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Saturday October 7, 2006

becky stands over a canal, contemplating jumping in.

Becky Flowers, FIU grad student and performance artists, has a blog where she documents one action she took each day. For example, intervening with a sculpture. Check out day 1. Also, her action for tonight will be at the Wallflower Gallery at 7:30! (thanks, Dervis!) Related: Bust that cycle.

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Tuesday November 28, 2006

isb

Hey, baby, check out my 85mm f1.2. Seriously, though, ISB has the four things needed to get this particular brand of pictures: a good location, decent photoshop skillz, the nerve to step to people and put a camera lens in their face, consequences be damned (though he usually picks on unaccompanied females, fwiw), and maybe like around ten grand worth of glass. Count me jealous, at least of the latter two. (via SotP/r)

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Tuesday May 22, 2007

Rebecca Wakefield on what happened to the kite-flying event in Bicentennial park Sunday. In short: it was a disaster. It was raining, so the city decided not to clean up after a huge festival there the night before. See also Commonsense Miami’s Bicentennial Park page — these are the people who organized the event, who apparently have some web-development muscle behind them.

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Friday February 9, 2007

Culture weekend

civ4

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Thursday August 3, 2006

South Beach synagogues

935 Euclid

I lived at 936 Pennsylvania Ave when the Synagogue at 935 Euclid was being rebuilt; I could see their stained glass star-of-David window from my window on the alley standing at the sink in my kitchen. I have a big photo of the building, gutted and ready to be rebuilt as luxury condos, hanging in my present apartment (a couple of blocks down on Euclid).[1] Since then all the condos have been sold; probably for close to half a million each (wild guess—anyone know for sure?).

Another synagogue, on Washington and 3rd, became the beautiful Jewish Museum in the 1980’s (?), but I was under the impression that the synagogue a couple of blocks down the street from my new apartment was still functioning. Boy was I wrong. Unbeknownst to me (and so done much more subtly then the 936 job), it has been converted into one huge contemporary residence. I’m going to go ahead and declare this “creepy.” Who would want to live there? Well, we’ll see: it’s selling for 17 million. The one thing I think I like about this renovation is that they left the exterior intact.

So as far as I know the only functioning synagogues on the Beach are on Alton now. What we have, of course, is the Jewish population moving away, mostly to Broward. It makes sense that the synagogues in residential neighborhoods would be converted to residences, and the ones along the bigger arteries remain as is. Unfortunately, the ones being renovated were more architecturally interesting, so there’s a severe loss of history here. So it goes. (via Rick and thanks NicFitKid, in Rick’s comments, for additional info)

[1] That’s my attempt to rephotograph it through the frame glass, and so the crappy quality of the picture.

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Tuesday December 4, 2007

Art Basel the links

Installing something impressive in the Botanical Gardens across from the Convention Center.

OK folks, you know the drill. I’ll be delivering coverage from the show all week, more comprehensive information, and sometime Thursday or Friday, the “Art Basel guide for normal people.” For now, let’s get started with some links, of to which I will be adding later:

Updates:

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Friday September 22, 2006

Wireless town-hall meeting

Wireless townhall meeting

Ok, it fell to me to go to the Miami-Dade Mayor’s meeting regarding the beginnings of a plan to have county-wide free wireless last night. For the most part, it was a back-patting/grandstanding session for both the presenters and the audience participants. But they did provide a decent overview of the plan. The mayor gave a brief “this is going to be great” sort of opening talk, and then three other speakers did the bulk of the information sharing. Actually, the guy who did the research for the project, Ira (I missed his last name, and the handout helpfully didn’t bother to list the names of the speakers!!), gave most of the useful information. Even though the crowd was maybe 100, the speakers were on stage, and even the questioners had microphones, so there wasn’t much opportunity for “conversation,” per se. But here’re the salient points (apologies for the bullet point format)(and i’ll correct/amend/supplement this post as I get more information):

Sorry for the parenthetical rant. Actually, a little information on the project is available at the Mayor’s page, here and here, although you could be checking those pages twice a day and you wouldn’t have known about last night’s meeting. Our government has a way to go.

