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.

To that end, the group is bringing the Characterized tour to Miami with an event at the The Lightbox at Goldman Warehouse, in Wynwood, on Saturday night. Here’s the official description:

Lightly competitive yet with no shortage of creative pride, each CHARACTERIZED Tour 2013 event blends a unique perspective on characters, with a visceral exposure to designers’ techniques and instincts. In partnership with HP, CHARACTERIZED incorporates Cut&Paste’s experimental team format to bring character designers together for an onstage throwdown. Teams of two artists each will create throughout multiple rounds of design, using computers and analog tools to make original characters. A jury decides the winning team by consensus, which receives a HP® ZR2440w 24-inch Display. Each event promises to be a dynamic mashup of designers as an audience witnesses work broadcast on projection screens while teams make designs in real-time.

The Miami jurors are Brian Butler (a familiar name around here), Mike Del Marmol, John Lacko, Phi Hollinger, and Vassoula Visiliou. The competitors are as follows:

Team 1:

Kevin Espeche (www.kevinespeche.com)
Andres Roquete (www.behance.net/rosquete)

Team 2:

Eric Fernandez (www.teslacake.com)
Anthony Anaya (www.behance.net/anthony_anaya)

Team 3:

DarwinAndTheDodo (www.cargocollective.com/DarwinAndTheDodo)
Maciel Vargas (www.cargocollective.com/macielvargas)

Team 4:

KNEE (www.kneetoface.com)
MEFX1 (www.kneetoface.com)

Giveaway Information

The 21+ event costs $7.50 in advance or $10 at the door. To enter to win a FREE pair of tickets, shout out the name of your favorite character — comic book, cartoon, etc. — on the Beached Miami Facebook page with a link to this post. We will announce the winner via Facebook on Friday afternoon (as in TODAY).

Until then, this video will give you a sense of the atmosphere at a Characterized event.

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Anthony Lister: Never Odd Or Even @ Robert Fontaine Gallery

Born in Australia but now based in New York, Lister combines a street art sensibility with more classical painterly flourishes in his works. In fact, according to the artist, this is his way of gate-crashing the fine art world. “I’m disguising myself as a fine artist until the revolution is fully here,” he says in the press for his solo show at Robert Fontaine Gallery. The works on display draw largely from a recent series of paintings of ballerinas, depicting one of the most cloistered, highbrow art forms with the energy and vibrant colors of graffiti.

Robert Fontaine Gallery, 2349 N.W. Second Avenue, 305.397.8530, robertfontainegallery.com

Maitejosune Urrechaga: Presque Vu @ Swampspace

The French title of this show, hosted at experimental gallery Swampspace, refers to that frustrating-tantalizing moment when an idea is “on the tip of the tongue” — something you can call to mind, but not quite verbalize. For her solo show, Urrechaga (one half of Pocket of Lollipops) explores this exquisite disconnect through painting, mostly portraiture that depict charmingly sketchy watercolor people mixed up with abstract shapes and washes of color for a sort of cosmic vibe. The opening starts relatively early, running from 5 p.m. until 10 p.m.

Swampspace, 150 N.E. 42nd Street, swampspace.blogspot.com

20 Shades of Grey and Reclaimed Miami @ Zadok Gallery

Zadok Gallery hosts two simultaneous openings this Saturday, and it’s best to ignore the terrible reference/play on words of that first one listed. The portion titled 20 Shades of Grey has nothing, thankfully, to do with pop-BDSM books. Instead, the “grey” of the title refers to the silver hair of the artists featured within. This show is dedicated to artists over 70 who have lived and worked in Miami since long before Art Basel trendiness. Reclaimed Miami, meanwhile, is all about creative re-use of materials, with artists “upcycling” found objects through techniques like silkscreening, embroidery, crocheting, and more. This is another early opening, running from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m.

Zadok Gallery, 2534 North Miami Avenue, 305.438.3737, zadokgallery.com

Jillian Mayer: Precipice/Postmodem and Tracey Goodman & Valerie Snobeck: Out Of Place @ Locust Projects

Followers of her work with Borscht Corp. will likely be familiar with Jillian Mayer’s film oeuvre, which often uses absurdist imagery and humor to explore the profound technological changes underway in the Internet Age. See her recent collaboration with Lucas Leyva, #POSTMODEM, which screened at Sundance and earned laughs from an exploration of Ray Kurzweil’s concept of singularity. Mayer revisits ideas from that film, plus other installation works, for her solo show at Locust Projects this Saturday. In the gallery’s project room, Tracey Goodman and Valerie Snobeck present Out Of Place, which is curated by Joanna Kleinberg Romanow, assistant curator of the Drawing Center in New York.

