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I want my iPhone! Photo by Erik
Bojnansky |
Like most forms of hysteria,
South Beach was not immune to the sudden iPhone craze.
Apple had announced its doors would open at 6 p.m.
Friday, June 29 with the high-tech devices in stock. So
Last Thursday evening Murmurs wandered over to the
Apple computer store on Lincoln Road and
Meridian Avenue and encountered at least a dozen people
already camped out on folding chairs, with laptops and
other belongings. They were on a quest to be able to
tell later generations, “Yes, I was the first person [at
one of millions of stores around the world] to get an
iPhone” — priced between $499 and $599 apiece and
described as a combination telephone, full-service iPod
music player and mini-computer capable of browsing the
Internet. Number one in line on Lincoln Road was
Telemundo reporter Jorge Bernal, who had been there
since 4 a.m. Thursday. He was later joined by
friends and fellow tech-fanatics Francisco Rodriguez
and Mauricio Armada plus various other iPhone-owner
wannabes. “We’re friends. It’s a family affair,” Bernal
said. Rain didn’t scare Bernal. He recounted how heavy
precipitation fell around him hardly an hour after he
set up camp. He put on his poncho and then, when the
rain got real heavy, retreated to the covered Morris
Lapidus-designed shelter until the rain and lightning
subsided. On Friday morning, when the monsoon returned,
the iPhone seekers huddled under tarps.
Conscripted into the “Best Of 2007” deadline horror,
Murmurs forgot about the itinerant iPhone community
until around 6:20 p.m. Friday, when a SunPost
staffer excitedly declared, “There is absolute
pandemonium at the Apple store! People are
cheering when someone walks out with an iPhone.”
And so Murmurs returned to Lincoln Road. The line had
swelled to a couple hundred people. Employees with black
Apple shirts cheered when someone entered and someone
left with a phone. The cheers inspired those in line to
cheer as well. One employee explained to Murmurs that
they were instructed by their bosses to cheer when
someone came in. On their own they decided to cheer when
someone left. “Some of these guys have been waiting
out here for 24 hours,” he told Murmurs with a hint
of admiration.
Murmurs could not find Bernal but he did spot a familiar
bearded figure who emitted a loud “Yaaaaaaaah!” of
delight when he exited the store. At the request of a
freelance photographer, Kenneth Bereski III, who
sat outside the Apple store for more than 24 hours,
repeated his joyful roar, and then, when a news camera
crew interviewed him, he emitted the “yaaaaah!” a third
time. After Bereski finished telling the camera crews
how wonderful the iPhone was, Murmurs asked for his
card. Turns out, Bereski is the president of SoBeMac,
an Apple Computer consulting company. Murmurs had to
ask: Couldn’t you use your contacts at Apple to just
get a computer? “I might have been able to,” Bereski
said. “[But] how many times do you get to do something
like this?”
Must Wear Bling
Just when Will Smith’s “Miami” was finally
becoming a distant, late’90s memory, it seems a new
pop anthem will debut at Miami Beach’s upcoming
Fourth of July celebration on Ocean Drive and
Eighth Street. Local up-and-coming music star
Jencarlos (of “Ride it Like a Ford” fame)
will perform the song “Miami Beach 25/7,” which
glorifies the party-hearty lifestyle everyone on
the Beach apparently lives and breathes. Appropriately
enough, the performance is scheduled to follow a
naturalization ceremony that surely will give new
U.S. citizens a good reason to celebrate.
It’s all part of a marketing campaign brought to you by
the city of Miami Beach, and it focuses on the slogan
“Miami Beach 25/7: so much to do you’ll need the
extra hour.” (That might explain the city’s upcoming
Sleepless Nights event, set for Nov. 3, when
restaurants, hotel bars and clubs will be open from 6
p.m. to 6 a.m. Most clubs usually close by 5 a.m.,
so there’s that extra hour we all were looking for.)
The male-Britney-like ditty was written by mega-hit
songwriter/producer Rudy Perez. It’s not certain
how catchy or oft-used this anthem will be (Murmurs was
left speechless after a sample listen), but the
eye-opening lyrics (by Perez and L. Russel Brown)
created dozens of questions and have Murmurs thinking of
leaving South Beach out of sheer inadequacy. For
instance, the song says you “must be seen wearing
your bling/up and down Lincoln Road.” But Murmurs’
humble budget barely allows for more than a few rounds
of dollar-drafts at happy hour and an empanada at
David’s Café II, much less displaying mad jewelry on
Lincoln Road! Murmurs wonders if the city might, right
now, be in the process of creating an ordinance
requiring the sporting of blingage.
