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Posts: 71

  1. Johnny Gets His Guitar

    27.Aug.08, 09:33 EDT
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    Long before he was channeling Keith Richard into his role as Captain Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp (sigh) was a swashbuckling guitarist himself. In the late '70s and early '80s, he played in a band called the Kids, one of many new wave acts trying to make it big in a part of the country geographically – not to mention psychically – far from the established music meccas: South Florida. Not many people know that before bass and Gloria, Miami was a rocking town. As the film Rock and a Hard Place: Another Night at the Agora documents, bands like the Kids, Cichlids, Charlie Pickett, etc., were creating the soundtrack of a tropical Athens (in fact, REM were Pickett fans).

    Depp is the only member of this scene who went on to great fame – and he did it as an actor, not a musician. But even the world’s biggest movie star can’t let go of those rock-star fantasies. I suppose that’s why Depp’s strapping his guitar on again; this weekend, he’ll play in a Kids reunion in Pompano Beach, as part of the Sheila Witkin tribute concert that also features Pickett, Slyder, the Romantics (featuring a veteran of the SoFla scene), Z-Cars, and Tight Squeeze.

    It’s not the first time Depp has rejoined his old bandmates: The Kids played the first Witkin tribute in 2007. Witkin was a concert promoter who helped build the South Florida scene; her son Bruce was also in the Kids. The ’07 concert was caught by the Rock and a Hard Place filmmakers. Depp wears a vest, beret, and his instrument hanging low. Be still, my heart.

    Rock ’n’ roll, like any arts career, is a crap shoot. Rock and a Hard Place perfectly captures that sense of failed dreams, the ones that got away. I mean, if even having the hottest guy on the planet in your group doesn’t get you an English countryside mansion, whatcha gonna do?

  2. Twin Cities Bards

    21.Aug.08, 14:34 EDT
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    Maybe it’s the Scandinavian influence, but Minneapolis is probably the cleanest rock ’n’ roll city in America. I remember the refreshing lack of pollution being my first impression, when I began visiting the Twin Cities in the mid '80s, hanging out on the fringes of the then-verdant rock scene, back when the Replacements, Husker Du, Babes in Toyland, Rifle Sport, Breaking Circus, and Soul Asylum were still around. I was well aware the metropolis had its seedy underbelly– a dark side that New York Times media columnist David Carr documents chillingly in his addiction memoir The Night of the Gun. In fact, I usually stayed with a bassist who doubled as the scene’s biggest drug dealer – let’s call him Sven. But even we pale, tattooed potheads went for hikes around Minneapolis’s many lakes and parks. Remember that scene in Purple Rain when Prince drives Apollonia out to a lake on his motorcycle? The call of nature is never far away in Minneapolis.

    Perhaps all that clean air offers a stark contrast to the pockets of depravity and hard-luck characters. Two of the best records of the year so far come from Minneapolitans skilled at spinning tales of gritty realism out of a city not known for its grit. On the Atmosphere album When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold, rapper Slug writes about a waitress trying to pay off student loans, a lost-soul rock star, and on “Dreamer,” a single mom struggling to make it from day to day. With a mantra chorus of “but she still dreams after she woke tight hold on that hope/ sometimes it can seem so cold do what you gotta do to cope,” it’s probably the best feminist anthem by a male rapper since Tupac’s “Dear Mama.” Spieled out over jazz piano riffs and spry, live backpacker hip-hop, these are unsentimental but sympathetic portraits worthy of Bruce Springsteen or Joe Strummer.

    The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn explicitly toasts Strummer on “Constructive Summer”: “I think he might have been our only decent teacher.” Finn cut his teeth in Minneapolis but formed the Hold Steady in Brooklyn. Whereas he used to locate many of his songs in the back woods and alleys of the Twin Cities, on Stay Positive, he writes about all of America. On first listen “Constructive Summer,” with its backdrop of paper mills and parties, became my instant summer anthem – I was driving around the Upper Peninsula, after all, in a county where the red steel plant of a container company is the largest local employer. I interviewed Finn a couple years ago, and not surprisingly, he knew my old friend Sven. Sven could have been the model for many of Finn’s characters: the big-hearted drunk, the tragedy looking for a savior.

    Minneapolis is in the heartland, so maybe it’s not so surprising that it’s produced two of the aughties’ Strummers – Woody Guthriesque champions of the downtrodden and unsung. Unlike the Minneapolis bands of the ‘80s, these bards aim for the anthems. Maybe grit is in the eye of the beholder.

  3. Life During Stormtime

    19.Aug.08, 14:01 EDT
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    Yesterday was supposed to be my son's first day of kindergarten -- a banner day in any parent's lifetime (even if their child already has three years of Montessori under his belt). But Cole's other mother -- Nature -- had different plans. Tropical Storm Fay has delayed his entree into public schol by two days so far. It's so Florida, I have to laugh.

    Of course, he and the 599,999 other South Florida kids affected are delighted -- while their parents, many of whom still have to work, struggle to find child care. At least most households have not lost their power. I'm sure an inordinate number of Dade and Broward youths have been sucking in an ungodly amount of MTV and the Disney channel. Thank goddess for the Olympics, which gave us something new to watch together as a family last night, curled together on the bed, eating popcorn -- until the rain knocked out our satellite receiver, doh!


    Ever since I watched one of the first gusts of Wilma topple the majestic avocado tree in our backyard, I've loathed hurricanes. The tree was the soul of our backyard, which is in turn the jewel of our house. Its bountiful fruit, as sweet and buttery as chocolate, were the envy of our neighborhood, with whom we always shared. We built our pool around its base, in an elegant kidney shape; I even picked out coping tiles to match the luscious, dark green of its leaves and peels (which, come to think of it, is a similar shade to the background of my MOLI profile). When it fell, my heart broke.

    The tree landed in the power lines, miraculously not taking them down. We were able to free it, pull it back up, retie it, and bury its roots. It survived. It yielded no crop in '06, a small one in '07, and this year, it has been full of fruit again.

    Yesterday my husband tied it to a ponytail and palm: trees helping trees. Fay has been long and strong, but not nearly as fierce as Wilma. Wilma turned our island into Venice, with storm surge creating a river mere feet from our front door, and tore down scores of trees. A picture of an apartment building a mile away, across from the public school that someday -- tomorrow? -- Cole will attend, with curtains and shades fulttering from its punched-out windows, was the cover of The Miami Herald the day after Wilma. It has taken three hurricane-free years for our neighborhood to begin to look something like it did before that storm-filled year -- although there are still holes in the sky where trees once stood, and for-sale signs in a neighborhood where property values had been shooting upward.

    Yesterday I ventured to Collins Avenue, next to the ocean. When I tried to leave the Walgreen's, an outburst had turned the street into a wind tunnel. Sheets of rain were blowing sideways. I was stuck. Eventually, I ventured out and pushed my way through the horizontal water. The wind whipped the car door from my hands and it was all I could do to pull it shut. The old man in the car in front of me gave up on his door, letting it fly open as he ducked into the store, undoubtedly to pick up some necessary prescription, like heart medicine.

    Palm fronds littered the streets on the drive home, and a street sign lay fallen. Even the young man carrying a surfboard took shelter behind a building. (In a Herald photograph, a cop explains to one man why he can't wakeboard in the street.)

    The pool is full of leaves and roiling as if Michael Phelps were cutting a swath through it. Out front, the bougainvillea and palms against our front fence are a dangerous wind-whipped gauntlet for anyone venturing down the sidewalk. Me, I'd walk down the middle of the street. But the tree stands tall and amazingly, we don't seem to have even lost that many avocados.

    If you want a glimpse of Fay in Miami, our friends at Shake-A-Leg have baycams at their website. It's been a comparatively mild storm. And honestly, having just returned from vacation, Cole and I needed the extra days to get prepped for school. But we're ready now. Can the wind please stop?

  4. Bottom Up in the UP

    14.Aug.08, 14:11 EDT
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    We (the media elite) generally think of culture with a big C: the high arts, or else, the mass arts. Ballet or Britney. The folk arts seem quaint, antiquated, parochial. Yet in fact, the artistic drive thrives in small, local institutions, where the heavy lifting of cultural creation and curation is part of the fabric of daily life -- far from spotlights and flashbulbs.

    I'm talking about places like the Ontonagon County Historical Society and the Ontonagon Theater of Performing Arts, that build the cultural fabric from the bottom up. These two institutions, one decades old, one founded a few years ago, promulgate and preserve the intellectual, imaginative life in a part of the world generally defined by physical culture: hunting, fishing, skiing, boating, snowmobiling, ATVing -- or working in the mill, the shipyard, the forests. In the past month I've been in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, I've written about Calumet and the Porkies, but I've tended to neglect the town that has always been the center of my summer sojourns, Ontonagon.

    Ontonagon, aka Harbor Town, is a boom and bust town if there ever was one. Located at the egress of the Ontonagon River, it has been a portal between the county's interior and Lake Superior -- and, thereby, the world -- since the 1800s. Vast swathes of timber used to float here; at the end of the 19th century, they caught on fire and the entire town burned down, except for the brick lighthouse on the river's west side. That lighthouse is still there today; the historical society offers daily tours. Progress has been so halting in this part of the world that the past is palpably present, not just in the form of relics (a century-old windup foghorn), but in the family names: Many of the old lighthouse keepers' descendants are still Ontonagon citizens.

    The historical society also runs a museum in downtown Ontonagon that is chock a block with artifacts of a frontier life that's still very much in sway. Needless to say, mostly retirees and teenagers volunteer their time to keep this effort afloat. Bruce Johanson, my husband's old music teacher, was our avuncular tour guide for the lighthouse. (Two weeks before, his daughter Linda, also a school teacher, took us horseback riding). These are the unheralded stars of small-town cultural institutions, as important in their own right as Brad and Angelina.

    Yet another teacher -- god bless the educators! -- spearheaded the effort to put a theater in the town's old brick library building a decade ago. Dana Brookins and her Harbortown Players put on several plays a year; tonight, their version of Gypsy opens. I admit full nepotism here: my dog Otis's father is one of the cast members, and Dana is one of my husband's oldest friends. The Ontonagon Theater of Performing Arts also hosts visiting artists -- shining a beacon of its own.

    No discussion of Ontonagon cultural institutions would be complete without a mention of Stubb's, the bar/museum that has been a repository for yellowing mining photos, taxidermied animals, beer cans, traps, liquor-advertising paraphenalia, and Packers memorabilia since the '30s. It's like a Hard Rock Cafe, with guns and bears instead of guitars and costumes. My parents took me here for afternoon Cokes when I was a wee lass. Now, every summer, we hold our annual Canada vs. U.S. foosball tournament here. Since America won again this year, the trophy now stands amid the overflow of bric-a-brac behind the bar, making my life almost complete.


  5. Happy Birthday BUST

    12.Aug.08, 13:07 EDT
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    Fifteen years ago, three smart ladies in NYC decided they didn't see any magazines that spoke to hip urbanites like themselves. The glossies were too, well, glossy -- not to mention governed by a beauty myth that seemed so 1980s. Sassy was aimed at younger women, Ms. at older. Debbie Stoller, Marcelle Karp, and Laurie Henzel craved a publication that spoke to women the way the music of Liz Phair and Missy Elliot did. So in the spirit of those DIY early '90s days, they decided to start one themselves.

    The fact that BUST is still alive and well is in part a miracle, but it's also a testament to the incredible savvy and tenacity of its founders. I know: I was starting my own publication, a multiculti multisexy journal called Resister, around the same time. And despite the collegial help and advice of the BUST ladies back then, Resister only lasted two issues. I didn't have the stomach for figuring out how to get circulated as alternative distributors went belly up, for getting money from advertisers, for not being able to pay contributors, for celebrity wrangling.

    All of which is to say BUST, I salute you! Along with Bitch -- another publication that has amazingly stayed the course since those heady days -- BUST captures the interests and insights of that group of proactive women who earned various names: third-wave feminists, postfeminists, do-me feminists, whatever. The magazine's title is a pun on the fact this is a publication intended for the female half of that demographic that was all the rage, the baby bust. BUST focuses on artists and activists who are expanding the definitions of gender roles and of feminism, women like Kim Gordon, Bjork, Amy Poehler, Chloe Sevigny, Tina Fey, etc. Karp and Stoller's book The Bust Guide to the New Girl Order was one of the first bibles of this generation. Stoller's later knitting tomes may not have lit the same feminist fires, but they did help spawn the whole crafting movement.

    Tonight Stoller and Henzel celebrate their anniversay with a killer shindig at Spiegelworld in New York (Karp was bought out of the company many years ago). Funny lady Amy Sedaris will host, JD Samson DJs. Peformers include Morningwood, Leslie Hall, Murray Hill, and Free Blood. It's sold out -- that's how cool and smart BUST still is, 15 years later.

  6. Paris Outsmarts McCain

    07.Aug.08, 13:21 EDT
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    I confess: I've been a Paris hater. Not that I've spent a lot of time pondering twiggy blond heiresses, but when I've had to, I've been unimpressed. Ms. Hilton has always personified the whole celebrity for celebrity's sake illness of our society: She's famous for being famous, for her ability to turn Page 6 antics into careers in television and music. Not my thing.

    But I have to give Paris Hilton major props for her hilarious response to John McCain's inane attack ad on Barack Obama, in which the aging senator impugns his colleage and opponent by comparing him, in photographic flashes, to Hilton and Britney Spears. The ad's (weak) point is that the Illinois senator is a celebrity, not a leader -- and therefore just another talentless bimbo. Then the McCain ad spins off into kneejerk attacks on the Democratic candidate's energy and tax policies. God, what an airhead!

    Hilton's response, made by the Funny or Die website, mocks McCain as "the oldest celebrity." Hilton makes letter-perfect funny of her own bimbosity, then offers a smartly nuanced energy policy of her own, before asking if it's okay if she, if elected, paints the White House pink. From Hilton's swimsuit to the juxtaposition of youth culture and old politics, the video lampoons the inanity of a campaign that so easily loses its focus on the real issues.

    Even before Hilton responded, the McCain ad struck me as a sexist smear. You want to denigrate someone's intelligence? Compare them to a couple of blond bitches. The ad, called "Celeb," misses the point of Obama's importance: He's a celebrity because of his intellect and accomplishments (and, okay, his good looks and towering charisma); most pundits agree that his fame indicates the possible end of the age of the vapid. The ad also disturbs me because it starts with images of crowds at the Washington monument, which seems to me to be a reference to Martin Luther King Jr. -- and an oblique appeal to viewers' racism.

    Even though I've never liked Paris, or Britney, I've always taken care not to bash them because I know hatred of them is often fueled by misogyny. (Besides, at this point, self-hating Brooke Hogan is the pop tart to hate.) My favorite part of the Hilton video may be when she says she's thinking of having Rihanna as a running mate. You go girls!

    See more Paris Hilton videos at Funny or Die

  7. Of Monks and Miners

    05.Aug.08, 13:40 EDT
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    In 1900 Calumet, Michigan, was a thriving copper township of more than 25,000 with money to burn. An opera house was erected downtown; lit by a mammoth copper chandelier, the Calumet Theatre drew such talent as Sarah Bernhardt to this nether region of the U.S.: the Keweenaw, the upmost peninsula of the Upper Peninsula.

    Tragically, the bourgeoisie didn't treat its proletarian so well. In one incident during the resultant labor unrest, 74 people -- including 59 kids -- were trampled to death at a Christmas party in the Italian Hall, a tragedy immortalized in a Woody Guthrie song. The copper boom went bust. Nowadays, Calumet has a population of about 900.

    But what a population it is. I admit I'm a sucker for little towns with historic industries, antique shops, confectioneries, and funky restaurants. A couple months ago, I wrote about that pearl of a Florida oyster town called Apalachicola. I hit the motherlode of mining towns in Calumet (sorry for my bad puns).

    The past is ever-present in the settlement that was originally known as Red Jacket. The imposing red stone buildings of a century ago still line the main streets. The town has a smart preservationist streak. The theater has been maintained and renovated, and today still hosts plays, concerts, movies, etc. The Vertin department store is now the Vertin Gallery, a haven for the area's many artists. The Michigan House is a great pub/restaurant, with its old northwoods mural and its Red Jacket microbrewery (I like the Pick Axe Blonde just for the name and label). Calumet is chockablock with antique stores and a to-die-for used bookstore (where you can also buy antiques).

    Perhaps best of all are the lodging opportunities. The Laurium Manor was built 100 years ago by a mining magnate. Now its 45 rooms house both a museum and a B&B. We stayed here several years ago, enjoying breakfast on the big porch on the second floor.

    One of the craziest, coolest places I've ever stayed in my life is several miles from Calumet. Follow the Eight Mile Road from Ahmeek and you wind up at the Sand Hills Lighthouse. Lighthouses are cultish magnets of romance and desolation, and Sand Hills is the perfect site of a gothic novel. The innkeepers, Bill Frabotta and Merry Mary, are an odd couple who have decked the rooms out like Hollywood movie sets, in lush velvets and antiques. Sand Hills alone is reason enough to come to the Keweenaw, even if the peninsula weren't a quiet, unique wilderness oasis -- and a registered national historic region.

    My husband and I always finish our Keweenaw tours at Copper Harbor, the little town at the top of the world that is almost as perfect as Calumet (there's just one too many tacky tourist shops). There we dine finely at the Harbor Haus, watching for the ferry to return from Isle Royale -- only to be greeted by the dancing waitresses of this Germanic eatery.

    The drive from Calumet to Copper Harbor is beyond scenic, whether you take the western road that winds along Lake Superior or Brockway Mountain Drive. Make sure to stop at the Jampot, perhaps the most unilkely spot of all in the Keweenaw. A group of monks make the preserves here, along with sinful truffles, in a divine spot between a waterfall and Gitche Gumee. My gay brothers insist their gaydar goes off whenever they're here, which is why they go each year; a local friend also tells tales of the friars' wild orgies. Isn't that just what you expect from monks? Eyeing the opulent gold minaret of their lakeside Holy Transfiguration Skete -- will someday this be a B&B too? -- I can only applaud the brothers for knowing how to live.

  8. Northern Lights

    31.Jul.08, 13:37 EDT
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    Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula, a crook of land that sticks out into Lake Superior like God's finger as painted by Michelangelo, was once a thriving mining and lumber region. Silver and copper made cities like Calumet boom towns, sites of fancy theaters, grand homes, and beautiful churches. Immigrants, mostly from Finland, but also from Italy, Scandinavia, etc., came to work and build, mixing with the native Anishinabe populations and the descendants of French and American fur traders.

    But the last copper mine, White Pine, closed more than a decade ago (my husband worked there). Some say even the big trees are running out. The Keweenaw has tens of thousands fewer people than it did 100 years ago. There are abandoned houses and actual ghost towns scattered throughout the woods and backroads here -- alongside old mining shafts, defunct railroad beds, and apple orchards gone wild.

    But natural beauty, the Keweenaw has by the buckets. While most of the old growth has been deforested, there are stands of towering virgin timber in places like the Porcupine Mountains State Park and Estivant Pines Sanctuary, and thick woods of birch, hemlock, maple, and poplar have grown up where loggers once trod. The glacier-formed ridges and valleys yield vista after vista. Cliffs drop precipitously into the multihued water of Lake Superior in some places, while elsewhere the land rolls into the water as gentle white beaches decorated by driftwood sculptures. Rivers crash over red and green rocks in abundant waterfalls, and inland lakes are fishing paradises. And then there's Superior herself: the world's biggest lake, vast as an ocean, mirror-still and gin-clear one day, storm-tossed and deadly the next (remember the Edmund Fitzgerald?).

    For years, Michigan's Upper Peninsula has been a summer cottage getaway for downstaters from the lower peninsula (aka trolls, because they live beneath the Mackinac Bridge), Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Illinois. I've been coming up for 40 years, since my family first moved to Beloit, Wisconsin. Now I make the trek from Miami every year, and I know people who come from Alaska, Montreal, Palm Springs, and San Francisco. It's that kind of place.

    With other industries depleted, the UP in general, and Keweenaw in particular, needs to find its place as a tourist destination beyond the cottage crowd -- though it needs to do so in a way that won't, once again, destroy its natural resources.

