
FIASCO
It wouldn’t be a presidential election if Florida didn’t figure out a way to screw it up. This time, hanging and pregnant chads and poorly constructed ballots aren’t to blame, and neither is a partisan U.S. Supreme Court. In 2008, the fault belongs squarely to Florida Democrats. In August 2006, the Democratic National Committee established…
THE FLORIDA SYNDROME
On Feb. 26, at least a million Floridians had their lights knocked out. A fire at a Florida Power & Light substation near Miami caused four plants – two nuclear reactors and two coal-burning plants at Turkey Point on Biscayne Bay – to shut down, setting off a chain reaction in Florida’s electrical grid. It…
LATIN AMERICANA
2008 is turning out to be a comeback year for rock en Español pioneers Todos Tus Muertos and Señor Flavio, formerly of the Grammy-winning group Los Fabulosos Cadillacs. Both bands paved the way in the ’90s for Latin alternative music in the U.S. and then quietly retreated during most of the decade that followed. “I…
KILLING TIME
It begins with a voice in the darkness. A woman’s voice, with a musical African accent. A voice that tells of the night the president was killed. The night their neighbor came to their door, the neighbor whose daughters she played with. The neighbor who brought the men with machetes to their door. The men…
FIRST SHOT
Fair warning: This column is now three weeks old, and that means it’s time to alienate some people. Screw Indiana Jones. Seriously. Snap out of it, folks. Take a good look at that trailer. Explain to us how it could be any more funereally paced, technically stilted or downright weird. Pretend it isn’t obvious that…
SWEET EMOTION
Diabetics and the eating-disordered got a little more to love and worry about earlier this year when Patti Schmidt expanded her after-dinner overstatement to the Church Street Station concourse. The Dessert Lady’s original location on South Kirkman Road had already garnered Schmidt a reputation for over-the-top confections in portions larger than most tummies will allow,…
THIS LITTLE UNDERGROUND
Debbie did Dallas, I chose Austin. And I’m fresh off the beat at the yooj 2008 South by Southwest Music Festival. At first, processing the event perks the brain like popcorn in the microwave. But eventually, its magnitude will make your head go the way of the hot dog. These are the bigger chunks that…
Is the Dalai Lama betraying his people?
These are troubling times for religious folk — namely for a certain Presidential candidate who, (oops!) put his faith in a very outspoken and video-recorded brand of crazy. Problems with religion aren’t self-contained to our little campaign here, though. Besides this whole Israel-Palestine-Iraq-Afghanistan, Islam vs. Judeo-Christianity problem that gets all the news (and body count),…
