Summer of Clarity

Everyone in Miami has a copy of Joan Didion's Miami on their shelf or coffee table, but no one has read it. Miamians just like having their egos stroked and this will suffice. 

Joan Didion asks Miamians “what Miami means to them?” 

And everyone replies that the eleven day long installation by Bulgarian and Moroccan artists that took place in a time when the city was in disarray from a refugee crisis, race riots, and unfettered corruption is emblematic of our city. 

In Miami, we define ourselves by a fleeting aesthetic. 

We’re bold and flashy until the laundered crypto runs out or grimy grift comes to a screeching halting stop. I’m haunted by the haiku that haunts Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking and I bastardize her bastardized version everywhere I go. 

Miami is yet again facing social crises of epic proportion. 

Miami boasts one of the highest income disparities in the nation, the coastline is being overdeveloped by towers that crack the foundations of what was there before. 

Locals are displaced and seeking a better life up north. Newcomers seeking freedom are denied the longstanding compassionate care this city once prided itself on delivering. 

I don’t recognize much of Miami anymore, but it feels certain that in a town plagued by its boom/bust cycle that we are once again headed for another collapse. And this time, I fear people will start defining this city by cheesy, gimmicky, corporate overlords like my nemesis, Romero Britto. I miss when people held puke-in rallies at the Dadeland South metrorail station, when people forced themselves to vomit on his work.

Aren't we all just drawn to neon because of the sun damage to our collective retinas? 

Who knows? Who cares?  

At least Christo had to spend years picking up trash on the barrier islands before we let them install their art.