    And there's no reason that the Keweenaw can't become an ecotourist and trekker destination. Spots like the Porkies already draw a tuned-in backpacking crowd. The park has dozens of trails that offer camping alongside streams and Superior. It has begun adding yurts to the log cabins that have been there for years. I have to admit: I stayed in one of those cabins for the first time in my life last weekend, and while it wasn't glamping, it was an almost perfect nature experience.

    The Section 17 cabin is across the stream from the Little Carp River Trail and reachable only by a simple plank bridge. It's a mere 1.4 miles from the trailhead, so easily hiked into, even with a five-year-old who refuses to carry his own pack. It's stocked with a wood stove, mattresses, cooking utensils, and, when we arrived, the complete ingredients for s'mores (left there by a previous camper).

    It was a beautiful day. I laid on the bridge and read Jim Harrison's Returning to Earth, a wonderfully written novel set in the UP, while my husband hooked brook trout and my son caught polywogs. We cooked brats over a campfire and, of course, enjoyed the s'mores. Even the bugs weren't bad, and that night, I did something I never do while lying on the ground in a tent: I actually slept.

    Of course, if you prefer to rough it more, you can pitch a tent just about anywhere in the Porkies. If you prefer not to rough it so much, the Union Bay Campground has full hookups for RVs alongside the lake. There is also a four-bedroom wooden cabin for rent by the week. If you want a hotel with bar and restaurant, the AmericInn in Silver City has lovely water views. There are numerous lakefront cabins and motels along the shore here, between the Porkies and Ontonagon; Scott's Superior Inn in particular has some gorgeous log homes for rent.

    The Porkies area offers numerous other pleasures. The Presque Isle River drops into Superior in a series of waterfalls that are hikable. Just outside the park, between Silver City and White Pine, the Big Iron River tumbles over rocks into pools. Cole and Bud jumped about 15 feet into one. We've always known this previously secret spot as Greenwoods Falls, but now it's marked with a sign calling it Bonanza.

    A group of locals, called the Friends of the Porkies, are helping increase the region's visibility. They sponsor an artist-in-residence program and an annual music festival, which is August 22-24 this year.

    There aren't a ton of dining options, but both the Foothills in Silver City and Syl's in Ontonagon have great breakfasts and decent lunches. Paul's at AmericInn offers fish and prime rib buffets. Shopping wise, make sure to stop at my friend Jackie's store, the Great Lakes Trading Company in Silver City, to check out pottery, jewelry, and other crafts by local artisans.

    On Tuesday, I'll write about the other end of the Keweenaw, and the picturesque towns of Calumet and Copper Harbor. The best overall guide to the UP is by the Hunts and available in print and online.

  9. Bajofondo's Nuevo Tango

    29.Jul.08, 11:56 EDT
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    Tango is fucked-up dance music. Especially if you’re used to the obvious 4/4 of rock 'n' roll, its beats are subtle and syncopated – more stepped around than on. My husband and I took tango lessons in a South Beach bar a few years ago, and they were hard. The rhythms are felt, not pronounced, and the steps complicated. You have to count, but to be good, you have to count subconsciously, so that the moves flow rather than stutter. This is why tango is so fraught and taut: It’s serious, sometimes nerve-wracking movement. The jitterbug it ain’t.

    Techno is dance music for fucked-up people. Its beats are mind-numbingly obvious, its movements freeform yet robotic. Techno is all about the symphonic voyage of a track – it’s music for tripping as much as stepping.

    Tango and techno would seem to be worlds apart, but in fact, a number of artists have managed to merge the two to compelling effect. The New York-based group of multinationals who call themselves Brazilian Girls find common club ground in multiple beats, including dub, trance, tango, and techno. More to the point, a few years ago Gotan Project and Bajofondo Tango Club both released albums that launched a new wave of tango, one that mixed Buenos Aires’s historic music with modern-day Balearic beats.

    After a several-year wait, Bajofondo released Mar Dulce, its second album, July 14. As the Argentinean-Uruguayan group expands its rhythmic repertoire, it has dropped the last two parts of its name. But tango remains the inspiration and heartbeat on such tracks as "Pa Bailar" (which features Mexican alt goddess Julieta Venegas on one of the album versions).

    Bajo’s main man is acclaimed producer Gustavo Santaolalla, the music genius who has helmed CDs for groups including Molotov, Juanes, and the Kronos Quartet. He is probably best known for his Oscar- and Golden Globe-winning soundtracks for films, including Babel, Amores Perros, Brokeback Mountain, and The Motorcycle Diaries. But tango is this Argentinean’s passion. His filmic tribute to it, Café de los Maestros, is scheduled to be released later this year. It could do for tango what Buena Vista Social Club did for Cuban son.

    Because of his immense industry cred, not to mention how damn good Bajofondo’s music is, Santaolalla was able to land an impressive posse of guest vocalists on Mar Dulce. Elvis Costello shows off his increasing immersion in Latin music on the torch song “Fairly Right,” Soda Stereo’s Gustavo Cerati spans the Argentinean decades on “El Mareo,” and Nelly Furtado croons “Boldozas Majados.”

    Fusion tango bridges not just genres but generations; I think my ballroom-dancing mom would love Dulce, but it’s also cool enough for South Beach. It’s the ultimate party music: smart, sophisticated, yet not at all above having a good time on the dancefloor. In fact, heightening the art of cutting the rug is what it’s all about.

  10. Ballad of Scott Storch

    28.Jul.08, 10:30 EDT
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    Two years ago, Scott Storch played me two tracks he was working on at the Hit Factory Criteria studio in Miami, where, true to the venue’s name, the wunderkind producer had set up shop and was churning out blockbuster after blockbuster: "Lean Back," "Baby Boy," "Candy Shop," "Run It." The first track, featuring singer Mya, showed off Storch’s complicated pop genius: It was sinuous and sexy and soulful, driven by the sort of hypnotic, overamped Middle Eastern filigree that was becoming Storch’s trademark.

    The second song was by Brooke Hogan, the emergent reality TV bimbo who Storch had signed as the first artist of his Storch Music label. Loud, propulsive, and instantly forgettable, this song showed off Storch’s mega ambition. The former protégé of Dr. Dre clearly hoped to do for this blond wrestler’s daughter what his work on Christina Aguilera’s Stripped album had helped do for that white girl: Give her both hip-hop cred and chart gold.

    Back then, as I was profiling Storch for a Miami Herald article, the Miami Beach multimillionaire was flying high and flashing ice. What neither of us knew at the time was that the tsunami of hits he had been riding for two years had peaked: Scott hasn’t had a top 10 hit since then, not with that killer Mya hook, not with Hogan's pop pandering. He has recently found himself in a heap of trouble, getting dragged into family court for two custody cases and falling two years behind in his property taxes.

    The story of Storch’s Icarus fall from the pop stratosphere is compelling enough that two major news outlets recently asked me to write about it; the article I reported for AP came out last Friday. Scott wasn’t talking this time. In fact, he seems to be in semi-hiding, not showing for court dates, no longer at Hit Factory, not talking to his two sons – though I did get a couple of reports of him recently sighted at South Beach clubs. He can leave a waitress a $20 tip, apparently, but can’t pay child support.

    I found Storch both repellent and endearing when I met him in ‘06. The fame game has definitely gone to his head, bigtime. But behind the aviator sunglasses and pop-tart arm candy is this geeky music-head, a talented keyboardist who was an early force in the Roots. “He always knew what he wanted to be,” Vanessa Bellido, mother of Storch’s 15-year-old son Steven, told me for the AP story. “He would play the piano unbelievably. He was determined at 15. He was like, I’m going to make it, I’m going to make it.”

    I’ve watched many talented artists struggle their whole lives for recognition and survival. But when I’ve come in contact with those, like Storch, or Kurt Cobain, who seem to have won it all, I’m not sure which group is the winners, and which the losers.

  11. UP in Michigan

    22.Jul.08, 12:10 EDT
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    The first bear usually shows up around 8 p.m. He has a white V on his black chest, so the locals call him Victor. He got into a bad fight a couple weeks ago: walks with a limp, has a bunch of patches of fur missing. I’m told he weighs about 250 pounds, and I believe it. He’s usually trying to get a head start on the other bear, who weighs over 300 pounds and who, judging by his own exposed swaths of skin, was on the other, winning side of the battle. I don’t know this bear’s name; people just call him big. When the second bear sees Victor, he charges. My husband says this is a fake charge, meant to scare. If the big bear were charging me, I would run. (July 23 update: The big bear is a mama. I'm told she has two cubs, and she definitely has dangling nipples. No wonder she's defensive, and hungry.)

    The funny thing is, once you’ve seen these bears walk through your backyard every day for a few days, you stop being scared. After all, they’re only black bears: herbivores, not people killers. I mean, I’m not going to be like Jim, the guy who lives behind us, who walks up to the bears and hands them scraps. Jim leaves food out every night. He even has rigged up various treats for the bears – I don’t know if they’re honey pots or salt licks or what – so that the bears stand up on their hind legs and lick from a post, and sit on his couch, and generally make themselves at home around his fire pit. Then they make their way down the street, to the other guy who feeds them. Or they cross the street and rummage through the restaurant’s dumpster down the hill.

    We’re walking down the road back to the house from Lake Superior, and the big bear walks out of the bushes 25 feet ahead. He looks at us, mostly at our Yorkshire Terrier; he seems far more scared of little Otis than Otis seems of him. Then he walks on by.

    The Upper Peninsula of Michigan is a place unto itself. Tucked between three Great Lakes, it has the same land mass as the lower peninsula of the state but only three percent of Michigan’s population. The UP has a lot in common with other north-woods locales, like Alaska, Maine, Canada. But generally unknown, unsung, and not much loved, it’s about as hick as you can get. The county where I’ve laid my hat for a month, Ontonagon, has been losing population. It’s a great place to get away from it all, as long as you don’t get caught up in the local dramas of domestic violence, pillheads, neglected children, etc.

    I’ve been coming here for 40 years now, almost every summer. There may be nothing that makes me feel more at peace with myself than walking down the sandy Superior shore, looking for agates and curious pieces of driftwood. I can walk for a mile without passing a soul. The sun sets over the endless horizon of water – as big as a sea, you know – around 9:30 this time of year. So every summer day is like two days, paradise doubled.

    The tourists have never really discovered the UP, perhaps because the bearable (ha, ha) season here – between snowstorms and black-fly invasions – is so short. The ursine residents have made our little back street in Silver City a bit of an attraction for what sightseers there are; a couple cars drive by every night, peering into the woods for dark shapes.

    We’re staying in a cute, comfortable mobile home: wood paneling, soft carpets, those old metal glasses that make everything taste so cold and delicious, canister vacuum, cribbage board – you get the picture. Nestled at the foothills of the Porcupine Mountains, Gabe’s Getaway is a short walk to the beach and a great deal.

    At any rate, I finally have the answer to a variation on that old riddle: Does a bear shit in our yard? Every day.

  12. Ladies Who Listen

    17.Jul.08, 12:09 EDT
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    You’ve been at that dinner party. Maybe it was a family gathering, maybe a business schmooze. The conversation turned to music, and suddenly all the guys in the room started talking about their favorite records with the sort of picayune intensity with which they’d been discussing baseball stats minutes before. “That’s the Wooly Wombats track on which Dude Ranchero from the Squats played foot organ with his elbow,” some dude in an ironic Starsky and Hutch T-shirt enthuses. You get excited too: “I have that on the Que Smells Seventies Smiles compilation as well as the original Boner Records 45!”

    I admit: I love this kind of talk. I’m a sucker for rock trivia and, ever the tomboy, I like to hold forth with the guys (that’s kind of why I became a rock critic). If the women convene to the kitchen, I’ll stay in the living room and dig through the host’s CD collection. I’m geeked that way.

    Still, many years ago, the way that some men use arcane knowledge to claim authority/ownership over music fandom began to irritate me. Ever since I traded 45s with my best girlfriends in 4th grade, it’s been apparent to me that female consumerism is a driving engine of pop history (even if I didn’t use those big words back then). Where would Bessie Smith, Frank Sinatra, Elvis, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Madonna, and Britney Spears have been without the little girls understanding?

    Yet at dinner parties and in the trade magazines, distaff voices tend to get shut out of the dialogue about music. That’s why I co-edited Rock She Wrote. It’s also why, in the early ‘90s, I started the All Girls Listening Party, inventing (I believe) what we now call a music club.

    The music club is similar to a book club. We meet once a month to drink, nosh, gossip, and discuss. But rather than all converging on one central cultural document (i.e., reading the same book), we each bring our own song to share. The only rule about this song is that it not be too long, so it doesn’t hog up the evening. It can be an old favorite, a new discovery, something you recorded or have something to do with, or a track you know nothing about, except that you like it. Each member gives a little explanatory intro of why she brought this song, then plays it. At the end of the night, we make a CD compiling the evening’s selections – now we have a group mixtape we can listen to whenever.

    The idea of the music club is to share our musical interests and create a critical conversation in a non-competitive, non-judgmental environment. My Miami group – which I now call Ladies Who Listen, because we’re no longer girls (and we don’t lunch) – is nicely eclectic, so we get to expose each other to diverse musical backgrounds. Last month, Geane brought Brazilian singer Mart’nalia, Laura brought Mexico’s Ximena Sarinana, Lolo (whose indie record store Sweat is often our meeting spot) played disco queens Hercules & Love Affair, and I rocked out to MGMT. (Thanks for the turn-on, Wendy.)

    You can start your own music club. Check out the MOLI profile I set up for ours to get an idea of how it works: www.moli.com/ladieswholisten. It doesn’t have to just be for women. We debate constantly about opening ours to men – and then never do it. So instead, one of our husbands has started his own music club. His is international, and works as an e-mailed playlist. Variations on the theme are encouraged.

    Books are great; the women in my book club are my favorite in Miami (and some are also in the music club). But if music is the universal language, then we need to find ways to talk about it that are inclusive, not exclusive. Welcome to the club.

  13. The Bitch Is Back

    16.Jul.08, 09:47 EDT
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    Some 20 years ago, Southern rock band Molly Hatchet opened for punk pioneer Joan Jett. Charming singer Danny Joe Brown “warmed up” the crowd with a little stage banter: “I can’t believe we’re playing before some bitch.” Jett’s road manager slammed the dirtbag against a wall and his own band soon canned him. Jett played on; it was the kind of sexist crap she had to put up with a lot as the rare woman on the hard rock circuit and it wasn’t going to stop her. “You’re living in the past/ It’s a new generation,” buddy.

    Fast forward: On Saturday, July 12, Molly Hatchet opened for Jett again at the Riverfest in Beloit, Wisconsin. This time the night was all smiles. Jett stood on the stage overlooking the downtown Riverside Park while the Hatchet churned through their hits (“Flirting with Disaster,” anyone?) in a comradely show of solidarity. Between the sets, guitarist Bobby Igram thanked Joan repeatedly for letting his band open for her. He even had an invite: Would Jett come on the Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute cruise with them in January? The tattooed love goddess was uncommittal. (Me, I’m getting my pitch together to cover what I’m sure will be an endless all-star “Freebird” jam.)

    “She’s O negative,” Jett’s longtime manager, producer, and sometime keyboardist Kenny Laguna said as we stood backstage and watched her watching Hatchet. “She can play before any crowd.” It’s true: Yes, it’s somewhat disconcerting to watch a woman who’s still crafting smart, timely, poignant anthems like “Five” and “Naked” having to trot out “I Love Rock’n’Roll” on what’s essentially an oldies (“classic rock”) circuit. A week before the Beloit gig, I caught Jett at the Miccosukee Casino in Miami; there, the opening act was Foghat.

    But Jett’s a professional and no elitist. I’ve seen her play at CBGB’s and at the Warped Festival, and she treated the mix of bikers and families at the Riverfest and casino with the same dedication and respect that she showed at those gatherings of the hipoisie and pierced. Maybe I’m projecting, but it seems to me the erstwhile Runaway is aware that out there in the crowd in Beloit was some awkward teenager, or 20 of them, who needed to see and hear a self-made woman sing about identity and desire and changing the world maybe even more than the gathering of the faithful at the birthplace of punk did.

    For me, it was an ultimate rock ’n’ roll moment. I stood on the side of the stage next to my five-year-old son playing air guitar and my 72-year-old dad drinking beer; it was both of their first real shows. In the background, across the river, stood my alma mater: Beloit Memorial High School. Jett was playing on my home turf. I was in town for a smidgen of glory myself; earlier that day, I signed copies of Mamarama at the town bookstore. The fact several of my old teachers, but only one former classmate showed speaks volumes about my own awkward adolescence on the shores of the Rock River (yes, that’s really its name).

    Jett closes her set with a cover of Sly and the Family Stone’s “Everyday People,” a song about the acceptance of difference – about treating everyone like they’re O negative. The thousands gathered on a perfect summer night on the banks of a swollen, brown Midwestern waterway cheered. Not bad for a bitch.

  14. Not Just Anybody

    10.Jul.08, 09:49 EDT
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    Many moons ago, I was in a band. My friend Michelle played bass, my boyfriend Jeff played guitars and sang, my roommate Paige drummed, and I played guitar and sang. We only had one gig, a going-away party for Michelle and me, who were embarking on a two-month road trip around the States; shortly after our return, we moved from Providence to Minneapolis and New York respectively. The, er, smoke has clouded my memory of the few songs we played – I think there was a cover of “Why  Don’t You Smile Now,” a song by a pre-Velvets Lee Reed band – but I do remember our name: the Fiendish Thingees.

    Pop trivia question: Where’d that name come from?

    Bingo Ringo: A “fiendish thingy” is what George Harrison called an explosive device that was curled at the Beatles in the classic Richard Lester movie Help!

    Paige and I were obsessed with this deadpan, madcap adventure – probably had something to do with that aforementioned smoke. Recently, I got to revisit my love for the flick that, along with the earlier Lester-Beatles movie A Hard Day’s Night, is widely considered the antecedent of music video (“Show me the blood test!” says Lester in the documentary disc that accompanies the DVD). As I’ve mentioned before, I rented it for my five-year-old son, and now, he’s a Beatlemaniac.

    It is one of the deepest pleasures of my adult life to hear my son singing in his wee little earnest voice, “Help! I need somebody/ Help, not just anybody.”

    The Beatles were one of the first groups I got obsessed with as a kid myself (there was also the Jackson Five). They were already broken up even back then, but it didn’t matter: There was something timeless about those million-dollar melodies and their cheeky, appealing personalities. In the liner notes for the Help! DVD, Martin Scorcese quotes the critic Geoffrey O’Brien saying that “the Beatles’ music possessed a beauty so singular it might almost be called underrated.” As the filmmaker notes, it’s absurd to call the most-acclaimed group in history underrated, and yet, so it is. I’ve heard these songs a million times – and admittedly, for years, even decades, I hadn’t bothered to play a Beatles disc. But rehearing them now with Cole, the sheer number of perfect compositions is overwhelming. Even a five-year-old can tell.

    I know it’s not very blogoteric new-discovery coolhuntery to write, in 2008, about the Beatles. But I believe that, as in literature, it’s always important to go back to the classics, and pop music simply does not get any better than “Ticket to Ride” (that syncopation!), “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” (most beautiful sad song ever?), “You’re Gonna Lose That Girl” (those harmonies), [your favorite Beatles song here].

    It was Ringo’s birthday earlier this week, and he had a wish: for everyone to make the peace sign and say, “Peace and love.” Very ‘60s, but also, very today.

  15. Immigrant Songs

    09.Jul.08, 08:25 EDT
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    One day, a few years ago, my husband and I attended an Argentinean rock concert in Miami’s Bayfront Park with a friend of ours from Buenos Aires. We had a bird’s eye view of the pit in front of the stage that separates the band from the audience, an area populated mostly by burly security guards, photographers, and the occasional VIP. When one man walked in front of the stage, he immediately began shaking the many hands stretched out to him from the packed crowd. Everyone seemed to know, or want to know, this guy. Bud and I didn’t recognize him, but then we were new to this world of rock en espanol. “Who is he? Some celebrity?” we asked our friend, let’s call him Alfredo.

    Alfredo shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe, immigration?”

