image via karenkeithdesigns.com

The dramatic, chunky necklaces by 27-year-old Miami jewelry designer Karen Keith are certainly not for wallflowers. One piece might be designed to sling halfway across the body in an elegant tangle of different-colored and -textured chains. Another might rework a vintage cameo with very 2011 hardware. Another still might work vintage bullet casings or even tiny Matchbox cars into items that almost look like personal talismans.

In any event, no two Keith pieces are alike, and none recede into the background, making her creations some of the most exciting to come out of the local young fashion scene. While Miami is full of talented accessories and fashion designers, there is definitely a certain expected aesthetic to much of their work — flowing, upscale bohemian, beachy.

Not so with Keith. Inspired by iconic musicians like Patti Smith and David Bowie, the former/occasional fashion stylist and visual artist opts for a markedly darker, but opulent aesthetic. With a sort of high-fashion goth, updated Victorian feel, she refashions one-of-a-kind elements collected from antique stores and estate sales into entirely new items.

Working around the energy of the original element — a jewel, a skeleton key, an old, gear-filled pocket watch — she builds outward with new chains, metalwork, and hardware, for a marriage of old and new. And though Keith creates a new line for each season centered around a specific repeating element, each necklace, bracelet, or pair of earrings is 100 percent handcrafted and 100 percent unique.

Another element adding to the specialness of even getting a piece is that Keith sells only to select area boutiques, and if you want the really good stuff, you’ll have to visit her newly opened atelier. The location, off Flagler Street, is a bit of forward thinking on her part. Rather than head for the trendier areas of Wynwood or the Design District, Keith chose a high-rise in the bustling-by-day, deserted-by-night ground zero of downtown Miami. Cheap rent, though, means that a slow trickle of artistic types are moving back into the area after being priced out of the aforementioned burbs, but not too far away.

The space also functions as an extension of Keith’s aesthetic itself. A little steampunk, a littel Hollywood glamour, she’s decorated it herself using a mix of styling ingenuity and works by other artists. The jewelry itself is displayed on rescued, slightly worn dress forms, and customers can also sprawl on a chaise longue and drink port while paging through a look book. The experience is entirely personal and relaxed, but that’s part of the fun. In a world all about fast-paced technology, it’s refreshing to see a designer making work exciting by, in many respects, looking backwards.

See all of Karen Keith’s designs at karenkeithdesigns.com

image via sousvidesupreme.com

My current favorite piece of technology isn’t a new gadget for the sake of being a gadget, but rather one with practical applications in the kitchen! It’s the Sous Vide Supreme, the first appliance meant for the mas market that brings the technology of vacuum-sealed, immersion circulator cooking to the home. Okay, so with a price tag of about $500 — which includes the required additional vacuum sealer and plastic bags — it’s not quite mass market yet. But for a cooking technique rooted in experimental, fine-dining kitchens, this machine itself is actually a great time-saver for busy people and offers lots of practical applications.

Sous vide is French for “in” (or really “under”) “a vacuum,” and sous vide cooking starts exactly with that. You take your food item of choice — usually a protein, or a sturdy vegetable or fruit, and vacuum seal it. Then, usually, you set a precise temperature on a water bath, and immerse the bag in the bath. The time used depends on the desired effect you want and the thickness of the food, but the important thing to note is that all temperatures are below boiling, and thus the cooking process takes a while. That’s an hour at the shortest for, say, a one-inch-thick steak.

The upside, though, is that though I can’t fully explain the science off the top of my head, as I understand it, because the food never reaches the boiling point, it never overcooks. The precise calibration of the water oven’s temperature, plus the vacuum sealing, also means the food will be exactly, evenly cooked all the way through. In other words, set the right time and temperature for a steak to be done medium rare, set it in, and it’ll cook perfectly on its own.

What’s more, once a food is cooked, if you use proper food handling techniques to cool it and refrigerate it, you can then bring it gently back up to temperature with no change in texture. This means, for instance, if you’re giving a dinner party, you can cook some things far in advance and bring them up to temperature the day of the part, meaning everything will be done perfectly right at the moment you need. If your guests are late, no problem — the food can also sit for a while, held at temperature in the machine, without cooking further.

