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BEST ART MUSEUM

Miami Art Museum

Art experts know that the museum, as a socio-cultural institution, was pronounced dead by a group of neo-Dada performance artists during a 1987 visit to the Museum of the Medieval Torture Arts in Toledo, Spain. The word has yet to reach most other cosmopolitan cities, but as curators of MAM can proudly attest, the Magic City is ahead of its time. "Miami remains the only major city in the United States without a world-class art museum," declared the eloquent essay that accompanied MAM's self-referential "Museums for a New Millennium: Concepts, Projects, Buildings" exhibition. A show surreally brought 25 of the most astoundingly designed art museums in the world (Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Spain, Rem Koolhaas's Center for Art and Media Technology in Germany) to MAM, which, of course, didn't make the list of 25 itself. They all fit inside MAM, thanks to the magic of photography and scale models. In the show's aftermath, however, MAM is eschewing its vanguard status and embracing the traditional, envisioning its own world-class waterfront building in Bicentennial Park. Just remember to never call it a "museum."

BEST PLACE TO MEET SINGLE WOMEN

Wyndham Miami Beach Resort

According to professional event planners, the Wyndham is the number-one spot in South Florida for high school reunions. Throughout the year, but especially in the late summer months, the place is heavily booked with old school pals getting together and tying one on after ten years (or fifteen or twenty) in the big bad world. Here single women are embarrassingly easy to spot. They usually arrive unescorted and look as hot as they possibly can, especially at ten-year reunions. If you're a clever fox, be ready to strike up a conversation the moment she puts on her name tag. Your lady will be hungry for attention from a good-looking man. After all, she wants to impress her former classmates. If you're lucky, she'll be there for a St. Brendan's reunion. There's nothing quite like a good Miami Catholic girl from Westchester.

BEST PLACE TO MEET SINGLE WOMEN

Wyndham Miami Beach Resort

According to professional event planners, the Wyndham is the number-one spot in South Florida for high school reunions. Throughout the year, but especially in the late summer months, the place is heavily booked with old school pals getting together and tying one on after ten years (or fifteen or twenty) in the big bad world. Here single women are embarrassingly easy to spot. They usually arrive unescorted and look as hot as they possibly can, especially at ten-year reunions. If you're a clever fox, be ready to strike up a conversation the moment she puts on her name tag. Your lady will be hungry for attention from a good-looking man. After all, she wants to impress her former classmates. If you're lucky, she'll be there for a St. Brendan's reunion. There's nothing quite like a good Miami Catholic girl from Westchester.

BEST LAWYER

Lida Rodriguez-Taseff

Smart, scrappy, and resolute, Lida Rodriguez-Taseff turned out to be exactly the kind of president the ACLU's Miami chapter needed to see it through a tumultuous three years. (Her tenure ended this past March.) A partner at the Duane Morris law firm, she was front and center on a wide range of constitutional conflicts, from defending Cuban exiles' right to protest the Latin Grammys to opposing the repeal of the county's gay-rights ordinance. She has been a vociferous and relentless critic of city officials' handling of protests at the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit last November. She also played a pivotal role in establishing Miami's Civilian Investigative Panel, which is now pursuing allegations of police brutality during those FTAA protests. Rodriguez-Taseff was and remains a role model for all who cherish the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights.

BEST LAWYER

Lida Rodriguez-Taseff

Smart, scrappy, and resolute, Lida Rodriguez-Taseff turned out to be exactly the kind of president the ACLU's Miami chapter needed to see it through a tumultuous three years. (Her tenure ended this past March.) A partner at the Duane Morris law firm, she was front and center on a wide range of constitutional conflicts, from defending Cuban exiles' right to protest the Latin Grammys to opposing the repeal of the county's gay-rights ordinance. She has been a vociferous and relentless critic of city officials' handling of protests at the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit last November. She also played a pivotal role in establishing Miami's Civilian Investigative Panel, which is now pursuing allegations of police brutality during those FTAA protests. Rodriguez-Taseff was and remains a role model for all who cherish the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights.