Oh, but back to the project at hand. Of course this is sort of “duh” to me, and I think they should get rid of the “no $$ out of the tax till” concept and just fund it 100%. In the future everyone will use the internet (that’s the idea behind this thing, anyway), so what’s the point of charging some and subjecting the rest to ads? Just make it free as the air we breathe, and fund it out of the money you collect from property-owners. Whatever injustices that unleashes will be offset by reduced administration costs. This is a no-brainer. It’s obvious. Except, of course, that the sooner it happens the more it’ll cost. With every year that goes by the technology gets simpler, easier to install, more far-reaching, and cheaper. But whatever: we have lives to live. Get the shit up and running.

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Monday November 14, 2005

Coconut Grove Playhouse historical designation

The New Times accouses the Coconut Grove Playhouse board of hypocrisy. To encapsulate: the board of the Playhouse will appeal a decision declaring the building historical, even though they’ve played up its historical nature in the past, when it was to their advantage. The issue here is whether the whole building gets preserved, or just the facade, allowing the interior to be rebuilt, to accommodate a broader range of plays.

Sorry, but that is not hypocrisy – it’s business. Running an old theater takes lots of money, and if government grants are available to cover some of those expenses, an organization should use whatever reasonable argument it can to go after that money. Does that lock them into that line of reasoning for evermore? Hardly. The organization needs to do what they can to serve their community, and here, both solutions (preserve the exterior/rebuild the interior vs. preserve everything) have their obvious advantages. The Playhouse has the option to go back to the preservation board with a new plan, or appeal the decision to the city commission. When decisions this important need to be made, a long and bureaucratic process may just be the best way. (For more information, see the Grove First archive on the subject.)

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Wednesday September 12, 2007

History-based Sprint ad

Sprint ad

The trend in cell phone marketing seems to be local flavor (there’s an AT&T ad with four palm trees as signal graphs making the rounds), and Spring comes in with this handsome entry, bearing the headline “Our signal is way caliente.” And featuring a light painting made on South Beach. I dig. But.

See the problem? Let me give you a hint. That’s right — the lifeguard stand in the photo was removed after last year’s hurricane season. I don’t think this particularly diminishes the ad (it does give a glimpse into the time-lines that go into producing things like this). But it sure gives lie to the idiot officials that claim the new lifeguard stands are as popular as the old ones. Picture this in the background of that image. Not so much, eh?

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Thursday May 24, 2007

The only two things new to me from this list of 50 offbeat Florida attractions were Jackie Gleason’s Mausoleum and the World Chess Hall of Fame.

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Tuesday May 23, 2006

The oceans between Miami and Bimini are home to all sorts of stuff, including some major deep-sea reefs, home to many completely unknown creatures. Over the next week, a team will be exploring some of those reefs. “A primary goal of the upcoming expedition . . . will be to search for marine organisms that produce chemical compounds with the potential to treat human diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s.”

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Thursday July 12, 2007

“Memo to the U.S. Department of Agriculture: You have better things to do with our tax dollars than harass Key West Hemingway House owners over the ubiquitous — and welcome — presence of 47 six-toed cats.” (Just added a Herald RSS feed to my collection: Editorials.)

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Monday December 3, 2007

MAM building Herzog and De Meuron

Here’s the model of the new Herzog and De Meuron Miami Art Museum building. Not pictured: some of the vertical columns are hanging vegetation. Looks spectacular, although I didn’t make it to the museum this weekend to see for myself.

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Wednesday August 2, 2006

Cuba: what happens now?

Cuba

Let’s assume for the moment that Fidel Castro is alive in fact, but dead effectively: that is, he’s sick to an extent that will make it impossible to return to power for a long while. Let’s further assume that the instability of the transfer, along with Raul Castro’s weaker political clout and cult-of-personality, make it impossible for the new leader to hold the Communist regime together. These assumptions each have considerable evidence behind them, but I feel comfortable making them primarily because the effect of their incorrectness would be little but to delay whatever the result would be. Where, then, does that leave us?

