Step right up and check it out, junk culture a go go, the side show that never ends. Girls in various stages of undress and whoredom, freaks up close and personal, mutant beings/club personalities way past the sloppy trappings of love, demanding only the quick fix of attention. It’s a…
Summer is the lean season. No good shows. Nothing happening. There isn’t one song by a South Florida artist good enough for commercial radio to play. Local music sucks. Meanwhile, back in the real world, it’s the last day of July, the dead-hot center of summer, and Charlie Pickett and…
The glitterati constellation, world without end, a black hole of hype and hustle, chance and destiny, ruled by the quantum theory of fabulousness. Random glitz systems colliding only under the spell of darkness, spontaneously combusting at random moments, eventually imploding with sex, fame, and money. Each infinitesimal molecule ruled by…
Who are you? Are you the buzzed-out little skinhead boy who fell off his chair while cheering on Young Turk at Washington Square in the wee hours, knocking over a table and spilling beer on my leg before hauling ass to what passes for bathrooms at the club? (If so,…
The real life funnies, Miami assuming the dimensions of a comic strip, spiced up and dumbed down for the tropical market. Love & Rockets parodying drag queens and warring promoters, a postabsurdist hypersexual Zippy with Bill Griffith’s intellectual ruminations studiously censored out, the Incredible Hulk as a particularly delectable go-go…
I’m bored. There’s nothing to do. It was sometime in the very early Eighties, I don’t remember exactly and I’m not going to look it up (as if there were some reference where I could). The place was 27 Birds in Coconut Grove. There was this kinda weird lookin’ guy…
The world needs more love, not more gossip columnists. But then, rooting through the detritus of Western culture, all the gratuitous innuendo, celebrity filth, and pop culture newsbites is so much more rewarding. A decidedly ignoble occupation, of course, the practitioners of the trade generally regarded as venom-spewing maggots, prissy…
So whatcha been doin’? Me? I just keep mantra-ing that Neil Young song, the one that goes, “Why do I keep fuckin’ up?” Great old song. Not a bad question, either. It’s an ego thing. So let’s let somebody else get a word in. “I agree with everything you’ve said”…
A return to real life after an all-too-brief vacation, slipping in and out of the immediate, pulled back into the dreamscape of memory. “Big Bad Wolf” at Les Bains, John Hood and Luigi Scorcia working the funk gestalt, the club less arch than usual, newly done up with mirrors and…
Our summer vacation, a busman’s holiday amidst the rich pageant of New York, taken up for the season by Patrick McMullan of Interview, mindful of the great social oracle’s dictum: Remember, it’s not who you are that’s important. It’s who you’re standing next to.” “A week of lurking around and…
Am I joking? Is it “true”? What is this thing called credibility, love? Some local rockers took exception to my claims in a “Music” story last week that Billy Yeager is the only decent musician in South Florida. Others have questioned the factuality of a recent program note involving a…
Parental Advisory: The following column contains ideas, notions, and thoughts that every single person might not agree with. Acts of violence will be visually represented. Read it at your own risk of not remaining exactly the same as you’ve always been. Turn on the teevy. Advertisers my ear. Cut their…
Memento mori, a dance to the music of time, the distinctions between past, present, and future blurring, the curious workings of memory and delusion taking hold. The brain, lately, one big quadruplex theater of postmodern nostalgia, cacophonous Sensurround images and floating scraps of dialogue, the portable movie sliding in and…
“Gwen, when you don’t remember something it is very strange. It’s the same as if it never happened….” …The Jesus freaks who talked about the end of the world were looking better every day…. …”There’s only one thing we’d like to know. We’re your friends. We’ve been friends for years…
Nightlife, one long forced march, the troops ever conscious of misstepping, a prance into the oblivion of darkness. An obstacle course fraught with tension and peril; to stumble, even momentarily, is to be devoured by the juggernaut of attitude. In any epoch, the in-crowd tends to be unforgiving and pitiless,…
“‘Are you Greg Baker?’ Geez. What the fuck’s wrong with people?” Finally a bit of vinegar outta Frank Falestra, someone got a reaction, as it were. Sorry somebody mistook you for that butthorn at New Times, Ratman, but you should say what I say when someone asks me that: “No…
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…