This was formerly the preserve of haute cuisine, molecular gastronomy types, but in everyday use you can make the process as complicated or as easy as you want. On the fancier end of the spectrum, you could cook different elements of a dish separately, and then finish them together, or later add a sauce or perform other steps. At the easiest end, you could season and seal some chicken breasts, dump them in the water bath, and then go run errands before coming home to most of your dinner already cooked.

I actually received this as a present this past Christmas, but months later, I’m still playing with it several times a week. My only regret is that I opted for the Sous Vide Supreme-branded vacuum sealer to go with it, which has proved to not be somewhat temperamental and not as powerful as other home vacuum sealers. (I will probably upgrade to a nice FoodSaver model soon).

I’m interested in cooking and new kitchen technology, but don’t love to collect gadgets with only a few applications. The Sous Vide Supreme is quite the opposite. I look forward to future products from its manufacturer, Eades Appliance Technologies (fun fact, the owners wrote the Protein Power diet books), as well as new consumer-friendly adaptations of molecular gastronomy tools.

An old installation at Bar by Dave FTL; image via 28ne14st.com

The most dramatic (well, for a certain segment of nightcrawler) change to the downtown nightlife landscape came last month. Bar, the simply named, hard-to-Google dive bar run by tri-city gallery OHWOW, suddenly shuttered. The reasons are unclear, and the stuff of much clubland gossip. This much is public: Bar had long shared physical space with the Vagabond, a popular club next door whose owners also own the building that houses both venues. Bar’s lease went up at some point, and nobody could reach an agreement on how to continue the relationship, and everyone announced Bar would cease to operate. That marks the end of the undisputed facts.

While Bar was set to go out with a bang on Memorial Day weekend with a free show by Jacuzzi Boys, even that got canceled. So the “whys” behind the sudden closing remain contentious and shrouded in mystery.

Bar’s run was actually pretty short. It opened in a space formerly occupied by the bar PS14 in December 2009, as a pop-up version of the legendary New York bar Max Fish. It was initially set to stay open only during that year’s run of Art Basel Miami Beach. Then it was supposed to stay open as a permanent outpost of Max Fish, but when that didn’t work out, it just became Bar.

It was a welcome addition — most of the gathering places here that serve as alternatives to the South Beach scene are actually still large dance clubs. Bar was pretty much just a bar. Bands played, and sometimes there were DJs, but it was a hangout spot. Drinks were relatively cheap, and you could have a conversation while plotting your next move, or make a whole night out of it. The crowd was always excitingly weird and random, and the setting was just grimy enough to make you feel okay about letting it all hang out.

Now, word officially is that Bar is set to reopen in a new location in the fall, while another venue is set to open in its physical space. What that exactly will be remains to be seen. Until then, there’s no real spot to fill in the gap left by Bar. Churchill’s Pub further north in Little Haiti is a suitable dive, but with its emphasis on bands, it often charges a cover. There are other bars close to downtown, but their crowds can get a little frat-tastic. For now, some of the diehard Bar regulars have even resorted to Bar-themed house parties. That’s how loyal a following the humble establishment built up during its short life. Bar is dead, long live Bar.

This mystery memorial appeared on Bar's facade after it suddenly closed; image via bardowntownmiami.tumblr.com

]]> http://www.scoutnetworkblog.com/2011/08/10698/r-i-p-beloved-downtown-hangout-bar/feed/ 0 http://www.scoutnetworkblog.com/2011/07/10690/rock-of-ages-shoot-turns-downtown-miami-into-80s-l-a/ http://www.scoutnetworkblog.com/2011/07/10690/rock-of-ages-shoot-turns-downtown-miami-into-80s-l-a/#comments Wed, 27 Jul 2011 12:00:56 +0000 Arielle http://www.scoutnetworkblog.com/?p=10690

A scene from the original 'Rock of Ages' musical; photo CC by 2.0, via Meglet127 on Flickr

Miami is already a city with a bizarre, disjointed sense of place, where often surfaces and surroundings seem not quite real. Thanks to some movie magic, that sense is currently even more heightened in the club district around NE Fourteenth Street in downtown Miami. For the past month or so, South Florida has been the filming site for the upcoming Tom Cruise movie Rock of Ages. Based on the somewhat ridiculous-sounding, but obviously commercially viable, Broadway musical of the same name, it follows an aspiring musician’s path to stardom through ’70s and ’80s L.A. The music comprises actual big hits of the era: “Don’t Stop Believin’,” “Pour Some Sugar On Me,” and so on.

