He didn’t like drugs or gangs or violence — he liked pretty girls, and that may have killed him.
Photo illustration by Silvia Ros and Marcy Mock.
Published in the January, 2010 issue of the Biscayne Times newspaper:
The days when Miami was awash in cocaine, cash, and bullet-riddled bodies are over. Today art gallery owners likely outnumber drug lords, and running gun battles are far less common than book fairs, art festivals, music conferences, and fashion shows. What was once the nation’s murder capital is now a well-branded cultural Mecca.
So just over a year ago, when the body of 18-year-old high school senior Alex Tillman was found beside the FEC railway tracks in Wynwood, the killing seemed reminiscent of an earlier decade, when violent criminals and cartel hit men committed scores of equally brutal slayings.
At the time of Tillman’s death, local news outlets made a point to mention that he had no criminal record and no involvement with drugs or gangs — declarations made necessary, apparently, because he was from Overtown, where most murders are still drug-related.
Indeed Tillman didn’t fit the profile of someone whose life was likely to end in criminal violence. His murder, friends and family suspect, was likely motivated by something else altogether — jealousy.
To read more, click here.
Published in the September, 2009 issue of the Biscayne Times newspaper:
Miami art collectors Carlos and Rosa de la Cruz are well along in the construction of their expansive new Design District museum that will showcase their world-renowned collection of contemporary art. It is scheduled to open in time for Art Basel Miami Beach in December. And although their art may be new, across the street from their building, where they’re planning a parking lot, they are dealing with something much, much older: oak trees.
Two 80-foot-tall Southern Live Oaks, estimated to be nearly 100 years old, rise from the soil like living monuments at the rear of the vacant lot at 28 NE 41st St., their wide evergreen canopies casting precious shadows over this corner of a sun-blasted city. Miami, in fact, is ranked among the worst in the nation for tree canopy. “Born” in the early part of the last century, the twin oaks have matured with the neighborhood as it went from agricultural seclusion to mid-century ritz to drug-ravaged slum and finally to its present incarnation as the Design District, one of Miami’s most vibrant commercial areas.
Those two stately oaks, however, may soon fall to the chainsaw.
To read more, click here.
(October ‘09 follow-up story here: The 41st Street Oaks Live to See Another Day).
Published in the Aug/Sept 2009 issue of ‘Social Affairs’ magazine:
“Given a chance to travel back in time, most people would choose to visit some pivotal or alluring period in human history—Classical Greece, Galilee in the era of Jesus, the Renaissance, or Victorian England, perhaps. But Tito and Che-Frio, two dim-witted and equally untalented Miami musicians, are drawn to a much more recent era—the year 2002. In those innocent, early days of the 21st century, people knew nothing of Bluetooth, camera phones, or the TV series Lost. More importantly, Reggaeton, that vigorous, hyper-sexualized stepchild of hip-hop and dancehall, had yet to come rumbling like a busload of lustful insurgents onto the North American music scene.”
.To read more, click here.
Photo by Silvia Ros
Published in the March, 2009 issue of the Biscayne Times newspaper:
Not far from Biscayne Boulevard, outside his ramshackle home just north of the 79th Street Causeway drawbridge, Omar Ali is slumped in a folding chair, his thin frame draped in well-worn canvas work clothes, his face turned toward the sun. He’s listening to Classical FM radio over a pair of loudspeakers, fidgeting with an unlit cigarette, and watching an osprey obsessively circling the sun-sparkled waters of Biscayne Bay that stretch before him.
The bird swoops down, talons outstretched, and with a soft splash, snatches a fish from the water. It rises, shakes off the water from its plunge, and glides over to a rotting wooden pylon to feast on its writhing prey. Ali smiles. He lifts the cigarette to his mouth, almost lights it, but stops. It’s the holy Muslim month of Ramadan, smoking is forbidden during daylight hours, and he’ll have to wait until sunset to break his daily fast.
But the 54-year-old Egyptian metal sculptor isn’t focused on his hunger or nicotine craving right now. He’s mostly thinking about the five-ton, stainless-steel sculpture towering 25 feet over his head, casting a strange, twisted shadow over his Shorecrest property and, more figuratively, over his life.
