This week, New Times publishes a profile of Serge Touissant, Miami’s most prolific muralist and sign-painter. If you’re hungry to see more of the former graffiti bomber’s work, you could simply take a drive through Little Haiti, or you could visit Cyber Serge Land. Devout fans have started a Flickr…
Reporters are herd animals. That was made painfully clear last week when approximately 76 of us had the same idea: Hey, let’s go to that A-Rod park dedication thing Friday night. I mean, I can understand why news cameras were there — you can’t beat a local A-Roid/steroid segment at…
During the party-filled week before graduation, Jeffrey Johnson Jr. kept a cap and gown neatly folded in the trunk of his burnt-orange Chevy Monte Carlo. The 17-year-old scholar, set to receive summa cum laude honors in the Carol City Senior High School class of 2006, had worked hard for both…
Drive through Hialeah and you’ll see a billboard advertising reggaeton pioneer Daddy Yankee’s cologne, which launched a couple of months ago. It got us thinking: Miami might be ground zero for the celebrity fragrance industry. After all, nothing says image-conscious excess — our national specialty — like paying $49 for…
In one of the more outrageous celebrity-death rumors we’ve heard (FYI: Eminem, Blossom, and Doogie Howser are indeed alive) various blogs have been reporting that Miami pseudo-star DJ Khaled led cops on a three-hour Bentley chase through Los Angeles streets before killing himself. A white-Bentley-driving assault suspect did indeed lead…
In “The Curse”, our feature article which hits streets tomorrow, New Times tells the tragic story of Carol City High’s Class of 2006, which has lost six of its members to arbitrary street deaths, including five to gunfire. These were “good” kids- none of them involved in gangs or the…
Apparently, mainstream America is ready for a dreadlocked, face-tattooed half-insane gangsta/nonsense rapper. In a pre-Grammys media blitz, Miami’s adopted loon, Lil Wayne, introduces himself to many very white people by reading David Letterman’s Top Ten list and doing an interview with Katie Couric. He’s come a long way since being…
It never fails: Just as we finish explaining to our out-of-town friends that Miami is not really like that, we catch wind of something like this: a plastic surgery fashion show. Last Thursday night, you could smell the silicone in Bay Harbor Islands. As a mitzvah-trained DJ spun techno music,…
So we were driving through Hialeah a few days ago when we saw a billboard advertising Daddy Yankee’s cologne. Yeah, yeah, it launched a couple of months ago, but this is the first we’ve heard of it, and before you blast us for old news you should consider the ramifications…
It never fails: just as we finish explaining to our out-of-town friends that Miami’s not really like that, we catch wind of something like this: a Plastic Surgery Fashion Show. Last Thursday night, you could smell the silicone on Bay Harbor Islands. As a mitzvah-trained DJ spun techno music, partygoers…
As resident Loon Elyse Wanshel illustrated in September, when she set out to ruthlessly mock a $55 brunch for dogs but couldn’t bring herself to do it, it’s really difficult to hate on animal lovers, even frivolous ones.Even more so when we’re talking about a good cause. So imagine our…
Yes, the plot of The Wrestler — in which a dude who had the world by the balls in the ’80s before falling flat on his face owing to disastrous, self-destructive decision-making and an audience that lost interest — is quite similar to the life story of the dude playing that…
We received a voicemail from an even-toned, religiously minded reader of this week’s feature, “Holy Hustler.” The story, which focuses on embattled Liberty City pastor Vincent Spann, had our reader weighing the good and bad aspects of the preacher — and returning a scathing verdict:I was reading your article about…
Enterprising videographer Jacob Katel spent a night in Pastor Vincent Spann’s Basic Training Deliverance Academy, which is featured in this week’s New Times’ feature story, Holy Hustler. The video documents conversations and give a great glimpse into this wild boot camp/addict rehab/Pentecostal church in troubled Liberty City.Let’s start in the…
On a sun-blasted Tuesday morning in the last weeks of 2008, four people pedal camouflage-painted bikes toward NW 61st Street and 13th Place, one of the busiest intersections for Liberty City’s booming drug trade. Donald Vamper, a jovial 46-year-old wearing a camo bandanna Tupac-style; his cornrow-tressed wife Sylvia; and Chris…
In his inaugural speech yesterday, Barack Obama declared that “we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals”- a statement Riptide felt spoke directly to the future of Guantanamo Bay, a place where due process and human rights laws have been kicked aside in the name of…
As Barack Obama momentarily studied his massive audience before launching into his poetic and bold inaugural speech, an unrestrainable middle-age man next to Riptide on the Capitol lawn seating area yelled out, “This is the moment!”That summed it up pretty well. This weekend in D.C. has been a raucous runup…
Okay, so being mayor of any city is pretty much being a professional schmoozer: attend a few balls, galas and fundraisers a week, bequeath a few keys to the city, glut yourself on cubed cheese and champagne, get re-elected, repeat. Riptide’s resigned to that- but it sort of rubs us…
In this week’s sign that our world is doomed, witness the launch of Anxo, a Miami-based line of bulletproof clothing for civilians. Its slogan, and we can’t make this shit up: “Our promise: You won’t be a victim of fashion.”Bulletproof clothing is not an original phenomenon, of course. In narco-ruled…
When Barack and Michelle Obama take the floor for his ceremonial first dance at the inaugural ball this Tuesday, we suggest they do the pretzel — you know, Dubya’s sworn enemy, the thing he choked on? We have some thoughts about which song should be playing too: “99 Problems,” Jay-Z…
Today our departing president held his last press conference, and it was classic Dubya: hokey jokes, strange grins, and a prickly defensiveness. The highlight: Bush admitted, for the first time, to making several mistakes during his presidency. Apparently he was the last to find out. “Clearly, putting a ‘mission accomplished’…
As easy as he is to mock with decades-old jokes, we’ve got to hand it to Bill Clinton — the dude can warm a room like Wayne Newton on crystal meth. Not that last night’s Fontainebleau crowd was a hostile audience. About 300 of Miami’s glitterati — among them sunglass mogul…
