New Development

Someone name-dropped John Stamos to me yesterday. I laughed, asked if his hair was still teased, and got a blank stare in return. The second time it happened, ("I was talking to John Stamos last night about traffic on I-95...") I managed to maintain a straight face, and by the third time I was even able, I think, to affect a what-an-interesting-person-you-are-to-talk-casually-with-John-Stamos smile of admiration.

I am now deciding between three places to live: an affordable dump in an OK location, a not-so-affordable/very small room in a house in an amazing location, and a luxury high rise apartment for the same price on an island in Biscayne Bay, which would just be sort of awful but wouldn't smell weird and or be infested with lizards.

Miami, briefly

I'm saving my most potent observations for the yet-to-be-really-named Florida Letter Writing Club, which I am way more excited about than this stupid web log right now. I got here on Monday and I'm staying at my editor's very fancy house on Miami Beach while he is out of town. It's quite nice. I wake up and play piano and lie around on white couches. Sometimes I go outside to sit on the deck where little lizards change color and mangos periodically fall from the sky. I've been going out a bit with acquaintences and new friends, but it's been very lonely. When my dad got stuck in the city for the night en route to Ecuador I almost cried with gratitude I was so happy to have someone to talk to. Finding an apartment has been really hard. Miami is much more of a car-centric city than I thought, and I want to live on the beach to be able to escape my car. It's expensive though, and parking is a hassle, and I have met some VERY weird people in the course of my search. Staunch Republican Zionists, Venezuelan political refugees, French expats who appear to be on a tour of every sun destination in the world... One demographic that is noticeably lacking is any sort of hipster indy rock sorts. "Cool nerd" is thus far not a moniker that I can apply to the population of any particular Miami neighborhood or scene in the way that you can apply such a label freely in New York. And the DIY culture of Little Rock is definitely not something I hope to find here, although I think there are very few places in the world where such a thing exists and most of them are probably small cities in the South. No, there are no thrift-store clad bicycle kids who play in bands and loot dumpsters as far as I can tell. There's no drinking whiskey on porches or going fishing or self-published magazines about local bands. I dropped in a dive bar last night and it was inhabited with the sorts of folks you expect to inhabit dive bars: not good-looking kids but watery-eyed and sodden loners. They did play Ring of Fire on the jukebox though. I've never been so happy to hear mariachi horns. I may be geographically southern, but I've left The South, and I've been pretty down about that.

Now, in Miami's favor: this is the most stylish place I think I've ever been. People are better looking than in New York, better dressed than in Rio or NY, more international than L.A. and in better shape than anywhere I've ever been. People are so gorgeous, and from all over the world, and they ride around South Beach on their glossy beach cruiser bicycles and I fall in love with each and every one of them. As for my friends here, I've been hanging out with Maya and Krishna, with Lily (see!), and with a couple of writers from the New Times. Everybody there, by the way, is at least ten years older than me, but that's OK. Everybody here works in real estate or is getting their real estate license or is thinking about getting it (even the Ashram-raised Krishna!). There seems to be a city-wide obsession with sofa design, such that in the course of a given day one is probably exposed to many thousands of images of boxy looking couches that represent sleek, urban lifestyles. There is also an obsession with lifestyle condominiums with names like Nirvana and Cité-on-the-Bay that all tie back to the real estate thing. I visited one luxury building, which was a terrifying experience. All the amenities, the in-house tailor and the swimming pools and the personal trainer and the valet parking seem to just exist to give the average douchebag a sense of nobility and importance. It's pretty gross, but the way it goes here. In sum, if Rio and L.A. had a baby, I think its name would be Miami.

BTW, the Lazy Fair EP was finished before I left Little Rock, but I don't know how to post it on here and even if I did I'm sort of shy about it. I'll send Mp3s or whatever though, if anybody wants. It turned out pretty good.

Hurrah

Dave on public radio talking about chicken.

overcompensation

I'm back in Arkansas for a few days more. Our friends Leigh and Tony were married in Fayetteville this weekend. It was a pretty amazing time. There were about forty people naked in a swimming pool by the end of the night, and then around midnight one of those crazy summer thunderstorms that only happen in the middle of the country rolled in, and there was a general scrambling of people to find their underwear, and a whipping around of trees, and lightning. The next day the defeated and hungover gathered in the park to play frisbee and bocce and soccer, supplied with about five cases of beer. The sun was hot, the cops didn't come, and it was essentially a perfect day. If I were a painter I would want to do a series of paintings about lawn games. I particularly enjoy the visual spectacle of watching people play bocce, all looking alertly in the same direction with their beers and cigarettes, moving around the field like a small herd of deer. There was always something about summer in Minnesota that I missed a lot on the East Coast that seems to exist here -- a certain shimmery quality to the air, most evident when one is on a soccer field looking at a line of trees against the sky. The heat smells a certain way and feels different somehow, the light has a richer quality to it, particularly at the end of the day. The bugs are loud, and there is Old Style to drink.

What else has happened? The Lazy Fair recorded in a barn in Benton. I should have mp3s by the end of next week. Davey's essay on hot chicken in the Oxford American made Best American Food Writing. I'm writing an article for the Localist on the American Princes that involved visiting the singer's grandmother on her sod farm in Scott yesterday. She made us bloody marys.

If anybody knows anyone in Miami now is the time to let me know. I'm leaving on the 17th, stopping in Atlanta, getting there on the 20th. Whew. It's going to be a sad departure, the end of a very nice chapter in Arkansas.