    The movement of the people around the world may have replaced abortion as the hot-button issue of our time. Immigration combines two of the U.S.'s deepest worries: the economy and “homeland security.” It’s a hornet’s nest of difficult questions that politicians wade into only with great reluctance, knowing no matter what they say they’re going to wind up stung. Meanwhile, xenophobia is symbolic to many people from other nations of everything that’s wrong with Americans: hubris, ignorance, fear. (Not that Americans have a corner on xenophobia: Just ask the Africans in Paris, or the Asian proletarian diaspora doing the globe’s dirty work.)

    hattie gossett plugs directly into the slipstreams of this debate in the immigrant suite: hey xenophobe! who you calling a foreigner?, her recent collection of poems from Seven Stories Press. gossett, a New York-based poet of page and stage, writes mostly in the voice of the confused, disappointed, and angry immigrant. There aren’t a lot of refugees from other countries’ war, oppression, or poverty delighting in the American dream in these stanzas. Recent newspaper stories back up gossett’s bodega-level reports: More and more people have not found the embrace of Lady Liberty to be all it’s cooked up to be, and have been returning home to their countries. The Miami Herald even profiled some Cubans who have gone back to their communist homeland – dios mio!

    gossett, who often performs her poems with a band and calls herself sister no blues, writes deceptively simple, repetitive lines. But she’s a mistress of rhythm, building patterns and crescendos that load each word with centrifugal force. She has a fine ear for the many accents around her: Puerto Rican, Dominican, black American, African, Indian, etc. She’s all about stirring the melting pot. In the poem “what do you like? how do you cook it?” she lists different ethnic foods over a calypso beat, ending with the observation and question, “we all eat rice & beans/ why can’t we get along?”

    Don’t mistake that Rodney King-ish quote for naivete. Sarcasm has long been gossett’s weapon of mass destruction, and she often dons people’s points of view in order to expose their shortsightedness. “have we got a job for you!” proclaims the recruiter in the title of one poem:  “doctor at home scrubs the hospital floor here.” She also doesn’t buy some immigrants’ own packed-in isms: In “in my country is no like this,” the narrator brags, “nobody cares what color you are/ each group stays with his own/ we don’t have to live next door to them.”

    Here in Miami, I know a lot of first-generation Americans who, after decades, still can’t figure out our health care system (or lack of one); who have found their new land to be as cruel as it can be rich; who have gone back home. I also know those, like Alfredo, who have gone to great lengths to be here and have the kind of life they couldn’t have in their native destroyed economies. Or at least that was the story a couple months ago. Because Alfredo works construction, which means round these parts, he hasn’t worked in weeks.

    Evelyn McDonnell is MOLI's editor at large. Her Populism blog runs Tuesdays and Thursdays.

  16. Miami's Hit Factory

    03.Jul.08, 08:27 EDT
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    The world champion DJ and now sought-after producer known as Infamous remembers the first time he visited the Hit Factory Criteria recording studio in Miami. “They gave us a walking tour,” says the man who subsequently helmed the boards for the hot Lil Wayne and Jay-Z collaboration “Mr. Carter” at Hit Factory Criteria. “The GA said, ‘Oh Eric Clapton recorded “Layla” there.’ As soon as I heard that I froze still and tried to inhale as much of the room as I could.”

    Iggy Pop also remembers his first glimpse of the stucco building in a quiet warehouse district. The rock legend, who eventually recorded most of his album Skull Ring there, says that one of the first things he did when he moved to Miami in the early ’90s was drive by Criteria, just to see where songs like “Funky Nassau” were made. The punk pioneer, who recently returned to Hit Factory to record with the band Jet, and calls metal engineer Chris Carroll the studio’s “secret weapon,” was smitten with the two-story building’s funky Miami charm. “You don’t feel like you’re walking into some goombah’s armpit,” says Pop. “It’s still very Florida; you can still chill.”

    For 50 years, the studio founded as Criteria then acquired by Hit Factory in 1999 has been host to a slew of recording legends: James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Eric Clapton, Bob Marley, the Rolling Stones, the Bee Gees, Michael Jackson, Ricky Martin, Madonna – the list goes on. I recently spent a month talking to a number of the people who built this iconic space and have helped it stay alive (to coin a phrase) for an Associated Press story: You can read the whole thing here.

    Criteria, and then Hit Factory, have drawn a dizzying array of artists together into one space. Founder Mack Emerman was a gear-head, and the rooms have been a haven for audiophiles ever since, from Tom Dowd and the Albert Brothers to Scott Storch and Timbaland. “It was the people behind the scenes who made the studios here,” says Robert Lanier, Hit Factory Criteria’s executive vice president and COO. “It was the engineers, the innovative individuals who were part of the growth of the recording industry. They came up with different sounds, new techniques.”

    Eric Schilling is one of the many serious music heads who revere Hit Factory Criteria’s big rooms and state of the art consoles. The freelance engineer has relied heavily on Criteria since the ‘70s, twiddling the knobs on tracks for such artists as the Eagles, Gloria Estefan, Juan Luis Guerra, and Janet Jackson. “It’s the sound of the rooms that keeps me here,” he says. “They’re good spaces for recording live. They don’t make rooms like that anymore.”

  17. Pixar's Little Tramp

    01.Jul.08, 12:28 EDT
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    Here's my antidote for junk kid culture: good kid culture. Your daughter zoning out on preteen Disney musicals? Rent Help! and A Hard Day's Night. Hyper-driven, commercial-laden Nick programming driving you nuts? Throw Modern Times in the DVD player. Cries for Happy Meals driving you crazy? Go out for sushi. My son hasn't kicked his Hannah Montana crush or Power Rangers habit, but he knows the words to a dozen Beatles songs and loves Charlie Chaplin. And his favorite breakfast is a tin of surimi from the local Latin takeout restaurant: inch-long eels smothered in olive oil and peppers and garlic.

    I'm not bragging about my five-year-old's sophisticated taste. Okay, I am bragging -- but I'm making a point too. A huge part of a parent's job is to curate and expose him to culture. For me, it's so much fun singing "Ticket to Ride" with Cole, I can't even call it a job.

    Of course, as long as Pixar's around, you can trust your offspring with at least some of today's pop culture. With Wall-E, the kings of animation have hit the ball way out of the park.

    Anthropomorphic robots are a staple of cartoons and sci-fi; Robots and The Iron Giant are also excellent kiddie flicks. But rarely has a nuts-and-bolts character had the vaudevillian soul of Wall-E. He looks more than a little like E.T., and he serves a similar function: as an emissary from another planet (which in this case used to be our planet) who reminds us humans of the humanity we've lost in ourselves (ditto Iron Giant).

    With his sad eyes, forlorn shabby appearance, and slapstick pratfalls, Wall-E also draws a lot on Chaplin. Like the Little Tramp, he will do just about anything for love. In Eve, he finds a va-va-voom modern girlfriend.

    But Wall-E is no mere sentimental cartoon: It's a pointed apocalpytic parable. Wall-E and his pet cockroach seem to be the sole inhabitants of an environmentally blighted Earth. Fat, lazy humans with their greed and consumerism have buried the planet in trash and then fled. It's An Inconvenient Truth come to cartoon life.

    Despite my opening graf, I'm not really a total snob. I like a lot of kid's movies -- better than most adult ones. We have a running joke in our house that we haven't seen a new film that doesn't feature a talking animal in years. And I don't really mind.

    Wall-E is quite simply one of the best. It's definitely up there with Monsters, Inc., Toy Story, Shrek, Finding Nemo, and Bambi. The landscapes and artistic direction in the film are stunning, their towering bleakness lightened with comic touches, like the robot's collection of found objects (a Rubik's cube, lighters, a tape of Hello, Dolly! that provides the film's unlikely soundtrack and romantic analogy). New York Times critic A.O. Scott called the first 40 minutes a "cinematic poem," and that's not wrong. Wall-E is the antidote. And the fact that millions are taking it in makes me feel more hopeful than ever about November 4.

  18. On Bob Dylan's Arm

    27.Jun.08, 12:04 EDT
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    Suze Rotolo is perhaps the most famous arm charm in rock’n’roll, quite literally. On the cover of Bob Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, she clutches the singer’s side as they make their way down a wintry West Village street in 1963. Rotolo was 19 at the time, and the girlfriend of the 22-year-old artist who was just beginning to be recognized as a colossal folk and rock talent. Talk about pressure.

    Before and after that photo, of course, Rotolo had a life story of her own, as she tells in A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties (Broadway). She was a red diaper baby, the daughter of communist Italian-Americans, who became an artist. She was a beautiful, intelligent New York City girl, whose political, intellectual, urban upbringing probably seemed exotic to the exile from small-town Minnesota. One gets the sense from this memoir that Rotolo was and is very much her own woman – albeit a fragile young person with a difficult home life, who probably tended to break “just like a little girl.”

    Freewheelin’ is by no means a tell-all. In fact, the author tells very little of the personal details of her relationship with Robert Zimmerman (she does reveal that not even she knew his real name and identity until a news story revealed it). Neither rancor nor a great deal of sentimentality drive the narrative. Four decades later, she is eminently respectful of the four-year love affair and her ex’s privacy – that tactfulness, so refreshing in the age of endless celebrity dish, itself speaks volumes about both Rotolo and Dylan.

    Freewheelin’ is most interesting as a document of Downtown New York during the folk boom and the birth of ‘60s counterculture. Mostly, Rotolo pays tribute to the incredible talent pool that was her community, people like Sylvia and Ian Tyson, Dave Von Ronk, and Janet Kerr. I absolutely eat up books like these, documents of bohemian places and times – god, it must have been fabulous to live there and then, I sigh as I turn their pages (even as an equally happening scene may be unfolding outside my window).

    Rotolo also captures the souring of the hippie experience – the good trip gone bad. Unsurprisingly, her relationship with Dylan collapses under the weight of their greatly changed lives, as his fame mounts. She is stalked, her apartment burns, and she has the kind of nervous collapse that so many people, living on the edge in pursuit of a dream, had at that time.

    The book falls apart a bit too; it’s unclear what Rotolo’s point is, as she grasps for a special light to shed on a much-illuminated era. Still, she has a vivid, clear way of describing her memories that’s enchanting; you can see how a guy would fall for her. “We were full of truths and enthusiasms, non sequiturs, stories, insights, pronouncements, resentments, and of course poetry, prose, and song,’’ she writes.

    The Freewheelin’ photo is a portrait of youth in love, two people sheltering in each other’s arms on a cold city street. Rotolo is no mere ornament – and unlike the usual rocker arm candy, her body is completely covered in a bulky winter coat (she told the New York Times she felt like an Italian sausage). Still, she’s the full-maned bohemienne giving flesh to the skinny bard’s songs. An emancipated woman living with her lover – Rotolo was the embodiment of freewheelin’. Her memoir reveals that she was more than just a symbol, though, that she had her own life and stories to tell.

  19. Happy Anniversary nyc boi!

    24.Jun.08, 13:48 EDT
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    Social networking sites work counter to that old Groucho Marx/Woody Allen joke, about not wanting to belong to any club that would have you as a member. The Internet is all about context. You are who you friend. MOLI and Facebook are both supposed to be havens from MySpace, for “grownups” who think MySpace is for teenagers. But SNSes only succeed if they have that critical mass of users who attract other users. They’re like giant high school cliques; people only want to hang out in the ones where the people they want to hang out with are.

    In his "Wk 52 -- self-ish" blog post for MOLI, the poet Mike Tyler discusses his own reasons for blogging much better than I do:  “I like Moli because it is new and growing and I like things at the beginnings like Silent Movies, and Early Rock ‘n Roll (when the electric guitar was just invented), and any kind of stuff that is going on before grown-ups find it and begin their jihad. (Look out for the word-ish, ‘monetize.’)”

    Tyler has been posting one blog a week under the profile name nyc boi for one year, every Sunday morning – hence the blog name, sunday am. I first met Mike when he was a poet hanging out at spaces like the Nuyorican Poets Café and ABC No Rio back in the early '90s, and made him the lead subject of a story I wrote for The Village Voice in '91: "Café Society." We’ve been friends since, and when he found out I was hired by MOLI some 52 weeks ago, he decided to make it a place to hang his own words.

    sunday am can be a tough, trippy, tripping, hilarious, profound read. Mike has always been a philosopher as well as a writer, and sometimes you have to follow his punning neologisms – words like “somethinc,” “humane bean” -- back to their etymological source (Mike’s brain) to make sense of him. I always find the investigation worth the wade.

    In "self-ish," Tyler – who made a name/spectacle of himself as a globetrotting performance poet back when spoken word was the MTV rage – in typical Tyler fashion, finds he has no lessons to share from his first year in a new medium: “I’ve had words of wisdom about blogging, before I did it, and now that I’ve done it, I have not one jot (whutz a jot?) more than I started.”

    But of course, Mike does have something profound to say about blogging, and it has to do with landing where your feet find themselves – monetizers beware and be damned. Like Juliana Luecking, Donnell Alexander, Wendy Case, Natasha Bright, Jana Martin, Jeanne Fury, Cathay Che, Audra Hodges, Neal Pollack, Martin Johnson, Richard Pachter, Rob Levine, Celeste Fraser Delgado, Rebecca Wakefield, Erika Schickel, and [your name here], nyc boi is the kind of person I want to hang out with, virtually or otherwise. As long as they’re here, I’ll be here.

  20. Hialeah Punks for Hope

    20.Jun.08, 13:48 EDT
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    New York, London, LA, Athens, San Francisco, Detroit, DC, Hialeah. Among the cities that can be name-checked in a punk-rock roll call, South Florida’s heavily Cuban American municipality is generally pretty low on the list. Hia-fucking-leah – as it’s lovingly known on a popular Miami T-shirt – is known more for being the birthplace of the 1970s proto-disco Miami sound (K.C. and the Sunshine Band, etc.) and chongas than for wearers of Mohawks and chanters of “hey-ho, let’s go.”

    The band Guajiro is out to change that. Thursday night, opening for a sold-out Rancid concert at Fort Lauderdale’s Revolution, the four-piece played a vigorous bilingual set in which they name-checked Hialeah on the song “Mulatona.” They also debuted the new band Final Reformation – Guajiro minus singer Willy Lopez plus singer Joe Koontz from Against All Authority.

    But most notably, they led the moshpit through a chant of their new single “Olé (Latinos for Hope)” (being released by I Scream Records on June 24). The anthem turns a futbol chant into an endorsement for Barack Obama, and translates Obama’s catchphrase “Yes We Can” into the riff “Si Se Puede.”

    Guajiro has made a powerful, will.i.am-style video for Oléthat mixes shots of the presidential candidate with video of Guajiro’s sweaty members -- Lopez, Jorges Gonzalez Graupera, David Santos, and Dougla' MacKinnon.

    Lots of musicians, of course, are getting on the Obama train; some Latin stars already recorded a video for him. But the presumptive Democratic nominee doesn’t usually get a lot of love from South Florida’s conservative exile community; in fact, today, some of Elian Gonzalez’s relatives (oh God, here they go again!) are holding a press conference against the senator because he has advisors who didn’t believe the boy was brought here by dolphins to be safe from Fidel.

    “Tonight it’s about hope,” Lopez told the crowd Thursday night. It’s hard to say whether the stylized youths got it – I did see one kid in an Obama T-shirt, but unfortunately, so many of these third-generation punk fans follow the fashion of the Exploited, but not the politics of the Clash. Rocking for voting is a gutsy move for some Hialeah punks. Olé!

  21. Why We Need Newspapers

    17.Jun.08, 11:35 EDT
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    On Sunday, my local newspaper, The Miami Herald, was one of several around the country to run the first installment of “Guantanamo: Beyond the Law,” an intensive, global investigation of the U.S.’s treatment of detainees in military bases since 9/11. The story, written by Tom Lasseter for the chain that owns the Herald, McClatchy, was everything the world desperately needs from the fourth estate: A thoroughly documented, unrelenting prying open of doors the government has done its best to keep shut (frequently by invoking “patriotism”). The series, which continues all week, reveals how many of the detainees had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or the Taliban, how they were often beaten, how some died in custody, and how the accumulation of American atrocities on these people has turned the prison camp at Guantanamo not into a terrorism containing instrument, but a place that breeds terrorists.

    Monday, day two of the series, the Herald announced that due to the continuing collapse of the newspaper industry, 17 percent of its staff will be eliminated through buyouts, attrition, or layoffs. McClatchy, in general, is cutting back its payroll by 1,400 employees, or 10 percent.

    It’s the best of times, and the worst of times.

    The Herald, like many papers, has made a lot of mistakes when it comes to keeping up with changing technology. Case in point: You can’t read articles more than two weeks old on its website, without registering for a special archive service and paying for them. There must be hundreds of articles on, say, Britney Spears in the Herald database, but you will only find the latest news in a Google search of her name. Talk about missed opportunities for easy hits.

    The Gitmo investigation, however, shows McClatchy (the nation's third-largest newspaper chain) making smart use of the web’s multimedia and extended database capabilities.  Lasseter interviewed 66 former detainees. You can see many of their pictures in the online version of the story, along with video interviews; handy hyperlinks in the text will take you right to them. There are PDFs of documents used during the investigation, a la the Smoking Gun. There are maps of where detainees are from. And there’s a place to leave comments (though I think this part of the story should have been played up better online).

    The investigation, so far at least, is a riveting must-read – and has been the talk of other news outlets. Coming on the heels of last week’s Supreme Court decision overthrowing the illegal detention of many of these prisoners, the timing couldn’t have been better – except for that little layoff announcement.

    MOLI  View contributing editor Rob Levine has done a great job of repeatedly drawing attention to the tremendous existential crisis facing journalism in this country; so has our colleague Richard Pachter. Normally, I would leave this discussion in their capable digits. But this time, the timing of the Guantanamo series and the layoffs is too egregious – and personal. After spending six great years as the paper’s pop music critic, I left the Herald a year ago, in part because I saw the writing on the wall in terms of the future of print journalism, and had a chance to get some Internet experience under my belt (thank you MOLI!). I have tremendous respect for the journalists I left behind. The Herald is far from perfect,  but the newspaper has broken some major stories for the community just in the seven years since I have lived here – perhaps most significantly, the Pulitzer Prize-winning House of Lies series on how developers and politicians were taking off with millions intended for public housing. Another realtor just last week went to jail, thanks to that exposé.

    I’m sure Lasseter is not in danger of being laid off right now. In fact, they should just hand the guy a Pulitzer this minute and forget the wait. But I’m also sure some people I know and respect will no longer be keeping an eye on the bad guys – whether in city government or local bands – as the Herald cuts are made manifest in the next month. And that hurts. All of us.

  22. Pictures of Patti

    12.Jun.08, 15:50 EDT
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    There’s perhaps no more famous and fruitful collaboration between a rock musician and photographer than the long friendship between Patti Smith and the late Robert Mapplethorpe. Roommates in New York in the '70s, a period fascinatingly chronicled in Mapplethorpe: A Biography, by Patricia Morrisroe, they both were transgressive pioneers: she as one of the poetess founders of punk, he as a portraitist of gay America. He shot the iconic black and white image of her for the cover of her debut Horses, an album that launched a million musical careers. If you ever get a chance to see Sandy Daley's obscure 1971 film, Robert Having His Nipple Pierced, don't miss it. Smith's rambling narration -- while, yes, Robert has his nipple pierced -- in her thick New Jersey accent is off the wall and hilarious.

    With her walleye, long tangled locks -- no gray-hiding hair dye for this artiste -- and Giacometti face, Smith has been a visual muse for many photographers since, including REM's Michael Stipe. For the last decade or so, the singer has been working with fashion shutterbug Stephen Sebring. His documentary about her, Patti Smith: Dream of Life, was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and is scheduled for September release by Palm Pictures, it was announced yesterday. New Yorkers get a first peek at it at the Film Forum, August 6 to 19.

    According to the press release, Dream of Life "is a plunge into the philosophy and artistry of this complicated, charismatic personality. Sebring captures Smith, who narrates the film, through her spoken words, performances, lyrics, paintings and photographs." The movie also features Phillip Glass and Sam Shepard (another legendary '70s collaborator of Smith's).

