Aside from the usual jaunts down the humiliation highway, the pointless theatrics and endless hook-up requests to dark world, the onerousness of being considered a combination of Michael Aller, Fredo Corleone, the social director on the Love Boat, and a dumbed-down Samuel Pepys, and the cruel dichotomy of living in…
Unrealistic Profile, City in Chaos, Skeletons Aplenty Art Levine is one of the most unprofessional writers I’ve ever met. If his intention was to present readers with a realistic profile of Miami Beach mayoral candidate Andrew Delaplaine, he was not successful (“Attitude Dancing,” November 2). If Mr. Levine thinks that…
And you thought Harry Pussy couldn’t get booked on Miami Beach. Ha! The majordomos of the local noise band scene have agreed to play a gig on Thursday, November 16, at Black Box, the multimedia performance space that opened last weekend in the South Florida Art Center’s Ground Level gallery…
While rampant dementia might be tough on the citizenry, insanity does lend pungency to the more popular cultures, and soon enough there’ll be no limits whatsoever. Samuel Beckett will cash in and approve Endgame as a comeback vehicle for Gary Coleman. The silicone warriors of Baywatch will remake Waterworld as…
Matti Bower: Eloquent and Busy For Kirk Semple to say that Matti Bower “isn’t a particularly articulate or precise speaker” is ludicrous (“Mistaken Identity,” October 26). She is so articulate that her phone, even prior to this city commission election, never stops ringing. When people have a problem, it is…
Let’s jump right in and confront the important, chew on the big issues: art, life, illusion versus reality, truth, sex, class chaos, and whatever else may be grist for the short-order sociology mill. It’s a world rich with blessings and beatitudes, everything intersecting at the nexus of nightlife, the gilded…
“I guess it would be nice to say it’s a sequel, but it’s not,” Jodi Horovitz says as she emits a big laugh. “Subconsciously, I’m sure, Freedy was spinning around in my head.” Singer-songwriter Freedy Johnston, that is, whose fine 1994 album This Perfect World contains an affecting song about…
Editor’s note: New Times readers who wish to contribute letters to the editor may now do so by e-mail. Our electronic address is listed below. Please remember to include a daytime telephone number and your home address. Though that information will not be published, we must have it to allow…
Michael Kennedy, a respected member of the local music scene, died of an apparent overdose of the muscle relaxant Soma on October 1. He was 37 years old. As primary songwriter for the critically acclaimed Broward-based band Rooster Head, vocalist-guitarist-keyboardist Kennedy penned many of the often humorous songs that showed…
Unlike the drawing rooms of Henry James and Edith Wharton, redolent with intricate ironies, the comedy of manners that is contemporary nightlife inevitably degenerates into broad, knockdown farce. But still, the modern velvet jungle remains a wilderness of artifice where image is everything, one long hand jive of self-delusion, fantasy,…
The News Isn’t All Bad in Goulds The pictures selected for Kathy Glasgow’s article “Going South” (October 12) did not accurately reflect the character or fortitude of my community, Goulds. They did not reflect that Goulds is composed of more than 80 percent single-family homes. We have parks, shopping centers,…
As with the more respectable strains of journalism, the lifeblood of pop reportage is information, from mere frippery to the legitimately sordid. It’s a definite learning experience, this industry of darkness, and felicitously enough for those obsessed with half-baked truths, loose lips — set free by liquor, hubris, and general…
“It’s a done deal,” Brian Franklin proclaims with more than a trace of relief in his voice, putting an end to two months of nail-biting suspense over negotiations with Mercury Records for what’s known in the music biz as a co-publishing/developmental contract. The drama began in early August when, having…
O.J. ruined my day, my week, and if his sorry story keeps being chewed over in the media, he’ll possibly ruin my life. Overnight America entered a terminal phase of short-order lunacy, something less than human and past the redemption of the divine, illuminated from within by the evil eye…
Local singer-songwriter Diane Ward doesn’t usually leave her guitar amplifier in her car overnight between gigs, but she did so a few weeks ago in a bout of self-described laziness. The lapse may have saved her life. While driving onto the Palmetto Expressway, Ward lost control of her Toyota Tercel…
In this particular line of work, the twin polarities of existence — the glorious and the sordid, the soaring of imagination and the sober parameters of reality — coalesce on a psychotic Ouija board, obeying no known dictates of seemliness, either earthbound, otherworldly, or of some ungodly dead zone. It’s…
Contrary to Saint Barbra, people who need people, party kind of people, aren’t the luckiest people in the world. People are crazy, they invariably drive each other even crazier, and the twisted prism of any given social occasion transforms all human interaction into a certifiably insane proposition. Fortunately the inmates…
Cheers, the SW Seventeenth Avenue lesbian bar that has featured punk bands two nights a week (Thursday and Saturday) for the last year, expands its schedule beginning this Saturday, October 7, when the club will start bringing in bands that play rock, acoustic, and alternative music. The lineup for opening…
For listeners of Boom, DJ Kike Posada’s Latin-rock radio show, it was the day the music died. On Sunday, September 17, the weekly hourlong program failed to air for the first time since it premiered almost two years ago as Miami’s first Spanish-rock program on commercial Latin radio. “I immediately…
In an MTV Latino studio lined with silky batik banners, a producer introduces herself and leads an audience in “applause practice,” throwing her arms above her head and bringing them down slowly. But the crowd — a stylish group of about 200 bilingual Latin rock fans, Latin American journalists, and…
Admittedly, the perks are great in this job but it can work on your nerves, and everyone seems to being trapped in an interactive mystery thriller. Nothing is quite what it seems. No one knows what’s going on, who to trust, or where their enemies are. And everyone lies, friend…
Night and day, a psyche at war with itself: In darkness the inner sanctum becomes a vast lollipop of lowbrow magical realism; by day all the short-order fairy tales yield to the cold crunch of truth. And so it’s another night on Earth, twelve straight hours on the job –…
