Florida is characterized by beer distributors and wholesalers as ‘a light lager crowd’, or a major-brand-preferring consumer base, much the same as the general beer-drinking populace of North America. Although a ‘light lager’ is just the sort of brew meant to be enjoyed while lazing on the beach or pounding em back at a college party, what are Floridian beer snobs expected to do? There are many reasons for this barren beer landscape: Florida has a heterogenous mixture of transplant residents with no strong preference for any particular variant of tasty brew, it has the general lack of unique local restaurant chains that could be tempted to serve craft brews (Outback steakhouse and Hooter’s both started in the Tampa Bay area), and a dearth of local craft brewers. Luckily for Floridians, that last driver for the formation of a ‘light lager crowd’ is beginning to fall apart. Craft breweries are starting up all across the sunshine state (there’s a list at the bottom!), and some are producing downright sensational products. One in particular, Cigar City Brewing, is stepping up to the Craft Brew microphone and making a lot of noise.
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In Florida, the first weekend in March is usually a Northerner’s fantasy… highs in the 70s, fat old sun shining away, birds bigger than they ought to be lazily picking critters out of serene swamps… but something significant is missing this year. It’s not the snowboards slowly playing shuffleboard in West Palm Beach, and it’s not shark attacks (although their number is down significantly). There is a very quiet ghost roaming South Florida, one whose glorious life was short but beautiful, and meaningful to many people around the world. March 6 2010 is the two-year anniversary of the death of a very good friend… In 2009, Langerado, Florida’s premier music festival, was canceled indefinitely, with little chance of ever occurring again.
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Recently a lot of press has been given to the fact that more people preferred to be an online fan of an inanimate pickle than of the modern rock band Nickelback. This has made newspaper second-pages across the country and even solicited ire from the band themselves. But what did this exercise really prove? Was Nickelback’s reputation sullied at all? If anything, people that had never heard of Nickelback before this instance may actually become fans of the band. All that was proven was this:
The general public tends to polarize into bland, isomeric factions based on personal preferences. +Continue Reading
THIS JUST IN: FLORIDA NOW 35% COVERED IN WRITHING, ANGRY SNAKES
Pet pythons placed in peri-urban waterways have found their way to the Everglades, and are thus slowly winding their way around Mother Nature’s pale, exposed throat, settling in for a joyless, reptilian kill. Many thought it a hoax when five years ago, a difficult to comprehend photograph surfaced on the internet… one in which a fifteen to twenty foot long snake had apparently consumed a sizable alligator, but in the last frantic throes of the insanity of death, the alligator had exploded from the gullet of the snake, leaving behind a pile of gore the likes of which not seen since Vietnam. Mankind is now embroiled in a war with an enemy which society has used as a symbol of evil since the dawn of time, and the battleground is America’s last bastion of child-friendly entertainment.
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Time for another Publix dick-riding session! The following five beers are not the craziest, tastiest, or most amazing beers, but they are definitely more cost effective than the last five. These will all set you back about seven to eight bucks a six pack. If you’re not from the south, then you’re probably confused as to what I’m talking about. Publix is a grocery store that specializes in going balls-out for its customers. Its headquarters are in Florida, and the majority of its stores are also located within the penile state. I once read a ‘Laughter is the Best Medicine’ column in Reader’s Digest (the best the doctor’s office could afford) that claimed that a little girl mispronounced the pledge of allegiance by instead saying ‘and to the Publix where we buy our stamps.’ As if the world needed more convincing that little kids are stupid. That being said, we begin our list of Publix-available beers.
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A phantogram is an image that has been color adjusted in order to make the picture, with the help of 3-D glasses, emerge from the page with new-found fidelity. Immediately upon settling the needle down on the imaginary vinyl of Eyelid Movies, the rookie album from the New York duo that record as Phantogram, the sound emerges in much the same manner… it seems to diffuse out from the speakers, a highly textured mixture of viscous sexuality and fearless mystery-pop that requires no special glasses to tickle your amygdala.
I have always asked myself the question ‘What will music sound like in ten years?’, and usually I come up with a generally far-fetched image of some total fucking weirdos making music that is a distant cousin of our relatively blaise current music. Generally that idea is disproved, although music does evolve, and yes, performers continue to get stranger. I am not usually disappointed, but I am a bit baffled at music’s predilection for recalling old tones and tunes and presenting them as new, and some genres’ musical oeuvre is so narrow that any progressive move would put new material in another category. Phantogram’s new album has come the closest possible to fitting my imaginary mold of some of the future aspects of music. It relentlessly blends styles, keeps sonically pleasant tones in mind, and doesn’t skimp on the quality for the sake of sounding authentic or ‘indie’.
For me, the best music evokes not an immediate emotional response or motivation, but rather summons a vaguely interrelated cloud of adjectives. I have prepared two graphs to give my best shot at scientifically explaining what happens when virgin ears happen to run into Phantogram’s album. The first is an interrelated scatter chart of adjectives in an (X,Y) arrangement with ‘cool’ on the X axis and ’strange’ on the Y axis, and the second is a pie chart attempting to account for the dozens of influences one will encounter on Eyelid Movies.
Ten pervasive adjectives are listed on the left, and they form the basis for the left to right flow of the infographic. As we can easily see, initial reactions of the ’strange’ variety give way immediately to a growing trend toward ‘cool’. As the album progresses, strange moments pop in here and there (consider a song titled ‘Futuristic Casket’, which starts out with gangster rap beats, yet ends with tender xylophone arpeggios), but the prevailing feel is that this is an unflaggingly hip, dark, and exciting album. Etiolated means bleached by lack of sunlight, by the way.
The next chart offers a detailed analysis of the songcraft and sonic 
texture of the album in terms of possible influences. The three strongest are Serge Gainsbourg, a deceased French songwriter (whom the band themselves cite as their prime influence), the Postal Service, and the Cardigans. Other influences are peppered in without abandon… I could have sliced this pie into slivers trying to characterize single songs, let alone the entire thing.
To wrap this up, this is an amazing debut album. My only regret is that it will be some time before we can hear new material from Phantogram, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a 2011 follow-up.
8.5/10
Last Saturday, the finest event in sports came to Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium for an unforgettable night of competition, pageantry, and triumph. The world’s trials and tribulations were put on hold at exactly 7:30pm, when the lights were lowered, the crowd tore its teeth out with anticipation, and the grumble of the competitors’ guts grew into an eardrum-splitting frenzy not heard since that one time Mt. Olympus exploded and buried all those people in red-hot liquid diamonds. MONSTER JAM HAD BEGUN.
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JUDGE THIS PUG!
COME ON, YOU MEME LOVING BASTARDS! DO YOUR WORST.
HERE IS A LINK TO THE ORIGINAL PICTURE
AND GO
Most lottery winners say something to the effect of “…the money won’t change me,” or “I’m still on a budget”. But what most lottery winners don’t anticipate is that though they may not change themselves, others may change them. And if there were no others to begin with, there will be soon enough. Abraham Shakespeare claims to have given the last three dollars in his wallet to a homeless man just minutes before his winning lottery numbers were called. On Thursday, his remains were excavated from a shallow grave under a concrete slab behind a rural Plant City building. This is a true story of envy, greed, murder, and circumstances that seem to be straight out of a Norman Mailer novel. This is the strange fate of Abraham Shakespeare.
Photo: Shakespeare’s mug shot (AP)
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“WHERE SHOPPING CAN PROBABLY GET YOU LAID”
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