Flamingo Magazine

No.

11

A POOLSIDE CHAT WITH P-FUNK MASTERMIND GEORGE CLINTON

THE ARTS & CULTURE ISSUE

For Floridians. By Floridians.

MIAMI ART WEEK:

Jaguars QB

BLAKE BORTLES

HOW IT ALL BEGAN

U N F I LT E R E D

A PERFECT ESCAPE TO Q TOWN OF SEASIDE

40

FLORIDA FILMS TO LOVE E LAUGH AT

JAKE OWEN Just How Much Does He Love Florida?

Uniquely grown in its native forest environment, Guayaki Yerba Mate is cherished as a sacred beverage.

Reach deep into yerba mate culture and you’ll discover people have long gathered to imbibe mate to awaken the mind, perform extraordinary feats and to exchange confidences.

Even Yari, the mythical goddess of mate decrees it the symbol of friendship.

Guayakí’s 2020 mission is to steward and restore 200,000 acres of South American Atlantic rainforest and create over 1,000 living wage jobs.

— fall 2018 —

CONTENTS F E AT U R E S

46

54

64

74

JAKE OWEN IS THE SUNSHINE SON

FLORIDA MAN’S MOVIE STAR MOMENTS

BRINGING BACK THE FUNK

MIAMI MASTERS

B Y S T E V E D O L LA R

Ahead of his world tour to promote his latest album, music legend George Clinton of Parliament-Funkadelic opened his home and his heart in Tallahassee, where he has lived for the last two decades.

BY JAMIE RICH

Country music artist Jake Owen made a name for himself with his sunshine-infused sound. Take a trip back with Flamingo to his hometown and the college bar where he got his start.

Cover Photography by

The wild mystique of Florida and the antics of our people have captured the attention of filmmakers for generations. Enter the weird world of Florida Man and the movies in which he stars.

JOSEPH LLANES

On the cover: Country music star and Vero Beach native Jake Owen on location in Key West

2

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

BY ROB RUSHIN

On this spread: A muralist at work in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood, known for its labyrinth of painted walls and public art Photography by Mary Beth Koeth

B Y N I LA D O S I M O N

We deconstruct Miami Art Week, along with its iconic fair Art Basel, and meet the people behind the event who gave Florida a place at the top of the global art scene. P.S. Don’t miss our guide to Miami’s artsiest neighborhoods.

D E PA R T M E N TS

14

41

96

WADING IN

COLUMNS

ON THE FLY

14 /// THE SPREAD: Finding France in Florida with gourmet scoops from Miami’s Bar Crème

41 /// C APITAL DAME: Diane Roberts wanders into the wild with three talented Tallahassee artists.

20 /// M ADE IN FLA: Discover these fashions, florals and funky party linens designed by inspiring females.

91 /// PANHANDLING: Prissy Elrod’s decision to amass a ridiculous number of family portraits comes back to haunt her.

24 /// FLAMINGLE: Five literary heavyweights with deep Florida roots

98 /// F LORIDA WILD: From fly rods to cameras, photographer Carlton Ward Jr. reflects on his connection with red drum.

26 /// T HE STUDIO: Orlando artist Kelly Joy Ladd is tearing up the art scene one piece of paper at a time.

30 /// O NE-ON-ONE: Timeout with Jaguars quarterback Blake Bortles ahead of a promising 2018 season

96 /// F LEDGLINGS: Floridian Casey Shea hones his classic rock sound with a new band, Grand Canyon.

100 /// G ROVE STAND: Chef and restaurateur Jim Shirley is spreading the culinary art of new Southern cuisine 104 /// BIRD’S-EYE VIEW: Find your sea legs following our day guide to Seaside.

112 /// THE ROOST: Artistic architecture and to-die-for domiciles 115 /// T HE TIDE: Thirty reasons to get out and explore the Sunshine State 120 /// F LORIDIANA: Thomas Edison and Henry Ford made history in these Southwest Florida estates.

36 /// JUST HATCHED: The freshest places and spaces to experience across Florida

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

3

EDITOR’S NOTE

f you haven’t noticed yet, I’m a music fan—with everyone from Fleetwood Mac to Indigo Girls, JJ Grey, Tedeschi Trucks Band, Zac Brown Band, Taylor Swift and Sugarland populating the soundtrack of my life.

And if you’ve been reading Flamingo over the last three years, then you’ve actually gotten to meet some of these artists in our pages. Of the many genres of music, country remains my go-to.

I wrapped my heart around country music as a teenager in the early ’90s when I discovered Garth Brooks while hanging out with high school friends on what was then undeveloped farmland in Broward County. We truly were, as Tim McGraw sings, “country boys and girls gettin’ down on the farm.”

To bring Florida’s current cultural picture into focus for Flamingo readers, our editorial team looked at some of the biggest names and rising talents creating music, art, literature, film, design and culinary craft across the state, and in some cases beyond. Then we asked them to share their stories.

In our cover story, “The Sunshine Son,” country music superstar Jake Owen takes us back to his days wakeboarding in his hometown of Vero Beach and then on to Tallahassee, where he started his career on a small beer-soaked stage. A

few years before Owen strummed his first guitar in the capital city, legendary funkster George Clinton, creator of the super-group Parliament Funkadelics, moved to town, finding solace and sobriety. In his article, “Bringing Back the Funk,” Rob Rushin meets up with the 77-year-old icon for a poolside chat about his latest album, a world tour and his 20 years in Tallahassee. And in our piece “Florida Man’s Movie Star Moments,” writer Steve Dollar pulls back the curtain on

the state’s history as a muse for a litany of filmmakers behind everything from art house films to documentaries, horror flicks and Hollywood blockbusters.

Any discussion about Florida’s arts and culture wouldn’t be complete without a fresh look at Miami Art Week, the state’s annual moment to shine on the world stage. In her piece “Miami Masters,” Nila Do Simon introduces us to the people behind the behemoth art festival, demystifying some of the week’s marquee fairs and sharing insider tips about Miami’s artsiest neighborhoods.

From South Beach to Seaside, and all points in between, the creative work of Floridians is shaping our culture. It’s the arts, after all, that move our hearts, minds and bodies. We all remember the music we danced to, the movies we laughed at, the books we cried over, and the art installations that made us stop and think and at times say, “What the heck is that?”

And because of that cultural connection, we’ll never forget the time and the place and the people with whom we shared those moments.

As you wade into the pages that follow, I hope you find your groove and a deeper sense of connection to this great state of creators.

Ed i t o r i n Ch i e f & P ublisher

let us know what you think. Email me at jamie@flamingomag.com

4

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

PHOTOGR APHY BY MARY BETH KOETH; MAKEUP BY JENNIFER COMEE WITH THE ROSY CHEEK

I

Get your groove on!

LIVE PASSIONATELY. DRINK RESPONSIBLY. © 2018. BACARDI AND THE BAT DEVICE ARE TRADEMARKS OF BACARDI AND COMPANY LIMITED. RUM - 40% ALC. BY VOL.

ISSUE

CONTRIBUTORS

11

For Floridians. By Floridians.

• FOUNDED IN 2016 •

KARA FRANKER loves to explore hidden gems along the Florida coast. She has been featured as a Florida travel expert in Condé Nast Traveler and Coastal Living and on the Travel Channel.

Additionally, the attorney and writer is the editor in chief of Modern Luxury Weddings South Florida and the Caribbean. Her favorite stretch of sand in the Sunshine State is the Pass-A-Grille section of St. Pete Beach near her home. In Kara’s debut assignment for Flamingo, she draws on her travel expertise to transport readers to the must-see events in The Tide and gives a sneak peek into the latest openings around the state in Just Hatched.

— fa l l 20 1 8 — Editor in Chief, Publisher, Founder JAMIE RICH jamie@flamingomag.com Consulting Creative Director Holly Keeperman holly@flamingomag.com Photo Editor and Senior Designer Ellen Patch ellen@flamingomag.com Contributing Designer Victor Maze Contributing Editor Eric Barton

MARK WALLHEISER is a Tallahassee-based photojournalist who worked as a staff photographer for two newspapers and a freelancer for magazines such as Sports Illustrated and Newsweek. Mark was individually nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes, one in 1988 for a series on crack cocaine in Tallahassee and the second in 2016 for an image of then presidential candidate Donald Trump. In his assignment for Flamingo, Mark captures the brilliance and bravado of legendary funkster George Clinton at home for our feature, “Bringing Back the Funk.”

Cont ributin g Writers Eric Barton, Jeanne Craig, Steve Dollar, Prissy Elrod, Kara Franker, Sean McCaughan, Laura Reiley, Diane Roberts, Maddy Zollo Rusbosin, Rob Rushin, Nila Do Simon, Carlton Ward Jr., Terry Ward Contributing Photographers & Illustrators Jenna Alexander, Leslie Chalfont, Beth Gilbert, Mary Beth Koeth, Joseph Llanes, Stephen Lomazzo, Birgit Singh, Libby Volgyes, Carlton Ward Jr., Mark Wallheiser Copy Editors & Fact Checkers Brett Greene, Emily Orr, Katherine Shy Marketing & Promotions Annie Lee Social Strategy Christina Clifford Global Director Partnership Marketing Neil Strickland neil@globetm.com Global Director Partnership Marketing Claudio Dasilva claudio@globetm.com Advertising Sales Robert Kohn robert@flamingomag.com Interns Jessica Fondo, Mae Logue, Maggie Martin Contact Us

P: (904) 395-3272 E: info@flamingomag.com

SEAN MCCAUGHAN is a native of Miami, where he says skyscrapers look like clouds. He is a freelance journalist and was the founding editor of Curbed Miami, a lifestyle and real estate resource. He writes about real estate, architecture, culture, and design. His current project, The Big Bubble, is a blog he runs about South Florida real estate. In this edition of Flamingo, Sean takes us inside art-inspired homes across the state in The Roost.

6

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

All content in this publication, including but not limited to text, photos and graphics, is the sole property of and copyrighted by JSR Media and Flamingo. Reproduction without permission from the publisher is prohibited. We take no responsibility for images or content provided by our advertisers.

JSR MEDIA

Be part of our winter Shop FLA Gift Guide promotion. Email ads@flaminogmag.com.

PHOTOGR APHY BY HAL YEAGER FOR MARK WALLHEISER

JENNA ALEXANDER is a photographer, illustrator and painter who creates aesthetically clean and simple artwork ranging from chalk pastel botanicals to figurative oil paintings and illustrations. Jenna loves working out of her studio, situated in a historic St. Augustine house built in 1908. Aside from her career as an artist, she draws inspiration from adventuring and traveling with her husband, Za, and their two kids, Jensen and Navy. In this edition of Flamingo, Jenna illustrates portraits of the men and women behind Miami Art Week and the city’s booming arts and culture scene in our feature story, “Miami Masters.”

THE

EXPERIENCES YOU’LL TAKE AWAY

CAN’T BE RECORDED ON A

SCORECARD.

When you play a round of championship golf at Omni Amelia Island Plantation Resort, you come away with more than just your score. From endless recreational options, cuisine to please every palate, 23 tennis courts and a full-service spa, no other golf experience brings you closer to the true spirit of the place you’re in.

EXTRA SUN, EXTRA FUN PACKAGE RECEIVE UP TO

INCLUDES LUXURIOUS

$

ACCOMMODATIONS,

250

RESORT CREDIT

VALET AND MORE.

OmniHotels.com/AmeliaIsland 888-261-6161

This fall, head to coastal Pensacola, Florida, from November 1st–12th for Foo Foo Fest, a 12-day celebration of happenings, events and moments of high artistic and cultural caliber, delivered with a hefty dose of Southern sophistication.

8

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

From authentic adventures to one-of-a-kind experiences, Palm Coast and the Flagler Beaches are filled with opportunities to connect with nature.

Come fall in love with the area’s unique personality and unspoiled charm — your vacation is sure to be anything but ordinary.

www.VisitFlagler.com

— Flor idians, far e, f inds —

WADING IN — The Spread —

C r e a m y, d r e a m y d i s h e s f r o m M i a m i

— Made in Fla —

Fabulous makers and designers with eyes for color

— Flamingle —

Five wonderful wordsmiths of the literary world

— the studio —

In the fold with artist Kelly Joy Ladd

— one-on-one —

Off the field with Jaguars quarterback Blake Bortles

— Just Hatched —

MARY BETH KOETH

The newest must-stops opening shop

10

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

Experience a Taste of Italy in the Tropics without the International Price tag!

This Winter, Costa Deliziosa will depart from Port Everglades and set sail for 7–night and 10–night sailings. That’s not all! With our different cabin categories, with Costa, it is simple to Costamize your cruise!

How to Costamize your cruise: Choose the itinerary of your dreams and the best cabin for your needs

Add on any extras you may like**

• A Basic Category, our best value cabin where you can build your ideal vacation with multiple drink packages, services, and shore excursions to choose from.

• Spa package

• A Total Comfort Category, with three different fare types in the category, receive a complimentary beverage package and, depending on your fare type, multiple other amenities that can reach a value of up to $2,350 per cabin! *

• Excursions

• Special dining • Internet or telephone package – And so much more!

