8/10

It's been a packed period lately. Around the "turn of the buoy" - half of my term here has well been overcome - there have been all sorts of happenings and curios things going on. Giuseppe, the flatmate from Sardinia who's been staying here for a month and a half, left some days ago, but we've definitely had a great time so far.

Work: pressed the clutch and set a higher gear, finally I'm completely busy. I had to build up my own position in the firm and invent my own schedule to complete some projects here and there. The warehouse has no more secrets for me!

Travelling: we drove to Key West, the "Southernmost place in the US", where Ernest Hemingway would live for some years in the 30s. It's more than 200 miles from Fort Lauderdale, all the way on those spectacular bridges linking the archipelago.

Food: yes, we've got plenty of Ben & Jerry's, including the classic tastes from the Chocolate Fudge Brownie to the Strawberry Cheesecake. Good memories of the months spent in the Netherlands.

We usually cook at home, after having shopped at Publix (grocery chain of SE United States), apart once when we popped at Whole Foods, the premium grocer's. We didn't care much but we paid some 70 dollars for a dinner based on salmon and tuna steaks; at least we enjoyed it -.-' otherwise I would have transformed the seafood dude into a nigiri sushi. However, my favourite dish to cook right now is sirloin steak, well seasoned with ginger and freshly ground black pepper, and of course juicily rare.

Talking 'bout sushi: I bought all the necessary items to make sushi. I set for myself the goal of transforming into a maki in my second life, but I'd prefer doing it with my own hands. Anyhow, cooking rice is a damn complicated process, and it will take some practice to reach the state-of-the-art in making good sushi rice - the start of good sushi dishes. I'll keep on trying next week...

Fun: we had this night out on a Limousine, with the chauffeur picking us up in Fort Lauderdale and dropping us off in Miami, where we went chilling out and clubbing in a couple of hot places. Then we hit other spots in the surroundings, such as clubs in Hollywood - halfway to Miami - and South Beach. We also touched three Hard Rock Cafés: Miami, Key West and Hollywood; plenty of memorabilia to gaze upon.

I'm waiting for the night of Sept. 5, when the Depeche Mode will rock the Bank Atlantic Center, in Sunrise - got a ticket for a the first ring, where apparently all the tickets had been sold out, but all sorts of hopes and prayers - and constant checks on the website - must have done the job.

Art District

Have you ever felt like wanting to spend your life with somebody you love? Even if you didn't, that's what inspired one of Tracey Emin's famous neon works, on exhibit at the Museum of Arts of Fort Lauderdale (MOAFL). Heavily influenced by the recent trends in fine arts and design launched by Miami's Art Basel showcase, and by the related flourishing of arts schools and districts, it was obviously a walk through a compendium of pieces of modern arts. A wing fully dedicated to William Glackens, Courbet-influenced painter from Philly, was the "element of unpredictability" in the middle of the visit.

It goes without saying that a part of the artworks, mostly paintings, put sex-related themes on show. Usually there is a sense of bare cruelty in this kind of representations, as if the artist himself had exacerbated the topic in the course of his life; maybe this was Emin's thought - take a past exhibition dedicated to sex, entitled Everyone I've Ever Slept With (1963-1995), she claimed the count was 102; probably that was when she showed the neon sculpture People like you need to fuck people like me.

Nowadays we are awash in artworks about sexual representation; I guess this is the result of centuries where the need of portraying erotism was inhibited by repression and censorship. Have we ended up amidst oversupply? Uncomfortably uninformed enough to give an answer, I can say there's a type of nudity for everyone. There's the hilarious representation of almost lesbian scenes in the women-populated paintings by Hilary Harkness, or the luscious and abundant breasts depicted by Lisa Yuskavage (said to have Vermeer's technical ability), or the same subject made cartoon-like by Tom Wesselmann. Someone went further and introduced intercourses in the game, with the greedy lovers of John Currin or the softly dissolved scenes pictured by Cecily Brown.

I spotted Currin at the MOMAK in Vienna, but now that I'm in the USA I fully understand the (simple) meaning of his portraits of fake women...