At this unpredictable, prison stripe-painted bunker west of Wynwood, renegade graffiti rat turned fine artist NeckFace parachuted into town for "Devil's Disciple," one of the most hyped events of the cultural calendar year. The secretive West Coast gremlin didn't disappoint with his wicked little drawings of blood-puking babies and raunchy cast of curb zombies and gore-basted amputees. His nefarious doodles where displayed on Mack truck-size crime scene photos of murder victims plucked from Mexican pulp magazines. The creep factor of the artist's first solo show in the Big Mango was amped up by a garish haunted house where members of NeckFace's family — gathered here from California — donned ghoulish garb to spook spectators. A screeching wooden ramp featuring a motley collection of skateboarders further entertained the crowd, and a DJ added to the frightful sounds. The monster exhibit morphed into a steaming pile of the abject, drawing more than 5,000 people to a sordid spectacle of decay. Tragically, all great undertakings come to an end. NeckFace's only-in-Miami moment went flaccid when cops crashed the party before midnight and prematurely ejaculated chemical-addled revelers from the space.

Say you're in the midst of the worst economic meltdown in decades and face a $360 million shortfall next year. As an elected leader of Miami Dade County, you send a clear message to voters by:A. vowing to take public transportation to work.B. joining a car pool.C. getting a BMW 500i Gran Turismo.The final answer is exactly what Mayor Carlos Alvarez did when he picked out a new set of wheels using $500 a month in taxpayer money. With a car like that, he'll have to fork out some of his own cash to make ends meet. But that got his minions thinking. On March 4, Miami-Dade commissioners agreed by an eight to four vote to ask voters to increase their pay by around 50 percent, from about $60,000 to $92,500. A little later, reality kicked in and they pulled the measure. Chutzpah? These guys are meshuga!

If you're like us, living paycheck to paycheck, yet suffer from a sweet tooth for the finer things, such as an original oil painting or fine art print to brighten up that dreary futon in your Section 8 walkup, this Wynwood art emporium will warm the cockles of your heart. On any given day, the gritty shop, located in the heart of the city's fine art nabe, boasts an eclectic stock of canvases and limited-edition prints in the $24.99 to $79.99 range created by names ranging from Ferrante to Thomas McKnight. Most of the blue-ticket-priced items come already framed. And you won't encounter a traditional art dealer's high-pressure sales pitch or have to rub elbows with snooty collectors eager to jawbone you to tears. Also, the Salvation Army's collection is rotated daily, you can haggle over the prices, and Wednesdays you can snag a landscape or still life at half-price, typically the cost of a case of beer, and hang it on your wall without feeling plucked clean by an art dealer.

Wonky TV dramas have nothing on the real-life soap opera that is Miami politics. Take Michelle Spence-Jones's acceptance speech upon being re-elected to her city commission seat in November 2009, moments before being led away in handcuffs on grand theft charges. The thing was a work of art that would have made The Wire's indignant-when-indicted Sen. Clay Davis blush with pride. Spence-Jones spoke in third person, quoted the Bible and Don King, and vowed to return like a vanquished villain at the end of a Batman sequel. Of all the choice quotes, though, our favorite was the one where she called herself "nappy-headed," obliquely referencing racist shock jock Don Imus and thus equating prosecutors with the cowboy-hat-wearing schmuck. If race-baiting were an Olympic sport, even the mean German judge would be waving a perfect 10 for this one.

David Castillo is a rare bird among Miami's intrepid flock of art dealers. He is the only one of his tribe other than Fredric Snitzer or Kevin Bruk to crack the mysterious Art Basel blockade on Miami galleries in recent memory. And this year, he became only the second Miami dealer accepted to participate at the Armory Fair in New York. His artists love him because he keeps his stable small and manageable and works tirelessly to place their pieces with museums and private collections, sometimes spending 12-hour days in his Wynwood office. It doesn't hurt that the Yale grad, who also studied art at the Vatican on a special program, can negotiate with clients in five languages and has expanded his collector base beyond the United States and Latin America to Asia and Europe. Since opening his eponymous space in Wynwood in 2005, the young dealer has also organized more than 60 shows that have consistently ranked among the most memorable of the season, while his artists have been covered by publications ranging from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal to ARTnews and the Art Newspaper. Oh, and when one of his artists isn't preparing for a show at the Whitney, Castillo can be found operating behind the scenes on the secondary market, selling works by the likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, and Frida Kahlo or quietly holding a clinic on how to build an art business without the smoke and mirrors and chest-thumping typical of the local art scene.

