"When Barry Jenkins made Medicine for Melancholy and set it in San Francisco, he built a story around the location, using San Francisco as a character and a theme. Micah’s struggle for connection with Jo came from not only his longing to connect romantically, but also from his growing disconnect with the city. The film was outwardly about both of these things, and intertwined them throughout.

This thematic connection is key to successful regionalism — understanding the place before recreating it on film — studying its history and placing your story in context of the broader narrative of the environment and letting your characters exist within that space. It was Barry’s successful rendering of San Francisco that made him such an obvious choice for a Borscht project. Born in Miami, Barry brought the understanding of a native but with the emotional distance of an expatriate. He had grown up in the city and moved on — only to return years later and find that a new Miami has sprung up in his absence. To me, this meant that Barry was able to look at the city with new eyes.

The resulting short film is not Barry’s experience; it’s his exploration of a Miami that didn’t exist when he last lived here. Astonishingly, the city featured in the movie has existed for only about five years, if even that long. Miami’s development has been so rapid that most of our locations ± a re-purposed train station turned music venue, an elegant private art collection, a bombed out construction site and a swank new condo — all manifested after 2006."

Interestingly, in the two short years since this short premiered, some of the skylines and streets have already changed dramatically again. I hope that one day the Internet gifts us a supercut of moments in Barry's films where the latent motif of gentrification bubbles to the surface. Alas, you will have to follow those threads on your own for now.

We are very proud to present the movie in its entirety for the first time ever online, with a foreword by Brazilian film philosopher and animator Bernardo Britto:

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On change for the non-chlorophyllic organism

Photosynthesis is one of those incredibly beautiful processes of the natural world, something that has evolved over millions of years to be as simple and efficient as possible. Plants absorb light energy through chlorophyll, use it to convert water and carbon dioxide into sugars, and expel oxygen. It’s an almost invisible occurrence, a highly internal reaction—transforming something that would normally have very little value for us into something that fuels our every breath. It takes place everyday, all over the world, and yet we barely notice it.

In a way, that’s essentially the nature of change. It is a constant occurrence that we barely notice. Consider the amount of change going on inside your body at every moment, the millions of cells dying and regenerating. We are always in a process of change, we are always in a strange in-between moment—not quite sure of who we are, with only a vague notion of who we were, and only a distant glimpse of who we want to be.

That in-between moment is at the very heart of Barry Jenkins’s short film Chlorophyl. Chlorophyl tells the story of Ana, a twenty-something second-generation Mexican-American immigrant suffering from that universal pang of rejection. In a way, Ana is possibly the ultimate embodiment of the in-between. She has been rejected by almost everything with which she identified herself. Her ethnicity has been reduced to mostly “not-Cuban” and specifically “maybe-Colombian”. We get a feeling that “home” in the Hallmark sense never really existed for her, with a childhood split down the middle between Texas and Miami. And, like so many other people her age, she seems to cling onto that childhood as much as she can, spending a lazy day disconnected in a house far too grown up for her. And of course there’s her boyfriend, who seems to have become the most important way she identifies herself. She never explicitly calls him her boyfriend but we get a sense, just in the way she speaks with and about him, that so much of her identity is tied in with being “his girl”. It’s hard to tell if she ever felt like she truly belonged anywhere and already, right from the beginning of the film, she feels completely out of place.

She is not in her home, she’s house sitting for someone else. And her boyfriend isn’t there, though he spent the night. And so, she wakes up in a stranger’s house all by herself. It’s an upper-class house, a beautiful piece of architecture complete with art on every wall. She calls her boyfriend; she wants to let him know she’s hurt but she still wants to say, “I love you.” When she does, there is a deafening silence on the other end, interrupted only by her own quick “Bye”. And, instead of being connected as she talks to him on the phone, they are even further isolated. He appears only by himself in her memory of last night, and the film quickly separates them as easily as night and day. The boyfriend barely appears for the rest of the film (except in a wonderfully wordless climax at a night club named Grand Central) but there’s rarely a scene where you don’t feel his presence—or, rather much more appropriately, his absence—in some way.

Like the perfectly decorated house she wakes up in, this is a film steeped in the minimalist tradition—less is more. While Jenkins has never been one to force plot contrivances on his characters, Chlorophyl feels even more restrained than his previous work. In his brilliant film school short My Josephine for example, Jenkins relies mostly on voiceover to convey character and mood. And a big part of the pleasure in watching his breakout debut feature Medicine For Melancholy is in the interaction between Micah and Jo. But in Chlorophyl Jenkins leaves Ana on her own. She gets no voiceover to clue us in to her emotional state (though she does teach us about chlorophyll) and no foil as a contrast. He makes us observe her from a distance, constantly reinforcing her isolation not only dramatically but also visually, deliberately separating her from her environment.

Given that the film centers on a mostly passive, isolated individual, Jenkins is also very smart in how he reveals information to the audience. We already get everything we need to know right in the opening phone call with the boyfriend. It sets up not only the conflict and the visual language for the film, but also perfectly encapsulates Ana at this point in her life. Later, when Ana is modeling for photographs, Jenkins turns what could have been a frustrating, exposition-heavy scene into a really beautiful moment. For the first time Ana becomes more than just “a girlfriend” to the audience, while simultaneously still keeping us at a distance. We don’t get to watch her relate any of her history; instead she appears frozen in photographs as a man interviews her. The pictures range from uncomfortable to candid to beautiful; and somehow, somewhere in between those intangible cuts, we get a glimpse of her true self. But the movie never fully announces it. Even the afore-mentioned climax at Miami’s Grand Central happens without much fanfare. It’s nonconfrontational in the same way that life really is and drama is always too afraid to be. After all, this is a film borne out of a song (“Chlorophyl” by MillionYoung) where the lyrics are barely audible, preferring instead to relay a feeling and a mood. This is a film inspired by the decidedly uncinematic process of photosynthesis, an internal reaction that is as vital as it is imperceptible.

But just like it would be wrong to assume that plants do nothing all day, so it would be to say that nothing happens in this movie. The wonderful thing about the film is that there is a lot happening—one could argue Ana’s entire adult identity is being forged—but we don’t see any of it start and end, A to Z, like so many movies tend to do. Instead we are shown a process, an evolution. Plants take in light and carbon dioxide and expel oxygen. It’s an ongoing process, and it’s part of a much bigger cycle, which never ends but instead waxes and wanes with each sunrise and sunset in conjunction with all other life. There is never going to be a moment where Ana reaches her destination. She’ll never achieve the “ultimate boon” that Joseph Campbell detailed. As James Baldwin so perfectly postulates and Jenkins so perfectly quotes, “Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.” To that I (perhaps unnecessarily) add, nothing begins and ends the way we seem to think it does. It’s all a process, an in-between moment.

