swampy reflections

Lowest Common Denominator

For South Florida drivers, suggestions of radicalization are bumper-sticker commonplace and billboard subliminal. Nationwide, the lone-wolves mis-adventures are likely to occur at increasing frequency and of course make headlines for a mind-numbed populace.

Where the Rudder Meets the Road.

Grappling with a landscape dominated by cars, trucks and asphalt, our culture seems resigned to avoid any reconciliation with mobility or sustainability. Looking around notice we not only built the best roads available but we also have luxury buildings for cars as we assign so such reverence to our automobiles that we are now powering them with bio-fuels made from our dwindling food supplies. Corn that could feed a starving child in Africa.

Music Now Available! Huh?

Meanwhile the cementization of the swamp continues without relent.

Here are a few panoramic photos of our latin-manhattan captured from this drivers seat.

Midtown Mediocracy

In fairness, the middtown theory does include developers undertaking a very green project titled World Gardens. It is a landscaped trial for our very own central park featuring all manner of tropical flower and fauna for strollers and dog-walkers.

But the bulk of the midtown dream is being rendered impervious with concrete and steel.

HipHop Scotch

The elevated train that will connect MIA airport to the metro trains is an engineering marvel of Epcot proportions for this horsetown. Built with mondo-rail technology to dominate the landscape, its elegance is sure to please travelers familiar with our daft taxi drivers. The final leg of this grand plan will be to connect miami beach to the system thereby enabling jet-set tourists levitate to and from without setting a wet or dry foot on the mainland.

Tunnel out of a Mole Hills

Perhaps the mother of all big projects is not the stadium or the museum but the Big Dig, a tunnel to hide all those ugly trucks that must trek consumer goods n stuff in and out of the Port of Miami. It will not seem like much when completed as most the engineering splendor will be buried under Biscayne Bay. In the meanwhile do expect periodic delays for the several years duration of the construction.

Tourist Traps

Friends of Waldo will have a time finding the Childrens Museum or the Parrot Jungle II but they are open for business.

Frigging Digging

Removing tons of muck material along the subterranean charted path will require unsurpassed imported Italian tunnel making technology and tons of cuban concrete to hold back the swamp, all of which make jobs for dump-truckers and pencil pushers.

Downtown Doldrums

Here is a view of the ultra new museum complex site where MAM will move to when construction is completed several years from today. The ground has been broken but the remediations are pending. The wikiword on Basel is 50/50 fight or flight.

Signs of the Times

Why does one eye focus on the blight of the swamp while another is busy capturing the aura of swampiness? Because we are built with stereoscopic vision.

Muralsedation

Without lament, artists are taking back the landscape with the outward expressions that celebrate the vitality of our spirit and the resiliency of a creative force that can not be plowed over.

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Road Rant

Horse Crossings

Automobiles are wonderful contraptions, they have altered our way of life in countless positive ways. Since the early days of our romance with mobility, cars and trucks have served so well that with the passing years we have altered the landscape so that cars seem more populous than people. And like guns and cell phones, cars don't harm people, people do.

Flash of the Crash

But cars are not just heaping careening hunks of metal and petrol. They have become extensions of our identities. The have come to define our culture in the sunshine.
And what some see is ugly. We see a spiderweb of concrete and asphalt that sever the land in a tangle of pavement, glaring sign pollution and the occasional costly citations for moving violations.
One can even get a hefty fine for standing still doing nothing.

Fender Bender Splendor

The auto industry has been a gold mine, black gold that is, from petrolium pumpers and car makers worldwide to the mechanic down the street. Auto-centricity ain't no cottage industry. In less than 100 years of our recorded human history, we have mechanized, industrialized and radicalized our footprint on this fragile planet. In an effort to go to and fro with ease, we have inadvertentely trampled nature into a globally warmer submission.

Speed Zone Ahead

Today, for much of the motoring public, we are navigating the mine-field that are the American roads. This lifestyle choice comes with necessary risks and engineered requirements that have us in a stranglehold of modernity for our personal convenience at the expense of the environment.

