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Friday June 24, 2005

Crabs

[Contributed by Potato Head]

Here is a sweet little post from Sunshine State. About crabs. Trust me, it’s great. And worth a read. Discovered because, god bless her, she links to right here. If anyone knows this kid please tell her to e-mail us so we can beg her to write more.

update: Yes, we did end up hearing from Frances Nash. She likes us. She hates our commenters, though. Her home page says, “Some magazine wrote about my blog. And they called it dumb.”

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Monday July 25, 2005

Lazy Mornings

Turns out that Monday is by far the most popular day to read Critical Miami, which means we need some content here…but the A/C is down at CM Headquarters, and brain activity slowed to a crawl over the weekend. Then we remembered our pal Frances Nash, and checked back in with her. Luckily, she’s been up to good stuff, taking photos both blessed and profane, and penning a Rimbaudesque creed about, um, barnacles.

Also, we were looking at this Eve Interrupted, which is supposed to be a local publication for gay and bisexual women. There seems to be very little going on there these days. After clicking around awhile, we found Fay’s Column (known in the space of two pages variously as “Fay’s Opinion,” “Fay’s Chronicles,” and “Fay Stories”), which is nice enough. But compared to Frances’ site, what with comments, random links, and myspace page, Eve’s static pages start to seem a little innert (possibly their club listings are of interest to some). Maybe they close up shop for the summer? Sounds unthinkable from here.

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Thursday August 18, 2005

Scala naturae

Let’s be honest: August is not the only month of the year when Miami is too hot for words—by our count, it’s March through October. Still, there’s something special about August; it’s the time when Miami residents hunker down for what we assume must be the hottest hell on earth. Actually, we’re cowering in our air-conditioned homes and cars (Cohen has a theory about how genocide and air conditioning are mutually exclusive propositions), but boy, outside . . .

Outside, though, is real life: there is nothing more alive then when the planet Earth’s tropics get cooking. Weird plants that wouldn’t survive anywhere else grow like crazy, it rains every day, and mosquitos multiply in any teaspoon of standing water. The whole place is teeming with life, and it’s very impressive, and a little gross. That’s if you think about it, which most of us don’t. But some of us do. Frances, the crab girl has recently marveled at all the spiders in her back yard. They remind her of masks and skulls (Frances was last spotted break-dancing on the Metro-Mover with some dread guys).

Kathleen’s parents have a pool with a broken pump, and she’s fascinated with what happens when we let a controlled bit of lake go wild. Incidentally, this is the same Kathleen that occasionally gives the painter dudes on Artblog.net a run for their argumentative money. Her new blog looks great so far.

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Saturday August 27, 2005

Florida Power and Light looks like a futuristic castle

We’re all bummed out over here because, due to a technical snafu, a cameraphone pic of empty onion bins at Publix from yesterday can’t be posted. If that’s comming across as gloating about our uninterrupted power, well . . .

Yes, hundreds of thousands are still without power (which is pretty staggering, when you think about it), and will continue to be so until sometime between Tuesday and Friday. (If you move to San Antonio, you won’t have to worry about these things.)

There is definetly a bummed-out, blah kind of feeling hanging over the city, even as the power gradually comes back on, in part because we know we got off easy.

The Herald can get exited about the VMAs, but we’re over it. Blah. Get MTV the hell away from us. Even kids today are listening to better music.

The only thing cheering us up is Frances Nash, who (from what we guess) must live in one of the hard-hit areas, yet manages to supply the name of this post, plust post-hurricane photos and photos and photos and photos and photos and photos.

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Thursday September 1, 2005

Help NOLA

We’re straying way off topic here, but hang in for one more post. What will become of New Orleans? People are trying to help, but more is needed. Artblog recomends giving to Mercy Corps and Craft Emergency Relief Fund. BoingBoing has a series of cooky suggestions. Frances is worried about the animals.

In situations like this, though, the smart money goes to organizations that have a high ratio of money that goes to help people vs. money that goes to administration and fundraising. The American Red Cross is the old standby, but they’re also the ones doing the most help in the field right now. And please, do not earmark your donations to help Katrina victims specifically; all that does is tie their hands. What if something even worse happens tomorrow and the Red Cross can’t use its money to help people who need it most?

