newest older email

2004-01-17 - 2:57 p.m.

My new hotel is a much hipper affair than the rampant nose aloft stuff-ery of the Ritz Carlton, and I feel much more Miami Beach now, or at least as much Miami beach as a pasty Englishman with no sense of rhythm or neon shirts CAN feel.

The manager of the new place is a dead ringer for Ben Gazzara in the film Buffalo 66. He has a permanent grimace and you can never tell whether he�s going to punch you in the face or burst into song. He�s very kind, though and treated me to a slap up dinner with some of his hotel-owning cronies, who all have wives with tits the size of Tellytubbies and no sense of irony. I�m now really good at faking interest in things like occupancy rates and booking systems, and I can say things like �What�s the lowdown on the saturation in the boutique hotel market?� without physically wincing. Whatever gives you a smokescreen to quaff down some more free booze, right?

Last night was a nightlife tour with some local clubbing guru � we did nine (count �em) clubs in a night, and I got to purvey not an unsizeable amount of what I believe is called Bling by turning up in a black Merc and pushing through the needy desperate hordes begging to be let in. I shared one of my clubs with the popular musical recording artist who goes by the name of Puff Daddy, though I had to have him pointed out and you had to squint through several lines of security. Boy, he really has a great time when he goes out, secreted away behind his personal army in a V-V-VIP room where they presumably serve champagne fermented from humming bird�s tears. I was in fact more noticeable than him, being only one of two white people in the club, and feeling like the uncoolest person on the planet. Still, it takes the celebrity count to, er, two.

Today is the unconfined orgy of fun that is the Art Deco Festival. As far as I can make it just means that the hot dog carts change the font of their logo to look like something from the twenties. Good times. Tonight looks suspiciously like the ultimate journalistic horror of not having a hosted dinner to go to, so I should try and track down the local branch of Subway or something.

One more day to go, which is usually about the time that I start panicking about not really having seen anything that I�m supposed to, leaving me with 1200 words to write about nothing, having wasted the whole week arsing about trying to blag freebies. Yep, that seems to be about right.

Back
hosted by DiaryLand.com