To read more, click here.
Illustrated version available here: The Titanium Dreams of Omar Ali.
Photo by Silvia Ros.
Published in the January, 2009 issue of the Biscayne Times newspaper:
There was a time when American life revolved around trains. For more than a century, from before the Civil War until after WWII, nearly every long journey on land began and ended on a railway platform. From the romantic steam engines of the Gilded Age to the stainless-steel streamliners of the mid-Twentieth Century, trains were fixtures in everyday life that captured imaginations and came to represent freedom, opportunity, and progress. Wherever the railroad went, new settlements, new industry, and a new way of life followed.
To read more, click here.
(March ‘09 follow-up story here: Still Waiting for the Train).
Published by the ‘The Writer‘ magazine, January, 2009:
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“Literary agent Taryn Fagerness of the Sandra Dijkstra Agency recently lectured at Miami Dade College in downtown Miami about the best way to approach an agent. She graciously dished out advice to aspiring writers during a four-day literary event hosted by the Florida Center for the Literary Arts…Here’s what she had to say”:
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To read more, click here.
Photo by Silvia Ros.
Published in the August, 2008 issue of the Biscayne Times Newspaper:
The City Inn hotel at 660 NW 81st Street in West Little River is the kind of place you wouldn’t recommend to your worst enemy. Tattooed pimps with gold teeth patrol the surrounding streets on spray-painted bicycles. Drug-ravaged women in stained miniskirts and worn-out pumps drift in and out of the lobby, stopping occasionally on the curb outside to light a cigarette, thrust out a hip, and nod to passing male motorists.
To most people, the ten-story City Inn is just one of many eyesores along I-95. Nestled against the west side of the expressway, it stands out more than most buildings along that particular stretch of asphalt, thanks to the large soft-drink banner and other ever-changing advertisements that completely cover the north and east sides of the hotel. Cellular companies lease roof space from the inn, and their large white antennae sit prominently atop the building, lending the hotel a hint of technological sophistication. Up close, though, there’s nothing sophisticated about it.
“That place is really, really bad,” says veteran Ofcr. Darrell Nichols of the Miami Police Department, when asked about the hotel. And with that grim assessment, I decide to do what any sensible writer would do: go and get a room.
To read more, click here.
Illustrated version available here: Edifice Complex: City Inn.
Published in the September, 2008 issue of Present Tense Magazine:
Excerpt: Miami and Tel Aviv share a similar aesthetic, boomtown history, temperament, regional significance, club scene, Mediterranean architecture, and lifestyle. “Tel Aviv and Miami are very progressive, very vital places,” says Shirley Kahn, a retiree and tour guide at the Jewish Museum of Florida. “People are constantly moving and they’re outdoors a lot.” The vibe of Miami’s popular Ocean Drive or Lincoln Road can be felt on Tel Aviv’s Shenkin or Dizengoff Streets, where outdoor cafes and bountiful shopping attract a wide cross-section of society. “And, of course,” she adds, “there are kosher delis and temples on every corner in some neighborhoods.”
To read more, click here.
Photo by Silvia Ros.
Published in the September, 2008 issue of the Biscayne Times newspaper:
No one seems to know when exactly Frank Sinatra stayed at the historic Vagabond Motel at 7301 Biscayne Blvd. But everyone over a certain age is required to have at least one Sinatra tale to tell, and Eric Silverman, the Vagabond’s charismatic 55-year-old owner, is no exception. “This place was a retreat for guys like Sinatra, away from the spotlight of Miami Beach,” he says. “It’s not like there was an announcement that he was here. He’d come to hang out at the bar and maybe get up and do a number. It was more of a private thing — you understand?”
To read more, click here.
Illustrated version available here.
(October ‘08 follow-up story here: Further Adventures of the Boulevard’s Big Man).
(December ‘08 follow-up story here: Don’t Mess with my MiMo).
(April ‘09 follow-up story here: From Hero to Zero).
