Enjoying The Silence! Kitefliers backs a winner
The local producers savor the success of an Off-Broadway Silence of the Lambs parody.
Creative Loafing Fiction Contest: It’s your last chance to enter
Submission deadline is today at 5 p.m. Reader voting begins on Dec. 23.
This week in food and drink
The Refinery’s Christmas Eve Eve Holiday Show, Vodka Latka Jewish mixer and more.
Cynical and Southern: Me, Courtney Love, and the four seasons
Jeremy Gloff reflects on how each of Courtney Love’s five albums played an important role in his life, each in a different season.
Reel Projections: Not your grandma’s Christmas movies
The Reel Projections gang takes on “off the radar” Christmas classics.
Nix the mix: DIY Mexican hot chocolate
Forget the powdered mix and make it from scratch!
Concert review: Skrillex at The Ritz Ybor, Ybor City
His masterful production and unrelenting performance made for a mind-melting spectacle this past Friday night; with video.
Inexpensive and easy, last-minute holiday sugar cookies (plus icing recipe)
The icing on the cookie.
Concert Review: My Morning Jacket at Hard Rock Live, Orlando
A break-down of last Sunday night’s show featuring the Kentucky indie rock band, with photos and setlist.
The Gaily News: Gay rights are good for your health
Much like straight men, gay men thrive after getting married, says a new study. The legalization of gay marriage and being allowed to tie the knot might even make them healthier. In a study of a group of gay men before and after Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage, during the year after the group saw a…
Dragon Tattoo leaves a mark
David Fincher’s adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s bestseller is pulp fiction at its finest.
How does mercury get into fish?
Once mercury gets into the marine food chain, it bioaccumulates in the larger ocean predators that end up on our plates.
Tasty twists on classic eggnog
Spirited renditions of a holiday standby (recipes).
Cheap eats in St. Pete
Neighborhood Dining Guide
Multiple types of orgasms
TanyaTate.com Tanya Tate I am multiply orgasmic. Most of you assume this means I'm capable of having orgasm after orgasm with no down time in between. This is true but I'm also multiply orgasmic in another sense: I have more than one type of orgasm. In fact, I have at least four different kinds of…
Cheap Trick Super Fan Trivia Contest!
Here's your chance to tag along with me, A&E editor, Julie Garisto, as I interview Robin Zander at Jannus Live on Tuesday, Dec. 20, at 11 a.m. Don't miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. In addition to meeting Zander in person, the winner will get a pair of VIP tickets to the New Year's Eve concert at…
Mitch Perry Report 12.16-12.28.11
This will be the last MPR for awhile, as we take some time off to celebrate Christmas home in San Francisco. A couple of posts today – one, a reflection and personal anecdote about the late Christopher Hitchens. And our top ten selections in movies, books and music of 2011. See you towards the end…
My favorite books, movies and music of 2011
This is one of my last columns of the year before I take some time off for the Holidays with friends and family in San Francisco. As I've done the previous two years in my role as news & politics editor at CL, I've taken this opportunity to get away from hard news for one…
The Christopher Hitchens interview I screwed up
Christopher Hitchens It was with sadness but not surprise that I learned that Christopher Hitchens had died of pneumonia, a complication of esophageal cancer, Thursday night at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston at the age of 62. The author/journalist/raconteur/commentator had an amazing career. Before he was diagnosed with cancer in June of…
Four essentials for any kitchen library
Must-have books for the newbie and the well-seasoned cook.
Tom Cruise’s latest Mission is a winner
Ghost Protocol stands tall among the season’s other blockbusters.
Oil vs. natural gas for home heating
Natural gas is both cheaper and has lower carbon emissions than oil, though it is still a fossil fuel and its green-friendliness is overstated.
Holmes and Watson play an excellent Game
Robert Downey Jr. revisits his best hero role.
Seasons Eatings: Dining out Christmas Eve through New Year’s Day
A guide to holiday noshing.
Signs of Intelligent Life… a one-woman showcase at Gorilla
A show made famous by Lily Tomlin might be better with only one act.
Eddie Powell: a XXX interview with an acclaimed adult director
Porn is stereotypically seen as being little better than student-films in terms of production value, but it's hard not to be impressed with the quality of work this latest generation of directors is producing with a fraction of the time and money most filmmakers require. Eddie Powell is a featured director for New Sensations and…
Wine, spirits and beer gifts for any budget
Spirited gift ideas
Reading into Daniel Clowes’ New Yorker cover
A recent New Yorker cover by cartoonist Daniel Clowes lampooned the modern state of reading. In the cover cartoon, a tweedy man of a certain age is in a bookstore that teems with literary tchotchkes. There are Mark Twain bobbleheads, Virginia Woolf canvas shopping bags, baseball caps expressing allegiance for Kerouac and Poe — yet…
Smoked meatballs and tomato gravy are tasty twists on Italian classics
That’s a smoky meat-a-ball!
