Melville House BooksI used to spend a lot of time and money purchasing slick vinyl re-issues of "forgotten" or "lost" eras in American music: albums with titles like New Orleans Funk, Vol. 1: The Original Sound of Funk, 1960-1975 and Miami Sound: Rare Funk and Soul from Miami, Florida 1967-1974.Listening to the artists, who were usually minorities signed to small, regional labels, it was sometimes hard to figure out why they never made it. Bad luck? Lack of ambition? The wrong look? Racism?
Wikicommons​Former Miami New Times staffer, Palmetto High grad, and current New Yorker editor Ben Greenman will read from his new book, Please Step Back, this Saturday at 5 p.m at Books & Books Coral Gables (265 Aragon Ave.).If you missed our review of the book -- a retrospective of the '60s and '70s rock scene through the lens of fictional rockstar Rock Foxx -- give it quick read by clicking here.Even better, read some of Greenman's work while he was a staffer here:&n
​Before Dwyane Wade, the O'Neal twins, Mario Chalmers, and Eric Spoiled Boy, a seven-foot two-inch giant ruled the Miami Arena. Alan Ogg drew calls of "Ogggggggggggg," and the fans loved him. Now he's dead at age 42. An infection somehow reached his enlarged heart. In 1991, then staff writer and now New Yorker calendar editor (and author) Ben Greenman wrote an admiring profile of the guy. It was a beautiful piece of work that aptly captured the city's early affection for the crappy team and th
Don't let the glasses fool you; he's a literary super hero​For fellow writers, Jonathan Lethem needs no introduction. 1999's Motherless Brooklyn, the story of a detective with Tourette's syndrome, put Lethem on the map, but by that point, he'd already written four novels that breached the genre line between science fiction and literary fiction, a line that, thanks in large part to Lethem, has more or less disappeared. A constant advocate of the fantastic and book culture in general, Lethem has
Ben Greenman​
Ben Greenman was a 20-year-old rookie scribe
fresh out of Yale when he was hired to write for the Miami New Times in 1990. The Palmettto Senior High alum joined a rabble
rousing crew of writers who included Greg Baker, Jim Defede, Sean Rowe and
Steve Almond. They were the ones who laid the foundation for the alt weekly's
muck-racking ways. "It was the wild, wild west in those days,"
Greenman notes. "The paper gave us a lot of license to do creative
work."
And
Greenman certainl