It would be a stretch to call Chlorophyl a Miami Movie™, but I also can’t imagine a better backdrop for this story. Here is a major American city, with the fourth largest urban area in the country, that’s still trying to figure out its identity. It doesn’t fit in with the rest of Florida, much less the South. It barely even fits in with the rest of the United States. Unlike New York which incorporates all its many different immigrants into proud “New Yawkers”, people who come to Miami rarely become Miamians. They cling onto their past homes, somehow unable to reject that past and move forward towards a collective future. Jenkins, a Miami native who returns to what I assume is a much different Miami than the one he grew up in, doesn’t make any overt comments on the city. He photographs the city’s brand-new buildings and its flora all with equal beauty. While Ana tries to come to terms with her now-unrequited love and Miami grapples with its incredibly sudden changes, at least Jenkins has learned to enjoy the in-between. This isn’t a nostalgic view of a city that doesn’t exist anymore. This is very much Miami as it exists today. Jenkins seems to accept it, and though he may feel like he doesn’t belong in its streets anymore, at least he isn’t looking back.

Towards the end of the film, Ana finally arrives in her own home. Her apartment seems old, by far the oldest interior in the movie, but it also seems lived-in, pleasantly cluttered in a way that only happens through actual time spent living somewhere. She takes a shower and gets rid of the purplish colors she’s worn for most of the movie (blue and red being chlorophyll’s preferred colors in the spectrum). She changes into a greenish top, which is the one part of the spectrum that chlorophyll rejects. She’s clearly had a change of attitude but she still doesn’t feel like she belongs, tossing and turning in her own bed. And who’s to say if she’ll ever feel like she truly belongs? The important thing is that she has started to accept that rejection. She has started moving away from that past. It’s not an easy process. But it is a process.

And the best we can do is let go.

And, if all else fails, refer to James Baldwin:

“Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he is set free — he has set himself free — for higher dreams, for greater privileges.”

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The first time that I set eyes on Celia Rowlson-Hall was while watching her 2012 short Audition. She makes an impression. Rowlson-Hall is a striking figure of a woman—maybe 5’10” (taller when her hair is up in the pompadour that she seems to favor), with wide pale blue-green eyes and a mouth that is a broad slot when she isn’t wearing a grin that’s alternately hilarious or deranged. She is fawn-like and lithe, with an impressive wingspan and long, slender legs shown off, in Audition, by a miniskirt. Rowlson-Hall’s films are almost wholly dialogue-free, and she has cultivated the full-body expressivity of a silent film gamine. Her particular physical presence is the principle tool of her art, and she knows exactly how to use it for impact.

In Audition, an actress, played by Rowlson-Hall, is trying out for the part of ‘Clipboard Woman.’ It’s a seemingly undemanding walk-on part but, in a single unbroken shot, an unseen interlocutor puts her through a series of ridiculous trials for it. The voice’s demands quickly move from silly to violating and demeaning, with Rowlson-Hall gamely dragging herself through the ordeal, hacking off her hair, spider walking, pummeling then gagging herself, even playing a sexy frog. When the interviewer in Audition demands “Can you re-enact a scene from your favorite movie?”, Rowlson-Hall uncaps a bottle of water and dumps it on her cast-back head, striking the arched pose of chair-dancing Jennifer Beals in Flashdance.

This may or may not be ironical. Virginia-born Rowlson-Hall is, first things first, a dancer. She graduated in 2006 with a BFA in Modern Dance from the University of North Carolina School for the Arts in Winston-Salem, and arrived in New York City not long afterwards. She showed every sign of making a success on stage, dancing with Monica Bill Barnes and Faye Driscoll and, in 2010, winning a Bessie Award for work in Driscoll’s 837 Venice Blvd. Rowlson-Hall had been doing music video choreography (MGMT, Chromeo) as well, and this is what put her onto making her own short films. In some of her early videos there is a tendency towards twee, but this is gradually planed away by an assertive stuntwoman fearlessness, an element of danger. In full-steam motion Rowlson-Hall displays an antic energy that threatens injury, a kamikaze physicality captured in the exhausting go-for-broke single takes of Audition, 2010’s Prom Night, or Goody! Two Shoes, the last done on commission for Brooklyn fashion house Keller. (Rowlson-Hall has done a number of such “fashion films,” and costuming plays a vital role in her films, each of which takes place in its own self-contained world.)

Si Nos Dejan, a 10-minute short commissioned by Miami’s BorschtCorp, is arguably Rowlson-Hall’s most ambitious piece to date, a string of scenes revolving around a man and woman dressed as though for a wedding, embarking on the strangest nuptial ceremonies that you will ever see. The film opens on the slo-mo image of a tuxedoed groom (Andrew Pastides) emerging from the Atlantic with a waterlogged, possibly-dead bride (Rowlson-Hall) in his arms. Are they being born from the primordial soup? Castaways from a honeymoon cruise? Inverting the ending to the music video for “Last Dance with Mary Jane”? Pastides drops his cargo onto the sand, where Rowlson-Hall’s limp body is discovered by an elderly beachcomber with a metal detector, who stoops to dig around inside her mouth, presumably for gold fillings.

From here we go to a seedy-looking hotel suite, an exemplar of South Florida jungle room décor, replete with a ceiling mounted disco ball and a stripper pole. Wearing a heap of a blonde wig and a frothy, sea-foam green party dress, Rowlson-Hall mounts and latches onto the pole, by way of a stool, which she kicks aside as one might when hanging one’s self. Clinging to the pole for dear life, she slides to the bottom in incremental squeaking slips, before finally plopping onto the tiled floor. Next sitting down to watch a movie, she removes the wig and props it on her knee, putting her arm around it as though it was a companion. We can’t see what Rowlson-Hall’s watching, though we hear the 20th Century Fox fanfare and then a fusillade of gunshots which send her ducking for cover—she uses a wad of gum to simulate a wound, then tears a strip off of her dress to tourniquet it.

