Off the Beaten Path

Alright, let’s get back to the purpose of this Blog. Here’s a good tale of a crazy night in the 305!

Last weekend Laura and I took a step off the beaten path. I’m trying to cut my spending for the remainder of the summer. I’ve gone to 25 hours a week at work to get time to work on my capstone project, the final part of my Master program. It’s going well, but they also cut my paycheck. So I’m looking for a cheap way to entertainment. In Miami that means stay off of South Beach!

Fortunately Miami has a pretty good underground arts scene. It’s taken me almost four years to tune in to it. This Saturday there was a show opening at the Faktura gallery. The place is run by a girl who waitresses at a bar I’ve been known to frequent. The gallery was up in Liberty City, the setting for the latest Grand Theft Auto game, if that means anything to you. It was a sketchy area, but the gallery was hopping! It was in an industrial park down an alley in a space that looked to be an old auto body shop, complete with grease and oil stains.







The show is called “Sit on It!” The show was a compilation by a bunch of Miami’s underground artists. They all put their own brand of art onto toilet seats. They had a bunch of the seats on the wall in the gallery. They ranged from paintings, to wood burning, to sculpture. All of it was done on toilet seats and lids. I took some pictures of my favorites. In addition we enjoyed free beer and freshly made sushi while we appreciated the art.

Outside they had a movie playing on the wall of the warehouse across the alley from the gallery. That was my favorite part. It was montage of bathrooms. They were all public bathrooms, some gross, some clean. Fortunately they focused on the writing in the stalls, and not the contents of the receptacles. Some of it was full scale graffiti and artwork; other was just scribblings in magic marker. My favorite one said “I love writing in bathrooms”! It ended with a scene from the Big Lebowski. The Dude has just been doused in the toilet and is pulling his sunglasses out of the water. “Come on, no women live here! The toilet seat is up, man!”

Next stoop for the evening was Churchill’s pub. This is an authentic English pub located in the Little Haiti neighborhood. They were having a psychobilly music night featuring a few bands form NYC. Psychobilly is a sort of thrash rock/rockabilly fusion, with the lyrics tending toward horror movie plots. Sounded weird to me, but Laura said she’s heard it before and it was cool, so off we went.

Now Churchill’s itself is a unique place. Its way off the beaten path, so it draws a dedicated crowd. Think English punk rockers. I think it would be a great place to watch the World Cup games, but I’m too chicken to go out there and face drunken Brits if the English side loses. It has a clientele mainly of Miami’s punk rockers. They were out in force last Saturday, it was awesome!

Laura and I settled in at the bar I front of the stage for the bands. There were six or seven bands on the bill so we ordered pitchers of ale. Opposite the bar there was a movie screen. It was playing Halloween 2 when we got there, then switched to Dr. Frankenstein and the Demon Monster, and was halfway through The Return of the Living Dead when we left. It really set the ambiance for the night. It was pretty dead when we got here so I had a good view. I watched when the bands were setting up between sets.

We stayed for about five bands, but I think we missed the main act. I was new to the music, but every band sounded the same. All hardcore thrash metal. I couldn’t really decipher the lyrics to tell if they were horror inspired or not. I can tell you that there were lots of F-Bombs. The only rockabilly we heard was over the PA when the bands took a break.

The best was the third band. The lead singer was girl with a huge Mohawk and spiky hair. She informed us at the start that their drummer had stayed in New York. So there was a stand in drummer who had learned their music in two days. They kept messing up their songs, starting and restarting them. Pretty funny. By that time there was a pretty good crowd. The members of the earlier bands were the most into it, and they got started a kicking mosh pit! It reminded me of the infamous Green Day concert in Boston. I didn’t partake, but I enjoyed watching it. We left around 3am for home and bed.




It was great night and I spent about 15 bucks. That’s phenomenal for Miami. I’m going to see how long I can go with mostly free parties. That should make for some good blogging!