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| Commissioner Matti Bower
kneels inside the Levity III Luminarium.
Photo by
Mitchell Zachs/magicalphotos.com |
If
you’re one of those folks who typically achieves REM sleep
before The Daily Show comes on, then Sleepless
Night probably seemed like an all-night culture fest. If
you’re one of those people who typically goes to bed at
3 a.m., well, let’s just say all the good stuff ended before you got
there.
The city of
Miami Beach
had the right idea when it spent $400,000, mostly from private
donations, on the spectacle, which promised to keep culture
vultures going all night long.
But the 13-hour
arts fest — held throughout the city from 6 p.m. Saturday to 6
a.m. Sunday on the night the clocks turned back — was almost too
big to navigate, and by the time you figured out which events
you wanted to see, they were already over.
Or they were so
packed that they didn’t seem worth the wait.
Throngs of people
anxiously waited in a Disney-esque line around Collins Park to
walk through the Levity III Luminarium, a psychedelic
labyrinth inside a massive tent handmade in Nottingham, England.
Sixty seconds
after entering the pressurized polymer palace, you forgot all
the crap that you had to put up with just to get there. The
whole experience was reminiscent of one of those weird
animated French movies that Emo clubs in the Design District
project against a wall at 4 a.m. when everybody’s wasted and
puking all over their white shoes.
A minute after
that, the rules the young volunteer told you as he lifted the
hatch to let you in — no running, jumping or rolling around
— suddenly seemed unreasonable.
But thoughts of
those restrictions evaporated almost as soon as they appeared
because, by then, you were completely entranced by the bulbous
domes glowing blue, green and red, and giddy for no apparent
reason other than the fact that you were standing in the heart
of an all-night party that no one else in the country had yet
experienced.
After missing the
ballet presentations, off-the-wall aerial dance performances
off the side of the
Bass
Museum
and Pablo Cano’s musical marionettes, at least Murmurs
caught some live jazz on the Bass terrace. But nothing really
compared with the trippy ride inside the colorful, cavernous
exhibition on the Collins Park Lawn — especially the overly
hyped preview of Spiegelworld’s saucy cabaret spectacle,
Absinthe.
Apparently, the
acrobats, who contort their nearly naked bodies into scandalous
positions in the traveling show, spent their Sleepless Night
flying over from France for their upcoming Miami tour, so The
Gazillionaire, the show’s emcee, and his sprightly
assistant Penny hopelessly tried to entertain the crowds
with raunchy jokes that just weren’t that funny. The
greasy-haired host explained the situation sort of like this:
“Well,
when we have money to pay them, then they’ll be here. In the
meantime, enjoy the FREE show!”
Perhaps they should have called the show Absent, since
its headliners never showed up.
Still, the night
wasn’t a total loss.
Throngs of
sinners and horn-dogs waited in lines stretching down
Washington Avenue
to get into the
World
Erotic
Art Museum,
a surprisingly large space that Naomi Wilzig opened two
years ago to exhibit her massive collection of sexual art. By
3:30 a.m., a stunned and bleary-eyed Wilzig, who offered free
admission to her museum throughout the entire night, had already
counted 2,400 guests. In fact, it was so busy that she had to
close the doors for an hour around
midnight just to clear out the masses. “I had to shut it down for a while,”
she explained. “It was a fire code violation!”
Murmurs hopes the
city brings back the event next year, but we’d be remiss if we
didn’t offer up a few suggestions:
-- Incorporate
more exotic attractions and diverse entertainment — maybe some
gospel, rap or belly dancing would spice things up — and keep
the shows going, well, all night long.
-- Bring in
strolling street performers, and have some kind of freakish
entertainers handing out chalk so people could create their own
sidewalk art.
-- Strategically
place colorfully dressed guides throughout the city to hand out
maps to passers by and offer suggestions.
-- And, of course,
more free food and drinks!
Referendum Fun
Miami Beach voters have given the city a mandate to stay ethical.
Besides deciding who should fill four seats on the Miami Beach
City Commission, voters voted yay on a charter amendment
requiring a special voter referendum before the city can pass
any laws that weaken its stringent ethics codes, which, among
other things, prevents lobbyists from sitting on city boards.
Long story short, a whopping 72 percent voted “yes” for the
“code of conduct” ordinance, which was motivated by
Commissioner Michael Gongora’s failed challenge of the
city’s ethics laws this summer.
Incidentally,
voters in the town of
Surfside
had two referendums of their own. A proposal to extend the terms
of Surfside elected officials from two to four years went
down in flames with 80.7 percent casting “no” votes. About
55 percent of those voters also rejected another referendum to
impose term limits. |