But wait, L.A.? Yes. Apparently, it’s cheaper to just re-create the city in South Florida than actually film in the city in which the movie is set. The movie first started shooting around Fort Lauderdale and Broward County for a while, even going so far as to erect a fake Hollywood sign on the closest thing the area has to a mountain — a landfill.

The weirdest results, though, are in downtown Miami. While offering area property owners structural improvements and other incentives, the filmmakers have transformed the club and warehouse district into the Sunset Strip of the ’80s. Yes, this means an entire Potemkin Village of the time and place, down to period-accurate Motorhead billboards and a vintage Tower Records (facade only). The Miami club Eve, even, has completely been transformed on the outside into a retro nudie bar, complete with a working neon sign. It somewhat bizarrely continues to operate.

So far, it’s mostly business as usual in the area, as filming is taking place at odd hours on off nights. This means you can go to a party at Eve through the doors of “Club Venus,” or pass by “the Bourbon Room” on the way to the Vagabond. During the day, the usual street zombies shuffle past “Gazzari’s.” Transient, disorienting, fast changes to the urban landscape? Just another typical Miami day, this time brought to you by Hollywood.

Click here to view pictures of the Sunset Strip transformation on Crossfade, Miami New Times’ music blog.

As Miami’s underground music scene continues to thrive, the tradition of genre-crossing continues. Crossover acts that blend Latin and other world sounds with rock have long been a staple of the city’s live music circuit, and even the downtown cool-kid acts tend towards the danceable. In other words, even in the “indie” scene, as such, “indie rock” is usually thin on the ground. That is, “indie rock” in its ’90s-perfected, college-radio-favored form of (mainly) dudes with guitars, specializing in heartfelt, distorted, jangly rock — no chasers.

One of the best new local acts is Plains, which is bucking the trend by favoring a slightly retro, classic indie flavor, which sounds fresh juxtaposed against its area peers. The main musical brain behind the band is frontman/guitarist/songwriter Mike McGinnis, whose day job is as an engineer at production music house/recording studio Honor Roll Music.

Live, he rounds out the lineup with a cast of local all-stars. It usually includes Jorge Graupera (of acts like bilingual punkers Guajiro) on guitar, Jared McKay (of the underwater art collective Coral Morphologic) on bass, and these days, Jorge Rubiera (of Animal Tropical and Can’t Stop) on drums. However, that lineup doesn’t come together too often. With everyone busy with other projects, Plains’ total shows since the band’s inception last year number only in the large handful.

Quality over quantity, then, has made the band one of the favorites of local tastemakers, a position that’ll only be enhanced by the release of Plains’ debut self-titled album on the local label 10K Islands, itself an Honor Roll offshoot. McGinnis played all of the record’s 13 songs himself live for the recording, and the production is polished while still remaining a little lovably ragged around the edges. Musically, the songs take a page from old indie greats like Built to Spill, Sebadoh, and the like. That means introspective lyrics, loud-soft dynamics, and most importantly, pop hooks. Above all, these Plains songs are catchy, whether they’re bidding adieu to bad times on “Black Feeling” or entreating the titular woman’s return on “Judy.”

The new record doesn’t seem to indicate any live shows beyond the usual, but the band is playing a few CD release shows starting with one on Friday, July 22 at the Vagabond in Miami, followed by a couple dates in New York and the midwest. Otherwise, you can stream the entire album via Soundcloud, below, or get it through 10K Islands.

PLAINS – PLAINS Album by 10Kislands

There are a couple features on Google+ so far I see as advantages over Facebook. For one, there isn’t yet a mass event invitation function, so there is, so far, no way for club promoters and similar types to spam up one’s inbox, news feed, and so on. I also, of course, appreciate the Circles feature when choosing with whom I want to share certain information. Facebook has similar options to an extent, but it is much less complicated to sort everyone on Google+.

