Miami

I just got back from three days in Miami Beach. Fucking A.

I have put down roots in South Carolina. If I weren’t married, and if I didn’t have a bunch of cats, and if every aspect of my life weren’t centered around living in the South, I’d move to Miami Beach in a second. I’d get a condo South of Fifth, or in the Setai. I already have the tattoos, jewelry, and other accoutrements; I’d have to start working out. I’d get a tan. I’d walk down Collins Ave, tattoos distorted by my rippling muscles, barely contained beneath my designer clothes. I’d have a hyperactive social life, which is the polite way of saying I’d be oversexed. Everyone is oversexed in Miami Beach. They are all wearing Versace. I had a bottle of Versace’s Eros for a while. It smells like what sex smells like—they recreated it and put it in a bottle.

I had dinner at Jaya at the Setai before heading out for a club night. The Setai has a reputation for being the quiet hotel, but Jaya comes alive after 8pm. There is music, there are dancers, there are lights; it is the place to see and been seen. It is very flashy. It is difficult to assimilate in Miami if you are not flashy. Everyone knows about the cars. A Lamborghini SUV is like a Honda there. Fake boobs. Plastic surgery. Instagram models. It is all about looking good.

Many people I know in South Carolina would fit in Miami like a wrestler on a basketball team. I joked with my wife that we should bring another couple from South Carolina down there for a weekend in the summer. Good luck. I have a difficult enough time getting my wife to Miami. She was born Pennsylvania Dutch in the agricultural part of Pennsylvania, filled with people named Stoltzfus and Snider. The Germans are very conservative in speech and dress. My wife does not own one article of clothing that reveals cleavage, and believe me, she should. It is not for the socially conservative, and when I say socially conservative, I’m not talking about Libs of Tik Tok. I’m talking about the Church Chat puritanism that exists pretty much anywhere in the country except for Miami, and possibly Los Angeles. If you are living in Miami or Los Angeles, you have to be ready to take your shirt off at a moment’s notice. It’s a cultural thing.

Miami, of course, is home to some pretty great electronic music. My favorite spot is Do Not Sit on the Furniture, an intimate club that is home to some pretty amazing organic and progressive house. There is another progressive club down the street, Treehouse, but that attracts more druggies and fewer househeads. And then, of course, there is Space, where the party doesn’t really get going until 6am and continues until noon and beyond. I did that once, years ago. Set my alarm for 5am and went to Space to watch Joris Voorn and Nick Fanciulli and watched the sun come up on the terrace. You get a lot of people who go to Space at 2 and leave at 4:30 and say, yo, I’m a badass! I stayed out late! No. You basically just disrespected Space. In Miami, you can start partying on Friday afternoon and keep it going all the way until Monday morning, and people do that.

Miami has a laissez-faire attitude toward these sorts of things. It was, of course, the global hub of cocaine transshipment in the 80s, popularized by Miami Vice. Cocaine is still fairly commonplace. The very long lines for the bathrooms at Do Not Sit are not because people have to take a dump. At Space, some people will do it right there on the dancefloor. Cocaine, I mean.

And then, of course, there is Eleven, which is a combination dance club and strip club—there are DJs, playing electronic music (usually crap), with a hundred strippers dancing and milling around. But they managed to create this environment where women feel comfortable going to Eleven, as it doesn’t attract the degenerate perverts, so you have regular women mixing with strippers and from what I hear, after a while it gets confusing as to which is which. I haven’t been there, mostly because I’m an annoying music purist, and I don’t want to listen to poseurs like Diplo. Eleven, by the way, is open 24/7. That’s right---you can go any time of the day or night. And if that weren’t enough debauchery for you, there is an honest-to-goodness strip club, Tootsie’s, which is a RCI Hospitality property. Haven’t been there either, but the stock has been doing well, with a tailwind provided by a lot of enthusiastic stock promoters.

I am making it sound like it is nothing but drugs and partying and partial nudity. There is more than that. There is Art Basel, of course, but that is such a food fight that I’ve never been, even though I have more than a passing interest in contemporary art. There are a bunch of museums. There are a bunch of great public parks. There are amazing restaurants. The funny thing about Miami Beach is that it’s actually calmed down a bit in recent years, due to gentrification. You are seeing a lot more strollers and a lot less riffraff. I have seen this phenomenon in Brooklyn and elsewhere—the strollers come in and ruin everything, and a bunch of Karens show up, complaining about the noise from the clubs, and next thing you know the city council is passing noise ordinances.

This is a problem that nightlife is experiencing more broadly. Gentrification, yes, Karens, yes, but culturally we’re moving away from the period of time where it was totally normal to go out and get fucked up taking magic pills and listen to bleeps and bloops. That peaked in the 90s and 2000s. The number of nightclubs in the world is shrinking, and that is true of Miami, too. One of my favorites, Trade, closed down two years ago. It was an amazing space with a sick sound system, and it’s gone. I saw Justin Martin there a few years ago. I’m not much into the Dirtybird flavor of house music, but it was an amazing night. It’s difficult to communicate how euphoric a night out dancing is. I’ve had some seriously religious experiences in clubs in my life. It would be too bad if it disappeared completely.

There is a lot of money in Miami, and I’m not quite sure where it comes from. Porsches and Teslas, but also Ferraris, Lambos, Bugattis, and Mclarens are all very common, not to mention the occasional Rolls Royce. Who buys this shit? I heard a theory recently that most of the supercars that you see on the road are rented. I suppose that is possible. Miami also has some very expensive real estate. On a per square foot basis, it’s not as expensive as New York, but on the ultra-high end, there are more $40-$80 million places than you can shake a stick at. Who are these people? I got an insight, one time, in 2014. A real estate agent bragged to me that he had dozens of Venezuelan expats who thought nothing of wiring $5 million in cash at a closing for a condo in a luxury building. They made all their money arbing the FX. There is a lot of South American money in Miami, some of it shady. There is a saying about Miami: it’s nice, because it’s so close to the United States.

Anyway, my goal is to make a shitload of money and then pick up a slightly more affordable condo down there. That has been my goal for years. There are direct flights from Charleston, which makes it a bit easier. Or maybe buying a place is a huge waste of money, when I can spend far less getting a hotel room for a couple of nights. Second homes are hard. Unless they’re easy to get to, you don’t end up using them. So until then, two weekends a year I fly down there and live out my fantasies. You know why I like Miami? Because it is materialistic. Materialism is the antithesis of spirituality. And far too many people neglect their material sides, focusing only on the spiritual realm. The same people who have that one sexy outfit that they never wear because they are saving it for a special occasion. If you wait for a special occasion, you will never wear it. In Miami, you get to wear it every day.

P.S. Speaking of all this nightclub stuff, you should really come to my birthday party in New York on Friday, March 10^th. I’m DJing, along with some really great other guys. It’s at Doux Supper Club, in Flatiron. Pick up some tickets here!  Bottle service available.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/stochastics-birthday-bash-tickets-503640561477