For more information and reservations, please contact your travel professional, visit costacruises.com or contact us at 1-800-GO-COSTA (1-800-462-6782). Mon - Fri 9 am - 6 pm ET *Beverage packages are available for select categories. Beverage/ drink items vary by package level. Beverage packages are available for individual bookings only. Value shown is calculated based on if each amenity were to be purchased separately and is for a Deluxe/Suite amenities value for a 10 –night cruise and is calculated based on 1 cabin for an individual booking during the 2018 year. Actual value may change at any time. The included amenities in the Total Comfort categories cannot be removed or exchange for a different amenity and have no cash value in those categories. ** Add-ons are available for an additional cost. Ships’ Registry: Italy 7877

A DV E RTO R I A L

Fall into Fun in

Panama City Beach

From seafood and pirate festivals to a classic car show and a holiday spectacular, autumn in Florida’s Gulf Coast is pure entertainment Lobster Festival & Tournament: September 17–23 Imagine fresh lobster prepared any way you like it—on a sandwich, in a roll, on the grill or chopped up in a heaping plate of smoked Gouda macaroni and cheese. Schooners, the Last Local Beach Club, is hosting their 29th annual seven-day lobster festival—the largest event of its kind in the Southeast—and it’s sure to be lip-smackin’ good.

Pirates of the High Seas Fest: October 5–7 Ahoy, matey! Landlubbers and swashbucklers alike set sail for a family-friendly weekend full of scavenger hunts for buried treasure, pillage parades, live music, fireworks and, of course, pirate battles and invasions. Head to Pier Park for the free Pirates of the High Seas Fest on Columbus Day weekend to walk the plank and explore the briny deep.

Panama City Beach Oktoberfest: October 12–13 Dust off your best lederhosen, tap the keg and hoist a stein!

Get ready for two full days of German beer, giant pretzels, bratwurst and sauerkraut at

the annual Panama City Beach Oktoberfest celebration in Aaron Bessant Park, just one block from the beach.

Bloody Mary & Music Festival: October 20 Who’s going to be crowned the “Big Tomato” and take home the four-foot-tall tomato trophy this year? Find out at Grand Lagoon Coalition’s third annual Bloody Mary & Music Festival on the beach. The competition is sure to be fierce as nearly two dozen local businesses attempt to overthrow the reigning champs from Dat Cajun Place.

Thunder Beach Autumn Rally: October 24–28 Rev your engines at the annual Thunder Beach Autumn Rally in Frank Brown Park. Known as the most biker-friendly free rally in America, motorcyclist enthusiasts gather together for live music, demo rides, contests and the opportunity to check

out custom bikes decked out in style and swagger.

Emerald Coast Cruizin’ Car Show: November 7–10 Cruise with the top down in a classic cherry red ’57 Chevy and watch the onlookers swoon. The Emerald Coast Cruizin’ car show transforms Aaron Bessant Park into an open-air showroom for vintage speedsters and hot rods.

Highlights include entertainment, celebrity appearances and a lively classic car auction.

Beach Home for the Holidays: Thanksgiving Weekend Usher in the holidays and roll out the red carpet for Santa Claus and his reindeer by lighting a giant Christmas tree, caroling, roasting s’mores around campfires and watching a spectacular firework show. Beach Home for the Holidays kicks off on Black Friday after Thanksgiving and sets the stage for the most magical time of the year.

Known for its pure white sand and turquoise waters, PANAMA CITY BEACH is the perfect place for a fall family getaway.

MAKE IT FUN MAKE IT SPONTANEOUS MAKE IT MEMORABLE MAKE IT YOURS!

Panama City Beach has so much family fun, heart-pounding action, eco-adventure and romance, the memories you make here will last a lifetime. Come make Panama City Beach your REAL. FUN. BEACH. Plan your fun getaway today.

VisitPanamaCityBeach.com

WADING IN :THE SPREAD FLO RIDA-F R ESH BITES & BEVS

By Er i c Ba rt o n • P h o t o g ra p h y b y L i b b y Vo l g y es

Mais Oui!

One man recreates the luxe crème glacèe desserts brought to America from Paris by Thomas Jefferson and now served in high style at Bar Crème in Miami

W

hen Thom Ziegenhardt

palaces on every corner. He started with

began dreaming up a new

Google. His search turned up something

ice cream parlor concept

surprising: ice cream got its start in America

four years ago, he pictured his parlor as something more refined, an antidote to the frozen yogurt shops and kid-focused sprinkle

thanks, in part, to Thomas Jefferson.

While Jefferson didn’t invent the stuff, he did help popularize it. After living in Paris for five

BAR CRÈME — LOCATION —

AVENTURA MALL 19575 BISCAYNE BLVD. AVENTURA — HOURS — MON.–SAT. 10 A.M–9:30 P.M. SUN. 12–8:00 P.M. This page: Bar Crème burnt

honey and lavender sundae

14

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

barcreme.com

Above: Bar Crème Bourbon Pecan Peaches sundae made with bourbon drunken peaches, spiced crumbles,

whipped cream and caramelized salted pecans on a warm buttermilk biscuit with rosemary sprig

years, Jefferson returned to the U.S. in 1789 with an appreciation for ice cream–based desserts. He’d later serve them to guests at the White House, then known simply as the President’s House.

As Ziegenhardt discovered, Jefferson dished up scoops of vanilla frozen custard on a hot pastry.

The dessert could then be ladled with sauces, topped with spiced nuts and finished with dried fruits.

After he finished his research, Ziegenhardt developed a shop called Bar Crème, which he plans to open this fall in Miami-Dade’s Aventura Mall. He and the shop’s owner Omar Mazzei anticipate opening five to 10 locations of Bar Crème across South Florida before going national.

The place has a Jefferson-era feel, with French oak millwork, Calcutta marble and antique satin

PREPARATION: Center a warm Liege waffle on a plate and top with vanilla ice cream. Ladle warmed burnt honey lavender sauce over the ice cream and top with whipped cream. Lightly sprinkle sundae with toasted almonds and fresh lavender petals. Garnish sundae with 2 mini stroopwafels and enjoy!

BAR CRÈME BURNT HONEY LAVENDER SAUCE 1 cup warm water 1/2 cup raw sugar 1/4 cup dried lavender petals 1/4 cup organic wildflower honey 2 cups organic heavy cream 1/4 teaspoon French fleur de sel Fresh lemon juice (optional) Beet juice for color (optional)

brass. Visitors can also indulge in imagining Jefferson spooning his way to the bottom of the same desserts.

Bar Crème Burnt Honey and Lavender Sundae S e rv e s 1 Freshly made Liege waffle Large scoop of vanilla ice cream Bar Crème burnt honey lavender sauce Whipped cream Toasted almonds Fresh lavender petals 2 mini stroopwafels to garnish

PREPARATION: Pour honey into a large saucepan and warm over medium heat until golden brown. Add warm water and dried lavender and whisk until honey has been dissolved into the water. Continue cooking for about 5 to 6 minutes. Remove from heat and strain out lavender petals. Return liquid to saucepan and place over medium heat. Whisk in cream, bring to a soft boil and cook, stirring frequently, until sauce has thickened, about 6 to 8 minutes.

Remove from heat and whisk in salt and fresh lemon juice to help cut sweetness.

Add lemon juice to taste a bit at a time, taking care not to turn the mixture tart.

If using, add beet juice in small amounts until sauce attains preferred color.

Roasted in Jacksonville, FL. Shipped to your Door.

15% off coffee orders with code: BOLDFLAMINGO www.boldbeancoffee.com Jax Beach 2400 South 3rd St.

Riverside 869 Stockton St.

San Marco 1905 Hendricks Ave.

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

15

WADING IN :THE SPREAD FLO R IDA-F R ESH BITES & BEVS

Float Fabuleux Pour on the decadence with fresh berries and cream at your next fall soiree

16

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

Bar Crème Smashed Strawberry Float 2 scoops of vanilla ice cream 1 small bottle of botanical soda 2 tablespoons Bar Crème smashed strawberries 1 whole strawberry to garnish PREPARATION: Add 2 tablespoons of Bar Crème smashed strawberries to the bottom of a glass and top with vanilla ice cream. Do not pack the scoops into the glass; allow room for soda to reach the smashed strawberries.

Slice whole strawberry and garnish rim of glass. Pour sparkling soda over ice cream until covered and serve immediately with a straw and a spoon.

BAR CRÈME SMASHED STRAWBERRIES 1/2 quart fresh, rinsed strawberries 1/4 cup raw sugar 2 teaspoons finely chopped mint leaves 1 teaspoon lemon juice 1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract PREPARATION: Hull, slice and toss strawberries with sugar until coated and sugar has dissolved. Sprinkle with mint leaves, cover and allow berries to macerate in fridge for 2 hours. Stir mixture once or twice in this time to help release berries’ natural juices. Transfer macerated strawberries to a saucepan and cook, gently stirring, over medium heat until mixture has softened and juices release. Bring mixture to a soft boil and cook for 6 to 8 minutes longer. Remove mixture from heat and add lemon juice and vanilla. Cover and refrigerate smashed strawberries until ready to assemble your float.

LIBBY VOLGYES

T

he menu at Bar Crème offers guests different ways to create a Jeffersonian dish. There’s a made-toorder option, where you pick a pastry, a sauce and toppings.

The menu is also full of composed dishes designed and executed by pastry chefs.

They’re assembled when you order them, the bananas flambeed on the spot. The toppings sound like a year’s worth of dessert specials from a fine dining restaurant: Chambord blueberry compote, “sweet-and-tart” cherries cooked in brandy, bourbon pecan peaches and a chocolatey caramel churro.

Sure, the dishes are decadent monuments, with an average price tag of $12. But this is a place to finish the night with something far more dramatic than watching a teenager drop a scoop of gelato into a paper cup.

Ziegenhardt imagines his ice cream parlor as a destination, where the creation of the dish is as sweet as the taste.

“A lot of it is about the show,” Ziegenhardt says. “It’s about the excitement of seeing this dish come together right in front of you.”

F L O R I D A ’ S O N LY S T A T E W I D E F E A T U R E M A G A Z I N E

One Magazine. All of Florida.

Subscribe to our PRINT EDITION at FLAMINGOMAG.COM/SUBSCRIBE and receive the magazine direct to your home 4 times a year OR

Download our DIGITAL EDITION to your favorite device at AMAZON.COM

BACK ISSUES A L S O A V A I L A B L E!

THE Arts & Culture ISSUE

EMAIL US AT hello@flamingomag.com

For Floridians. By Floridians.

THE Arts & Culture ISSUE

THE Arts & Culture ISSUE

For Floridians. By Floridians.

For Floridians. By Floridians.

FLAMINGOMAG.COM

FlamingoMag

@TheFlamingoMag

A DV E RTO R I A L

In Vero Beach, the true gems lay beyond the coast, in the heart of town

Cultural Riches street for more Old Florida vibes at Barefoot Cafe, a favorite among locals, who gather at the tiki-themed bar for comfort foods like grilled Cajun chicken wraps and the epic macaroni salad. And if you love murals, you’ll find one of the latest additions to the Indian River Mural Trail along 14th Avenue—the unmissable rendering of a heart being pulled in several directions, surrounded by declarations of love.

ovelist Carl Hiaasen, country music star Jake Owen and the Florida Highwaymen artists are among the cultural beacons of Florida who call Vero Beach home. And though it’s the shipwreck booty recovered here that earned the region its “Treasure Coast” nickname, equal riches of the cultural variety inspire visitors to explore these golden shores.

WORLD-CLASS ART The heart of Vero Beach culture beats inside a riverfront neoclassical building housing the Vero Beach Museum of Art, which attracts nearly 80,000 visitors each year as the principal visual arts facility in the Treasure Coast. From October 6, a visiting three-month exhibition called Made in Germany, featuring contemporary art from the Rubell Family Collection, showcases works by Thomas Schutte, Anselm Kiefer and other pioneering 20th- and 21st-century artists. The youngest members of the family can find inspiration at the museum’s Art Zone, a child-friendly space with chalkboard walls and a 25-foot interactive sketch aquarium that scans kids’ drawings and sets them afloat in virtual waters. Make time for lunch in the atrium at the airy Museum Café.

MAIN STREET VERO BEACH For all the fun along Vero’s beachfront, it’s also worth heading inland across the Indian River to the vibrant downtown, anchored by 14th Avenue. Within a revitalized arts district known as Main Street Vero Beach, find shops, galleries and restaurants inside Mediterranean Revival buildings. Don’t miss the historic Vero Theatre, an Instagram darling. The monthly Downtown

THEATER FOR THE AGES Riverside Park’s other cultural treasure, the Riverside Theatre, is the largest of all small-town professional theaters in the U.S. In addition to the Broadway-quality productions that play out here—West Side Story and Mamma Mia, to name a few—the theater has a dedicated stage for children’s productions and is one of a few playhouses in Florida designated a cultural institution, with the costumes and sets all created on-site.