This is the play-acting of a restless child left to her own devices—shades of Juliet Berto’s performances for Jacques Rivette—sampling different roles as they pop into her head. Similarly, in Prom Night, Rowlson-Hall can be seen dressing up as The Virgin Mary, Lolita, Marilyn Monroe, and Madonna until, dumping a punch bowl over her head, she does Carrie as her encore. Rowlson-Hall seems fascinated by that space where a performer’s eagerness to please becomes a psychic break, compromises the ego—mutable identities and wild mood swings are essential to her work. Though she winningly beams like a “Make ‘em laugh” Broadway hoofer when dancing, in repose she will acquire the feral, haunted look of a woman from Egon Schiele’s sketchpad. In Way to Go- Neighbors, an episode of “Like Like,” Rowlson-Hall’s “playful collaboration” with fellow dancer/ choreographer Lexy Hulme, both women cycle through several dozen outfits in the space of three-and-a-half minutes. And Rowlson-Hall’s dancing has this same aspect of trying things on for size and quickly discarding them: A veritable Swiss Army knife of styles, she will go from a Ray Bolger crazy-legs to hip-hop to mime-in-the-invisible-box to vaudeville shuffle to Francoise Dorleac in Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, sometimes in the space of moments.

Rowlson-Hall isn’t the only role-player in Si Nos Dejan. When Pastides enters the jungle room after her, he’s wearing breakaway stripper-cop duds, executing a spin on the pole while he patrols the seemingly empty suite. (He and Rowlson-Hall always seem to be just missing one another.) Entering the bathroom, he strips down to tuxedo shirt, bow-tie and cummerbund, then submerges himself into a froth of bubbles in the hot tub. Rowlson-Hall enters the room, runs a hand through the tub, now seemingly empty, as though searching for something. She pisses into the foamy water while standing up, tucks her used wad of toilet paper into the toe of one of his shoes, then clunks off wearing the oversized Oxfords herself—a usurpation of the masculine role.

This opens onto a cycle of rhymed water images, accompanied by Pastides singing a particular woebegone rendition of the title track, a song popularized by the Mexican singer Luis Miguel (The original kicks in over the closing credits.) A little boy on the beach in soaked tighty whities throws a penny into the surf. Rowlson-Hall and Pastides, hand-in-hand and looking ready to walk down the aisle, stand on the lip of a scummy, overgrown in-ground pool in the rain, seen in a dwarfing long shot. She watches him strumming the guitar from a distance, a shallow pool of water separating them. (In the over-the-shoulder reverse shot from his POV she is, curiously, absent.) Wearing the wig and something like the orange one-piece made famous by Pamela Anderson in Baywatch, Rowlson-Hall cradles the same little boy—cut to her at poolside, cradling Pastides in the same position, he looking limply marionette-like. Accompanied by a glinting shower of loose change, the couple plunge underwater, where they will really commune for the only time in the film, hungrily mashing their mouths together. When they surface, they’re alone again—in every instance, their union is a fleeting exception, their separation the rule.

Given the matrimonial wear and the lyrics of Miguel’s tune (Roughly translated: “If we leave/ We're going to want a lifetime…”), it’s safe to say that Rowlson-Hall is playing around with the idea of marriage, here seen as an almost-constant state of flip-flopping roles and missed-connection disunion. The final image of Rowlson-Hall and Pastides caught at the moment of diving into that slimy pool hand-in-hand could be taken as visualizing the adage “Taking the plunge,” but Si Nos Dejan generally operates on a less literal, more intuitive level. The same flowing, free-associative imagination at work in Rowlson-Hall’s dance—the means by which a pair of shoes will suddenly become defibrillator paddles in Goody! Two Shoes, for example—can be seen in the idiosyncratic logic by which these tableau are arranged, interfacing with one another and with her other films. Certain preoccupying symbols found elsewhere in Rowlson-Hall’s growing oeuvre have, for example, been repurposed here: The loose change is in her Three of a Feather, the water-as-wormhole in her Unto the Locusts. Around this point it’s standard to close by saying of an artist so young that it will be interesting to see what he or she does next. But in truth, what Celia Rowlson-Hall has done to-date is already seductive and uncanny in the extreme.

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Cartilaginous Fish Out Of Water

“This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.” –Albert Camus, from The Myth of Sisyphus

Anyone who grew up near a coast has watched a fish die. Suffocation, brute force, by the knife – these are all roads to extinguishment upon this portion of the interspecies trough, whether for feeding or not. You saw it on the swirling reddish fiberglass deck of a wet boat, the fresh catch’s blood mixing with salt and water while leaking to holes in the stern near the looming presence of the outboard. Or perhaps it was cudgeled to death on a nameless brown dock with its guts dripping the sea worn planks down into the bay. Maybe you watched it die in a bucket or a cooler, breathing and pulsating desperately on its side, confined briefly (yet for that fish forever), to a terror ridden and ominous immovability. In all of these situations, the poor beast’s only defense is a flop, and only a small percentage of the time the impotent fish flop returns the creature to safety under the cresting waves. Typically, it does not.

If we anthropomorphize this, we get the oft-utilized analogy of a “fish out of water”. The most obvious usage being when it’s yelled at particularly elusive prey in the friendly poolside game of Marco Polo. Not surprisingly, there is never the word “CARTILAGINOUS” in front of the accusatory phrase “FISH OUT OF WATER.” A cartilaginous fish out of water is intensely unwieldy, and even dangerous. Cartilaginous fish typically refers to sharks, though rays and skates apply too. These are often seriously aggressive and dangerous animals to touch. A cartilaginous fish flop can have unpleasant consequences.

They all fall within the scientific classification of chondrichthyes, which are distinctive for having a jaw, chambered hearts, paired fins, and most importantly skeletons made of cartilage. One of greatest adaptations to life in the sea that chondrichthyes made is flexibility, which has helped them glide quietly through the depths for hundreds of millions of years. We always learned, quite awesomely, that the age of dinosaurs also knew the resiliency of sharks, giving us a link to a past long ago.

More recently, in the summer of 2009, one particular cartilaginous fish met it’s untimely demise, somewhere, and somehow, in downtown Miami.  Two men, called “vagrants” in the news, dragged a five foot long nurse shark ostensibly out of Biscayne Bay, on to the MetroMover railway, and then around downtown Miami a bit before giving up on their quest. This moment was painted as cruel by the media and it was. There was evidence of torture; the majesty of a creature whose forebears once swam with plesiosaurs erased as it sat festering one night summer night on a Miami street, covered in bugs feeding on its fetid carcass.

So we come to the short and touchingly dark Reinaldo Arenas, a filmic retelling of that infamous moment in Miami’s intricate and habitually strange narrative. The film, produced by in 2010 for the Borscht Film Festival is named after a Cuban exile poet and depicts an old Cuban man, musing on his path as an ex-patriot.  The subject matter is dark. It is a man expressing himself empty of meaning and confused by his place. He is first on an unnamed wharf, staring at the sea, lamenting his life and landscape. The poet, whose words the script are based on, first came to Miami, a place which was not fond of and often spoke harshly about.