Locust Projects, 3852 North Miami Avenue, 305.576.8570, locustprojects.org

Jonathan Rockford: Preserving the Void @ Hardcore Art Contemporary Space

Rockford hails from Minnesota, but now proudly lives and works in the Sailboat Bend section of Fort Lauderdale. There, he’s been working on a body of sculpture and installation work that explores volume and space, formally, and memory and time, conceptually. For this particular show, that means unwound and re-molded VHS tapes as a prominent material. You can hear the artist explain more in his own words in this nifty video trailer he created for the exhibition.

Hardcore Art Contemporary Space, 72 N.W. 25th Street, 305.576.1645, hardcoreartmiami.com

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Led by Kevin Barnes, Of Montreal (center, gold medallion) is getting ready to release their twelfth album, Lousy With Sylvianbriar.

Fresh off the release of their eleventh album, Paralytic Stalks, and already teasing their next LP (due out in fall), Of Montreal (who are actually of Athens, GA) will perform at Grand Central on Friday night with opening act Wild Moccasins. To enter to win a pair of tickets to the show, shout out the name of your favorite Of Montreal song on the Beached Miami Facebook page with a link to this post. We will announce the winner via Facebook on Thursday afternoon.

Update: And the winner is …

Update: Show postponed to July 5.

Until then, here are a few of my Of Montreal favorites, plus two tracks by Wild Moccasins.

“And I could make you spaghetti with tomato sauce with just a touch of oregano and a parsley stem…”

“He helps her in the stirrups then he straps himself in. They spend their days in heights of ecstasy. But wait. Why then does she look so sad?”

“There’s nothing precious about old people in the cemetery reciting bible passages…”

“All I ever get is sad love. The unrequited kind is all I have procured, and it was nothing at all like what I’ve heard…”

These two Wild Moccasins tracks are off of the band’s debut LP, Skin Collision Past, which was originally self-released by the band in 2010 and re-released by New West Records in 2011. Based in Houston, TX, Wild Moccasins is currently working on their sophomore album.

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Photo by Jessie Asknizai

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Directed by prolific GIF generator Ronnie Rivera, the mad man behind Bleeding Palm, the short stars Bosh as a 12-dimensional “star prince” who flees his home universe after inadvertently causing his own father’s death by the hand of the Evil Sorceress Jillian (played by Miami artist Jillian Mayer). Try as he does to escape his past in the guise of “an above average professional human millionaire basketball player,” Bosh must overcome issues of “interdimensional abandonment” and face his heroic destiny. Luckily, “Bath Salt Zombie” victim Ronald Poppo and the Mystic Wolfman Barfar (who takes over Mike Miller’s body during the NBA Finals) are there to help.

Mystic Wolfman Barfar by Bleeding Palm

Needless to say, “Adventures of Christopher Bosh in the Multiverse” is a fiction, but that didn’t stop the NBA from allegedly sending Borscht a cease-and-desist letter last year, an absurd development that only reenforced the film’s underlying message: These are strange, strange days.

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All photos by Jesse Meadows.

To view many more photos from Sweatstock 2013, visit the Beached Miami Facebook page.

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SNL veteran Seth Meyers will perform at the Fillmore Miami Beach on Thursday for South Beach Comedy Festival.

“When I heard Lebron James was moving to Miami, I was shocked. I had no idea he was Jewish.” Comedian Seth Meyers said that while hosting the ESPYs in 2010. At the 2011 White House Correspondents dinner, he said, “Donald Trump often appears on FOX, which is ironic because a fox often appears on Donald Trump’s head.” Back in March, as host of Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update, he called the American South “the Michael Jordan of racism.”

Meyers will say more funny things at the Fillmore Miami Beach Thursday night when he performs for the South Beach Comedy Festival. Well, I’m presuming. Who knows? Maybe he’ll be super depressing. Either way, we have a pair of tickets to give away for the performance. To enter to win, simply post an incredulous “REALLY!?!” on the Beached Miami Facebook page with a link to this post. We will announce the winner via Facebook on Thursday morning.