N

Friday gathering lures locals and visitors for a street party with live music. Wander into the Florida Highwaymen Landscape Art Gallery, which celebrates the 26 AfricanAmerican artists who famously sold their work from the trunks of their cars a half-century ago. Some afternoons, second-generation Highwaymen painter Ray McLendon paints in the gallery, detailing his canvases with the flourishes of Florida’s moody landscapes. Cross the

WADING IN :MADE IN FLA TOTE

Clockwise from top left: Mandolin

skin is in

2.0 in Portofino, a collaboration with Missoni; Mandolin 2.0 in Giraffe; Carmen fanny pack in bluish gray with strap; designer Ximena Kavalekas; Carmen fanny pack in mustard with strap

WHILE VISITING A FRIEND WHO OWNS

a tannery and leather goods factory in Florence, Italy, Ximena Kavalekas had an idea she couldn’t ignore. She would design handbags using the skin of pythons, the beautiful yet invasive reptiles overwhelming the Everglades back in her home state. Creating the designs came naturally to Kavalekas, who has a background in the fashion industry. She sold the first bags to parents from her children’s Miami school, and they scooped them up as quickly as she could make them.

The handcrafted line of small bags enjoyed a warm welcome in the international

20

fashion world thanks to their luxe materials, chic silhouettes and quality. The bags would soon become hot items on luxury retail sites like Net-a-Porter and Moda Operandi.

Most recently, Kavalekas collaborated with Margherita Missoni in launching a limitededition collection of her iconic box bag, Mandolin 2.0, adorned with floral details in vibrant colors.

The verve of her adopted home can be seen and felt throughout Kavalekas’s designs. “Miami is a melting pot of multiple cultures. You find people from different parts of the world who call Miami home. The eclectic and international environment and Miamians inspire me,” says the Ecuadorian-born Kavalekas.

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

“Some bags are named after close Miami friends from Ecuador to Greece. You can find some visual references also through a palette of pastel colors related to the Art Deco buildings in Miami Beach.” ximenakavalekas.com —MZR

XIMENA K AVALEK AS

A Miami accessories designer gives new meaning to upscale luxury with her python bags

WADING IN :MADE IN FLA TOAST

LOVE AT FIRST STITCH Lettermade’s embroidered linens are sew pretty you’ll want to collect them all

LET TERMADE, ELLIE DRE YER

MALIA PALMA

is out to replace paper napkins, one cocktail party at a time.

Her Winter Park–based linen company, Lettermade, produces embroidered pieces for every occasion, with elegant monograms and playful designs like bacon and eggs or summery palm trees.

Growing up, an appreciation of fine linens was instilled in Palma by her grandmother. She went on to learn to sew from her aunts, and soon, the craft became a hobby she carried into adulthood.

While working full time at a nonprofit, Palma decided to make a little extra money selling her designs. Lifestyle blogger Bradley Agather Means, of Luella & June, posted about Lettermade the

This page: A spinoff of the classic linen napkin’s embroidery, Boom Bam Pow denim patches add pop to a party.

Below: Founder Malia Palma in her Winter Park studio

week shoplettermade.com went live in 2014, immediately creating buzz and demand. “Three months later, I officially quit my job,” says Palma. “I realized I had to commit to Lettermade full time or step away from the business completely.”

Her decision to take a chance paid off, leading to collaborations with Reese Witherspoon’s clothing line—Draper James—and photographer Gray Malin.

Beyond cocktail and dinner napkins, Palma also produces guest towels and handkerchiefs. In addition, all of her linens can be custom-stitched with, for example, a crest, a business logo or an image of a favorite pet. shoplettermade.com —MZR

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

21

[ WADING IN :MADE IN FLA B y M a d d y Z o l l o R u sb o si n

In Full Bloom

Through romantic floral designs, a Jacksonville photographer gives new meaning to the phrase “flower power”

I

company in Austin, Texas. “To entertain my brain, I started photographing the flowers that people would bring me, because I was on a lot of painkillers and couldn’t retain anything,” she recalls of her seven-month recovery. “I knew if I took a picture, I could always go back to it.”

[

t was an inundation of “Get Well Soon” floral arrangements that led Ashley Woodson Bailey to start photographing flowers. She was recovering in 2012 from a horrific car crash—one that not only resulted in a broken back but also forced her to give up her full-service floral and event design

22

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

Top: Into the Garden (Black) is inspired by

Bailey’s first floral photograph, Dutch Love.

Above: Florist-turned-floral-photographer

Ashley Woodson Bailey

MET RESTAUR ANT VENICE, MK SADLER, MICHELLE CALLOWAY

As her health improved, she began playing around with the idea of turning these floral pictures into artwork. Her main hang-up: She wasn’t sure people would buy them. Not to mention they were all shot and edited on her phone. Luckily, her images transitioned seamlessly from the screen into the art world.

“It was so beautiful I cried,” she says of seeing her first print, which she dubbed Dutch Love.

Its romantic combination of amaryllises, roses, carnations, peonies, daffodils and lisianthus has gone on to become one of her most popular images.

After seeing how well Dutch Love turned out, Bailey realized that her vision of starting a floral printing business could become a reality. In early 2014, she officially launched her company with a collection of prints. “The photographs started out really dark and romantic and moody, and I think that probably had a lot to do with my mental state at the time,” she explains of her original designs. As soon as her business debuted, her floral art business took off, gaining the attention of design blogs and magazines.

Last year, Bailey relocated to Jacksonville after falling in love with it on a trip to visit family. While the overall aesthetic of her work continues to evoke an old-fashioned and romantic feeling, living in Florida’s sunshine has influenced her: “Now that I’m in Florida, everything is turning a little bit brighter, which is fun for me because I didn’t ever really do that before,” she says. “It feels very light and bright and happy here, so that has influenced my work a lot.”

Her art has also evolved and expanded beyond just prints, as her floral designs have been turned into dreamy wallpaper, upholstery fabric and even clothing, including pajama sets and robes.

Bailey has collaborated with other designers like

Savannah-based Brooke Atwood, and she took her four-year-old business international by working with Australian children’s brand Hubble + Duke. Despite her success, Bailey hasn’t stopped shooting most projects on her phone. “I still like the way they turn out,” she says.

“It’s been awesome, and it was very unexpected,” she says of her career as a florist-turned-floral-photographer. “That very sad thing happened, but it brought all of this amazing beauty into my life.” awblove.com

Clockwise from above: Sophia, named after

Bailey’s mentor, Sophia Holmes; Into the Garden (Blush) includes peonies, anemones, ranunculus and berries; Time Travel; a recent, still-unnamed work

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

23

WADING IN :FLAMINGLE A FLO C K OF FASCINATING F LOR IDIANS

Word SLINGERS five literary LUminaries rooted in (and rocketing from) our peculiar Peninsula

LAUREN GROFF Swamp Savant

Rocket Man

Writing isn’t rocket science for this former aerospace engineer who finds fiction to be the final frontier.

University of Florida alumnus Jack Clemons worked as a lead engineer on some of NASA’s most famous moon missions, including Apollo 11 and Apollo 13. Now his head is in the clouds as he becomes a science fiction and nonfiction author. In his forthcoming memoir, Safely To Earth: The Men and Women Who Brought the Astronauts Home, Clemons takes readers behind the scenes at NASA during the height of the space race and chronicles the unprecedented technological challenges of his most momentous moments.

JAMES PATTERSON Persistent Pat

The Guinness World Record holder for most No. 1 New York Times bestsellers, James Patterson sold his first novel in 1976 after 31 publishers had rejected his work.

Patterson took a job at the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, where he entered as a junior copywriter and worked his way up to North American CEO. The 71-year-old author has sold more than 350 million books. His most recent work, The President Is Missing, was co-authored with former President Bill Clinton. The Palm Beach resident has funneled his passion for education into over 400 scholarships for up-and-coming teachers and has donated more than a million books to students.

MITCHELL KAPLAN

PETE MEINKE

Book Worm

Paradisal Poet

Mitchell Kaplan worked on his first feature film, The Man Who Invented Christmas, for nine years before its national debut last fall. The film brings to life the nonfiction book by a fellow Floridian, Les Standiford, about Charles Dickens’s struggle to write and publish A Christmas Carol. Kaplan’s love of story runs as deep as the stacks at his South Florida bookstore chain, Books & Books, which has nine locations and 35 years in business. Kaplan also founded the Miami Book Fair, the nation’s largest literary festival, which attracts hundreds of authors, including dozens of A-listers, for a week of intimate talks, panels and book signings each fall.

Peter Meinke, 86, reigns as the poet laureate of Florida, a position only three other people have held in the state’s history.

His latest book, To Start With, Feel Fortunate, is the second collection of pieces from “Poet’s Notebook,” a column he writes for Tampa Bay’s Creative Loafing. In the column, he pairs poems with personal narratives that range from his experiences in the Army and the Great Depression to literary analysis and political debates. In March, Meinke harnessed the healing power of poetry when he read with students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School at their memorial event, “Poems for Parkland: Poetry of Peace.”

ILLUSTR ATION BY STEPHEN LOMAZZO

Lauren Groff stepped into the spotlight in 2015 when President Barack Obama named her novel Fates and Furies his favorite book of the year. In Florida, her newest collection of short stories, the New York Times best-selling author transports readers across the state from stormstricken shores on the Gulf Coast to Gainesville’s reptilian reservoirs and the salt-sprayed cities surrounding St. Augustine.

Aside from this summer sensation, the 40-year-old has authored five books and a myriad of short stories and essays. Between book tours, this Florida phenom takes to Twitter to defend authors’ rights against bootlegged books and fight for indie bookstores.

JACK CLEMONS

24

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

UNDER OUR CANOPY OF SKY

MAGIC HAPPENS

Take refuge at our idyllic luxury oceanfront resorts. The sun rises out of the ocean, the moon shines high above the sea. The lush championship golf greens await.

The stage is set for long days of marvelous play.

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, FL 32082 | PONTEVEDRA.COM | (844) 648-8833

WADING IN :THE STUDIO FLOR IDA ARTIST PR OF ILES B y M a d d y Z o l l o R u sb o si n

PAPERSCAPES

When hit by an unexpected life challenge, this Orlando artist stopped painting and started tearing, cutting and folding paper

S

ome of the most influential moments in Kelly Joy Ladd’s life happened in high school, when she worked as a performer at Disney World. She recalls how enthralled she was backstage with the intricacies and designs of the costumes.

“It really helped me create and build my imagination,” she says. “I saw these worldclass designs every day. I was immersed in that, which has helped a lot with my art.”

Ladd’s imagination and love of art started growing when she was a little girl.

Born in Tallahassee, the fifth-generation

26

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

Floridian grew up in Lake Mary in Central Florida.

“I’ve always been into art in some way — I’ve always made things,” she says of her formative years, when she was still dreaming up things to create. “I remember when I was little-little, I would write articles and different things.”

Ladd attended the University of Central Florida, majoring in liberal studies, and eventually went on to work as a local magazine editor and writer for nearly a decade. In her free time, she transferred her creativity to canvas by painting. However,

that all changed 12 years ago, when her husband developed a severe sensitivity to chemicals as a result of Lyme disease, making it impossible for her to continue painting inside the house.

“I had to figure out something else to do, so I started playing with paper, since he could be around it,” says Ladd. Before long, ripping, cutting, tearing, folding and piecing together paper was her new medium.

“In a weird way, his illness made me fulfill my dreams a little bit,” she continues.

ANAVI PHOTOGR APHY

Above from left: Aurora Borealis, made with paper and acrylic on canvas; artist Kelly Joy Ladd; Big Bang, constructed with acid-free paper on canvas

From top: Works

by Kelly Joy Ladd: Wormhole II and Gravitational Waves

Ladd spent about six months experimenting with her paper art. Soon after, in 2013, she had her first art show, exhibiting hanging paper sculptures. Three days later, her magazine closed.

“I was like, ‘Aha, the universe is trying to tell me something,’” Ladd remembers. “When I stopped working for the magazine, that’s when I started to really focus on my art and trying new techniques.”

Ladd views her work as a very meditative process, especially because of the repetitiveness it takes on through the ripping, cutting and gluing of thousands of tiny pieces of paper. Each of her pieces is truly one-of-a-kind, though many are inspired by nature, the tides, and geometric shapes. Another theme Ladd continues to go back to is astronomy. Her love of outer space stems from her college days, when she was enthralled with celestial studies. She tries to incorporate cosmic concepts into the titles of her work, like Europa, which is named after one of the icy moons of Jupiter.

“The piece has these long, spiky shards of paper,” she explains. “While I was making it, I just kept thinking about the icy moons, and my interpretation of what it would be like on the surface of those moons.”

Now working full time in Orlando as an artist, Ladd shows her work at Snap Orlando and the Mennello Museum of Art. One of her pieces has even made it to the West Coast, where it is on display at Kevin Barry Fine Art in Los Angeles. Ladd also takes commissions for custom pieces, with clients selecting the colors and patterns they prefer. But at the end of the day, Ladd credits her love of the outdoors as the ultimate artistic inspiration.

“Because I grew up here, I’m a nature girl,” Ladd says. “I really like to go out into the woods and hike. I’m inspired a lot by the palm fronds and the different textures that you can see.”

