Reasons to Believe

I don’t care about his feathered hair. I don’t care about his unfortunate fascination, in the Seventies and Eighties, with puff sleeves. Or his continuing fascination with white suits. Or the fact that, with some teenage parenting, he could technically be old enough to be my grandfather. I love Rod…

Bambi Bump-Off

Three skulls lay in the dust beneath silvery buttonwood leaves. Two were covered in rotting flesh. One had been severed by a hacksaw. That was December. A month prior, a truck driver had swerved off the road to eviscerate an endangered key deer, spreading her organs over 30 yards of…

StreetWorks – Wynwood Art District

As I walked from gallery to gallery during this year’s first Wynwood art walk, I noticed a lot of graffiti but assumed most of it was there as part of an exhibition. But this one on NW 2nd Avenue and 24th Street was far from most of the galleries and…

Codepink Stink

First there was the menacing claim broadcast on Spanish-language television that “someone might crack your head like a coconut.” Next came three death threats. Finally, as the peace loonies recently piloted their Dodge Ram pickup onto SW Eighth Street, an angry crowd composed mostly of Cuban exiles — spitting and…

Letters from the Issue of January 24, 2008

Heroes All So proud: Thanks so much for Janine Zeitlin’s “Frogmen” (January 17); it’s such an amazing article. I’m so proud of my father, Andy Pruna, for being one of the heroes in this article. I read this great story to my kids so they could hear the truth about…

Throwback Tuesdays: Biz Markie!!

There’s something about the video for “Just a Friend” and the song in general that was pivotal for an entire generation to get a better understand of what hip-hop really is. Up until this song went national, most hip-hop singles were either serious, message driven tunes of the “White Lines”…

Club Action

With the conversion last year of the old Jackie Gleason Theater to the Fillmore Miami Beach, Miami-Dade County gained yet another live music venue. And it was yet another enticement for bands to play down here, rather than make the rest of us trek up to Broward or even Palm…

New Times Turns 20

The beef began with a fish. Fueled by liquor, it ended with Miami New Times owner Mike Lacey launching a bottle at its editor Jim Mullin. “One of our sarcastic writers called [legendary newscaster] Ann Bishop ‘a bossy old trout’ in, I think, the first ‘Best of Miami’ issue,” Mullin…

Letters from the Issue of January 17, 2008

Thanks, We Think Now you’ve got it: Jason Handelsman’s January 10 article about Rick Ross, “Still Hustlin’,” was 10 times better than the garbage he wrote about Bigg D (“Bigg Pimpin’,” December 13). The focus was on Rick Ross and his music, not on fried chicken and strippers. Thanks! John…

StreetWorks – NW 167 St. and Palmetto Expressway

After missing my exit on the Palmetto Expressway, the one that leads to NW 167th Street, because some dude couldn’t show me some common courtesy. I had to take the long way back onto the expressway. I looked to my left as i traveled up the ramp back onto State…

Letters from the Issue of January 10, 2008

A Wicked Check into the Boards Chris, can you skate backward?: Brett Gillin proves in his January 3 article “The Whiny One” that he knows nothing about hockey or Sidney Crosby. It’s one thing to talk about something he knows about, but it’s another to repeat things he has heard…

The Shows Go On

I know, a couple of weeks ago I talked smack about year-end lists while dispensing a roundup of my favorite local albums of 2007. But I couldn’t resist one more, especially with the previous issue’s national roundup of the year in music. For some local flavor I racked my brain…

Letters from the Issue of January 3, 2008

Standing Up for Stacey She’s won some too: I am writing to you five days after reading Bob Norman’s December 20 story “Stacey and Friends,” about my wife, Stacey Honowitz, because I didn’t want to have a knee-jerk reaction to it. I am absolutely incredulous that your publication could allow…

Zombies Storm South Beach

Click here to check out a slideshow from the Zombie Walk. I was playing fast and loose with other people’s money, and I came up dead one morning in a Dumpster wearing this amazing outfit,” a guy named Jesse says as one of his brown eyes peeks down at me…

Letters from the Issue of December 27, 2007

Homeless Harangues No sympathy here: I am having a hard time finding sympathy for the men in “The People Under the Bridge” by Isaiah Thompson (December 13). They assaulted the innocence of children, as far as I’m concerned. They forfeited their right to state support (I’m not particularly sure I…

Miami’s Best Albums of 2007

It’s that time of year again — the end, that is, when High Fidelity-style geeks compile High Fidelity-style best-of-the-year lists. There are slobbering dissections of Spoon’s Ga Ga Ga Ga, blathering babble about Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible, and a crock of criticism of M.I.A.’s Kala. If that’s what you want,…

Letters from the Issue of December 20, 2007

Homeless The Terminator is better than we are: Thank you so much, Isaiah Thompson, for shedding light on this tragic situation in your December 13 article “The People Under the Bridge.” Florida should be ashamed of itself. I can’t believe this is what the sex offender “hysteria” has led to,…

Classic Common Sense

Talk about a throwback! Here’s some old school Common from 1994 off of his Resurrection album. He was still going by Common Sense at the time and still living on the Southside of Chicago…not doing Gap ads, not making movies, not wearing cardigans, and definitely keeping his rhymes simple and…

Throwback Tuesdays: Suck My Kiss

“Hit me, you can’t hurt me…Suck My Kiss” It’s been a long time since this video got any spins on the major Viacom stations and as far as the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ catalogue goes, that’s really a shame. It’s a really well-shot video, especially for the time frame and…

‘Lectric Friends

Back in the mid-Nineties, the Miami-birthed noise act Kreamy ‘Lectric Santa was playing now-defunct Miami Beach venue Washington Square. Suddenly the club’s musical director, a guy named Doc Wiley, cut off the sound. “There’s nothing like tripping on acid and being drunk, and being told by the club’s sound guy:…

Letters from the Issue of December 13, 2007

Thanks for the Tip Danny is not to be missed: It has been many years since I attended the theater, but Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, reviewed by Brandon K. Thorp in “Soul Porn” (December 6), was about the best reintroduction I could have experienced. My wife and I…

Raw Meat

It’s 11:30 p.m. on a Friday at Churchill’s Pub (5501 NE Second Ave.), and Miami filmmaker Aiden Dillard, age 26, is positioning the legs of an inflatable doll on his shoulders. She wears a pink chiffon dress and sequin Santa hat. “Ho, ho, ho, it’s that gift-giving time of year,”…