Summertime in Miami, hot and pitiless as the Gobi Desert, an opportunity to relax, kick back, slowly sink into a terminal slough of despond. The right crowd, even in the beyond-the-pale doldrums, still making news. A rumor about the separation of philanthropists Sanford and Helene Ziff leading to extensive telephone…
Something’s got to give. Marilyn’s last, if she had survived shooting it. I celebrate Norma Jean’s birthday every June 1, usually with a reach for that breach she fell into. So far I’ve survived. I’m glad for moments like June 5 (so I celebrated a few days late, so what)…
I went with venom. Came back with a smile. A rock does that for me. The Game is like rock and roll A you have to know it to love it, you have to love it to know it, you have to live it to be it. I once asked…
A weekend of pop history, the American Booksellers Association convention coming to the wasteland, the forces of literary imperialism conquering the provincial barbarians. Miami, the endlessly entertaining if vaguely embarrassing tropic of pointless pleasure, awash in the relentless march of American lite culture, becoming the epicenter of civilization for a…
A while back I had the pleasure of speaking to several hordes of high school students and teachers who gathered at FIU for a seminar with the unwieldy title of the Dade County Public Schools Student Gender Equity Conference. Leonard Pitts, Jr., and I attempted to explain to these bright…
Memorial Day weekend, a nation mourns its war dead, throws sloppy barbecues, drinks too much beer. Miami, as usual, out of sync with the rest of the nation, bracing for the ultimate dialectic: the literary star power of the American Booksellers Association convention vying with the ugly threat of rioting…
It was nearly twenty years ago, and I was just a snivelly little street punk (okay, okay, so I still am). Because of circumstance, I had an especially close relationship with and reliance on radio. I always had – and did right up to the point when the corporates-computers-consults came…
The posthuman cyborg, comfortably numb for the off-season, beyond feeling and pride. A long revel in the local art form of the disgusting, savoring the various permutations of offensiveness like a true professional, taking a punch-drunk pleasure in an ability to withstand anything. Miami, a cartoon universe, the cast of…
The armies of the night, helpless in the face of the social addiction, doomed to wander forever like vampires, seeking sustenance and sensation. A losing proposition of diminishing returns, the relentless eventually losing all sense of perspective. The sheer process of simply going out, anywhere and everywhere, becoming an unfathomable…
Yo, watch out for flying slogans. Sure, come on over, and bring your bud with you. We’re heading to Al’s Pumphouse, the coolest club in town, located at the north end of Greenville, South Carolina. This place is like Churchill’s but bigger A divided by the bar into a pool-shootin’…
A city festering like a mutant amoeba, imploding and feeding on itself in a frenzy of hype, too fabulous for its own good. The media rooting through the carcass for unsavory morsels, gorging on the second wave of expatriate celebrities fleeing Los Angeles, completely doomed and, worse yet, unfashionable. The…
Miami, a floating surrealistic circus, breaking loose from the constraints of reason and propriety. A satellite republic of weirdness, a banana republic without cash-flow problems, the brave new American city of the future. Terminally democratic, a duty-free zone on the brink of anarchy, embracing a twisted interpretation of the Jeffersonian…
It was Kennedy A and you know I don’t mean John F. A who said it best: some people are powered by greed, some are powered by need. I don’t need much, and I don’t get it, but before I go I would like to thank each and all of…
Tumbling into a different dimension, the party zone, suspended in time and space, a parallel universe of insatiable desires and twisted pleasures. Lawless and unforgiving, the operating policy, oddly enough, succinctly defined by a three-year-old of our acquaintance, absorbed in a fit of psychotic whining: “I need it because I…
Miami, fashionable and fickle, a game of chance and improbability, a whimsical yet deadly postmodern landscape, kind of disgusting but kind of fun, too. You’re up, you’re down, you don’t know where the hell you are. Ocean Drive magazine throwing a party at The Forge with Jacques and Pascal, the…
This is it, folks. I ain’t pretending. Next week’s is definitely the last “Program Notes.” Cleaning out my office, I just came across an old note from band manager Mike Eiseman. “About the new religion based on Rooster Head music,” Eiseman wrote, “I think you need a little vacation, or…
Miami, the town that care remembered, but somehow neglected to worry about, allowing the subjects of Babylon to cavort with the abandonment of wayward Olympians. “Pops in the Park,” the New World Symphony’s gala dinner dance at the Omni Hotel, the upper classes in the throes of decorous merriment. The…
Spring sprung? God, I hope so. My great friend of twenty years, Ben Bank, is in town with his family, and we have plans to watch his alma mater lose the NCAA basketball championship (quick, Chris, call a time-out!) but my car breaks down and this time I can’t rig…
Schizophrenia is a serious illness not to be made fun of, but I can’t think of a better term or a better way of giving in to the impossible (or at least implausible) pushing and pulling of planetary life. Probably most people feel this way. Which means I’m normal. Schizo…
The Avenue — production of “Rondo” at Mario’s South Beach, a very loose adaptation of Miriam Schapiro’s book, many spirits unraveling, awash in the “melodrama of being,” the solving emptiness that lies beneath everything we do. The evening hours, a world where everything is permitted, but nothing, at the very…
Proto-reality, the high-concept world of television, as alluring, addictive, and curiously entrancing as clubs, the inevitable distancing of the cool medium making the alternating anxiety and boredom of nightlife slightly more palatable, and somehow more real than actually being there. Visions of pitch meetings, lucrative guest appearances on infomercials, starlet…
The lessons they are hard. In the March 10 installment of this alleged column, I claimed there is no God, other, perhaps, than Greg Brown. Yeah, I guess you could say I was fairly fired up for Brown’s skedded visit to Stephen Talkhouse that weekend. It was something to live…
