A Los Angeles entertainment production company has been running classified ads in newspapers across the country, seeking exhibitionistic kooks saddled additionally with addictive personalities for a television documentary series to be called HABITS. The series will chronicle the various misadventures of people battling debilitating obsessions or compulsions. According to the…
“I have been through this,” writes Chilean novelist and playwright Ariel Dorfman in his new essay collection Other Septembers, Many Americas. Indeed for Latin Americans of a particular political stripe, September 11 occupied an ominous slot on the calendar long before 2001. “Ever since that day in 1973 when Chile…
The interview is not going well. We’ve barely begun talking and Argentine director Lucrecia Martel is already staring back at Kulchur with the expression of a woman who’s just swallowed a mouthful of sour milk. “It wasn’t until we finished the script that we contacted Almodóvar,” she insists sharply, referring…
How Unbalanced Was It? So unbalanced it fell right into the union’s lap: The picture painted of Pan American Hospital in Forrest Norman’s article “Blunt Trauma” (January 20) was distorted. Pan American is a 146-bed general acute-care medical center and one of the few remaining not-for-profit hospitals in Miami-Dade County…
Dead Ducks: Murder May the guilty humans meet the same gruesome fate: Francisco Alvarado’s article about the Muscovy ducks being murdered in Doral made me sick (“Foul Duck Death,” January 13). And yes, it is murder. I sincerely hope the bastards who poisoned and gassed those defenseless animals, and the…
The Bitch normally can’t imagine leaving the house on a Saturday morning to spend time in bleary, tan-inducing sunlight, but this past weekend was different. The chills of football fever goaded the canine to pry her eyes from the DVD of Underworld and drive past the cow fields and tribal…
If That Was a Flack Attack… …then we need more of them: It is most unfortunate that, while castigating the Artécity condominium project and DindyCo PR for throwing a great party around an art-show opening, The Bitch neglected to address the real news in her “Condoflage” piece (January 13). The…
If it is nighttime when you read this, go outside and look at the sky. Saturn is the closest it gets to Earth all year — only 750 million miles away, and hangs enormous and golden over the ocean just after sunset. Also, an unexpected, unexplained celestial phenomenon has caused…
“My whole life I was introduced as someone else,” Anthony Kennedy Shriver quipped to the well-heeled crowd before him at a Toronto benefit dinner this past fall for his Best Buddies foundation. “I grew up the nephew of President Kennedy. Then I was the nephew of Senator Kennedy. Then I…
Now that the deluxe edition of Napoleon Dynamite is out on DVD, there is absolutely no reason to do anything but remain indoors indefinitely, memorizing every line of the uniquely hilarious, eminently quotable film about a clan of unselfconscious Idaho nerds and their junk-food-eating llama. To help readers get started…
My Daughter, Bad and Good With help she went from one to the other: Rebecca Wakefield did a great job with her article about my daughter Laurie Lichtman (“Tow Head,” January 6). She truly captured the real Laurie. Laurie and I are not proud of her drug years, but I…
“Don’t get me wrong, it’s really flattering that so many people have wanted to write about us,” explains Adam Zimmon, guitarist for the Spam Allstars, while furrowing his brow over the barrels of ink that have been expended on his band. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and countless…
For the first time in more than twenty years, the 24 hours of Christmas ticked by without a single note of Caribbean or reggae music broadcast by public radio station WLRN-FM (91.3). Instead listeners deprived of even the regular NPR news feed were exposed to the sounds of choirs from…
Not Just Nail-Pounders Navy Seabees can handle bullets as well as bulldozers: First allow me to congratulate Eric Alan Barton on a very well-written and touching portrait of the realities of war in his article “The Deadliest Day” (December 30). However, I feel he failed to do his homework, and…
Open That Laptop! Nobody boards the plane till we’ve scrolled through every last file: After reading the delightful “Your Safety, Their Punch Line” by Adam Baum (December 16), allow me to add a few comments: As an aviation consultant, I travel thousands of miles every year to international destinations, hired…
If you spent much time at this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach art fair, you heard plenty of talk about truth and beauty, of how a painting could be so transcendent as to be priceless, its value incapable of being measured in mere dollars and cents. Save it, sister, at…
Karl Marx: Alive and Well in Miami Shamelessly pandering free weekly is plainly pinko: Why do you writers and editors at New Times assume all your readers are left-wing radicals? Example: Tristram Korten’s mean-spirited column about Leslie Rothenberg (“Judge Not,” December 9) was not a piece of journalism, it was…
One Ninety, the bistro on NE Second Avenue and 46th Street that was both ultra-chill alternative to South Beach and neighborhood hangout, will hang up the “Closed” sign for good this week after a three-year run. Owners Alan and Donna Lee Hughes, who cannot resolve a dispute over a proposed…
Don’t hate Fabian Basabe because he’s beautiful. “I don’t work, and a lot of people just don’t understand that,” the 26-year-old Basabe says, sounding genuinely hurt by the less-than-sympathetic response his poor-little-rich-boy persona often inspires. Pausing for a sip of his margarita, he continues: “People focus mainly on the glamour…
Art Basel Transformed My Life In three short years I went from vulgarian to sophisticate: Reading through the New Times guide to Art Basel Miami Beach (“Artquake,” December 2) reminded me that three years ago I knew next to nothing about art. I had a Marlins poster on my wall…
Jessica Dorsee endured not a moment of that whole teenage self-loathing thing. “I’d be sitting in my high school classroom and I’d see myself, instead of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., addressing crowds. I had visions of myself as a great leader. If you went back and talked to the…
They aren’t nearly as morbid as the tourists who swarm to the entryway of Gianni Versace’s South Beach mansion, taking snapshots of each other on the very spot where the fashion designer was gunned down in 1997. But then the steady stream of pilgrims arriving at 461 Ocean Boulevard in…