Every Day P.S.A.
(public service announcement)

The message here is simple. We get it.
We get that venturing out strapped to a tank is a well rehearsed routine with improvised road humps. Most of the time traffic moves allong in a orderly crawl of 30 mph. But the roads are also the stage for an un-orchestrated dance of a thousand misfits. The streets are teeming with volatile uncertainty and chance. One thing is certain, be prepared to be photographed.

Cluster-Flubb

What began as an honest experiment in modern independence has morphed into a greasy display of the pitfalls of blind-folded science. Not only do cars contribute to the demise of our legacy, they also are a the third largest expenditure for most households in cities like Miami where there is little or no practical alternative to transportation.

Red-Fright Scamera

Conventional etiquette says that staring is not polite. Who wants cameras all up in their business? Not anyone i know. But the snaky governor and his grubby lawmakers in our great state capital cleared the way for this invasive technology in a money grab that will yield buckets of billions from now on. We are now in the clutches of a surveillance society where obnoxious gawking paparazi apparatus , though un-welcomed, are to be planted at every intersection.

Smile, Its the Red-Light Bandit

There is nothing cute or quaint about getting tickets in the mail. Often hundreds of dollars each, these unwelcome correspondences are being sent in bulk to citizens struggling to make ends meet with already strained budgets. If we could get the figures on just how many of these legal extortion shake-downs are issued, the numbers would be alarming to some, but not me. I've gotten three.

Houston, We Have Another Revenue Stream

Some folks have no problem being part of the problem. These are the same folk who, when in uniform, have not qualms issuing a citation to their on mothers. After all its the law... and followers will calmly pull that proverbial lever of collection. Take the human out of the equation and we have a self induced sci-fi authoritarian nightmare come true.

Have a Shifty Day, Sir

I actually almost yearn for the old days when an real starchy "human" being would deliver the bad news of an infraction. With courteous community service their cringing guiding motto, our traffic cops were the only ones deputized enough to make judgment on your ass right there on the side of the road. If one were really good at arguing, the encounter would be a non-event.

Professor Prophet

Today we have deputized technology. We have handed over the unsavory task of shaking down the citizenry to lifeless contraptions that breed on our very complacency. How will the world as we know it end? One camera at a time.

Slamming On the Brakes

This guy is on my VIP list.
(Valor In Public)

How Low Can You Go

Pumped up oil executives have announced that OPEC is considering changing the currency of oil from dollars to euros. Elsewhere China has announced that it no longer wants to buy our ailing currency. How much more of a beat-down can the almighty US dollar take? We have not seen the bottom of this fabricated economic caldron but its not gonna be pretty until we unveil our secret weapon.




Unauthorized Cars Will Be Tarred and Fined

Hey wait, that's my... Great Car-Art.
With this sublime symbol of suburbia no words are necessary to remind us of the ubiquitous automobile and its skids across our cultural landscape.
Did you leave anything in the car?

The Motoring Publix

The business of art is a slippery affair. Artist have a responsibility to be socially relevant, to draw for others a picture that clearly illustrates our human condition in an increasingly complex environment of information and distraction. The artist must also make light.



the Walk-Don't-Walk tree

The fruit$ of a depressed populace does not fall far from the tree of greed.




Science is a Sacred Cow

Each advancement in technology can be viewed with stereo vision. One eye on the golden calf, the other on the ground chuck. Science without Civility is a certain psychic train-wreck barreling around the corner.



Blooming Bluebeam Batman

Someone at the local newspaper called Norman Brahman the Car Guy. maybe so, but he is so much more than an auto dealer. he is the guy who would like to change the culture of corruption in Dade County.
This car goes to Stormin'Norman.



Cyclists across the Julia Tuttle Causeway

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Odor in the Court

A Jury of My Peers

With perennial precision, swampthing is again called for jury duty. There was a time, when I was a lowly salaried employee, that serving the justice system was a welcome escape from the mundane regularity of a 9 to 5. Those days are long gone as being willfully self-unemployed has worked out really well.




Wheel of Just Us

Some of you may recall there was a time not long ago when the roll of prospective jurors was drawn from the list of registered voters. This seemed fair enough as with the privilege of voting came the responsibility to sit in judgment of your questionable neighbor. Our constitution makes it very clear that you are innocent until proven guilty by a jury of your peers, not some aristocratic bloated magistrate.