Eternity
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The briefest novel excerpt ever. Featured on Six Sentences:
The old wind-up clock on the bedside table said three a.m. and the boy, sitting on his windowsill, fought the heavy, persuasive lure of sleep. The street below was empty except for the occasional moped whirring by in the night, briefly obscuring the nighttime cricket songs of summer and throwing up invisible plumes of pungent smoke. Ship lights blinked in the dark distance and some were so far out to sea that it was hard to tell whether they were stars low on the horizon or large vessels on the verge of dipping down to the other side of the earth. An hour passed and drowsiness eventually jumbled his thoughts to the point of hallucination, until he slid off of the windowsill and onto his bed, but sleep didn’t come easily and once again he was awake and staring at the stars through the open window. For years, they appeared as white dots painted on a flat surface, but now he could see their depth and understood that the bright ones were closer and the faint ones farther away. The notion of eternity briefly entered his brain and a sick, helpless feeling took hold of his gut and he closed his eyes and tried to think of something else, but the thought would never be far from his mind again.
Published in the July, 2008 issue of the Biscayne Times Newspaper:
The Miami Police Department’s annual crime report for 2007, available since May of this year, is slowly making its way through sluggish distribution channels and beginning to arrive in mailboxes across the city. The sleek little booklet organizes the Magic City’s crime statistics into aesthetically-pleasing graphs and colorful pie charts that would impress even the sternest grade-school teacher. But residents familiar with the streets of Miami are likely to notice something missing from the publication.
To read more, click here.
Published in the April, 2008 issue of the Biscayne Times Newspaper:
When Cliff Ensor bought Villa Paula in 1974, the house was in a grave state of disrepair. Vandals had shot out the beautiful stained-glass windows, graffiti was scrawled across the stucco walls outside, and the county was ready to order its demolition. Not to mention, the ghost of a one-legged Cuban woman frequented its hallways.
To read more, click here.
Illustrated version available here: Villa Paula and the Ghosts of Little Haiti.
No Grace
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In the first century A.D., Saint Paul the Apostle was tied to a stone pillar in Pafos, Cyprus and given 39 lashes as punishment for preaching Christianity to the locals. In 1989 A.D., as a disorderly 13-year-old, I sat atop that very same pillar and casually smoked a cigarette while two like-minded friends sprawled out on the surrounding Roman mosaics and blew smoke rings into the air.
The ruins are fenced off now. There’s a plaque to commemorate the ancient ordeal and the site has even been added to the UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites. But straddling that piece of ancient archaeology remains a fond memory for me—not because of the false sense of entitlement or exclusivity—but because of the nostalgia and experience of living in a time and culture where there were few rules.
As kids in Cyprus, we drove motorbikes and cars without licenses and if the police stopped us we said that we left our documents at home. They’d wave us on and sometimes even chuckle at the flimsy lie. There were no parking meters to worry about, or even parking spaces for that matter, and speed limits were merely suggestions. We drank at the local bar before we ever had hair on our faces and people, adult people, bought us rounds. We spent many nights sleeping outdoors on beaches and rooftops—because it was fun—and no one ever came to chase us away. Swimming was simply a matter of pulling the car over onto the sand and jumping into the sea whenever the fancy grabbed us. And, of course, hitchhiking was a perfectly acceptable means of transport, too. Then there were the ruins—the Roman temples, Hellenic tombs, and Byzantine castles that we turned into our personal playgrounds.
An acquaintance once described life in modern, developed, western societies as having “no grace.” I’m not sure exactly what he meant by that, but I’ve always interpreted it as meaning that life is more rigid, less impulsive, more restricted, and less charming than the one I knew as a kid. My youth was defined by freedom—freedom from tightly enforced laws, from western ideas of accountability when things go wrong, and from the predictability of living in a carefully managed society where reason is king. It rendered me ill-prepared for later life in America where I discovered pay-for-access beaches, traffic tickets, background checks, liability, service standards, rationale, procedural policies, and a cultural obsession with “making sense.”
There is a danger in romanticizing developing nations, though. They’re often rife with traffic-related deaths, corruption, professional-level incompetence, and an ineffectual, laizze-fare attitude that can stifle much-needed development. But the charms outweigh the drawbacks for many people. Retirees from America and the U.K. regularly flock to developing nations, not just because of the lower cost of living, but because of the easy lifestyle. Younger people, with foreign roots and language skills, often seek out niches for themselves in their ancestral countries because of the prospect of a more interesting life.