OK, now get those checkbooks and credit cards going.

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Tuesday September 27, 2005

Tuesday morning linkiage

Robert critiques the Marlins.

T.C. Boyle at Books & Books tonight.

Frances listens to acorns.

Gus agrees with us about immigration policy.

Bickering on the set of Miami Vice.

Looking forward to the Ana Mendita exhibition opening at MAM this weekend.

Tortoises are in danger from our development (this is something different from the problems sea turtles face).

Praise God: There are no tropical cyclones in the Atlantic at this time.

Update: w/r/t the Tortoises, it gets worse. This is from the Duval County schools site (from last year, but still)(emphasis ours):

Since 1988, when the last gopher tortoise was legally plunged into a Florida stew pot, there have been reports of gopher shells bearing the marks of butchering. A dozen in a backyard, a few in an abandoned citrus grove. But nothing like what Eric Holt saw last week in Leesburg. More than 200 tortoise shells, some whole and others shattered, were piled densely among rotting leaves and trash in some woods off U.S. 27. Holt’s boss, the owner of a construction firm, was cutting a road through the area when he stopped to call his employee, who breeds turtles as a hobby. Holt quickly identified them as gophers, a state-defined “species of special concern” that developers can either relocate alive, or plow over their burrows and pay into state-regulated “mitigation banks” of habitat elsewhere. Neither of these legal alternatives is cheap, and they can delay building projects for months.

Ugly stuff.

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Wednesday October 19, 2005

Wednesday morning clickage

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Monday November 7, 2005

Upside down tuesday linkiage

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Monday December 12, 2005

Miami Performing Arts Center says NO

Miami Performing Arts Center construction

A lot of you have heard bits and pieces of this story, and I finally decided to type it all out, for the record. It’s the story of how this very blog cost me a job at the Miami Performing Arts Center.

At the beginning of September, I was alerted to an opening at the Miami Performing Arts Center for a Graphic Design Coordinator. The job description seemed to match up with my qualifications pretty well, and it sounded like a dream job – I’m obviously interested in the performing arts, and this is to be the biggest, shiniest spot in a town I care very much about. Still, I figured they must be getting in thousands of applications for a job like this (graphic designers are a dime a dozen), and I figured my chances were slim, so I sent in my resume and pretty much forgot about it.

A few weeks went by, and I got a phone call: they were interested enough to want to meet with me. My first interview, in early October, was with Gail Eaton, Marketing Director, and it seemed to go pretty well: I have print as well as web design experience, a simple, clean style, and experience working for a non-profit in the performing arts, which seemed to be the exact combination they were looking for. I was called in for a couple of more interviews. In fact, I ended up meeting with seven different people from Miami Performing Art Center (some of these were group interviews), plus a representative of a design firm they employ.

To make a long story short, I was hired, and we agreed on a start date of November 14, 2005. I gave my notice at my job on October 31 – exactly two weeks (less then I would like to have given, but that’s the way it worked out – there was a hurricane in there, remember?). I got my hire letter [link to a jpeg scan], and I couldn’t wait to start – I was thrilled.

On Wednesday, November 9, I got a call from the Center. Seems there is a blog called ‘Critical Miami,’ of which they had been unaware, which has some negative, and factually inaccurate, material about Miami Performing Arts Center, and the knowledge had caught them off guard.

Now, I should point out that Critical Miami is listed on my resume [pdf link; highlight added], although it’s true that I didn’t bring it up during the interviews. Anyway, it sounded like it was a serious problem for them, so I asked if I could send an e-mail to put my posts on the blog, as well as why I hadn’t brought it up during the interviews, into perspective. I sent the e-mail the next morning. In addition to the one post they’d mentioned, I pointed out two others. Here, here, and here are the three posts the e-mail references.