Down by the River

But proportionately few residents of the swamp exercise their right to vote compared to their right to drive. As the backlog of trivial cases grew, the justice mill had the forensic foresight and fiduciary fritters to make some quiet adjustments. With little fanfare the rules were changed. Today the list of prospective jurors is drawn from every citizen 18+ that has a drivers license. Bam! unlimited pool of prospectives for a bloated court system.




Lunchtime by the Courthouse

I have served on some very interesting cases and appreciate the opportunity to have a first hand view of the halls of justice from the providers side. All in all it is a worthwhile experience and not completely futile.
But why do they call every blinking year? Surely there must be a note in my dossier showing that the moment i open my mouth, all interest parties are quick to dismiss me with a congenial thanks and a xeroxed certificate.... till next year...$%^&@

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FDOT WTF

Hopscotch for the Hopeless.

For three years residents and motorist along Biscayne Boulevard on Miami's Upper East Side grudgingly put up with the total demolition and re-building of the public commons. Business went out of business, traffic backed up for miles and the scheduled completion... well let's just say whatever.



It ain't over till it ain't over.

It's been less than a year since the roadwork was completed. Street life was decent again, businesses began to rebound from the rubble and tar hell. So imagine what a surprise to find work crews tearing up perfectly good sidewalks to build planters for trees.



Please Use Other Sidewalk?

Take a walk up the Boulevard... if you can avoid the obstacles. The planters are placed strategically so as to make the sidewalks rather People Un-Friendly. Who decides these things and where are they from, Planet Plunder?




Stupid Is.

And where they actually had created a perfectly good place to plop a palm... huh?!@%$ They just had to crush more concrete on the side. Like Bedrock City, it is now abundantly clear that Metro Dade is crazy about concrete and crushed rock.




It's Just a Job Mon.

People need jobs but the grunts get chump change while the contractors get filthy rich and the streets remain basically about the same. Maybe moneys would be better spent putting the guys through vocational training or assuring that their kids have other opportunities besides ditch digging menial laborers.




We Report, You Retort.

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Time of the Signs

Code Green in the Face.

We all understand color coding of our prescribed temperament. Back in the hay-days of homeland insecurity, it was obvious to some that all was going south and no amount of duct tape would mend our ailing psyche. Today the signs continue to accumulate in the concretescape of the swamp.



Laying Down the Crude.

Why do we continue to consume barrels of oil like there is no tomorrow?
Why is the Julia Tuttle Causeway being re-surfaced? Because it is business as usual for DOT and Dade builders/destroyers.



Smoke gets in your Eyeballs.

No that's not a tropical thunderhead approaching.

The Burke Mansion burns in the early summer swelter. In the posh enclaves of Miami Beach this ridiculous residence was a symbol of 70' excess and frivolous fantasy that was synonymous with South Florida lifestyle. Luxury living was our number one industry. But these are changing times and what was once the admiration of the wanabe's has become the tinderbox for a new swampy order.



First Responders Ponder.

When is snitching actually a good thing? Best before the fact, but i will wager for every high profile insurance scam there are score of others that get no ink. Dade is littered with 'for sale', 'for rent, 'foreclosures', 'short-sales', upside-down sales', yard sales' and other signs of the times that spell hell for millions falling through the safety nets of society. Expletives such as "fucked-up" are on everyones lips.



We Buy Ugly Info.

Who would not parley insider information into cold cash in the culture of snitchers.
The Burke Mansion was a really cool place, a hybrid of design with Vincent Price, Hugh Hefner, Santa's Enchanted Forest, Vizcaya and Epcot Disney obvious influence. My kid was friends with the caretakers kid who would have pool parties on occasion. The place was really dungeons n dragons.


Miami Socio, the Path to Vice.

If you are old enough to recognize the name, Austin Burke, then you probably have some really interesting outfits in your closet that might off-set the current slow-down in your revenue stream. I predict that 1970's fashion will rear it's hilarious head among the trendy soon.




Vote for Me, I'll Set You Free.

And speaking of signs, what's your WTF take on this jewel of an image?

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