The physical actor depicted in the short is actually filmmaker Lucas Leyva’s father, and the voice of the shark is Alberto Ibargüen, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Knight Foundation, an organization that is the single largest funding arm of the Borscht Corporation and all of it’s own tentacles. The filmmaker’s father and the film festival’s symbolic father are the two main characters. It’s homage to Leyva’s childhood, and lifetime, those who brought him into this world and fostered his body and identity. Both men are Cuban.

Then, the Kraken comes out of the water. We see the old man on the train holding the shark, as if a bag of groceries, something that is feeding him yet we know it is the opposite. We find ourselves witnessing a completely ridiculous moment that once actually happened, but is now repurposed as a symbol of Cuban exile and a heavy weight to carry.

A landscape such as Miami requires a certain Camusian acceptance of the absurd. How can you live here when people treat life and nature sometimes with such flippancy and disrespect other than to shrug emptily and stare at the deepest part of the abyssal trench? Motives be damned with someone you can’t or choose not to comprehend. Whether by language, culture, physical distance, or the brief and daily practice of our own existential parodies, we all stand apart. It is not just Cuba, or Miami Beach, or Sunset, Fisher, Star, Palm, La Gorce, Indian Creek, Brickell Key, or Key Biscayne. Like Fowles said every man is an island. And if Sisyphus carries a rock up a hill continually throughout his tragic existence, then for inexplicable reasons Miami, and its countless Cuban exiles carry a shark. But for similarly incomprehensible reasons Miami takes the shark on a light-rail train and then leaves it in the street to slowly and sadly rot. 

The Corals are Dreaming Again

The Coral Reef Are Dreaming Again is a fusion of three different short films that Coral Morphologic has either contributed to, or collaborated on, from the past three Borscht Film Festivals. The script was written by Lucas Leyva, but the concept was inspired by many Miamians, and adapted to frame a famous allegory of 3rd century BCE Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi. The result is a new film re-contextualized to mirror many of the metaphorical concepts that both Coral Morphologic and Borscht Corp. broach in our respective works. In fact, the existence of the film itself is representative of the accretion, hybridation, and symbiosis that amplifies creative output from the Magic City.

If The Coral Reef are Dreaming Again seems confusing at first view, that’s okay, as it is flooded with metaphors (including flooding metaphors). In it we have two anemones that question the reality of their dreams. In this sense, the classic story of Zhuangzi dreaming he was a butterfly, is flipped. In the original story, Zhuangzi is left questioning whether he exists as a man only because the butterfly dreams it so, leaving him in something of an existential paradox. However, in this film the story takes the perspective of the beautiful creatures questioning their own existence as they look backwards through the mirror of a perceived reality that may or may not be a dream. The film portrays two cyclical lifeforms face-to-face at their metaphysical nexus. If I had to sketch this relationship, I would draw an ouroboros (like Borscht’s logo) and twist it to form a figure eight-like Moebius strip. Ultimately the film lays bare the interconnected and infinite nature of the universe, while postulating that multiple universes may in fact be interactive.

On a more tangible metaphorical level, the context of the film only makes sense from the perspective of the time and space from which it was birthed. First, it must be understood that Miami is a city whose infrastructure is literally comprised of the processed skeletal remains of corals and marine life that once colonized South Florida when it was submerged in eras past. Almost every building, sidewalk, and highway in Miami contains calcium carbonate-based concrete that is recycled from the remnants of those coral reefs. It is a city where vertebrate and invertebrate life-forms are forever bonded through a calcium carbonate matrix. Skeletons that were once enveloped with fluorescent coral tissue now form the foundation for a neon metropolis to mirror its coral reefs.

In death there is opportunity, and corals take full advantage. In fact, coral reefs only form when corals grow on top of the skeletons of their ancestors. Over many years, the upward growth of new corals results in a dynamic three-dimensional urban ecosystem.  From the Coral Morphologic perspective, corals are the primeval city-builders on planet Earth. Besides humans, they are the only other animals that build structures visible from space, and they have been doing so millions of years before before animal-kind crawled its way out of the primordial oceans to colonize terra firma. With corals long predating the dawn of humanity (and the supposed conscious awareness of reality that came with it), the film suggests that perhaps it is we that are living inside of a coral’s dream of the future.

In the film we see a man within the coral dream who lives in the Magic City; a place where gender roles and identities are fluid and ever-shifting. This is no different from the coral reef, where many species are frequently transsexual or hermaphroditic. Gender politics and sex have long played a central role in the cultural identity of Miami, a place where flamboyance and sex are celebrated as a form of liberated consciousness that allows people the freedom to be as nasty as they want to be. On the coral reef, sexual reproduction is celebrated in an annual cosmic ritual that that is synchronized to the celestial clockwork of the Earth, Moon, and Sun. Organisms of all kinds celebrate in a nocturnal orgy that mixes the sperm and eggs of a myriad of species together. The sea becomes a genetic soup in which none of the resulting offspring will ever know the identity of their parents. Likewise, Miami is a melting pot of genetics whose affinity for the ultraviolet rays of Sun is only surpassed our nocturnal attractions beneath the libidinous tug of the Moon.

Just as Miami has been flooded and dried many times throughout glacial and greenhouse periods of Earth’s history, it will one day be submerged once more. Miami has an Atlantean destiny, one that is actualizing before our eyes as humans expire gases that are insulating the planet like a blanket. Already corals and humans alike are being forced to adapt to new climate conditions whether we like it or not. The durability of Miami Beach will no doubt be tested within our lifetime. It is, afterall, a city, not yet a century old, that was dredged from the mud by opportunistic real estate tycoons looking to sell island dreams to frigid Americans. While many coastal cities and islands around the world will be faced with rising sea levels, few other places have the treble handicap of being artificially constructed, in the crosshairs of increasingly powerful hurricanes, and just a few miles from one of the strongest oceanic currents on the planet.  

When the ocean finally comes licking at our doorsteps, the South Floridian real estate pyramid will crystallize as a monument to New World fantasies.  Eventually the limestone remnants of our metropolis will be recolonized by the corals as their own, and our collective destinies will come full circle. The corals of Miami represent the ouroboros of construction, consumption, decay, and resurrection. In the meantime, we humans may be trapped in the samsara of existence, unaware of the true nature of reality, and breaking the cycle may be as easy as waking up inside a coral’s dream.

Xemoland is important in the history of Borscht for a number of reasons, not the least of which being it was the first Borscht commission to screen at Sundance. It's universal commercial appeal is obvious, but we love the little Miami touches that give it more depth and context.

Also, the gifs have nothing to do with the list, they are just gifs from the movie.

