The Magic of places in time, the good kind, and the dark

Neverland cake

Magic City, Miami Beach 1959, first episode season one. What I loved: the hotel has tiny vents which force in fragrance-- “of ocean breezes”; and the hotel is air conditioned to the nines, “like a meat locker”...."so the women can wear their furs...” The dark, modern bars, the tiki or deco references, recall my favorite time and place in books, the astronauts' Cocoa Beach, (as illustrated by Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, and James Michener's Space.) The star Jeffrey Dean Morgan looks like 1959 Florida to me, I guess because in his 1959 Florida glamor he reminds me a little of my handsome uncle during that era, whose family collected Disney art and who moved them from New Jersey to Florida to engineer air conditioning and the dream that's a wish your heart makes. In Magic City the owner's son looks like our commercial landlord's son, not in his features or coloring but in his grooming: the ironed tight polo shirt and khakis, sculpted muscles, good polished loafers, tan skin, brilliantine hair and teeth, and our landlord's son is not available on weekends because he's skiing in Utah...

Downtown Abbey's limited appeal for me is similarly a favorite detail: the way the ladies, Mary, her mother, stand there with their arms just hanging passively at their sides, languidly complementing their dresses. (I even practice this on my own time, I find the posture compelling. Just standing here, pretending I don't have arms. Don't have to do anything.)

We watched Magic City courtesy of Netflix, I gather it had been a Starz original series in about 2013 and according to Variety in October, soon to be a movie? http://variety.com/2014/film/news/magic-city-starz-show-movie-1201344337/

Other than the setting, the first episode of the TV series was boring though, the characters were boring, the graphic sex throughout was boring! or maybe that's just me. I might watch another episode someday, in the spirit in which I might watch Downton Abbey if there's nothing else to do, for the fashion, and for the china! (the reason I watch all the British murder mysteries, noting the tea, and the whiskey, and the fish and chips takeout).

We hugely enjoyed the series The Assets on Netflix, based on truth involving an American double agent selling to the KGB. It's DC Virginia in the 80s and I love the heroine's now-dowdy long plaid skirts, loafers and pumps, sweaters and blouses. Remember when women still dressed for work in daywear? Now that is the correct self-effacing appearance of a CIA mole hunter. The story in this one is actually exciting, but aside from that and Sandy's A-line skirts, I loved the painted yellow dacha in the Russian country and the old Russian hero victimized by the Soviet state and who looks like my greatgrandfather, and the Communist offices and apartments dividing up the lovely old buildings of a past aristocracy. The rooms are so familiar, haven't we seen photos of Eric Snowden there?

Now here's a contrast which occurred to me as I was thinking about that piped in environment of fragranced coolness in Magic City. Have you ever been inside a welfare office of any kind? That environment has got to be just as intentional. It's in an office building and must be the same age as all the other neutral, fungible offices in the building, but in this one, the walls are dirty and dingy and dinged, needing paint for years now, the furniture must have been picked off the junk truck, wobbly peeling tables, stained, burned, broken chairs, filthy floors, smeared window dividing the receptionist from the visitors, nothing appears ever to have been wiped down.

Surely this neglect is meant to be perceived as intentional, as a message to the guests. Just as the cool ocean-scented indoor breezes are not intended to be noticeable as a product of human invention, but merely invisibly enhance the mood, like magic.