Murmurs 

“Wasn’t that a blast? A hive of kids doing the monkey chant — isn’t that cool beans?”

Bayfront Park becomes a Balinese temple as Monkey Chant guru Grady Cousins entrances New World School of the Arts theater students. Photo by Cynthia Archbold

Moveon.org got local folks to grab a corner of Lincoln Road last Thursday for a demonstration. Photo by Ryan Brown

Choose Your Own Parking Adventure!

You attend a Miami Beach Capital Improvements Projects City Center Project meeting. On the overhead projector, you see that your street may lose some parking because of the new mid-block bump-outs, bulb-outs, medians, mid-block crossing and sidewalk improvements. Do you:

Call the CIP office to see if your parking will be affected?

Visit the CIP office to see if your parking will be affected?

Forget about it and go home?

Crawl into the fetal position and sob?

You call the Capital Improvements Projects Department.

The CIP office has no idea how many parking spaces will be lost, or where. A traffic study has been conducted but according to CIP Director Jorge Chartrand, “The report has not been published yet.” Do you:

Wait for the report to be published?

Complain and raise hell until they publish the report?

Forget about it and stay home?

Crawl into the fetal position and sob?

You wait for the report to be published.

The On-street Parking Inventory portion of the traffic study report conducted during March 2005 and compiled in September of that year, indicates the “potential reduction in on-street parking” to be about 44 spaces within the approximately two-mile radius around the Miami Beach Convention Center. But according to the CIP Department, this is a preliminary report. Mario Gonzalez-Pola, senior CIP coordinator, estimates that “the worst-case scenario is 44 spaces.” The report is also careful to mention that “only roadway segments where on-street parking was potentially lost” were reported. Chartrand says the “report was done before the design of the spaces.” Do you:

Call the CIP office to see if your street will be affected?

Visit the CIP office to see if your street will be affected?

Forget about it and stay home?

Crawl into the fetal position and sob?

You call the CIP office to see if your parking will be affected.

About a month later, the CIP office tells you that about 60 percent of the designs by Chen and Associates Civil and Environmental Engineers have been completed. By visiting the CIP office you can view the plans to see if your street will be affected. Do you:

Visit the CIP office to see if your street will be affected?

Forget about it and stay home?

Crawl into the fetal position and sob?

You visit the CIP office to view the plans.

The CIP office shows you that you can view the plans for your street. It looks like your residential parking will be affected. They insist, although the designers must be contacted to confirm, that the project isn’t really losing 44 spaces. That’s more like a maximum number, but you’d have to either count each individual lost space by comparing preconstruction survey sheets with the final construction plans, or call the designers to find out. Do you:

Call the designers to see if your street will be affected?

Forget about it and stay home?

Crawl into the fetal position and sob?

You call the designers to see if your street will be affected.

The designers do not return your phone calls. You don’t know if the designers return the phone calls from the city, because the city does not return your phone calls. Do you:

Assume you’re probably losing some parking and stay home?

You assume you’re probably losing some parking and stay home. Congratulations! You win! Kind of.

“I’m sorry. It’s just that Mr. Regalado can be very funny at times.”

Paper Clips

At last week’s Miami Commission meeting, Commissioners Tomas Regalado and Marc Sarnoff exchanged a few words that prompted the latter to burst out laughing right in the middle of the meeting.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just that Mr. Regalado can be very funny at times.”

Turns out it was a paper clip that spurred the innocuous har-de-har. But we’re not talking just any paper clip, mind you — this precious clip was from former Commissioner Linda Haskins’ office (where Sarnoff’s staff is now based). And, for one reason or another, when Haskins left, she — or someone — took along the files and constituent information (mainly complaint documents) as well as all the stationery!

“Yeah, Marc was complaining about not having any of the files or any paper, pens and office material in his office, so when he asked if he could have the clip, I told him, ‘Sure, I saved it from Linda’s office,’” Regalado explained to Murmurs in a follow-up call.

“In our file cabinet, you would have seen several files, such as on the Nirvana development or any sort of complaints from residents, but they were all gone — only the empty files with the labels were there,” Sarnoff told Murmurs. “I guess they wanted to make it very difficult to create any continuity in that office, or give us the chance to see what the status was on complaints. Basically they just wanted to make us look inefficient.”

