This creation, by Orkibal and Shieko Reto, came out of last month’s Characterized Kuala Lumpur. — via cutandpaste.com
Everything’s grounds for competition these days. Cupcake baking. Weight losing. Runway walking. So why not character designing? That’s the premise of the Characterized tour, produced by Cut&Paste, a New York-born organization that tries to make designers better understood through performance, video, and conversation.
As summer heats up, the Miami art world tends to cool down as the rising temperature sends everyone into hibernation. Still, you’ll have plenty to do at this Saturday’s Art Walk in Wynwood and Design District. Here are five of the exhibition openings on our radar.
With Lebron James, Dwyane Wade and the rest of your Miami Heat just starting their playoff run, the Borscht Film Festival this week released the full version of “Adventures of Christopher Bosh in the Multiverse,” which premiered at Borscht 8 back in December.
If whenever you see a pair of closed elevator doors at the end of a long, quiet corridor you brace for a tide of wine-dark blood, then you’re probably pumped for (or terrified in anticipation of) O Cinema’s Stanley Kubrick retrospective next week, which will comprise eight films (seven by Kubrick and a new documentary about the auteur’s terrifying masterpiece The Shining), several panel discussions about the man many consider the greatest filmmaker of last century, and even a remote Q&A with Full Metal Jacket star Matthew Modine.
“In my era, soldiers would have been pissed if we had been lied to about WMDs,” says O’Brien. — photo by Pfc. L. Paul Epley via archives.gov
Sponsored by the Miami Writers Institute, this post features an interview between Andrew Slater and Tim O’Brien. Slater is a veteran of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, a lecturer of English composition at the American University of Iraq- Sulaimani, and a fiction writer whose work has appeared in the literary journal Epiphany and the anthology ‘Fire and Forget’. O’Brien, an American novelist who has written extensively about the Vietnam War, is best known for the short-story collection ‘The Things They Carried’ and the novel ‘Going After Cacciato,’ for which he won a National Book Award in 1979. On Tuesday, April 9, O’Brien will deliver an address at Coral Gables Congregational Church as part of a month-long series of events inspired by his work. For full details, visit thecenteratmdc.org.
As Vatican cardinals deliberate on whom to name as Pope Benedict XVI’s successor, it may be interesting to visit a little-known collection of paintings by the 19th Century French artist Jehan Georges Vibert at St. John Vianney College Seminary, a few miles west of Coral Gables.
Rosecrans Baldwin is the author of Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down, a travel memoir that GQ named one of its Favorite Things of 2012. The book chronicles Baldwin’s experience living and working in Paris, a city to which he, like so many Americans, felt a powerful romantic attraction since adolescence and which he, unlike so many Americans, came to know in all of its inglorious modern glory as a copy writer at a Paris ad agency. (You can read a very entertaining excerpt at GQ.com.) Baldwin is also the author of the acclaimed debut novel You Lost Me There, a co-founder of the online magazine The Morning News, and a book reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered.
Most people know Maurice Sendak and his book Where The Wild Things Are, which, since its publication 50 years ago, has transported millions of children around the world to a darkly magical island in their minds. But who’s this Tomi Ungerer guy whom Sendak says taught him “to be braver than I was”?
The Sunday Stroll will feature neighborhood “hotspots” like the Little Haiti Cultural Center, pictured here during a performance of a vodou ritual. — photo by Robby Campbell
With the increasing number and volume of complaints about Wynwood’s Second Saturday Art Walk and its rowdy atmosphere, a Little Haiti-based coalition is inviting the culturally curious to explore a different Miami neighborhood. Spearheaded by Yo Miami with the support of Sweat Records, the Little Haiti Cultural Center, and other neighborhood anchors, the first Little Haiti Sunday Stroll will take place from noon to 6 p.m. on March 3.
Organized by influential urbanist and author Richard Florida (pictured), Start-Up City: Miami will feature talks by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh and AOL co-founder Steve Case on Wednesday, Feb. 13. — photo by Jaime Hogge
The narrative of Miami’s ongoing transformation comprises various story lines, including, most prominently, the burgeoning of its artist community and cultural offerings (as chronicled in the recently released documentary Rising Tide). There’s also the less prominent stories of its increasingly vibrant music scene — attested to by our list of the Top 50 South Florida Songs of 2012 — and its surprisingly rich bike culture (surprising because our sprawled-out, car-centric city would seem utterly inhospitable to bike travel — and, in fact, it can be.)
