Last Weekend: Gingerman’s Videos from Friday Night’s CD Release Show

Gingerman309 was out last Friday night, as he usually is, to videotape The Pretty Faces.

The sheer volume of shows that he’s captured is impressive. Here’s a link to his YouTube channel, Gingerman309, with videos of almost every South Florida band you could ever want to see.

The Pretty Faces, “Sinking Ship” live at Propaganda:

Southern Flaw Plays Tonight!

Wow, I just saw on the New Times wesbite that Southern Flaw will play tonight at Bar TV tonight at 8 p.m. This is located just south of 6th St on the east side of Federal Highway (at 530 N. Federal Hwy, right near that Winn Dixie shopping plaza). I think I just might have to go to this.

LAST WEEKEND: THE PRETTY FACES CD RELEASE SHOW AT PROPAGANDA

Last Friday night, Sentinel writer Sean Piccoli and I, and a bunch of handsome giants, contorted our torsos and limbs into a car and went to watch The Pretty Faces CD release party show at Propaganda.

The 40-mile drive from Fort Lauderdale to Lake Worth took a long time, and, on account of that, we missed Stonefox‘s opening set, which was a major bummer. We did arrive in time for the main performance, a nice long set that The Pretty Faces played in support of its second album, Another Sound. There were a lot of local rock stars standing around with delicious scowls on their faces. Case in point: The Pretty Faces looked its usual slim and trim self, which made me think about how easy it would be to fit into a car with them for a long drive, and they immediately proceeded to rock, well pop, us the hell out. My favorite part about the show was that the band played a nice, long set; The Pretty Faces played for at least an hour. The songs on Another Sound are poppy, catchy headbobbing fare, and the covers — many folks expressed surprise that the band played covers at all during its CD release party — were very light, danceable tunes like Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl” (which is quite a humorous song choice for a band with husband-wife members, especially when the wife is universally acknowledged to be a hottie) and a song by The Cars. I can’t remember which one it was. The Pretty Faces drew a pretty good crowd that night, and had remarkable support from members of other local bands, including, of course, Stonefox (which opened for them), members of The Freakin’ Hott, TIMB, Brent Indeed, and The Postmarks.

While I was there, I learned of a show that’s really not to be missed: Quiet River High (the band we fell hard for last week), Stonefox and The Freakin’ Hott at Poor House on May 9. The scene will probably look a little something LIKE THIS, plus QRH. Sounds fun!

D-Rod at Kim’s – Funny Sentinel Piece

This Sentinel snippet on Dennis Rodman’s aborted attempt to chillax at Kim’s is funny…and true. I was trying to wash away the lingering misery from watching Trap with a few tall glasses of water, , at Kim’s Alley Bar on Weds night/Thurs morn when Dennis Rodman came in with a stereotypically sexy female and graciously hello-d everyone at the bar before being talked to death by one relentless guy. A few moments later, we were celebrity free.

More Tonight: What We Would Do If We Weren’t Going to Propaganda

Besides the sure-to-be awesome show at Propaganda tonight, there are other things going on that are pretty darn rad. I am searching for things of value in my hometown, and for me that starts with the places and people who are legitimately pushing the culture forward. I am especially excited about the show tonight because I think that The Pretty Faces and Stonefox are both bands that push hard to play a lot of shows and to keep their audiences informed about what they are doing. Besides that, they are both very good bands and performers.

Of course, there are places like my personal haunt, Maguire’s Hill 16, which will celebrate its 10th anniversary tonight.

We will try to pop by, but the drive up to Lake Worth is a long one. Freebies will be available. How cute! At the Lifestyle Center at Whole Foods, the Fort Lauderdale Children’s Theatre improv group Child’s Play (ignore the date on the link and just get the 411 from it) will perform, starting at 7:30 p.m. — $15. Aileen is having “Bowie Night” at Undergrounds Coffeehaus, and she will paint your face Bowie style for a donation. If you’ve never been to Undergrounds, you MUST check it out some time soon if not tonight. Why? Because it’s a small business and it’s a unique business with a very cozy environment. This is where you want to go to play on the internet for a few hours or to kick back in a cozy chair. The folks there make all variety of coffee drinks and Italian and French sodas and tots. It’s old school, and it’s one of my favorite places, and I think that if you go there once, you will understand what’s so special about it. It’s located in the strip center North of Oakland Park Boulevard just west of Bayview.