Another line, “party hard and never sleep,” calls
to mind all the issues some South Beach residents
have with noise pollution and drunken partiers.
Mumurs sent the lyrics to one who hadn’t yet heard of
the campaign. “The city’s promotional lyric is
very attractive: to irresponsible tourists,” South
Pointe activist and self-anointed “noise consultant”
Morris Sunshine told Murmurs. Though he takes
some comfort in the slogan. “They could have made
it “25/8 or 35/9,” he quipped.
Afford Ethics?
Now that the county has to cut $300 million from
its budget thanks to new property tax legislation,
a lot of government offices and agencies are
anticipating the sensation of tightening belts. Worse,
another $100 million is expected to be shaved off
the county’s 2008-09 budget.
Not immune to the cuts: The Miami-Dade County
Commission on Ethics and the Public Trust. “It’s
been made clear that it’s going to impact everyone,”
said Director Robert Meyers in his progress
report during last week’s meeting. Meyers, pontificating
on the impact on the county as a whole said “the county
budget is around $7 billion, only $2 billion of that is
operational.” So there won’t be massive pink-slippage or
gone fishin’ signs posted on libraries. Instead
vacancies in city departments just won’t be filled. And
instead of building new libraries, the one’s now
standing will just be augmented, he said. Meyers
wasn’t sure how that tactic would effect an agency
like the ethics commission, since it’s one of those
governmental bodies that hardly ever sees
turnover, and doesn’t plan on building a library anytime
soon.
“This is probably not the best time to be making
cuts in the ethics commission,” Meyers said, a comment
solidified by an earlier report on a newish addition to
the world of Miami-Dade ethics, lengthily named in the
tradition of ethics related boards: The Ethics,
Integrity and Accountability Task Force (EIA). The
16-member task force met most recently on June 20, and,
as Meyers was pleased to report, was gung-ho about
ethics stuff. One major goal: educating people
about whistle blowing. And to that and other ends, a
subcommittee is meeting for the first time in July. A
report with recommendations will be expected around
120 days after that — no small task, really,
considering some of the recent corruption uncovered
within local governments that went on for years,
apparently in a vacuum.
“We don’t want to create a climate of snitches,
but people are afraid to come forward for fear of
retaliation…In time we can make some impact,” Meyers
said. “It’s embarrassing some of the things that
have happened in this county.”
On the Campaign Trail
A moped-riding dude in a yarmulke was seen by Murmurs
picking up Miami Beach commission candidate Luis
Salom’s posted campaign signs and then dumping them
on a public lot. Was this a fever dream? No, say Salom
representatives, who tell Murmurs they were able to
track down Moped Man after initially filing a police
report.
In other strange
election news, commission candidate Deede Weithorn
would like anyone who got an e-mail from “her” about the
need to downzone a strip of Alton Road to know that she
didn’t write it. “It’s June. They must really be
scared,” Weithorn told Murmurs last week. Who the
“they” exactly are, Weithorn did not know. (She faces
four opponents in the Seat 6 race.) What she does
know is that the false letter has already cost her at
least one vote, and possibly some money for her
campaign.
“I got a call from someone screaming at me about this,”
she recounted. “He said, ‘I can’t support you if this is
what you said.’”
The e-mail, sent around June 15 from
deedeweithorn4mbcommissioner@hotmail.com,
was addressed to neighbors and said, “In the past, a
resolution sponsored by Comm. Saul Gross, which
if passed would have controlled the growth and
density of the Alton Road Corridor between Fifth
Street and 17th died for lack of support. We that
are directly by the overdevelopment of our neighborhood
MUST UNITE and stop this lack of action by our elected
officials. With your support, after these upcoming
elections Deede will be our Commissioner and we will
have a firm voice that will protect our neighborhoods
from overdevelopment by down zoning or by doing
whatever it takes to maintain the character of the
neighborhood.”
Weithorn insists that not only is the e-mail not
her official campaign e-mail (deedeweithorn.com lists
her e-mail as weithorn@acfm-cpa.com), she also has not
taken a position on whether or not Alton Road should be
down-zoned. “To put words in my mouth about an
issue I didn’t even talk about is just…,” Weithorn
paused, then finally said, “I’m incensed, incensed
that it has to start this early.” (Weithorn ran to
fill the last year of Commissioner Luis Garcia’s seat
last year.)
She eagerly points out that whoever sent the letter used
her old campaign banner. “It’s written in poor
grammar and it looks sloppy,” she said. Weithorn
plans to file a complaint with the Miami-Dade
Commission on Ethics.
Got murmurs? E-mail
editorial@miamisunpost.com. Comments?
E-mail
letters@miamisunpost.com.