I don’t like, however, that you can be added to someone’s circles without the choice being mutual. I’ve set my profile information to generally be limited in visibility, so I’m not worried about that. But I think Circle placement should be accepted by both parties. So far, I’ve been added to circles by strangers and people I actively avoid in real life, which is strange and rather unwelcome. The profile format itself also seems limited in scope and capacity, although knowing Google, I’m sure the bells and whistles will come soon. In the meantime, I’m having fun playing around on the site, even if it’s with connections I share on other previous social networks.

Image free by Copyleft, via Jean-noon on Wikimedia Commons

I may be one of the last music fans on the planet who hasn’t been totally enthralled by Lady Gaga; in fact, I can continue to say I’m not a fan. I find her music to be generally insipid — though I like dance music and some dance-pop — and her look to be largely derivative of past artists. I don’t find her to be particularly “freaky” or “different.” She is, after all, a thin white woman selling music that is palatable to Top 40 radio, apart from the visual trappings of “otherness.”

Still, I’m glad she exists, for her message of acceptance is important to be heard in the mainstream. She’s also a worthy idol for people outside of major cities who feel different, and for whom Gaga is the “weirdest” thing they’ve come across.

More importantly, she’s a good entry point to researching true iconoclasts, and with her reappearance in the public eye, I’ve been thinking about some of the sources from which she must have cribbed a lot of her style. Madonna and the grand Grace Jones are obvious, but in her super New York theatricality and love for huge shoulder pads, Gaga must possibly trace back a line to Klaus Nomi.

That brought me back to revisit one of my favorite documentaries of recent years, 2005′s The Nomi Song, conveniently available on Hulu. Nomi is one of my favorite post-punk figures, ever, for his singular weirdness. An awkward German who moved to New York in the ’70s, he had a love for opera, and particularly for his eerie falsetto. The man sounded like Maria Callas, a quirk which had no place in the classical music world of the time, and thus drove him to the East Village’s experimental, punkish scenes.

Nomi soon went even further into artistic never-never land, dressing as something of a black-and-white alien, and creating an entire mythology for himself. Along the way, he released insane, unforgettable songs that married opera with New Wave, appeared on television alongside David Bowie, and then sadly seemed to alienate all of his friends before dying prematurely of AIDS. That last part is extremely sad, but Nomi’s artistic contributions were enough to lead to some amazing interviews in the documentary. Every time I watch it, I get “Total Eclipse” stuck in my head for days, even though I could never hope to sing along.

]]> http://www.scoutnetworkblog.com/2011/06/10135/remembering-klaus-nomi-a-truly-weird-would-be-pop-star/feed/ 0 http://www.scoutnetworkblog.com/2011/06/10146/cult-legends-of-rock-headed-to-south-florida/ http://www.scoutnetworkblog.com/2011/06/10146/cult-legends-of-rock-headed-to-south-florida/#comments Wed, 22 Jun 2011 12:00:03 +0000 Arielle http://www.scoutnetworkblog.com/?p=10146

Bryan Ferry in 1973; public domain image via Wikimedia Commons

South Florida’s been having a decent run these past few months of performances by up-and-coming and mid-level musical acts, which in the past was pretty unheard of. For this, we can credit a host of factors, among them currently very important venues like the Fillmore Miami Beach, as well as the city’s cultural renaissance in general. Blah blah blah. But while we are pretty good at attracting indie bands and left-field electronic acts, it’s unusual for old cult legends to bother making this way this far south.

As such, I’m not the only one here super-excited about two shows coming up in future months. First, in September, one of the most unlikely of all: Michael Gira’s infamously abrasive Swans, who will play in West Palm Beach, of all places. The town is about an hour and a half north of Miami, and generally considered far from everyone and everything else in South Florida. But it is home to a longstanding alternative venue there with a somewhat gothy bent, Respectable Street, where Gira will take the stage and doubtlessly make ear drums bleed.

Swans; image CC by 3.0, via M0d3M on Wikimedia Commons

Not long after, the great Roxy Music maestro Bryan Ferry is set to perform at the Fillmore Miami Beach. This is pretty awesome in and of itself, but more bizarre is the fact that this date, apparently, marks his only one in the United States on this particular outing. Why Miami, of all cities? Why not New York? Did Ferry just want a beach vacation?