Green Community Calendar weekend events
Suncoast Sierra Club auction and potluck, beekeeping workshop, farmers markets and more.
Mitch Perry Report 12.15.11
Good morning everybody. We'll lead off today with our story on Florida GOP Senate candidate Craig Miller, who we had previously encountered back in July when he made his fly-through across the state to announce his candidacy. Like Herman Cain, Miller served some time as head of the National Restaurant Association, but apparently didn't have…
Tomes for all tastes
It’s not all doom and gloom for food publishers this year.
Live & Local Spotlight: Sons of Hippies
On Sons of Hippies' new EP, Fade to White, the Bradenton band explores abstract themes of love, drugs and the cosmos against their seething brand of psyche-electro rock. Singer/guitarist Katherine Kelly purrs the first few verses of opening track "Dark Daisies" before her voice rises in an echoing cry — "We get highhhhhhhhhh!!!!" — and…
Aasif Mandvi tries to drug test Gov. Scott
Plus: Swingers in Seffner, Tebow Time and more …
The Knowledge To Succeed: How To Get A Record Deal
Knowledge is empowering, and Wendy Day's book, published by Rap Coalition, has me charged up. (This was my first eBook purchase, and I finished it in two days.) The book reinforced some long-held thoughts, like my resolve that a record deal is not my goal, and gave me some concrete examples of how I can…
Protector
This year I had the pleasure of finally reading the work of science fiction author Larry Niven when I ran across a 50-cent thrift-store copy of Protector. Like Arthur Koestler's Case of the Midwife Toad it is a work of science, but also an intense and thrilling page-turner. I finished it in a few days,…
Cookie & Me
Destined to become a Florida classic, Cookie & Me is by the gifted Mary Jane Ryals, a Tallahassee writer, poet and teacher. Set in the Jim Crow 1960s in Tallhassee, it's the coming-of-age story of two enchanting but worrisome characters — Cookie, who is black, and the tomboyish narrator, Rayann, who is white — who…
Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York
James Wolcott, currently at Vanity Fair, has had a long and illustrious career as a culture critic and blogger for a number of publications. But this book is his memoir of being fresh out of college in mid-1970s New York City and working at the Village Voice, his coverage of the punk/new wave scene and…
A Study in Scarlet
For me, this year's winner is elementary. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's inaugural Sherlock Holmes mystery introduced one of fiction's most famous roommate pairings: Doctor John Watson and the brilliant detective. Holmes's agile mind is a pleasure to indulge, and so is Doyle's exceptional skill as a storyteller, particularly when the narrative becomes a gripping Western.…
The Smuggler’s Ghost
An almost unbelievable 2009 autobiography by Steve Lamb (with Diane Marcou) of a teenage pot smuggler from St. Pete Beach who rode the karma wave from Woodstock to Venezuela. —Phil Benito, Brokenmold Entertainment
The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English
I want to become a better writer, promoter and speaker, and I've found this book (by the Poynter Institute's Roy Peter Clark) to be the best one around to help with the little things and most common mistakes in language. —Anna Serena, No Clubs Productions
Further Reading
More music books perfect for holiday giving.
Guilty pleasure
My kink is her bad memory.
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
I assigned Nicholas Carr's book to one of my classes (so I had to read it, of course). Carr argues that the brain shapes itself to our dominant media activities, which, these days, is skimming stuff on the Internet, tweeting, and messaging. In the end, he says, we're making ourselves unfit to read anything much…
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union
Michael Chabon's 2007 novel is his best book, but not his most famous. The visual clarity with which he depicts Sitka, Alaska is vivid and entrancing. —Neil Bender, artist
Farewell to the Globe
A St. Pete mainstay is closing, but JoEllen Schilke will keep on working to change the world.
Bleachers
A great, fast read from John Grisham. I love it, because as an athlete I identified with the characters — their workouts, how they practiced their skill for hours, how sometimes they threw up (LOL). Most of all because Grisham vividly describes everything in the book, making you feel like you're there. —Esther Solano, coach/trainer…
Noel and Cole: The Sophisticates
Stephen Citron's book tracks the parallel paths of Noel Coward and Cole Porter, showing how both lived through enormous success and enormous failures and how two gay artists traversed the entertainment world of the 20th century. I just did a cabaret show of Cole Porter music and I'm working on a Noel Coward show for…
Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century
Written by WorldChanging.com co-founder Alex Steffen, this encyclopedia of innovative design was an important influence on Re/Creating Tampa — the website and the book — and I loved it so much I bought the second revised and updated edition when it came out in April. "Worldchanging," in the site's own words, "is an online, open-source…
Studio Studies: Studio 10’s favorite books
The team from Channel 10’s morning show on the best books they read in 2011.
