The socially acceptable hour of midnight had passed at the farewell party for Club Nu, the exalted mega-disco on Miami Beach, and the marvelous ones had come to pay their respects and be part of nightlife history. Andrew Delaplaine, former owner of Scratch and current publisher of Wire, parked himself…
The thirtyish black man who stands outside the door of the Cash Dome purses his lips distractedly, idly rubbing the videocassette recorder he holds under one arm. Beside him, his wife clasps and unclasps her hands. Inside the Cutler Ridge pawnshop – a lurid pink double-hemisphere that looks like a…
Blue-black clouds rumbled overhead as Leonardo Selis and Ricardo de Jongh sifted through the tattered sheets of canvas, torn burlap sacks, half-filled inner tubes, and rusted iron pipe strewn about the front yard of a house in a working-class West Dade neighborhood. Against the side of the small house, three…
My earliest image of black Miami was supplied by one of my uncles, a man who always looked nine months pregnant in his thin cotton undershirts. Darting in and out of traffic in his Chevy station wagon, he would explain to me the finer points of race relations. “If a…
FITZCARRALDO: I’m doing all this because I have one dream. The opera. The great opera in the jungle. MOLLY: Fitzcarraldo will build it, and Caruso’ll sing the premiere. It’s only the dreamers who ever move mountains. Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog THE MOUTH OF A GIFT HORSE Perhaps you haven’t heard, but…
Late evening was bleeding into early night when we passed 140th Street and pulled off Biscayne Boulevard into the semicircular driveway of the Miami Moon Motel (“efficiencies, color TV, air conditioning”) in scenic North Miami Beach. A hand-written sign on the front door of the office instructed visitors to knock…
THREE WEEKS AGO, when James Brown began recording his first album since being released from a South Carolina prison, the studio was abuzz with the sort of excitement that surrounded his legendary sessions for “I Got You.” Three decades later, in the same studio, the Godfather of Soul looked around,…
AIRWAVE: Four years ago veteran radio DJ and production manager Robert W. Walker opened this North Miami Beach studio, which specializes in commercial production – jingles and other radio commercials – and audio for TV. Such work is usually done digitally, with synthesizers, but Airwave prefers the old-style approach, with…
There are two ways to record music: in analog or digital. Analog is the old-fashioned way. Singers and musicians play their parts into microphones, which are wired to a console, where engineers twist knobs and slide levers (known as faders) to add effects – balancing the volume of various sounds,…
Gloria Leonard, Al Goldstein’s friend and colleague, is on the phone from New York City. “Victims again?” Goldstein says to the former pornographic-movie star and publisher of High Society magazine. “It was a setup. You can’t win, Gloria.” It seems Leonard had been invited to appear on Geraldo to discuss…
Forget about those two front teeth. Back in the early Sixties, little Billy saw a TV commercial and immediately knew what he wanted for Christmas: King Zor, the Fighting Dinosaur. While primitive by today’s standards, the black-and-white commercial got the job done. Filmed from low camera angles to make the…
Chris, a 33-year-old transvestite hooker with drowsy hazel eyes and a coiffed copper hairdo, looks up from his game of solitaire. “Why am I here?” he asks. “This is where I like it best.” Chris’s possessions – clothing, shoes, a silk robe, a purse, plates, cooking pans, several teddy bears…
Three days ago, it might have answered to “Spot.” Or “Checkers.” Or – God forbid – “Pumpkin.” But for now, the mutt heaped like soggy coal on the asphalt fringe of Miami Gardens Drive is fetching slippers for a higher authority. Its muzzle, framed by a Rorschach of dried blood,…
If you drive from Miami up to Surfside and park in the shade of a certain palm tree near the fashionable Bal Harbour Shops, you can watch Leon Weinstein coming home to his bungalow at midday. He appears in a heat shimmer at one end of Carlyle Street with Peppi,…
When Michael Robert Finney, a member of a black militant group called the Republic of New Africa, hijacked a Trans World Airlines flight to Cuba nearly twenty years ago, he saw himself as a freedom fighter against racism in America, an angry young man whose destiny was shaped by historical…
blowfly n. Any of several flies of the family Calliphoridae that deposit their eggs in carcasses or carrion or in open sores and wounds. The American Heritage Dictionary After riding a Metrobus from his home just south of Joe Robbie Stadium to the North Miami Beach record company where he…
“Some of his decisions are not popular, but they are correct. Others are simply wrong. But he must have been given the authority to make those decisions or he wouldn’t be making them. Obviously he’s doing what someone higher wants done, or someone else would be in his position.” An…
Do you have what it takes to embark on a new career in the highly skilled field of zoning administration? You might possess the special aptitude required to decipher zoning codes and blueprints, to distinguish a C-1 from an R-1 at a glance, to rule on whether a project requires…
Under a zinc-colored sky, a block away from the railroad tracks and next to a buzzing electrical substation, a young man with hair immaculately slicked back, in black baggies with fob swinging low, oversize gray suit, starched white shirt, and a fat Forties tie takes giant strides as he leads…
Long before 1901 – the year Miami’s first canal was dug from the Miami River to present-day Allapattah – social progressives and capitalist greedheads alike had fantasized about a bigger, drier Miami. Not only were the vast western swamplands unprofitable in their natural state, they were an affront to the…
From the moment I stepped into the canoe, I felt good about the trip. The boat, a seventeen-foot aluminum Grumman, capsized instantly and left me standing up to my shoulders in Biscayne Bay, flapping against the chop. My knapsack bobbed among the swells, along with a life vest and two…
On a Tuesday-morning drive to Miami International Airport, Cesar Trasobares is rolling up the ramp from Le Jeune Road as he begins to describe the terrain around him. “What you have to imagine is a progression from light to dark to light,” he says. “Here we’re going through a dark,…