November 29 - December 2

PRIME F. OSBORN III CONVENTION CENTER JACKSONVILLE, FL

Lecturers

Juli Catlin Catlin Design Jacksonville, Florida William Nash E. W. Nash & Sons Jacksonville, Florida Leta Austin Foster Interior Designer Palm Beach, Florida Mary Aarons Daughter of famed photographer Slim Aarons Boston, Massachusetts Keni Valenti Fashion Designer and Vintage Lilly Pulitzer Collector Joshua Tree, California

Kathryn Livingston

Author of Lilly: Palm Beach, Tropical Glamour and the Birth of a Fashion Legend New York, New York

BENEFITING WOLFSON CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL WOMENSBOARDWCH.COM

Over 40 art & antiques dealers from across the country A Place in the Sun Gala Children’s Fashion Show TICKETS & SPONSORSHIP OPPORTUNITIES 904.202.2886 artandantiquesshow.com

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

27

ADV E RTO RIAL

Amelia Island CHRISTMAS

BE TRANSPORTED TO VICTORIAN-ERA LONDON THIS HOLIDAY SEASON AT AMELIA ISLAND’S FOURTH ANNUAL WEEKEND CELEBRATION, DICKENS ON CENTRE

W

hen Charles Dickens penned A Christmas Carol, his wife was expecting their fifth child. Because the couple was struggling to make ends meet, he began the novella simply to provide for his family. And yet his biographers tell us that Dickens quickly found himself swept up in the story and the idea that Christmas should have little to do Scrooge’s gold; rather, the focus of the holiday should always be on the celebration of loved ones and the joys of spending time with family. A Christmas Carol was released in 1843.

It was an immediate success, and it made a permanent mark on how the holiday would be experienced for years to come.

More than a century later, there are Dickensinspired celebrations the world over, including here in Florida, on Amelia Island.

DICKENS ON CENTRE is one of the most charming interpretations of an oldfashioned English Christmas to be found on this side of the Atlantic.

Now in its fourth year, the festival is scheduled for December 7 through December 9. For the event, which is free to the public, historic downtown Fernandina Beach is transformed to resemble London in the 1840s. The Victorian-era buildings are decorated for the holiday, white lights illuminate the streets, the smell of roasted chestnuts is in the air and sidewalks are filled with men and women in period costume. Look for top hats and hoop skirts,

and keep an eye out for Tiny Tim, who might tip his cap when passing by, as well as the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future.

The festival is family-friendly, as the event features entertainment for everyone in your clan. For music lovers, there are carolers in the streets and performances by local bands and choirs.

Together, grandparents and grandchildren can listen to a reading of “The Night Before Christmas” and watch a one-man performance of A Christmas Carol. Those traveling with young children will find plenty to do in the Kid Zone, where the little ones can meet St. Nick, write letters that will be sent straight to the North Pole, play cornhole and ornament toss and more. Or, if you’re visiting without the kids, get tickets to the new adult-focused ghostly event “Dickens After Dark,” complete with the sounds of dragging chains and hot toddies to sip.

If you’re not up for scheduled performances and tours, simply stroll down charming Centre Street for holiday shopping with local vendors or take a turn down Artist Alley. Time spent at Dickens on Centre is an opportunity to unwind, take a step back in time and give yourself the space to remember what matters most at the holidays. ameliaisland.com/dickens

A Victorian Christmas festival transforms historic Fernandina Beach into Victorian London.

This Christmas, come make cherished memories on Amelia Island.

Costumed Characters • Festive Food & Drink • Tiny Tim's Kid Zone • St. Nick Visits Victorian Entertainment • Horse & Carriage Rides • Fezziwig's Courtyard & more!

Holiday Home Tour

November 30 - December 1 Amelia Island Museum of History

Lighted Christmas Parade December 6 America’s Youth

WADING IN :ONE-ON-ONE CO N VE RSATIONS, INTERVIEWS, STOR IES B y Ja m i e R i ch

Going Long with Blake Jaguars quarterback Blake Bortles on growing up, kneeling down and finally breaking a very long losing streak

Above: Bortles played football and baseball as a young athlete in Central Florida; Bortles at the 2014 NFL draft; Bortles at a high school game for the Oviedo Lions

F

ew NFL players have felt the gnawing pressure to win more than Jacksonville Jaguars starting quarterback Blake Bortles. Now 26, Bortles grew up in the tiny Orlando suburb of Oviedo playing baseball and football alongside his younger brother and eventually becoming the star quarterback at the University of Central Florida. At 6-foot5 and 236 pounds, Bortles was drafted by Jacksonville in the first round as a rookie in 2014. Despite the young quarterback’s celebrated arrival, the Jaguars continued to

30

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

lose (13 games in the 2016 season), and the team has consistently ranked in the bottom third of the NFL for the last decade.

The tide shifted in 2017 for Bortles and the Jaguars under new leadership and with the arrival of new players. The team advanced to the American Football Conference championship against New England, a match-up unimaginable only a year earlier. The Jags lost the game but won the respect of fans, starved for a winning season and a quarterback that can take it to the bank every week.

Much has been written about the homegrown player’s past bad throws and preferences for beers and blondes. But a few hard knocks on and off the field have forced Bortles to grow up, focus on the positive and rely on his signature sense of humor to shake off the haters. On a recent summer afternoon, ahead of a promising 2018 season, Flamingo Editor in Chief Jamie Rich sat down with Bortles at the Jaguars’ TIAA Bank Field to talk Foxborough, Fleetwood Mac, the American flag and his love of Central Florida.

This page: Jaguars

quarterback Blake Bortles played for the AFC championship in 2017

WHAT WAS GOING THROUGH YOUR MIND LAST YEAR WHEN YOU PLAYED THE PATRIOTS FOR THE AFC CHAMPIONSHIP? BB: You know, it had been an incredible ride.

We knew we had a really good team, and we knew it throughout training camp, and then it was proven throughout the season.

Going into New England, it was kind of surreal because everyone dreams of playing in the Super Bowl and winning the Super Bowl. To be part of an organization that for the past decade hadn’t made the playoffs and to be that close was special. The only thing that could have been better would have been getting to play that game at home in front of our fans in Jacksonville. But to do it in New England, in such a historic place in Foxborough—outside of playing in the Super Bowl, there couldn’t be a better atmosphere to play in. So that was extremely exciting. We came up a little short.

HOW DID YOU FEEL ABOUT THE EVOLUTION OF THE FANS OVER THE COURSE OF THE SEASON? BB: Playing in the first couple years, we weren’t very good, and the team hadn’t been good for a few years. There were still a lot of people who came to games. So to finally be able to give them something that was enjoyable to watch and something to be proud of, it was cool. It raises everybody’s attitude, and it gives them something to be happy about.

And there’s nothing better than playing in front of a sold-out stadium at home.

COURTESY SUZIE BORTLES, AP PHOTO, JACKSONVILLE JAGUARS

WHAT’S IT LIKE PLAYING IN A STADIUM THAT’S EMPTY IN THE SECOND HALF?

BB: It’s not fun. There were times in the past where I would throw an interception late in the game or something bad happens late in the game, and you see everybody get up and leave, and there’s two minutes left in the third quarter. Those are tough. I wouldn’t want to watch my home team get beat or play bad or do whatever, but to go through that and then have the year we did last year, I think a lot of those trials and tribulations and adversity that we went through are a big part of why I think this team is going to be successful for a while.

HOW ARE YOU FEELING RIGHT NOW ABOUT THE 2018 SEASON? BB: Our defense is the best in the NFL. And it was a challenge every day going against them. We kind of snuck up on some people last year, but I think everybody’s aware of who the Jaguars are. It definitely raised the bar of expectations in the public’s perception of what kind of team we can be, and I think we’re fully ready and capable of exceeding those expectations.

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

31

WADING IN :ONE-ON-ONE CO N VE RSATIONS, INTERVIEWS, STOR IES

My mom loved the beach. We played a ton of baseball when we were kids, so we would travel all over the state, and when we weren’t playing baseball, it was a 40-minute drive to the beach.

IS THERE A PERSON IN YOUR LIFE WHOM YOU MOST ADMIRE?

BB: My dad had a huge impact on me. He’s done everything to support his family. He sells stuff, and he kind of grinded through that and was able to support everything that me and my brother wanted to do.

And for the most part, it was just play as many sports as we could. He’s also the best athlete that I’ve ever been around, still to this day.

FLAG ON THE PLAY WHAT’S THE TOUGHEST MOMENT YOU’VE FACED IN THE NFL?

DO YOU THINK THE DIFFERENCE WAS CHANGING UP THE LEADERSHIP ON THE TEAM?

BB: Coach [Doug] Marrone and Coach [Tom] Coughlin were a huge part of it.

Them coming in and overhauling just the mindset and attitude in the locker room and how we were going to run our team and how everything was going to go as far as discipline and holding guys accountable and all that.

Bringing in some older guys that have had a lot of success in this league, they were really able to help out in the locker room with the younger guys.

LET’S TALK ABOUT COLLEGE FOOTBALL’S CHANGING PLAYOFF STRUCTURE AND UCF’S UNDEFEATED SEASON. DO YOU THINK THEY WERE CHEATED OUT OF A TITLE? BB: I think they’re trying to find the best process possible to be able to

32

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

BB: My third year was probably the toughest. You kind of get a free pass as a rookie because they’re like, “He doesn’t really know what he’s doing yet. He’ll figure it out.” The group of guys that I was with, we were all going into our third year for the most part, and we just really underperformed. I didn’t play well. When I looked up in the stands, and there are moms and kids flicking you off, like, “You suck. Go home. We don’t want you anymore.” And it’s like, “Man, this is what it’s come to?” We won three games that year. So going through that 13 times was difficult to rebound and do it again the following week. crown a college football champion, and UCF happened to catch the wrong end of that as far as the playoffs are concerned. I think what UCF did is something to be extremely proud of. If they want to claim national champions, I’ll proudly say that.

TELL US ABOUT GROWING UP IN OVIEDO.

BB: It’s a really small town right next to UCF. It was the type of town where everybody went to the high school football games on Friday nights, and as a kid playing Pop Warner football, you idolize the guys who played varsity football. At the time, you really didn’t think that there was a whole lot past that. I wanted to be a starting varsity football player for the Oviedo Lions. That was the dream growing up.

ANY FAVORITE MEMORIES OF GROWING UP IN FLORIDA?

BB: Being able to be outside year-round is something that I’ve always appreciated.

Clockwise from left: Bortles at the Fiesta Bowl for

UCF in 2014; Bortles with his mom, dad and brother in Oviedo

THERE WERE RUMORS THAT YOU WERE OUT AT THE BARS EVERY WEEK. HOW DID YOU DEAL WITH THAT?

BB: That’s a funny story. I’m at Mellow Mushroom this past Saturday. I played golf, and then I was going to pick up food and had like 25 minutes to wait. So I go in there, and the bartender comes up to me and is like, “Hey, when you walked in the door, I thought you were Blake Bortles, but as you got closer, I realized you’re not him.” And then he starts talking shit. He’s like, “Yeah that guy’s kind of a douche.” So at this point, I really just want to see what he has to say, so I’m like, “What happened?” And he says, “Well, he came in here one time, and the bill was like $500.” And I’m like, who spends $500 at Mellow Mushroom? “We gave him 50 percent off, and he tipped like $15.” And I was like, I wouldn’t do that for this exact reason, for people to be able to talk bad about it. And then he was like, “Yeah, after he got divorced, he used to be at Hoptinger on Tuesday nights, on cocaine in the back with his buddies.” And I was like, I’ve never done cocaine or been to Hoptinger on a Tuesday night. I’ve never been married or divorced. I said, “All right, well, I’ll just see you later.” Walking out, it kind of hit me, it doesn’t matter. I Above: Bortles at the Fiesta haven’t been to a beach bar Bowl for UCF in 2014 in like two years, but there are people just saying stuff.

YOU’RE PROBABLY NERVOUS WHEN YOU GO OUT, LIKE, “WHO’S WATCHING?”

BB: I’ll just stay at my house or go somewhere a little more secluded to be able to enjoy time with friends. It’s irrelevant, what you do. People are just going to make stuff up and talk about you, and as long as you know who you are and what you do, it’s all right.

AP PHOTO, COURTESY SUZIE BORTLES

THIS IS OUR ARTS AND CULTURE ISSUE. WHAT’S ON YOUR PLAYLIST RIGHT NOW?

BB: I was actually listening to the Pandora “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” playlist. It’s all kinds of good stuff. It’s ’90s alternative, Matchbox Twenty, Red Hot Chili Peppers. And then I like old stuff. I got a record player a year and a half ago.

SO YOU’RE INTO VINYL?

BB: Yep, big into vinyl, like the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Credence Clearwater Revival, Fleetwood Mac. So every holiday I get new vinyl from my parents.

IntrepidCapital_HalfPgAd_R4.indd 1

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

33

8/2/18 2:57 PM

ONE-ON-ONE VICTORY FORMATION BEFORE LAST YEAR’S SEASON OPENER, THE WHOLE TEAM STOOD ARM IN ARM WITH JAGUARS OWNER SHAHID KHAN, SETTING THE TONE FOR THE WHOLE LEAGUE. WHAT’S THE FEELING IN THE LOCKER ROOM THIS YEAR?

You Need the Right People to Succeed.

We believe in people and their amazing potential. We work hard to connect great people with great organizations. Whether you’re seeking new hires or contract support, you’ve come to the right place.

For more information, please contact our Orlando office at 407-803-5111.

Aerotek.com

BB: It’s tough, because there’s not anything going on within our locker room that is anywhere near comparable to the issues in society. And then there’s guys on our team that deal with that outside, whether it’s family members or friends or different things happening. And I think that standing arm in arm, we’re just here in support. We’re a close-knit group, and we’re in this together as far as trying to figure out a way to make change and get things the way they should be as far as the way people should be treated.