1. The raccoon getting run over near the "Key Biscayne" sign. 

2. Ocean Village.

3. Rivera movie theater.

4. Cleaning ladies outside of 7-11. (A better writer could perhaps concoct an essay about Xemoland as a metaphor for socioeconomic class stratification in Miami. But it is too hot outside, and this is a listicle.)

5. Mercy Hospital.

BONUS: Jupiña snack. Our glorious, sugary, pineapple soda sponsor that year. (Click here to watch a white person drink it.)

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Child of Technology: Jillian Mayer's Multimedia Identity Games

by Annie Hollingsworth (Originally published as the cover story in the September/October 2011 issue of Art Papers Magazine.)

Jillian Mayer, a young artist born and raised in Miami, tells the story of a recent trip to Buenos Aires. She was displaying her collection of Simpsons finger puppets—crudely-knit interpretations of the characters sold around the world—which her Argentinian friend recognized immediately: "Oh, I love Los Simpsons, I grew up with them, they're a part of my family!" Mayer says the same thing. In a nature-culture substitution, she claims to have grown up in the company of an animated family. She also credits Full House, Family Matters, and Beverly Hills 90210 with major life lessons.

The identities of many young people were formed around the two-dimensional ethics and fictional family dynamics delivered nightly during prime time. Often, television characters were more influential than real-life role models. It was a different era, before the Internet, when characters and plot turns were a collective point of reference. Kids who weren't allowed to watch TV were, for better or worse, disconnected from the mainstream. Since then, technological revolutions have drastically altered the relationship between individuals and the media they consume. Yet, sitcom logic continues to surface as once-voracious TV fans become cultural producers themselves. As an artist, Mayer is both a fan and a critic of television, indebted to the golden age of the sitcom and charting ahead into the still open-ended structure of the Internet.

Recently, Mayer has made a sudden and unconventional entrance into the international art world and the public eye—appropriately, on YouTube. In the summer of 2010, the Guggenheim Museum sent out an international call to video artists for YouTube Play, a curatorial experiment designed to uncover new talent and explore the power of the Internet as a creative arena. The selection committee received over twenty-three thousand video submissions from ninety-one countries, which were uploaded to YouTube. Twenty-five works were ultimately selected, including Mayer's Scenic Jogging, 2010, which was subsequently shown at Guggenheim outposts in New York, Venice, Bilbao, and Berlin as well as on a YouTube channel set up by the museum.

Six months later, Mayer was commissioned by the Miami-based Borscht Film Festival to produce three short videos. One of them, I Am Your Grandma, 2011, was posted on YouTube following the blockbuster festival screening. As Mayer and her collaborators predicted, the video went viral immediately, with over 220,000 hits in the first week. I Am Your Grandma was designed for mass appeal. Humor, short-attention-span pacing, and an addictive soundtrack by Miami-based band ANR -now available on iTunes - make it as engaging as a Super Bowl commercial break. A title screen introduces the video's content: "Video Diary Log: A Message to my Future Unborn Grandchild." Mayer posits video as a medium of lasting intergenerational communication, a way to accurately send the present into the future. She plays herself—the author—dressed in elaborate feature-distorting costumes inspired by legendary performance artist Leigh Bowery. I Am Your Grandma leans towards the fictional. On the internet, its intention and authenticity are totally undefined.

To date, I Am Your Grandma has gotten almost a million hits. It has been spoofed—mostly by kids. It has spawned micro-communities on Facebook and YouTube. Its title has entered the online Urban Dictionary as a slang term for "when something is really weird and terrifying and traumatizing in a way you can't forget." Online comments highlight the majority disposition of the Internet community—many honed in on buried sexual undertones and Mayer's shocking costumes in sometimes crude and raw language. A few proposed marriage.

Regardless of its unconventional exhibition history, I Am Your Grandma was originally produced for the art world, a context that does elicit more sophisticated viewer responses. A month before its Borscht Film Festival's screening, I Am Your Grandma was included in Family Matters, Mayer's first solo show [David Castillo Gallery, Miami; April 9—May 7, 2011]. Titled after the television show, Family Matters teased out a slightly different interpretation of I Am Your Grandma: the definition of individual identities within the family structure. Here, family roles become fictional constructions shaped by stereotypical expectations.

The details of Mayer's technology-driven debut are in perfect step with her conceptual territory. She plays games with popular media, the public, and the art world. Reception is central to the work: its fate and the layers of interpretation it accrues as it crosses channels and institutions are often as relevant as its message. Technology plays a deliberate, crucial, and multidimensional role in terms of production and as a means of intersection with public and private memory. Some of her visual references tap into specific cultural histories. Others are offered to a mass of anonymous viewers with an invitation for unqualified public response. In the context of the art world—Mayer's primary audience—viewers become subjects in her nostalgic experiments as well as witnesses to sociological phenomena happening elsewhere.

In Mayer's practice, popular culture stands in for nature—it is our artificial garden. Her work puts forth a powerful assumption: following our birth into a biological world, we develop in an environment of manufactured cultural products. As Scenic Jogging succinctly demonstrates, gaps erupt when we fail to simulate nature's full complexity. Here, Mayer runs through a deserted urban neighborhood, attempting to keep up with projected nature scenes that move quickly across warehouse walls. The video's rapid pacing produces an acute sense of anxiety. Her character is perpetually unable to catch the landscape where, metaphorically, she could find rest. The nature images—idealized and simplified landscapes designed as default screensavers&mdashare incomplete representations: insufficient and impenetrable. Scenic Jogging points towards a cultural dilemma: we may never be able to locate ourselves fully within a manmade world. Inevitably, uneasiness pervades.

In nearly every project, Mayer considers the implications of early identity formation within a manufactured reality. Her installations and video projects frequently include what she calls "boards"—two-dimensional painted scenes with cutout spaces for performers' bodies. The boards take us back to a world of children's entertainment clearly influenced by Saturday Morning TV, amusement-park photobooths, and the exaggerated world of Pee-wee's Playhouse. They also reference—albeit less directly - the faux-domestic interiors of sitcom world, theatrical sets where family dramas take place. Mayer's boards also generate funny and distorted images of bodies—like the costumes in I Am Your Grandma.  

In Family Matters, childhood and family scenarios were reenacted through the boards—but something was always wrong. Characters were sited in cartoon-accident scenes, around a broken chandelier or under a fallen tree. Performers occupied the sets during the opening reception, their bodies extending out at odd angles. Their facial expressions were bored and nonchalant. Then, for the run of the show, the boards were left empty—a variation that allowed viewers to mentally insert themselves into the scenes. In both cases, Mayer externalized a Freudian creepy space, the dark side of family dynamics. A hint of morbid childhood imagination mixed in with repression of physical violence and emotional trauma. Memory is the place where fantasy and reality become indistinguishable, a blurring made even more dramatic when measured against television morality.

