Once more into the breach, another onslaught of rigorous fun, another year of hope triumphing over experience. The season, a heady brew of distractions and rough amusements, greeted with the usual mix of dread and delight. Miami’s annual march through the winter solstice, the city primed to bask in the…
The party circuit, an ugly scramble for the hollow moment, the regulars rooting around like epicene little pigs, chasing after trifles and courtesies. The true addicts haunted by the sweetest prize possible, the ideal phantasmagoria: a gathering lousy with glitz and glitter, riddled with the elite, and better yet, entirely…
Miami, another year of hype and hustle in the city of ambition, another rush to seize the moment in the town that glamour built. A tropical metropolis tumbling pell-mell into the consciousness of the world, simultaneously hyperventilating and falling apart, uncannily like an overextended Caribbean nation with attitude problems. Warm,…
Near the end of some of his live shows Steve Forbert sings about how “you cannot win if you do not play.” Being a certified loser, I wouldn’t know. In the summer season of the Southwest YMCA basketball league, the New Times team won its conference and played last Thursday…
Rosh Hashanah, a new year, a new beginning, a new attitude of unsettling contentment, gooey delight reigning in the house of nice. The first traces of autumn and renewal, born again after a difficult period, the usual endless summer doldrums of whiny personal crises, Freudian black holes, and various fabulous…
The other night about 4:00 or 5:00 a.m. at Spo-dee-o-dee, just for fun — I wasn’t on X, I wasn’t even ecstatic — I kept hugging people. I can’t remember everyone I hugged, although I do recall a warm embrace with fellow slacker-critic-poseur-writer Mike “Teddy Bear” Burrell, because he’s really…
The essence of the Florida Keys, as regularly conveyed in the sports pages of the Herald, consists of perpetual leisure and fun. It’s all about fishermen having the times of their lives, splendid international sailboat races, and gripping offshore powerboat duels. Much of the credit for this alluring image of…
You know the bomb is mack when you spot John Hood at a rock and roll show in a place like Stephen Talkhouse. But there he was, the most dapper doorman and prop promoter on South Beach, the guy the press’ll never stop hyping as an “intellectual thug,” the man…
September song, a seasonal dirge for a cruelly unyielding landscape, the brain a vicious jumble of frippery and unsavory associations, one vast over-the-top Hitchcock dream sequence. The internal nightmare curiously more tolerable than reality, lately a battleground straight out of cable television hell, uncannily like a Jane Whitney trash talk…
My parents taught me lots of things, like never lie, cheat, steal, or take advantage of people. The lessons came in handy the other day on the streets of downtown Miami. In fact, they saved me twelve dollars. It went down like this: A black man with a gray beard…
Sometimes I wonder if I could write one of these columns without ever mentioning music. Like my idol, Robert Steinback of the Miami Herald, just ideas, thoughts, mammals replacing insects, insects replacing thoughts back to ideas. Am I starting to read like my other idol, Tom Austin? Big Love takes…
The dog days of the killing season, tempers fraying, minds unraveling, the dark reaches of the collective unconsciousness bubbling up to the surface like an evil cancer, a plague upon the hot bottom of the Earth. Lost and dispirited in the seventh circle of the inferno, the reassuring tug of…
Life’s a banquet and most poor suckers are starving, the fortunate and feckless alike craving something beyond their fair share of the available resource pool. The rich demanding discounts and getting richer, the disenfranchised sliding down the totem pole, the media fighting over scraps like jesters at the king’s court,…
Last week’s issue of New Times was very popular. We got lots of phone calls. Readers picked up papers so quickly that by Thursday most of them were gone. Staffers from all departments reported an extraordinary amount of comment among friends and acquaintances. That issue contained a new column called…
I think, so. So? I won’t bother you with it. This week’s just like one big shout out. I’m running low on energy, passion, and adjectives. Jeff Fritz has left Drive Choir. As you may know, all local bands break up as soon as New Times writes about them. Fritz…
In our continuing efforts to provide readers with stories they’re not likely to find in other local media, we introduce this new feature, devoted exclusively to the affairs of the Miami Herald and its corporate parent, Knight-Ridder, Inc. (KRI). The irony is palpable: The biggest, most influential news organization in…
Hey, yo, can you hear me? Is this thing on? All love. All gone. Did you listen to me and go see Charlie Pickett and 3 (I’ve renamed the band, thank you) at Stephen Talkhouse? Hope you got there early. The night before at Churchill’s Hideaway some great bands recorded…
Step right up and check it out, junk culture a go go, the side show that never ends. Girls in various stages of undress and whoredom, freaks up close and personal, mutant beings/club personalities way past the sloppy trappings of love, demanding only the quick fix of attention. It’s a…
Summer is the lean season. No good shows. Nothing happening. There isn’t one song by a South Florida artist good enough for commercial radio to play. Local music sucks. Meanwhile, back in the real world, it’s the last day of July, the dead-hot center of summer, and Charlie Pickett and…
The glitterati constellation, world without end, a black hole of hype and hustle, chance and destiny, ruled by the quantum theory of fabulousness. Random glitz systems colliding only under the spell of darkness, spontaneously combusting at random moments, eventually imploding with sex, fame, and money. Each infinitesimal molecule ruled by…
Who are you? Are you the buzzed-out little skinhead boy who fell off his chair while cheering on Young Turk at Washington Square in the wee hours, knocking over a table and spilling beer on my leg before hauling ass to what passes for bathrooms at the club? (If so,…
The real life funnies, Miami assuming the dimensions of a comic strip, spiced up and dumbed down for the tropical market. Love & Rockets parodying drag queens and warring promoters, a postabsurdist hypersexual Zippy with Bill Griffith’s intellectual ruminations studiously censored out, the Incredible Hulk as a particularly delectable go-go…