Two Gentlemen of Lebowksi
As a music nerd, I find song mashups, such as Blondie vs. The Doors, simply horrifying. However, combining pop culture, film and/or literature, if done right, can come off brilliantly. Take Adam Bertocci's Two Gentlemen of Lebowski. It renders the script of The Big Lebowski in Shakespearean verse, iambic pentameter and all. The Bard's hypothetical…
Bookseller’s Choice
Mitzi Gordon, Bluebird Books Bus
Townie: A Memoir
Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog, describes his rough childhood in a tough Massachusetts mill town where he preferred punching bags to books. Hitting first and hardest against anyone who provokes him, he gradually starts to realize the limitations of violence, how most fights are more about proving something to the…
Double Dexter
Jeff Lindsay is at his Hemingway-esque best in this latest discourse on Dexter, deft devotee of death. Lindsay expertly juxtaposes his antihero's predilection for predation with his bumbling grasp of the human condition in this delicious dose of darkness, which finds the depraved daddy deadlocked in a duel with a demented doppelganger, on top of…
Travels with Charley in Search of America
Charley is John Steinbeck's poodle, and together the novelist and his dog take a road trip across the country — elegantly simple premise, important observations. Like a lucid, wiser On the Road. —John Nowicki, drummer, Poetry n' Lotion
The Family Fang
Kevin Wilson's breezy novel concerns itself with the lives of performance artists and their grown offspring. Creative calamaties force the family to reunite, and Wilson adroitly details their squabbles and quirky bonding. Perfect for those who enjoy the off-beat output and dark themes of filmmakers Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach. —Evan Tokarz, CL contributor
A Discovery of Witches
At 592 pages, Deborah E. Harkness' novel is a hefty but well-paced volume about a young scholar and descendant of witches who discovers an enchanted, centuries-lost alchemical manuscript that holds the key to the existence of witches, demons and vampires. The story traces her dealings with both a flood of underworld creatures (including a handsome…
House of Leaves
I usually read dusty old crap that reaffirms my fist-shaking, old-man crankiness toward the world in general. The most recently published book I read this year was Mark Z. Danielewski's 2000 novel, House of Leaves. It scared the crap out of me… nearly as much as it irritated the hell out of me. It was…
Swamplandia!
Karen Russell's debut novel had me hooked from its haunting first sentence: "Our mother performed in starlight." Set in a gator-wrestling enclave in the Everglades threatened by The World of Darkness, a (literally) hellish theme park, the story mixes Old Florida flavor with phantasmagorical detail, grounded by the wide-eyed wisdom of its beguiling narrator, 13-year-old…
With Liberty and Justice for Some: Glenn Greenwald talks tough
His fiery new book condemns both parties for protecting the powerful.
The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl
This debut cookbook from Ree Drummond, an L.A. gal-turned-ranch wife and food blogger, is a collection of simple, comfort-food recipes with Midwestern and Tex-Mex influences and mouthwatering, step-by-step photos. Anecdotes about her family, Midwestern ranch living and life before babies, cows and her "Marlboro Man" husband add a personal touch, making the book both a…
The Instructions
Four days. A 10-year-old schoolboy who is also, probably, the Messiah. A detention center called the Cage. 1,030 pages. Adam Levin's novel synthesizes Portnoy's Complaint, Lord of the Flies, and The Catcher in the Rye. It reads like a punch in the face. —Jeff Parker, director, MFA in Creative Writing, University of Tampa
Music to your eyes
These new books will appeal to the music junkies on your list.
