Tom Austin

This is the last "Swelter," the end of the road. It's time to say goodbye to all that, keep things short, sweet, and even more about me than usual. I've had a long enough run, God knows, given that the first column appeared on August 21, 1991, which translates to...

There are certain perks to living in Miami, but at times it's rather like being a typecast actor, vainly struggling to escape some early career embarrassments and forge a new image of professional seriousness. Of all the baggage associated with the city, none is more crippling than the idea that...

Of all the luminaries who have passed through Miami, Kenneth Anger -- avant-garde cinema pioneer and author of the Tinseltown trash classics Hollywood Babylon and Hollywood Babylon II -- may be the most remarkable. Anger has been flown in as a featured attraction of the Miami Film Festival and the...

Among other charms, Miami has very little in common with the rest of the U.S. It's a Disney World devoted to decadence and twisted family values, a festering tank town hacked out of the swamps and overrun by psychotics, crooks, and visionary hustlers. In this tropical gulag of American exile,...

Miami approaches its centennial celebrations, and during certain moments it feels as if I've been on the job for a hundred years. Amid a profound delirium, my early days of discreetly licking Julia Tuttle's ass for invitations to tea have yielded to the current epoch of scattershot sycophancy extended to...