Audio By Carbonatix
We don’t begrudge the Internet. We wouldn’t be writing and you wouldn’t be reading this if we did. But there’s something about print that just can’t be replicated. Maybe it’s how natural it feels to read it on the crapper, or the grainy, inky feel of newsprint, or the way you can roll it up and squash cockroaches, but we think there will always be a place in this world for newspapers. (What did you expect us to say?)
That said, we’re restarting our “This Week in Print” posts to remind you that while New Times’ online version is required work reading, the print edition is where we truly flex our writing chops. And we chose the right week too. New Times takes Florida’s villainous Gov. Rick Scott out to the whipping shed in Lisa Rab’s “Overlord of Evil” feature. By now, the state is collectively saying, “How was this guy ever elected?” Rab documents his dirtiest deeds so far:
Since taking office, Scott has: 1. outsourced prisons to his political
donors; 2. enacted Jim Crow-style voting laws; 3. axed funding for
people with disabilities; 4. slashed public education funding; and 5. gutted environmental protection programs, among other things Rab
highlights.
Here’s a little taste of what she wrote about his contempt
for open government:
Rick Scott doesn’t hide his disdain for Florida’s open government laws.
In February, he invited three powerful state Senate leaders to his
mansion for a private dinner. They discussed, among other topics, his
budget proposal. This was strange, because when three senators gather to
discuss legislative business, Senate rules require the meeting to be
open to the public. But the citizens of Florida didn’t get a dinner
invitation.
In March, Scott scheduled a coffee date with ten legislators. When a
Miami Herald reporter inquired about who would be attending and what the
politicians would discuss, Scott’s spokesman snapped at him, saying the
event was “purely social.” Then he canceled the coffee date. Scott,
meanwhile, told workers at the Department of Elderly Affairs that he
doesn’t use email — which is a convenient way to avoid creating a public
record of his conversations. “I don’t have email,” he said in March.
“It’s easier if I never get emailed. I get embarrassed by it that way.
It’s not as easy to communicate.”
While Rab documented the guv’s actions, staff writer Tim Elfrink sat down
former Mayor Loco and current Miami-Dade Commissioner Xavier Suarez to get a
handle on his re-emergence in local politics for this week’s Metro story.
With Suarez, you never really know what you’re going to get, but Elfrink
takes you inside the commissioner’s head in “Don’t Call Him Loco,” and that’s an interesting place
to be.
Mostly, he still sounds like “Mayor Pothole,” the brilliant leader who
guided Miami out of its mid-’80s economic funk and racial strife as the
city’s first Cuban-born mayor. But talk to him long enough and flashes
appear of “Mayor Loco,” the seemingly deranged guy from the late ’90s
who banged on an old lady’s door in the middle of the night and insisted
a $68 million budget deficit didn’t exist — and more recently
self-published a thick-as-an-Aristotelian-brick treatise seeking to
unify all scientific and religious thought.
advertisementadvertisement
Sure, the issue is filled with politics, but it’s chock full of culture
as well, led by Chris Joseph’s review of Ilan Hatsor’s Masked, playing at
GableStage. Well-produced family dramas are exercises in tension, but
with the backdrop of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the play brims
with intrigue and intensity.
[Masked] is full of psychodrama that plays out the intensity and dread
of men at the height of paranoia stirred by legitimate, unabated fear
and anger.
At its heart, Masked is a story of family and blood. And it deftly toes
the line between political commentary and emotionally charged drama.
Truth is, the setting could be anywhere, during any war or violent
struggle in human history. But the rawness of the subject matter brings
home the richness of this particular story, and director Joseph Adler
gets his actors to hit the right notes at every turn.
And we couldn’t tally up the wonders of this week’s print edition with
our take on the finale of the Harry Potter franchise. Nick Schager gives
it to you straight with his review of Harry Potter and the Deathly
Hallows: Part 2:
With a pop-culture Goliath riding on its back, David Yates’s adaptation
of the second half of Rowling’s last tome follows a Part 1 that could
barely sustain itself as a stand-alone work, given that it was driven
less by necessary plot fidelity than by a desire to squeeze two films’
worth of box office profits from a single book, a bottom-line decision
that’s also true of this entry’s superfluous 3-D. Yet Part 2 is a
magnificent finale for this fantasy opus, one that pays ample justice to
Harry’s long-in-the-making showdown with He Who Must Not Be Named, a
battle in which life and death, the past and the future, precariously
hang in the balance.
That’s just a sample. You’ll have to pick up the print issue to read the rest of the stories.
Follow Cultist on Facebook and Twitter @CultistMiami.
