My Puff-Piece

Ocean Drive Magazine has taken the lead in reporting on yours truly.
Miami's own, an enigma in the swamp.


Almost Famous

Why ’80s East Village pioneer Oliver Sanchez is Miami’s best-kept art secret

By Brett Sokol



Oliver Sanchez with his Nunsmoke, 2009

If you’ve spent any time exploring Miami’s contemporary art scene over the past few years, then you’ve seen the handiwork of Oliver Sanchez. From exhibitions at the Miami Art Museum to the Rubell Family Collection, Sanchez’s craftsmanship has been on prominent display. Just don’t look for his name on any of the accompanying wall text.

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Harvest Moonshine

Tis the Season of Decay

With the end of summer now official, it is time to appreciate autumn in the swamp. The cooler nights are a welcome relief from the record breaking global warmthing. The anticipation of a bountiful tourist season prods us onward.  Yet all is not well in this seaside oasis.  Life in South Florida looks a drab austere when colored with the rusty palette of fall... and the predictable regressive groupthink.

Scamera Wars

Miami Beach is going headstrong with their embrace of Red-light Scameras. The blasted gizmos are being installed one at a time.  One a day that is.  These insidious eyes-in-the-sky are a blight on our quality of life and harbingers of Orwellian things here today.  Wake up people and smell the extortion. 

Severe Beach Erosion

"If your voice is not heard, if you do not take the time to listen and learn what is going on and get engaged, you may see our fine Town decline into chaos."   surfside mayor Dietch  9/13/2010

As with Florida Hometown Democracy and Amendment 4 on the November Ballot, the Town of Surfside is once again a microcosm of the bigger blunder.

How We Doing?

Construction of our Community Center – we will be swimming next spring

Modern parking meter pay stations – contracts are executed and work will be completed this calendar year

Fixing the long neglected water and sewer infrastructure – these projects will be completed over the next five years

Document management equipment that will allow us to properly maintain public records – this will reduce costs and allow the Town to be fully compliant with state statutes

Purchasing a new telephone system – this will replace the functionally obsolete system

Procuring new architectural and engineering consultants – this will ensure that we always receive the best value for needed services.

And don't forget to throw some money grubbing' red-light cameras into the strained budgetary.

Developer Missed the Bus 

The site of the old Surfside 6 Motel on Collins and 92 street sits empty for 3 years and counting.

"The first thing is, we wouldn’t be having this conversation if Mr. Deitch hadn’t given special zoning accommodations to the proposed hotel across from the houses on Harding and reduced development requirements elsewhere."  Charles Burcket Previous Mayor of Surfside

Little Amendment That Could 

Letter to current Mayor from a resident community organizer.

SEPTEMBER 14, 2010

Daniel Deitch, Mayor

Daniel;

I read your latest note and I respectfully disagree.

We did not elect you and the other commissioners to continue to spend on over-paid engineers and/or department heads. We hoped you would be fiscally aware and cut expenses. Yet each of the items in your "good news" entails spending more of our limited resources. Nowhere do you propose any cuts-only further expenses. This will not restore Surfside as a great community.

Following is my personal list of misplaced activities:

Hiring a new Town Manager without an advertised search is dictatorial!

Nearly 50% of the town budget goes to the police department!

The historical deficiencies you refer to are really the overly bloated and unnecessary expenses being sucked out by administrative salaries, perks and pensions!

It is better to show fiscal responsibility than to accuse concerned residents of devising.

We are desperately trying to make you aware of the true needs of our Town.

A PETITION IS THE AMERICAN WAY OF PROTEST!

DO NOT PUT US DOWN! We knew enough to rid the town of the former commission and we also know enough to VOTE on issues of importance. We are not a small group - we are more than 610 registered Surfside voters who signed petitions in only 10 days rather than the 20 days to which we were entitled.

While I have the floor, I must digress to address Marta: You of all people, who left your homeland of Cuba and the life you had because of the loss of rights - Marta, how could you not vote to let us vote? I will never understand.