There are many aspects of the developed world which most people would hate to go without. Unfortunately though, you can’t have both—the charms of loosely governed societies rarely coexist with modern efficiency and order. Cyprus has changed since 1989, as have many other nations that were then in a transitional period between traditional and modern life. At some point, the government, and then the culture, of emergent nations make a conscious decision to upgrade their ways and mentality, and once the process begins, it’s impossible to go back.
You can still bribe security guards in Egypt to let you climb the pyramids at night, you can sunbathe nude in southern Europe undisturbed, you can jump a train in India without anyone protesting, and you can drive in many parts of the world with little more than horn-blowing skills. Most northern Mediterranean countries have not yet reached the stage at which they rigorously adhere to strict laws and petty regulations, either.
One thing is certain though, it’s been a long time since an undisciplined thirteen-year-old could climb on top of an ancient ruin of religious significance, light a cigarette and say something like, “Hey, you guys wanna rent motorbikes and go get drunk out by the sea caves?”
No grace, indeed.
Also featured on ‘Passion Before Paycheck,’ a site about adventure, passion, and living life to the fullest.
French writer Albert Camus once wrote, “I know this with sure and certain knowledge: a man’s work is nothing but a slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”
For those of us who were children in the 1970’s and 1980’s, one of the great and simple images in whose presence our hearts first opened was that of an elegant, mythical-looking man in a red wooly cap traversing the world’s oceans in his ship the Calypso. He and his team of charismatic adventurers called on foreign ports that we could not visit ourselves, explored ancient sites that we knew only from dreams, and lived life in a limitless way that few of us will ever experience. Our hearts didn’t just open in the presence of those enduring images, our hearts were transformed and grew bigger, and we learned early on what it means to yearn for life and adventure and for experiences as rich as Captain Cousteau’s.
Much time has passed since The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau or The Jacques Cousteau Odyssey television series graced our screens, but the images live on in our hearts, timeless and iconic. We think of them often. We think of rusty medieval war canons being lifted onto the Calypso’s deck, of Cousteau sniffing Roman amphorae for ancient wine, of chief diver Falco resurrecting bronze statuettes from watery Aegean graves, of dolphins playfully flanking Calypso’s hull as she glides through pristine Caribbean waters. And then there’s the lasting image of the explorers gathered on deck, sharing a laugh or a cigarette or marveling at Venetian coins retrieved from the wreck below. Their camaraderie, their unmatched collection of shared adventures, evoked the tales of Homer and they not only took us along on their modern Odyssey, they provided us with a soundtrack and a poetic narrative that made the voyage more than an adventure, it made it art.
We knew even then that above all, Cousteau was an artist, a gifted and passionate cinematographer. “I’m not interested in achievements,” he was once quoted as saying, “I’m interested in having an interesting life and sharing it with the public on television.” And that he did, in almost a hundred films, two T.V. series, and eighty books that we compulsively collected. Yet, he still found time to co-invent the aqualung, father the science of undersea archaeology, advance underwater filming techniques, and later co-invent the Turbosail. As the inscription on his National Geographic Society Gold Medal reads, “To earthbound man, he gave the key to the silent world.”
If Cousteau and his men deserve criticism for anything, it’s for setting an impossible precedent for adventure. How many of us, after all, will ever experience the freedom, danger, joy, and pioneering thrill of the Calypso crew? Modern commercial jet travel, crowded airports, contrived vacation resorts, they do nothing to satisfy the adventurous spirit. In that sense, most of us don’t care about the extent of Cousteau’s scientific credentials, or about his private family affairs, or whether he failed twice for every success. What we care about is what Jacques Cousteau represents to us: freedom, art, adventure, the joy of being the first and best at what you do, living by the motto “Il faut aller voir” (“We must go and see for ourselves”). Whether he erred often or greatly makes little difference to those of us who grew up dreaming about donning a red cap and sailing the world. “We are not documentary,” Cousteau once said, “we are adventure films.” And it was the adventure that mattered to us. Not the science.