Atlas Shrugged
I read Ayn Rand's 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged for the third time. While I don't mirror all of Ayn Rand's beliefs, I do find this story to be an incredible tale of the end and rebirth of the world. I find new things in this novel every time I read it. It's not an easy…
Bossypants
Tina Fey's best-seller was entertaining to the last page, complete with visual aids and humbling experiences. A must-have on any how-to leadership bookshelf, Fey's book is right on the mark describing the best practices for negotiating through the dynamics of people management. And she delivers it as comically as any episode of 30 Rock. —Ami…
The Best American Nonrequired Reading
Edited by Dave Eggers with an introduction by Guillermo Del Toro, this amazing compendium is a vibrant celebration of the words that come at us from all directions on a daily basis, ranging from well-chosen magazine articles on M.I.A. and Roger Ebert to fascinating excerpts from Mark Twain's autobiography (wherein he apologizes for giving his…
The Quickie
For an electrifying, suspense-packed novel with a sexy title, grab a copy of James Patterson's The Quickie. The chain of events following a quickie gone wrong never ceases to shock, and will leave you wondering if everyone has skeletons in his closet. —Juliette Cassistre, CL contributor
Booksellers’ Choice
Mojo Books & Music staff
The Daily Adventures of Mixerman
Mixerman (real name Eric Sarafin) sardonically chronicles his frustrations as a recording engineer for a newly signed band, affectionately dubbed Bitch Slap. Despite hating each other, the band members are attempting to write and record their debut album, which needs to be Full! Of! Hits! to appease their major label. The Internet is still trying…
The Best Book I Read This Year
Book lovers choose the texts they liked the most in 2011.
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
A page-turner by science journalist Charles C. Mann, 1493 traces the ecological exchanges that began at the time of Columbus, as the animals, plants and peoples transported across oceans ushered in five centuries of globalization. I'm halfway through the book and so far the lowly mosquito is the imperial dominator. 1493 follows Mann's fantastic 1491:…
The Sense of an Ending
Julian Barnes's brilliant new novel is short, complicated and gorgeously written; and, in the end, both puzzling and upsetting. Looking back on his "quiet" life, Tony Webster discovers that nothing was quite what it seemed to be, and — reminiscent of Virginia Woolf — a lot more disturbing. —Peter Meinke, CL Poet's Notebook columnist and…
Those Across the River
Southern Gothic meets Hammer Films Gothic in this immaculately detailed debut from St. Pete author Christopher Buehlman. Set in Depression-era rural Georgia, this novel could stand as either superior historical lit or one of the best horror-fic offerings in years — but open-minded readers will appreciate it as both. —Scott Harrell, CL columnist, Life As…
Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar
Mussar is a 19th-century movement, started in Lithuania, which sees human consciousness as a battleground of good and evil, and offers techniques for the development of the good. A challenging read by Alan Morinis. —Mark Leib, CL theater critic
1Q84
Several years ago, Haruki Murakami's fantastical novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle crept up my list of favorite books. This Christmas, I'm gifting — and giving myself — his latest: 1Q84, a 900-page, genre-bending tome that follows female assassin Aomame (whose name means "green peas" in Japanese) through a Tokyo lit by two moons. —Megan Voeller,…
The Pre-Occupied Shopping Guide
Tips on supporting local merchants, helping non-profits and giving without spending.
The Diary of a Wimpy Kid
My choice for best book(s) ever. Written by Jeff Kinney and first published in 2007, the series adds a new edition each year, detailing Greg Heffley's adventures in middle school. These books keep my preteen boys entertained for hours without violence, curse words, or porn. How much longer will I be able to say that?…
Circus comes to town
Plus: Vagabond Swing, Black Tusk and more …
Attention vets: ArmedZilla will give you an iPad2 for your war stories
You could win an iPad2 for sharing your war stories with military social networking site Armedzilla.com.
The Affordable Health Care law gets more promotion in St. Pete
Atecia Robinson Members from the round table meet to talk about the Affordable Care Act at the Pier Hotel in St. Pete The lack of access to healthcare is a major problem in Florida, but the Affordable Care Act that was signed into law in March of 2010 is designed to make access to care…
Queened Out: One community, one goal — but is that really so?
Have you ever sat down and asked yourself, what do I want out of life? I do it all the time, and one of the things that I want to happen one day is the opportunity to have a husband and kids and have that picture-perfect, picket fence idea of the suburban household. With all…
Craig Miller says young people have to “get off their butt and get a job”
Craig Miller Florida GOP Senate candidate Craig Miller wants to make it clear that his comment at a Tea Party convention last month that Occupy Wall Street protesters should “get off your ass and go get a job" needs a little context. The former Ruth Chris' Steakhouse CEO from Winter Park says that he isn't…
Hillsborough BOCC workshop votes to open up garbage contract
Garbage has never been sexier in Hillsborough County, now that a $60-million-a-year contract is up for grabs. On Wednesday afternoon, Tea Party members and liberal activists filled the County Center to hear the Board of County Commissioners host a workshop on whether or not to open up the bidding process on their solid waste contract,…
Charlize Theron is a beautiful beast
Juno‘s creators reunite for Young Adult, a humorous, unsettling character study.
Nuts to Chipwrecked
Alvin and friends deserve better.
Usher in the New Year with Johnny Cakes and The Four Horsemen of The Apocalypso
A punk/ska explosion guaranteed to rock your NYE world at Gasoline Alley