Thank you.  DORIE LURIE

 

Shady Isles

Through decades and numerous administrations, Surfside has managed to resist persistent requests by developers to build taller and taller condos. It would be an embarrassment to have our current town attorney (who is partly responsible for the uber-development of Sunny Isles into a condo canyon) to do an encore performance on Surfside's building code.

Down the Drain... 

And for the latest twist of this bizarre tale of sleepy town:

The five Surfside residents who sponsored the "Right to Vote" petition received knocks on their door this afternoon fromSurfside police officers. The police officers handed them a letter stating that the whole petition drive had been disqualified.

Alas with the fall comes the realization that we should not cry over spoiled swamps, we should learn from Forest Gumps, keep an eye on the chumps.

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recession proof

Flier Flies

These fine ladies fluttered into the Swampspace Gallery last saturday night with their usual pamphletering. While the nightlife in South Florida is only interrupted by the blinding daylight, the blistering bogus business of a messy metropolis slugs along.



Paradise Framed

The whole nine yards of concrete are getting poured into forms that interrupt the swampscape.
In some ways an economic depression can be a good thing when the brakes are put on progress. much of the construction going on was planned and spent before the bubble burst. The show must go on...



Stimulus Gumbo

Little Haiti is finally getting homogenized with more endless roadwork and a continuity code for store-fronts. Good luck with that.



Bastion of Barons

Indian Creek Island is tearing up the road at its bridge entrance for no apparent reason other than to justify expenditures from slush funds.



Make Good Fences

North Bay Village is spending some of its revenue from the Red Light Scameras that have been extorting wads of cash from the motoring public. The irony is that they planted palms that block the traffic camera's line of sight.



Re-Reconstruction

The sidewalk and curb along N.E. Second Avenue were completely tore up and replaced for no apparent reason. Bay Harbor Island also is trashing all their sidewalks and replacing with bricks for no apparent reason.



Old is New Again

This historic building on Biscayne Bay near the Omni is the old Flagler Fashion School that was built before air-conditioning was invented. looks like it is being rehabilitated.



Jazz Hands

Rather nice mural in otherwise tumbleweed Wynwood.



Slippery When Texting

Car wreck on the teflon highway. Why can't Miamians drive in the rain, cheesus!



Rail Light

Disney style monorail will connect Miami Airport to some other isolated car-centric place, not quite sure.



Why Not Write

Back down in the hood there is an empassioned yet cryptic PR campaign for social justice.




The More Things Change

Someone once said about the swamp, "only the faces change". Maybe so, but change is a tired thing by now, particularly when you like the way things are. That's when i get very conservative.

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belated 9/11

“The greatest enemy of the truth is not the lie – deliberate, contrived, and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, pervasive, and unrealistic.”
John F. Kennedy

The Architects

Most of what I know about the events of September 11, 2001 was gleaned from Google. There is an ever growing amount of information but not a kernel of closure. Looking back there is one thing I knew the moment we all saw the World Trade Center collapse live on teevee. Those towers were brought down by more than just airplanes. Nearly one month after, on my first visit to ground zero, a stench hung in the air of the entire lower Manhattan. The autumn breeze was a toxic assault on every olfactory downwind. The place reeked of the pulverized remains of the pillars of privilege mashed with the contents of 107 stories reduced to a pile in a hole in the middle of new amsterdam.



All You People

The official story of 9/11 is a glossy photoshop composite cropped just so as to keep whatever is beyond the frame out of sight. People who buy the official story rather than the panorama of a spectral reality do so for their own sanity's sake. The cold forensic facts outside the frame may drive them batshit crazy. This is one case where the truth is more fantastic than most can imagine.



Hey, its Legal

In the days leading to September 11, if you follow the money, there is no pot of gold, there is olny put options and obfuscation. If a plane had crashed into Wall Street, the level of outrage would have been a resounding sigh of relief. Do a google, follow the shekels and there you will find nothing as all the paperwork was shredded into the pulp of fiction.




