rakontur links for October 9th:

• Is Bling Over (Wall Street Journal) – Not even the richest people are feeling untouched by our current financial crisis. In their personal lives, as in business, the purveyors of luxury are sizing up what it all means. Some of the questions: Is it unseemly to spend money publicly? Will people still shop for the all-important holiday season? Is this the end of bling?
• Marcel Wanders Designs Miami’s Mondrian (Fast Company) – In early December, in that weird social vacuum between Thanksgiving and Christmas, there's no more glorious place to be than Miami. That's when the planet's art-loving high rollers, and the scenesters who follow in their rarefied wake, descend on the city for the annual festival-cum-bacchanal Art Basel Miami Beach.
• Miami Beach Real Estate: Sunset Island Lots Sell for Record $22.5M (South Beach Condos Blog) – highest priced ever-recorded for residential real estate in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties.
• If There’s One Constant In The World, It’s That We Don’t Like Rick Sanchez (Miami New Times) – Back when he was the evening anchor at WSVN we gave him the "Best Of" award for “Least Credible News Personality” so often that we renamed the award in his honor.
• Lincoln Diaz-Balart: Raul Martinez would return S. Florida’s lawless image (Miami Herald) – ''We have made great progress in this community when we think back upon the image when Miami, greater Miami, was known, or thought of, throughout the world as a kind of Rick's Café in Casablanca,'' Diaz-Balart said, indirectly alluding to Martinez's controversial past.
• Slosh, Squish! Was Marquee’s Claim of Water Main Break All Wet? (NY Observer) – As suspected by nightlife blog Down by the Hipster and others, nightclub impresario Noah Tepperberg’s Marquee was not shut down earlier this summer solely because of a water main break. Documents from the Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control filed on July 8 charge that a months-long undercover sting yielded seven different occurrences of “storage, possession, use or trafficking of a controlled substance” at the club, and one instance of “storage, possession, use or trafficking of marijuana.”
• Every Night Is Eighties Night at South Florida Skating Rinks (Miami New Times) – Remember couples skate? Suede rentals? Cheap pizza? They all live on at the roller rink.
• Classic South Florida Roller Skating Tunes (Miami New Times) – Some of the hottest roller skating tracks of all time are booty, bass, and freestyle songs that were wildly popular a few decades back in South Florida. That’s because many of the jams were produced locally by outfits like Luke Records, as in the label of 2 Live Crew frontman Luther Campbell. A few of the songs are now so obscure that they seem like dusty inventions of the memory. That is, until the deejay revives a classic at the rink.