To the Rev. Isaiah Clark, the facts were as clear as a church bell chime. If the city of West Palm Beach sold the Municipal Auditorium to the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society -- the Jehovah's Witnesses -- for $12.5 million, it would cast open the floodgates for a modern-day...
Spacehog The Chinese Album Sire/Warner Bros. Records Spacehog has been characterized as David Bowie reincarnate, and the comparisons are not unfair. One could easily picture this British band's frontman, Royston Langdon, standing in front of the mirror as a child, hair dyed orange, face decorated with a glittered lightning bolt,...
When Gary Numan first appeared in 1979, singing the chilly synth-pop song "Cars," he didn't look like a 21-year-old rock star. He looked like a flesh-covered robot. In the song's video, Numan wore a black shirt and red tie, his dark hair combed perfectly to one side, menacing black eyes...
Her vocal arsenal is made up of jazzy phrasings, titillating coos, and scat-speak. She knows her way 'round a guitar and has a little-kid way of delivering biting punch lines about people in the "Bible belt buckle" and men on motorcycles. Miami-based singer-songwriter Magda Hiller is a breath of fresh...
When a visitor arrives, West Palm Beach City Commissioner Jeff Koons drops the newspaper he's been reading, stands up, and shakes hands like a politician on the campaign trail, even though he was reelected just a few months ago. He suddenly announces: "We have an errand to run." Hurrying toward...
Crack open a playwright whose career has just gotten under way, and you'll more than likely find a dreamer wrestling with the ghost of Anton Chekhov. American theater festivals are littered with reinventions of The Three Sisters, the Chekhov classic in which characters saddled with longing speak of the day...
David McMahon knew something was wrong with his breeding experiment with Florida shrimp when he saw dozens of his subjects lying dead on the bottom of their tank. Normally a glassy blue in color, the shrimp had turned bright orange, as if they had been cooked up for paella. The...
David Park hopped out of the Ford pickup truck wearing his bright white protective suit, respirator, and goggles. It was about 10 a.m. on June 21, 1993, and the Broward County parks worker had just finished spraying a potent mix of pesticides and herbicides on the football field at Tequesta...
When she's not fronting the Boca Raton-based rock band Blonde Enuff, Cassandra Eubank is busy snagging interviews with megahot rockers like Matchbox 20 and Collective Soul when they pass through South Florida. The interviews are aired on her local music-video show, Home Grown Music. Eubank also hosts local battle-of-the-bands contests,...
I was polishing off a sizzling skillet of crocodile fajitas on the top floor of Bayside when I felt the floor begin to vibrate and heard strange plucking sounds. At first I thought the Poltergeist-like scene was a result of the Tabasco-laden fajitas. However, after a glass of ice water...
Last summer an untried labor activist named Ocean Dessoi saw his first union victory deflate into defeat in the time a fax machine spits out a single page. The scene of Dessoi's dizzying free fall was a drab hotel conference-room in Deerfield Beach where he and nine colleagues had been...
In 1970 Steve Boone, onetime bassist for the Lovin' Spoonful, went down to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, bought himself a sailboat, and made it his home. For three years he sailed around the Florida Keys and the Caribbean. He lived frugally and ate mostly brown rice and fresh...
Drinking coffee at Hollywood Boulevard's Warehaus 57 provides more stimulation than the average house blend. On the walls hang colorful paintings with titles such as Indian Tantric and Sun Keeper. Over 3000 used books, including Sadism and Masochism, The Anatomy of Witchcraft, and The Physics of Star Trek line the...
I recently acquired a satellite dish and have become a shameless junkie of old Westerns. In half of these B movies of plains life, it seems there is a woman giving birth. After they give her the obligatory wooden spoon to bite on, someone always yells to boil some water...
Tori Amos From the Choirgirl Hotel (Atlantic) Tori Amos likes contradictions. She's a classically trained pianist who plays pop music, a feminist who humps her piano bench in concert, a waifish nymph with a grasp of classic Greek literature. But the biggest contradiction inherent in this 34-year-old musician is how...
Soaring in a universe far removed from Miami is an elite constellation of media moguls. Ted Turner is a member. So are Michael Eisner, Rupert Murdoch, and a select few others. We all see their faces on the news, maybe catch a tuxedoed photo-shoot in Vanity Fair. Sometimes we skim...
To a casual passerby, the sight of Phillip and Doris Samarco probing and poking through the grass of their neighbor's front yard on a summer afternoon might have seemed a familiar suburban tableau: a retired middle-class couple in West Boca Raton retracing steps in search of a lost set of...
Buck Anderson and his father, Whitey, are brewing their first batch of beer. But they're not at home. The light Canadian Pilsner they've created is bubbling away in one of six shiny copper kettles lining the front window of Brewmasters South in Pembroke Pines. "We wanted something lighter for the...
Icebergs figure prominently in Titanic, Christopher Durang's absurdly wild 1974 deconstruction of family life, but then so do hedgehogs, marmalade, and tortured slices of Wonder Bread. There's no Leonardo DiCaprio, but there is a Captain. He's the one sporting the black dildo on the white tennis headband -- a getup...
The Father, the Son, and the Holy Reporter We greatly appreciate the fine article by John Ferri entitled "Keeping the Faith" in your February 26 edition. It was a real pleasure to visit with Mr. Ferri while he was writing his story, and we especially appreciate the way he captured...
In an empty lot littered with bits of broken glass and fast-food refuse, a man hunches over and pulls apart the weeds as if searching for a lost contact lens. Standing around him are half a dozen men, talking and drinking out of bottles in brown paper bags. Making halfhearted...
Norman Ganz didn't wait for an introduction before launching into an exasperated monologue on the phone. All he knew was that a news reporter was on the other end of the line. "I am not a bad person! I work for a living and I help people. I don't steal...