Whatever the reasons for either of these bookings, I’ll gladly take them. Miami is not a city that is very aware of history, in general, and that extends many younger acts on the local scene that tend to often ape dance-blog trends. Perhaps these performances by living legends will prove instructive, and feed back some new ideas and energy into the creative cycle here.

The main library branch in downtown Miami; photo CC by 2.0, via Phillip Pessar on Flickr

With museums and other public institutions in Miami making a bid for new, younger audiences, why not libraries, too? A new summer exhibition at the Miami-Dade public library system’s main branch, in the heart of downtown, is a bid for the same kind of renewed relevance. Called Enter the ’90s, it’s a love letter of sorts to zine culture, and takes a new twist on the library’s annual summer art show.

For the occasion, the library created its own one-off zine, called Poetry and Power. Then, it invited dozens of local artists, writers, and other creative types to create their own zines, and trade for a library copy. The end result is now all on display for public reading in the exhibition’s lounges. Also exciting is the fact that the library has added a number of donors’ zine collections to its permanent archives, and many seminal selections from this will also be on display as part of the exhibition.

I’m a former zine publisher myself — as a young teen, a friend and I wrote a music zine, and that’s technically what started me on my current professional path. As such, this exhibit seems to be promising in two respects. One, zine culture is due for a renaissance. Blogs are great, but zines are personal and warm in the way that vinyl records are. Two, hopefully this marks an upcoming series of fun, more cutting-edge events throughout the local library system.

The library created a one-off zine for the exhibition.

On a semi-related note, I’m a library lover myself, as I’m self-employed, and as I type this post I’m actually in a library myself — the Miami Beach Regional Branch, to be specific. This is one of my favorites in which to work, locally, as it seems to be designed with people like me in mind. There are plenty of electrical outlets everywhere, an outdoor garden/patio/fountain area that’s good for a mental break from working, and a connected cafeteria area where you can eat, drink, and talk openly.

While I would love a local library like the ones I encountered in Paris, complete with lively smoking and coffee lounges, this branch has taken several steps in the right direction towards shedding libraries’ fussy, fusty image.

On a recent trip to New York to attend a wedding and visit some friends, I made a specific pilgrimage to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to check out the current Alexander McQueen retrospective, Savage Beauty. When I arrived on a Saturday morning, I had to stand in a 45-minute line that wound its way through the museum’s galleries, and then battle crowds within the exhibit itself.

It was worth it — not only was it one of the best fashion exhibits I’ve seen, it was one of the most creatively designed museum shows I’ve seen, period. Even my boyfriend, who tried to rebel halfway through the line when he realized we were “going to look at clothes,” left impressed.

While I am a fan of personal style and interesting designers, I wouldn’t say “fashion,” per se, is one of my top cultural interests, but the McQueen show truly pushed the boundary between clothing and performance art. Each gallery of the sprawling exhibit is arranged more or less, according to theme and by collection, with wall texts trying to link McQueen to 19th century notions of dark Romanticism. That seemed apt, what with all the ruffles and complicated layers.

But most striking were the parts of the show that were unsettling, and even disturbing. Each individual room, rather than the usual stark white gallery walls, had been done up to related effect to reflect the mood of the clothes being shown. For one particularly goth collection, for instance, everything was dimmed, the walls covered with smoky, rotting-looking mirrors. In another, body-restricting accessories were arranged in a cabinet-of-curiosity type displays. (Particularly grotesque, though awesomely so, here, was a metal corset designed to look like a human spine and ribcage.) Throughout, background music added to a creeping sense of dread.

Also arresting were videos playing throughout of past shows, which were more performance art than boring catwalk. In one clip playing in the gallery, a wounded, dazed-looking model staggered across a dais as robots splattered her white dress with paint; the resulting dress was on display as well. In another, a similarly discombobulated girl struggled with metal S&M-style restraints as she descended a staircase in an endless loop. And the creepiest of all was a clip of McQueen’s spring/summer 2005 show, in which a robotic voice ordered ghostly models around a human-size chess board.

The overall mood of both horror and the sublime stayed with me for a while after the show, and made me appreciate more the world’s loss when McQueen took his own life last year. Clearly, this was a person who didn’t just make expensive party dresses, but had an entire aesthetic yet still to express fully.