Since our current international eye is so used to looking at Iraq, it’s easy to conjure up images of civil unrest, chaos, and jostling for power. I find such predictions unpersuasive. In fact, I think the Velvet Revolution may be a much closer model of what is to come in Cuba. Whether it be in weeks or years remains to be seen, but let’s consider how the end of the Castro era in Cuba is likely to be similar or different from the fall of Communism in Czechoslovakia. (For new readers, I was born in Czechoslovakia in 1974, and immigrated to the US with my family in 1980.)

The Velvet Revolution was precipitated by events from outside the country: specifically, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the overthrow of Communism in most surrounding countries. As shocks to the system go, it seems roughly equivalent to loosing the one figurehead who’s been in charge of the Communist regime of Cuba for all this time. So the spark is there. But is there any fuel? By my estimation (And this might be a fair moment to point out that I’m no expert on on this stuff. If these thoughts have any weight, they must have it on their own merit. Feel free to dismiss them as rampant speculation.), two components are necessary for a relatively bloodless transition away from Communism: a strong intellectual dissident movement, and a significant percentage of fed-up population willing to put themselves at some risk to overthrow the regime.

Dissident intellectuals? I suspect Cuba is rich with them. Witness the reports that the government has been cracking down on just such dissidents over the last few days. That Raul may take a particularly strong position against them in the first days of his rule to prove his strength. And note the plight of Guillermo Fariñas, which, for all his suffering, made it into the international press. On NPR today I heard an interview with a Havana resident described as a “dissident and economist.” Nuff said.

Fed-up population ready to demonstrate? Hmm… here’s where Cuba’s geographical situation works against it. The problem is that it’s just so darned close to the US, which provides an escape hatch for those to whom the regime is most insufferable. I mean, no, the journey from there to here is nothing if not arduous. But it’s doable. And the costs of an attempt are low. (In contrast, my family had to go through endless legal wrangling and political subterfuge to get official permission for a vacation in Yugoslavia, which for some reason had a demi-porous (read: soldiers with machine guns patrolling, but only intermittently) border with Austria.) The result is that the very Cubans who might right now be most eager to rush into the streets of Havana with a view towards overthrowing the Commies are . . . living in Miami.

Of course this isn’t intended as a slight on Cuban-Americans or on the act of immigration. (When faced with a situation, it’s only right that each family does what it needs to do.) It’s an observation: one that might explain the oddly reticent reaction of folks still on the island. The lack of protests might very well be a simple a biding of time, though.

In the case of the Velvet Revolution, more then a week went by between the sparking incident and the tipping point, which came on November 17, 1989. Basically, what is required is a consensus feeling that change is possible, and something to motivate a lot of people to get out there and make it happen. Lots of things go into something like this, and again I note the importance of dissident leaders as a motivating force. (The riot police who responded to the demonstrations on November 17th blocked all the exits except one, and every person, as they filed out, got a whack of billy club across the back. The strength of a large group of people being able to take shit like that leads rather directly to the downfall of governments.)

Weighing all of this, I can’t help but feel optimistic for Cuba. Some absurdly thoughtful comments at the previous thread make it clear that the Velvet Revolution is but one possible model of what is to come in Cuba. Another equally plausible one is China: a Communist power that relaxes financial restrictions while holding tightly on to control of society. I don’t think I need to convince anyone that the way I’ve outlined—of temporary, short-lived suffering, followed by the sweet freedom of reality—is preferable to the slow and gradual relaxing of restrictions by a still oppressive regime. But I think the the situation is right for this kind of overthrow. The idea of Communism in Cuba is so closely tied to the leader that Val calls ‘the bearded goat’ that with him gone, everyone—man in the street, soldier in uniform, party intellectual, and even Raul himself—will be thrown into enough of a state of anomie that some drastic change will seem inevitable. The inevitability of that change itself is a powerful motor. Let’s hope it gives a push in the right direction.

Update: Some interesting and related information at the 26th. And at Balabu: read this and do this.

