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Reflections from Miami on Playground Cities
Written by Jimmy
Sitting on the 16th floor, overlooking Miami beach, bright white sands, covered with hotel loungers, and a dozen kite surfers bouncing off small waves just off shore. And I’m trying to understand the appeal of London…So continuith our exploration of cities. We’ve given you discussions of vertical cities and horizontal cities, So now, what do we do with playground cities? These are cities built for one purpose — to play. Pursuing any other activities in such cities, other than what they are built for, is delusional — and I say this fully understanding I am here for a business meeting!
Miami is built entirely around a simple idea — go to the beach, get sunburned and get sand in your pants. All roads lead to said beach, all hotel rooms face it, and all services get you to it, sprinkle you with water while you’re on it, ply you with food and drink to make it hard to waddle back, and in the evening, they arrange lighting to make your sun burn look like a tan. And you start again. A great, simple idea. This hotel even has a funny steel drummer who plays for the little kids club. He was playing concrete jungle while 8 little 4 year olds were playing with hula hoops. ‘I know I am bound here in captivity!’, he sings, as the little four year old chases after a hula hoop that rolled under his steel drum. Oh, and when the steel drum guy stops — he is playing and singing to a back up tape, he presses a different button and a tape plays with him on steel drum and singing. Go figure!
And because I mentioned steel drums and this is all about the music, here are two of my favourite Steel Pulse songs:
That’s the steel drummer. I also mentioned food to make you waddle. I flew in at 1600 yesterday (2100 UK time) and checked in, jumped in shorts and went down to read at pool and get an hour of sun. I decided to order a drink and some fried calamari. In Spain, if you did this at the beach, you would get a very tiny drink with two ice cubes that you watch melt as they arrive. And you would get four rings of calamari, lightly breaded. The lemon on the plate takes up more room than the calamari. A nice, little appetiser. Which is what i wanted, forgetting, of course that I had crossed the Atlantic. My drink arrived…in a bucket. With a handle. The bucket, was accurately labeled ‘Bucket o’ Booze. And it looked like this, but not that’s not me:
So, that was the drink. Then the calamari arrived. There were not four or five little rings of Fried Calamari, there were 400 pieces of heavily breaded pieces of heavily breaded pieces of heavily breaded… bread. Hmmm. And that’s the whole point of a playground city… nothing is meant to be normal or sustainable. You don’t order a tiny drink, you drink a bucket of booze.
And as I write this, a smaller propellor plane just went by (it was about 16 floors high and directly out of my window) with one of those trailing advertisements announcing ‘Foam Night at Bay of Pigs’. Nice.
So back to this issue of Sustainability — i’m not sure you could do Foam night everynight. New York has a problem with lifts. Houston has a problem because there’s no city in that City. but Miami. It only has one problem. Staying here. How can you build an actual life in a city so perfectly designed to relax and not work? How can you look out this window and …well, idiotically stay inside to right a blog (I’ll be out shortly)? Who the hell can WORK in the place? And that goes for Palos Verdes (where I grew up) and Key West and definitely NOT London. London’s all about work. Sadly.
But then that means you don’t work here. You play here. Or you retire here. Which I heard happens a lot in Florida. Which I guess explains Foam night. Probably coushions the old folks when they fall. Maybe I’ll go to Bay of Pigs tonight.
I’m here all week.
Jimmy