Yesterday we attended the Miami International Boat Show at the Miami Beach Convention Center. This is a massive event held each year that features a small nation’s GDP worth of boats and boat related paraphernalia. We were interested in seeing just what the future held for boaters, what exciting gadgets we could only wish we could afford, and what sort of people constitute the crowd at such an event.

The show was ‘ok’; about what you’d expect, no surprises. The world of personal boats doesn’t seem to be evolving anywhere near the rate of cyberspace, but then again it shouldn’t really. A good boat needs to float, get you out and get you back; requirements that have been in effect for centuries and unlikely to change anytime soon. Cigarette boats, flats boats, big game fishing boats, party boats, inflatable boats, cabin cruisers, jet skis, and life rafts were all featured prominently. A certain practical size limit seemed to restrict the presence of massive yachts.

In addition to the boats themselves, the show featured prominently a wide array of instruments, accouterments, necessities, and frivolities that come along with boat ownership. The most cutting edge stuff at the show seemed to revolve around GPS, radar, sonar, and associated technophilia. Things have come a long way from tiny little ‘fish’ and bottom representations on “depth finders”. Nowadays, it seems that the average Joe can have at his disposal (and disposable income) a three-dimensional, full-color bathymetric map of the sea floor, displayed Navy-style on a waterproof 30 inch flat-panel LCD monitor. Fish beware!

LED bottom lights seem like a popular method to “pimp your boat”, much like the neon running lights that were once popular on modified Honda Civics in this city. Probably not a bad way to attract squid and baitfish at night to your boat while fishing, or to light up the bottom under the boat for a night dive. I’m telling you, LED lights are the future.

Fishing gear was also pretty well represented, but I can’t say I saw anything groundbreaking. But take a look at the size of this trolling lure… Not quite the Hula Popper that I was familiar with as a kid bass fishing.

Game fish art and photography was prominently featured in the “Big Game Room”, but I can’t help but feel that this ‘art’ hasn’t really progressed much in the past decade. The only ‘progression’ I saw was that Guy Harvey has ventured into the wine market, and now sells Cabernet, chardonnay, and merlot. From his website…

“Imagine the awesome power of a broadbill swordfish leaping from the depths of the ocean on a dark summer’s night…

Picture the majesty and courage of the legendary blue marlin forever immortalized in Ernest Hemmingway’s Pulitzer Prize-winning saga “The Old Man and The Sea”…

Then drink a toast to the beauty of the world’s oceans with Guy Harvey Artist’s Collection wines… offered for the first time ever.

Whether you’re an outdoor lover drawn to the wild, untamed beauty of the world’s oceans… or a true fisherman dreaming of the day you’ll reel in “the big one,” the Guy Harvey Artist’s Collection is a “must have” addition to your wine collection.

Each limited-edition wine in the Artist’s Collection is spectacular in its own right. But these four liquid jewels become instant collector’s items when adorned by the life-like creations of world-renowned marine artist Guy Harvey.”

Ha, good stuff, “must have”. I sampled each of the wines, and not surprisingly they all tasted like wine. Everyone loves a label, so he’ll probably continue to make a whole bunch of money…

This poor little betta fish was living in urine-colored water in an acrylic tank set up to demonstrate the waterproof and buoyant powers of some walkie-talkie. What happen when the show ends?

And for all the millions and millions of dollars of boats and equipment on display at the boat show, we could not locate a single personal submarine. Sheer disappointment. You know that you’ve really outdone the Jones in your yacht club when you bubble up in a luxury sub. A submarine, even just one, would have really convinced me that we were dealing with the 21st century of personal nautical exploration. Instead it’s still all just four-strokes, Furunos, and fishing rods. C’mon, this is Miami, a city of oppulent decadence. There has got to be at least one person who can afford to buy a submarine here, in front of a crowd of gawkers. Even if it’s too daunting to operate yourself, you can still talk about “MY submarine…”.

I’m sure that if there is a boat show in Dubai, it features at least one personal submarine. If a vanity license plate can sell for more than $14,000,000 in Dubai, surely a submarine is just spare change. It’s sad that we can’t even keep up with the rest of the world when it comes to absurd displays of material possession anymore. Miami, we’ve got some catching up to do.

Last night we attended the second night of International Noise Conference (INC) at Churchill’s Pub in Little Haiti. Churchill’s shares a common wall with Sweat Records, where our “Discosoma” aquarium resides. The annual event is free and features a collection of some of the country’s most dedicated noise makers. People actually come from far-flung places to have their ear drums shredded in our fair city. The fact that the event is free validates it in my mind as a necessary absurdity contributing to the cultural diversity of Miami. I would be hard pressed to pay even $5 to have my ear drums bled arhythmatically for me; but free noise can be a sight to behold.

Churchill’s Pub is an incredibly important venue for the local music scene in the city of Miami. It proclaims itself “A Sorta English Pub”, but as far as cultural embellishments go in this city, that’s an understatement. Bloke owned and operated, two genuine double-decker buses decaying in the parking lot, football (non-American) on the tele, bangers and mash, Bodington’s Ale, and authentic English bar-maids (that only look good from a distance or after 4-5 pints). In addition to the English trappings, Churchill’s qualifies as a reliable dive bar with multiple places for musicians of all calibers to play music. There is even a laundry room for touring musicians and vagabonds to wash their smelly clothes in. Often, the music is very loud, and less than crisp; a synergy resulting from the type of music that is played here (distorted), the type of people that hang out there (grungy), the physical environment (dank), and the air (smoky). A perennially successful formula for a do-it-yourself music scene to take root. The loudest show I’ve ever experienced took place in Churchill’s: Lighting Bolt, in their final tour performance before recording the ear-splittingly good Hyper Magic Mountain (2005), playing on the floor in front of stacks upon stacks of bass amps at full volume. Churchill’s is not a place to forget your ear plugs.