WHAT’S YOUR TAKE ON KNEELING ON THE SIDELINES DURING THE NATIONAL ANTHEM?

BB: I think it’s definitely bigger than just the act of taking a knee. I think there’s a bigger purpose. I know the guys who participated and who had something that they wanted to accomplish as far as bringing recognition to issues in our community and our society. And I think, for the most part, they got Above: Bortles with his longtime friend C.J. people talking about it.

Personally, for me, I have no problem with guys expressing their beliefs and what they’re trying to get out there. It’s America, the greatest country, and that’s part of it, being able to have that freedom. But for me, I have tons of relatives in the Army and in the Navy and in the Marines. When the national anthem is played, that’s a chance for me to honor them and those that have died defending our country. I’ll always stand and take my hat off and put my hand over my heart for the national anthem, but I do really see both sides.

Aerotek is an equal opportunity employer. An Allegis Group Company. ©2017

34

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

BB: My foundation is for mentally and physically disabled people. It started with kids and expanded into all ages, and then first responders, firefighters and cops. It all started in my hometown. There was a thing called Challenger League. The high school football team Saturday mornings would help mentally disabled kids play flag football. So I did that, and that created a relationship with a kid [named C.J.], and we became really close and family friends. And I was like, “Man, if I ever get enough money to go and do anything charitable, that would be something I’m really passionate about.”

BL AKE BORTLES FOUNDATION

TELL ME ABOUT YOUR FOUNDATION.

COURAGE. INTEGRITY. COMPASSION.

Bolles alumni like Ryan Murphy ’13, 3x Olympic Gold Medalist, have gone on to become judges, Pulitzer Prize winners, Olympians, Rhodes Scholars, renowned artists, professional musicians, CEOs and so much more.

Experience the Extraordinary Bolles Life includes a superior curriculum and the greatest variety of high-quality educational offerings in Northeast Florida for day and boarding students in grades Pre-K to 12. Extraordinary opportunities and grand discoveries await you in our vibrant, global community.

Unlock your true passions and talents as you build the foundation for a remarkable future. Bolles students develop a lifelong

love of learning, meaningful personal connections, skills to succeed and values to make a difference in the world.

Discover who you are and what you want to become.

For more information on #BollesLife and to schedule your tour, please visit www.Bolles.org or call (904) 256-5030.

Four Unique Campuses Ponte Vedra Beach Pre-K–5 Whitehurst Pre-K–5 Bartram 6–8 San Jose 9–12 Day and Boarding School from Pre-K through Grade 12.

WADING IN :JUST HATCHED DEBUTS TO PER USE (NORTH) set on your diet (more power to you), there are plenty of healthy and gluten-free options on the menu as well. facebook.com/ grovemarketcafe

THE DISTRICT: SEVILLE STEAK & SEAFOOD P E N S A C O LA

Above: Beefy cuts of fresh Gulf Coast seafood like this one set The District: Seville Steak & Seafood apart from

other Pensacola steakhouses.

EL JEFE

PURE HYDRATION

Already known for his fried green tomatoes and creamy shrimp and grits, Chef Scott Schwartz of Amelia Island’s popular 29 South restaurant set out to recreate a cuisine he first fell in love with as a kid: Tex-Mex. Not “fresh Mex,” or Baja style, or any other chefdriven take on it. Just old-school Tex-Mex. Before opening El Jefe in Jacksonville’s historic Murray Hill neighborhood, Schwartz traveled to Texas to taste his way through the border’s best tacos, nachos, fajitas and queso fundido. All tortillas are made in-house, and cocktails like the El Diablo—a tequila-style concoction that includes Polish blackberry brandy—are crafted with freshly squeezed juice. eljefejax.com

Avid travelers Spencer Wanderon and his wife Hannah first tried IV hydration therapy in New York City. Within 15 minutes, both felt a sudden onset of energy, mental clarity and general well-being. After experiencing the same results at other clinics, the couple was hooked and decided to open what would become the first IV hydration spa in their hometown. Designed with the serenity of the sea in mind, Pure Hydration features multiple suites adorned with subdued hues of gray and blue. The company’s most comprehensive infusion treatment includes a combination of vitamins and nutrients designed to improve the immune system, reduce

JACKSONVILLE

JACKSONVILLE BEACH

inflammation, promote skin health and boost energy. purehydrationspa.com

GROVE MARKET CAFE TA L LA H A S S E E

A breakfast and lunch eatery with a throwback diner feel, Grove Market Cafe is the kind of place where you can count on staples like fluffy eggs and cooked-to-perfection bacon.

A chef by trade, owner David Gwynn introduced a few creative dishes designed to cure a sweet tooth, his favorite being the pineapple upside-down pancakes. And then there’s pie. Think freshly baked pie with a flaky crust and ooeygooey filling, made in-house and displayed at the counter to tempt you. The coconut cream is a crowd favorite. If you’re still

Housed inside a century-old building in downtown Pensacola, owner Wilmer Mitchell’s newest restaurant, The District, embodies his expert take on the classic American steakhouse with a contemporary spin. With a design aesthetic modeled after The Plaza Hotel in New York, the upstairs lounge makes for a society-style gathering place, with leather love seats and sofas framing sets of cocktail tables. The downstairs dining room exudes an upscale but casual ambience, perfect for a business-minded power hour or a romantic date night. Featuring executive chef Josh Warner at the helm, The District is developing a menu that includes dry-aged steaks, fresh-from-theGulf seafood and house-made desserts. districtsteaks.com

(C E N T RA L ) THE VERANDA LIVE O R LA N D O

Featuring an outdoor stage draped in string lights and surrounded by restored colonialstyle homes, The Veranda Live in downtown’s historic Thornton Park has an ambience that’s equally charming and relaxed.

It’s a come-as-you-are sort of place where couples and families can sway to the sounds of a live band under a starry night sky.

Jim Faherty, a longtime music promoter in Orlando, handpicks performers to play free shows

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

37

WADING IN :JUST HATCHED DEBUTS TO PER USE (C E N T RA L ) on Thursdays and Saturdays.

Faherty, who’s booked everyone from the Indigo Girls to Nine Inch Nails over the course of his career, wanted to create a laid-back, kid- and pet-friendly music venue—filling a void in downtown Orlando. And he’s already drawing plenty of fans. theverandalive.com

STREAMSONG BLACK STREAMSONG

Golfer’s paradise Streamsong Resort occupies sprawling acreage between Tampa and Orlando. Already home to two popular golf courses, Streamsong Red and

Above: Streamsong Black golf course, tucked quietly between Orlando and Tampa, was designed by Gil Hanse, architect of the 2016 Olympic golf course in Rio de Janeiro.

No .

GWEN VS. THE MEN: THE RACE FOR GOVERNOR

10

No .

9

THE

Travel

ISSUE

— 6 0 R E AS O N S F LO R I DA I S T H E G R E AT E ST P L AC E O N E A RT H —

THE ICONS ISSUE

For Floridians. By Floridians.

A BAHAMIAN RHAPSODY THE EXUMAS to

W HY FLO R I D IAN S LO V E TH E BAHAMAS: From

THE ABACOS, ELEUTHERA, ANDROS and Every Cay In Between

SOLAR POWER? It’s q SUNSHINE STATE ...

Come On! EXPLORERS GUIDE

x

GASPARILLA ISLAND eBOCA GRANDE

Award-Winning

CHEF CLAY CONLEY’S PALM BEACH EMPIRE

theflamingomag

For Floridians. By Floridians.

BIG BEND BINGE OY S T E R S H O OT E R S , RUM RUNNERS & G U I TA R P I C K E R S

STILTSVILLE’S RAUCOUS PAST P ROSY FUTURE MAYDAY IN THE EVERGLADES

EASTERN AIRLINES

DISHING ON:

}

Made in Florida

theflamingomag

StylesuKeep Our Oceans healthy

FLIGHT 401

NAPLES, 30A & KEY WEST

& PRO SURFER * ANASTASIA ASHLEY LIVE d SOUTH BEACH

Join the chatter

No .

FLIP PALLOT: TH E G O D FATH E R k F L O R I D A F LY F I S H I N G

8

THE

Outside

ISSUE

No.

DIANE ROBERTS

hangover cure

O N TH E WATE R, I N TH E W O O D S AN D O UT O F B O U N D S

ISSUE

THE SECRET LIFE k

For Floridians. By Floridians.

to

Hurricane

FROLICS

THE

Travel

A BAHAMIAN RHAPSODY THE EXUMAS

EXPLORERS GUIDE

For Floridians. By Floridians.

25 FRESH AIR

GWEN VS. THE MEN: THE RACE FOR GOVERNOR

10

W HY FLO R I D IAN S LO V E TH E BAHAMAS: From

THE ABACOS, ELEUTHERA, ANDROS and Every Cay In Between

SOLAR POWER? It’s q SUNSHINE STATE ...

Come On!

x

GASPARILLA ISLAND eBOCA GRANDE

Award-Winning

CHEF CLAY CONLEY’S PALM BEACH EMPIRE

theflamingomag

SANTA CLAUS (Hint: he has a condo in Margate)

theflamingma

Best-selling

AUTHOR JEFF VANDERMEER

FROM BOOKS TO THE BIG SCREEN

Insider’s GUIDE:

AMELIA ISLAND

DISHING ON:

NAPLES, 30A & KEY WEST

Follow us No .

9

— 6 0 R E AS O N S F LO R I DA I S T H E G R E AT E ST P L AC E O N E A RT H —

THE ICONS ISSUE For Floridians. By Floridians.

BIG BEND BINGE OY S T E R S H O OT E R S , RUM RUNNERS & G U I TA R P I C K E R S

@FlamingoMag

STILTSVILLE’S RAUCOUS PAST P ROSY FUTURE MAYDAY IN THE EVERGLADES

EASTERN AIRLINES

}

Made in Florida

theflamingomag

StylesuKeep Our Oceans healthy

FLIGHT 401 & PRO SURFER * ANASTASIA ASHLEY LIVE d SOUTH BEACH

No.

GWEN VS. THE MEN: THE RACE FOR GOVERNOR

10

THE

Travel

ISSUE

For Floridians. By Floridians.

A BAHAMIAN RHAPSODY THE EXUMAS to

W HY FLO R I D IAN S LO V E TH E BAHAMAS: From

THE ABACOS, ELEUTHERA, ANDROS and Every Cay In Between

SOLAR POWER? It’s q SUNSHINE STATE ...

Come On! EXPLORERS GUIDE

x

GASPARILLA ISLAND eBOCA GRANDE

Award-Winning

CHEF CLAY CONLEY’S PALM BEACH EMPIRE

theflamingomag

DISHING ON:

NAPLES, 30A & KEY WEST

@TheFlamingoMag No .

GWEN VS. THE MEN: THE RACE FOR GOVERNOR

10

THE

Travel

ISSUE

For Floridians. By Floridians.

A BAHAMIAN RHAPSODY THE EXUMAS to

W HY FLO R I D IAN S LO V E TH E BAHAMAS: From

THE ABACOS, ELEUTHERA, ANDROS and Every Cay In Between

SOLAR POWER? It’s q SUNSHINE STATE ...

Come On! EXPLORERS GUIDE

x

GASPARILLA ISLAND eBOCA GRANDE

Award-Winning

CHEF CLAY CONLEY’S PALM BEACH EMPIRE

theflamingomag

DISHING ON:

NAPLES, 30A & KEY WEST

No .

GWEN VS. THE MEN: THE RACE FOR GOVERNOR

10 No .

9

THE

— 6 0 R E A SO N S F LO R I DA I S T H E G R E AT E ST P L AC E O N E A RT H —

Travel

THE ICONS ISSUE

ISSUE

For Floridians. By Floridians.

For Floridians. By Floridians.

BIG BEND BINGE OYSTE R S H O OTE R S, RUM RUNNERS & G U ITA R P I C K E R S

STILTSVILLE’S RAUCOUS PAST P ROSY FUTURE MAYDAY IN THE EVERGLADES

EASTERN AIRLINES

}

Made in Florida

A BAHAMIAN RHAPSODY THE EXUMAS

theflamingomag

to

W HY FLO R I D IAN S LO V E TH E BAHAMAS: From

THE ABACOS, ELEUTHERA, ANDROS and Every Cay In Between

SOLAR POWER? It’s q SUNSHINE STATE ...

Come On! EXPLORERS GUIDE

x

GASPARILLA ISLAND eBOCA GRANDE

StylesuKeep Our Oceans healthy

theflamingma

DISHING ON:

& PRO SURFER * ANASTASIA ASHLEY LIVE d SOUTH BEACH

Bird is the word

Award-Winning

CHEF CLAY CONLEY’S PALM BEACH EMPIRE

NAPLES, 30A & KEY WEST

FLIGHT 401

No.

GWEN VS. THE MEN: THE RACE FOR GOVERNOR

10

THE

Travel

ISSUE

For Floridians. By Floridians.

A BAHAMIAN RHAPSODY THE EXUMAS to

W HY FLO R I D IAN S LO V E TH E BAHAMAS: From

THE ABACOS, ELEUTHERA, ANDROS and Every Cay In Between

SOLAR POWER? It’s q SUNSHINE STATE ...

