For four years, Flippers served as Miami’s premier source for world music. DJs, musicians, students, and foreign film directors congregated at the disheveled storefront on NE Second Avenue, combing sections marked flamenco, reggae, Spanish reggae, North Africa, West Africa, South Africa, Cuba (before and after the revolution), Brazil, Latin jazz,…
Sometimes you just get lucky, and lately life’s just been coming up roses: Expecting nothing, and for once getting back everything in return. Curiously enough the recent glamour drought ended overnight with the National Urban League Conference, which turned out to be a virtual firestorm of bliss. And so we…
A storm of controversy swirls around the new ‘Cane Records compilation CD, Miami Hybridized, which is scheduled for an August 30 release. The disc — the second from the fledgling label run by University of Miami students — showcases five local artists: rappers 5th Gear, vocalist Carla Hall, straight-ahead rocker…
There’s a certain pathology to this pop life, this culture of the damned, a sick compulsion shrouding the worship of the superficial. Once you’re trapped in the lower orders of the glamour mafia, it’s impossible to escape the pernicious pall of the cartoon void and the trivial — all the…
The Goods may want to add another step to their getting-signed strategy. “I’m Not Average,” a perennial audience favorite, is included in a CD and home video release from Playboy entitiled The Girls of Radio: Talk, Rock, and Shock. The package showcases up-and-coming bands from around the natiom, as well…
Maybe it’s in the air, all this churning of spiritual anorexia, these studies in dumbed-down concerns, but then, they’re always good for a snarky remark or two. Miami entering a new plateau in its continuing evolution as a low-wattage version of Los Angeles — not a pleasant prospect — an…
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…
