aka Vice City, Little Cuba, Magic City, the MIA, the 305
The exterior of O Cinema, via facebook.com/pages/O-Cinema/143935142284243
The film scene in Miami is a bit of a drag lately, but that, like so many other things here, seems to be changing — if slowly. Last month, I posted about the totally homegrown Borscht Film Festival, which has proven a booster for locally authored film and music. Now, there might be a place to actually watch it.
Full disclosure: At my full-time gig, part of my responsibility is to edit a daily music blog, Crossfade, which is meant to cover all things in the Miami music and nightlife scene. I would welcome some more independent competition, and I enjoy exchanging with other people who run similar local blogs — but there aren’t a lot of them.
Kill Your Idol recently opened on Espanola Way, South Beach. (Photo via Kill Your Idol's Facebook page)
The funny thing about living in Miami is that outsiders always equate “Miami” overall with “South Beach,” which is, in fact, just a small section of a legally different city — Miami Beach — which is also an island, separated from the mainland by a couple causeways. South Beach is where tourists mostly and understandably want to go. That’s where all the art deco architecture is, where all the flashy nightlife is, and of course, the actual sand and water.
Image CC by 2.0, via dpstyles on Flickr
As someone who falls in the 25-34 age bracket, lives in a large city and goes out a lot, I feel like I am “supposed” to be using Foursquare. While I generally enjoy using new social media tools, I just can’t get into this one. People unfamiliar with it call Twitter disdained banality. But Foursquare seems to be that even more. A rather content-less, competitive stream of places where people have gone, mostly to consume stuff. Here are the reasons I’m not hopping on the Foursquare train right now:
I don't want to have to wear these every single time I go to the movies. (Photo CC by 2.0, via pink_fish13 on Flickr)
Like I’ve said before, I am one of the few people I know who still attends movies regularly. My attendance has dropped off lately due to an overload of work commitments, but at one point, my boyfriend and I would see about a movie a week. So it was with great amusement early last year that we attended the first 3-D movie to come out in a long time, the slasher flick My Bloody Valentine.
Cheesy reality TV can stay confined to South Beach's Washington and Collins Avenues club scene. (Photo CC by 2.0, via emilio labrador on Flickr)
I have watched far more “reality” trash TV than I care to admit. But hey, a little Schadenfreude and light voyeurism are often great for making you feel better about your own troubles. So, at first, when the trickle of cheap production of this stuff became a flood, I was amused at the number of one-off, now-forgotten series that came to Miami to film. Every one of these productions celebrated the worst aspects of the city — its superficiality, materialism, the cheesiness of both the built environment and the population.
Shorts with heels: Strange but logical in Miami. (Photo CC by 2.0, via emilio labrador on Flickr)
Summer may not be technically here on the calendar, but the summer temperatures have already arrived in Miami. They’re only going to get worse as the months wear on, making getting dressed extremely difficult. If you plan to go out anywhere in the evening where there are other human bodies around, you basically have to wear as little as possible.
Jacuzzi Boys are local favorites. (Photo via myspace.com/jacuzziboys)
Miami definitely has musical seasons based around the big international events that roll through town. The winter, or rather November and December, tend towards the artsy and experimental, with everything coming to a head with a string of performances around the time of the annual Art Basel Miami Beach fair. By February, things are gearing up for Winter Music Conference, and then until the end of March, it’s all about electronic music. WMC, though, creates a real fatigue, and that, combined with the annual summer slow-down, means that things get back into a more rock and roll mood for the locals. Lately that’s meant a lot of garage-y stuff — definitely not limited just to Miami, but swampy sounds jibe especially well with the summertime weather here.
An inside view of Bar, Miami's current most bicycle-friendly, um, bar. (Image via facebook.com/BAR28NE14ST)
Miami is way behind basically every other major city in bike-friendliness. While there are a decent number of pretty vistas to ride past, actually taking to city streets can be a kamikaze experience. In a particularly gruesome incident this past January, a man riding on an island path extremely popular with cyclists was killed by a hit-and-run drunk driver — around 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning!
Tights hand-painted by local artist Caroline Geys.
For a while there, even the artsy crowds in Miami were as label-obsessed as their “mainstream” counterparts, only swapping, say, Viktor and Rolf, Marc Jacobs, and maybe Jeremy Scott for the usual Gucci/Prada/whatever. It would be easy to link recent winds of change in that attitude to the recession. But bohemia exists in a parallel universe, anyways, and the cost of living here has long been so much cheaper than New York or L.A. that Miami people always seem to have more disposable income.
A screenshot of the Guest Lab's Tumblr site
Tumblr, lately, seems to be a popular blogging platform for local types. Since it’s somewhere between Twitter, with its tiny character constraints, and full-on blog software like Wordpress, it is, in a way, more flexible. Tumblr lets you share little bits of ideas and multimedia, and can be used quickly without the implied obligation to write too much. Some of the best new Miami-based arts and culture blogs have turned to Tumblr. Here are a few worth checking out. Read More
Jamie Oliver versus West Virginia
Although it’s cool to claim you don’t watch much TV, I’ll admit that the boob tube does run a lot chez moi. It’s mainly for passive background noise. Writing and editing professionally is often solitary work, and I often labor from home. I find too much quiet disconcerting, and as I write mostly professionally about music, I also don’t run a lot of music while I’m working. I have to switch between writing and editing other people’s pieces really quickly, and it causes too much of a mental disconnect to be, say, playing metal when you’re examining words about hip-hop on a screen. So I let TV run as a sort of perverse background white noise, usually on Bravo or VH1. Most of the daytime programming plays over and over again and the repetition is kind of soothing if you don’t actually pay attention.