Family Matters adeptly blends aesthetic styles from a specific media moment—1980s and 1990s television. As such, viewers of Mayer's generation are more likely to react viscerally to her board-based work. For this demographic, she plugs directly into the mainline of an earlier and more impressionable age, potentially surfacing all kinds of latent memory material. In other words, her viewers' responses are bound to be age-specific. On one axis is the path of identity development from early childhood, through adolescence and into adulthood. On the intersecting axis are rapidly evolving technology and popular media. Each viewer's specific intersection along these axes will determine which psychological stage her work activates. Postmodern cultural theory bemoans this specificity as the fracturing of a unified public.

We As Me, 2010, a video featured in Family Matters, makes a light-hearted statement on the technological dimension of identity formation. Here, Mayer is less a critic than she is a fan. We As Me presents a pair of slightly disoriented characters: a red girl and a blue girl. They are divided aspects of an electronic self that can be reunited, in theory, by putting on a pair of old-school 3D glasses. It's just a joke, though. With or without the glasses Mayer provided for the exhibition, the two characters eventually find their way into a single image. They merge into a fictional Technicolor version of the artist, who plays herself. Here, again, "Jillian Mayer" is a constructed character, illustrating the fact that identity is fluid, culturally induced, and temporally specific.

Mayer's own childhood relationship to television characters clearly informs her work. She recalls:

They were real to me... that's how the youngest child is supposed to act. That's the relationship between the teenage girl character and the mother. They fight. You know. So then I thought, okay the cool character does do that in school, the girl that looks like the nerd is the nerd... I followed a lot of the cues they would give me on TV, I watched a lot of it and I would make jokes that it raised me.1

With reality shows now dominating the mainstream television market, the line between fiction and reality is even blurrier.  

The short standalone film Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke, 2011, made in collaboration with Rakontur Films and screenwriter Lucas Leyva, crystallizes the thematic and structural layers of Mayer's work. It also uses her boards as both stage and backdrop. Originally screened at the Borscht Film Festival and later shown in the group exhibition Sum of the Parts [David Castillo Gallery; May 14—June 25, 2011], Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke is a take on Chris Marker's cult 1962 film La Jetée. Pop culture phenomenon Luther Campbell—aka Luke Skyywalker or Uncle Luke—is cast in the central role. In real life, Campbell is a Miami celebrity, former member of 2 Live Crew—the controversial group famous for sexually explicit tracks like Me So Horny—and future Miami mayoral candidate. Like the Terminator who became Governor of California and former Minnesota Governor/WWF wrestler Jesse Ventura, Campbell bizarrely blends personality with pop culture persona. Following the storyline of La Jetée, Campbell plays a slightly altered version of himself as a time-traveler who revisits his memories.

Uncle Luke begins in Miami's Liberty City, where the Luther Campbell character sees a man get killed. "Damn! Motherfucker just got cut! To the white meat!" The story then merges into actual events from Campbell's life. He rises to fame and is subsequently brought to trial for obscenity—in Leyva's script, the court case is "Stale White Bitches vs. The 2 Live Crew." Uncle Luke then fast-forwards through an imagined sci-fi future. Campbell wins the election for Mayor, survives a nuclear meltdown at the Turkey Point power station, and then, well, hopefully you have seen La Jetée and you get the picture. If not, you can watch it on YouTube for free, in the original French or with English subtitles.

Uncle Luke is undeniably entertaining—whether you get the references or not. It is a smart and intricately self-reflexive example of what cultural theorist Jim Collins has called "the perpetual circulation and recirculation of signs that form the fabric of postmodern cultural life."2 Mayer and her collaborators are quintessential bricoleurs. In Uncle Luke, street-credible slang and classic booty beats reconstruct a landmark of film history. High and low, art and entertainment, fiction and reality become multiple facets of an intellectually-integrated work that specifically depends on cultural quotation. The parallels are both narrative and structural. Whereas La Jetée is constructed from stills, referencing the psychological relationship between photography and memory, Uncle Luke draws from the nostalgia power of Mayer's two-dimensional boards.  

As cultural theorist John Storey has observed, "we communicate through what we consume. Consumption is perhaps the most visible way in which we stage and perform the drama of self-formation."3 When confronted by the culturally specific references found in Mayer's work, viewers variably respond according to generation, education, cultural literacy, social status, geographic region, musical taste, and so on. To put it another way, response is a measure of the degree to which they identify with the cultural consumption patterns she has represented. The effect is most apparent in response-generating forums like the Internet, where it can literally be tracked.  

Mayer has only begun to unravel the possibilities of the Internet. A close look at her YouTube posts and Facebook pages—she has many: one for her real self, one for her fictional self, and now one for I Am Your Grandma—reveals that she is actively considering the possibilities of online social spaces as territory to be explored, exploited, and deconstructed. She also imagines new forms of online exhibition: something moderated, not quite the free-for-all of YouTube. Regardless, Mayer's work is firmly tied to the world of television. We are, it seems, bound by our roots.  

NOTES

1. Author's conversation with the artist, July 1, 2011.

2. Jim Collins, "Postmodernism and Television," in Robert C. Allen, ed., Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, London: Routledge, 1992, 327-353.

3. John Storey, Inventing Popular Culture: From Folklore to Globalization, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003, 72.

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Extremely Lewd & Incredibly Verbose: Rap Flicks Retrofit Two Controversial Figures

by Brandon Soderbergh (originally published in the June 2012 issue of SPIN Magazine)

Back in March, footage of an inane debate between two Florida state representatives went quasi-viral. In the video clip, Democrat Alan B. Williams expresses his support for a bill that would refine Florida's evidence code by quoting Jay-Z's "99 Problems": "I know my rights and you're gonna need a warrant for that / Aren't you sharp as a tack? / You some kind of lawyer or something?" Spoiling for a fight, Republican Dean Cannon, who opposed the bill, proceeds to misquote the lyrics as, "You should try for a lawyer or something." Then, he inexplicably lectures Williams: "It's an unspoken rule: If you're going to invoke Jay-Z, you must get the lyrics correct."

