Florida’s Hate Man is elbow-deep in battle in the bowels of his girlfriend’s 1995 Chevy Astro van. The brakes are mucked up, and he has decided to fix them. But as balmy, breezy morning turns to sunny afternoon, Hate Man has to admit defeat. And he is pissed. After removing…
It’s high noon, and the TV-news folk are gathered across the street from the American Media, Inc. offices, which swarm with agents from the FBI and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in search of anthrax. More accurately the 40-or-so reporters, photographers, and cameramen assume agents are swarming inside the…
But can Stratton put a cork in it? Can Jeff Stratton write one article without mentioning Pank Shovel (Bandwidth, October 11, September 27, and August 16 and “Can You Dig It?” September 6)? It’s insulting with all the musical talent we have in our area that you continue to give…
Dark-suited attorneys clog the antechamber to bankruptcy courtroom 308. Six days after the World Trade Center towers in New York City and the Pentagon in northern Virginia were attacked, a jittery mood permeates the third floor of the federal courthouse in Fort Lauderdale. Snippets of conversations about terrorism and imminent…
For her curatorial debut as director and CEO of the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, Kathleen Harleman chose a show about lawns — lawns as nature, lawns as artifice, lawns as refuge, lawns as rebellion. “I remember being excited to see “American Lawn’ in a city like Fort Lauderdale,”…
Terror is nothing new to Walid Phares. The 43-year-old Florida Atlantic University associate professor grew up in Beirut and survived the Lebanese civil war of 1975 to 1990. A Maronite Christian, he recalls witnessing the detonation of the first car bomb in his hometown in 1977. Indeed he’s lucky to…
Smoking Susan: What was Susan Orwell — er, ah, Eastman — smoking when she penned “1984 and Counting” (September 27)? First, Katie Couric and others had the correct and not Orwellian responses to the terrorist tragedies in New York and Washington, D.C. What was Orwellian about them or the various…
Downtown Miami is nearly deserted on this steaming summer Friday night, but the Wallflower Gallery emits a quiet hum. Following the scent of fresh-brewed espresso, patrons walk through the various rooms of the gallery or sit in the darkened space where guitarist-singer Alex Diaz ekes a pained whisper from his…
A few minutes after 2 p.m. on September 22, eight figures filed through the staff area of the Imperial Point public library. Librarians glanced up at the parade as it wound back to a meeting room half-filled with plastic chairs. Four of the eight wore T-shirt mementos from science-fiction conventions…
RAMP 48 is a low-budget affair, 25,000 square feet of raw commercial space that used to be a West Palm Beach indoor flea market. Now, with the aid of many unpainted two-by-fours, plywood, and industrial-grade, mesh-metal fence, it’s separated into several distinct zones of skateboard topography including ramps, platforms, and…
Pay to play: I read Bob Norman’s article in the New Times with great interest (“Red Alert,” September 20). As a downtown New Yorker who lived through the September 11 tragedy and as a passenger on Continental Airlines this weekend, I can assure you that nothing has changed. The security…
The beep of the money-wiring machine is almost nonstop, the line is growing, and Agnes Essien is working harder than she expected during the last days of August. If the customers don’t want to send cash to loved ones, then they’re bringing in payments for the electric company. Or they’re…
It happened in the waning days of one of the greatest orgies of conspicuous consumption in American history, an era when investors threw millions at baby-faced dot-comers, where the stock market reached stratospheric heights, and boomers saw their retirement nests get super-sized to Jurassic proportions. It happened with terrifying ease…
The Biggest Story Anyone Can Remember poses a conundrum for any hometown newspaper from a hometown that isn’t New York or Washington, D.C. On one hand the story of the terrorist attacks and their aftermath is epic, moving, and deeply relevant to every American. On the other hand it is…
An inferiority complex bred their racism: In regard to “The Heart of Whiteness” by Adam Pitluk (September 6), I am not Jewish or African, and I am not a racist. I am of Russian descent, 35 years old, and male. I grew up in north Philly in a rough neighborhood…
Inside the palatial Palm Beach County Courthouse on March 29, 2000, Melvin Donald Ruth pleaded for his freedom, trying to convince the judge he wouldn’t run if he were let go. Ruth, who had been jailed on a probation violation stemming from a 1996 fraud conviction, had reason to feel…
They say we were taken completely off guard. Since suicide hijackers crashed airliners into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, government officials have repeated in media reports that the country had been caught completely by surprise. U.S. intelligence officials have declared that they knew terror was planned but expected assaults…
The smooth, mellow sounds of the Grateful Dead reverberate throughout Luke Lukasik’s black Land Rover in the early morning hours as he winds from his home in Port Orange toward New Smyrna Beach, 50 miles northeast of Orlando. “Ripple” is the song of choice this morning, from a recently released…
Watching the Hollywood City Commission is like sitting down to tea with the Mad Hatter; gibberish is table talk, sense doesn’t make any, and time seems stopped at six o’clock. That’s when the 12-hour discussion of a zoning issue began September 12. Twelve hours. Zoning. Four hours into the madness,…
Some of his best friends are…: I thought Adam Pitluk’s September 6 article (“The Heart of Whiteness”) was interesting and good, not the usual smear of white people and their interests that seems to be the rule nowadays. I’m not a member of any of the groups associated with white…
The streets breathe heat. Wavy vapors liquefy distant sights. A stop sign ahead evokes the work of Salvador Dalí. In the rear-view mirror of Bernard Benson’s silver 2009 Saab Nomad, things are closer — and stranger — than they appear. “The Persistence of Memory,” Benson mutters, recalling the famous painting…
Twenty years ago Jahib Daher bought ten acres of mosquito-ridden, melaleuca-choked swamp in far western Broward County. The land around his still looks the same, but Daher has turned his property into a private Eden. The 53-year-old, his wife Dalva, and their three children share their land with five dogs…