    Rizzoli will publish a companion book in August, which will include Polaroids taken by Smith. In addition, she and Sebring are releasing on their new PASK label The Coral Sea, a live CD she recorded with My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields -- along with photographers and playwrights, Smith has excellent taste in guitarists (Lenny Kaye, Tom Verlaine, her late husband Fred "Sonic" Smith, etc.).

    There's no artist who has been singularly more inspiring to me as a woman than Patti. That said, I find the sometimes reverential attitude of and towards her work since the early '90s can get a tad annoying. Smith has always prided herself on her sense of humor, citing Johnny Carson as a major inspiration. I hope Dream of Life has some of the wackiness that makes Daley's movie a classic. Whatever: The world could always use more Patti Smith, now maybe more than ever.


  23. Michael Carlebach's Miami

    10.Jun.08, 12:05 EDT
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    Miami is a photojournalist’s dream. The abundant subtropical sun is god’s little lightbox, and there’s always a rich pageant of subjects: landscapes, characters, news stories, even cute animals.

    Michael Carlebach is an excellent study of character. Miccosukee Indians bathing,  a snake-oily condo salesman, a freshly mugged guy in a bar, and Jackie Gleason all find themselves pinned to the wall in his black-and-white portraiture show Witness: South Florida, at the Miami Center for the Photographic Arts.

    Featuring a profusion of sun-kissed and party-weary South Floridians with furry mustaches, Witness is as much a time capsule as a document of a region. Some of the photos remind me of what Iggy Pop once said to me, about when he first discovered Coconut Grove in the ’70s: "I spent a night or two as the couch guest of a young neo-hippie, in a house that had roof tiles and stucco, and the cement was cracking and lizards and snakes were coming and going and vines were in the kitchen. The inside was going out and the outside was going in. I thought, `This is the place for me.'"

    People talk nostalgically about Miami before Gloria, before Madonna, before Andrew and Wilma (all those dramatic divas). But aside from a TK Records greatest hits album, nothing has conveyed to me this unique time and place in American history as well as Carlebach’s photos.

    These aren’t the glamour shots of the future Ocean Drive, though there is a little Miami Vice in them. Shooting regular folks in their homes and habitats, Carlebach is Miami’s Weegee. Other photos capture the quiet intellect of a city generally considered obsessed with appearances: Isaac Bashevis Singer and Tenneessee Williams stand alongside shots of a Mariel boatlift refugee and of a pregnant woman and her boyfriend – the “boyfriend” looking so much like a woman, you have to take the caption’s word for it.

    Health demands led Carlebach from South Florida a couple years ago (he needs to stay near the North Carolina institute that gave him two new lungs). At Witness’s opening Saturday, he spoke of how he missed the crazy visual stimulation of Miami. Lots of other photographers were there to see these quintessential documents of the Magic City; many of them are Carlebach’s old students at the University of Miami and current employees of The Miami Herald. As happens at any gathering of journalists these days, there was glum talk about the change in times, outmoded technologies, decaying economies.

    Along with informing us of the present, journalism is the future documentation of the past. Maybe, we need it now more than ever.

    The Miami Center for the Photographic Arts is in the Borders Picture Framing Shop at 1601 SW 1st Street, Miami, 305-659-9575.

  24. The Art of Noise

    05.Jun.08, 11:56 EDT
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    Robert Longo, Untitled (Men in the Cities), 1980, Holzer Family Collection, New York. Photo courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

    The Down Home Southernaires were playing their hearts out in the middle of the exhibit room at North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Hipsters and swells, there for the opening of Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock n Roll Since 1967, walked around the group, staring and smiling. To actually hear the Southernaires’ psychedelic indie swamp boogie, you had to don one of the headphones hanging on the soundproof plexiglass box inside which the band was playing. The musicians were pictures at an exhibition, a natural-history museum diorama sprung to silent life, Art Rock Exhibit A of a show that seemed to ask, What is the connection, or disconnect, between visual and audio stimulation?

    Untitled 1996 (Rehearsal Studio No. 6 Silent Version), by Rirkrit Tiravanija, is the attention-getting centerpiece of this remarkably cool gathering of album art (Funkadelic head case Pedro Bell), photographs (uber-underground Richard Kern), videos (Robert Longo, Red Krayola), photomontages (punk feminist pioneer Linder – how f-ing cool is that?!), artifacts (lots of Throbbing Gristle; cool factor to the infinity degree), drawings (Rita Ackerman, Yoshitomo Nara), sculptures, and whatnot. The show originated at MOCA in Chicago, whose Dominic Molon curated it; it opened in Miami on May 29 and runs through September 7. Did I mention it’s really, really cool?

    Christian Marclay, David Bowie (from the series "Body Mix"), 1991. © C. Marclay. Courtesy of Christian Marclay and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York


    The exhibit title is misleading: Sympathy digs a lot deeper than anything as obvious as a giant lips logo. The array of film, art, and video taps into more of a Gen X demo than a boomer one. The Andy Warhol-assembled Velvet Underground is the aesthetic jumping-off point for what is essentially a survey of three decades of subcultural pioneers, with lots of contemporary pieces. As the Throbbing Gristle flyers and Christian Marclay installations show, sound and vision have a history of feeding each other – these are people who see industrial refuse as musical instruments and vinyl records as found artwork.

    A lot of attention has been paid of late to Miami’s vibrant visual arts scene. But as Sympathy for the Devil proves, where there’s art, there’s usually noise – the Down Home Southernaires are the tip of a growing musical iceberg providing a soundtrack for Hernan Bas, Naomi Fischer, Jose Bedia, etc. Perhaps, the MOCA show will serve as a sort of inspirational mecca for cross-disciplinary creative types in what DHS calls the Black Magic City. Any artist can book time in Tiravanija’s Petri-dish rehearsal studio, and the museum is hosting a battle of the band series beginning June 24.

    The Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami is located at 770 NE 125th Street, North Miami, FL. For information, please call 305.893.6211 or visit www.mocanomi.org. Museum hours are Tuesday – Saturday, 11 am – 5 pm; Sunday noon – 5 pm, and last Friday of each month from 7 – 10 pm. Admission is free for MOCA members, North Miami residents/City employees, and children under 12; $5 non-members; $3 seniors and students with ID.

  25. A Busker on Broadway

    29.May.08, 11:28 EDT
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    Stew looks sardonically out at the audience in New York's Belasco Theater from his vantage point at center stage. Sometimes, as he narrates the action of Passing Strange, the show he wrote with Heidi Rodewald, which just won two Obies and is nominated for seven Tonies, he sets his heavy black glasses on top of his head and pauses with lips pressed tight, emphasizing a particular absurdity – of a character, the plot, the whole situation of being a longtime outsider artist finally let in. It’s a healthily skeptical narrative device that intellectually keeps this smart, funny play from becoming what it has actually become: a Broadway musical. “Can you believe it?” the gesture says. Well, yes.

    Passing Strange, which moved from the Public Theatre to the Belasco February 8, is the story of that skeptical artiste as a young man. The Youth, played with just the right mix of wide-eyed gawkish disdain by Daniel Brecker, escapes the phony palm-tree-studded life of growing up black and middle class in LA by following his muse to Amsterdam and Berlin, where he falls in with hippies, anarchists, and performance artists. Stew thanks GW Bush for the show’s inspiration. “When I found out that he had never been to Europe in his youth (or in his adulthood until he became prez!!!) I immediately knew I wanted to write a play about a kid who wanted to go to Europe,” he writes on the show’s website. “That fact about Bush said a lot to me about America's lack of interest in anything foreign except that which it can exploit (always to exploit – never to learn from).”

    In the show, Stew, who with Rodewald had a band called the Negro Project for a decade, is just as critical of Euro bohos’ curious interest in and ignorance of his background as he is of American close-mindedness. In order not to get evicted as a pop capitalist pig, the Youth winds up playing the skin card, pretending to have been a kind of Crip to his communal flat-mates – who lap up his gangsta art. “No one in this play knows what it’s like to sell a dime in South Central,” Stew drily states to the Belasco crowd, making fun of what must have been his own adolescent shuck and jive – and raising a red flag for any minstrel tendencies in this current song and dance.

    Years ago I recall seeing Stew busking in the Astor Place subway station; I’d like to say I recognized his Elvis Costelloish genius back then, but I’d be lying. I’m definitely rooting for him Tony night, June 15. He’s the lucky, worthy struggling artist who has finally hit the lottery – bravo for his capitalist pop!

    Passing Strange will perform Tuesdays at 7 p.m.; Wednesdays - Saturdays at 8 pm; Wednesday and Saturday matinees at 2 p.m.; and Sundays at 3 p.m. at the Belasco Theatre (111 West 44th Street) on Broadway. Tickets are priced $111.50 - $66.50 - $36.50 - $26.50, and are available through Tele-charge at www.TeleCharge.com, or by calling 212-239-6200.

    For additional information on    Passing Strange, visit www.PassingStrangeOnBroadway.com.

  26. MOLI's Cowboy Blogger

    27.May.08, 13:00 EDT
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    Phil Martin is one of the best things to happen to this website. The Brady, Texas-based musician, poet, retired professor, and all-around pontificator is MOLI’s most prolific blogger. At his Campo Madrone profile he has 19 different tabs, including the D&E Ranch, featuring the prose of his alterego Cletus Duhon, and the Border, photographic and writerly snapshots of life where Mexico meets Texas. As if that weren’t enough, Phil has also launched a profile for the Cowboy Chautauqua Company, a performing troupe of cowboy singers and poets. You can read more of his poems there, and hear some great Americana anthems, like Andy Wilkinson’s "I’ll Be Better Than This," which Phil says was inspired by something he said.

    I’ve never met Phil, though I try to keep up with the emails he sends me through MOLI – man, I envy his verbosity and quick wit! Unlike some of us, Phil isn’t paid to blog. He just has a passion for writing, and he’s found us to be a good site to air out his bounteous ink, so to speak.

    After a decade hiatus, Phil is trying to revive the CCC. You can book one, two, four, or a whole posse of poets, writers, songsmiths. It’s great to experience Martin’s original American voice virtually wherever you are – but I’d love to see him and his friends in person. Judging by the Campo Madrone blogs, it would be a pointed, philosophic, hilarious, and poignant night of songs, jokes, and running commentary. Like an old campfire gathering – one where W. is likely to get roasted on a long pointed stick and someone gets messy confessional.

    The Chautauqua is based on an historic form of popular culture, pre-Internet, even pre-the chitlin circuit: “Chautauquas were a big part of the American entertainment scene during the last half of the 19th and first part of the 20th centuries,” Phil writes in one posting. “They died out mostly because of the invention of motion pictures and radios . . . but they thrived for nearly half a century.  Describing what they did isn't easy because a wide disparity of styles and formats existed among them.  But a national circuit developed, one where traveling troupes of entertainers came through small towns across America on a regular basis.  These shows were in part educational, aimed at bringing the thriving culture of the cities to the rural parts of the country.”

    Brady is a long way from my perch in Miami Beach, but I feel like I’ve gotten to know Phil in the past year. (His wife, Evelyn [nice name], makes the amazing Lathers del Corazon handmade soaps and lotions, which I highly recommend.) I’m not just saying this as some sort of MOLI promotion, but getting to find a voice like his – or really, I should say voices, since he writes in so many personae -- is what makes me believe in the use of a social networking site, or the Internet in general. Call it digital chautauqua. Make sure to send him an email – and be ready for a new pen pal.

  27. Baracking Obama

    22.May.08, 13:18 EDT
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    Politicians have to do a certain amount of pandering. That’s why Barack Obama now wears a flag pin, and John McCain has gone on an ethical staffing spree. But more important than catering to constituencies is staying ahead of the curve of public opinion. In other words: leading.

    And as good, albeit unlikely, a sign as any that Obama will be our country’s next leader is his opening act when he speaks at Sunrise's Bank Atlantic Center on Friday: the Spam All Stars.

    In South Florida, and in the global jam-band circuit, the Spam All Stars are well known to be the best Latin funk band led by a DJ, ever. DJ Le Spam (aka Andrew Yeomanson) leads his multinational ensemble through what he calls electronic descarga. The improvisational grooves are mostly rooted in Cuban music, but there’s hip-hop, rock, dub, etc., in there as well. Ever since they first established a Thursday night residency at the Little Havana nightclub Hoy Como Ayer some seven years ago, the All Stars have typified the progressive, eclectic embrace of a Miami demographic that loves Cuban culture – but isn’t necessarily down with the bomb-throwing tactics of the old-guard exile community.

    In other words, having the All Stars warm the crowd up plays to the Latin vote that all the candidates, who are converging on South Florida this week like sharks around a bloody game fish, will be sucking up to. But it’s a Latin vote for change; Spam’s not Willy Chirino, or Gloria Estefan. Spam All Stars provide the soundtrack for a new Miami: a town that is now predominantly Spanish-speaking, yes, but that’s as much due to recent immigrants from other Latin American countries as to the generations who fled Castro decades ago. Plus, the children of those ‘60s exiles have come of age, and like most second-generation immigrants, they don’t necessarily share the world views of their parents.

    As Ana Menendez urged in her excellent Miami Herald column, when you come to Miami, please don’t just talk about Cuba. “Whatever you do, for the love of God, please do not pick up any maracas,” Menendez counsels.

    Perhaps, before Obama takes the stage, Spam will spin "Si Se Puede," the recent anthem by another South Florida band, Guajiro – a song that features electric guitars, not maracas. "Si Se Puede" is the Spanish translation of "Yes I Can." It’s a bilingual hardcore answer to the will.i.am Obama tribute. Guajiro are three Cuban Americans, and one Irish drummer, from Hialeah who play Rancid/Clash/Green Day-influenced punk. They don’t wear Che Guevera shirts – but they are down with Barack.

    I believe the last time Obama spoke at an event like this in South Florida was for the Miami Book Fair in 2006; he was at downtown’s Gusman Theater, and it was one hot ticket. The BAC is about three times as large as the Gusman, able to hold about 15,000 (depending on the setup). It’s a place for rock stars; the last time I was there I saw Bruce Springsteen. And right now, Obama is America’s number one idol.

  28. Hammer of the Sad Sack

    20.May.08, 13:43 EDT
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    Dean Wareham is nothing if not self-lacerating. One of the on-the-road tales he tells in Black Postcards: A Rock & Roll Romance, his memoir of his years as the lead singer and songwriter for the bands Galaxie 500 and Luna, is about his first time with a prostitute. In a legal brothel in Hamburg, dude prematurely ejaculated. “’Schade,’ she said, which translates, ‘It’s a shame.’” Talk about the ultimate deflation of rock-star mythology – Black Postcards is a far cry from Hammer of the Gods.

    The subtitle “Rock & Roll Romance” is meant ironically. The bleak title is far more accurate: Black Postcards is as much a chronicle of failure as of love.

    It’s hard to imagine a big audience for this book, since, as he’s the first to admit, Wareham has never had a hit record in his life. And yet, even as I wondered who cares about yet another gig and hotel room (a seemingly repetitive pointlessness that is Dean’s point precisely), I found myself anxious to return to Postcards every time I put it down. This was partly because to some degree, I was reliving a segment of my own obsessively insular indie-rock past. During their brief lifespan and early in my career as a music critic, Galaxie 500 was one of my favorite bands. I reviewed them for The Village Voice and later, met Dean, Damon, and Naomi when they were recording at Kramer’s Noise New York studio. I wound up living around the corner from Wareham in the East Village and used to run into him on Bowery often. We’d stop to chat about what we were listening to, or whatever; Dean was always personable, and I liked his wife, Claudia. I remember being floored when he told me that he had landed Stanley Demeski to play with Luna; we both raved about the Feelies drummer’s economical way with a snare.  

    But that was years ago; I moved, and only peripherally stayed attuned to Dean’s career and personal life. Reading Postcards was a bit of a surreal experience: I knew the action and players intimately in the first half, but the end was still a mystery to me. I really wanted to know what happened to this old acquaintance I suddenly knew better than ever. (People have told me they’ve had similar reactions to my book; now I get it.)

    Well, nothing much happens, yet like the crazy rhythms Demeski gets out of a few spare drumbeats, it’s a lot. Postcards is a chronicle of the life of an Ivy League-educated, moderately successful indie/modern/alt rocker (choose your sobriquet). Up and Down With the Rolling Stones it’s not. There’s a fair amount of Ecstasy but barely any groupies. Kramer and former male prostitute/talent scout Terry Tolkin are interesting side characters, but they’re not Truman Capote or Marianne Faithfull. The biggest plot development is when Wareham leaves Claudia and their young son Jack, after taking up with Luna bassist Britta Phillips. Confessing his constant crying, Wareham is not afraid to come across as a sensitive sad sack. But clearly, he can be a bit of an asshole too.

    Dean always seemed sad (best bedroom eyes in alt rock), smart (Harvard), and wryly sardonic to me, and that’s definitely how he comes across in his memoir. He never sentimentalizes or mythologizes. He’s surprisingly funny, in a flip way. His bands may never have become as big as Metallica or Nirvana. But his literate audience is probably large enough to eat up Black Postcards. And as Liz Phair said in her NY Times review of the book, Wareham definitely captures an era and a way of life.

    Still, I don’t really buy it when Wareham laments having sacrificed the “normal” life of a suburban family to being a musician. Being a band leader and a good husband is no easy balancing act. But I don’t believe for a minute that Wareham’s going to disappear into New Jersey and become an accountant now that Luna is disbanded. After all, he’s already found a second artistic career, one he’s pretty good at. And book tours are much less grinding than rock ‘n’ roll ones. 

  29. Geek Chic

    15.May.08, 11:41 EDT
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    Oscar Wao and Newell Ewing are comic-book fanatics. Both outsider youths have bodacious moms and superhero complexes. Wao is an obese Dominican in Paterson, New Jersey, who’s seemingly stuck in a perennial virginal pubescence. Ewing is an actually pubescent WASP denizen of suburban Las Vegas. Both nerds are ‘07 literary heroes: Wao is the titular protagonist of Junot Diaz’s first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, while Ewing is the missing child at the center of Charles Bock’s debut novel, Beautiful Children.

    Both books were released, the former by Penguin, the latter by Random House, to an envious amount of hype (envied by this writer, at least). Wao, the successor to Diaz’s acclaimed 1997 collection of short stories Drown, was years in the making and wound up winning a Pulitzer. Bock’s book, also a long-term labor of love, earned him a front-page review in The New York Times Book Review – and a MOLI book of the month pick – though it doesn’t seem to have lived up to its initial hype with sales or prolonged fanfare.

    Diaz and Bock are both products of literary schools: Diaz teaches at MIT (and compares a gruesome bit of torture to a MLA seminar in one stretching-it passage in Wao) while Bock has talked about the years he spent workshopping Beautiful Children under the tutelage of masters like David Foster Wallace. Both books can be self-consciously writerly. Wao breaks free of its footnotes and rotating narrative voices, while Children gets bogged down. Both represent a triumph, and moral denouement, for geek chic.

    It used to be that male writers would at least feign a certain machismo – emulate Spanish civil war fighters or Neal Cassady or junkie outlaws or lords of the rings. The adolescent obsessions with fantasy and sci-fi that Diaz and Bock must themselves have once had – given their meticulous attention to genre detail – would be the kind of dirty past you’d want to keep hidden. Superman would deny his Clark Kent. These days, a familiarity with the arcana of the Fantastic Four can apparently earn one a hardcover, major-publisher, balls-out book deal.

    Diaz and Bock put their antiheroes through ugly fates, yet clearly they love them. For all his weirdo unsexiness, Wao is one of the more finely drawn, empathetic, original characters to emerge from Paterson since William Carlos Williams’s wheelbarrow.

    But I’m waiting for a female lit star who sees her altergo in Wonder Woman, Catwoman, Supergirl, and Tank Girl. She should be awkward, fat, shy, and doomed – and earn her creator a fat book contract and NYT slice of hype.

  30. A Key Find

    13.May.08, 13:13 EDT
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    Key Largo is the northernmost Florida Key. It’s the first one you hit as you drive down US 1 and emerge out of the Everglades’ river of grass and into this string of islands that hook between Florida Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. Depending on traffic, you can get there in an hour from Miami. This is both good and bad: Key Largo is the most accessible key, but it’s also the one where you’re most likely to run into urban problems, like crime.