SATURDAY: Tomorrow night, more local bands will take, well, local stages, including Viva Le Vox at Propaganda and Aquaphonics and Cypress at Dive Bar in Fort Lauderdale.

The Women’s Theatre Project is staging a new production called The Interview, a play about a holocaust survivor and the child of a holocaust survivor who interviews her. This play is directed by utter fabulousness trapped in the human form, Genie Croft. The Interview will run through May 17th at Sixth Star Studios, 505 N.W. 1st Ave, in Fort Lauderdale, on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m.

PS. Freakin’ Funny stuff this way —-> CLICK.

Tonight: Sweet Bronco and I Will Definitely See You at Propaganda Tonight

WHAT WE’RE DOING!!!

THE PRETTY FACES CD RELEASE PARTY AND STONEFOX AT PROPAGANDA IN LAKE WORTH! Tonight Sweet Bronco and I are going to the CD release show for The Pretty Faces featuring special guests Stonefox! The show will go down at Propaganda in Lake Worth. As we’ve been following both of these bands for the better part of a year now, we’re especially excited to be celebrating this occasion with them.

Click on the icons below to learn more about these top local bands!

The Event starts at about 8 p.m. tonight, but we know the bands aren’t going to go on until later in the evening. Tickets cost $5 – very reasonable. Congratulations to The Pretty Faces for putting out this the band’s second album, Another Sound. It truly is a reason to celebrate. Hell, anyone can have a birthday and anyone can find some sucker to marry them, but how many people can put out an album that doesn’t suck???? Big kudos to you guys! I gotta find and wear my Pretty Faces t-shirt. Awesome, I’m a dork.

Trap at Cinema Paradiso — Thinking of Joining FLIFF

Last night, my mom and I went to see a movie called Trap at Cinema Paradiso. It was kind of like Slumdog Millionare except for that it was set in Eastern Europe and instead of winning a whole bunch of rupees for his long suffering at the end of the movie, the protagonist gets shot to death by a passing car. It’s the kind of story that insists that life is unfair, ugly and full of pain. But still, my mother and I managed to have a nice time at the dinner, served outside on the patio, and during the film. It’s cool just to be inside of this beautiful theater and to experience film as an art form rather than just as an excuse to eat large quantities of greasy and sweet food without thinking too much about it. Tickets for the event were $15 — not too bad for dinner and a show. I’m thinking about joining FLIFF for $70 a year. They have a couple of events coming up that sound fun. First, they’re having a Kentucky Derby Party on May 2. This will include an outdoor barbecue and a screening of the race in the movie theater. So, that sounds fun. Also, om may 9, FLIFF is going to have the award-winning actress Celeste Holm come in for a chat and to sing a couple of songs before the screening of one of my personal favorite classic flicks All About Eve.

An Interesting Article on What Makes Some of Us Slugs

I think it’s too bad that so many of us, myself included, take our parents’ perspectives on how we live our lives too seriously. What follows are all kinds of unnecessary amendments to our own inclinations and half-hearted attempts at living out our interpretation of how they want for us to live our lives.

One of the memories that I find as jolting as I do funny is that of my mother opening my bedroom door, popping her head in and yelling, “slug!” when as a teenager and, admittedly, in the years following my graduation from college, I could not seem to rise on the dimmer side of noon. Because my mother has a Boston accent, this takes on a whole other level of humor…but that is something that can only be captured on a tape recorder. Anyway, I always love to find interesting little articles such as this guest column by Leon Kreitzman in The New York Times called “Larks, Owls and Hummingbird” that are like a pat on the back and permission to “pass go” for one such as myself whose circadian rythyms do not always agree — except of course in the case of field trips — with the world at large. Thanks for sending the article along, Sweet Bronco, you slug!

If linking to this article and sharing my own difficulties with being sometimes, often, our of synch with the rest of the human population makes you feel at all better about your own challenges, then I have done one good thing today.

Last Weekend: Quiet River High and The Marchen at Dada

Hello there! Sweet Bronco and I went to see Quiet River High and The Marchen at Dada last Saturday night. The show was well worth the trip. Gotta run for a few hours, but will detail this event of awesomeness in a while. Hope your Monday is less painful than mine. If so, thumbs up for you!

