Mattel’s new Ken doll is on the market. New Ken is getting almost as much press as New Coke did. Since his introduction at a toy convention in New York City in February, Ken’s been everywhere, including the front page of the New York Times’s Arts and Leisure section. Why…
Miami commissioner Miriam Alonso has suffered some recent setbacks in her bid to become the city’s first female mayor. Considered a strong front-runner just weeks ago, polls now indicate Alonso will have to scramble if she is to overcome rival Steve Clark in a runoff. (New Times went to press…
No use lying about it, the game was ugly, a final blemish on the frowning face of the Miami Heat’s 1992-93 season. The Knicks were in town, the swaggering, trash-talking Knicks, tuning up for their playoff date with Air Jordan’s Bulls and embarrassing the Heat without much effort. In one…
It was all in honor of Dan Quayle, back in February 1991, when he was still vice president. Drivers down Biscayne Boulevard slowed to an irritated halt while a few dozen people crossed the street, back and forth from the I-395 overpass to Bicentennial Park, like a disoriented trail of…
Miami’ll drink to that! Having won the Southeast regional semifinals of the Tanqueray Rocks talent contest at the Stephen Talkhouse on South Beach (after a technicality disqualified top vote getter Nil Lara and Beluga Blue), Natural Causes jetted to New York City last week and came back with something fine,…
Raul Martinez’s office in exile is about three blocks from Hialeah City Hall, on the ground floor of a pink-hued building on East First Avenue. He’s got a glass-topped desk here, and a leather couch. The scattershot decor includes maps of Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties, a Haitian painting…
At certain moments the bodega on NW 21st Street near 20th Avenue looks deceptively still, a forgotten concrete low-rise next door to a men’s underwear company, amid a scraggly topography of small warehouses, factories, and workshops just north of the Miami River. The sign above the bodega is straightforward: Yaber…
Dumb it down, mainstream it, keep it safe, and corral the masses for your advertisers. The mentality of commercial radio programmers explains why people walk around mumbling “radio sucks” and it’s also one reason Big A and 30 cohorts have relaunched the pirate station Radio X, at 88.3 on your…
That a liberal bastion like the New York Times would command Congress to turn off TV Marti came as a surprise to no one. In an editorial published October 1, the Times referred to the controversial television project as “the limp blimp,” and noted that it had consumed $67 million…
A mean little piece of land along the Miami River gained brief notoriety last month as the site of the so-called pizza murder. A thirteen-year-old boy, who had brought some pizzas to share with others who frequented the spot, shot and killed a homeless man for taking two slices instead…
The old man doesn’t have to wait long to prove his point. Where upward-flaring, stainless-steel columns once graced the grand, sweeping entranceway of the Fontainebleau Hilton Resort and Spa on Miami Beach’s Collins Avenue, spindly shafts now stand. “I hate to go back into these places,” he mutters as he…
At the tunnel-light end of the Seventies, Ted Gottfried was working as a water-meter reader for Dade County. Leslie Wimmer was employed at a bookstore near her home in Deerfield Beach. Along with a close friendship, Gottfried and Wimmer shared a passionate curiosity about the revolution in rock. Disco was…
During his long career, Morris Lapidus worked on hundreds of architectural projects, including stores, hotels and motels, apartment buildings and public housing projects, banks, schools, synagogues, hospitals, laboratories, theaters, shopping malls, municipal facilities, office buildings, convention centers, country clubs, private homes, and cruise ships. The architect’s involvement ranged from remodeling…
Each year, out of the goodness of their promotion-hungry hearts, booze giant Tanqueray sponsors Tanqueray Rocks, a national battle of the bands that yields a compilation CD, juicy prizes, and, for the top five bands, a trip to New York City for the finals. This year one of the five…
Few black South Floridians enjoy the name recognition and high profile of Miami attorney H.T. Smith.
This was not going to be a particularly pleasant holiday season for Simon Steckel. Just two days before Christmas 1992, the prominent Coral Gables attorney had injured his back badly enough that he would later need surgery. Adding to his discomfort was the sorry state of his marriage, which appeared…
Increasingly, stern voices are shouting at those brave enough to walk the streets of Miami. And when we turn to respond, we are ashamed to discover we are being chewed out — by a car. “Warning! You are too close to the vehicle,” proclaims the voice. “Step back!” “Oh, yeah?”…
A few months back, during one of his regular Wednesday night jazz jams at Tobacco Road, flautist Mark Krumich was approached by a tense man who wanted to know when Krumich’s Roadkill Jazz Orchestra was going to take a break. Krumich, who has run the jam session at the venerable…
On Tuesday, October 5, the Florida Press Club announced the winners of its annual Excellence in Journalism Awards. New Times and its writers won six awards in competition with other weekly newspapers throughout the state. The work of staff writer Jim DeFede topped two categories. DeFede earned a first place…
Evenings, when the sidewalks of South Beach become a pedestrian mall of boozing and buying, Michael Hernandez’s pitch might be mistaken for just another commodity among the burgeoning itinerant marketplace of flower vendors, parrot photographers, and craftspeople. But Hernandez’s merchandise is singular. And he’s unloading it for free. The 23-year-old…
Lisa Cox and Caroline Clone’s positions as Miami’s top lesbian club promoters make them two of the most well-known members of an increasingly visible community. Gay women’s prominence in the media, both nationally and locally, has raised public awareness of lesbianism and, in turn, has prompted in the lesbian community…
A Prelude Nineteen floors above the gum-stained sidewalks of downtown Miami, in a private room within the First Union Financial Center’s exclusive Miami Club, an assembly of South Florida’s most important but least known individuals gathered recently for their monthly luncheon. Between them they represented some 40 nations, and each…