    At the Pelican, for instance – our favorite place to stay in the Keys and a jewel of a find I’m sharing with you now because I love you, oh MOLI reader – someone once stole my flip-flops from the shore as I was out kayaking. The resort figured it was the same young couple they caught trying to load one of the Pelican’s paintings into their car – and kindly reimbursed me for my footwear, which I had just bought down the road at one of my other favorite Key Largo establishments, Divers Direct.

    Whatever: Having wandered up and down this Caribbean appendix to the U.S. many times in 20 years, I think that Key Largo has become my favorite key. Key West has the gingerbread houses and the gay-friendly nightlife – but it also has the roving drunkfest of Duval Street. Islamorada has Kaiyo Asian restaurant and the amazing Casa Morada – but both are budget breakers in these tight economic times. At $200 a night, the Pelican ain’t cheap – but for that price, you can get one of the waterfront rooms with your own private porch and watch the sun set over the water as you grill your fresh fish. It’s a quick, easy getaway from the city – and even after only one night, you’ll feel like you like you were in Jamaica, or the Bahamas, or Puerto Rico, or somewhere foreign and exotic and tropical. But you didn’t have to fly, and your dollar isn’t deflated here, and you can stop at Alabama Jack’s to see some old-fashioned clogging (yes, clogging) and eat a bowl of chili on the drive home.

    Key Largo is a city. US 1 is lined with businesses; you’re not in the wilderness. That’s part of what’s so amazing about the Pelican (formerly known as the Hungry Pelican): At one end of its driveway, you can walk to a CVS, or get a milkshake from the funky diner Mac’s, or order custom deck furniture shaped like a lobster or fish or dolphin from the store across the street. But walk west down that driveway, past each of the modest cottages with its own little grill area, and you wind up at a Florida Bay oasis, with a hammock strung between palm trees over (imported) white sand and two docks leading out into the water, from which you can watch a mother horseshoe crab carting her baby around the bay’s bottom.

    I’ve had some truly magical moments in Key Largo. Once, in a Pelican kayak, we found ourselves in a pod of feeding manatees. One of the great, lumbering beasts came so close to us, my husband scratched its head. On Mother’s Day last year, the water literally came to sparkling life: Some sort of tiny bioluminescent creatures do it every year in May under the full moon, and their coitus was leaving little squiggly marks in the water. This Mother’s Day, we kayaked to a mangrove island where cormorants and herons were nesting, and we saw a little white baby heron head sticking out of one nest in a tree.

    Key Largo’s chief asset is John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park, an oceanic preserve that is world renowned for its snorkeling and diving. The variety of life here in shallow waters is astounding – although if you’re at one of the reefs where the glass-bottom boats dump tourists, the quantity of human life can get annoying. Still, there’s so much reef, that unless you’re snapping pictures of the Christ statue, you can usually get away on your own and find the nurse shark nesting under a ledge, or have a little damselfish attach itself to you like you’re some lost mother figure.

    Every time we go to the Keys (which is a couple times a year – lucky us), we make sure to stop at the Key Largo Conch House, an old Victorian with tables on the deck, a golden lab named Chief, a parrot named Romeo, and great breakfasts, sandwiches, salads, and smoothies. They also serve dinners there now, but we haven’t made it there yet for that, as we’re usually grilling at the Pelican.

    This past weekend, once the steak was done, we found out that all the forks were gone from our room. The woman at the desk told my husband she had just stocked all the cabins with flatware – again – and only gave us two forks, one of which was plastic. Okay, so that wouldn’t happen at Casa Morada. Then again, we couldn’t bring our son to that child-free institution. And Cole loves Key Largo so much, he begged us to stay another night.

  31. Kanye West Superstar

    08.May.08, 13:12 EDT
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    (A tribute/parody inspired by the Glow in the Dark tour’s Miami stop on May 6.)

    Every time I watch you rap
    I don’t understand
    Why you let the things you say
    Get so out of hand
    You would manage better
    If we could see your band
    80 minutes of just Kanye on stage --
    Did the ego just land?

    Oh, it’s your spaceship “Jane”
    You sure have an imagination
    (Though TLC in '99 did the robot voice)
    You’re sweeping the nation

    Don’t you get me wrong
    Don’t you get me wrong now
    Don’t you get me wrong
    Don’t you get me wrong

    I really loved the show
    I really loved the show
    I really loved the show
    I really loved the show

    Kanye West
    Kanye West
    We love you
    But need the wood, get off the cross

    Kanye West
    Superstar
    Do you believe you’re who you say you are?

    We all know you think that you’re
    The pick of the crop
    But it’s nice you brought some friends –
    It can be so lonely at the top
    Lupe Fiasco, he was where it’s at
    Is he where you were?
    N.E.R.D. rocked the crowd
    Pharrell is so hot
    Speaking of hot, Rihanna – ouch!
    Was that some cheesecake? Or
    Is she on a dominatrix trip,
    A record and ball breaker!

    Don't you get me wrong Don't you get me wrong
    Don't you get me wrong, now Don't you get me wrong
    Don't you get me wrong Don't you get me wrong
    Don't you get me wrong, now Don't you get me wrong

    I really loved the show
    I really loved the show
    I really loved the show
    I really loved the show

    Kanye West
    Kanye West
    We love you
    But need the wood, get off the cross

    Kanye West
    Superstar
    Do you believe you’re who you say you are?

  32. Meet the New Boss-Heads

    07.May.08, 11:05 EDT
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    The hand-lettered sign was one of many that dotted the arena. “Thunder Road [written in Bruce Springsteen’s script] for my 21st Birthday Please.” The Boss is in an obliging mood on this tour, so he played the piano-driven anthem that used to be his signature but for years he had dropped from his repertoire. The irony, of course, is that the 1975 song was written long before the requesting fan was born. Looking around the Bank Atlantic Center in Sunrise, Florida, May 2, that wasn’t actually so surprising.

    There are few things more annoying than bald boneheads shouting for songs from their youth at classic rock concerts. Sure, there was a lot of that Friday night: “Just play ‘Rosalita’!” some old codger rocker shouted behind me, precisely as Bruce was in the middle of a very soulful moment in "Devil’s Arcade." The song from his ’07 album Magic is about a soldier in the desert, and the music got still as Max Weinberg’s drums enacted the lyrics: “the beat of your heart, the beat of her heart.” Then the idiot shouted.

    More heartening were the teenagers in front of us singing along to every song, old and new. There was a surprisingly wide age range at the show – perhaps because Springsteen has never stopped generating new albums. Sure there were a lot of people (like myself) reliving the days when Born To Run defined their adolescent urges. But a generation of kids alienated by bling-hop and teen pop is listening to their parents’ rock’n’roll. (I recently interviewed the high school students behind the group For Darfur, and despite the fact they’re promoting a Kanye West concert in Miami on May 6, executive director and music obsessive Gabriel Schillinger confessed he’s a classic rock fan.) And while I’m not down with being stuck in one’s "Glory Days," I think it’s important for music fans to learn from the masters. The Beatles were long broken up when I became obsessed with them as a pubescent – and I think my pop instincts are all the better for it.

    I’ve been to many a concert where the Boss challenged his old-school fans, by turning "Born in the U.S.A." into a noisy protest song, or playing "American Skin (41 Shots)" in a Madison Square Garden full of cops shortly after Amadou Diallo’s murder. In general, this wasn’t one of them -- although he did raise the heckles, and hackles, of some of those around us when he prefaced "Living in the Future" with a speech about how the last eight years have been an attack upon the Constitution. "Fuck Obama," another bonehead near us muttered. (Springsteen has endorsed the presidential candidate.)

    Bruce reunited the E Street Band for this tour, and he played oldie after oldie – including "Rosalita." He took the requests written on the hand-lettered signs, not the shouted ones – apparently, there was some Boss-head memo about this, as hundreds of fans knew to bring them.

    The show was originally scheduled for April 18 but was postponed when Danny Federici, Springsteen’s keyboardist and friend for 40 years, passed away April 17 from melanoma. Bruce opened with a video tribute to the original E Streeter, accompanied by the song "Blood Brothers." History shouldn’t be repeated – but it should be honored.

  33. For Darfur in Miami Herald

    05.May.08, 10:00 EDT
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    Gabriel Schillinger was 17 and a child of privilege -- son of a doctor, a junior at the private Episcopal St. Andrew's High School in Boca Raton -- when he decided he needed to do something to give back to the world. He got together with some other students, and they asked each other, ``How can we help?''

    To read more of my article about the organization For Darfur, Inc., see The Miami Herald's website.

  34. Supa FUPA Fly

    01.May.08, 15:17 EDT
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    I love my FUPA.

    FUPA, in case you're not up on the latest teen lingo, stands for Fat Upper Pubic (or Pussy) Area. It's a word my now 17-year-old daughter taught me a couple years ago, right at the same time she gave me a boy-beater tank top with another contemporary acronym -- MILF -- on it. MILF, of course, stands for Mother I'd Like to Fuck. The two terms, one derogatory and one complimentary, are linked not merely because I learned them at the same time, but because many mothers battle their FUPA in order to maintain fuckability. I'm glad Kenda gave me a MILF tee -- I believe the occasion was Mother's Day, so it was a pretty rockin' gift from a stepdaughter -- and not one saying FUPA. But I am not ashamed of the fact that since I had a baby, my body hasn't been the same. And yet, apparently, according to this very tough critic, I'm a MILF.

    I bring all this up because, thanks in part to the celebrity mom boom and the media's mania over it, new mothers' bodies are becoming a bit of a cultural obsession. One tabloid cover I recently saw in a supermarket -- I won't buy these damn things -- had the gall to rate which stars had best recovered their figures since giving birth. Equally heinously, a Miami plastic surgeon (of course) has written a children's book to help kids understand why their mommies are covered in bruises and bandages after having operations to correct "the ravages of pregnancy." I kid you not. (Thanks to The Miami Herald's Howard Cohen for reporting on My Beautiful Mommy.)

    I loved being pregnant. I suppose it was like being ravaged -- but then, I kind of like being ravaged too. I've always been a bit of a skinny Minnie, and I relished the transformation into curves. In the Herald story, author Dr. Michael Salzhauer complains of sagging breasts and stretched skin. Maybe I'm an exception, but my boobs are bigger and better than ever at age 43 (just ask my husband). And stretched skin is a small price to pay for having my son wake up this morning, look at me with a big sleepy smile, and say, "I love you Mom."

    You, reader living in some hip urbane boho area, might assume My Beautiful Mommy is a laughable tome destined for dustbins. But I can tell you, here in Miami, where the beauty myth holds full sway, it has a captive audience. Many are the mothers at my son's school who have comically inflated lips and breasts -- thus disfiguring their resemblance to their darling children. I suspect some are familiar with Dr. Salzhauer himself.

    Even fellow alt-parenting author Erika Schickel has chronicled her own battle with the bulge, fighting her "pussy belly," as she calls it, with a girdle in a funny, poignant scene in her book You're Not the Boss of Me: Adventures of a Modern Mom.

    Now, I'm an advocate of fighting the notion that motherhood equals frump. That's part of the premise of my book Mamarama: A Memoir of Sex, Kids and Rock'n'Roll. But I'm sick of the pressure on moms to be hot, hip, and wasp-waisted, like the caricature on the cover of Salzhauer's book. Instead of applying teenaged beauty standards to grown women, we need to start fetishing mature bodies. Saggy breasts rock. "Look at these, my child-bearing hips." FUPAs are fuckable. Put it on a T-shirt.


  35. Three for the Road

    29.Apr.08, 16:38 EDT
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    “What’cha listening to these days?” It’s the music buff’s conversation opener, a bid to share discoveries, compare notes – maybe show off. So in case you were wondering, here are three discs that recently crossed my CD player – and have stayed there.

    Santogold, Santogold (Downtown): There’s something about females singing obliquely over angular, rhythmic tracks that makes me want to jump up and down. The debut album by Brooklyn toaster/singer Santi White (pictured) and songwriter John Hill mixes '80s empower pop with '00s dancehall: It’s Missing Persons meets M.I.A., complete with clap tracks and weird synth effects. Media from Rolling Stone to Interview have been salivating over tracks like "LES Artistes" since they first hit the Internet last year. Santogold finally arrives in stores today.

    Macaque, Chinatown EP: Another fem-punk New York new wave outfit, Macaque warble like Bjork and cavort like the Brazilian Girls. Evers’s vocals are seemingly cotton-candy light, but pack a not-so-hidden bite, as she taunts a "Big Man:" "I can’t wait to knock you down." Chris Hart’s beats are deliriously Garageband simple – you’ll wish you’d thought of them first. But Macaque did.

    Various artists, Independent Music for Independent Coffee Drinkers (sonaBLAST!): My colleague Wendy Case would probably call this collection of mellow coffeehouse anthems chirp rock. But it’s really good chirp rock. In a compilation of largely unknown folk singers, you’d expect to find several bad beans – but the quality control here is excellent. Mark Geary (who used to be my favorite New York bartender back when I called Irish pub the Scratcher my living room) is at his Nick Drake loveliest on two tracks, "Here’s to You" and "Obi’s Chair." Charlotte Kendrick is an endearing Luddite on "I Get Stupid." The oddball winner of the collection is "Violet Morning," in which Jamie Barnes sings with endearing, over-the-top sincerity and compassion about the day R.E.M. drummer Bill Berry collapsed from a brain aneurysm. I’d say these laidback tunes are more for the herbal tea than the espresso crowd – or maybe they’re for slow-grind aficionados (sorry, can’t stop the coffee puns).

  36. Parking Violation

    24.Apr.08, 17:19 EDT
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    The Cesar Pelli-designed Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts is a tumbling marble reef overlooking Miami's Biscayne Bay. Since it opened in 2006, the publicly and privately funded venue has struggled to attract audiences to a downtown known for its seediness and crime, and to meet its operating costs. In the last year -- already in its short history -- it has gone through massive changes, including a name switch (from the Carnival Center, when banker Adrienne Arsht outgifted the cruise line) and new director. Under Lawrence Wilker, the center seems to be making great strides forward.

    Unfortunately, Tuesday night, I had the kind of terrifying, mystifying, criminal experience that keeps people away from this part of town.

    The evening started magnificently. After a dinner at Michael's Genuine Food & Drinks -- the kind of meal that Frank Bruni recently raved about, when he picked Michael's as the fourth best new restaurant in the country -- Mom and I went to see the 25th anniversary edition of Forbidden Broadway at the center's Studio Theater. It was the first time this hilarious and sometimes quite hard-hitting satire of musicals has played South Florida. Created and written by the witty Gerard Alessandrini, Forbidden Broadway is a show for people who hate to love and love to hate the theater. Gina Kreiezmar is a brilliant mimic -- of Liza Minnelli, Sarah Brightman, Patti LuPone, Ethel Merman, etc. -- and quite a good singer. I was all set to write a nice little review.

    Then we walked out to the PAC parking lot to find out my car had been stolen.

    I'll try to make this long story short: After calling 911, it turns out my PT Cruiser had been towed at the request of the American Parking Company, the operators of PAC lot F. After a very stressful couple of hours, of dealing with police and PAC security and Galactic Towing and American Parking, my husband had to pick us up and take us to the tow lot in Liberty City -- not a part of town you want to take your mom, who's in from out of town late at night -- and pay $101 to get my vehicle back.

    Now, I know tow company scams are rife in big cities. But this one is particularly heinous. My car was not illegally parked. I was in a designated Arsht Center lot, as you can see on this map. Dozens of other patrons parked there that night. It's one of the lots Wilker is referring to when he tells the press there is plenty of parking around the center. The lot is owned by the Florida Grand Opera, one of the center's resident companies. The tow truck pulled up to take more cars when I was on the phone with the police, but at that point, the show was over, and the other patrons managed to get away without being robbed.

    After I filed off an angry email to the Arsht Center's publicist Wednesday, Larry Wilker called me to apologize for this incident. He said he was "angry and mortified and embarrassed." FGO COO Mark B. Rosenblum also emailed me, saying he has "asked American Parking to stop the current towing policy. We will be reviewing all policies and procedures, and making adjustments as necessary." They are also reimbursing my $101.

    That's great; I appreciate it. I doubt the center or the FGO is a direct part of this towing scam (although it does seem to me that towing a few cars is a way American Parking can make money on what would otherwise be a slow night, and FGO does presumably profit from its financial relationship with American Parking). But this is just the kind of thing that's going to keep people away from downtown. Other patrons saw what happened to us. Word gets out -- um, I am a journalist. Wilker told me there had been one other incident. That he knows of.

    The other day, I blogged about the superiority of the cultural nightlife on the west side of the Dade County causeways. I stand by what I say. But I'm also once burned.

  37. SoBe's Ugly Truth

    23.Apr.08, 17:14 EDT
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    It’s no secret that the South Beach nightlife scene long ago ceased to be a playground for the kind of off-kilter, bohemian individuals who make nightclubbing a blast. In fact, it’s more like a cesspool of overpriced clubs playing bad trance and full of narcissistic, superficial airheads who get by on looks and/or money rather than talent or brains.

    The way in which SoBe clubs have become killing grounds for tourists and suckers was made abundantly clear in a Sunday story in The Miami Herald (full disclosure: I am a former Herald staff critic and still contribute to the paper and its associated websites). Reporter Lydia Martin details the costs and cachet of buying into bottle service, and thus VIP treatment, at the clubs. She talks to such partiers as Romy Grantley, a 39-year-old financial trader who says he spends $3000 every Friday at Set. Martin is a genius at getting people to say things that lay bare the weird culture of Miami; a couple years ago she quoted literary entrepreneur Mitchell Kaplan saying, “We have the image that everybody here has fake boobs. Well, some people with fake boobs are very intellectual.”

    The winner in this story comes from party promoter Tommy Pooch: ''If we made you buy four bottles, and you're only four people, you can bet we didn't want you there. You're probably ugly. We were hoping you would just leave. But you were so desperate to get in, you agreed to the four bottles, and now we're stuck with you.''

    This, of course, explains why South Beach clubs are full of ugly rich people and desperate model wannabes who are essentially, and often literally, paid to be there. I suppose if you’re one of those types, they’re a great place to hang. But
    Word to the people like Grantley, who brag about buying their popularity each weekend: That kind of club scene is over. You can see T-shirts in South Beach with the letters VIP circled with a slash through them. There are club nights, even at such once star-obsessed Beach venues as Tantra, that brag that they are celebrity-free. Economic times have changed, people hate Republicans, and little democratic dive venues are where it’s at.

    The infamous SoBe scene is not only over; it’s dangerous. Martin’s article was prompted by a recent episode at behemoth venue Mansion where clubgoers were allegedly beaten by bouncers after they protested the size of their bar tab. Mansion officials deny the allegations but the patrons have sued and eight bouncers have been arrested for battery. You can see a video of the incident here.

    Meanwhile, the kind of DIY fashionistas, art-school kids, trannies, budding MCs, etc., at the heart of any city’s cool club scene – not to mention most of the rest of Miami -- long ago decided to stay on the west side of the causeways. In neighborhoods like Wynwood, Lemon City, Downtown, and the Design District, there’s a vibrant mix of singer/songwriters, indie clubs, cool record stores, world-renowned galleries, and hip restaurants. Places like Sweat Records, Churchill’s, 190, Transit Lounge, etc., don’t pull that velvet-rope stuff. Pay your admission (if there is one, it’s probably dirt cheap), and enjoy some good local music. Ugly people welcome.

  38. Pariah Carey

    17.Apr.08, 12:33 EDT
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    There are two classic mistakes critics, particularly pop music critics, make: 1. Hating something just because it’s popular, or 2. Liking something just because it's popular. On Tuesday's Soundcheck Smackdown on WNYC radio, I was set up as the representative of the former position, while Slate critic Jody Rosen repped the latter. The topic of debate was "Mariah Carey: Bimbo or Brilliant?" We were somewhat role playing (or at least I was. I don't know; maybe Jody really does think Carey is in a league with John Coltrane and Led Zeppelin). It was fun.

    I didn't and wouldn't call Mirage (her high-school nickname) a bimbo; in an act of feminist reversal I learned from Ann Powers, I only call guys bimbos. I don't think Carey's stupid: She strategically married early in her career, has wisely followed the winds of pop change, and got loads of money from a record label for whom she only had to deliver one record. She's always been involved in her own songwriting and musical direction; she's not a puppet (though she does like to play the victim). And yes, I do envy her ability to hit a lot of notes I can only dream of.

