A new year, the dread urgency of the fin-de-siecle, civilization crumbling, and Miami, as ever, going for the baroque. Madonna adding muscle and visual punch to her New Year’s Eve frolic, regulars like Bruce Weber and Nan Bush cavorting with John Salley of the Miami Heat and male models as…
Rat city, ugly little beasts growing fat and sleek in a tropical cornucopia, vermin functioning as the true parallel creatures to the human race, gorillas being nasty enough but essentially guileless. The mankind-as-rodent metaphor erupting in a truly linear fashion over the holidays, decidedly nonallegorical plague-bearers descending on our house…
Once more into the breach of Trashland USA, wallowing in the lurid and lewd, the frenzied countdown to the half-baked resolutions of the new year especially punishing, fueled by an ugly itch to wrest every conceivable diversion from the dregs. The process of simply going out, anywhere and everywhere, eventually…
Oh by gosh, by golly, it’s Christmas time, the town that never stays home plunging headlong into a marathon of high-octane socializing. The populace mawkish and sort of forgiving, a regimen of endless bonhomie and goodwill taking its toll, mankind not naturally given to extended bouts of charity. Another seasonal…
The Miami story, wired up and ready to roll, the city functioning on scatterbrained creative circuity. Ordinary life, as of late, coming to resemble a pulp-market rewrite of Naked Lunch with touches of magical realism, outright pornography, and assorted knock-’em-dead gimmicks drawn from the cheaper forms of fiction. On the…
White Party week, a crush of the noble and base, the pure and putrid, undercut by the frenzy of renown, from Prince to the luminaries of the gay universe. Off to a rousing start at Paragon for “An Evening of South Beach,” coordinated by nine different AIDS organizations and the…
Settle back and relax, it’s Prozac time. Life just doesn’t get any weirder — or much worse either — than this. A dicey proposition of alternating repulsion and fin-de-siäcle pleasures, the city drifting into a bizarre free-trade zone of arrested development, floating somewhere between St. Tropez, pre-war Berlin, and an…
Miami, a tumble through fortune and folly, the celebrated making random unscheduled cameo appearances, propping up a rapidly faltering production. Lincoln Road on a crushingly banal afternoon, the staff at Books & Books casually detailing their brushes with fame: Sinead O’Connor, Bill Murray, John Waters, Madonna buying glamour magazines, Mickey…
Show business, the new opiate of the masses, rife with ritualized pageantry and comforting recreational delusions, enveloping and pernicious as a cult. Everyone’s favorite industry pursued with the fervor that English intellectuals of the Twenties once brought to the Catholic Church, communism, and buggery, the nuances of devotion lost in…
Halloween weekend, the national holiday for the nightlife industry, a surreal but profitable refraction of ordinary club existence, sort of like Christmas without basic human values. The same pervasive air of forced jollity and indulgence — a twisted pomade of resentment, longing, and touches of genuine good feeling — piled…
The breaking filth beat, learning too much about people, most of it unpleasant. Lurk around enough crowded rooms, nod politely at appropriate conversational junctures, and a pitiless deluge of errant behavior will sweep over the unwary: distasteful personal revelations, the private hell of celebrities-I-have-known, the dank secrets of friends and…
A surrealistic sojourn in the City of Angels, the American dreamscape, glittery and cruel as a mirage, an eerie augury of Miami’s destiny. Mired in the sheer exhilaration of modern vulgarity — all small-change renown and bargain-basement chic — and tumbling headlong into an uncertain future, haunted by the glorious…
Once more into the breach, another onslaught of rigorous fun, another year of hope triumphing over experience. The season, a heady brew of distractions and rough amusements, greeted with the usual mix of dread and delight. Miami’s annual march through the winter solstice, the city primed to bask in the…
The party circuit, an ugly scramble for the hollow moment, the regulars rooting around like epicene little pigs, chasing after trifles and courtesies. The true addicts haunted by the sweetest prize possible, the ideal phantasmagoria: a gathering lousy with glitz and glitter, riddled with the elite, and better yet, entirely…
Miami, another year of hype and hustle in the city of ambition, another rush to seize the moment in the town that glamour built. A tropical metropolis tumbling pell-mell into the consciousness of the world, simultaneously hyperventilating and falling apart, uncannily like an overextended Caribbean nation with attitude problems. Warm,…
Rosh Hashanah, a new year, a new beginning, a new attitude of unsettling contentment, gooey delight reigning in the house of nice. The first traces of autumn and renewal, born again after a difficult period, the usual endless summer doldrums of whiny personal crises, Freudian black holes, and various fabulous…
September song, a seasonal dirge for a cruelly unyielding landscape, the brain a vicious jumble of frippery and unsavory associations, one vast over-the-top Hitchcock dream sequence. The internal nightmare curiously more tolerable than reality, lately a battleground straight out of cable television hell, uncannily like a Jane Whitney trash talk…
The dog days of the killing season, tempers fraying, minds unraveling, the dark reaches of the collective unconsciousness bubbling up to the surface like an evil cancer, a plague upon the hot bottom of the Earth. Lost and dispirited in the seventh circle of the inferno, the reassuring tug of…
Life’s a banquet and most poor suckers are starving, the fortunate and feckless alike craving something beyond their fair share of the available resource pool. The rich demanding discounts and getting richer, the disenfranchised sliding down the totem pole, the media fighting over scraps like jesters at the king’s court,…
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…
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…
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…
