Before a nerve disease stole his independence, Martin Marcus lived a richly diverse life. He trained thoroughbred horses, manufactured hot tubs, sold units in a Colorado time-share project, and worked as an executive at a film company. He met success and tasted failure, but he always sprang back with a...
The good news is that Oliver Saucy and Darrel Broek are not putting Café Maxx and East City Bistro up for sale, despite rumors to the contrary. The better news is that the duo finally has found a site for East City Grill, their successful Fort Lauderdale venture that was...
Who stole the soul? Add Rawkus Records, the label that puts out the Lyricist Lounge series, to that list. In hip-hop the name of the record label often carries as much weight as the artists themselves when it comes to influencing sales (see Cash Money Records). Armed with arguably the...
It's always a letdown when the waiter in a quaint picture-perfect café hands out a slipshod piece of paper that passes as a menu. First thing most of us do is turn it over to see if there's anything else written on the other side. Artichoke's is the antithesis: The...
Now that our little Cuban refugee is back in his homeland, quietly becoming a role model for other young communists, it's the season in Miami for Elian retrospectives. It seems every local publication has compiled a list of winners and losers from the protracted custody saga. Regrettably these indexes tend...
Read “The Assassin Next Door, Part 1” The man who has just finished eating a plain yogurt at his black metal desk is so steadfastly intent on obliterating his past that when someone with those years in mind leans toward him and asks in a low voice, “Excuse me, are...
The BoardroomWith the number of legal works of graffiti in the area increasing, the results have been larger projects done in plain view. The Boardroom is one of these pieces. Easily visible to traffic traveling north on NW 27th Avenue, the mural is a purist’s dream. Measuring about 12 feet by 55 feet, The Boardroom demonstrates […]
The BoardroomWith the number of legal works of graffiti in the area increasing, the results have been larger projects done in plain view. The Boardroom is one of these pieces. Easily visible to traffic traveling north on NW 27th Avenue, the mural is a purist’s dream. Measuring about 12 feet by 55 feet, The Boardroom demonstrates […]
Even a casual observer in Havana would notice the striking disconnect between the slogans emblazoned on billboards across the city and the actual mood of the Cuban people who pass underneath them. “Imperialists, You Don't Scare Us at All!” reads one towering graphic depicting a Cuban soldier facing off against...
Sitting at a desk in his office, which is in a strip mall on Collins Avenue, Dave Samson thrusts his large head forward. The palms of his hands press on his desktop, supporting the weight of his squat torso. He wears a white polo shirt. What is left of his...
On a crowded bus in Buenos Aires, a gaggle of teenage girls huddled in the back, giggling and gossiping as teenage girls everywhere do. Their exuberant youth was too much for a cynic in his early twenties, who stood clutching a pole in the aisle. He couldn't resist baiting the...
Paola di Florio's documentary Speaking in Strings takes a midcareer look at Italian-born violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, who leapt to prominence in 1981 when she became the youngest-ever winner of the international Naumburg Competition. Salerno-Sonnenberg, who moved to the United States at the age of eight, became a child prodigy of...
Thanks to the Elian Gonzalez saga, things in las dos Havanas are becoming surreal. In Little Havana reporters spend hours waiting for a six-year-old kid to wheel by on a bicycle, and tourists pose for photos in front of the home where he is staying. Across the Florida Straits, Fidel...
I cannot for the life of me remember the first time I watched Jeopardy! I do remember a few games of Trivial Pursuit in which I mopped the floor with my family, my friends, and my family's neighbors, who used to be their friends until one night I whooped a...
Few groups have taken more critical abuse in recent years than Phish, if not in the form of outright animosity from hipsterdom-at-large, than in the guise of backhanded bemusement on the part of the mainstream media, ready to dismiss the band as nothing more than a curious replay of Sixties...
Keith Moss emerges from the garden of his north Coconut Grove home carrying a hose. "Not many people water their car," he says, while drenching more than twenty species of herbs, flowers, vines, and weeds that completely cover his 1980 Toyota Corolla station wagon. Plants such as mallow, Moses in...
A pile of 34 shoes sits just inside the front door of Stephen Bonnell's comfortable South Miami home. They came off the feet of the seventeen people kneeling or sitting in Bonnell's living room, chanting in unison while facing a small cabinet, the butsudan, hung chest-high on the opposite wall...
Two of Miami-Dade County's top high school football teams -- Northwestern and Jackson -- are stocked with ineligible players who employ dubious addresses in order to attend and play for their schools. Numerous student athletes on both teams, which are among the best in the nation, claim to live within...
UPDATE: In 2013, director Michael Bay released an adaptation of this three-part series. That same year, New Times revisited Pain & Gain and tracked down what's become of the Sun Gym Gang two decades later. Miami businessman Marc Schiller disappeared from his Schlotzsky's Deli franchise in mid-November 1994. A month...
She's convinced it's bound to come, the high-tech hurricane of the Y2K computer bug, and so Melissa, a well-educated professional with two teenagers, is selling her three-bedroom Miami-Dade house, quitting her white-collar job, and fleeing the area for her mother's north Florida farm. "Oh my God," she says, half-jokingly, "I'm...
The drive from Miami to Meridian, Mississippi, takes fourteen hours, but Tag Purvis doesn't mind. He likes to make the trip to his hometown behind the wheel of the baby-blue Lincoln he has on long-term loan from his father. When he passes the Alabama border into Mississippi, a place he...
On the morning of January 6, on the ninth floor of the James Lawrence King Federal Courthouse, the man for whom the building was named, Senior U.S. District Court Judge James Lawrence King, presided over what will long be remembered as one of the more bizarre moments in South Florida's...