    But skill is not the same as talent. Carey has an impressive vocal range and a somewhat superhuman ability to pack countless notes into one syllable, yet I don’t think she’s a great singer. She's not inventive, she's showoffy, she coos, she lacks soul. Rosen compared her to John Bonham and Coltrane, but to me, she's like Joe Satriani, who can pick the shit out of a guitar, but it still sounds like noodling to me.

    That said, I don't hate her. That would be too easy. Two things I will say for Mariah for sure: 1. She's a survivor. Her career has lasted 18 years, and she just passed Elvis to have the second-most number-one singles in music history (the Beatles are number one). 2. She invokes passion. People -- regular people, not just critics -- love her or hate her. You can see that in the comments at the Soundcheck site, some of which are a lot smarter than anything Jody and I said. I once reviewed a Mariah concert, and it provoked the second greatest amount of hate mail I've received in my career, thank you very much. (My Chemical Romance fans beat her out some tenfold, however).

    So what do you think: Mariah Carey, brilliant or, um, overrated?

  39. Gossip's Raw Power

    16.Apr.08, 19:30 EDT
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    Is the Gossip a dream? Watching the video for “Standing in the Way of Control,”  the band’s ’06 club and UK hit that is featured on Gossip – Live in Liverpool, it’s hard to believe that a major label is promoting this concert album and DVD (Columbia’s Music With a Twist imprint releases Liverpool today). Or that the self-defined radical feminist band is playing on Late Show with David Letterman tomorrow night (April 16). And that in the UK, where proudly overweight singer Beth Ditto has been an unlikely, sometimes naked music-tabloid cover girl, the members are already rock stars. Even MTV is in on the action (the band’s part of the network’s “52/52” campaign). Is the revolution being televised?

    Like the album, the "Standing" video (you can watch it in the View player) is a resolutely raw-power document. Singing in a throaty blues howl that actually merits the usual Janis Joplin comparisons, Ditto wears a shiny skin-tight minidress; in a recent Bust magazine interview, she talked about how she purposely wears exactly what fat girls are told they’re not supposed to. Token guy Brace Paine manages to play bass, lead, and rhythm guitar on one instrument, while drummer Hannah Blilie is the siren of the snare.

    Back in the heyday of what Bikini Kill called Revolution Girl Style, I’d have been moshing with a pack of other tattooed women in some tiny Lower East Side anarchist space to a band like this. That was some 15 years ago, back before Gossip expressly moved from Arkansas to Olympia, Washington, to hook up with Riot Grrrls. Of course, even back then, major labels were dying to sign Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney; corporations like to buy into rebellion. The politicized musicians stuck with indies – and ultimately self-destructed (BK a lot quicker than SK).

    It would be ridiculous to call the Gossip a sell-out. The band is scarcely trying to hide who it is; Music With a Twist is a label for gays and lesbians. In press releases, interviews, lyrics, everywhere, the band wears its politics on its sleeves. “This is for the faggots,” Ditto shouts before “Yr Mangled Heart” on Liverpool. (Later, she dedicates her cover of Aaliyah’s '98 pop hit "Are You That Somebody" to that tragically short-lived R&B star.)

    As much as the Gossip’s success makes me giddy with surprise and delight, it doesn’t mean the revolution is won. In some ways, they make it harder for their kin. Any rock conservative can now counter an argument that so-and-so’s career has been waylaid by homophobia, misogyny, fat prejudice, or the feminist backlash by saying, “Well, that didn’t stop the Gossip!”

    But like a precision instrument led by a diamond-hard drill bit, Ditto et al are an unstoppable force. They’re that good. When there’s a band as mediocre as a dozen popular boy bands – or surgically altered pop tarts – and fronted by a big, fat, loud, strident, bull dyke that gets its MTV spotlight, then I’ll believe the revolution has been won.

    Until then, somebody pinch me.

  40. An Old Florida Pearl

    10.Apr.08, 19:33 EDT
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    You know when you have an idea of what you’re looking for in a vacation spot, but you’re not sure where to find it? You drive and drive, and instead of a pristine fishing village and quaint inn, you keep passing the same old chain stores: Target, Best Buy, Wal-Mart. You start to wonder if you’ve fallen for some vintage postcard image that condos wiped out a couple decades ago (ain’t that America!), and if you’ll be camping at a KOA after all.

    Then at the end of another one of those miles-long bridges that stitch together this oceanic region, there it is: a riverfront lined with 19th-century clapboard warehouses and fishing boats. I’m talking real, working fishing boats with nets and pulleys and crates that haul in shrimp and oysters – not white and chrome outfitters who charge $200 a day to take tourists out to slaughter some gorgeous game fish. A couple blocks past the end of the bridge, there’s a main street with broad sidewalks and diversion-filled cross streets. Within spitting distance of each other, there’s an independent book store, a handmade chocolates store, a shop selling nautical bric-brac that spills out onto the yard, and an internet café called Café Con Leche with Venezuelan specialties.



    Perched where river meets sea just around the bend in Florida’s panhandle, Apalachicola is a gem of a town. No, in honor of the oysters that are plucked from the Gulf of Mexico here, and whose shells fall off a conveyor belt into a giant seagull-surrounded pile down the street from the nautical store, let’s call it a pearl. My husband, son, and I made a last-minute decision to drive around Florida for Cole’s spring break at the end of March. We had an ultimate destination – Bud’s aunt and uncle in Crestview, which is about as far from Miami (some 600 miles) as you can get and still be in the Sunshine State; in fact, we ventured into Alabama for one afternoon idyll. In between, we were winging it. We figured drive a few hours, find a place, stay a night, check it out.

    Matlacha, a strip of road connecting the mainland to Pine Island, is a great beach-boho village amid the overpriced development of the Naples and Fort Myers area. The charming Bridge Water Inn is built on a deck, so water literally laps under the rooms – but we’ve stayed there before, so it wasn’t a discovery. The next day, we were impressed by the rescued animals (my type of place!) at Homosassa Springs State Park – but the area was packed with families on spring break.

    We thought we’d stop earlier the third day, but instead we kept driving, because nowhere seemed “right” -- though the scenery was improving. After Crystal River, we’d finally escaped the strip mall sprawl. We were driving on two lanes down Florida’s back country, over the slow-moving Suwanee River, past sweet-smelling orange orchards, through palmetto-filled swamps, to the white sands of the Gulf of Mexico.

    My friend Hunter had tipped me off about Apalachicola, but I was maintaining a healthy skepticism until proven otherwise. We’d eaten a gas-station nonlunch and I was hungry and cranky by the time we reached the river and sunset was approaching. Along the way, we’d seen a lot of beachfront being replaced by blocks of cookie-cutter condos, and I was bracing for another gentrified, touristified town, where actual industry had been replaced by Ye Olde Shoppes. From that first bridge glimpse, we could tell Apalachicola is the real deal.

    Yes, one of those riverfront warehouses has been converted into a hotel and restaurants. But the Apalichicola River Inn is a charming and unpretentious place. The lobby doubles as a liquor store, so sweaty locals pedal up on bikes for their daily fifth as you check in. The rooms all have gorgeous views of the river. On the second floor, you get your own private balcony. It was our first real mattress in a couple nights, and there was a cooling ceiling fan and rattan furniture. There are two adjacent restaurants: upscale Caroline’s and the legendary Boss Oyster, whose motto is “Shut up and shuck.” We ate at the latter and it was divine. The oysters are (obviously) very fresh and come topped with all kinds of things; we chose Oyster Bienville, which had blue crab, sherry and Monterey cheese. Bud and I have a thing for hominy, so we had to have the grand grits, which were served in a cream sauce with chunks of ham and jumbo shrimp. The grilled bay scallops were delicate and tasty. We enjoyed all this while sitting on the river, watching the boats come in from a hard day of fishing and the gulls trying to scavenge.



    The inn is handily located beween the oyster shell pile and the nautical store. We managed not to invest in some little wooden shrimp boats – which we regret. At Downtown Books, a cozy store focusing on local authors, I bought a copy of The Yearling, the classic novel set in the old Florida landscape through which we had just driven. The clincher, though, were the chocolates. I can’t tell you the name of the store, because the chocolatier is a retired man who told me he just does this for fun, not for fame, and he doesn’t make business cards, or stickers, or anything with a logo. He opens and closes when he feels like it and doesn’t take credit cards. He does make dozens of types of creamy fudges, truffles, turtles, etc.

    Especially for Florida, Apalachicola is an old town; in fact, Dr. John Gorrie invented the basis for air conditioning (and refrigeration) here in 1849, essentially enabling the settling of the state. There are beautiful Victorians near the water – many of them for sale. Go inland for a few blocks, and you’ll quickly see that this is also a working-class, even a poor, town. Unlike so many quaint seaside villages, it hasn’t all been gussied up for tourists. Which is how this tourist likes ‘em.

    Finally, of course, there are the beaches. The panhandle is famous for its soft white sand and the Gulf of Mexico is gentle and blue (when there are no hurricanes, of course). St. George Island, with its state park, is just a few miles away.

    A heavy fog denied us a sunrise over the river the next morning and sparkling sea views as we left. But you know, you can’t have everything.


  41. Alabama Swang

    08.Apr.08, 12:52 EDT
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    A swing set looms large in the front view. In the background stands the quintessential one-room shack – an icon of Southern rural poverty. But the emphasis in this painting by Toby Hollinghead, with its bright colors and children running to play, is on joy. It’s evident in the hand-painted title across the bottom: A Brand New Swang Set.

    “They abandoned the old tire swing, they moved up in the world!” the artist explains over the phone from Opp, Alabama, where she lives and runs her Grab Bag Gallery. “I grew up with tire swings, and they don’t have them much anymore.”

    Hollinghead has had what some might call a hard life: Blinded in one eye at age 2, picking cotton alongside her mother, living off welfare and the land as a child. But like the 19th century impressionists’ work her mostly rural images recall, her paintings are about the light. Often, as in Rapture Circle, pictured here and available at the Marcia Weber Gallery in Montgomery, it’s a heavenly light. Or else it’s just the infatigable sun of the Deep South, where Hollinghead has lived her whole life.

    Born in 1953, Hollinghead didn’t start painting until 1998. Now she’s a collected folk artist, in the tradition of Howard Finster or Laura Levine -- although given the importance of God in many of these artists' works, it would perhaps be more accurate to call them spiritual or gospel painters, rather than the somewhat patronizing f-word. It’s easy to romanticize these glimpses of a life so removed from the ones we live in modern cities like Miami, what with their crude lines and creative spellings (in Florala, it’s definitely pronounced “swang”) – and hard not to like their frank colors. Besides, is it so distant? I grew up in Beloit, Wisconsin, and relished the tire swing we had hanging from the oak tree in our backyard. As I reminisced with Hollinghead, who has a lilting, musical voice, you could twist it up then let it go and spin till your insides were pushing against your glottis.

    I came across A Brand New Swang Set at Strickland’s Fine Art Gallery in Florala, a small, picturesque lake town that, as its name implies, strides the Florida and Alabama border, and where you can get lots of antique kitchenware and some excellent barbecue. I didn’t make it down the road to Opp (call it a missed opportunity, ba-dum dum). But I will next time I’m in this area. And I’ll try to come on Sunday, so I can hear the painter sing and play guitar at the Opp Church of God.

    You can read more about Toby and see some of her paintings at the Marcia Weber website.

  42. Kids Rock Article on MomsMiami.com

    07.Apr.08, 10:57 EDT
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    The other day my son Cole was sitting in his car seat singing to himself. “Soaring, flying,” he crooned sweetly in his five-year-old voice.

    “Oh Cole, that’s so nice; what song is that?” I asked.

    “It’s from High School Musical!” he beamed.

    I stopped. “Oh no honey. Your mom has a very important reputation to uphold as a musical snob. My son can’t be caught singing High School Musical songs!”

    Let’s be honest: From nursery rhymes to today’s heavily marketed preteen bubblegum, kids’ music can suck. There are some great and glorious exceptions to this rule – more so every day, it seems – but in general, being stuck in a car listening to the Wiggles and Raffi is pretty much my idea of hell. We don’t have to eat Gerber’s peas and carrots, we can leave the room when Teletubbies comes on (unless we’re still coming down from a rave and want to stay), but there’s a way in which tots’ tunes are inescapable -- maddeningly so. Indie-rock icon and Wee Hairy Beastie Jon Langford told me he once threw one of his kids’ CDs out the car window. We’ve all been there, haven’t we?


    Read the rest of the article.

  43. Old Soul Meets Neo-Soul

    03.Apr.08, 13:00 EDT
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    Everyone knows the importance of pitch to singing, but rarely do people talk about the need for rhythm. A skilled drummer can make a good singer great; as the song says, it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

    Which is why I’m excited about the news that Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson has coproduced Lay It Down, the upcoming album by Al Green. ?uestlove, drummer for Philadelphia hip-hop group the Roots, is a musical connoisseur who has worked with Common, Erykah Badu, Fiona Apple, Blackalicious, and a ton more, constantly proving – John Henry like – that man can outdrill machine.  Green, of course, is just one of the world’s greatest living singers, the man whose falsetto defines soul sensitivity.

    I’ve seen Green perform a couple times, and he can hit those high notes like swatting a fly. Of course, that also means it’s easy for him to phone it in. Perhaps ?uestlove can do for Green what Rick Rubin did for Johnny Cash: Find new depths in a legend. With guests John Legend, Corinne Bailey Rae, and Anthony Hamilton, it’s old school meets new school time.

    Admittedly, those neosoul singers can wax a little milquetoasty. But I’m trusting ?uestlove and coproducer keyboardist James Poyser – another musician with heavy-duty credentials (Badu, Lauryn Hill, Jill Scott)-- to make this more than just a nostalgia act with modern beats. Other players on Lay It Down include the Dap-King Horns (Sharon Jones, Amy Winehouse), guitarist Chalmers "Spanky" Alford (Mighty Clouds of Joy, Joss Stone), and bassist Adam Blackstone (Jill Scott, DJ Jazzy Jeff). Fuck sample clearances.

    Lay It Down will be released May 27 by Blue Note. For a hint of how incredibly groovalicious this collaboration sounds, check out the promotional video.


  44. "Nightspot" Hits the Spot

    29.Mar.08, 19:16 EDT
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    A new ballet with music by Elvis Costello, choreography by Twyla Tharp, and costumes by Isaac Mizrahi would be big news in any town. For Miami, the world premiere of Nightspot on March 28 was an historic event. The breathless, vivid, Romantic (with a capital R) dance is the first major commission by the Miami City Ballet, a 22-year-old company that has been increasingly catching the dance community’s eye. Opening night, drawing a mass of tuxedoed swells and South Florida glitterati, was also a momentous occasion for the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, now in its second year and under new management with a new name. Nightspot was a world-class performance – was there any more important dance event on the globe that night? – that, with its infusion of multiple Latin and club beats, moves, and styles, was also very Miami. It was a blast even for the ballet skeptics who were there just to see what Elvis was up to.

    Following three couples as they dance and flirt their way through the nightlife, Nightspot is sort of a modern-day West Side Story (with no words). There’s forbidden romance, betrayal, good girls and bad girls, and a climactic fight – though in Nightspot, it’s between two men, not gangs. The fight scene draws heavily on Brazilian capoeira (as well as American break-dancing). It seems like the creators spent some time in Miami clubs, where salsa, bboying, and house music frequently rub elbows, as well as studying up on Latin styles: There’s mambo, tango, and boogaloo. The snaking bass lines Costello has loved so well since "Watching the Detectives" fit in well here. His moody jazz studies and experiences with classical music also came in handy. There were nine players on stage and 35 in the pit, from congos to clarinet to strings.

    Perhaps most exciting for Miami was how spectacularly its dancers performed. Setting Nightspot in club land was a stroke of genius, allowing Tharp to accentuate the narcissism and abandonment of young dancers. At one point, Jennifer Carlynn Kronenberg duets with a long piece of scarlet fabric – a red carpet? – and a (literally) supportive entourage. This is only the second time I’ve seen MCB, but Miami Herald dance critic Jordan Levin writes that many of the moves seemed created for these precise bodies. Jeremy Cox grounds his kicks in a friendly smile. Isanusi Garcia-Rodriguez shook his body with Afro-Cuban exuberance rather than ballet’s usual restraint. Mizrahi’s purple and red costumes, mixing flamenco, club, and street styles, echoed the giant hibiscus flowers in the stage curtain, which is part of the Arsht Center’s collection of original art.

    Costello, Tharp, and Mizrahi were all there opening night, as were photographer Bruce Weber, producer Sebastian Krys, and conductor Michael Tilson-Thomas. Outside, the subtropical air throbbed to the electronic sounds of the Ultra Music Festival, just blocks away. Across Biscayne Boulevard, at the PAC’s other theater, the Cleveland Orchestra was premiering an evening of Russian works. Parking and traffic were the infrastructural headache caused by this throbbing success. But what city doesn’t have those issues?

    Nightspot moves to West Palm Beach's Kravis Center April 4 to 6 and then Fort Lauderdale's Broward Center April 11 to 13.

  45. Jay-Z Lauds Obama

    25.Mar.08, 12:38 EDT
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    Four years ago, journalists and pundits hailed the '04 presidential election as the first one in which the hip-hop generation might affect the outcome. Numerous rappers and music impresarios rolled out various get-out-the-vote campaigns (this journalist accompanied the Reverend Run and Russell Simmons as they worked a Miami flea market and also tagged along with Missy Elliott as she went to cast a ballot at an Aventura condo). There was a marked, but not giant, increase in the youth turnout at the electoral polls. But it was unclear what precise effect the rap attack had, since all of the campaigns -- unlike Bruce Springsteen’s Vote for Change Kerry effort -- were nonpartisan.

    This year, hip-hop’s leaders are taking their electoral politics a step further. In ’04, Jay-Z -- with Memphis Bleek and Ludacris by his side -- rolled out his voter-drive campaign (along with a new sneaker line) at a shoe store in downtown Miami the day after the MTV Video Music Awards. Saturday night, he again chose the Bottom as the site for a political announcement (and why not, given Florida’s infamous role in the ’00 voting debacle). Shortly after taking the stage at Miami’s American Airlines Arena for the launch of his Heart of the City tour with Mary J. Blige, Hova repeatedly flashed a picture of George W. Bush. “Ready for a change, right?” Shawn Carter asked the frenzied, sold-out crowd. Then the image of the thin-lipped commander in chief was replaced by a smiling shot of Barack Obama.

    Def Jam and Hip-Hop Summit Action Network founder Russell Simmons and Black Eyed Peas member will.i.am have also announced their support of Obama. It’s not surprising that the first serious African-American contender for president is drawing out the hip-hop vote. And while in the wake of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy, Obama is not likely to go touting his support from the rapper who styles himself an American Gangster; still, as a star and as a sometime music-industry CEO, Jay is a good person to have in your pocket.

    Hova knows the importance of powerful friends. That’s why he had Blige – who sang her ass off -- open for him and Kanye West, Young Jeezy, Timbaland, and Bleek all join him on stage Saturday. There was little politicking; most of the night was about celebrating these two greats’ decade-plus in music with some serious demonstration of skills.

    You’ll have to watch out for my review of the show in an upcoming Spin magazine to find out more. Hint: I endorse the ticket of Mary Jay Z.

  46. Wild at Heart

    20.Mar.08, 01:15 EDT
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    The other day, for his fifth birthday, I took my son Cole to the Miami Metrozoo. We make this trip at least once a year together. The first time we were there, he was barely walking, but he toddled right up to the big black pot-bellied pig at the petting zoo and looked straight in its hairy face, in love. Another time, he was wooed by a cockatoo on a trainer’s arm. This year, he had a mystic experience with a one-eyed turkey.

    Cole knelt to pet the tom’s feathers ever so gently. The turkey would puff up, shake its tail, make a little purr-like noise (yes, I suppose it was a gobble), push close to my son, and look at him intently with his one good eye. With wrinkly red skin covering their face and dripping from their beaks like molten plastic, turkeys are at least as weird-looking as pot-bellied pigs. But Cole, my wild manic birthday boy, seemed to have connected to this one’s soul. He was ever so docile and at one with this odd creature, as if it were the most beautiful thing in the world.