Who and what goes on at the International Noise Conference? I was previously unawares myself… Dreadlocked crusties, moon-booted kilt-wearers, face-painted weirdos, freaks, and plenty of Churchill regulars. Also, a surprisingly large number of exceedingly tall skinny dudes (men? guys?). Even more surprisingly, a respectable number of attractive young ladies.

The first act we witnessed was a fellow who spent several minutes running mic feedback through his amps at ear-piercing volume. This was then followed by a lot of screaming and yelling, which wasn’t easy to discern since it was so heavily distorted. Basically he made a bunch of noise. At some point he got pretty aggressive; throwing himself into the audience, flailing limbs, rolling around on the floor, menacingly swinging the mic (see pic below). He got a pretty good crowd response in the form of applause at the conclusion of the noise spectacle.

Outside, a nerd jammed out to a modified original 8-bit Game Boy. This electronic music had rhythm, and therefore was significantly more easily digested by the brain. He even had my toes-a-tappin’. This music must be the end result of a lifetime of video gaming, Sunny D, ADD, and plenty of free time. Fortunately the results were far more positive than annoying, and definitely worth the money that I hadn’t spent. He had a good thing going on, and he had his Napoleon Dynamite dance moves down pat.

The next noise maker played through his laptop, a chopped, rapidly repetitive (like a CD skipping, only much faster), and ever so slowly morphing barrage of noise. The samples assaulted in the form of vile swear words, non-sequitors, and incomprehensible snippets that repeated enough times that they actually seemed to develop meaning in your brain (impressive). This is the sort of stuff that some countries would probably utilize when trying to break down politcal prisoners to try and extract information. 30 minutes is tolerable yet novel, but after about 13 hours of it I bet the average person would crack like an egg and tell you whatever needed to be said to make it stop.

According to the INC “rules”, there is supposed to be “No Droning, No Laptops, and No Mixing Boards”. I saw all 3 of these rules being broken in the 3 acts I watched, so perhaps they only make the rules to have them be broken, which is, you know, so anarchic. “Screw the International Noise Conference and damn their suffocating stranglehold on our creativity!”

By perusing the merchandise tables at the INC, I quickly learned that the preferred format for “noise recordings” appears to be the cassette tape. Not CDs, not vinyl, but the obsolete and sub-standard quality of cassette. If 8-track tapes were more DIY recording friendly, I’m sure that those would have been the hot tickets. It appears that the INC exists as an answer to the question “why not?”, as exemplified in this stubborn dedication towards eschewing accessibility. ‘Noise’ can be respectable, if maybe less than pointless, and in the end everyone’s ears hurt. But someone’s gotta be doing it, and someone’s gotta be absorbing it.

I wonder to myself if the bootleggers of “noise musicians” try to get as low quality a recording as possible…maybe recorded onto one of those tiny cassettes in a vintage answering machine? Does additional tape noise and distortion contribute to a “better” live recording?

We learned later, after Jared pulled several thumb-tacks from the soles of his shoes, that we had just missed the freak that had poured the tacks on the floor, roll around in them shirtless, and then wrap his head in barbed wire until he was prickly and blood-stained, all to more ear splitting noise. The festival starts at 11am and runs all day and night, so I guess you can’t catch ‘em all. We lasted about an hour before needing to rest our ears and brains. I can’t imagine someone spending all 3 days in that noise. Anyone that can is a freak, and Churchill’s was pretty successful in accumulating a bunch of freakin’ weirdos. May god bless you Churchill’s and your awesome freak magnetic powers! I’ll be back next year…

(Photos courtesy of Patrick Albertson)

Jared and I spent a really great day out on Biscayne Bay with our good friend Carlos. Carlos has a classic 25-foot Boston Whaler, aptly named “Slingshot”. No frills, just good boat. We had hoped to do an underwater photography mission on some local Miami reefs, but my camera kit acted up at the last second (figures), so we scrapped the shoot and enjoyed a day on the water instead. We cruised down south out of Coral Gables’, past ‘Mt. Trashmore’ ( a huge stinking landfill), past the Turkey Point nuclear reactor, and then around the tip of Elliot Key, before heading back north along the ocean side of the Keys.

We saw several solitary dolphin jumping and quite a number of Portuguese man-o-war ‘jellyfish’. These animals aren’t true jellyfish, but are actually a colony of tiny hydroid-like polyps called siphonophores, that link together in long, powerfully stinging tentacles. I’m not sure exactly how the colony is able to produce the gas-filled float that allows it to catch the breezes, perhaps someone else can educate me there. Maybe these creatures know something…

The most noticeable thing about being out on the water in Biscayne Bay is just how much bigger the Miami skyline has gotten in the past 8 years from when I first arrived in the MIA. It’s pretty impressive looking now, but I can’t help but wonder what’s going to happen to all those new, vacant condo high rises what with the real estate bubble all but imploded. Even the buildings that are recently completed seem mostly unoccupied. You can look up the whole front of a building, and see not one piece of deck furniture, or any other piece of evidence suggesting that it is otherwise occupied. And even still, they are breaking ground on new buildings, even in the wake of the obvious real estate market crash. The wild card for Miami though, is whether the declining dollar will bring in a bunch of buyers from Europe and South America who want a Club Land getaway residence. I think that this would be preferable, in that these buyers would probably be a lot less reliant upon the city’s unprepared infrastructure. I don’t think that downtown Miami is capable of supporting the population increase that would come with permanent residents living and working in the area. In any case, from out on the water, the city looks Magic.