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Friday June 6, 2008

Old school weekend

turntable

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Wednesday January 24, 2007

Cleveland Orchestra at Carnival Center

Carnival Center, Cleveland ORchestra
photo: Roger Mastroianni

For all intents and purposes, this past weekend was the night everyone was waiting for with respect to the Carnival Center’s concert hall — the first performance by by a full-scale, professional orchestra. The Cleveland Orchestra did it right, too, performing Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, paired with Leonard Bernstein’s 1st, to a sold-out audience. We already know that the Cleveland Orchestra is considered the best in the country, so the real question regards the Knight Concert Hall’s acoustics. (Although “Are they so good that a few performances a year make up for not having a local orchestra?” comes to mind.)

So let’s just get it out of the way: the room sounds great. When the music goes lound and fast in the 4th movement of the 9th it was almost overpowering. But where it really shines is on the quiet bits. Bernstein gets all 20th-century-American experimental in the first movement of his symphony, and there are little one and two bar solos for various instruments. Each time, it sounded like the player was sitting in my lap. Your ear adjusts for dynamic levels the same way your eye does going from a darkened theater into bright sunlight, but the Knight hall made everything sound just right.

The hall’s sound-modifying features were in their medium-intimate setting, with the canopy in its lowest position and the sound-doors partially open. I spoke to Gary Hanson, the Cleveland Orchestra’s executive director, who told me that this was the orchestra’s preferred configuration, giving the Knight Concert Hall an intimate sound, not unlike that of their own Severance Hall. The configuration was determined during the orchestra’s tuning visit to Miami last year, and will be used for all Cleveland Orchestra performances at Carnival Center. Other orchestras may choose a different configuration; for example, the New World Symphony actually changed the configuration between pieces during their inaugural performance last year.

Hanson was enthusiastic about the sound. He pointed out that like any concert hall, the sound is a little more reverberant in the top balconies and a little more present on the floor, but it is generally very consistent, which is in fact one of the marks of a great hall. The Cleveland Orchestra is very happy in the Knight Concert Hall.

So on to the show. The performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony was spectacular, comparing very favorably with my London Symphony Orchestra recording, especially in the third movement, which sounded the most modern. The biggest difference I noticed was in the opening; whereas on my recording the first movement opens with a bang, on Saturday it built dramatically from a quiet foundation. This performance featured 180 singers from the U/M Frost Chorale and the Master Chorale of South Florida. They sat motionless behind the orchestra for the first three movements, and only came in for the grand fourth movement (the longest), which goes full-tilt almost from beginning to end. Wow. Lawrence Johnson checked the Friday show out for the Herald, and he was also thrilled. (By the way, here is an interesting radio interview with conductor Franz Welser-Möst about his views of Beethoven’s 9th.)

What do you pair the most famous symphony in history with? Welser-Möst chose Leonard Bernstein’s 1st symphony, which seems odd only at first blush. Bernstein’s three movements are very different from each other; one is probing and experimental in a early-20th century sort of way (quirky two-bar solos! woodblock!), the second is fast and dramatic, and the third is mournful, and featured Kelly O’Connor’s vocal (which was wonderful, but honestly I couldn’t even tell what language she was singing, and it was English); this was the perfect thing to wake up the ears.

And so we have one of the best orchestras in the world in town for a few weeks every year. And while some former members of the defunct Florida Philharmonic feel that this will make it more difficult to re-form a local orchestra, as an audience all we can do is enjoy it. Apropos of that, extra seats have just been released (on the choral riser! should be a great place to sit) for the performances this weekend (Mahler!), and tickets are also available for the March performances (Tchaikovsky!).

I wouldn’t let the high-art thing intimidate me, by the way. Dress nice and bring your active-listening ears and you’ll be fine. If you can avoid wearing a loud jangly bracelet and moving around all night, you’ll be doing better then the woman sitting across the aisle from me (what was she thinking?). There is nothing quite like being in this particular room listening to this particular band; it’s something everyone should do.

See also: More information about the Knight Concert Hall at my Carnival Center writeup.

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Friday June 15, 2007

The Herald profiles Mika, the gay/ambiguous singer who’s playing Studio A Sunday. I skipped it in my weekend roundup because the show is $20 and his album got crazy panned in Pitchfork. But check out the profile — they’ve got audio clips, and it just might be your thing.