One of the great lessons that we learned from the Captain’s life is that is doesn’t take advanced educational degrees, wealth, or connections in high places to achieve success. It takes only creativity, desire, and an instinct for innovation. Cousteau evolved from a sickly child into a self-proclaimed misfit, then into a naval officer, later into an inventor and master cinematographer, and finally into the world’s greatest explorer and father of the modern environmental movement. None of it was planned, or handed to him, or laid out in advance. “Sometimes we are lucky enough to know that our lives have been changed,” Cousteau said about his first experience using goggles underwater. He took the seeds of chance and nurtured them into forests of experience, relying only on a visceral drive to create and discover new things.
The details of Jacques Cousteau’s life are fuzzy now for most of us, but it’s those early images that still dominate our thoughts: Cousteau emerging from his diving saucer after a 1,000ft-dive in the dark depths of the Atlantic, his son Philippe hovering over the pristine glaciers of Antarctica in a multi-colored air balloon, the inflatable Zodiac launching wildly out into rough waters to retrieve a lost buoy, the team’s helicopter circling a Greek island in search of Atlantis, the PBY Catalina seaplane roaring out of the sky one minute and then bobbing silently on the crystal waters of the Bermuda Triangle the next.
“I have accepted death not only as inevitable but also as constructive,” Cousteau once said. “If we didn’t die, we would not appreciate life as we do.” We were young when Cousteau uttered those words, and knew nothing of death, but we appreciated life because he appreciated it, and because he showed us how. He was not only captain of the Calypso, he was captain of our imaginations, and clearly one of the great men of the 20th century. Our only question now is, where is the successor to the charming and charismatic man who skippered the dreams of our youth?
It has been said that true happiness lies in the fulfillment of childhood dreams. If there is any truth to that statement, then happiness for many of us means donning a red wooly cap, climbing aboard an affectionately named ship, pointing to the horizon, and announcing to a small group of bold adventurers, “We must go and see for ourselves.”
Also featured on RealAdventures.com:
Although often overshadowed by expatriate hotspots like Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama, El Salvador is proving to be a viable alternative for travelers in search of a low-key, low-cost Central American adventure.
Popular with the outdoors set for years, El Salvador’s empty beaches, mountainous terrain, and rustic appeal have been attracting surfers, hikers, mountain-bikers, and plain old pioneering spirits ever since the country’s civil war ended sixteen years ago. Beaches like El Sunzal sport long, slow swells that are perfect for experienced and aspiring surfers alike. $25 will get you a one-hour surfing lesson with the resident instructor at Sunzal’s Casa de Mar, a tropical hillside hotel made up of 11 villas. $40 buys drinks and a full-course meal for two at their hilltop restaurant overlooking the Pacific—think fried fish, ceviche, and seafood cocktails.
In 1990, twenty-four-year-old Chris McCandless left his upper-class neighborhood in suburban Virginia and set out on a two-year, hobo-style journey across the country in search of that illusive ghost we call freedom. He donated his college fund to charity, burned the cash in his wallet, and abandoned his car. Two years later, he died of starvation in the wilderness of Alaska. He apparently found his freedom, but it came at a price.
Author Jon Krakauer originally told the true story of Chris McCandless in an article for Outside magazine in 1996. The response was predictably unsympathetic. Many readers felt that Chris got what he deserved. Not only was he ignorant, they surmised, but he had committed the much more serious crime of arrogance by walking into the harsh Alaskan wilderness ill-prepared and unqualified for survival.
The criticism was understandable. After all, Chris was wealthy. Nobody sympathizes with the rich and their spiritual dilemmas. Furthermore, at twenty-four, he should have known better than to strike out into the bush with not nearly enough in the way of supplies or clothing. An angst-ridden teenager might have garnered some empathy, but foolishness is a trait unbecoming of a man.
From a literary perspective though, it is totally irrelevant.
As Walter Bagehot once wrote, ‘All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality—the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.’ To criticize Krakauer’s book because its real-life protagonist was foolhardy would be unfair. He has crafted a non-fiction book as inspiring, moving, and artful as the best works of fiction. He has offered up a real-world story of physical and spiritual escape, a bold tale of adventure, and a quest for something unseen. That search is something with which every reader can identify, regardless of their opinion of the method.