Here we go:

On Saturday night, Sweet Bronco and I drove the 25 miles that you have to drive to get up to that little slice of cultural heaven called Dada. As I mentioned last week, we had plenty of enticement to stay with all that was going on in our own neck of the woods at the likes of Radioactive Records, which was celebrating National Record Store Day with a lineup of bands, and the Stonefox and Monty Warren at Alligator Alley, but we’ve been meaning to check out Quiet River High for a long time and the band did not appear to have any other upcoming shows in its calendar, so…we only did what we had to do. It was well worth it. Dada is always enchanting, and we haven’t been there since we moved back from Cali, so it was a real treat to soak in the atmosphere at that Delray Beach hotspot.

But wow! Wasn’t Quiet River High just a talented bunch of nubile creatures? The lead singer, Paul, has such an interesting voice tinged with the depressive moans of Ian Curtis, but he can certainly bellow when he has to and the youngster — he couldn’t be more than 23 — shows great signs of promise as a rock singer. Sweet Bronco says, Slow down, Court, he sounds more like the guy from Shearwater or Cold War Kids. He’s also an awesome guitar player. The other guitar player Nathan was as sweet as he is adorable — the way he wags his torso back and forth while playing is really something to see – and Paul and Nathan have this way of gesturing off of each other that’s quite entertaining. I’m not sure what the drummer and bass players names are, but shoot, I just checked them out for the first time…and I expect to see a lot more of them in future.

We also watched The Marchen, which for some reason I keep calling The Kraken. They were also a very good local band, fronted by a pretty blond female who belted pretty female vocals.

There they are!

This Weekend: What Wonderful Things Will Tempt Me Away from Watching Eastbound and Down and In Treatment Reruns On Demand…Hmmm

FRIDAY: This had better be good! Well, on Friday night at 9 p.m., as I’ve stated in a previous post, Peter Giovenco will host the closing party for the very hip Blender exhibit at Full Circle Gallery. I will not dedicate precious time to rehashing all of the details of this exhibit. Instead, I ask you to follow this link to a previous post about Blender, where you can find all of the info. Also, tomorrow night (Friday) at Alligator Alley, there will be a Groove Thangs reunion. To be perfectly honest, I love listening to Florida blues every once in a while, but I lack the sophistication to tell the difference between one local legend and another. Good thing they’re all getting together on one stage — likely this will begin at 9 p.m., the standard time for Alley events.The gang of cutesters that we recently saw at Radioactive Records, Totem Pole, will take the stage at Propaganda in Lake Worth tomorrow night. They’re pretty experimental and fun!

SATURDAY: Early in the evening on Saturday begins the event that I mentioned in the previous post, The Pineapple Jam at Stranahan House. If the S House is just a name you’ve heard a hundred times and forgotten due to lack of interest but you’re finding that you suddenly feel interested, check out a previous post about my visit to that historic location — after all it is where it all began here in Lauderdale. As the hours go on into Saturday night, the tug of war between hot local indie bands begins. For me, it’s between a hand that I’ve seen at least 5 times (Stonefox) and one that I want to see but never have (Quiet River High).

Stonefox will play on Saturday night at Alligator Alley with Monty Warren and The Friggin’ Whatevers and Quiet River High will play at Dada in Delray Beach. Though it is quite tempting to drop into one of my favorite local bars and listen to a band that I know rocks the live show, I think that I will probably opt to see Quiet River High on Saturday and assume that the live show will be as exciting as the songs that they have up on the Myspace. It is, after all, a CD release party for an album called The Marchen. The ad for this show confused me. A band called The Marchen played after Quiet River High, and it was that band, not QRH, that had a CD release party. Below is a video of Paul from Quiet River High covering the Bon Iver song “For Emma”

Cover from Paul Championstar on Vimeo. A fun band with the most disgusting name that I have ever heard, Tongues of the Heartworm (yucky!), will take the stage at Propaganda in Lake Worth on Saturday night. Get ready to rock (and barf every time the band mention its name) with Tongues of The Heartworm. Back in the 954, Radioactive Records will celebrate National Record Store Day with live performances from Mr. Entertainment and the Pookiesmackers, Totem Pole, Secondhand Outfit, Monsters and Bulletproof Your Limousine

.

I definitely think that the Eastbound & Down and In Treatment Reruns will have to wait until the following weekend.

Next Page »