BEST LOCAL ARTIST

Roberto Behar and Rosario Marquardt

Their five-tiered, twelve-foot-tall House of Cards, inhabited by humanoid dummies, was a big hit at Miami Art Museum. This artistic duo also deserves credit for a shack they never built. They had planned to construct Casa del Pirata on a wall of the historic La Cabaña fortress using boards they had hoped to find in Cuba. "A sort of romantic monument to individuality and courage, misfortune, and hope," Behar says. "Maybe the house implies a shipwreck, the search for a treasure, or a story of love and betrayal." Maybe a little too pointed for paranoid government curators afraid that a dummy of the dreaded dictator as buccaneer would appear. They nixed the project, citing rules against tampering with the fort's infrastructure. Yeah, right. Meanwhile authorities in Brussels let the Argentine couple play with the façade of the Centre International pour la Ville, l'Architecture et le Paysage. For a work called The Mask, they draped a beautiful rainbow spectrum of 40-foot-long plastic streamers from the roof of the sullen brown brick museum to the sidewalk, forcing people to penetrate the strips to enter the building. R & R's surreal outdoor living room has long been a Design District icon. They're currently plotting to transform Monument Island into The Star of Miami, a huge painting visible from jets landing at MIA. See some of their works at Placemaker Gallery (3852 N. Miami Ave.) in the Design District and you'll see what we mean.

BEST LOCAL WRITER

Carl Zablotny

Rumors of South Beach's demise are greatly exaggerated -- at least according to Wire, the Beach weekly published and written mostly by Carl Zablotny, a one-man cheerleading army for the city's enduring charms. Since buying the paper from founder Andrew Delaplaine in 1999, Zablotny has continued its mission of chronicling the city's queer social whirl. Dashing from nightclub event to art happening, profiling local entrepreneurs and visiting celebs, as well as shooting photos of it all, Zablotny takes a refreshingly catholic view of just what constitutes a notable cultural event. It makes for a wacky mix, but Zablotny is at least as political in his outlook as Delaplaine's often over-the-top editorials were. If his impassioned campaign endorsements seem to change wildly depending upon which Beach candidates buy full-page Wire ads, as when a commissioner labeled a nightlife "Nazi" suddenly transformed into a well-meaning civic leader, well, that's part of the fun. After all, as Zablotny himself has wryly quipped in his own pages, "It takes more than a pretty face to make the cover of the Wire ... or does it?" Upton Sinclair he ain't, but for a vivid slice of the Beach life -- high, low, or in drag -- Zablotny delivers week after week.

BEST PARKING ON SOUTH BEACH

Flamingo Park

Truth foretold: One day in the near future there will be no place to park on South Beach that will cost less than cab fare from halfway across Miami-Dade County. But till that day arrives (and it is inevitable) there are still some prime, meter-free parking spots in the lots around Flamingo Park. The park is just a few short blocks from Washington Avenue, where most of the rambunctious nightclubs are located. (When it comes to free parking on South Beach, proximity is a luxury.) You may encounter a few guys in search of sex with complete strangers, but it's relatively safe and regularly patrolled by police. The upside of that: If you're looking to find convenient parking and get gay too, you don't even have to leave the vicinity.

BEST PARKING ON SOUTH BEACH

Flamingo Park

Truth foretold: One day in the near future there will be no place to park on South Beach that will cost less than cab fare from halfway across Miami-Dade County. But till that day arrives (and it is inevitable) there are still some prime, meter-free parking spots in the lots around Flamingo Park. The park is just a few short blocks from Washington Avenue, where most of the rambunctious nightclubs are located. (When it comes to free parking on South Beach, proximity is a luxury.) You may encounter a few guys in search of sex with complete strangers, but it's relatively safe and regularly patrolled by police. The upside of that: If you're looking to find convenient parking and get gay too, you don't even have to leave the vicinity.

BEST FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FAME

Celeste Fraser Delgado

Miami New Times staff writer Celeste Fraser Delgado was arrested and jailed last November as she was reporting on the protests associated with the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit. While other reporters were "embedded" with police, Delgado was in handcuffs, charged with the misdemeanors "failure to obey a lawful command" and "resisting arrest without violence," accusations she vehemently denied. After a sleepless night in the slammer, she was released from Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center, but not before local NBC affiliate WTVJ (Channel 6) and the Associated Press had reported on the incident. With the clock ticking on her fifteen minutes, Delgado quickly penned a 2700-word story about her experience. Following its publication ("Jailhouse Crock," November 27, 2003), Newsweek quoted her and PBS documentarians interviewed her, as did the Sun-Sentinel, ABC affiliate WPLG (Channel 10), Univision, and Telemundo. Later she filed a formal complaint with Miami's Civilian Investigative Panel, but by then her time was up.

Best Of Miami®

Best Of Miami®

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