Spend enough time working in South Beach’s competitive nightlife industry, and you’re bound to make some enemies. Just ask Gerry Kelly. After arriving in Miami in 1994, the Irish-born Kelly spent the next few years cannily rising through the ranks of clubland’s promoters and managers, eventually being hired in 1998…

It’s only the second day of the Miami Film Festival, but the event’s new director, David Poland, is already engaged in damage control. After being publicly announced, mysteriously canceled, and then just as cryptically reinstated on the fest’s schedule 24 hours earlier, famed Cuban filmmaker Humberto Solas’s new Miel para…

“When I started taking photographs, people were so open to situations,” Bruce Weber recalls ruefully of his career’s beginnings in the Seventies. The famed fashion photographer spears a forkful of rugelach inside the Rascal House restaurant in Sunny Isles Beach and continues. “You might tell a girl: ‘I think you’re…

“These people need to stop working my nerves,” Marilyn says sharply, with a dramatic toss of her long blond hair. “I’m serious,” she stresses, taking in Kulchur’s smirk. “Unlike some I could mention” — she motions offhandedly to the Lincoln Road strollers swirling past her sidewalk table outside Score –…

Brian Andrews has been up for sixteen hours now. Rising at 3:00 a.m., the reporter for WSVN-TV (Channel 7) substitute-anchored the station’s morning news show from 5:00 to 9:00 a.m. Then he hit the streets to cut live on-air spots as the John Acosta story broke: a grand juror indicted…

What a difference a war makes. Back in 1995 CNN devoted no fewer than 388 breathless hours to the daily murder-trial proceedings of OJ Simpson. On Tuesday, December 4, however, as news broke of Simpson’s alleged connection to an accused member of an Ecstasy smuggling/money-laundering/satellite-television piracy ring (talk about a…

Ray Lata is about to wax nostalgic. The director of Wilhelmina Models’ Miami office leans back in his chair and casts his gaze out the window of his Lincoln Road office. “When Miami was at its worst, the fashion industry was at its best,” Lata opines of the turn-of-the-decade period…

The collective mood inside the Level nightclub for November 17’s Ford Models’ Supermodel of the World competition was less exultant than simply relieved. After all, for the past two months the very existence of the modeling industry has been called into question. In the immediate aftermath of the September 11…

The cobblestones of the Shops at Sunset Place are a world away from Mr. Cheeks’ old haunts in South Jamaica, Queens. Indeed as the 29-year-old rapper leads Kulchur inside the mall’s sprawling GameWorks arcade, there’s little to distinguish the expat New Yorker from any of the other figures playing video…

Forget about anthrax jitters or terrorist sleeper cells. To hear outgoing Miami Beach Mayor Neisen Kasdin tell it, there’s a more imminent threat, one set to rear its head with the local election this Tuesday, November 6. “The fate of the Beach hangs on Elaine Bloom beating David Dermer in…

“A recession is never a good thing,” says Saul Gross, owner of Streamline Properties (a real estate management and brokerage firm) and a candidate for the Miami Beach City Commission in the November 6 election. But, he explains carefully, there’s a “silver lining” to this ongoing crunch, particularly as it…

What’s the tasteful way to make a buck during a time of national tragedy? That’s the question the pop culture industry has been gingerly grappling with a month on from the horrific attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In those strikes’ immediate aftermath, entertainment practically vanished from…

You don’t need to tell the staff at the Delano Hotel that a recession is here. One look at the pool makes it pretty obvious. Gone are the days when only a strategically placed tip would snag you a prime deck chair as the $400-per-night set splashed and sweated in…

Even through a closed door you can still hear DJ Greo’s angry voice thundering away. “I got no life!” he hollers. “I got no girlfriend! I got no kids! I’m a grown-ass man now, and all I got is this!” This is Blaze 104.7 FM, the hip-hop station Greo has…

It seemed harmless enough at the time. Sitting with Source magazine head David Mays and Source Youth Foundation director Edward DeJesus earlier this summer, Kulchur noticed both men wearing the same distinctive medallion necklaces — an M set inside a black shield. Was there a third Musketeer missing from our…

Will the real thugs please stand up? After two and a half months of fearful teeth-gnashing preceding the arrival of last week’s Source Hip-Hop Music Awards, South Beach endured … just another weekend. There were no hotel trashings, no melees with police, and aside from the occasional woman about to…

To get a sense of Madonna’s cultural heft you didn’t have to look too hard at the audience gathered for her recent sold-out concert at Sunrise’s National Car Rental Center. Just a quick sideways glance would do. To Kulchur’s left was a squad of eighth-grade girls, erupting in squeals of…

Is Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs still cool? The answer to that question is more than just a matter of taste. It speaks to the future of hip-hop and specifically to the economic fortunes of Puff Daddy’s $300 million conglomerate, Bad Boy Entertainment. It may even determine whether we one day…

“He has a problem because white people are starting to hate him,” Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs said last week, and although he was speaking about fellow crossover artist George W. Bush, he could just as accurately have been referring to his own public fortunes. Puffy’s headline-grabbing trial this past winter…

People be asking me all the time, “Yo Mos, what’s getting ready to happen with hip-hop?’ People talk about hip-hop like it’s some kind of giant in the hillside coming down to visit the townspeople. — Mos Def, “Fear Not of Man” “I want to build the Time Warner of…

Every woman has her breaking point. Amy Gerstenfeld’s arrived at the crowning moment of her wedding vows. As her family and friends sat gathered before her on Memorial Day weekend inside a banquet room at South Beach’s Loews Hotel, she listened solemnly to her rabbi pose that all-important question. Then…