Nobody’s been this excited about Jermaine Jackson in a very long time. “He dropped by and we spoke,” gushes Algerian singer Cheb Nasro over lunch on Lincoln Road, recalling the fruits of a Los Angeles recording session in a studio owned by Jackson’s long-time bassist. Apparently unaware that Jermaine Jackson…
It was hard to tell who was more annoying: the shirtless, apparently medicated fellow wobbling up and down Lincoln Road as he bellowed out Doobie Brothers tunes, or the officially sanctioned performers, bashing through some generic altrock atop a small stage. And that felt about right. This was, after all,…
If you bought into the advance hype, the MODA in Miami Fashion Week of the Americas should have been a raging success. Here finally was a chance for South Beach to burnish its reputation as the so-called American Riviera, in the process offering a sophisticated corrective to those who would…
Of all the heartfelt elegies for the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia, it was fellow traveler Ken Kesey’s that seemed to strike just the right note. “Hey, Jerry, what’s happening?” he breezily wrote shortly after Garcia’s August 1995 death. “I caught your funeral. Weird.” Weird indeed. It’s almost too easy to…
Read “Sex and the Single Raver, Part 1” An intense game of naked Twister is the best way to describe the scene unfolding inside the bathroom of the South Beach nightclub People’s Lounge. Technically speaking, Monica Mayhem and Joey Ray are having sex. And if director Kris Kramski — wielding…
Read “Sex and the Single Raver, Part 2” “I couldn’t believe the attention I got by putting on a little ten-dollar tank top,” marvels Lisa Garcia. “Suddenly I was at the top of the line, the A list in Miami.” The teeny top in question may have simply had the…
It’s not exactly a page out of the Vidal Sassoon hair-care manual, but it works. “Elmer’s glue,” explains Karl Michaels when asked for the secret to maintaining his spiky ‘do, an array of bright blue foot-high pointy cones. “I leave it in for four or five days, and it holds…
It’s morning in post-rave America — well, morning by South Beach standards — and Josh Kay is looking a little bleary-eyed, sitting outside a Lincoln Road café at 1:00 p.m. The main thoroughfare finally has sprung to life, and brunch is in full swing. In fairness to Kay, we’re seated…
When Bob Marley spoke of gathering the mythical Twelve Tribes of Israel for a final assault on Babylon, it’s doubtful he envisioned the 10,000-strong crowd that turned out February 17 for the eighth annual Bob Marley Caribbean Festival. Who’d a thunk so many of the Children of Jah would be,…
“You should start at the beginning …. Kierkegaard said, “Every duty is essentially duty to God.'” “Nigga be a leader, not a follower.” “What?” “Master P said that.” “You still listen to rap?” “Why?” “It’s just all about marketing now.” — Matt “Big Pussy, Jr.,” Bompensiero to Anthony Soprano, Jr.,…
In this high-tech era of worldwide Internet connections and satellite uplinks, an age when even junior-high kids are carrying cell phones, who on Earth still listens to fusty old shortwave radios? Spies, that’s who. As the ongoing espionage trial of the Wasp Network of Cuban spies definitively reveals, cold war…
Monday, January 15, 11:30 p.m. You never forget your first time. “Lua was just incredible,” sighs nightclub promoter Mykel Stevens with a smile. He’s momentarily lost in a wistful memory for the Española Way space in which he first threw his weekly Back Door Bamby party in the mid-Nineties. Stevens…
It all looks so easy. Just lease a space on Washington Avenue, hire a DJ, throw a velvet rope up out front, and voilà! You’re a South Beach club owner! All that’s left to do now is pick out a name for your venture, preferably one with a not-so-subtle allusion…
Nearly two decades before legions of concerned parents and oh-so-earnest editorial writers spent sleepless nights fretting over Eminem winning a Grammy Award, heavy metal was the musical siren luring America’s impressionable youth to their ruin. As he answers the door to his spacious Miami Shores home, Swedish-born heavy-metal warrior Yngwie…
This was a lousy year to be a film buff in Miami. Not that there weren’t plenty of great movies released. Just that Miami was one of the worst cities in the nation in which to see them. Reissued classics such as the vintage noir Rififi, Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Decalogue,…
There’s a theory that the pop music of a given moment in time isn’t determined by aural trends, record-company marketing plans, or even artistic flashes of brilliance. All those elements simply are dogs chasing the rabbit. Instead, if you want to decipher a period’s music, look to its drug of…
“The difference between the communist and capitalist systems is that, although both give you a kick in the ass, in the communist system you have to applaud, while in the capitalist system you can scream. And I came here to scream.” — Reinaldo Arenas, shortly after arriving in Miami, 1980…
Read Part 1 If you really want to ponder the strange and wonderful world of Florida politics, forget the ongoing Gore-Bush drama. Look instead to Cuba. As a reminder that not everyone has given up on Boris-and-Natasha cold war games, this past week saw the opening of the trial of…
Read Part 2 As the results of the Florida presidential election came in on November 7, Volusia County officials sitting in Daytona Beach were faced with a situation much more alarming than Gore and Bush tally irregularities, or even rumors of stolen ballot boxes. Without any advance warning Volusia County…
What happens when subcultures come of age? The answer would look a lot like the roomful of 75 social workers, therapists, teachers, activists, and self-professed “party people” who sat in a circle in a meeting room at downtown Miami’s Wyndham Hotel last month. An intense high school girl in baggy…
A camouflage-clad National Guardmember pokes his head into Kulchur’s car window. “Are you here for the special event?” he asks gruffly. I’m here for the drug-free rave apparently is the correct password. The guardsman motions to drive on to a parking spot past his hulking military truck outside Coconut Grove’s…
Wrapped tightly inside a black gown with eye-grabbing side slits and a strategically cut gap across her straining bosom, Keri Windsor doesn’t look like your typical e-commerce analyst. Indeed her ownership of a stripper agency, and her starring roles in X-rated films such as Low Down Dirty Dames, I Touch…