Anyone watching the Oscars in March would have seen the normally staid Best Documentary speech shaken up by the unfurling of a sign reading, "Text DOLPHIN to 44144." It's no surprise that Ric O'Barry, a Coconut Grove native, pulled a stunt like that. Not only was he featured prominently in the film The Cove, but also the dolphin activist has become synonymous with the movement to free these intelligent sea creatures from aquariums and other unnatural habitats all over the world. Ironically, O'Barry actually worked for the entities he now decries, such as Miami Seaquarium. His brief stint there in the 1960s, and as a dolphin trainer for the popular TV show Flipper, made him aware of the horrors of keeping these mammals in captivity. Since then, O'Barry has founded the Dolphin Project, freed more than 25 dolphins, written two books, spoken at countless international conferences, and become a celebrity in his own right. His latest cause, to stop the slaughter of dolphins in Taiji, Japan, resulted in the documentary The Cove, which won an Academy Award. After that coup, O'Barry was given a show on Animal Planet called Dolphin Warriors, which is being produced by his son, Lincoln. Dolphin Warriors is set to premiere this fall. Despite his fame, O'Barry has not forgotten his roots. The 70-year-old was recently spotted on a sweltering sunny Saturday on Key Biscayne protesting keeping Lolita, the Seaquarium's killer whale, in captivity.

For his quirky, muscle-powered opus, Neraissance, avant composer Juraj Kojs relied on good old-fangled elbow grease to explore kinetic energy in an artistic context. As part of the Miami Light Project's Here & Now Fest at the Arsht Center this spring, the Slovakian artist combined human performers, experimental sound, and bleeding-edge analog and digital gadgetry in a rollicking 20-minute spectacle of stunning visual poetry that left spectators breathless with wonder. Kojs used two dancers on stationary bicycles to produce the energy to activate sewing machines, alarm clocks, fans, and strings of holiday lights for his dazzling multimedia extravaganza. Kojs, who is director of music and multimedia programming at Wynwood's Harold Golen Gallery and a postdoctoral associate at Yale's Department of Music, conjured a trance-inducing reverie in which a silver-winged fairy and a bride on a tricycle, who later peeled off her wedding gown as part of the surreal display, collided onstage for a performance that was both striking and unforgettable.

Liberty City is in desperate need of a leader. When native Houstonian Rev. Gaston E. Smith took over the pulpit at the Friendship Missionary Baptist Church on NW 58 Street, it seemed the troubled community had found one. The fiery preacher was a role model, a diplomat, and a father figure, all stuffed into a linebacker's build and a flashy three-piece suit. When he's not booming the Word on Sundays, he's visiting ailing parishioners in the hospital or coaxing gangbangers off the street. His potential made it even more tragic when Smith betrayed the flock that adopted him: Last year, he was convicted of stealing from a county grant named after Martin Luther King Jr. His supporters claim he was railroaded by trumped-up charges, but the fact remains that he was careless and irresponsible, not the leader Liberty City needs. His sentence was suspended, and Smith remains the church's pastor, so he'll get a second chance to make a difference.

It wasn't particularly brave of director Joseph Adler to mount a production of this extremely controversial play, and that's because he couldn't have resisted anyway. Blasted is the ideal play for Adler's GableStage — a powerfully moral tale wrapped in extremely weird and frequently disturbing packaging. In it, Adler introduced us to a girl with developmental disabilities, and then he introduced us to the man who would soon rape her. He staged the rape and then blew apart a hotel room. He made us feel sorry for the man who committed that rape — even though he was more of a reptile than a person, and even though he probably deserved everything he got. Then Adler brought a baby onstage, which he had killed. Then he made the rapist and his victim reunite — sweetly — and he made us happy they did. Then he made us realize we loved the rapist, because his humanity had been made so obvious and so luminously lovely. Having achieved this, Adler made rain fall from the hole in what used to be the hotel room's ceiling, and it was beautiful. Look past the rape, the cannibalism, and the mind-numbing violence that made this play infamous, and you'll find actor Todd Allen Durkin giving the performance of a lifetime, a set design as shockingly ingenious as the script is weird, and a story more soulful than any sweeter tale.

OK, technically the bombshell star of ABC's hit sitcom Modern Family is not originally from Miami. But this Colombian-born actress made the Magic City her home way before she became a famous actress. While living in Miami, she modeled, hit the nightclubs (as Chris Paciello's onetime girlfriend), and hosted a slew of shows for Univision. After making a noticeable splash in Miami in the '90s, she moved to La La Land to pursue acting full-time. Vergara scored small parts in TV shows (Entourage, Dirty Sexy Money, Hot Properties, and The Knights of Prosperity) and movies (Big Trouble, Four Brothers, and Meet the Browns). At one point, the sexy brunette even "auditioned" for a real-life role as Tom Cruise's paramour via a high-profile date at Jerry's Deli in Los Angeles. Fortunately, that "job" went to Katie Holmes. Otherwise, we would never have seen Vergara play the fiery Gloria who puts Al Bundy — um, Ed O'Neill — in his place repeatedly on Modern Family, which was picked up for a second season. Success is finally coming fast for the 37-year-old Vergara, who has a teenage son named Manolo. She just landed the female lead in the new live-action Smurfs movie (opposite Neil Patrick Harris and Hank Azaria), which is filming in New York. She is also a spokesperson for Cadillac and has her own charity, Peace and Hope for the Children of Colombia. The most remarkable thing about Vergara: The actress has remained as down-to-earth, unpretentious, and spunky as she was when she was modeling in Miami and trying to make it.