Beautiful Sunrise Photos from Fort Lauderdale Beach, daily

I came across a very interesting profile to follow on Twitter.

http://twitter.com/FtLauderdaleSun

Who takes photos of the sunrise off Fort Lauderdale Beach daily, and uploads them to Twitter and

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ftlauderdale

I won’t post any of the photos here, (because that would be stealing) so you’ll have to click the links or follow them on Twitter to see these beautiful photos every day. Let me tell you, they really are great photos, and they’re taken using an iPhone. Amazing stuff.

Sure, I live a few miles from the beach and can see the sunrise myself whenever I want…but the only time I ever see a sunrise is when I stay up all night! So getting to see these great photos daily is very kool.

-Tiki Chris Pinto for Tiki Lounge Talk

Tiki Lounge Talk nominated for BOB (Best of Blog) Awards!

Thanks to the cool cat or kitten who nominated The Tiki Blog for a best of blog award with the South Florida Sun Sentinel! We’ve been nominated for three categories…Pop Culture, Travel, and ‘defies category’ which is kinda funny,.

You can vote for us here:

http://interactive.sun-sentinel.com/community/ssblogcontest/voting/?vote_for=79#79

Please vote! If you like what we’ve done here, give us a little smile by casting a vote. You can vote once in each category EVERY DAY, plus you can vote for us for Best Overall Blog.

We seem to be doing best in Pop Culture. I don’t know why we’re in Travel, and I think the other blogs in that category are better suited to that award…but We’d love to get that first place in Pop Culture, and hell, even defies category! So please log on daily (through March 5) and vote! It would be a real gas if we swiped the jackpot, baby!

The Groove Tube, 1974 - Mod Movie Monday at The Tiki Blog

One of the craziest, funniest, raunchiest movies of all time, the first major motion picture ever to use the sketch comedy format made famous by Saturday Night Live and Second City TV, here’s this week’s Mod Movie Monday Feature

The Groove Tube, 1974

Starring Ken Shapiro, Chevy Chase, Richard Beltzer and ensemble.

In the 60s and early 70s modern ’sketch’ comedy was still new, and Channel One Theater in New York was one of the groups pioneering this off-beat sort of comedy. From that was born The Groove Tube, written and directed by Ken Shapiro of Channel One.

As always I won’t give anything away, but I can give you a basic idea of what you’re going to see. The viewer is to believe they are not watching a movie, but TV in a world where nudity, adult themes, far-out trips, cursing and unbound comedy is uncensored. After the opening credits (which spoofs 2001-A Space Odyssey and features music by Curtis Mayfield) the viewer seems to be watching a TV that someone else is controlling…changing stations, watching commercials, etc. (much like Robot Chicken does today (except with real people instead of toys)). (wow, that’s a (lot of) brackets!) Each sketch is a full commercial or part of a TV show, and include such greats as Koko the Clown, Brown-25 from The Uranus Corporation,  a commercial for “Geritan”, Chevy Chase singing “I’m looking over a four leaf clover”, and “Channel One Evening News.”

Although Shapiro played the anchor on the Evening News, the skit and its tagline, ‘Good night and have a pleasant tomorrow,’ were taken along to Saturday Night Live with Chevy Chase, and live on today as Weekend Update.

This movie pulled out all the stops, using full-frontal nudity, drug use, prostitution, and silliness in a truly funny way. I also believe this was the first and only time a grown man in a suit, hat and brief case danced through the streets of New York singing “Just me, Just You” and lived to tell about it.

Seriously, this movie is funny as hell. I waited 25 years to see it and wasn’t disappointed. Back in 1975, when it was playing at the Towne-4 movie theater next to the Searstown Mall in Pleasantville, NJ, my family wanted to see it. The TV commercials made it look like a straight-up comedy (without the raunchiness), and the newspaper ad showed it as being rated “G” (it’s actually rated R). When we got to the movies, and I still remember this clearly, the pretty young girl at the ticket counter told my my parents “Aw, you don’t want to take him in there”, to which they said, “But it’s rated G”, to which she replied, “Oh no, sorry about that. The paste up guy at the newspaper didn’t do the ad right and the “R” slipped off the ad, if you look at the paper again you’ll see the “R” overlapping the ad under it.” How about that, huh? So I didn’t get to see it. Considering I was 7, it’s probably a good thing.

It wasn’t until the early 2000’s when I finally found the DVD available on the internet that I was able to see it. I gotta tell you, even after 35 years it still is funny, and has some shock value.

This is some pretty low-brow comedy so for a drink & snacks I’d say cheap beer and chips all the way. Miller High Life and Doritos would be very 70s. If you’re not a beer drinker, then Jack on the rocks, and Herrs potato chips. Some New Yawk style pizza too. Watch it by the glow of a Lava Lamp and a Spencer’s Gifts fiber-optic tree for full effect, man. Yeah.

-Tiki Chris for Tiki Lounge Talk

Tiger Woods…who flips a beat?

Converstaions at the Tiki Bar

A perspective, ala Beatsville

This riff is a little off topic for Tiki Lounge Talk, but it has been a conversation at the Tiki Bar between my old lady and I, so it gets laid down on the score, ya dig?