Gangsta-rap pioneer Ice-T and 2 Live Crew frontman Luther "Luke" Campbell hopefully got at least a chuckle out of this exchange. Twenty-plus years after President George H.W. Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle denounced "Cop Killer," by Ice's rap-rock project Body Count, and a Florida District Court judge ruled 2 Live Crew's As Nasty as They Wanna Be "obscene," elected officials are now quoting rap lyrics for authenticity points. But meanwhile, hip-hop's most vilified free-speech martyrs are recasting the genre's contested history in their own image: Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap, a documentary helmed by Ice-T, and Jillian Mayer's experimental short, Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke, starring Campbell, both premiered at Sundance this year.

Something From Nothing features everybody from the Cold Crush Brothers' Grandmaster Caz to Common, hanging out and discussing the intricacies of their craft. Ice-T's OG status gives him the access that similarly styled "art of rapping," straight-to-DVD docs could never obtain. And Rakim's explanation of how he goes about writing his airtight raps…he starts with 16 dots on a piece of paper, which he intently toys with until he finds the perfect word…is fascinating. Even more so, since Ice himself is as baffled as we are by the God MC's almost mystical approach.

Particularly touching moments include Kanye West, grinning and unguarded, laughing it up as he tells the story of losing his first rap battle in middle school (the line that beat him: "Yo, my name is Chris / Let me tell you one thing…you smell like piss"), and Eminem solemnly explaining the therapeutic role that rapping played in his recovery from drug addiction. The documentary's tone is earnest, even provincial, and it suggests that if someone were to one day do the ten-hour history of hip-hop in the style of Ken Burns' Jazz, it could very well be Ice-T.

There is, however, a certain self-seriousness to Something From Nothing, so after nearly two hours of hip-hop shoptalk and wordy dudes furiously spitting rhymes into the camera, it's a pleasure to experience Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke, a 13-minute expressionistic take on the booty-bass innovator's colorful career. The 1990 obscenity trial and Campbell's 2011 run for mayor of Miami are acknowledged, but Mayer plays fast and loose with facts…even reality.

In her film's version of Luke's life, he wins the election, turns his hometown into a utopia, and all is well. Or, at least until Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station melts down. After the nuclear holocaust, Luke, the only survivor, becomes Miami's own Omega Man, battling radiated zombies before getting nabbed by two scientists from the future…or maybe it's the past…who send him back through time to spread his seed so that others will survive the meltdown.

If the bare bones of this plot sound familiar, that's because Freaky Times is, like Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, a twisted but quite faithful remake of Chris Marker's 1962 short film, La Jetée. Adding to its avant-garde pedigree are the Kool-Aid–colored, two-dimensional sets with holes for actors' heads and limbs…like living folk-art sculptures…which makes this bizarre, charming biopic turned Tim and Eric–esque spazz-out a visual treat as well.

First, a little background on director Marco Ramirez:

Marco, a Miami native, returned to the city after he graduated from NYU until 2008, when he enrolled at Juilliard’s postgraduate playwriting program. During this time in the Miami he wrote no less than two classic short plays that both won the Heideman Award (the highest honor a short play can receive) and founded to the ill-fated Foryoucansee Theater project. Foryoucansee was created around the same time as Borscht, and similarly sought to create a specifically Miami theater. The company’s first production was the reggaeton musical Toners in Time, about two Turkey Point nuclear reactor employees who inadvertently go back in time and take credit for inventing reggaeton. The show had two completely sold out runs at New Theater’s old space in Coral Gables, and the company also put out a book of popular Hialeah Haikus (now in its third run, I believe).

Toners in Time was among the first wave of media created by 80’s babies to depict Miami as not being defined by nostalgia (either for another country or time) or the glitzy sheen that attracts tourists. It was one of the first works, and definitely the only play, to address and engage a uniquely Miami culture. Not Cuban-American, or Puerto Rican, or Southern, or Haitian, but Miamian- with its own set of specific references, slang, and mannerisms. I think the term that was used to define those with a sense of irony about Miami culture was “Spicster,” best exemplified by Jose El Rey (RIP), a brilliant parodist who did it first and better than anyone since.

Based on the success of Toners in Time, Foryoucansee planned two more plays. However, this was in the days before Wynwood Art Walk was Santa’s Enchanted Street Fair. The Arsht Center was still the floundering Carnival Center and did not yet truly support locals, and the audience was generally much smaller for these things. This was the reality of Miami B.K. (before the Knight Foundation's Arts Challenge democratized artistic creation in the city): funding was scarce and there was no infrastructure to support an upstart organization like Foryoucansee.

Foryoucansee Theater fell apart (some members of the Foryoucansee Theater still create work under the name, but it is mostly in service of the Hialeah Haiku project.) Marco moved to NY, Jose El Rey was murdered, and the promise of “spicster” media was replaced by brown-face entertainment that perpetuates the worst kind of stereotypes without commenting on them, all while hiding behind the idea of parody. 

Marco currently lives in Los Angeles, where he writes for the Starz series “Da Vinci’s Demons,” but A Toast hints to what we hope will one day be a return to his hometown to create the Hialeah nerd version of Mean Streets.

Marcos Ramirez’s autobiographical paen to his specific brand of Hispanic suburban nostalgia was commissioned as the opening of Borscht 7 in April 2011.

It’s boldly unironic- deftly skirting the line between precious and dark while exploring personal Miami experiences in a universal container. Marco’s Hialeah is seen through the eyes of a dreamer who maintains his innocence in spite of being aware of the true villains in his world.

Part spoken-word poem, part melodrama, it sort of put images to a lot of the ideas behind Foryoucansee and the genesis of Borscht- albeit in a much different tone.

I guess what I am trying to say is, A Toast is essentially echoing Trick Daddy’s Born n Raised or Pitbull’s 305 till I die or Rick Ross’s Bitch I’m From Dade County, and may or may not be in conversation with Will Smith’s Welcome to Miami. It’s the articulation of a largely misrepresented culture from a fresh perspective. If Borscht had a flag, it might look like this film.

Here is the esteemed Dr. Tobias Rodriguez-Wynwood with another take on the work:

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To, or From, “A Toast (To Miami)”

Before the Face Eaters attacked en masse in Star Date XC753 and the Battle of Yambo decided the fate of the world, Miami was a quaint, multilingual metropolis in Southern Florida known mostly for being the butt of Anglo-Saxon-American jokes. This essay outlines, from within the confines of fourth dimensional narrative, the transition of Miami from cultural backwater to cultural empire to empire in decline to interstellar battlefield and demonstrates the role in this process played by Marco Ramirez’s 2010 short film A Toast (to Miami).

