In mock honor of my tenth anniversary as a professional music critic, I wonder if you might indulge my views of the future of music journalism: There is none. “Virtual reality” — an oxymoronic piece of linguistic rubbish to begin with — is now “virtuality.” We’ve gone too far. We’ll…
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…
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…
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…
Certainly much will be said beginning this coming Tuesday when If I Were a Carpenter hits record stores. The release is a collection of songs by the Carpenters, Karen and Richard, as performed by some of today’s hottest and coolest alternative rock acts, including Sonic Youth, Redd Kross, Cracker, and…
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…
In many parts of the world one of the biggest names in pop music is Aswad. If that’s a news flash, you have to understand that the world is a big place. It doesn’t begin and end with North America, although the British reggae band also has enjoyed a few…
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 room is brightly lighted and freshly painted all white, like in a hospital. Or a morgue. There’s a cooler in the corner filled with ice and a bottle of water. Above, a lackadaisical ceiling fan spins slowly around and around and around like the world itself. There’s a table…
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…
Third Wish consists of serious musicians, veterans of the University of Miami’s music school, true virtuosos capable of technical precision in a variety of genres. Even so, they’re a damn good rock band. If that seems unlikely — that players who can run through a perfect Beethoven sonata are also…
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…
On a scalding Miami afternoon, Juan Alvarez arrives home from work to find his son, known as Christopher Alvy, sitting in the kitchen talking to a stranger. So Alvarez fixes some cafe cubano and breaks out the scrapbooks. The father, a former baseball player and musician, flips the pages and…
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…
During the great spring shakeup at WIOD-AM (610) — including a shuffle of the talk-show lineup and the hiring of a new program director — afternoon personality Phil Hendrie was, after just a few weeks on the air, suspended for vandalizing the studio. Then he took sick. The station’s hopes…
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…
Sounds simple, huh? Well, you have to drive all the way across Pennsylvania, the long way, horizontal. Which doesn’t sound bad until you get to the border and find out that the speed limit in all of Pennsylvania is only 55. It rained and rained (throughout the entire 4500 mile…
“Everything I say is a lie” — that’s some semantic conundrum. If everything I say is a lie, and I say everything I say is a lie, then that’s the truth, so everything I say can’t be a lie, so it’s not the truth. Reality can be tricky like that,…
Fuck everything you know. Now imagine those four words sung plaintively like a wishful prayer, not a harsh declarative. Add a little acoustic strum behind them, making the nihilistic verbiage — fuck everything you know — still gentler. Fuck all that’s gone before, all you’ve ever heard and seen, everything…
Now that you’ve all had time to celebrate my demise, it’s time to get back to work. Natch, this week it’s What I Did on My Summer Vacation (Part 1). There sure is a lot of America out there, really a lot of Americas. We drove to Georgia, slept, drove…
Even fishing gets old. But this was a new one on me. “Bro, I just caught a 30-pound fish, about three feet long, using a blueberry for bait in the lake by the horse track.” Of course it was Zap talking. I searched my memory. Had I ever fished at…