The e-mail wasn’t good enough. I got a call on Thursday, asking if I could come in Friday and discuss the situation. I pointed out that that was my last day at my old job, but they were pretty insistent, so I agreed. At this point I was pretty worried. I wanted to be ready for the meeting, and I spent a lot of time thinking what I was going to say, and how I’d respond to hypothetical questions. I also prepared a selection of printouts to have ready for questions: about a dozen printouts of grateful, positive e-mails from readers of the blog (including a couple from local journalists), another copy of my resume, and site stats.

The meeting was with Gail Eaton, as well as a couple of others from the organization. I was supposed to explain how I could work for the Miami Performing Arts Center when I’d written “so negatively” about it in the past. One of the things that they kept coming back to was that the fact that I hadn’t “disclosed” the blog was the real problem; yet they also spent lots of time incredulously quoting the posts, suggesting that the content was the problem. I mostly just tried to expand on the content of my e-mail. I pointed out that someone who takes an interest in the community might be just the sort of employee they want, but it was no use. In the end, I didn’t say whatever it was they needed to hear, and I was sent on my way, in the unfortunate position of having to ask my old employer for my job back (which worked out, luckily).

It’s difficult to say whether I had any chance of affecting anything in that meeting. I’m no lawyer, but I think I laid out a reasonably good case. At some points it felt like they’d made up their minds on Wednesday, and just decided to call me in for a little rebuke; other times it seemed like particular things I said were definitely working against me, and I should have had a set of talking points and just repeated them. Who knows? (I might point out that they never did point out anything in the posts that was factually inaccurate.)

The Miami Performing Arts Center is going to be just fine without me, and I’ll be just fine without them, so all this is really no big deal. I guess it’s just a little disappointing that such an important organization is being run this way.

Update: Blogs linking to this entry: Artblog, KH at Metroblogging and The Next Few Hours, Bark Bark Woof Woof, Hidden City, Flablog, Conservative Trail Head, Harlan Erskine, Dig, Sunshine State, 26th Parallel, Miamista, Infomaniac, babalú. Thank you everyone! (Technorati is not doing so great tracking all these.)

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Saturday November 26, 2005

SoFla blog scene picks up steam

Sorry to bug you with a nother post about Miami blogs, but there’s lots going on. We’re going to sail through it, and then lay off the blogs for awhile; fair enough? (BTW, we’re much more interested in blogs about Miami, not just bloggers who happen to be in Miami).

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Wednesday December 21, 2005

It's Tuesday somewhere

reynaldo elias rapalo

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Tuesday February 21, 2006

Outoftowner Tuesday

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Thursday February 23, 2006

Subtropics Experimental Music and Sound Arts Festival

Subtropics opened tonight. Ordinarily, you’d have recieved advanced warning, so appologies on that front [1]. This yearly music festival represents the true cutting edge of avant-garde music, and it’s amazing that Miami has been able to support it all these years. (‘Nuff respect to Gustavo Matamoros for keeping this thing going long before the MPAC money started coming in.) Sufice it to say that for anyone interested in sound art, Subtropics should be the highlight of the year. Opening night was a blast:

The evening started with Alvin Lucier’s Music on a Long Thin Wire performed by Ben Manley.

Hypersonic Test: Florida is Gustavo’s first collaboration with video artist Charles Recher since Cars and Fish. 9 performers equiped with backpack power generators, armband video ipods, and chest-mounted unidirectional sound modules walked around the room, selectively delivering snippets of south florida flavor.

Sometimes, the performers confronted each other. Yowzer! (Note the ipod video.)

David Dunn walked the whole thing home with an audiovisual presentation that pulled together chaos theory, strange attractors, bats, bugs, and small invertebrate creatures that live in standing water. Unlike in past performances of his I’ve seen, David was miked up at his computer, and set up each piece with an explanation of what the sounds were.

His art deals as much with faithfully capturing the acoustic experience of natural phenomena as with creating an artistic “work,” so his presenation had a Discovery Channel edge to it. David does not shy away from intervention when it is necessary to the piece, though – a 40 second recording of bats had to be slowed down (to reduce the pitch) to be audible, alienating it from its original time-reference, but not violating its relationship to reality.

