Yesterday I was complaining to my friend Laura Quinlan that I hadn’t been out of the country in a couple years. “You live outside the country,” Laura said. “Just go to your local supermarket [Bay], and you’ll feel like you’re in Latin America.”

It’s
true: I can eat at one of the little luncheonettes across from Bay and,
from its aroma of onions and beans and cilantro to its ragged
furniture, feel exactly as I’ve felt in Puerto Rico, or on any
Caribbean island. Fans barely keep the tropical air moving, and I’ll be
lucky if the waiter speaks English. It’s one of the running jokes about
Miami: “It’s such an interesting city, and so close to the U.S.”

I
lived in the East Village a dozen years before I moved to Miami Beach
in 2001, and there’s a worldly electric buzz about New York that I will
always miss, and relive in my dreams. But for all the cultural mix that
I enjoyed in the subway and Central Park, in Miami, I deal daily with
people from other parts of the world to a degree I never did in
Manhattan. As I’ve written before,
rappers call it da Bottom, but for southern hemisphere dwellers, it’s
the top of Latin America. Europeans love us, and you’d be surprised at
the number of Asian communities there are in Miami.

That said,
there are days I feel like I’m in the middle of nowhere. The average
musical tour stays hours away, if it ventures into Florida at all.
There’s no dedicated indie cinema. If I didn’t belong to a book club, I
could go weeks without discussing literature. Thank god I get The New York Times delivered daily.

That
cultural isolation and sometimes backwardness are disappearing rapidly,
and it’s thanks to pioneers like Laura. For 20 years, her nonprofit
group the Rhythm Foundation
(run with her husband James and many others throughout the years) has
brought the world’s top musicians to Miami, from Sun Ra to Bebo Valdes
to Kraftwerk to Gilberto Gil, to hundreds more in between. You can see
this amazing history on the walls of the cifo
Art Foundation in downtown Miami (one of the sites of the new Miami
renaissance), in blown-up photos, old flyers from the amazing Cameo,
and Miami Herald articles.

Quinlan, the Bill Bragin
of Miami, runs the foundation from the bottom up, always working the
neighborhoods and businesses where an artist’s constituency is based,
staying well in tune with the area’s ever-changing, growing diversity.
She’s not alone: Tigertail Productions and the Miami Light Project
are other well-rooted arts institutions that have drawn on and nurtured
the city’s deep and wide cultural base (and that are run by super-smart
women). Now top-down organizations like Art Basel and the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts
are trying to tap into what these trailblazers have spent decades
building, Basel with resounding success, the PAC still struggling to
find itself.

Far from feeling cut off from the world, I feel in
the middle of it during weeks like this. My calendar is booked,
including several world premieres: Jay Z and Mary J Blige kick off
their tour at the American Airlines Arena Saturday, indie songstress
Kimya Dawson performs March 25 at Shake-A-Leg Miami,
Pink Martini plays with the new Miami Pop Orchestra Friday at the Arsht
(the show is copresented by the Rhythm Foundation), the survivalist
dance-music gathering Winter Music Conference runs March 25-29, and the Miami City Ballet premieres Nightspot, an opera composed by Elvis Costello, choreographed by Twyla Tharp, and costumed by Isaac Mizrahi, March 28. Shwew.



Callie Manning and Carlos
Guerra in NIGHTSPOT. Photo by Bruce Weber.

Miami
is a unique spot geographically: It’s a gateway, a refugee town, a
port, a stopover. The crime rate sucks, the real estate market is
particularly catastrophic, and we have an ever-growing traffic problem.
But not only do we have the most beautiful turquoise water and pink
buildings: We have a distinct, emergent artistic vocabulary that can
now brag of decades-old tenacity. I don’t have to leave the country to
sample Brazilian, Argentinean, Greek, Colombian, Cuban, Thai, Japanese,
Mexican, and Peruvian culture: It’s all within blocks of me. Even
though I live on an island.