By Jordan Melnick | January 23rd, 2013 | No Comments
Don’t get too close.
In the beginning of Beware of Mr. Baker, Ginger Baker smacks Jay Bulger in the face with his walking cane, sending blood streaming down the filmmaker’s nose. It’s a fittingly aggressive start to a film that chronicles a life spent hitting things: hitting joints, pummeling his veins with heroin, hitting the dusty road on an improbable musical excursion through the Sahara, even whacking polo balls from the backside of a galloping horse — and, of course, banging out drum beats that transformed rock and roll.
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By Jordan Melnick | January 21st, 2013 | No Comments
Dark stories over black coffee, anyone?
In support of Transportation, a collection of short stories released on the first day of 2013, author Nancy Rommelmann is visiting Panther Coffee on Tuesday for a talk, reading, and presumably a cup of coffee. Raised in Brooklyn and based in Portland, Rommelmann is a journalist, novelist, and short-story author whose latest work “dives into some strange pockets of the human soul and swims a line right on the blackest edge of fear, desire and despair,” according to the Oregonian. Here’s more from the paper’s review:
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By Jordan Melnick | January 17th, 2013 | No Comments
After a quiet 2012, PLAINS is revving up for a productive new year, promising a stream of single releases leading up to its second full-length album in early summer. In fact, guitarist Jorge Graupera says the LP is “90% completed”. That’s very good news considering PLAINS’ self-titled debut featured two songs in the top five of our South Florida Songs of 2011 list, including the number-one spot. To whet your appetite for a year of PLAINS production — and, in the shorter term, for the band’s Churchill’s show on Friday, Jan. 25 — here is a video (shot by occasional Beached Miami photographer Jesse Meadows) of the band performing “Swim”, a song from the forthcoming record.
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By Jordan Melnick | January 14th, 2013 | 5 Comments
The Steubenville rape case shows how far football mania can go. — photo via salon.com
In an open letter to Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross after the 2011-2012 NFL season, Beached Miami Damn Dolphins columnist Nathaniel Sandler made a bold claim: “Football is the most important thing in America.” As a sports fan who is not particularly fanatic about American football, I first considered the claim a ridiculous exaggeration. Then Sandler’s brief explanation made me realize what he meant by it, and why it was not only not a ridiculous claim but possibly true.
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By Jordan Melnick | January 9th, 2013 | No Comments
Richard Blanco, a son of Cuban exiles who grew up in Miami, will recite an original poem at Barack Obama’s second presidential inauguration, on January 21, according to the New York Times.
From the moment Barack Obama burst onto the political scene, the poet Richard Blanco, a son of Cuban exiles, says he felt “a spiritual connection” with the man who would become the nation’s 44th president.
Like Mr. Obama, who chronicled his multicultural upbringing in a best-selling autobiography, “Dreams From My Father,” Mr. Blanco has been on a quest for personal identity through the written word. He said his affinity for Mr. Obama springs from his own feeling of straddling different worlds; he is Latino and gay (and worked as a civil engineer while pursuing poetry). His poems are laden with longing for the sights and smells of the land his parents left behind.
Now Mr. Obama is about to pluck Mr. Blanco out of the relatively obscure and quiet world of poetry and put him on display before the entire world.
To learn more about Blanco, who honed his craft at FIU and writes about “negotiating the world” as a “mainstream gay” man who came out of a very conservative culture, read the NYT’s profile. On this recording, Blanco reads “América”, a poem from his first collection, City of a Hundred Fires.
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By Jordan Melnick | December 16th, 2012 | 14 Comments
Just one of many unforgettable Borscht 8 images.
On Saturday, the Borscht Film Festival presented its eighth quasi-annual short film program to a crowd of hundreds at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts. While Borscht will continue to host events through this coming Friday, the Arsht Center screening was the festival’s main event, the culmination of months of work on mostly Miami-centric films, many of which Borscht commissioned and produced itself.
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By Jordan Melnick | December 12th, 2012 | 2 Comments
With 59 chapters around the world, the Awesome Foundation is now in Miami to fund “flashes of micro-brilliance.” — photo via stickermule.com
Got an awesome idea that needs a bit of money to become reality? Lucky for you, the Awesome Foundation just opened a local chapter and is currently accepting applications for “micro-genius” grants of $1,000. To learn more about the foundation and exactly what kind of awesomeness it intends to fund in Miami, I traded emails with Natalia Martinez, AF’s Miami dean.
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By Jordan Melnick | December 11th, 2012 | No Comments
Fresh off of receiving a $500,000 vote of confidence from the Knight Foundation and landing two spots in the Sundance Film Festival’s 2013 Short Film Program, the Borscht Film Festival is getting ready to present its eighth edition of Miami-inspired independent cinema. (See ticket giveaway details at bottom of post.)
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By Jordan Melnick | December 11th, 2012 | 2 Comments
With sweet prizes and sweeter glory on the line, the Beached Miami community stepped up on Instagram and shared 1,500+ #beachedbasel photos from its collective Art Basel experience, posting everything from celebrity sightings (Will Ferrell, Beyoncé, Kanye, Iggy) and fabulously farcical fashionistas to flame-throwing graffiti artists and polka-dotted poodles.
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By Jordan Melnick | December 4th, 2012 | No Comments
Twenty-five years after its birth, the Graphic Interchange Format — more commonly known as the GIF (with a hard guh) — has hit its prime, becoming the dizzying, aneurysm-threatening face that has launched a million memes. To celebrate its quarter-century milestone, Tumblr, the GIF-giddy social blogging network, and Paddle8, a virtual auction house, teamed up on Moving The Still, an ode to the surprisingly versatile image format that attracted thousands of whirling, dripping, gyrating, and even beautiful submissions.
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