Night and day, a psyche at war with itself: In darkness the inner sanctum becomes a vast lollipop of lowbrow magical realism; by day all the short-order fairy tales yield to the cold crunch of truth. And so it’s another night on Earth, twelve straight hours on the job –…
They came. They recorded an album. They left. Well, while here they also attended a Marlins game, went to the dog races and jai alai, and ate Italian a lot. They = Air Miami, composed of Mark Robinson, Bridget Cross, and Gabriel Stout, the former two refugees from indie-pop uber…
The tropical storm brewing between the University of Miami’s student-run record label, ‘Cane Records, and several of the bands appearing on its just-released compilation CD, Miami Hybridized (“Nightclub Jitters,” July 27), has been downgraded to a mere summer squall and no longer threatens to swamp the album in a sea…
September song, and the angst of August — if the heat doesn’t get you, the stupidity will — dwindles down to a foul psychic sinkhole, infested with boredom, futility, and the remains of wasted flesh. Yet again the same old dirge of hopelessness is everywhere at once: Miami’s really over…
You’re at your neighborhood music megastore in search of the latest release by your new favorite group, Seguridad Social. “How ya spell that?” asks a perplexed clerk in the Latin music department. He then walks off to scan the computer (“How did ya say ya spell that again?”), leaving you…
The signs were all there, a red alert of bad karma and a quiet death instinct warned against a spontaneous trip to California. All the essential discount glamour hookups had fallen apart, and given some petty pecuniary circumstances, the travel budget barely covered cigarettes, booze, and Diet Coke. In the…
La Covacha, the Northwest Dade salsa and Latin rock roadhouse, has a new logo — a red parrot wearing a fireman’s hat. The bird appears on the club’s invitation to a “hot, hot, hot party,” which reads, “We told you and we proved it. We are so hot we burned…
The glamour drought of August, a kind of purgatory for normal social columnists. Though to our way of thinking, admittedly not an advisable sensibility, Miami once again has festered into civic perfection, chaos theory in motion, ripe for tales of the wasteland. In this dodgy discipline, either you use the…
Tom Smith, major mullah of local noise band To Live and Shave in L.A., which also includes bassist Rat Bastard and oscillator-theremin player Ben Wolcott, calls to engage in a little P.R., shifting into self-promo overdrive at the sound of the beep. To paraphrase Bette Davis in All About Eve,…
Last summer Bo Crane, president of Miami’s Pandisc/StreetBeat Records, invited rapper Garrick “Jammin G” Troutman to contribute to one of the label’s compilations. The intended genre was Pandisc’s bread and butter, that brain-thumping derivative of rap known as bass music. “But G requested to do a few hip-hop songs,” explains…
What with the truly feminine pathology of Hurricane Erin A she might fuck you up, and then again, she might not A the week turned out to be slightly less satisfying than we would have liked, remarkably similar to a nonorgasmic sex thrash with a mean witch you couldn’t stand…
For four years, Flippers served as Miami’s premier source for world music. DJs, musicians, students, and foreign film directors congregated at the disheveled storefront on NE Second Avenue, combing sections marked flamenco, reggae, Spanish reggae, North Africa, West Africa, South Africa, Cuba (before and after the revolution), Brazil, Latin jazz,…
Sometimes you just get lucky, and lately life’s just been coming up roses: Expecting nothing, and for once getting back everything in return. Curiously enough the recent glamour drought ended overnight with the National Urban League Conference, which turned out to be a virtual firestorm of bliss. And so we…
A storm of controversy swirls around the new ‘Cane Records compilation CD, Miami Hybridized, which is scheduled for an August 30 release. The disc — the second from the fledgling label run by University of Miami students — showcases five local artists: rappers 5th Gear, vocalist Carla Hall, straight-ahead rocker…
There’s a certain pathology to this pop life, this culture of the damned, a sick compulsion shrouding the worship of the superficial. Once you’re trapped in the lower orders of the glamour mafia, it’s impossible to escape the pernicious pall of the cartoon void and the trivial — all the…
The Goods may want to add another step to their getting-signed strategy. “I’m Not Average,” a perennial audience favorite, is included in a CD and home video release from Playboy entitiled The Girls of Radio: Talk, Rock, and Shock. The package showcases up-and-coming bands from around the natiom, as well…
Maybe it’s in the air, all this churning of spiritual anorexia, these studies in dumbed-down concerns, but then, they’re always good for a snarky remark or two. Miami entering a new plateau in its continuing evolution as a low-wattage version of Los Angeles — not a pleasant prospect — an…
America the ugly, darkness visible, an eternal pinball journey through the seven circles of a tabloid Hades. The final exorcism may be at hand, but in the meantime, gossip’s a growth industry and Miami remains in the vanguard of the filth follies. Reality unplugged, a bumpy ride on a breaking…
And so we all go, to and fro, talking of Michelangelo and the Delano, the media locusts drifting momentarily from the Hugh Grant mess to little old Miami, always good for a junket and a breaking trend story. The phoenix of fashion mutating into a new incarnation of tenuous postcoital…
Home sweet home, immersed in a dangerous fallow period, nurturing our pet obsessions — sex, fame, making a living — and taking a breather from the tabernacle of degradation, these loathsome adventures in the societal trenches, this ring of fire and fury signifying nothing. It’s all one big celebrity circle…
And so there we lurk on an unfathomably hot Saturday evening, at play with the Brothers Gibb on N. Bay Road for “The Gypsy Party,” another installment of the Miami social waltz, a dance on the precipice between heaven and hell. The Rangoon-like air clutching the throat like an evil…
Lately the surreal dementia of the world has come to resemble thoroughly ill-conceived porno, past all common sense, dramatic plausibility, and redeeming social values. Something on the order of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude rethought as a comeback vehicle for filth farmer-talk show hostess Jenny Jones. Throw…
