No one ever has disputed Robbie Gennet’s piano prowess — his eight-hours per night practice regimen doesn’t hurt, nor does the fact he began playing at age six — but that alone isn’t enough to satisfy his dreams of pop stardom. With earlier songs such as “Niggle’s Parish” and “Jones,”…
As bleak as 1994 was, with deaths of important figures too numerable to list here, it’s nice that the time is neatly framed, as if calendar measures meant something. As for 1995: Think positive. I’m predicting that to be the next year’s big trend: a move toward positive approaches, a…
Actually there were just a few of us in town for the holidays, going from party to party. Sylvester Stallone. Madonna. Emilio Estefan. Ingrid Casares, always in the right places. Daisy Fuentes and her floating house of discord. Gianni Versace, traveling with sister Donatella, her husband, Paul Beck, and the…
Don’t ever say that Florida Attorney General Robert A. Butterworth isn’t a rock and roller. Actually it’s the local bureau of the attorney general’s office that’s throwing the party, but the boss and his Tallahassee posse are invited (sorry, but the public isn’t) to the office’s holiday party, where the…
I ran into another “homeless” street guy, Uncle Tim, a friend, who revealed through Scripture that my entire Theory of Human Life is based on a fallacy, namely the story of Adam and Eve. See, I always figured that because everyone came from the same source — Adam and Eve…
At a certain level of spiritual coarseness, the nobler aspirations of humanity are stripped of meaning, made ridiculous, and life becomes mere agitation, a wonderment over trifles: the deceits of glamour, the frenzy of renown, the opiate of dissipation. As with the pursuit of religious epiphanies, devotees must suspend disbelief…
You can tell Crash Basket has a handle on songwriting and can play just fine by listening to their Pete’s New Shoes. They rock as clean — but much harder — live. Really driving stuff. Saw ’em at a club called Churchill’s Hideaway in Little Haiti, which I hear we’re…
Some people say life’s the thing, but of late we’ve been seeking solace in air-conditioning and reading, taking comfort in the vast historical continuum of the social graces A from the obscenely rich matrons of the gilded age to the calculated pseudonihilism of the Warhol crowd A attempting to place…
Miami, the ultimate 21st-century city, a portable prison of twisted culture in the vanguard of the bizarre. The demon seed offspring of the American family, an incorrigible distant relation who lowers the tone and drives everyone nuts, dangerous but undeniably interesting. A city careening along with the invincible logic of…
Don’t let it fool ya. Life, like this column, don’t have a beginning, middle, and end. This ain’t freaking Shake-speare (it takes a hyphen, by the way, because it was actually a nom de plume used by Edward de Vere, the true author of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth…) with…
It might seem petulant and childish, but several powerful music industry sources insist that parochialism — almost to the point of isolationism — can be the best way for a local music scene to prosper. These sources say that a community — in this case, South Florida — needs a…
It’s a great life, especially on paper, this play of light and darkness, ferreting out scraps of nourishing filth for a curious sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde existence. Evenings in the bowels of America, restrained at the vast banquet of nightlife like reined-in livestock, held back by domestic circumstance and a pernicious…
I am a whore. And I’m not so idiotic as to try to convince myself or anyone else otherwise. I turn word tricks for money. I was talking to someone whose opinion I respect, and this person asked why I’m so “reckless,” intentionally making enemies of people who could help…
The summer of discontent, tainted and debased as a leper, taking an immersion course in alien surroundings with an idyll in Atlanta: polite, humanistic, charged up with neo-Babbittry and all-American positivism, a brave new city with Coca-Cola as the munificent Big Brother. A boomtown landscape gathering strength for the Olympics…
Oh, great, now I’m getting complaints from readers because I’m not babbling self-referentially and taking up valuable space with my meaningless meanderings. You’re angry because I’ve been dispensing with the endless blah-blah-blah that generally makes this column about three times longer than it needs to be. Ya gotta understand, partners…
The dead zone of summer, fraying tempers and unfortunate behaviors, and yet the interior landscape somehow turns cheery, the system adapting to an inhospitable environment like a beast fighting for survival. To be both hot and depressed, after all, is to risk extinction. And so it’s a policy of disengagement,…
Let’s talk about the F-word. Buck you, not that F-word, this is a Family newspaper, you Fasshole. Sorry, I meant to call you a Flibbertigibbet. Look it up. I did. Brings me Felicity. Then there’s Fetid. Fetid, which means “stanky,” can be pronounced fehtid or feetid, and can even be…
I know you’re trying, I tried to, too. But I’m tired of playing the game, tired of everything, because it never stops. Pain on top of pain under pain. Bad things happen to good people, bad things happen all the time, every time, and, frankly, I’ve lost interest. So if…
The great advantage of these half-baked atrocities of guerrilla journalism sewn in the shadows of life is the enriching horror of being forced to regularly confront the real world: the lust and greed, the rage and madness that spring from thwarted longings, the fumblings toward charity and redemption. The darker-urges…
Yellow cabs fry in the sun like eggs. It’s a game and we’ll play more in a minute, but first…. I’m always writing about this column or myself in this column or on myself, but this week it’s time for something new. Public service. Talkin’ phone etiquette. The record command…
A song of August, the dirge of sweat, exhaustion, and derangement, ready to embrace the new cachet of heroin addiction and serial murder. The months, years, and epochs spent in the trenches of trash blending into one vast well of spite and noise, a wail of longing, desire, and general…
Where am I? What floor am I on? Where have I been? Told you about vacay, but then when we got back home I got really sick, some throat virus or something, and it wiped me out. Thanks to a ten-pack-a-day cig habit (I know it’s illegal to smoke tobacco…
