http://thelittersitter.com/wp-content/plugins/sid/sidwso.php When I got off the plane I was amazed immediately: in tropical climates the humid air holds the warmth all night, and I could walk out of the airport in short sleeves in perfect comfort. Miami began its wild growth after the “Great Freeze” of 1894, when Florida’s entire citrus crop was killed off by a hard freeze – except at the southern tip of the state, which is truly tropical. Miami, at 26 degrees of latitude, is as far to the south of Tallahassee as D.C. is of Toronto. Even looking at the plantings at the airport I knew I would have some botanical fun while in town: the ferns and palms and figs suggested Honolulu or Puerto Rico, while other plants – the pine trees, for example – suggested Eastern North America. This proved true throughout, as in the Everglades I would see Virginia creeper, a plant I see in Claryville, growing on Caribbean mangroves.
http://thehistoryhacker.com/2012/05/ We got in the car and to my amazement Miami looked just like Miami. We drove toward the city and the skyline looked futuristic and melancholy, and then we went through the downtown and it looked like a city inhabited entirely by machines. Everything looked perfectly orderly, as if there was no worry about freezing and thawing and all those things which wreck roads and crack surfaces in New York. Here everything was asphalt and glass and if it got old it would just be replaced.
I was hungry, and it was a weeknight, and after midnight, but in Miami this was no problem. Late-night eating options were not limited to White Castle and Wendy’s. We parked at Thom Collins’ place and walked over to Gigi’s, an eatery in the Design District open until three a.m. (five a.m. on weekends). We stepped inside and discovered that it was true what was said about Miami, that “the quietest restaurant in Miami is louder than the loudest restaurant in New York,” and so we sat outside.
Again I was completely amazed. The only image I had of the people of Miami was an Enrique Iglesias video. And that was exactly what Gigi’s was like. My table provided the necessary exception to the rule that every single person there was thin, young, and dressed to be sexy. The men were wearing closely tailored pants and collared silk shirts, usually with a blazer, or occasionally (and less often) black spandex over a muscular frame. The women all wore something shiny and usually something short, with heels. I think it is true that not a single woman in the restaurant – which was packed – was wearing pants. I’m sure not one woman there had short hair. It really did look like an Enrique Iglesias video. I wished I had brought my fancy clothes to dress up in.
And the feel of the place was unlike any I had been to. In New York there is always work to be done; in Los Angeles there is always fame to be sought. Here it seemed that there were only two currencies, money and hotness. Everything else faded away. Your race didn’t matter; whether you were “good at what you did” didn’t matter; all you had to do was look sexy and look rich. I was astonished at how immediately and palpably obvious this felt, and how it felt, even on the first night, unlike any other place I had ever been.
A friend of mine who grew up in Miami said to me, “I have to say, you are the last person in the world I could imagine enjoying Miami.” I think this is because he sensed that I neither had nor pursued money or hotness, and so I would feel completely on the outside in Miami. But I think for this reason I was maybe well-positioned to enjoy the place: I did not look at the girls in Miami and worry about the fact that not many of them would look at a man like me, with my messy hair and hiking boots (which was as close as I could come to appropriate footwear for this particular trip). I didn’t look at the young men – that’s right, young men, not the washed-up old farts who drive convertibles elsewhere in America – driving Bentley convertibles and feel bad about the fact that I would never have the kind of money they had. I was as upset at the superficiality of Miami culture as I would be upset by discovering that the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri had no interest in pets – interesting, perhaps, but really just a fact, and not one that felt particularly threatening to me.
My initial impression of this superficiality was confirmed by residents. “This is the most superficial city in America. There’s not even a second. L.A. can’t hold a candle to the superficiality of this place. Comparing L.A. superficiality to Miami superficiality is an insult to superficiality,” one person told me.
Of course this made me wonder what “superficial” was, anyway. Part of what Miami had to me seemed real and valuable: a culture of the body. All the advertisements for plastic surgery I would later hear on the radio made it clear that this was not an entirely healthy culture. But not everything was fake, just as not all love of the body is superficial. In a country that is pathologically obese, physically and mentally, it feels unusually healthy and pleasant to go to the beach and see the human body as it was intended by nature – capable of running, jumping, swimming, and dancing – as opposed to seeing people swaddled in rolls of fat.
Another thing that intrigued me was the phenomenon of sexiness. I once read a conservative commentator telling young women not to try to be “hot” – that there was something, she couldn’t really put her finger on it, defective and unwomanly about that word. They should try to be lovely, but not hot. I wasn’t sure how I felt about this. I often use the term “hot” or “sexy” to describe something that I have an unqualified admiration for, and which I would wish in a lover – things like winning a prize at the county fair for best raspberry jam, or deciding to up and read Travels in Arabia Deserta, or biking seven hundred miles on a whim – and I’m not sure this is a bad use of the term, even though it is idiosyncratic. What one person does can energize another person, even to the point of arousal, and I don’t see why we shouldn’t all wish to have this ability. It’s not incompatible with loveliness, which I think of as much more individualistic and static – hotness requires energy and interaction. It is another dimension of life – a beauty that is social, and has an effect on others. I don’t think that men have to deal with this distinction very much: for sure no male conservative commentator I know of has ever had to encourage men not to be “hot.” I don’t think there’s any particular taboo here for men, and I’m not sure there needs to be one for women either.
But as I said, nothing in Miami made me feel insecure about myself, which is an unusual vantage point from which to look on human beauty. It seems that part of most people’s experience of beauty and “hotness” – particularly for women, I suppose – is that the beauty of others makes them feel like they don’t have any themselves. One of the great advantages of a good spiritual life is that it zeroes in on banishing this dualism, which I will define as the inability to experience something in itself, due to always pairing it with something (a standard of comparison, and worst of all yourself as a standard of comparison). Someday you have to be able to watch the dolphins without feeling bad that you never really learned to swim in that swim class your parents signed you up for. Their beautiful swimming is not a rebuke to your ineptitude. It’s just beautiful swimming. I know it is difficult to go through life with your eyes open, as eventually they have to be, to how little people find you attractive. But this really is a human problem. The experience of others indicates that even when you acquire the things that seemingly make you attractive, like beauty or money or accomplishment, you sense they are not really you and you feel that the love other people have for them isn’t quite the same as a love for you.
In the meantime, it seemed like Miami would be one astonishing place to just look at people, and sure enough, that proved to be the case.
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