Florida Keys Journal: The Trading Post

watercolor by Hallie Cohen

Key comes from the Spanish word “cayo,” and it means reef or low island. There are l700 hundred of them in the Florida Keys. Among the largest are Key Largo, Key West (also known as the Conch Republic, which threatened secession in l982, “we secede where other people fail”), Plantation, Lower Matecumbe, Upper Matecumbe, and Sugarloaf. Driving down Route 1 from Miami, along the Everglades National Park, you know you’re in the Keys when you start to see signs advertising “Bait.” Islamorada, the village that comprises Upper Matecumbe, Lower Matecumbe, Windley and Plantation Keys is known for its fishing while Key Largo attracts the divers. Passing the town of Tavernier you come to an establishment called the Ocean View bar, which has retained its name though due to a hurricane it was swept across the highway and now faces a golf course. Many of the homes you see are on stilts since it’s the only way they can be insured. There's a subtropical refulgence mixed in with an air on indulgence. Asian massage parlors and in the age of cybersex one of the last XXX theaters in the United States are scattered amidst dilapidated shopping malls and million dollar houses which come with their own landing strips. A strip club is the neighbor of a Sotheby's Realty franchise.  Facing The Ceeca Lodge, the sprawling resort in Upper Matecumbe, is a 24 hour store called The Trading Post, outside of which is the display for a plot of artificial turf with the picture of a boy and his dog and the question "Has you grass EVER looked THIS good? followed by the misspelled “ask inside for detals.”

Miami Journal: Booty Call

view from Brickell Key Bridge (photograph Hallie Cohen)

One of the first things you see driving into Miami from the airport is a billboard advertising Beats Booty Paint. Yes body painting is alive and kicking in Miami. Can you purchase a brand especially created for the gluts? Or is it simply the culture talking? Miami is screaming sex. Hit the bar at the Mandarin Oriental. Who's that Asian woman in the tight purple dress raising her glass exuberantly? Cross the Bridge at Brickell Key and you’ll find apartment complexes that are ripe for the remake of Rear Window—undulating bodies weaving to a silent beat. Hit the terrace at Truck's, the famous stoned crab place and you find yourself making long distance calls to adjoining tables. You’re the avid and silent member of intimate conversations of which you aren’t a part. The air is balmy and your Bulgarian waiter describes how he likes to chill down in the Keys. In the meanwhile the two Hispanic women in the spikey heels, who had been looking at themselves in hand mirrors as they applied blue lipstick, have finished their exotic mixed drinks and are now preparing to climb into the white BMW station wagon which has just been retrieved by a valet? Where to? You wonder about their fundaments and whether they have seen the Beats Booty paint ad. They say Miami is drowning and that parts of it are already underwater, but the condos and office buildings with their cosmopolitan clientele stand proud. It may not be Venice, but it’s got the canals--and skyscrapers to boot.

Inauguration Day or The Man in the High Castle

The Amazon series The Man in the High Castle based on Philip K. Dick’s l962 novel of the same name is becoming prescient. Dick envisioned an alternate universe in which the axis powers won the Second World War dividing the spoils, ie the US amongst them. Philip Roth’s 2004 The Plot Against America painted a similar kind of parallel universe catalyzed by a putative Charles Lindbergh victory in the l940 election against Roosevelt. Today it’s no longer the Axis powers that are a threat but the Russians. Joseph McCarthy is probably peeing in his grave. The paranoiac vision of Dr. Strangelove is now coming true replete with the ultimate mole, in the form of a newly elected president. Actually most publishers wouldn’t even have accepted this novel, as it doesn’t allow for the willing suspension of disbelief. However, here it all is, real estate ventures, branding deals, golden showers all provided under the watchful eye of Russian intelligence, a practice know as Kompromat which is a far cry from the old Samizdat. In this new version of The Man in a High Castle President Trump appoints President Putin as director of the C.I.A in attempt to create a new business model of international relations, in which annexations and even invasions are simply looked through the lens of a business model, as mergers and acquisitions. Thus it doesn’t matter if Russia acquires the United States or the United States acquires Russia. In the net result, the two countries become one big happy family ruled by Putin & Trump LLC.

Portrait of an Odd Couple

For years, they were not a fixture of the Hampton’s social scene or anywhere. You could see them, pretending to study the menus in the window of tony restaurants as they  ogled the crowds. Some people get into trouble when they have too much fun, parenting kids out of wedlock and becoming addicted to the pleasures they once merely enjoyed. Yet this couple found themselves getting into fender benders as their eyes riveted on the luxury cars parked outside of all the social gatherings they were never invited to and from whose windows emanated music and laugher that disemboweled these unwary travelers on the shoals of unfulfilled desire. There had always been a hope that they would one day be rewarded for the profession they’d made out of their very apartness from human society. However, as the years passed and it became apparent they would never receive recognition for their talented anomie, they began to undertake the things that people do who have nowhere else to go such as wait on the 12 items and under line in supermarkets, enroll in discount clubs and seek even greater discounts on bulk merchandise, like toilet paper, than the ones they already enjoyed. Finally one summer’s day when the rest of the community in which the had anonymously been vacationing (if that's the appropriate word for their extended isolation) had proceeded to their cocktail parties after spending the afternoon lying languidly on the beach, the feckless couple simply decided to give up and head back to the Metropolis. All the restaurants would be emptied of the fine people whose happy lives had always been a rebuke to them and they’d get home in record time since they’d be going against the traffic.

Rome Journal: Pluperfect

"Pluperfect" watercolor by Hallie Cohen

Rome is an archeological site. Layers of history co-exist with an urban infrastructure that allows the current iteration of civilization to perpetuate itself. Railway lines run alongside ancient aqueducts. Futuristic structures, remnants of the Mussolini era, are punctuated by arches and monumental sculptures that reflect both a nostalgia and idealization of the classical age. The juxtapositions on almost any street corner of the city can be surreal and the contemporary culture often reflects these contrarieties. A former power station becomes an exhibition space for antiquities. There are tracks everywhere, but the timeline is the subliminal means of transport by which the populace navigates its daily destiny. Nature itself is less predictable. The Tiber runs through the city and the refulgent vegetation and palm trees are reminders that Rome is almost tropical, a rain forest out of which the first stirrings of an empire that bridged the gap between the pagan and Christian worlds, would come to life. Rome is a pageant in which the alliance between the past and the present is dramatic, theatrical and inescapable. In the Eternal City precious collective memories are recaptured by ancient architecture.