    Zoos are places of beauty and brutality. We visit them to see the animals we love up close -- to pay homage even. Yet, watching a polar bear pace or a lion stare apathetically at a noisy crowd, it’s impossible not to also realize we are bearing witness to cruelty, to vestigial colonialism -- to nature trapped, shipped far from its homeland, and held captive. That’s part of why the public was so enthralled by the story of that tiger mauling a man in San Francisco in December: Even before we knew the drunk had taunted the beast, we guessed exactly where the killer was coming from.

    In a PETA world, zoos are coming to grips with their own antiquated morality. A growing number have vowed not to raise any more elephants. (These very sensitive creatures need miles to roam; their psychic imbalance is a barometer of Earth’s peril.) In most zoos, old iron cages have long been replaced by lush landscapes; sometimes, it can be hard for visitors to find the damn animals!

    With the advent of the Discovery Channel, or National Geographic’s 24-hour African watering hole camera, we don’t need zoos to show us far reaches of the world, like we once did. Still, as someone who wants to raise her child to be something more than a screen baby, I take him every year. After all, there are some things you can only learn from life unmediated and unedited. To really get a sense of how black and large a giraffe’s tongue is, you have to feed it green leaves. Education, rescue, and conservation are the core mission and the future of zoos. The disabled turkey was probably lucky to be sheltered here rather than on a farm. The Miami Seaquarium has a tank full of manatees too maimed by boat propellers to survive on their own.

    “Look how long those birds’ legs are!” Cole marveled at the flock of pink flamingos that greet visitors to the Miami zoo. “And look how short that one’s are!” he said, pointing to a duck.

    “Yes; isn’t it amazing how animals come in so many different shapes and sizes?” I said pedantically; I know a teachable moment when I see one.

    “Oh yeah! And look how much beak that bird has!” Cole exclaimed, gesturing at one of the wild ibises that choose to make the zoo, rather than the nearby Everglades, their home.

    I wonder how my son will feel next Thanksgiving. Will he remember his friend at the zoo, and feel differently about our turkey meal? That, too, could be a zoo’s mission in the 21st century. Even PETA would approve.

  47. 305 Live

    18.Mar.08, 12:06 EDT
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    Yesterday I was complaining to my friend Laura Quinlan that I hadn’t been out of the country in a couple years. “You live outside the country,” Laura said. “Just go to your local supermarket [Bay], and you’ll feel like you’re in Latin America.”

    It’s true: I can eat at one of the little luncheonettes across from Bay and, from its aroma of onions and beans and cilantro to its ragged furniture, feel exactly as I’ve felt in Puerto Rico, or on any Caribbean island. Fans barely keep the tropical air moving, and I’ll be lucky if the waiter speaks English. It’s one of the running jokes about Miami: “It’s such an interesting city, and so close to the U.S.”

    I lived in the East Village a dozen years before I moved to Miami Beach in 2001, and there’s a worldly electric buzz about New York that I will always miss, and relive in my dreams. But for all the cultural mix that I enjoyed in the subway and Central Park, in Miami, I deal daily with people from other parts of the world to a degree I never did in Manhattan. As I’ve written before, rappers call it da Bottom, but for southern hemisphere dwellers, it’s the top of Latin America. Europeans love us, and you’d be surprised at the number of Asian communities there are in Miami.

    That said, there are days I feel like I’m in the middle of nowhere. The average musical tour stays hours away, if it ventures into Florida at all. There’s no dedicated indie cinema. If I didn’t belong to a book club, I could go weeks without discussing literature. Thank god I get The New York Times delivered daily.

    That cultural isolation and sometimes backwardness are disappearing rapidly, and it’s thanks to pioneers like Laura. For 20 years, her nonprofit group the Rhythm Foundation (run with her husband James and many others throughout the years) has brought the world’s top musicians to Miami, from Sun Ra to Bebo Valdes to Kraftwerk to Gilberto Gil, to hundreds more in between. You can see this amazing history on the walls of the cifo Art Foundation in downtown Miami (one of the sites of the new Miami renaissance), in blown-up photos, old flyers from the amazing Cameo, and Miami Herald articles.

    Quinlan, the Bill Bragin of Miami, runs the foundation from the bottom up, always working the neighborhoods and businesses where an artist’s constituency is based, staying well in tune with the area’s ever-changing, growing diversity. She’s not alone: Tigertail Productions and the Miami Light Project are other well-rooted arts institutions that have drawn on and nurtured the city’s deep and wide cultural base (and that are run by super-smart women). Now top-down organizations like Art Basel and the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts are trying to tap into what these trailblazers have spent decades building, Basel with resounding success, the PAC still struggling to find itself.

    Far from feeling cut off from the world, I feel in the middle of it during weeks like this. My calendar is booked, including several world premieres: Jay Z and Mary J Blige kick off their tour at the American Airlines Arena Saturday, indie songstress Kimya Dawson performs March 25 at Shake-A-Leg Miami, Pink Martini plays with the new Miami Pop Orchestra Friday at the Arsht (the show is copresented by the Rhythm Foundation), the survivalist dance-music gathering Winter Music Conference runs March 25-29, and the Miami City Ballet premieres Nightspot, an opera composed by Elvis Costello, choreographed by Twyla Tharp, and costumed by Isaac Mizrahi, March 28. Shwew.



    Callie Manning and Carlos Guerra in NIGHTSPOT. Photo by Bruce Weber.

    Miami is a unique spot geographically: It’s a gateway, a refugee town, a port, a stopover. The crime rate sucks, the real estate market is particularly catastrophic, and we have an ever-growing traffic problem. But not only do we have the most beautiful turquoise water and pink buildings: We have a distinct, emergent artistic vocabulary that can now brag of decades-old tenacity. I don’t have to leave the country to sample Brazilian, Argentinean, Greek, Colombian, Cuban, Thai, Japanese, Mexican, and Peruvian culture: It’s all within blocks of me. Even though I live on an island.

  48. Jett Set

    14.Mar.08, 17:03 EDT
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    It’s hard to take the annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony seriously, what with the institution inducting Madonna and John Mellencamp earlier this week, while Iggy Pop and the Stooges and Joan Jett and the Runaways remain unanointed. It’s not that I’m against Madge and Johnny. But there’s an important difference between innovation and commercialization, and the first priority of a curating body like the Rock Hall should be the former. I also know what’s raw power and who loves rock’n’roll: Pop and Jett are rockers to the gut, in a way Ms. Ciccone or even Leonard Cohen (also honored) are not. If nothing else, the former Mr. Osterberg has been making music longer than Mellencamp, and the erstwhile Ms. Larkin’s career predates Madonna’s by several years. C’mon people, let’s show some respect.

    Thankfully for the HoF, Pop and Jett also don’t hold grudges, so both performed at the March 10 induction ceremony. The Stooges played a Madonna tribute at her request, so really, the Material Girl gets props from me here – it’s not her I’m bashing. Jett honored the Dave Clark Five. Yeah, it was a pretty dull year for the HoF.

    Fortunately, Jett is getting her props elsewhere: Venus magazine names her the best female guitarist of all time in its current issue. I was honored to be one of the judges for this contest, and yes, I do love me some Joan Jett. She’s an underrated icon: a proto-punk, a self-made woman, an independent artist. Because she was a teenage Runaway, because she plays hard rock rooted in the great bubblegum pop of Tommy James and the Shondells, because she sports tattoos and leather and that awesome shag, I think people tend to underrate Joan’s intelligence and commitment, to write her off as a hair-metal icon. I’ve interviewed her a couple times, and believe me, she’s a smart cookie, with a fascinating, important history that someone should document. (Ditto for Pop, except that someone already has documented it; Paul Trynka’s Iggy Pop: Open Up and Bleed is a rock bio as compelling and complicated as its subject.)

    It was an impossible task to pick 10 guitar goddesses, and I know I overlooked some people, even some of my personal favorites, like PJ Harvey (fortunately, she made others’ lists). There’s nothing that, as the inimitable JFury would say, gives me a boner like seeing a woman sling an ax. I remember watching Harvey for the first time at a Manhattan nightclub, back in the early ‘90s, when so many girls were rocking out – and Jett was pushing the grrrl revolution on, working with Bikini Kill and Bratmobile and Babes in Toyland. Madonna was in Harvey’s audience that night too, because there’s one thing she excels at: knowing a good thing when she sees it. Now if only she could convince the HoF.

  49. Iron Ladies of Liberia

    10.Mar.08, 12:07 EDT
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    Voting makes me sappy. Waiting while poll workers shuffle through thick books of names, pulling back the curtain, pressing the little “Vote” button -- in a society that seems more fragmented every day, casting a ballot is a rare shared experience (even if frightening numbers of Americans still ignore this coveted franchise). Getting to vote back in January for either a female presidential candidate or an African-American one was a particularly verklempt experience for me, despite the fact there’s a raging debate about whether that vote counts for shit, having been cast in Florida.

    But why has it taken our country so long to get this far? Sometimes it seems like the U.S. will be the last nation ever to get a female leader. After all, women have been proving since at least the days of Cleopatra that you don’t need gonads to govern. With Cristina Kirchner in Argentina and Michelle Bachelet in Chile, South America is way ahead of North on this issue.

    There are some who argue that women lead differently than men: gentler, more peaceful, maternal. About the only nice thing I can say about Margaret Thatcher is that at least she proved that sexist generalization wrong. Iron Ladies of Liberia, a powerful documentary by Siatta Scott Johnson and Daniel Junge that played last week at the Miami International Film Festival, explores this notion of gendered power by looking at the first year in office of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. The African country’s first female president appointed several women cabinet members to help her pull Liberia out of a tragic morass after years of civil war. The film shows in graphic montages the beyond daunting task ahead of them: rivers full of trash, no electricity, no running water, 90 percent unemployment rate, crushing international debt.

    Liberians call Sirleaf Old Ma, along with the Iron Lady. Narrated by Johnson, a woman journalist who admits she’s pulling for one of her own to save the country, Iron Ladies probably isn’t the most objective film ever made. But the filmmakers got access to many high-level meetings, and not all of the drama captured is favorable to Old Ma.

    The best scene is when Sirleaf manipulates a room full of retired soldiers to give up their protest. After listening to their concerns sympathetically, she chastises and chastens them for the role they played in destroying their country. The weathered men become guilty, apologetic children, caught with their hands in a brutal cookie jar. Equally as effective is the way Sirleaf and her finance minister get the U.S. to forgive Liberia's debt, after playing kissy-kissy with China.

    ***

    This blog is a revival for me: As pop culture writer at The Miami Herald, I for a time penned a column called Populism. It was my chance to dig deep into arts and entertainment trends, to look for big truths in what sometimes pass as small things -- to find philosophical justification for my career-long obsession with what's supposed to be ephemeral. After nine months as editorial director at MOLI, I'm picking up my (virtual) quill again. Assembling the cast of characters of the MOLI View, and editing them daily, has been a highlight of my working life. But I've increasingly wanted to be one of them, to offer my own words of wisdom into the admittedly overcrowded blogosphere.

    So here I go again. Now I get to find out what this job has been like for the other amazing editors at the View. I hope I can live up to their shining examples.

  50. Went-Went to Go-Go's

    12.Feb.08, 11:39 EST
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    I try not to indulge in nostalgia (though you wouldn’t necessarily know that from the shows I’ve been reviewing here). But why else would one go to a Go-Go’s concert? Unlike Iggy Pop or Deborah Harry, the 1980s California garage-poppers have not kept up a body of new work since their heyday. So I hereby admit: Beauty and the Beat was in heavy rotation on my turntable when I was a purple-haired misfit in a Midwestern small town. Seeing as how I never saw them then, or since, I went to the Jackie Gleason Theater (currently known as the Fillmore Miami Beach at) February 8 hoping to hear “We’ve Got the Beat,” “Our Lips Are Sealed,” etc.

    Wish granted.

    Written off by sexist twats as gimmicky fluff, the Go-Go’s were/are skilled musicians with a twisted sense of humor and a gift for sly pop hooks that every indie rocker live or dead -- including Elvis Costello -- would trade a lifetime supply of overpriced, oversized spectacles for. Yes, on songs like “Tonite” and “Vacation,” they celebrate girlish pleasures -- but with wicked glee. They dressed Friday not in candy-colored miniskirts (unlike some of the middle-aged fans in the audience) but all in black. Individual players have venerable punk pedigrees: Textones, Edie Massey, Germs (almost).

    Unfortunately, I still haven’t really seen the Go-Go’s: Guitarist Jane Wiedlin left the tour because, as bassist Kathy Valentine announced, “her mom’s dying.” Replacement Eve Monsees laid down a couple pretty gnarly, noisy solos. Mostly, it was Charlotte Caffey who played bandleader -- and singer Belinda Carlisle who pulled a bit of a diva intro, taking the stage after an instrumental number by her bandmates, as if she’s James Brown or something. Yeah, Belinda’s a stone fox and a really great singer. But the amazing thing about the Go-Go’s is they were the first all-female rock band (i.e., with female instrumentalists, not only a vocal group) to have a major impact on the charts.

    So seeing them, incomplete or not, wasn’t just about reliving the past: It was an act of honoring history. And great fun.

  51. MOLI's Jay-Z rumors spread

    03.Jan.08, 17:08 EST
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    I reported back in July that Jay-Z would be going to head a label at Apple. Now that Hova has left Universal, those rumors are back in circulation (and thankfully, Boy Genius gives me credit).

  52. Pop Art

    06.Dec.07, 11:33 EST
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    “Thanks for the company! It gets so lonely at these ‘art shows.’” So joked Iggy Pop as he cleared 'bout a hundred fans off the stage that had been pitched by the sea for the opening concert of Art Basel Miami Beach Wednesday. It wasn’t “the burning sands” -- not at 10 p.m. this time of year -- but that didn’t stop Miami’s most legendary punk rock resident from performing his signature tune with those lyrics, “I Wanna Be Your Dog,’’ not once but twice. It was the first time the skinny 60-year-old had played a public concert in his adopted hometown since he moved here in the early '90s. For the grand occasion, he not only performed for free (that is, tickets were free; I’m sure the Swiss art fair paid Mr. Pop a handsome sum); he brought the Stooges with him.

    It was a propitiously over-the-top start to the annual week of conspicuous spending on crazy amounts of art. In six years, Basel has sprawled out from its MB Convention Center digs to take over diverse parts of Dade County, from the shipping containers and skateboard ramp of the Art Positions show, next to which Pop performed, to warehouses in Wynwood. In a town that likes to make a scene, it is the scene to end all scenes. At the Basel Vernissage, people dressed to, well, something: Alongside the suits staring perplexedly at the pregnant Mona Lisa with the fetus shown in her cutaway stomach strolled a man with full Geico chimp makeup and tail (perhaps he has a nose for art?), a woman with film rolled into her bouffant, and a man in a SS-looking uniform arm in arm with a man in a dress.

    With so many satellite shows generally featuring art’s next generation, the official event has almost become beside the point. Still, there’s always something to remark on at Basel. Two buzz pieces this year are installations: A replica market fills ShanghART’s space. But artist Xu Zhen dumped the contents out of all the packages, filled them with air, and resealed them: The empty containers are now art pieces for sale (talk about a metaphor). Another booth is a crammed schoolroom converted into a voting booth, with a junk-strewn alley outside.

    Over at the always interesting Pulse show in Wynwood, artmakers themselves are on exhibit. The Geisai show-within-a-show-within-a-show gathers artists from around the world who do not have gallery representation. So Masamitsu Katsu from Japan can explain to you that the undulating paper that looks like Ellsworth Kelly in a black phase is something more interesting: a dense drawing made entirely with pencils.

    I’m a Baselmaniac. Even when all the Eurotrash pulling up in limos in front of down-and-out Miami schoolchildren make me apoplectic, I love the art. Sometimes I like it when it makes me look aside from all the ugliness in the world: Zadok Ben David’s box of little stainless-steel flower silhouettes, with their colorful sides reflected off a backing mirror, enchanted me at Pulse (and netted Miami’s Ambrosino Gallery $31,000 from someone much richer than I).

    And sometimes I thank it for making us look at what we would brush aside. In the middle of the convention center, there’s a photo of the aftermath of an attack on a building in a nameless Mideast city. The contrast between the stormtrooper garb of the US servicemen and the checked Kafiyahs of the civilians is so surreal, I thought it was a posed tableau at first, until I looked closely at the bodies sprawled on the floor -- and the woman holding a limp child. The Dreadful Details, the photo is called, and I was so upset, I left before I could note the gallery or artist.

    Outside, Pop was having a real cool time with the Florida fans who were finally getting their pound of his flesh. Basel director Samuel Keller weaved through the audience; this is his last year running the festival he has made an outsized success. “I am you,’’ the singer chanted onstage. I can’t say in a week dedicated to the art of the VIP that that’s a typical Basel sentiment. But it’s a good one.

  53. Ah, Rapture

    19.Nov.07, 18:17 EST
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    Forget the cheekbones: like mesas on a face that is Badlands wide. Forget the dance moves: would that my joints ever had such a lubricated swivel, let alone when I'm 62. Forget the garb: a black and white miniskirt outfit showing how fashion has still yet to catch up to the insouciant sexiness of new wave. What about the voice: Hitting high notes like a cat nonchalantly batting flies, Deborah Harry sounded pitch perfect November 16 at the Fillmore Miami Beach at the Jackie Gleason.

    (Note: This picture is not from the Fillmore show.)

    Harry was on tour with a band of four young lads promoting her new album, Necessary Evil. Most people were there to hear Blondie songs, of course. She obliged with acoustic versions of "The Tide Is High" and "Heart of Glass," seeming a bit like she was bored to shreds. She also sang some of her lesser-known solo hits, like "French Kissing in the USA."

    But it was on new song "Two Times Blue" that Harry hit the highs with the same easy grace with which she exudes sexy-cool. If I could have just one drop of Harry’s ageless hipster sex-kitten juice, I’d be sated. But I bet I could still never ping those notes as if I were merely arching an eyebrow.

    I was very skeptical when Live Nation -- formerly known as Clear Channel’s concert production company -- took over the Beach’s storied Jackie Gleason Theater and topped it with their Fillmore brand. The name and history of the Gleason personify Miami’s showbiz past (the Honeymooner shot The Jackie Gleason Show there); we don’t need no Haight-Ashbury vibe acid-raining on our hit parade. But Live Nation has given the mid-sized venue a decent makeover, and South Florida is ever in the quixotic search for a good concert hall. Acoustics and layout wise, the Gleason -- I refuse to call it the Fillmore -- fits the bill.

    I’m also tired of yuppie rocker nostalgia being shoved down my throat Hard Rock-style with endless concert photos and memorabilia. It’s so Baudrillardesque, isn’t it: The music business is dying, but the simulacra of music is alive and well. Then again, if it takes a corporate monolith repackaging the counterculture to bring Harry to town, then can I have my tie-dyed concert T-shirt in a women’s medium please?

  54. Climb every mountain

    15.Nov.07, 18:27 EST
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    All week I've felt like I climbed Mount Everest, after my exhausting but exhilarating weekend with the MOLI View crew at our editorial summit, Miami Book Fair promotion, and Style Wars event. And I have the pix to prove it! Here's Jana, Cathay, and me at the fair booth:


    And here I am with Erika Schickel and Neal Pollack at our fair panel:



    And here I am judging the Style Wars event:


    For more on this amazing week, check out Jana's, Wendy's, and Juliana's articles on the weekend in the MOLI View! Thanks to everyone who made the week such a success.

  55. Women at a Crossroads

    08.Nov.07, 15:10 EST
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    The Miami Book Fair International got off to a sniggering celebrity start Sunday with Rosie O’Donnell. The 24th annual event continues through November 11 with a street fair starting tomorrow, and dozens of readings by both youngbloods and literary luminaries: Madison Smartt Bell, Erica Jong, David Leavitt, Edwidge Danticat, Alex Ross, Susie Horgan, Amy Bloom, etc.