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Tuesday August 8, 2006

A wall in Liberty City that was built to separate blacks and whites is being considered for historical status. Am I the only one that thinks this is a terrible idea? For one thing, a wall with historical status is still a wall: still does what the original did: make it more difficult to get from here to there. More importantly, the perpetrators of racism are the ones that need to be reminded of stuff like this, not the victims. Update: Miami-Dade historical page. (via Urban Paradise)

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Thursday February 9, 2006

A Prairie Home Companion at Bayfront Park

Garrison Keillor and company hit Bayfront Park on Sunday, causing mayhem and destruction. Heh, heh – got ya there, didn’t I? Seriously, though, Garrison was great, talking Miami history (he had a whole thing about the Lyric Theater) and different parts of town, pointing in wildly wrong directions and mispronouncing “Calle Ocho” (maybe on purpose).

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Wednesday July 19, 2006

‘Miami Vice’ Film Reminds of Cocaine Past in the Washington Post. “The ‘Miami Vice’ TV series (1984-89) accurately reflected those crazy times, according to people who lived through them.” Fun article. (via, of all things, Miamist)

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Thursday October 20, 2005

Miamist stumbles onto the scene

Hey, check out our about page [Our about page has changed, the original one is here.], and it’s pretty clear we were inspired by the -ist family of city blogs. So when Kathleen dropped us a note earlier tonight about Miamist, we were very exited. On first glance (actually, the second glance – on first glance miamist crashed firefox), it’s hard not to notice the absence of a skyline icon, typical of the other -ist sites. On second glance, the site seems a bit of a mess overall; broken links abound, and the staff page is a complete train wreck (we got a screen grab; click the image to see the whole horrid thing, if they’ve improved things by the time you read this). Clicking on the staff suggests they’re writing for Chicagoist, but we assume someone just copied a page and hasn’t plugged in the information yet (no idea on what the garbage at the top is).

Oh right, so their archives indicate they went online at the end of September, about three weeks ago. So far the focus seems disproportionately on sports, with little tidbits thrown in. Some of it is clearly hack-work (hurricane prep tips??), while some of it is decent (a post on South Beach vendors works, but someone should tell them that “Google Images” isn’t really a photo credit!). Nothing we saw definitively proved that any of the writers has ever set foot outside Chicago, but doesn’t disprove Miami-nativeness, either.

Miamist is the competition, but we are thrilled to have them. Hi, guys! Thanks for gracing our town with your presence. Please clean up your links, import a skyline photo (we know you know how to use google image search!) into illustrator and get up a logo, maybe reconsider the puke yellow, and get down to business. We’ll try to compete with our (thus far) non-commercial resources. It’ll be fun.

Meanwhile, we’ll be rewriting our about page. And, especially in light of Wilma (Category 5, y’all), we’re packing an overnight bag and heading up to Chicago for a little Critical counteroffensive.

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Wednesday May 30, 2007

tornado

Tornado in downtown Miami, May 12, 1997. (via Rakontur, via SDoFB)

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Monday April 16, 2007

“These Haitians left their homeland in a desperate attempt to escape the horrendous political, social and economic conditions in Haiti.” — a letter sent by South Florida’s three Cuban-American members of Congress regarding the 101 refugees being held at the Broward Transitional Center. Also: Day 12 of the hunger strike. Information on how to help at FANM. BTW, the cost of applying for a green card is about to go up from $325 to $905. Rick pretty well lays out how messed up that is.

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Monday May 14, 2007

Hidden City gets into a car accident with some guys who’re being chased by the police. Hillary Hilarity ensues.

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Wednesday November 28, 2007

Tonight and Saturday:

Slave house tours

See the Miami Hidden History website for more info.

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Thursday April 26, 2007

Tommy Vision

tommy vision's silver babies

Tommy Vision is an artist I met at work yesterday, and we spent a while talking. He rode up on an orange bycicle with baskets in the front and back loaded up with stuff and wearing an orange safety vest and a bycicle helmet with a baseball cap visor taped to it. He says people call him “TV”.

Check out his website, which someone in his building made for him in exchange for using his parking space. Try the “lastest work” section and be amazed. His work is very much in tradition of blurring the line between painting and sculpture — it’s flat, but he often attaches objects to the surface, which is shiny and highly textured. Most of the reproductions are not great, so it’s difficult to tell exactly what’s going on in them.

