the case for miami
Miami is having a moment. Cold and Covid have hit the Northeast hard, at least Los Angeles has the Lakers, and San Francisco is San Francisco. Against this backdrop and sunny and sexy Miami has swaggered in with high temperatures, low taxes, and open restaurants. Long the redoubt of refugees from Cuban tyranny and Tri-State weather, Miami these days is on the make, trying to move up from playpen to tech hub. With New York staggering, there’s room on the metropolitan mountaintop, and Miami is ready to paint it in pastels.
Writers from Tom Wolfe (Bloody Miami) to Isaac Bashevis Singer (My Love Affair with Miami Beach) to Will Smith (Miami) have long been taken with this Southern city that sometimes seems more like a Northerner’s fever dream, with its bubbes and bikinis. Part of Miami’s appeal has always been this synthesis between Long Island and Las Vegas, sandy and seedy. Miami Vice is both a catchphrase and a promise. Fun at close proximity has perennial appeal, never more so than now.
As you might have gathered, I’m writing this poolside. For a defiant New Yorker used to castigating friends for bailing on the city in its hour of need, spending a few days on the beach feels well deserved and a bit of a betrayal. In the best way. It isn’t so much that Covid-19 doesn’t exist here, or that people pretend that it doesn’t, so much as that it coexists with all of the pleasures that lay their own claim to being infectious: dancing, dining, a sense of perennial party. Talking to Miamians across hotels, bars, and the beach (a tough assignment) has revealed a heady mix of snowbirds, weekend warriors, and those making a longer and more interesting bet on the place to be an emergent hub in a new post pandemic landscape.
But walking along Collins Avenue reveals a far more interesting reality: Miami isn’t exactly pre or post-pandemic, but interestingly parallel to it. People wear masks, and they party. Nobody is saying that every precaution is taken, but the bias is towards life and Liv. Sipping a fig old fashioned in the lobby of the Setai Hotel, surrounded by beauty of all kinds, seemed like both an escape and something like a deep cut to the most glamorous marrow. You can argue with it, but if you don’t feel the urgency of a return to the silliness of the scene than your bubble might be a little bit too thick.
Covid has tilted our landscape in strange ways: many of us have never been freer to work or live where we choose, while there have never been more restrictions on how our bodies circulate. We are nomads in a still largely shuttered landscape. Here’s the tension: on the one hand, this is a time to commit to places and people, when loyalty is tested. We’re in the trenches, and these are the settings and stories we’ll tell for years to come. Our comings and goings matter.
Also: this is an instant of loosened bonds and disassembled routine. Like a beating heart we must move systolically and diastolically with people and places, taking in the wildness and the variety while not losing our basic sense of self. Our lives have to feel real to us, even if we feel like we’re hanging out in a dramatically extended parenthesis. We don’t have to pick cities for forever, but we should find the values and people who we want to choose alongside. This is the interval to build our teams, to invest in both the frame and the freedom.
In the meantime, a little fun in the sun-
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