I’ve said from time to time that I believe South Florida is basically “LA without the benefits.” As with most things that emanate from my grey matter and cracked lips, very few people ever understand what the hell I am talking about. And just so that I completely understand what the hell I’m talking about, I’ll explain it to myself.

In LA, underneath the fault line of unending sewerage that’s pumped into our television sets and into the Pacific Ocean, at least there is an underlying lie of creativity. Los Angeles calls unto itself from across the globe actors, writers, would be rock stars and all manner of aspiring creative types. So underneath the crap that gets produced on celluloid and in the digits of this new age of content for everyman, there is still an air of creativity. The folks in LA may go there to be famous or to become great (and wealthy) filmmakers, but because the lie lies on a bed of content, underneath the floating flotsam and jetsam, there is a respect and admiration for the creative and even though many would not admit it, art. LA is built on a foundation of business, but without the writer or the actor and the artist, deep down inside the moneymen know that they could and would not exist without the artists, assholes they may be.

Here in South Florida, the other land of the last resort, the transient nature of LA exists, along with the edge of the world in the other direction. But instead of a world that exists from exploiting the blood and soul of the artist, it’s a land that exists on death and trading real estate from this vanishing swampland like pork bellies. So in SFla, the great brass ring is the business of the pantsuit, mortgage, cemetery plot, condo rules, percentage point. It’s a land that has been built from the foundation of speculation and the turning under of the land. And the great influx of the north to this land of mud and mosquitoes is rebuilding the coastline and waistline for a world that smells like Queens and rots like the Fishkill’s landfill. So this world, this South Florida becomes a new great divide. A land rush for the newly dying and the latest speculation of the bust yet to come. So be it as full of shit and a phony as the great fault line, still the fault line is held together with the glue from the sinew ground down from countless men and women with actual souls. Here, only the souls are laid to rest.

Even New York, a city based on real estate and subsisting almost wholly on commerce and the grey suited businessman, it too has an underlying community of content. The artist and the writer and the poet and the musician and the misunderstood live between the cracks of Wall Street, just across the East River, where rents and rats keep it honest and dirty for a time. Hell, after all, the place was bought with beads.