Until then, here’s a little segment I like to call …

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Polish your dancing shoes! Record Store Day 2013 is on Saturday. — photo taken at Sweatstock 2011 by Robby Campbell

This Saturday is the third Saturday of April and that means it’s Record Store Day, an international celebration of music, music makers, and the independent stores that make music as easy to purchase as a head of lettuce while ensuring freshness and that certain ineffable crunch.

In keeping with recent history, South Florida is doing RSD 2013 right. In Miami there’s Sweatstock 4, a free all-ages three-stage block party hosted by Sweat Records that will feature performances by Otto Von Schirach, ANR, This Heart Electric, Holly Hunt and a slew of other bands and DJs. The party will double as a celebration of Record Store Day, with exclusive vinyl releases, and a commemoration of Sweat’s eighth anniversary as one of the bastions of the Miami music scene. Learn more at sweatrecords.com.

Up in Ft. Lauderdale there’s the Block x Blog music festival presented by Consequence of Sound, Subculture, and 3-J Hospitality. With a host of top local talent — Jacuzzi Boys, Krisp, Lil Daggers, Ex Norwegian, Plains, Afrobeta, and many others — on the bill behind headliner Holy Ghost! (the Brooklyn-based synthpop duo of Nick Millhiser and Alex Frankel), this RSD 2013 celebration will cost you $25 if you purchase a ticket from Radio-Active Records or Revolution Live (Ticketmaster’s charging a weighty $38).

To help you decide whether Block x Blog is worth your hard-earned dough, here’s a new track from three of the local bands on the bill (from a recently dropped compilation).

“36 Trap” — Afrobeta

“Aventura” — Ex-Norweigan

“Will You Tell Me” — Krisp

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If you like what you hear, make sure to catch live performances by Rickolus, Lil Daggers, PLAINS, Ex Norwegian, and sound sleeper at the Block x Blog Festival in Ft. Lauderdale on April 20th.

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Decades after a deranged Jack Nicholson channeled Ed McMahon — “Heeeere’s Johnny!” — The Shining captivates cinephiles and conspiracy theorists alike.

First things first: Learn how you can enter to win a pair of tickets to ‘Room 237′ on the Beached Miami Facebook page.

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.

The occasion for the retrospective is the acclaimed documentary Room 237, made by University of Miami alum Rodney Ascher. The film delves into various theories about The Shining, touching on everything from the Holocaust to the alleged hoax of the Apollo 11 moon landing, with the help of five Kubrick worshipers whose voices guide the film but whose faces you never see.

Ahead of the retrospective, I emailed a few questions to Ascher to learn more about his connection to Kubrick, The Shining, and the story behind Room 237.

Does your film reveal more about The Shining, Stanley Kubrick, or the five interviewees/theorists?

RA: That’s the question isn’t it? Whether The Shining is a puzzle or a projective test. I’m afraid I can’t answer it to definitively, but clearly most people’s relationship with The Shining is two-way.

Why did you choose not to ever show the interviewees faces?

RA: It’s a style I began with a short doc I did a little before 237 and I like the way it makes the film play in sort of a different part of your head than a straightforward documentary might. I like to think we’re not looking at the speakers, but through their eyes.

How and why did you end up making this film? What is your personal relationship with The Shining?

RA: Kubrick’s always been a personal favorite and a filmmaker whose work resonated with me in a personal way. When my friend producer Tim Kirk discovered a mind-blowingly complicated symbolic analysis of The Shining online there wasn’t anything either of us was much interested in talking about for the next three years other than the secrets of The Shining.

What is your favorite out-there theory about The Shining and Room 237?

RA: To pick one sort of randomly, I love the way John Fell Ryan talks about the conflict between what we see and what we hear and I, in turn, tried to play with that a little in 237 as well.

Do you have one of your own?

RA: I believe I found a link between Murnau’s silent version of Faust and The Shining that I haven’t found discussed elsewhere. I also suspect that some scenes have been edited out of sequence.

What projects are on the horizon for you?

RA: A comedy album (editing, not performing), and I’ve begun interviews for a dueling pair of docs vaguely in the same style as 237.

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For full details on O Cinema’s Kubrick retrospective, visit o-cinema.org/kubrick.

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