Come On! EXPLORERS GUIDE

x

GASPARILLA ISLAND eBOCA GRANDE

Award-Winning

CHEF CLAY CONLEY’S PALM BEACH EMPIRE

theflamingomag

DISHING ON:

No.

GWEN VS. THE MEN: THE RACE FOR GOVERNOR

10

THE

Travel

ISSUE

For Floridians. By Floridians.

A BAHAMIAN RHAPSODY THE EXUMAS to

W HY FLO R I D IAN S LO V E TH E BAHAMAS: From

THE ABACOS, ELEUTHERA, ANDROS and Every Cay In Between

SOLAR POWER? It’s q SUNSHINE STATE ...

Come On! EXPLORERS GUIDE

x

GASPARILLA ISLAND eBOCA GRANDE

Award-Winning

CHEF CLAY CONLEY’S PALM BEACH EMPIRE

theflamingomag

DISHING ON:

NAPLES, 30A & KEY WEST

No .

GWEN VS. THE MEN: THE RACE FOR GOVERNOR

10

THE

Travel

ISSUE

For Floridians. By Floridians.

A BAHAMIAN RHAPSODY THE EXUMAS to

W HY FLO R I D IAN S LO V E TH E BAHAMAS: From

THE ABACOS, ELEUTHERA, ANDROS and Every Cay In Between

SOLAR POWER? It’s q SUNSHINE STATE ...

Come On! EXPLORERS GUIDE

x

GASPARILLA ISLAND eBOCA GRANDE

Award-Winning

CHEF CLAY CONLEY’S PALM BEACH EMPIRE

theflamingomag

DISHING ON:

NAPLES, 30A & KEY WEST

No .

No.

9

GWEN VS. THE MEN: THE RACE FOR GOVERNOR

10

THE

— 6 0 R E ASO N S F LO R I DA I S T H E G R E AT E ST P L AC E O N E A RT H —

THE ICONS ISSUE

Travel

ISSUE

For Floridians. By Floridians.

For Floridians. By Floridians.

A BAHAMIAN RHAPSODY THE EXUMAS to

W HY FLO R I D IAN S LO V E TH E BAHAMAS: From

THE ABACOS, ELEUTHERA, ANDROS and Every Cay In Between

SOLAR POWER? It’s q SUNSHINE STATE ...

Come On! EXPLORERS GUIDE

x

GASPARILLA ISLAND eBOCA GRANDE

Award-Winning

CHEF CLAY CONLEY’S PALM BEACH EMPIRE

theflamingomag

BIG BEND BINGE OYSTE R S H O OTE R S, RUM RUNNERS & G U I TA R P I C K E R S

STILTSVILLE’S RAUCOUS PAST P ROSY FUTURE MAYDAY IN THE EVERGLADES

EASTERN AIRLINES

No .

9

— 6 0 R E AS O N S F LO R I DA I S T H E G R E AT E ST P L AC E O N E A RT H —

THE ICONS ISSUE For Floridians. By Floridians.

BIG BEND BINGE OY S T E R S H O OT E R S , RUM RUNNERS & G U I TA R P I C K E R S

STILTSVILLE’S RAUCOUS PAST P ROSY FUTURE MAYDAY IN THE EVERGLADES

}

Made in Florida

StylesuKeep Our Oceans healthy

FLIGHT 401 & PRO SURFER * ANASTASIA ASHLEY LIVE d SOUTH BEACH

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

Made in Florida

StylesuKeep Our Oceans healthy

& PRO SURFER * ANASTASIA ASHLEY LIVE d SOUTH BEACH

EASTERN AIRLINES

38

}

FLIGHT 401

DISHING ON:

NAPLES, 30A & KEY WEST

theflamingomag

theflamingma

NILE YOUNG, PINK NARCISSUS DAY TONA BEACH

NAPLES, 30A & KEY WEST

(C E N T RA L ) Streamsong Blue, the resort recently opened its third course, Streamsong Black. Designed by Gil Hanse, architect of the 2016 Olympic golf course in Rio de Janeiro, the new course stretches across a landscape with rolling elevation changes and challenging tumbles and ridges. After a round, players can cool off inside the new clubhouse at Bone Valley Tavern, which features cold draft brews as well as pub fare classics by chef Victor Kendlehart. The world-class spa also shouldn’t be missed at this elegant retreat. streamsongresort.

PINK NARCISSUS DAYTONA BEACH

Perfect for the shopper in a sunny state of mind, there’s nothing that will jumpstart a vacation mindset more than a vibrant Lilly Pulitzer sheath dress. Danny Quinton recently opened the fourth outpost of his popular Florida-based Pink Narcissus boutique in the new One Daytona entertainment and retail complex, across from Daytona International Speedway. A Lilly Pulitzer signature store, the boutique carries everything from pineapple-adorned beach totes to coral reef–inspired caftans, plus plenty of gift ideas for every member of the family. And since the store has a dedicated staff that aims to make every customer feel special, you know you’ll walk out with something fabulous. lillypinknarcissus.com

Above: Pink Narcissus gives Lilly Pulitzer fans a new reason to visit Daytona Beach.

WINE BAR GEORGE LAKE BUENA VISTA

As one of the world’s elite master sommeliers, George Miliotes knows a thing or two about wine. It was important to him to develop a restaurant concept where guests could learn how to swirl, sip and taste in a comfortable setting, without too much pomp and circumstance. His new Wine Bar George in Disney Springs looks like a cross between what you might see in Napa Valley and Tuscany. Along with executive chef Ron Rupert, the team pairs a powerful combo of cheese, charcuterie, small plates like mac and cheese bites, and family-style entrees like wine-braised chicken with more than 40 varietals of wine from regions around the globe. winebargeorge.com

Pure Perfection.

ONE OCEAN BLVD. ATLANTIC BEACH | FL 32233 WWW.ONEOCEANRESORT.COM

YOUR DAY. YOUR MOMENT.

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

39

WADING IN :JUST HATCHED DEBUTS TO PER USE (SOUTH) NOBU HOTEL MIAMI BEACH

What happens when Academy Award–winning actor Robert De Niro and world-famous Japanese chef Nobu Matsuhisa get together on a business deal? A collection of one-ofa-kind hotels and restaurants.

Considered a hotel within a hotel, Nobu Hotel is located inside the historic Morris Lapidus–designed Eden Roc on the glittering shores of Miami Beach. Already a magnet for A-listers, the celebrity-studded Nobu Restaurant & Bar moved from its original location in South Beach to the new 206room hotel. While the hotel’s exterior displays iconic Miami modern architecture, interior designer David Rockwell brings the outside in with black-andwhite photography of Japanese landscapes juxtaposed against striking ocean views. nobuhotelmiamibeach.com

NOELA CHOCOLATE & CONFECTIONS S A R A S O TA

Mmmmm, chocolate. Shane and Ande Grant, a husband-andwife team with artistic expertise in crafting melt-in-your-mouth chocolates, named Noela Chocolate & Confections after their two sons, Noah and Elijah.

While the Grants just opened their first artisanal chocolate boutique in downtown Sarasota, they also have a bustling 6,000-square-foot factory in Cape Coral. They enjoy combining flavors and designing fair-trade chocolates that are

40

almost too pretty to eat. Starting with eye-catching packaging designed in-house by a team of graphic designers, customers fill keepsake boxes with chocolates they pick out, making for a uniquely personal experience. noelachocolate.com

EL VEZ

F O R T LA U D E R D A L E

A virtuoso when it comes to masterminding culinary hit after hit, Stephen Starr is one of America’s most successful restauranteurs. He’s opened another one of his crowdpleasers inside the posh W

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

Fort Lauderdale. Considered an elevated cantina concept, El Vez has everything you’d expect from a Mexican restaurant by Starr, including super high-quality food and drink. A few key staples include chef Steve Menter’s madefrom-scratch guacamole, mahi mahi tacos and whole fried yellowtail snapper topped with fennel, jalapeno, olives and lemon. Wash it all down with a frozen blood orange margarita, then play a game of cornhole with sweeping beach vistas in the background. elvezftlauderdale.com

Above: El Vez chef Steve Menter

makes killer guac and fish tacos.

NOBU HOTEL MIAMI BEACH, ANDREW HEK TOR

Above: The Zen suites at Nobu Hotel combine clean Japanese-inspired design with luxe Miami touches.

— Unf ilter ed Fodder —

Capital Dame

By Di ane R o b ert s • I l l u st ra t i o n b y S t ep h en L o m a zzo

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE Finding a cure to the concrete in the mythical, restorative nature found in the works of three Florida artists

If you want to understand Florida, connect with its sometimesmenacing beauty, encounter the place unmediated by walls, glass and airconditioning, here’s how you do it: Go outside. Leave the comfortable subdivisions—Osprey Pointe, Oak Arbor, Sweetwater Springs—named for whatever

the developer destroyed in order to build them. Get away from the places where nature is highly policed and curated. Go where’s there’s no asphalt. Even if you live in a city of concrete punctuated by a few highly regulated flowerbeds and clipped lawns, surrounded by strip malls and big box stores, McTaco Kings and endlessly replicating interstate motels—in

Florida, the wild is never far away. Go to the woods, the swamp, the scrub, the marsh, where you’ll find all those hot green lizards, birds with iridescent feathers, candy-colored wildflowers and shady wetlands humming with the song of a million beating hearts.

There’s something both mythical and restorative about nature in Florida, as three

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

41

Capital Dame UNF ILTER ED FODDER

of my favorite artists can show you. Mark Messersmith, Linda Hall and Robin Rodgers make work that celebrates the state’s transcendent beauty and the persistence of animal and plant life here, despite everything we do to contain it, scare it off or kill it.

They work in different materials: Hall is a watercolorist and sculptor who works with cloth and paper, Messersmith is primarily a painter who works with oils, and Rodgers is a potter. Hall’s fabric “beasts” are sometimes fanciful, sometimes scary; she has created dream-renditions of ghostly buzzards diaphanous as smoke, portrait heads of David Bowie and Eudora Welty with cat’s ears, and giant masks of beings kin to earthly animals yet conjuring up the images of ancient gods.

Messersmith’s critters are under stress from human incursion into their habitat. Rodgers’s Florida animals are serene and iconic like the Native American effigies that translate an animal’s essence into clay or Mark Messersmith will exhibit at the stone.

Gadsden Arts What I like Center, Sept. 28 about these three to Dec. 15. Visit artists is the way markmessersmith.com for details. they remind us, sometimes gently, sometimes sharply, that Florida’s natural beauty is endangered. These artists don’t let the viewer pretend we have no impact on the land and water. They both delight us and call us to account. Only one of them is a native Floridian, but then, as an eighth-generation Floridian myself, I know this state has a way of getting into your bloodstream and claiming you for its own.

Nature as Sacred and Threatened Messersmith’s paintings could be altarpieces in a cathedral of nature. His saints have fur or feathers, snouts and paws; his demons are hunters or the slavering dogs doing the bidding of humans. Every inch of his

42

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

These artists don’t let the viewer pretend we have no impact on the land and water.

Above: Sea Turtles Jar by Robin Rodgers, a piece

of wheel-thrown, raku-fired pottery with incised designs and sculpted lid

Right: Glitter Buck by Linda Hall, made from a repurposed antique quilt and natural deer antlers, embellished with applique, beading, paint and costume jewelry

monumental and luminous canvases (some eight feet tall) thrums with movement: examine the pale-green luna moths in flight, apple snails clinging to a reed, freckled pitcher plants thrusting up from the ground, magnolias in full

bloom pushing into the frame, long-necked anhingas, little blue herons and moon-faced barn owls jockeying for space on tree limbs.

Sometimes, Messersmith stacks megafauna on top of each other in a way that doesn’t happen in the real woods: monarch butterflies rest on the heads of young snowy egrets perching on the back of a fox standing on a bobcat balancing on a panther who’s lounging on a large alligator clinging to a tree limb—a tree limb about to break. The metaphor’s not tough to untangle. “My paintings take the side of the animals,” says Messersmith. “They’re under such pressure just for a place to live, just to exist.”

I visit Messersmith on a moody Tallahassee afternoon, on which the sunshine is punctuated by fat storm clouds that will burst with thick rain in a few hours. His studio is in the back of the house he and his wife Susan share in an oaky old neighborhood not far from the Capitol. Big windows look out onto a garden lush with bromeliads, palms and elephant ears.

“Gardening and painting are almost the same thing,” he says. “Creating a world that’s an avoidance of the world.”

One of my favorites in his new series of smaller paintings—a mere 4 by 4 feet—shows a snarling bobcat hunched behind a brass rail, illuminated by flaming birds and moths. The hard-faced ghosts of human hunters emerge out of the pale moonlight below blue bottles stuck on magnolia branches. Messersmith has a real bottle tree outside, a tall metal rack festooned with cobalt blue glass bottles. The bottle tree is an old Southern custom, probably brought over by slaves from Congo. The blue bottles catch spirits and mediate between the

Capital Dame UNF ILTER ED FODDER

human world and the world of ghosts. It occurs to me that Messersmith’s paintings catch spirits, too, the voiceless souls of the natural world we keep doing our damnedest to destroy, as he translates them to canvas.

When I tell him this picture is both beautiful and distressing, Messersmith smiles. “I suppose so,” he says.