Also got a chance to pop over to the MoCA Annex for the opening of . . . —- not AGAIN?! Sorry, the MoCA has no mention of the opening tonight at their annex anywhere on their website. They sent out a card, which I have somewhere, and I’ll post the information here as soon as I get it. Meanwhile, [Kathleen to the rescue] Luminosity, an exhibit by Natalia Benedetti. It’s a groovy skydiving video installation. There’s also an exhibition of the usual suspects from the MoCA’s permanent collection, which apparently they were upset about only being able to show for a few months every other Summer (their piece by Nam June Paik is included, of course).

But so anyway, here is the schedule for the rest of Subtropics. If you like your music weird, go.

[1] Nobody tells me nothing. I found out because of the Dorsch marketing machine, which cranked out a press release on the morning of the event.

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Tuesday March 7, 2006

A new era of wine rights Tuesday

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Tuesday April 11, 2006

Last Tuesday Ever*

miami beach city hall

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Thursday May 4, 2006

Big Cypress

West down Tamiami Trail, past all the airboat rides, past the Miccosukee casino and village, and past Shark Valley (where Frances recently went) lies Big Cypress National Preserve. A big park ranger station/visitor center has a gift shop (with lots of interesting books, actually), camp ground, and a little boardwalk where you can see lots of alligators. This is halfway to Naples, and many tourists just make a pit stop on their way cross-coast.

The dry season is a good time to visit, because hiking around the station without wading through the actual marsh is possible. Here is a trail that leads west from the station. There were thousands of dragonflies and butterflies (no mosquitoes).

The trees thicken, and get taller; this is the inside of a hammock, sort of an island of trees. In some sections, the ground was covered with tinny sage plants. In others, there were clumps of delicate little orchids.

In the center of the hammock there’s a little pool (reduced to muck now). The word “bog” comes to mind. A wrong step here can sink you into some shoe-loosing mud.

All manner of beautiful little flowers bloom.

There are occasional signs of recent fires. Regular burning is part of the ecosystem, keeping the trees in check, allowing the smaller plants to thrive, and redistributing nutrients.

Butterfly sex!

This is another spot. Yes, there are gators everywhere. No, I didn’t photograph them. And yes, they leave people alone.

On the way back, a stop at Clyde Butcher’s Big Cypress Gallery. Clyde’s got a nice little nature trail, and some stellar scenery (the previous picture with the water was taken here).

Majestic photos, for sale by the pound! Note the eerie blue light coming in from the outside.

Further down the road back, a memorial to those who perished on ValuJet flight 592, May 11, 1996.

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Tuesday May 16, 2006

The thing about the alligators

sign: We Sell Smoked Alligator Original or Hot
Image by Frances Nash

Now don’t get any ideas – this isn’t going to be one of those we’ve been eating them for decades, it’s a wonder they haven’t started eating us sooner type of things. But what’s really going on with all these alligator attacks? Look. Gators have brains the size of a pea. They’re running on some ancient-ass instinctual behavior, and they’re designed to live in the swamp, not in a lake by some dumb UDB-pushing cookie-cutter development (actually, human beings aren’t designed to live like that, either, but I don’t want to digress). What’s more, they’re cold blooded, kind of like a solar panel – the warmer it is, the more energy they have to move around, and the more they have to eat.

But of course the alligators aren’t the problem – the problem is people. Remember the guy from Grizzly Man? He thought he was going to be friends with bears, and ended up getting his brain snacked on by a grizzly while his girlfriend watched. Well, that’s the same thing that’s happening for our whole species with the alligators. The solution is simple: stay the hell away from the gators, and especially don’t feed them. (When gators get used to being around people (and esp. if they associate us with food), the possibility of taking a bite out of our ass becomes to look pretty attractive to a hungry one.)

The problem with this approach is that everyone has to do it for it to work. Good luck there. Also, all the alligators that have already gotten used to people are not going to un-learn shit. So my alternate suggestion is to watch your ass. Forget the zig-zag running thing – it’s a myth (alligators don’t chase people). The key is to just stay the hell away from them. If you’re attacked, pound the crap out of their snout and eyes. Yikes. All that and more in this fun video:

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Saturday May 20, 2006

stingray

Frances Nash goes diving. Making underwater photography look easy, obvious, and cheap!

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