    I’m looking forward to seeing my colleague Jana Martin, MOLI’s contributing editor for Fashion & Design, read from her new collection of short stories, Russian Lover. The book’s the debut title from Yeti Press; it’s a dizzying collection of tales of young women facing down difficult circumstances: cheating husbands, leering strip-club customers, mountains of cocaine, etc. The fair will bring Martin back to familiar turf: Many stories are set in Miami in the decadent '80s – when the city was even more decadent than it is now, and Jana used to live here. Jana reads Sunday afternoon at 3:30 in the Centre Gallery, Building 1, in the downtown Miami campus of Miami Dade College. (Full disclosure here: Not only am I Jana’s editor, but we have a long-distance writing group together – the Fictionaires – where many of these stories were workshopped, and she’s a dear friend.)

    Russian Lover is also the first selection for the MOLI Book Club's Book of the Month. Please sign up for the club, and let us know what you think of Russian Lover.

    What’s the oldest story in Russian Lover and when did you write it?

    Honestly I don’t remember. I think it’s “The Father,” the short piece that has a falling utensil as its climax. I wrote it long enough ago that I couldn’t write it now.

    Why did you decide to put these stories together?

    Actually it was a collaboration between myself and the publisher and editor. I had a slew of stories, and these stories seemed to connect and yet change pace enough to make it interesting.

    What is it about the story "Russian Lover" that defined the collection for you?

    I loved the name "Russian Lover" as a title, although it nearly got misinterpreted by the original book-cover illustrator, who is a really wonderful, talented artist, but took the description literally. I had always imagined a really angry girl thinking about a so-called "Russian Lover" as opposed to the actual lover. I had also imagined a cover that was a bit edgy, an angry girl who was very exposed (not necessarily naked but very much there to the world), yet didn't give a shit about anything or anyone else besides the rage she was feeling at the moment. The irony there, of course, is that we're looking at someone who is absolutely refusing to be looked at. Yet there she is. Then I also realized I had been imagining the paintings of Steven Schwartz (also known as SAS), a superb artist who had moved to Los Angeles but had been a really good friend of mine in Brooklyn. The publishers were incredibly cool about my proposing something else. That's one thing you get with a small, rugged independent: They believe in your vision, and so they are willing to see it through. And when Steve was willing to have one of his paintings reproduced, that was the beginning of a great collaboration.

    I guess I’m a big one for irony — in a guffaw sense, not a precious sense. And in the story there really is no "Russian Lover" anymore, just a kind of assault on the main character’s entire life embodied, in her mind, in the faceless face of this “cabbage eater.” I also love the character Amy’s energy: her boldness; her total ambition to set the record straight and her absolutely mistaken sense of how to do it. Her heart and her sense of injustice are so deep that they carry her task away, like an undertow of emotions. I love that. I was told I write a lot about women getting into trouble, and that some of them seem kind of, um, “disturbed.” But I never think of them as disturbed. They’re at a crossroads and they need to make a decision, and it’s fight or flight. The truth is, adrenaline plays a larger part in our lives and reactions than we think. And I’m charmed by Amy’s adrenaline.

    What is the novel you’re writing?

     

    Well, there’s that old adage that if you talk about it, you can’t write it. Let’s just say it’s a longer story and takes place over a lot of time. But as usual I started out creating a n entirely different world to the world I know, and the world I know decided it needed to invite itself to the party. So it’s a pretty big raucous scene right now. I’m trying to keep it a one-ring, not a three-ring circus. I can say that I like to see chapters as whole stories, and that is having a strange effect on where the action rises and where it falls.

    A lot of these stories are about women in crisis or going through tough, sometimes sordid experiences. Are these things you have experienced yourself?

    Ahah. There’s that question again. Well, there were, honestly, my lost years in Miami. I wasn’t lost so much as kind of elevated by the craziness all around. That was before Miami really had rules, I think.

    The crisis issue is — yes, they are in crisis. They have to make a decision. Or decide to not make a decision. They are women who can’t settle into one definition of themselves, often, because they have a restless curiosity about life and a passionate need to feel alive. And often, they are not the prime movers of their own life. And there are men around who aren’t really doing them any favors. That sounds like a total cliché, so I’ll stop there.

    Whether or not I lived it doesn’t matter so much as whether or not it comes alive on the page. If it makes you think I might have been there, I’ve done a good job.

    Are your women heroes or victims?

    My gosh, does it have to be one or the other? In the traditional sense of a victim they aren’t victims: They speak, they breathe, they run, they act. They may not be thrilled with the situation they’ve gotten into, but they’ve got a plan and they’re going to fix it. I think actually they’re heroes. Or call them escape artists. Victims I think of as passive, and maybe I'm being overdefensive of the women who populate these pages. But these girls are anything but passive. Their energy flies out of them. Otherwise they wouldn't fill my head with their voices and pull me by the hand through the middle of Boston in the middle of winter, in my head. Let's go back to calling them heroes. Heroes inspire. And sometimes these characters inspire me.

    What writers have/do inspire you?

    So many. Poets as well as fiction writers, and nonfiction writers as well as that. I love Grace Paley, for the diligent and dogged and brilliant way she wrote and observed and wrote. So many people shook their heads to say she didn’t have enough stories out there, which infuriates me: She wrote what she wrote, and each story is enormous if you think about it. To get inside the minutiae of a person’s life is a mammoth undertaking if it’s done right. And she does it right. I have always loved TC Boyle as a writer, but I could do without the uniform and the cult. I love Joy Williams: uncompromising, steely, able to look a lot of bullshit right in the face. And from her I learned a lot about sentences and how they can work, and about voice, and about economy. Those are three for now. There are tons more. In general I’m inspired by many writers, so long as they are serious and willing to crack open convention and find what’s true. I used to have someone beg me to write a good old-fashioned page turner, as if that’s what I should aspire to be: the next Danielle Steele. Um, not.

    More writers I thought of as I was driving this afternoon: Denis Johnson, Mary Robison, Edwidge Danticat without question, Martin Amis with some slight sense that I'm being manipulated into liking him. Matthew Sharpe, who I went to college with. He wrote a great novel, Jamestown, that brings the colony to light in very surprising ways. Sam Lipsyte, who is funny like heartbreak funny, funny like grostesquely beautiful funny, and Lydia Millet, who refuses to do anything but what she has to do. She is ahead of the curve in so many ways, I think. Those last two actually provided blurbs for my book, but I'm not throwing props back their way because they did that. I asked them to blurb the book because I love them. I lucked out. Sometimes art is a matter of luck.

    How did you hook up with Yeti and Verse/Chorus?

    Mike McGonigal of Yeti had published a lot of my work and I’d written nonfiction for his magazine as well. We’d talked about doing something for a long time. I met Steve Connell [of Verse/Chorus] through him. We took a while to figure out all the details. It was a wonderful process.

    What’s it like being the debut author of a new imprint?

    Well I think I wasn’t supposed to be, but someone, I won’t say who, was late with his manuscript. It has meant being able to say something people may remember as they call me Donna.

    How do you feel about the other authors on Yeti?

    Like we’re littermates.

    What else are you working on?

    Everyday, being as brilliant as I can as I write about design and fashion for MOLI. Or at least being original. What a great day job. Talk about fueling the fire and great company. That’s a great example of what I mean: These writers inspire me as much as (and here's more of a list) Jim Harrison, Carole Shields, James Baldwin, Chinua Achebe, Frank O’Hara.

  56. After the party's the afterparty

    07.Nov.07, 14:59 EST
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    And when you're done with the book fair on Saturday, check out the Style Wars extravaganaza at the White Room. I'll be a judge, and MOLI will be in the house!

  57. MOLI and me at the Miami Book Fair

    07.Nov.07, 14:43 EST
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    I will be reading at the Miami Book Fair International Sunday, Nov. 11, at noon, with fellow alt-parenting memoirists Erika Schickel (author of You're Not the Boss of Me) and Neal Pollack (author of Alternadad). And the whole View crew will be doing a fair takeover. MOLI will have a booth, which the editors will be taking turns manning (see the MOLI View and MOLI Book Club profiles for the exact schedules). Buy discounted copies of books by MOLI authors Donnell Alexander, Cathay Che, Jana Martin, and myself, and have them signed. Also, check out Jana's reading at 3:30 Sunday at the Book Fair. If a book fair sounds square, then you obviously haven't been to the Miami one -- or its attendant parties. Come see us!

  58. Read the View!

    04.Oct.07, 08:34 EDT
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    In case you haven't figured it out, I'm editrix of MOLI's View, our multimedia magazine. But this isn't about me: This is about the eight brilliant contributing editors I dug out of my old Rolodex and from emailed resumes: Wendy Case, Jana Martin, Juliana Luecking, Richard Pachter, Donnell Alexander, Rob Levine, Cathay Che, and Celeste Fraser Delgado. They really are the best. And they're having a superlative week this week. Check them out on the RSS feeds on the right side of this page, or just click on the MOLI View Flash box on the left. Jana on Britney and "image warming." Cathay on New York Nights. Rob and Richard on Radiohead. And more, every single day. This is one of the best jobs I've ever had, largely because of the pleasure of reading their words every day. Please tell us what you think.

    Particularly, what do you think of the name, the View?

  59. DJ LeSpam and me!

    12.Sep.07, 14:14 EDT
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    Miami's best DJ, Mr. LeSpam, will be spinning at a back-to-school party for parents at the amazing Skipping Stones Sept. 27 at 7 p.m. I will also be reading from Mamarama.  7120 Biscayne Blvd., Miami.

  60. To Elizabeth Murray and Sekou Sundiata

    17.Aug.07, 12:32 EDT
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    Elizabeth Murray was a beautiful woman. Externally, of course: Those bright blue eyes and wavy, wiry, white hair. But more importantly, on the inside: She was kind, intelligent, interested and interesting, graceful and gracious. And of course, she made beautiful art: great tableaus of rich, swirling colors whose shapes were sometimes obvious to discern, sometimes left to the imagination. Two years ago, I walked amongst  the canvases, some of them bending and thrusting, during a retrospective of her work at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. I felt both lifted and stirred by her life’s work, a life of works.



    Elizabeth was also an independent woman, a feminist, and a rare female to break into the canon of great contemporary artists. (How many living artists get MOMA retrospectives? How many of them are women?) She was a formidable but approachable role model to me and my girlfriends in the ‘90s, when we knew her from her stately presence at readings at the Nuyorican Poets Café (where her husband, Bob Holman, was a director) and at meetings of the Women’s Action Coalition. She supported us, materially and spiritually, especially when we needed it. I didn’t know her well, but I’m glad I knew her, that I have memories of standing around the kitchen in her West Village townhouse during a white-out snowstorm, or of her trying to hold onto the leash of a giant puppy in my Dumbo loft during a reading/party around 2000. That’s my last memory of this great painter; strangely, it’s the only time I ever saw her looking slightly befuddled.

    In the past month, two talented souls I had the great fortune of knowing in my New York salad days passed away. Sekou Sundiata was a poet and a teacher who I used to watch at venues like the Nuyorican, when they were my main haunts. He plugged the rhythms of jazz so completely into his spoken word that it was as if he were dancing when he read. He was also a very sensitive, gentle man, a deep-thinking soul, even when he was riffing hypnotically about being stopped by cops for driving while black (before that became a catchphrase). I hope all the def poets out there raised a glass to the sky when Sekou died July 18.



    Elizabeth died Sunday in her upstate New York home. She had been ill with brain cancer for a long time. According to Bob, “Elizabeth just breathed gently into the day.”
     
    There will be a Praise Day for Elizabeth at the Bowery Poetry Club Saturday, August 25, and memorial at MOMA in November.

  61. The gospel according to Al

    25.Jul.07, 14:50 EDT
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    Al Green makes oldies feel brand new. Of course his signature tunes are some of the greatest love songs of all time: "Love and Happiness," "Let's Stay Together," "Tired of Being Alone.'' But Tuesday night at the Hard Rock Live in Hollywood, Fla., he even made others' chestnuts -- "My Girl," "Build Me Up, Buttercup" -- sound reborn. That's because the Reverend treats them like a preacher treats hymns that he sings over and over again: They're fresh channels for the Holy Spirit every time.
     
    Not that he was in a religious mood, at the opening night of the BB King Blues Festival tour. Rather, Green was playing the fool. He got down on his knees to hit that first heavenly high note of the night -- then broke tune and joked, "Did that hurt?" "I can't take all of your love, I'm just one little man,'' he kept telling the packed, rapt venue.

    When the festival replaced opening act Etta James with Chaka Khan a couple weeks ago, it felt like a bait and switch. Sure enough, Khan's set was disappointing; the funk diva's shrill voice sounds shot -- and at its best, was never a match for James's. But Green and King held up the bill on their own. The 81-year-old diabetic headliner limped to the stage and played guitar sitting down. King too was in a jovial mood: "My knees are bad, my back's bad, and my mind's not much better.'' But his hands can still wring those classic leads out of old Lucille.

  62. B.B., Al and now Chaka -- whatta night

    18.Jul.07, 22:06 EDT
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    I've been salivating over the upcoming B.B. King Festival, coming to Hollywood, Florida',s Hard Rock Live July 24, for some time. I'm kinda disappointed that Etta James just got replaced by Chaka Khan. But as long as Al Green's on the bill, my sweetie and I are there. Ever since we saw him at Central Park early in the blossom of our romance almost a decade ago, here's our love connection, the most soulful and sensual of singers.

  63. Reading and radio July 23

    17.Jul.07, 09:53 EDT
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    Hear me on the air and in person July 23. In the a.m., from about 8 to 9, I'll be on 97.3 the Coast, filling in for Julie Guy and talking about Mamarama and MOLI on the Those 2 Girls in the Morning show with Tamara G. At 7 that night, I'll be reading at the public library in North Miami, 835 NE 132nd St. Refreshments will be served and books signed.

  64. Sting, Styler, and an Economic Hit Man

    13.Jul.07, 13:02 EDT
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    John Perkins’s New York Times bestseller Confessions of an Economic Hit Man confirms every bad thing you ever thought about how U.S. corporations and government conduct business, hand-in-boxing-glove, in third world countries – from the inside perspective of a onetime evil-doer. The economist who used to do the bidding of big business in such places as Indonesia and Panama spoke at Books & Books in Coral Gables July 12, to promote his new book, The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth about Global Corruption. He was a charming, convincing, sometimes dramatic speaker: “After 9/11, as I looked down into that smoldering pit, I knew that I had to tell this story,’’ he said, explaining why he finally broke his silence on deeds that had troubled him for years.  

     

    Perkins wasn’t all doom and gloom; having just come from visiting several Latin American heads of state, like Evo Morales, he’s optimistic. “They give us tremendous hope,’’ he said. “Change can happen and it can happen peacefully.”

    Among the hundreds packed into the room were Sting and Trudie Styler, in Miami for the Police tour. Styler spoke about her own recent experiences in the Ecuadorian rain forest, seeing the tragic effects on children of environmental destruction caused by oil companies. With gold bangles sparkling on her wrist and her and her husband’s perfect blond looks (“Sting and Bling,” one wag called them), it was hard to envision Styler as the voice of the downtrodden. But she too spoke passionately, her voice shaking.


    Sting sat in the audience. Afterwards, he told MOLI he was there as a friend and fan of Perkins. “For the first time, having read both books, it explained to me why the third world was so poor,” the Police man said. “It explained to me what the process of how that happened is, and how we need to change it.’’ (Photos by Susie J. Horgan)

  65. Recommended reading: Russian Lover

    07.Jul.07, 12:31 EDT
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    My friend Jana Martin's sterling collection of short stories, Russian Lover (Yeti Press), just got a great writeup in Time Out Chicago.

  66. Only on MOLI

    06.Jul.07, 16:38 EDT
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    … can you get a sneak listen in its entirety to Duran Duran’s contribution to Instant Karma: The Campaign to Save Darfur. Taking part in the compilation put together by Amnesty International was apparently such a no-brainer – Cover John Lennon songs, and help protest one of the worst global atrocities? How lowlife would you have to be to say no? -  that the contributions overflowed two CDs  into 11 bonus tracks. You can buy them with the rest of the album on iTunes. But first, you can listen to Simon Le Bon, etc., sing the title track on MOLI”s home page. Listen carefully, and you’ll hear our own community director, Jenny Gunns, singing backup. Now, go buy the whole thing. The Flaming Lips covering “(Just Like) Starting Over”? Regina Spektor singing “Real Love”? How could you go wrong? Not to mention your money goes to Amnesty International. Learn about the genocide in <country-region st="on"><place st="on">Sudan</place></country-region>, if you don’t already know.

  67. Women and punk

    04.Jul.07, 11:59 EDT
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    The BBC has a great podcast on women and punk, featuring Gina Birch (Raincoats) and journalist Sheryl Garratt. The Slits, X-Ray Spex, Pretenders: this is foundational music for me. Hearing them talk about the freedom they had to wear big old clothes is especially poignant when you consider what body-issues agony Lily Allen -- a literal daughter of those times -- has gone through recently after choosing to make the same sartorial statement. Oh bondage up yours indeed.

  68. Women and hip-hop

    29.Jun.07, 17:49 EDT
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    For my Miami Herald swan song, I wrote about how some women -- Jacki-O, Yo Majesty, Trina -- are creating their own spaces in hip-hop, struggling within the struggle, trying not to get beaten in the game.

  69. Is Hova Jobs-hunting?

    28.Jun.07, 18:40 EDT
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    Jay-Z, Beyonce, and Steve Jobs: How’s that for a power trio? An inside industry source recently told MOLI that it’s a done deal: Pop’s top couple will move to Apple to run a new music division. It sounds rather incredible: Carter’s already got a pretty good job, running Def Jam, and Jobs may be too smart to get into the tanking recording business (as others have said). Of course, if it is true, my guess is this would be a new, revamped record biz, one based on digital distribution, not boring old physical products. (To which this writer, by the way, retains an old-school allegiance; I neither download music nor possess an MP3 player. Then again I just left the newspaper business for online, so even old dogs can learn new tricks.) It certainly speaks volumes about the state of the culture industry, if two artists who have been served well by the current way of doing business are willing to jump ship. Spokespeople for Apple, Shawn Carter, and Def Jam (Mr. Carter’s label) did not return requests for comments.


    The move would of course follow Paul McCartney’s move from a traditional label, Capitol, to one run by another entity, Starbucks Music. Starbucks started signing artists after establishing a successful retail model through their Hear Music outlets and compilations. Apple has made a similar achievement with iTunes, to say the least.


    Apple is definitely poaching at least one smart guy from a label: Capitol publicist Jason Roth starts at the technology company July 2. He says he knows nothing about the aforementioned rumors.

  70. Yummy Hump

    27.Jun.07, 16:22 EDT
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    The White Stripes' inaccurately named Icky Thump has been helping make my new album-long commute to work tolerable. Jack White is a great blues singer and rock guitarist, indie rock cred aside. "You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told)" has the cathartic singalong potential of an Animal House anthem -- and I don't mean that as a bad thing. Several songs are about the power dynamics of an intense relationship that's possibly sadomasochistic -- or maybe that's just a graphic metaphor for sexual politics '007-style. When White sings on "300 M.P.H. Torrential Outpour Blues", "I have a woman that says/ 'Come and watch me bleed,'/ And I'm wondering, just how I can do that/ And still give her everything that she needs,'' you can feel the torment of his dilemna. When he complains about having been tricked down the aisle in the glorious mock-Spanish throwdown "Conquest," it's hard not to think about the singer's own marriage to model Karen Elson. Icky Thump may offer the most intensely intimate window on a much-watched relationship since Bruce Springsteen's Tunnel of Love.

    There are off-topic gems on Thump too, like "Rag and Bone," his hilarious call and response with drummer Meg White, wherein they pose as garbage-pickers -- a not inaccurate analogy for the Stripes' scrappy approach to American roots musics. The duo has not made a bad album to date; are they the greatest band in the world?

  71. Whaddya want? Really

    26.Jun.07, 14:42 EDT
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    Today is my second day as the lucky person who gets to determine what MOLI members will read, see, and hear as we get really serious about this thing. So let me know what kind of articles, rants, reviews, profiles, pictures, videos, whatever, you want to see in the View. Also let me know of people we should feature as Rollers. And wish me luck.