A lesser author could have easily mangled this story and glossed right over the kernels of wisdom which can be extracted from it. But Krakauer, an adventure-seeker himself, knew exactly where the lessons and themes were buried. He begins each chapter with quotes from authors who have expounded on the virtues of nature and living on the edge of survival far from civilization’s comforts. He offers examples of men who pursued almost identical paths as Chris McCandless. As the story progresses, we begin to feel that Chris was not a solitary quack, but rather one link in a long chain of individuals who decided that society’s comforts were unessential.
Of course, Chris’ journey would have faded into history long ago were it not for the journal and letters he wrote along the way. Notes made in the margins of books that he carried with him – books by Tolstoy, Jack London, Thoreau—also provided some insight into his thought process. Musings such as the following paragraph undoubtedly help readers make the leap toward viewing him more as a legitimate soul-searcher, rather than a self-absorbed drifter with a Jesus-complex.:
“You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.”
Krakauer’s book has something now which it did not have back when it was originally published—a certain nostalgia. It would, after all, be much harder to lose yourself in today’s world of cell phones and internet access. To close the Pandora’s Box of technology and shun all contact with friends and family for two years would be a veritable prison-sentence to most modern youths.
Into the Wild’s protagonist may have been naïve, rash, and even a little arrogant. He may, on the other hand, have been none of those things. What the author knows though, is that stories with which readers cannot emotionally identify are failures. And, who among us has not dreamed of shaking off society’s chains and striking out into the unknown—to know the feeling at least once in a lifetime? Chris McCandless may have done many things wrong in his search for freedom.
But at least he tried.
It has been said that there is no such thing as a new idea in fiction. The creativity and freshness of the art form lie in the particular way a story is spun. McCarthy has proven the truth of this adage in No Country for Old Men.
The plot is as familiar as they come—a drug deal gone bad, a satchel full of cash, and an ordinary Joe who stumbles upon the carnage and makes off with the money. Variations on this theme have been around for decades. In fact, the storyline is so common it has almost become the exclusive property of Hollywood scripters and crime writers. McCarthy however, is neither.
No Country for Old Men shares much of its noir aesthetic with The Road, a post-apocalyptic novel for which McCarthy was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2007. The brusque, austere writing style, devoid of sentimentality and descriptive indulgences, feels right. What remains after you put the book down is not the bold protagonist, not the cold-blooded psychopath tracking him down, but the language, the engaging dialogue, and the narrator’s voice.
Of course, as any editor will tell you, story is everything. Mediocre writing can easily hide from the general public behind a great story. So, why does this novel work? Because, unlike other chase-the-money dramas, No Country for Old Men is not about the man on the run. In fact, the objective point-of-view McCarthy uses to tell his tale gives us almost no access to the mind of the protagonist, Llewellyn Moss. The only heart to which we are privy is Ed Bell’s, the low-key Sheriff who is trying to piece together the details of the book’s many crimes.
Throughout the novel, McCarthy switches to an internal, first-person narrative to reveal the sheriff’s perspective and specifically, his belief that society is in a downward spiral. What’s refreshing about Sheriff Ed Bell is his stoicism. After all, how many more aggressive, fast-talking cops with New York accents can the entertainment world handle? Sheriff Bell is not interested in busting heads. His motivation is to get to Llewellyn Moss before Chigurh, the sociopathic killer, and save him from certain death. He aims to protect, not dominate or punish in the alpha-male style of most police dramas.
Essentially, the story is a race, a page-turner that will have readers invested, in equal measure, in the fate of the three main characters—Llewellyn Moss, who succumbs to a temptation that few of us would be able to resist; Sheriff Bell, whose world-weariness is easily understood by anyone over a certain age; Chigurh, the sociopathic killer whose single-mindedness and stony conscious is somehow alluring.
Of course, a book’s ending usually defines its theme. In the case of No Country for Old Men, the theme seems to hover somewhere between morality and justice. Do not however, let the standard-issue plot fool you into thinking that the story will culminate with a triumphant ride into the sunset. McCarthy may have recycled an old plot, but in the hands of such a gifted novelist, most will hardly notice.