Lucky Seven

Takes a 50 story pile of good luck to hide the smoking gun in plain sight.
Building # 7 has a history of housing a shadowy host of tenants and oblique bureaucracies and opaque operations. Nondescript and shrouded by the flash of the shimmering twin towers at the World Trade Center, building 7 was made more than expendable, it had to come down, it was the pantry in a house of cards still standing. Today on the internet anyone can read about the irregularities of its implosion. We wooble, you decide.



Nothing to See Here

Was the rush to find closure for the survivors a convenient smoke screen for the quick disposal of forensic evidence from the crime scene of the decade?
The big sift was in high gear, complete in less than 10 months.


Fresh Kills Land Fill Staten Island, NY

Recovered
• 4,257 pieces of human remains
• 54,000 personal effects—95% belonging to survivors, including 610 pieces of jewelry
• $76,318.47 found loose in the fields
• 6 kilograms of narcotics
• 4,000 photos—found and delivered to Kodak Laboratories and NFL Films to be decontaminated and restored
• 1,358 destroyed vehicles processed: 102 pieces of fire apparatus, 61 police department vehicles, and 1,195 personal automobiles
• Hundreds of airplane fragments
• Several pieces of Auguste Rodin sculptures from the offices of the investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald
• Thousands of rounds of unexploded ammunition
  

EYE eye eye

Sci Fi writers past would conjure up wild version of a future world where leering cameras hung everywhere in your waking days and crawled up our brain in while asleep. The new world order with its affection for surveillance is a major league global pain in the identity.
Bad enough most earthlings gotta be dirt poor, now they want to watch @#$%^!




Lucky Charms
A mind is a terrible thing to turn into a killing machine.




Friendly Fire For Hire

It defies dignified comprehension to try or make sense of the madness that would intentionally set out to fabricate an enemy where there is non. Is it possible that given unlimited resources and demented persuasions humans are capable of such sinister intent or are those blunderers just that stupid. Is al Qaeda no longer just a database in a classified computer.

In the 1980s, one program undertaken by the United States was to finance Mujahideen propaganda in textbooks for Afghan schools. The US gave the Mujahideen $43 million in “non-lethal” aid for the textbook project alone, which was given by USAID: “The U.S. Agency for International Development, [USAID] coordinated its work with the CIA, which ran the weapons program,” and “The U.S. government told the AID to let the Afghan war chiefs decide the school curriculum and the content of the textbooks.”



Krypto the Celebrity

The textbooks were “filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings,” and “were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines.” Even since the covert war of the 1980s, the textbooks “have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books.” The books were developed through a USAID grant to the “University of Nebraska-Omaha and its Center for Afghanistan Studies,” and when the books were smuggled into Afghanistan through regional military leaders, “Children were taught to count with illustrations showing tanks, missiles and land mines.” USAID stopped this funding in 1994.[65]



What is more believable,

Helen Lawson or the official 9/11 story?

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Labor Pains

Same Old World

It is a well kept secret that labor precedes capital. Without the muscle there is no hustle. This fact is not lost on the titans of industry, multinational corporations and one-world elite who strong-arm unions and insidiously muddy the message to assure that the balance of power is tacked for their profit. Capital's contempt for Labor is proof enough that without the worker the boss has no job in the new world order.



Since the building of the great pyramids of Egypt the pharaoh understood the need to keep workers content, they gave them beer. More recently, after much unrest and bloodshed, president Grover Cleveland declared a national holiday to honor the lowly workers that built this great nation. Without them there would be no development, no progress, no fortunes. His gesture defused unrest and assured that the other 364 days of the year would be productive.




Then and Now

Not much changes in the work ethic.
A virtuous worker has always gotten the job done regardless of the compensation. Other less dignified workers will look for ways to game the system to get something for nothing. One is motivated by a sincere willingness to be contribute to the union, the other by sly self-serving contempt for humanity.