Messersmith goes often to the St. Marks Wildlife Refuge on the Gulf Coast, where he hikes and paints en plein air. Messersmith’s birds are often on fire, searing yellow and orange flames emanating from their heads and wings like old images of the Holy Spirit come to bring a revelation.

His art conjures a sense of the numinous, even the sacred. He shows me a copy of a book of hours, made for a 15th-century Dutch princess. The illustrations of saints and biblical stories glow with lapis lazuli blues, fiery topazes, emerald greens and amethysts—the same rich shades Messersmith uses in his work. Like on a Gothic altar screen, there’s a main image, a narrative with something dramatic happening, then a series of other images around it. Messersmith’s big canvases come with a kind of predella, the bottom step of the altarpiece, with shadow boxes holding flowers or animals or sometimes tiny dioramas to amplify or comment on the main picture. On the sides or the tops, he places carved plants or animals. On one piece, lean, snarling carved hounds have sharp little chips of broken mirror for claws.

Messersmith comes from St. Louis originally. He was taken with the North Florida landscape from the time he arrived in 1985 to teach painting at Florida State.

The landscape of the Midwest didn’t excite him. “There was nothing dangerous there,” he says. Here, he says, the darkness is thick, evocative, full of the sounds of birds, insects, frogs. You can drive “ten minutes out of the city and straight into a national forest where you might encounter

anything—bears, gators, cottonmouths, great blue herons and ibis.” He places himself in the long line of Florida landscape artists, including the late 19th-century painters Martin Johnson

Heade and George Inness, who came south on Henry Flagler’s railroad to escape the northeastern winters. Their paintings present the state, then the least populated in the South,

Messersmith’s paintings catch spirits, too, the voiceless souls of the natural world we keep doing our damnedest to destroy … as a pastoral dream of rosy sunsets, pacific rivers and graceful palms: nature at its gentlest.

Messersmith’s Florida is less idyllic: If you look closely at his paintings, all is not well. In his 2014 Malaise of Discontent, the iridescent blues and greens begin to resolve themselves as you make out several logging trucks with headlights jabbing the moonlit sky, loaded with longleaf pines ripped from an ancient forest, roaring past a couple of billboards touting Florida as a “vacation paradise.” Three ivory-billed woodpeckers, a species teetering on the verge of extinction, perch on what’s left of a pine tree.

Worry for the Wild Linda Hall’s art is full of birds, too—and felines, canines, ursids, cervids and intriguing hybrids thereof. Hall is a superb painter; I own several of her enigmatic watercolors of magical swamps with translucent cypress knees, golden skies and girls with the heads of alligators. Lately, she’s been sculpting animals in fabric and papier-mache. If Messersmith’s work laments the degradation of wild Florida and the disappearance of its animals, Hall tries to repopulate the landscape with new critters: patchwork deer with pearls on their heads, bears with beaded and glittering muzzles, and beaked and feathered bird masks to be worn by sneaky cats. One of Hall’s most arresting pieces is a bear, big as a real grizzly. The cloth “suit” has an opening into which a human could climb

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

43

Capital Dame UNF ILTER ED FODDER

and go off terrorizing the neighborhood.

Hall fashions her work out of cloth, tissue paper, wire, faux fur, sequins, bird nests, dried flowers and real antlers. She says a taxidermist she knows in Havana (the one just north of Tallahassee, not the one in Cuba) gave her the rack on the patchwork deer’s head. Many of Hall’s animals are soft, meant to hang or drape, intentionally left without innards.

“I make them empty,” says Hall.

“Something has been inside or something might yet get inside of them. I think it’s a way of holding onto things that are passing.”

(Like Messersmith’s, Hall’s work evokes the pain of loss and worry for the future of the wild.) Hall used to drive a tour boat as an AmeriCorps volunteer, explaining to visitors the cornucopian biodiversity of Wakulla Springs State Park, with its alligators, otters, eelgrass, osprey, manatees and mullet. And both draw from sacred art, claiming for the flora and fauna of Florida the mythic power of medieval Christian iconography. Hall’s animals are as richly clad and bejeweled as a Madonna statue in a Spanish church. The similarities aren’t surprising: Messersmith was one of Hall’s professors at FSU, where she got her bachelor’s in fine arts.

“We hit it off on a deep visual art level,” she says. She cites his work as an influence on hers; for his part, Linda Hall Messersmith says will host an open Hall inspires him: studio at her home in November. Check “There’s always lindahallart.com for a lot of mutual details. thieving.” Indeed, in a painting of Messersmith’s that hangs in his living room, I spotted one of Hall’s “fertility goddess angels,” a red-lipped, round-breasted winged figure. She used to paint them on hunks of wood she’d nail to telephone poles around Leon County.

44

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

attending a party here back in the 1980s, a bohemian throw-down at which a beloved local band called The Implications played.

“I had this vision of me in a white dress in this very place, which is now my studio, and somehow I just knew I was going to grow old here.”

Hall left Tallahassee in the late 1980s for an MFA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and lived for a while in Atlanta and Athens, Georgia. Somehow, though, North Florida kept calling her back: “I was a military brat and never had a sense of home until I came to Tallahassee in 1983. I’m rooted here.”

Above: Summer Respite by Mark Messersmith, oil

on canvas with carved wooden bird with snake on top and mixed media predella box on bottom

Hall believes in work breaking out of the gallery: “I think art belongs in the wild,” she says.

“Not in institutions.” Her art appears often in traditional spaces—she has shown in museums in New York, Atlanta and Jacksonville—but she also takes it into the street, staging parades of people wearing her animal suits and heads.

As an adjunct art professor at FSU, she herds her students outside, teaching them to observe as they sketch or take photographs. Hall gets around herself, too: She’s worked in puppetry at the renowned Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont and collaborated on dance and film projects. But her studio, a small white wooden house with a front porch, an enormous wreath of scuppernong vines and often a couple of semiferal black cats lounging around, always pulls her back to Tallahassee. The little house is one of the last surviving structures on a narrow, almostsecret street in the remnant of a historic AfricanAmerican Tallahassee neighborhood called Smokey Hollow. Hall thinks she remembers

Animals as Totems Robin Rodgers has always known where “home” lay: the green hills and mysterious waters of West Florida. He’s from Chattahoochee, an old Gadsden County town at the conjunction of the Flint, Apalachicola and Chattahoochee rivers.

Growing up, he liked to listen to Jack Wingate, a local historian and collector of Native American artifacts who also owns a fish camp decorated with taxidermied bobcats and bear heads. The sense of the past is palpable there: 1,000-year-old temple mounds rise by the Apalachicola River.

Rodgers’s parents used to camp on sandbars in the Apalachicola and collect things that washed up: fossilized shark teeth, spear points, arrow heads and pottery shards. He lives now in northern Leon County, and at his house one afternoon, he takes a curved piece of Native American pottery out of a display case. He found it when he was a kid. It’s possibly part of a bowl or other vessel, incised and carved with what looks like a stylized hand. “This is 800 years old,” he says. “I think it’s what started me on the road to pottery.”

As an undergraduate at the University of Montevallo in Alabama, Rodgers had intended to become an illustrator. But then he took a pottery class and loved the way he could make circular forms on the wheel tell a story in clay.

After earning an MFA in ceramics from Florida

Arts, Culture and the rest is History.

State, he settled in Tallahassee, where he throws jars on which monarch butterflies flutter, egrets dance and turtles swim in turquoise seas.

He crafts bowls with frogs or pelican heads as handles, often using a 500-year-old Japanese technique called raku firing, in which the piece is removed from the 2,000-degree kiln and smoked to darken the random crackled patterns of the clay. Rodgers also makes face jugs, following in the ceramic folk tradition that goes back to Europe in the Middle Ages, Robin Rodgers pre-Columbian America and Africa. will exhibit at the Under But his best-known work represents One Roof show this fall and celebrates the creatures that at Goodwood House and Museum. Check inhabit his own area: “Animals in their goodwoodmuseum.org environment, doing their thing,” he for details. says. And Rodgers’s favorite animal, or at least the one he seems to depict most often, is the woodpecker. Messersmith paints woodpeckers, too, and Hall has crafted her own versions of them, but with Rodgers the bird—especially the ivory-billed version, with a long, pale scissor-blade beak—is an impressively large totem animal (20 inches high, 30 inches at the wingspan). Rodgers has even been on a pilgrimage to Arkansas to try and spot one after there were sightings in 2004 and 2005. Alas, the woodpecker didn’t show. “They’re dramatic and big,” says Rodgers.

“Some Native American cultures thought the woodpeckers could communicate with the other world.”

Rodgers’s ivory-bills, with their sharp triangular red-and-black heads, perch on his jar lids, stare at each other from opposite sides of a bowl, or fly on the surfaces of his pots. They are at once zoologically correct and mythic, beautiful and haunting, a contemporary iteration of an ancient tradition.

“There’s something satisfying about taking clay, which comes from eroded mountains that ended up in deltas, making something and transforming it by fire,” says Rodgers. “There’s a connection.”

The sad thing is that for many people, a connection to the earth, to the flora and fauna that surround us outside of our air-conditioned boxes, is being lost. Seems to me that these artists remind us to notice what’s left of Florida before we drain it, pave it and drive it into extinction. “It’s all going to come back to haunt us,” says Messersmith.

And as for the animals, “Their demise is our demise.”

Diane Roberts is an eighth-generation Floridian, educated at Florida State University and at Oxford University. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian and the Tampa Bay Times. She has also authored four books, including Dream State, a historical memoir of Florida, and Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America.

Around here, nature isn’t our only attraction. Discover exciting sidewalk festivals, browse a fine art museum, enjoy live performances at a majestic theater or at our contemporary performing arts center. You can even explore Native American ruins, pioneer villages and the winter retreats of millionaires.

Conveniently located between Daytona Beach and Orlando.

Download a visitors guide at VisitWestVolusia.com

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

45

Jake

the sunshine son:

Country music superstar Jake Owen opens up about life growing up on the water and in the orange groves in his hometown of Vero Beach, his big Nashville break and how he hopes to pay his successes forward

Owen

By JAMIE RICH // Photography by JOSEPH LLANES

J

anthem recorded by John Mellencamp in Miami in 1982, with a nod and a wink to his own days playing that song night after night from a tiny beer-soaked stage in Tallahassee.

Flamingo Editor in Chief Jamie Rich recently caught up with Owen in between tour dates.

Here’s a few moments from their conversation.

How often do you get back to Tallahassee?

JO: I still get there as much as I can. I love going and watching football games. It seems like every year that I come back is like confirmation of how much older you feel, you know what I mean? I get older. They get younger. But it’s a lot of fun. I’m still a big supporter of Florida State and always will be.

Anyone who ever saw you play music there or requested a song probably feels a personal connection. Like, “We were there in the beginning!”

JO: Yeah, I meet a lot of people like that all over the country now. After they left college

MARY BETH KOETH

ake Owen wasn’t supposed to be a musician. As a kid, he filled his days with rounds of golf, innings of baseball and tricks on his wakeboard in the Indian River. Music lessons never factored into Owen’s “ocean life” in his hometown of Vero Beach, on the Treasure Coast. In 2000, he moved to Tallahassee to attend Florida State University, where he had hoped to play on the school’s golf team. Fate intervened, and at 19, Owen picked up a guitar for the first time and started strumming, becoming a popular act rocking the local bar scene night after night with his band Yeehaw Junction.

Longing to perform beyond the moss-covered oak trees of Tallahassee, he changed course before graduating and moved to Nashville in 2003. That decision, and a routine trip to a SunTrust Bank, proved serendipitous. Today the 37-year-old singer, and dad to 5-year-old daughter Pearl, has racked up a slew of awards and seven No. 1 hits on the country charts, positioning him among music’s hottest stars.

Owen’s latest hit single, “I Was Jack (You Were Diane),” pays tribute to the classic youthful

48

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

they filtered out throughout the United States. I’ll be playing a show somewhere, and somebody will come up and say, “Hey, I used to watch you in Potbelly’s.” And that’s always pretty cool. I usually try to catch up with them on what they’re doing these days, and it’s just kind of cool to see what life does for you.

Your love of golf has been well documented.

Did you play golf at Florida State?

JO: No, I didn’t. I went there with hopes of playing and taking a walk-on spot. I hurt my shoulder and then ended up not playing. That’s when I started playing guitar. I had to find something to do.

Above: In 2017,

Owen drove what he called the “love bus” on a road trip across Florida, stopping to perfom along his way down to Key West.

Opposite: Owen performing on stage at the Porter County Fair in 2014, with a patch of the Florida flag on his guitar strap

I figured I could go play for an hour or so by myself somewhere. I stopped at Potbelly’s one day and asked if I could play. [The guy] said, “Yeah, you want to play tonight?” So I played that night, and I started playing every few nights.

Then I started a band.

Your band was called “Yeehaw Junction.”

Have you ever been to Yeehaw Junction?

JO: Yeah, many times. I mean the only way to get to Tallahassee [from Vero Beach] is to take the turnpike to 75 North, and you got to leave from Yeehaw Junction off of Highway 60.

Were you writing your own music back then?

JO: I was. I was writing a lot of my own songs. It’s like So how did that happen?

