Good morning. Miami Herald circulation department. How can I help you? Yes, I’d like to report a problem with my delivery boy. What’s wrong, sir? It seems the little bastard has shrunk my paper. Just because I forgot to tip him at Christmas doesn’t mean he has the right to…
Dear Jim: I was greatly disturbed by the recent efforts of some city officials to ban Cuba’s Los Van Van from playing in Miami, and was particularly appalled by how smug and self-righteous the mayor and several city commissioners seemed throughout the entire charade. Don’t they realize they are behaving…
Once again, the cultural commissars of Miami’s Cuban-exile community have cracked their whips. The result: the embarrassing spectacle of city officials falling all over themselves in their quest to cancel the first local appearance of legendary Cuban timba outfit Los Van Van. Of the group’s 28 tour stops around the…
Miami finally received a tangible expression of the economic aftershocks of Ricky Martin mania and the newly ascendant Latin chic with the opening of the second Café Nostalgia, this one on Miami Beach. The club’s location inside the venerable Forge restaurant — a world away from the original site’s funky…
It’s not easy being a hardcore punk band in Miami. Just ask Jason Deucifer, drummer for the local outfit Where Fear and Weapons Meet. “People are scared of us,” Deucifer says with frustration in his voice. “We draw 300 kids to our shows but we get no press, no nothing…
Politics and pop music are rare bedfellows these days. Instead social consciousness finds itself comically channeled into spirituality, where today’s young activists can adopt a rebellious stance without having to tackle the thornier issues of class and power. Thus, Lilith Fair audiences can coo about what passes for premillennium feminism…
For anyone pondering the explosion of interest in Brazilian pop — particularly David Byrne’s tireless stumping on behalf of tropicalismo — last month’s concert by Brazilian superstar Caetano Veloso at the Jackie Gleason Theater explained it all. It wasn’t just Veloso’s ability to meld gorgeously lilting melodies with ferocious blasts…
If there is one moment, one 30-second span of time, on the FBI surveillance tapes of James Burke that is more striking than any other, it is the instant Howard Gary handed Burke $5000 in cash — “a down payment” Gary called it, for a larger bribe to come. Burke…
In true South Beach style, no matter how heated a recent three-hour meeting of the Washington Avenue Task Force got, few of the local club owners in attendance stopped answering their cell phones. Instead they simply got up from their chairs at the tightly packed conference-room table inside Miami Beach…
Had the penny tax for transportation passed two weeks ago, the owners of construction companies and engineering firms (and their lobbyists) wouldn’t have been the only folks gleefully anticipating a twenty-year feast of riches. Reporters all over town would have raised a toast as well. In fact, as the election…
Think of Miami’s current hip-hop scene and bass-influenced figures such as Trick Daddy and the expatriated J.T. Money come to mind, with their machine-gun snare-popping rhythms and over-the-top braggadocio. Still, other styles do percolate around town, albeit with far less attention. MC Kenyatta raised more than a few eyebrows with…
Celebrating like members of a football team who had just won the Super Bowl, dozens of federal prosecutors and law-enforcement agents gathered on the back patio of Tobacco Road, reveling in the conviction a few hours earlier of Miguel Moya, the jury foreman in the 1996 trial of reputed drug…
The overwhelming defeat of Alex Penelas’s proposal to raise the sales tax by a penny leaves the mayor in strange and unfamiliar territory. Until now he had been the golden boy of Miami-Dade politics, his political savvy having always landed him on the winning side of important issues. Never before…
There’s no official word from the Phish camp yet, but the band’s singer Trey Anastasio let the cat out of the bag onstage during a Columbus, Ohio, show this past week. The group will be performing a millennium New Year’s Eve blowout at the 2000-acre Kirton Ranch, northwest of West…
Although investigators say they believe the victim, the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office has decided not to file criminal charges against North Miami Police Det. Fred St. Amand for allegedly exposing himself and masturbating, on three separate occasions, in front of a female co-worker. The State Attorney’s investigation, which was released…
“When I first read it, I just couldn’t even believe it. That story is the definition of bad research,” says Marc Christopher, director of Miami Beach’s electronica-focused internet radio station the Womb (www.thewomb.com). The story in question was a recent Herald profile of the Beach’s EyeQRadio (www.EyeQRadio.com) and its founders…
One of Pres. Bill Clinton’s few endearing qualities is his ability to adopt as his own the emotions of those around him. So it was when he came to Miami last week. At a state Democratic Party fundraiser the president couldn’t help but feel the pain of Miami’s Cuban-American community…
n June 29 Ramon Saul Sanchez was working at his day job as an office manager for a community development corporation in Little Havana when he first learned that something terrible was taking place off the coast of Surfside. Tellingly, the first person to call him was a TV reporter…
Disco music is a disease. I call it Disco Dystrophy. The people victimized by this killer disease walk around like zombies. We must do everything possible to stop the spread of this plague. — Steve Dahl It was with those words that Dahl, a Chicago FM radio DJ, opened a…
Lead Stories *In the course of a June report decrying the Canadian economy’s discrimination against people who do unpaid work (mostly housework), the feminist group Mothers Are Women called on the government to pay wages to women for breast-feeding to bring that activity in line with the production of other…
The day after the Coast Guard fiasco involving six Cuban rafters off the beaches of Surfside, Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart went to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and called on the Clinton administration to suspend its 1995 immigration accord with Cuba. “This administration’s policy toward Cuba can no…
Lolita: A Whale Who Spins a Web Lissette Corsa’s recent article on Lolita (“Livin’ la Vida Orca,” July 8) was great! I am working for Lolita’s freedom along with Howard Garrett, though I do it differently. You mentioned schoolchildren from Washington and their letters and petitions to Wometco CEO Arthur…
