America the ugly, darkness visible, an eternal pinball journey through the seven circles of a tabloid Hades. The final exorcism may be at hand, but in the meantime, gossip’s a growth industry and Miami remains in the vanguard of the filth follies. Reality unplugged, a bumpy ride on a breaking…
And so we all go, to and fro, talking of Michelangelo and the Delano, the media locusts drifting momentarily from the Hugh Grant mess to little old Miami, always good for a junket and a breaking trend story. The phoenix of fashion mutating into a new incarnation of tenuous postcoital…
Home sweet home, immersed in a dangerous fallow period, nurturing our pet obsessions — sex, fame, making a living — and taking a breather from the tabernacle of degradation, these loathsome adventures in the societal trenches, this ring of fire and fury signifying nothing. It’s all one big celebrity circle…
And so there we lurk on an unfathomably hot Saturday evening, at play with the Brothers Gibb on N. Bay Road for “The Gypsy Party,” another installment of the Miami social waltz, a dance on the precipice between heaven and hell. The Rangoon-like air clutching the throat like an evil…
Lately the surreal dementia of the world has come to resemble thoroughly ill-conceived porno, past all common sense, dramatic plausibility, and redeeming social values. Something on the order of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude rethought as a comeback vehicle for filth farmer-talk show hostess Jenny Jones. Throw…
In a world without distinctions, nothing, save for television, seems real any more, and given the prevailing moral weather, nothing is impossible. Grade-Z celeb Kato Kaelin becomes obscenely rich as well as absurdly famous with an enormous book advance. Former all-American sweetheart Nancy Kerrigan steals another’s woman’s husband, proving to…
I find the song selection and those songs’ ordinal placement on Bruce Springsteen’s chart-topping Greatest Hits album transcend any chronological approach, but more important, you must use a yellow bowl with soapy water to fight aphids. Not red or blue or even off-white — yellow. My dad taught me that…
There’s a sad expanse of oiled flesh by the Fontainebleau Hilton pool, sizzling like bacon in the sun, and the Peck’s Bad Boy of England, author Martin Amis, is rolling another cigarette by a high camp mural of rearing horses, eerily composed for a man in the eye of a…
This Saturday the place to be is actually two places. As mentioned here last week, the Florida Music Association presents an expo and a concert on Saturday, although it turns out that only the show will take place at Button South — sixteen acts on two stages (see our “Calendar”…
Basta! It’s like a joke, a running joke, a sick joke. Yes, another important local rock club is shutting down. This time it’s Rosebuds, which for sixteen years (five times longer than the Talkhouse) has provided a stage for rock and roll, in the past few years concentrating on metal…
Home in bed with the vapors, overcome by existential futility and retreating from the social fray — who are these people? why are these people? A society assuming the qualities of a 3-D interactive round-the-clock tabloid, hardwired to the cornea. And then the whims of destiny dictating two consecutive nights…
One of the coolest-vibe clubs on South Beach, one with extra friendly service and reasonable prices and a clientele made up of people whose company actually was enjoyable — and one with excellent live local music — has closed its doors. Blue Steel might not make news like the Stephen…
And so there we are at The Forge, the palace of excess, working the great game show of American life. Another week in the popularity sweepstakes, another a-star-is-stillborn story, another feast on the gravy train. The clean-living Tommy Pooch celebrating a birthday amid the nomadic beasts of pleasure, dodging an…
Florida is best known in the rap world for a genre called bass, that beat-heavy, thump-thump-boom sound you actually can feel coming out of chopped-down cars around town. Bass music is like other rap forms but with more beats per minute and a woofer-blowing emphasis on, well, bass. It was…
Dateline Palm Beach, a flight from local society, working the shortcuts of the American dream. The endless journalistic scramble, the hustles, the protocol phone calls paying off with a stray Saturday night at Mar-A-Lago, returning to command headquarters of Donald Trump, the All-American survivor. Donald and Marla Maples celebrating yet…
Maybe it’s just us, but lately parties seem like one vast theater of the ridiculous, riddled with bad taste, dysfunction, and assorted societal diseases. Accordingly, taking the path of high culture and hauling a shattered carcass down to the Gusman Center for the Performing Arts, eager to bask in the…
A few weeks ago, Bobby Johnston, lead singer for psycho punk maniacs Load, was sitting in the studio of WAXY during the Beast and Baker Show as his band’s raging music roared into the airwaves like drunk Scuds. Between Load cuts, Johnston answered questions about his band, mentioned upcoming gigs,…
Nightlife, over time, renders everyone walking obsessive-compulsive voids, feckless and hopeless, lab rats in a B.F. Skinner universe of degradation. One long wasting in appetite, rats and humanoids doomed to press eager little noses against a pleasure bar, searching for sensation, sustenance, cocaine, and endorphin rushes, accepting rude shocks and…
Is it a scene yet? Whatever you think of the press coverage provided by corporate media outlets A the Miami Herald, New Times, et cetera A you can’t say local original rock isn’t receiving almost as much coverage as it deserves. Cable television offers Music X, Rock Ya Ma Call…
We’ve got five years, man, that’s all we got. (Sorry, Mr. Bowie.) But it’s true, the millennium is quickly running out on us, and I consider it a deadline. People have to turn around what’s been neglected in recent years: Feed the hungry, clothe the ragged, console the hurt, heal…
Another dream of the night, another chaotic cesspool of delights, diversions, and close encounters of the unfortunate kind, the past, present, and future jelling into a tortured narrative, a monologue of narcissism and hurt, the cheap melodramas of darkness. You take a beating out here every day, but the pros…
He wrecked his truck, got stabbed, run over, and lost a finger. His wife ran off with his best friend. He got shot, chased by large crowds of angry people, then thrown in jail. And that was in just one day. So goes the Rex Neilson-penned tune “Thank God I…