On the Peace Path

Last Thursday the intersection Alton Road and Lincoln, on South Beach, turned into a venue for public discourse on national foreign policy.

“Everything changed after 9/11!!” a woman stopped at a red light yelled from her car.

“Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11!!” replied a man holding a sign that read “No More Mad Cowboy Disease, Impeach Bush.”

Others driving by honked or gave a thumbs-up as pedestrians took pictures of the demonstration with cell phones.

Meanwhile, Larry Thorson, a retired AP journalist with a soft voice and a Daily Kos shirt, asked people to sign a petition he held in place on a clipboard.

“The petitions will be returned to moveon.org, to get an idea of national opposition and to drum up enthusiasm … to let people know they’re not alone in opposing the war,” said Thorson.

The Miami Beach resident signed up to help organize the event on the well-known political Web site, which allows visitors to register to attend, or hold, demonstrations against the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. These moveon.org demonstrations, currently taking place nationwide, were spurred by the Jan. 10 presidential address in which President Bush called for an increase in U.S. troops in Iraq.

“You’re against the war, right?” Mandelana Cruz, a passerby asked Thorson. “I used to be a journalist in Cuba. I came here looking for freedom,” Cruz added, “but freedom is not sending the poor to die in war.”

“I think it’s ridiculous,” said young demonstrator Sam McGrath, 14. “We should have planned this better. We should have something better than this new plan as well.”

McGrath was with his friend and fellow demonstrator Keith Clougherty, also 14.

“I hope this helps people realize that we should not be in Iraq .… I hope we can help spread awareness,” said Clougherty.

Downtown Monkey Chant

Against the steel and glass construction chaos on Biscayne Boulevard, amid the cacophony of jackhammers, cranes and bulldozers, an ancient ritual, older than the trees, unfolded Friday afternoon.

As the traffic festered, a mob of mesmerized teenagers sat cross-legged in a circle on the ground in Bayfront Park, swaying and chattering a cappella sounds, seemingly transported into a state of rapture.

No, these were not Hare Krishnas or kids on ecstasy, but theater students performing the 2,000-year-old monkey chant.

More than 100 entranced New World School of the Arts theater students spent the afternoon bending their bodies way back and then way forward down towards the earth, fluttering their fingers, then pushing up and flinging their arms towards the sky, all the while creating a kind of chant-in-the-round.

Monkey chant guru Grady Cousins acted as a conductor, directing the chanters to take turns making particular rhythmic sound combinations, creating a vocal texture of percussion, counterpoint and harmony.
Not your typical drama school exercise, but Octavio Campos, who teaches movement at New World School of the Arts, admits he tends to push the envelope of creativity, and so was compelled to hire Cousins to teach a week of master classes in the Indonesian art.

What seems most impressive is that the teenagers sat still and meditated for a solid 10 minutes during the chant. “They experienced total peace. It was so beautiful. Everybody was so into it,” said Campos.

Never heard of the monkey chant? Few outside of its birthplace of Bali have, Cousins says. It’s formally known as Kecak (pronounced ketch-ack), a complex chant involving a cappella sounds and usually sung in a temple by 100 to 200 men.

The men do indeed represent a mob of monkeys — a mythical army of simians from the Ramayana story, a Balinese saga.

In any case, Cousins admits the monkey chant is pretty obscure in America. “I don’t know too many people in America who are doing what I’m doing, but it’s very common in Bali.”

“Wasn’t that a blast?” asked Timothy Schmand, executive director of Bayfront Park Management. “A hive of kids doing the monkey chant — isn’t that cool beans?”

At the beginning some of these imaginative young actors were so excited about imitating monkeys they started climbing trees and running after people in the park.

“They went after my maintenance man, who panicked and ran away,” said Schmand, laughing. “But other than that — how could you not react to that? It was just great.”

Hence, he’s asking New World students to perform street theater during the farmers’ market taking place every Thursday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., Feb. 22 through April 5. Schmand says he wants all of those lawyers, accountants, bankers and secretaries cooped up in their offices to come outside and enjoy spectacles like the monkey chant.

“In public spaces one should be confronted by surprising beauty,” he said. “Our goal in Bayfront Park is to create those moments of surprise where people just go ‘gasp.’ And that was one of them.”

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