There’s an opening on Sunday in Hallandale that Tommy has some pieces in at the Renaissance Design Center, and he also supposedly has work more regularly at someplace called the Art Project Gallery (in the same neighborhood), but I don’t have that exact address.

Tommy gave me a photo of one of his pieces with his information taped to the back. The painting isn’t on his website, but it’s titled “Trapped.” It shows a white elephant being chased up a tree by two huge white rats. Small blue leaves are falling gently from the tree. The picture has a border of real moustraps, each of which has a red silouette of a mouse on it.

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Tuesday May 13, 2008

An interesting article on the discussion about which schools to close due to budget cuts. Sounds to me like low enrollment + crappy school (C, D, or F school) = a good one to close. Of course it gets more complicated, because there have to be nearby schools to absorb those kids. But the worst thing you can do is to have the professional staff figure it all out, and then close all the schools they recommend except the ones where there’s the most complaining. The solution? I dunno, maybe make Rudy Crew school Dictator For Life — did you see yesterday’s post? The school board is nothing but a thorn in his side anyway.

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Wednesday April 25, 2007

Cocaine Cowboys the movie

cocaine cowboys screenshot

Cocaine Cowboys is a documentary about the drug trade in Miami in the late 1970s and early 80s. Built around absorbing interviews with Jon Roberts, Mickey Munday, and Jorge “Rivi” Ayala, it’s intercut with occasionally cheesy reenactments and some fascinating stock footage.

In the first part, Roberts and Munday tell their stories. Small-time crooks who happened to be in the right place at the right time, they become two of the biggest importers of cocaine from Colombia to Miami. They share lots and lots of interesting stories about the technicalities of how they did it (many more are on the DVD’s great deleted scenes section), how much money they made, and all the cool shit they got to buy. There’s stories of destroying the private room at the Forge and just paying to have it restored, smashing cars as a form of tension-relief, and transporting coke in the trunk of a car on a flatbed truck. There are great stories about dropping loads with homing signals in the ocean, evading the Coast Guard boats at Haulover Park inlet, and flying around the West side of Cuba.

The focus shifts to the violence that came with the business in the middle section. From prison, Ayala tells the story of his quick rise through the ranks to become the main assassin for Griselda Blanco (“La Madrina”), and then the story pretty much stick with her. She’s painted as the leader of one side in the early 80s cocaine war, having guys killed along with their wives and children, laying waste to anyone who rubs her the wrong way, and generally being all capital-R ruthless. Ayala is the star of the movie, sympathetic and serious, even as he describes systematically tracking down and killing a dude who slighted Blaco’s son outside a police station.

In the third act the movie makes the case that the cocaine trade is singularly responsible for Miami’s current financial clout. We see the sleepy resort/retirement community of the 1970s, the building boom that came in the 80s, and the economic contraction that came when Regan cracked down on the drug trade in the mid-80s. At the time, 90% of the cocaine imported into the US came through Miami. There are enough quotes from experts that connect the dots between the drugs and the financial status of the whole city (why are there so many banks in Brickell, anyway?) that make the argument seem quite plausible. When the big bust came (Roberts and Munday both spent time in prison, as did Blanco), the city had supposedly been given enough of a push that the economy flew on its own.

I think everyone already knows that this is a fascinating film, but I’m throwing in my “me too” anyway. If there’s a complaint to be made, it’s how much it relies on straight interviews. Besides the three main guys, we get lots of police, experts, and a few smaller criminals. The filmmakers don’t help themselves by trying weird montage effects and transitions between the interviews and other bits. And there’s lots of use of photographs, sometimes manipulated for graphic effect. Maybe this is all done about as well as it could have been, but the fact is that the old-Miami footage is the only thing actually worth watching, and Cocaine Cowboys would probably work just as well with the picture turned off. But that’s not so bad — the three main subjects are intriguing, and the pacing of the narrative is perfect.

One other thing: it’s graphic. They went and got crime-scene pictures of all the shootings, and they sprinkled them throughout the movie at the appropriate points. No half-assing it here.

