I started my trip out lost in the middle of Miami Beach far away from where I needed to be. Where I needed to be was in Miami proper (where I arrived an hour earlier and took a bus away from), but I was able to route myself and meet up with my friend Yibai at his amazing display in at the Mike Weiss booth at Art Basel. I was going to stay at a hostel but Yibai offered me a couch at the Fountainbleu and so I was invited in to a circumstance of unexpected luxury (quite a nice deal). Yibai busied himself with meetings and deliveries and various orders of business while I took it easy and watched youtube videos of Richard Feynman while sitting in a bubble bath. Now before I continue my story about florida let me talk about Mr. Feynman, who sparked a whole new and interesting chapter of my life (the physics one). Richard Feynman is a physicist from brooklyn who has an incredible talent with relating the complex ideas of science into layman terms. So I went out and read a couple of his books which were not scientific, just him reminiscing about events in his life, and often they would touch upon the scientific. And the more I read the more interested I became. So I went out and got a book of his science lectures, and I devoured it! So I went out and got the next on, but after only a single chapter I found that the mathematics were too complicated for me to grasp... so I've since hit the books and have been studying math voraciously in hopes to get to a level where feynman's basic physics lectures are not too complicated.
Anyway, back to Miami: So at night my friend who happened to live in Miami would take me out to clubs and get me into VIP areas where expensive alcohol was poured freely. A very interesting experience, mind you. You see I did not know what to expect coming in to this whole trip, and what I was introduced to was stranger yet. After weaving through a dimly lit and densely packed club, I am taken to a private table with seven to eight guys sitting around, most of them are exhausted from repeatedly going out and drinking the previous nights, each ogling the closest and most attractive girl. And everywhere I turned there was an extremely attractive girl, it was as if they only let attractive people in, which, as my friend informed me moments later, was actually the truth. Okay thats nothing special to Miami, that's all over the world. Indeed. But this sort of event would become synonymous with my time spent in Miami, and each place I would see the same faces repeatedly, all of them regularly staying out at these clubs until 3 or 4 AM. It was a strange strange place, and (sadly) I cannot make claims that I was above the pale, despite my sitting around and attempting to objectively observe the situation. There is something about these club scenes where it seems to absorb you into this process of de-evolution, where the primal urges of mankind become the sort of common language and actual verbal interaction is completely superfluous. It's like our way of maintaining the animal instincts which got us to this stage of evolution; it's as if Miami is a great petri dish where survival of the fittest is applied to aesthetics.
I might make a very large sculpture incorporating some of the strangeness of this experience, more on that in the months to come.
As for the rest of my florida trip, it was spent relaxing at my grandparents house, watching more videos about physics and science, as well as reading some Richard Dawkins and watching atheism debates (blasphemy!).