In Earth Year 2007 Che-Frio, Tito and Laz, pseudonyms for Ramirez, Alex Fumero, and Danny Monsalve, formed The Toners, a three-man reggaeton act. The group then re-formed the group in 2002 via a time-traveling episode instigated by a malfunction at the Turkey Point Nuclear Power Plant, as explained in the 2009 theatrical production, The Toners, produced by the now-defunct Foryoucansee collective. By traveling back in time and starting the U.S. reggaeton craze prior to its historical commencement, The Toners initiated the re-alignment of the time-space continuum in Miami, which had been previously marked by disruption.

The disruption began in 1565 when the fleet of Spanish explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilés took shelter in Biscayne Bay during a Category 3 hurricane. Tequesta Indians found a water-logged and hungry Menéndez and sheltered him in a coral rock cave. In return for their kindness, Menéndez took the brother of the Tequesta Chief to Havana to be educated by Jesuit priests. A year later, Menéndez and his Tequestan-Cuban prodigy returned to Miami and formed a mission on the location of what is currently Bongo’s Cuban Café, adjacent to the American Airlines Arena. The mission quickly became the nexus for a hybrid Tequestan-Cuban night life where men wore loose-fitting, sleeveless clothing and women donned elaborate, bangle earrings. The music played at the mission is described in the journals of Spanish sailors as “muy sexual” and “que explosivo.”

In 1570, armed by one of Menéndez’s rivals, Calusa Indians raided and destroyed the mission, which was never rebuilt. When Spain surrendered Florida to the British in 1763, the Tequestas were sent to Cuba, and then to barracks in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In prison, they continued to experiment with drum patterns and looped melodies. Diaries of the guards describe the prisoners as “muy guapo” and “tremenda avant-garde.”

When the United States took over the Panama Canal construction project in 1914, they supplemented the project’s workforce with illegally conscripted indíos and other non-white Puerto Ricans, a population that included an overwhelming number of Tequesta descendants. The Afro-Panamanian culture that formed out of the Canal project—work songs, culinary experimentation, jorts—traveled back to Puerto Rico, created “Spanish Reggae” in the 1960s, and led directly to the underground mixtape culture that eventually gave birth to what we know now as reggaeton.

So we can see how Spanish-Calusan interference into Tequestan-Cuban culture disrupted the time and place of the birth of reggaeton, displacing to Puerto Rico and the greater Caribbean what is rightfully a purely Miamian phenomenon. We can only speculate as to the other cultural non-events created by this disruption (computer models have suggested, for instance, that the natural area code of Miami is 999), but one of them is without question the creation of an alternative Miami. This Miami, which lasted until The Toners realignment in 2002, is well-documented in Western history as being dominated by aggressive real estate speculation, mid-grade plastic surgery, and overpriced Asian fusion restaurants.

2002 is significant for many reasons, the most important of which is that it is the first year in which the Miami Circle is electromagnetically active. Unearthed in 1998 thanks to the efforts of time-traveling explorer and glow stick-pioneer Bob Carr, the Miami Circle took four years to re-gather its particle field, after which point it began to act as a magnet for psychic energy from other time periods. Due to its roots in Tequestan culture, the Circle immediately latched onto reggaeton devotees Che-Frio, Tito and Laz and used the 2009 malfunction at Turkey Point to draw them, across the tiny span of seven years, back to itself. With reggaeton suddenly re-established in its native space, the fourth dimension of time also began to realign, and the entire culture of Miami began to shift into a period of empire.

In 2003, director Michael Bay, reeling from 2001’s Pearl Harbor, returned to Miami to shoot Bad Boys II, an art-house film disguised as a buddy-cop picture. It would end up grossing $273 million world-wide. The same year Art Basel created a stateside version of the largest art fair in the world and inexplicably chose Miami Beach, a city previously known in the art world as the home of a Brazilian children’s face-painter. 2003 also witnessed the Detroit Pistons drafting Serbian center Darko Miličić at number two overall, a comical maneuver that allowed Dwyane Wade to fall to the Miami Heat at pick number five. 2004 brought the release of Pitbull’s M.I.A.M.I. (Money is a Major Issue), a revolutionary concept album addressing the death of the alternative Miami, and the Heat’s acquisition of center Shaquille O’Neal. In 2006, as the Heat were winning their first NBA Championship, the County opened its first major performing arts center. In 2007, Ultra Music Festival, the modern Woodstock, moved to a two-day format. 

Then on July 8, 2010, LeBron James, whose 1/116th Tequestan blood made him particularly susceptible to the electromagnetic waves emanating from the Miami Circle, announced that he was spurning the larger New York and Chicago markets to sign with the Miami Heat. Playing alongside Wade and above-average center and Interstellar Space Prince Christopher Bosh mere steps away from the original Tequestan-Cuban Mission (now emanating low-frequency bass tones from beneath Bongo’s), LeBron James reconnected downtown Miami across three centuries to its cultural roots, ushering in an empire that was immediately and always already ascendant.

As one of the principal instigators of Miami’s return to its disrupted world dominance, Marco Ramirez is a central figure in galactic history, and A Toast (to Miami) is not only a nostalgic and averagely-made short film but also made a lyrical diary of 300 years of Miami history. Arriving as it did at the zenith of Miami’s reconstructed empire, the film’s MC Escher-esque map of the formation of reggaeton via a series of carefully constructed poetic images is often referenced by other multiverses as a shining example of image-based archival material. (Making these images literal would rob them of their pataphysical attributes, so I’ll only say, armed with the current narrative, any person of even limited imaginative capacity will be able to connect the lyrical to the actual.)

According to galactic historians, in the wake of Ramirez’s film, Miami’s empire begins to wane as corruptive elements sneak through the Miami Circle’s force field. The most nefarious of these invaders are a species of space worm harvested by the Calusans (who left Earth for Planet R-K0 in 1791) that implant themselves in the brains of several otherwise well-intentioned humans and hybrid-humans such as Jeffrey Loria, Filomena Tobias, J.J. Colagrande, David Rivera, Rudy Eugene, and Banana Man.

In 2013, the demonstrable effects of Miami’s decline, besides a few random outliers, are not yet visible and will not begin to be felt for another ten years, during which time a few notable events will occur: the Miami Heat win three more NBA championships, Udonis Haslem is elected Governor of Florida, the Miami Marlins stadium becomes the world’s premiere cockfighting venue, the Freedom Tower is discovered to be a hidden nuclear missile silo, the Miami River is paved over to create a RollerBlade nature trail, Werner Herzog takes a job teaching sophomore English at Palmer Trinity Academy, and an underwater Metrorail line is built that links the Malécon to the parking lot of La Carreta.

 By 2024, no one in Miami is toasting anything, nor has anything to toast with, as all the alcohol on earth has dried up. It was a bad time for the empire.