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Thursday July 20, 2006

Elisa Turner reviews Snap Judgements. I can’t wait to see the show. (Note to the Herald web team: Please hit “refresh” and look at the articles when you post them. On this one all the body copy is in italics.) (via TnfH)

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Monday July 31, 2006

What's up with Castro?

Raul Castro

Holy shit: People have taken to the streets in Little Havana in Miami. Calle Ocho is packed with Cubans celebrating the news. The news, that is, of FIDEL CASTRO’S POSSIBLE DEATH. I’ll go with the guy on Calle Ocho that Balabu quotes: “While we celebrate here, I urge the Cuban people in cuba to take to the streets. This is the opportune moment. Now is the time.”

Image: Raul Castro, currently in control of Cuba.

Update (11:30 pm): Cubans in Miami wait for news on Castro. How would Raul Castro govern?

Update (11:56 pm): Channel 4 is doing online and on-air live coverage of local celebrations and ad-hoc analysis of Cuba’s future, “a nexus of emotion.” Manny Diaz is on the scene. I’m toasting Fidel’s possible death myself. Here’s to your hopefully imminent demise, old man—may you rot in hell!

Update (12:50 am): Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Alvarez press confrence: “The Emergency Operations Center is active on level 2 . . . keep your celebrations out of the street [fat chance] . . . 311 is open . . . blah, blah, blah.” Channel 4 just replayed the announcement that Castro’s office manager read, and it’s some crazy stuff. Meanwhile, balabu is still on it: “Behind every smile, behind every feeling of unbridled joy and desperate happiness, there are 47 years of tears . . . Viva Cuba libre coño!”

Update (8/1/06 7:27 am): The consensus among news sources is that Fidel Castro is still alive, though probably in very poor health. Raul’s profile has been gradually increased, possibly over the last couple of months. Humanitarian violations in Cuba have stepped up over the last couple of days. Meanwhile, some Wikipedia articles worth keeping up with: July 2006 transfer of power, Raul Castro, and, of course, Fidel Castro. The latter entry is locked up tight to newbie modification.) From the Herald: the Complete text of the proclamation is worth reading. Can’t seem to find the video of the proclamation, which was also very interesting (the guy who read it was very young). Raúl groomed for top job.

Update (7:38 am): Wha? Part of the Herald’s coverage is coverage of Critical Miami coverage. I’d be careful about clicking that link – some weird hypertext feedback loop might result (ok not really – they don’t give my URI, much less link!). And yes, I had to find out about this from Rick, where, truth be told, I first heard about Castro last night. Way to go, Rick! (And check out his frank look at his own feelings about all this.)

Update (7:56 am): A brief report on how Cubans still living on the island took the news of Fidel Castro’s illness (4’s coverage of all this generally has been superb). I’m looking around for more media interviews with Miami Cubans about this, with little success. Val’s thoughts are great: “I should note, for those of you that arent very familiar with fidel castro’s deaths, that this is the first time where actual reports on castro’s health were made publicly to the Cuban people via Cuban media. [. . .] If you guys think last nights imromptu celebrations caused by the news of the relinquishing of power were big, just wait until the news that the old goat is dead top be confirmed. Even clocks will stop in Miami that day.”

Update (8:47 am): At the BBC, a great slideshow of Miami celebrations (which begins with a picture of the Cuban spokesdude that delivered the proclamation), as well as one of those quasi-celebratory Castro bios Val predicted. More quotes: “I’m praying to God to give us a miracle and let that man die.” (Gabriela Burmudez) “My grandfather waited forever for this day and he died in 2000. I’m here celebrating for him.” (Edgar Montegudo) And Conductor says, “As my grandmother has grown older . . . one of the things she frequently repeated was that she only really had one thing to live for anymore, to outlive fidel castro even if it would be by only one minute . . . Hang on Abuelita, hang on.”

Update (9:51 am): Joe Cooper is having a panel to discuss all this on his show today. Participants have not been announced. Listen at 1 pm on 91.3 fm or wlrn.org. Bob compares point sizes of the word “Castro” on the covers of the local newspapers. Y No Mas says: Castro’s signature is a fake.

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