Who the hell gives a flip what scene Tiger made, except for maybe his old lady?

Oh sure, we all dig ripping on some cat who got caught with his paw in the cookie jar. And dig it, Tiger Man did bust up on one of the 10 Commandments: Thou shalt not swing with another hip chick while the hen is roosting in the coop, unless of course thy old lady riffs to that krazy scene.

So the flipsters and spinners that hit the airwaves are making big bones about this cat’s high-infidelity. Soakin’ up the green, that’s all they’re in it for, no matter that it splatters the cat’s rep like a frog in a blender.

As the Big Man once said, “let ye who has not blown a sour note or riffed a bad scale cast the first stone, baby.” I say, if the man wants to goof on golf balls and knock around with some chicks, that’s nobody’s jazz but his own. Leave the cat alone and let him swing, both with golf club and kittens.

Are you hip?

- Darrin C. M. Buckley, for the Tiki Lounge Tiki Blog

Art Deco & Mid-Century Modern Come Together in Downtown Hollywood, Florida

It was a beautiful day in downtown Hollywood, Florida where I work. Sun shining, puffy white clouds, not too crazy hot. So I decided to take my trusty Instamatic Camera (not really, it’s a digital camera) and head down to the happinin’ section of Hollywood Boulevard.

Hollywood was founded in 1925 by a visionary named Joseph Young who wanted to build his dream city in Florida. It quickly became a thriving city, with beachfront hotels, beautiful homes, and a busy downtown area. This downtown was first built up in the mid to late 20s, with some slowing during the depression and WW2. It found a resurgence in the 50s, as many vacation spots did, and had a building boom through the 60s. This history led to a unique combination of early Art Deco construction, Spanish-Floridian construction, and Mid-Century Modern.

It’s amazing that these buildings were able to survive through the architectual vacuum of the 70s and 80s, but some managed to hang on with their original look intact. The late 90s saw a re-popularization of the original styles, and luckily the popularization has remained through the present leading to numerous restorations, retro-refitting of more recent dull buildings, and dig this…brand new construction in the Art Deco and Mid-Century style. Seriously. (continued after the slide show)

I was able to get some very nice shots of the Art Deco and Mid-Century Modern buildings along the boulevard. One of my favorite buildings is the Great Southern Hotel, located on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Young’s Circle. I believe Young himself had this hotel built as part of the city plan back in the mid 20’s. It has a sort of Florida-Spanish style combined with that 1920s pre-Deco look you see in a lot of shore towns. What the hell do I mean by that? Basically it means simplicity, symmetry, and terra cotta.

There are a good number of trendy nightclubs and cafés along the boulevard, and most of them have stuck with the retro look. It’s nice to see people taking these historic styles seriously, and appreciating them for the timeless beauty they portray.

***

Funny story about The Great Southern hotel. When we first moved to Florida in 2000, my wife and I took a drive to Hollywood to check it out. At that time it was in a state of change; a lot of stores were vacant, and still looked like they did in the 70s. I noticed the big white hotel on the corner, and thought to myself that it looked really familiar, but couldn’t place it. Mind you this is the first trip I ever took to Hollywood. Anyway, a few years later in 2005, I end up working in a building on Hollywood Boulevard a couple of blocks from downtown. While there I picked up a local paper, which happened to have a story about “The Great Southern Hotel” on the cover. The story was about how the owners wanted to tear it apart to put up a parking garage, how the city didn’t see anything wrong with that, and how the historical society was about ready to commit murder if necessary before letting that happen. The name rung a bell…but I still couldn’t catch it. Then one day it came to me…where I’d seen that name. It was in a movie, which I ran out and bought right away.

There it was, in one of the last scenes of Midnight Cowboy from 1967. Joe Buck and Ratzo Rizzo are headed down to Miami on a bus. The bus stops for a break, and Joe Buck ditches his cowboy outfit and boots for a Hawaiian shirt. As he shoves the boots into a trash can, you can clearly see a giant white building with the name “Great Southern Hotel” in giant letters in the background. That was it; a scene in a movie I had seen when I was about 13 had stuck in my head for years…and as fate would have it, I wind up working down the street from the place. But here’s what’s even more interesting: One of the themes of the movie is that the characters want to get out of the city, out of the cold, away from the freaks up north and down to sunny Florida where the palm trees sway and you can pick the oranges right off the trees. Well, my father and I used to joke around about it all the time, that we had the same dream. Finally, in 2000, he, my wife and I made it down here. “Everybody’s Talkin’ at Me” from the movie was going through my head as we crossed the Georgia border into Florida. The sun actually was shining through the pouring rain as we drove down I-95 into Fort Lauderdale. My father, who was very sick at the time, made it down right behind us, but unlike Ratzo lived a few years to enjoy it. Whenever I see the Great Southern I think of him, and how we both got our dream to come true.

(This is a repost from last year, but it was such a popular one I thought I’d give it another view)
-Tiki Chris Pinto, for the Tiki Blog