The Ultimate Resource

The human resource is largely untapped. When will we get with the program and lift humanity out of the dumb-age? When will capital temper its Darwinian impulse of predatory capitalism with compassion and social relevance? A quick look around makes it clear that a living wage for most of the worlds workers will not come any time soon.



Down-Time Deferred

For some of our most dedicated workers there is no time off from their job.
The rewards come not in a paycheck or long weekend, but in the form of honor from service to country. The front-lines may be a dusty outpost or a moldy office cubical, both are valid so long as the mission is for the betterment of civilization. Doing no harm is more than just a job, it is the guiding principal in considering any employment.



Now Not Hiring

With the unemployment numbers at stratospheric heights, the economy talking a double dip and the dollar in the dump, keep your head above the water line and figure out a way to get your overhead down. Keep in mind that there must be better times ahead, its the only prospect we have for now.



Official Humor

So on this celebration of Labor remember the boss is always right, to the left of center.

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Ted Baxter Syndrome

~ Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity,
and I'm not sure about the former. ~
Albert Einstein



This one is real easy.

CNN's Rick Sanchez is a clown... but he is our clown.



Tweet Him

Can't wait to find his first book, already in the bargain bin.



Order in the Court!

The great Tres Patines.




People Change When They Come to this Country

Rick Sanchez is a talking head for our times. To his credit , he probably turned down a job at Faux but he will never be a Manolo Reyes ( the cuban Walter Cronkite) .

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end of combat ? whatever

Soul Brother in Chief

With solemn and gracious proclamations, our hard-working commander-in-bro has declared the official end to combat operations in Iran. With sorrow and grimace the anti-war crowd shrug a sigh of relief with the usual suspicion because as we all know this is the Endless War. Those Ferragamos are made for marching.



Drones Aweigh

Read Glenn Greenwald on how we now have a exciting new Muslim country to drone attack.

Amnesty International has released images of a US-manufactured cruise missile that carried cluster munitions, apparently taken following an attack on an alleged al-Qa’ida training camp in Yemen that killed 41 local residents, including 14 women and 21 children.

So now, administration officials -- hiding behind the anonymity which these media outlets naturally provided -- fanned out to announce a new, Growing, Scary Al Qaeda Threat in Yemen, which, they boast, now needs its own escalated bombing attacks and CIA operations. The goal is that the War never ends; the only variable is where it happens to increase on any given day.



Individualistic Calisthenics

More Greenwald the Gregarious

The predominant attribute of American elites is a refusal to take responsibility for any failures. The favored tactic for accomplishing this evasion is the "nobody-could-have-known" excuse. Each time something awful occurs -- the 9/11 attack, the Iraq War, the financial crisis, the breaking of levees in New Orleans, the general ineptitude and lawlessness of the Bush administration -- one is subjected to an endless stream of excuse-making from those responsible, insisting that there was no way they "could have known" what was to happen: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile, (condi rice)




Bulldozing for Profits

The perfect enemy for this endless war is one with no homeland, no state to sanction, no country to pulverize. The perfect enemy will buy all our tired firepower with our foreign aid dollars and drug profits. Open both eye folks, al-Qaeda is a construct, a straw man burning in the scrambled minds of the intolerant, the war profiteers and the anti-assimilationists. For the crazies, al-Qaeda is a crypto-blessing that must be simultaneously maimed and maintained. We who stand for peace must take great caution in avoiding our wildest nightmares, that they are never brought to reality. They hate us for our hatred, it is the mobius strip of stupidity.




al-Quba ?

As our military might will go wherever there is faulty intelligence, perhaps if some one Cuban power-player with fabulous shoes could get the ear of the prez to press the thought that there may be the scurrilous threat of al-Qaeda in Havana, then the capital of the Caribbean would surely get liberated ... but first we would have to destroy it further.

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