Letter from Baltimore

Last week, escaping the latest blizzard, I went to Miami Beach for some sun. But it was cold and rainy, and they were noisily replacing the carpet in my hotel, so I was reduced to checking my e-mail in an Internet café and getting an expensive facial – truly a case of closing the stable door.

South Beach, as it is known, is widely celebrated for its art deco street and beachscape. This is one of the most colossally successful con jobs of all time. Take an unpretentious tropical beach community, popularised in the 1940s by canny Jewish holidaymakers from the north-east. Throw up a couple of thousand tawdry two- or three-storey shoeboxes with basic amenities: a couple of ceiling fans and no windows. Roll out some chrome cladding and neon. Toss in a bit of applied detail, a few top knots and some frosted glass. Then paint it an improbable pale pink or green or yellow, or some other combination of pastel colours that manage to be both insipid and stubbornly vulgar. Unleash a million twelve-year-old, chain-smoking fashion models; drug-dependent muscle boys of volcanic stupidity (usually active, but at times gigglingly dormant); and a throng of shrunken retirees who would be sleepwalking if they were not in partial control of powerful motorised wheelchairs. Mobilise an army of sullen ex-Cuban midgets. Bring on the smelly Eurotrash photographers and every cheap hustler within a radius of 3000 miles. Sprinkle vomit on the sidewalk, tread in some dog poo, and scatter to the winds your empty soft drink cans and unwanted potato chips, and voila! You have created an art deco Shangri-La.