Tanks lined Biscayne Boulevard at noon last Sunday just as the Rock en Miami festival was getting under way at Bayfront Park. New Times reported the week before on some bad blood between local Latin rock promoters, but did the situation really require heavy artillery? Well, no; last Sunday was,…
Hillary and Rosie and Two Times Wrong Make that flat-out wrong: Brett Sokol’s column “The Political Dance” (“Kulchur,” October 31), about the annual dinner for the Dade Human Rights Foundation (now named the Gay and Lesbian Foundation of South Florida), requires the correction of some serious misinformation. First this statement:…
No one has done more to build Miami’s rep as the swirling epicenter of cotton candy Latin pop than impresario, erstwhile producer, and savvy pitchman Emilio Estefan, Jr. And no one has done more to counter that rep than independent distributor, Latin alternative booster, and sincere pitchman Gustavo Fernandez. After…
Open mouth, insert high-heeled foot: If you’re speaking at a swanky dinner for a gay community organization, it’s a sure bet your audience will be filled with die-hard liberals, right? Not if it’s the Dade Human Rights Foundation. At its October 19 fete, the eight-year-old foundation celebrated its expansion into…
Pot Papers: Not in Our Neighborhood Sorry, but the truth is yes — in your neighborhood: As a Hispanic, my attention was drawn to Humberto Guida’s article “The Preppie Pot Papers” (October 24) because Cubans were named as dope dealers. I wanted to read what this Humberto Guida had to…
The Rosenberg Resurrection We shall return him to the film festival — or else: In Brett Sokol’s recent “Kulchur” column about the crisis at the Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival (“They Shoot Divas, Don’t They?” October 10), he wrote that “…not just the gay community, but the entire city…
In the heady idealism of the 1970s, Chilean novelist and playwright Ariel Dorfman wrote How To Read Donald Duck, a treatise against cultural imperialism. The cuddly little creatures in Disney movies and other kiddie tales, so the argument goes, send the message that Europe and the United States are civilized…
Before the gangsta, there was the guapo — the tough guy who cruised the mean streets of Spanish Harlem and El Bronx with a wide-brimmed hat cocked over one eye and a razorblade hidden in his pocket. In the Seventies the urban Latin sound was salsa, and there was nothing…
My last column, “Smiling Through the Apocalypse,” split its popularity strictly along age lines: Seniors like me, and mature women, thought it was funny in a sardonic way; young dudes (like the Broward-Palm Beach NT calendar editor Dan Sweeney) took offense, feelings hurt at being indirectly called “slackers” for not…
After several long weeks immersed in the depressing subject of Miami’s world-class poverty, I found some relief in the final article of New Times’s two-part series “We’re Number One!” (September 26 and October 3). Titled “A Few Good Ideas” and compiled by staff writers Rebecca Wakefield and Tristram Korten, the…
Mutant Writer Spews Gibberish Fiendish free weekly creates journalistic Frankenstein: The once friendly, sober, and decorous Frank Alvarado of Miami Today and the Daily Business Review joins New Times and appears to have been psycho-surgically transmuted into a caustic, trash-talking Hunter Thompson wannabe named Francisco Alvarado, a snappy pseudo-hipster with…
“A lot of people say I’m difficult,” Robert Rosenberg muses with an awkward smile, pausing over a description he’s been hearing quite a lot lately. Leaning forward at a table inside the Beach’s Wild Oats market, he continues: “Look, it takes a certain kind of obsessed person to want to…
Poor Miami: No Tears Don’t just sit there — do something substantial: Thanks very much to New Times for the special report on poverty in Miami (“We’re Number One!” September 26 and October 3). We must all do better for our community and its people. Conviction and education are the…
Maria Marocka is no schoolmarm. Over at Biscayne Gardens Elementary in North Miami, she’s the cool teacher. Tall and glamorous with funky clothes and an asymmetrical haircut, she has CDs filled with songs that she wrote and sang. “Are you famous?” her students ask as they hand over scraps of…
In the bad old days of segregation, wasn’t nobody black and famous come to sing in the white-only nightclubs of Miami Beach who didn’t make a late-night stop for a show in Colored Town: Ella, Basie, Nina Simone. Then the interstate sliced through and drained the blood out of a…
Good Job on Public Corruption Too bad you screwed up the details: Once again New Times deserves to be commended for doing a public service by writing an in-depth article about public corruption (“Busted!” September 19). I would like to think that when it comes to political corruption we are…
Vaclav Havel arrives in Miami on Sunday, as much a visiting rock star as a sainted political leader. The Czech president, who’s jammed with both Lou Reed and Frank Zappa, even has a snazzy tour name for his South Florida jaunt — ready-made for souvenir T-shirts: “Cuba Libre.” And at…
Clickety Clack on Down the Track Seeing America by rail was a privilege, and now it’s lost: Congratulations to John Anderson for researching, writing, and experiencing “The Last Amtrak” (September 12). I grew up (one year old in 1935) making annual summer round trips (always by Pullman) between New York…
Attention aspiring South Beach power brokers: Wanna learn how to game the system like a pro? Hollywood macher Michael Bay was more than happy to provide an easy lesson, schooling one of Kulchur’s clubland spies as she shimmied up to the Bad Boys 2 director inside Lincoln Road’s Rumi lounge…
If You’re So Smart, Go Start Your Own School It’s more work than you’ll ever imagine: New Times should be ashamed of Rebecca Wakefield’s article on Florida International Academy (“Strange Days at FIA,” September 5). Any effort to present a balanced treatment of this embattled charter school was negated by…
Last week, in the days leading up to my father’s funeral, I played Susana Baca’s album Espiritu Vivo (Living Spirit). The beat of the cajon, the wooden box that speaks Afro-Peruvian rhythms, might have seemed incongruous to my brothers and sisters as they sifted through photos of our childhood in…
Give former supermodel Janice Dickinson points for a sense of humor. In her new tell-all memoir No Lifeguard On Duty, the enfant terrible of the late-Seventies fashion world writes: “Models are supposed to be dumb, right? But most of us can actually walk and talk and snort coke at the…