JO: Looking back on it, I was pretty bored considering I wasn’t doing what I had intended on doing. I don’t really know how to explain it other than, just sit there and work at it. I played long enough to where I’d learned a few songs that

anything: You can always become a cover singer and just sit around and play “Sweet Home Alabama” every night and have people tip you because they want to hear “Free Bird.” Or you can take a chance on playing your own songs and hoping that one day people will take care of you and give

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

49

THE MAIN GOAL WAS GETTING TO A PLACE WHERE I COULD TRAVEL AROUND THE COUNTRY AND SEE PLACES I HAD NEVER SEEN BEFORE AND ENJOY LIFE. AND FIND A WAY TO HAVE A JOB THAT NEVER FELT LIKE A JOB. —JAKE OWEN

50

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

Jake Owen, 2018

you money for your own songs. I just got to a point where I wanted to do bigger things. I still find that there’s nights where I play songs that I played when I was in college. But I just wanted a little bit more out of life.

Hardworking Man

When you went to Nashville, was there a big break for you?

Greatest Hits, 2017

American Love, 2016

Days of Gold, 2013

JO: I moved to town. Didn’t really know anybody. Started writing some songs with people that I would meet. Meanwhile, I was still just trying to set up things, like finding an actual place to live. I was starting a bank account, and the lady at the bank asked me what I was doing. I told her that I moved to town to play music, and she said, “I’d love to hear your songs some time.” I gave her an album, a CD of songs that I had, and the next thing I know she passed it along to someone else. And they called me and said, “Do you want to come chat with us at Warner/Chappell?” I was pretty excited.

honky-tonks. I moved there because I love music. I looked at it as, Below: Owen I want to be a singer on runs through the the road, doing what I’m crowd at a show in Vienna, Va in 2018. doing now in Tallahassee but on a larger scale. And the only way I can do that is go to the place where they make that kind of thing happen. When I moved to Nashville that’s all I thought about.

I didn’t think about girls. I wasn’t thinking about being famous. I wasn’t thinking about money.

All I wanted to do was work. The main goal was getting to a place where I could travel around Left: Owen taught

himself how to play guitar as a freshman at FSU.

This banker just happened to put your demo tape in the right hands?

JO: Yes, and she’s still my banker.

It was only a year and a half from the time you moved to Nashville until you put out your first album. That’s pretty fast.

Barefoot Blue Jean Night, 2011

Easy Does It, 2009

JO: Yeah, I wasn’t waiting around. You can get distracted doing a lot of different things and get caught up in the wrong circles with people that are going to tell you they can do this for you, do that for you. I made a point to always surround myself with the right people. I’ve just kind of stuck with those people, worked hard, and they kind of streamlined me into the big machine of the music business.

Were you one of those guys slogging it out in the honky-tonks?

JO: No, no. I mean, I put my hard work in, but that’s kind of a misconception about Nashville, that you have to be some guy who’s been there for 10 years and performed around the Broadway

Startin’ with Me, 2006

the country and see places I had never seen before and enjoy life. And find a way to have a job that never felt like a job.

Riding the Breeze

Is being a Floridian in country music a challenge? The state isn’t typically associated with Southern culture.

JO: Florida, as we all know, is a melting pot of a state, and where I grew up, I got the best of both worlds. I got to live the ocean life. And then I’d go out west of town in the orange groves, in the agricultural side, where we could get out there and go hunting and fishing and do the things that anybody in any other state that’s so-called country is doing. And there’s so many great musicians that have come from Florida.

Like John Anderson, one of the most awesome

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

51

THERE’S SO MANY GREAT MUSICIANS THAT HAVE COME FROM FLORIDA. LIKE JOHN ANDERSON, ONE OF THE MOST AWESOME HONKY-TONK SINGERS EVER. MEL TILLIS IS FROM FLORIDA. TOM PETTY IS FROM FLORIDA. —JAKE OWEN

honky-tonk singers ever. You know Mel Tillis is from Florida. Tom Petty is from Florida. Lynyrd Skynyrd is from Florida. The Allman Brothers.

There’s just an amazing well of music. Gary Stewart. From classic country music to rock ’n’ roll. So I had a lot of influence growing up in a lot of different ways.

go off your gut feeling that you think you can do this? What happens if you don’t? You don’t have a college education.” My thing was you can always get a college education. You can’t always move to Nashville at 22 years old when you don’t have any other responsibilities in life.

What drew you to country music?

What has been the highlight of your career?

the stories. I like the way that the fans support it. There’s something about country music where people are accessible, and it’s a more real, downhome kind of format. Growing up in a family where we’re all raised on good morals and values, that’s the kind of the thing I like.

JO: John Anderson, Tom Petty, everything that was on the radio. Alan Jackson, Brooks & Dunn, ’90s “rock ‘n’ roll” music, ’80s “rock ‘n’ roll”. I listen to everything. That’s a very hard question to answer, but the fact of the matter is, if I only listened to a few, I wouldn’t be singing at all.

can look around me and see a group of guys that have played with me for over 10 years, that have fed their families and made a living playing songs that I wrote, and they’re very well taken care of and they take care of me. Then I look at my foundation and how much money we’ve raised for not only St. Jude Children’s Hospital, which is an amazing organization, but all the kids and local charities in my home town of Vero Beach.

And that to me is what I look at and think, “Wow, this is what matters.” And it’s really fulfilling to know that you can chase a dream and that the end result can be giving back to people and organizations I’m passionate about.

Was there a moment when you Thought, “This is going to happen”?

What does the Jake Owen Foundation do?

JO: I felt like getting to Nashville was definitely one of the main parts of things taking a turn.

There’s a lot of people in my life who said, “You mean you’re going to drop out of college and just

JO: When we started this, my whole deal was to be able to help people in ways where people can’t help themselves. There’s not one particular thing. We’re always looking, I’m always listening

Who were some of those early musical influences for you?

52

JO: The highlight of my career is the fact that I

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

This page: Owen, performing at Stagecoach festival in Indio, Ca. in 2018, is currently on his Life’s Whatcha Make It tour.

Opposite from top:

COURTESY OF JAKE OWEN

JO: I just always liked country music. I like

Days of Gold

Owen with Cal Ripken Jr. and NASCAR driver Kevin Harvick at the ribbon cutting of Jake Owen Field, which serves the youth of Vero Beach; Owen’s foundation focuses on helping those in need, not only in his home state, but across the nation.

BEST V JAKE

The country crooner shares his hometown spots to kick back and cool off in Vero Beach

GO-TO FISH TACOS? RIVERSIDE CAFÉ 3341 Bridge Plaza Drive

BEST BURGER?

to people that have things they’re going through, and that’s when I get on the phone with our board for our foundation and say, “These people really need help.

How can we help them?” I definitely have a passion in my heart for children, because I have a child of my own.

But we help anybody who is in need, and that’s what I’m proud of.

CASEY’S PLACE 917 Azalea Lane

FAVE DIVE BAR? WALDO’S 3150 Ocean Drive

TOP LOCAL BEER? ORCHID ISLAND BREWERY 2855 Ocean Drive

MUST-PLAY GOLF COURSE? VERO BEACH COUNTRY CLUB

How do you raise money?

JO: Well, we have incorporated a golf tournament called The Great Free Open. Over the last few years I’ve brought the No. 1 golfers in the world to the small town of Vero. Jordan Spieth, Jason Day and John Daly came last year. And then we do a big concert and sell lots of tickets, and all the money goes back toward our local foundations. Everything from Autism Speaks.

My little nephew is autistic. And then we got Boys & Girls Club, Habitat for Humanity, and then St. Jude Children’s Hospital. They take care of everything.

They don’t charge anyone to come to that hospital.

There’s no bills. It’s all taken care of by people who make donations.

800 30th St.

WAKE BOARDING SPOT? You know, in the INTRACOASTAL, where I hurt my shoulder.

YOU’RE STILL OUT FLIPPING TRICKS? Wherever there’s a boat. Wherever there’s water.

You’ll be co-hosting Real Country with Shania Twain this fall. Why did you decide to get involved with a contest show?

JO: I love finding, helping and developing people who have a passion like I did when I moved here.

Waylon Jennings made a famous quote a long time ago that you have to care about the music. If you don’t, you shouldn’t be doing it. He said it’s not about the publicity or the fame or the money. And you better not be doing it just because it’s a way to make a living, because that’s not always going to be the case. He said you have to believe in it, and you have to believe in the music you’re making, and you have to mean it. And I think that says a lot for the people that are going to be on this show, or people that aren’t on this show, that are just moving to Nashville or just trying to make it in the music business.

You have to believe in what you’re doing. You have to believe in the music you’re making.

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

53

Florida

Man’s

M O V I E STA R M O M E NTS

By STEVE DOLLAR

Is it the mind-numbing humidity, the alligator-infested swamps, the potential for mischief on 1,350 miles of coastline or something wilder that explains why people in the Sunshine State act in dark and strange ways? Filmmakers have been obsessed with that essential Florida mystery since motion pictures began.

L 56

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

ian dude-bros (Creature from the Black Lagoon shot in Wakulla Springs), horny, homicidal teenagers (Bully, Spring Breakers, Wild Things), drug runners (Cocaine Above from top: Cowboys, Square Grouper: The GodfaScenes from Frogs and thers of Ganja), disillusioned male stripTwo Thousand pers (Magic Mike), disillusioned bodyManiacs! builders-turned-kidnappers (Pain & Gain), grinning, pretty-boy psychopaths (Miami Blues, Something Wild), sexy, topless aliens (Nude on the Moon), pubescent voyeurs (Porky’s), experimental farming methods that turn a man into a turkey-headed monster (Blood Freak, a cautionary tale), man-eating alligators (Adaptation), man-eating cobra gators (CobraGator) and good, old-fashioned man-eaters (Body Heat, with Kathleen Turner as a scheming seductress who manipulates half-bright FSU Law School grad William Hurt into a murder plot).

Left: Scene from River of Grass from writerdirector Kelly Reichardt

BRIT TON F0STER, STATE ARCHIVES OF FLORIDA

Long before the Internet made him famous, Florida Man was ready for his close-up. The meme only became a viral sensation a few years ago, a perverse homage to those news headlines about aberrant, often drug-induced, behaviors across the peninsula that always begin with the fateful words “Florida man”: as in, “Florida man arrested after driving 110 mph while naked with 3 women in a Cadillac” and “Florida man who had sex with dolphin claims it seduced him.”

Thanks to sunshine laws that make arrest records available to the press, such reports have for decades been a staple of daily newspapers across the state. No one knew him by that name back then, but once smartphones and social media arrived, so did Florida Man, who even has his own Twitter account. The mysterious entity flourished, and flourishes now, as a kind of rebel spirit, an avatar of untempered gonzo.

If you look at the history of Florida filmmaking, you can see him everywhere—so much unruly dark matter infusing the cinematic imagination with twisted tales of social deviance and extreme eccentricity.

Movies have been made in Florida almost since motion picture cameras first rolled in the United States. Jacksonville was a hotbed of production during the silent era, welcoming its first movie studio in 1908, and with the 1916 launch of Norman Studios, it became a pioneering site for films made for African-American audiences. Neighboring St. Augustine also boomed and played an essential role in the history of the American horror film.

Now lost, the 1915 Life Without Soul was groundbreaking. It was the first American feature film based on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and conjured a European setting in coastal northeast Florida. Even at the dawn of the art form, tales of madness, obsession, delirium and crimes against nature were dominant in movies made in and about the Sunshine State.

Over the decades, Florida has been portrayed onscreen as the land of serial killers (Monster and its documentary source, Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer), recovering child molesters (the documentary Pervert Park), zombies (Day of the Dead, I Eat Your Skin), cannibals engaged in Confederate reenactments (Two Thousand Maniacs), a mutant amphibian apocalypse (Frogs), lovestruck amphib-

Out on a Limb

Thoughts of this unusual legacy came to mind during my visit to April’s Tribeca Film Festival, a springtime launching pad for a wealth of foreign-language art house films, American indies and documentaries. Presided over by Robert De Niro, the festival attracts scores of Hollywood celebrities and rising stars to mug for the paparazzi on its red carpets and tipple the night away at seemingly bottomless open bars and private parties. Such scenes have been familiar to me for the last 30 years in my on-again, off-again role as a film critic for major newspapers, from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution to The Wall Street Journal, and a host of websites. From Sundance to Toronto to Berlin and beyond, the film festival circuit is a well-traveled one. This was my sixth or seventh visit to Tribeca, a festival whose main theatrical venue is in Chelsea and, for about three years, in my nearly literal backyard. Yet, to my surprise, I saw something I’d never

seen before. Right there, in the strobe-like pop of a camera’s flash, I could swear I glimpsed Florida Man. Or someone very much like him.

He’s embodied by the subjects of White Tide: The Legend of Culebra, easily the most outrageous film at this year’s festival. The documentary is a rollicking evocation of native Floridian weirdness that owes no small debt to early Errol Morris. The filmmaker may not be a household name, but he pretty much invented the true-crime mystery format so beloved of Netflix binge-watchers. His classic The Thin Blue Line, about the murder of a Dallas, Texas, policeman, saved a man from the electric chair through its meticulous investigation of the evidence that led the wrong suspect to be convicted. But it’s Morris’s 1981 documentary Vernon, Florida that should earn the director a place in the state’s hall of fame. Morris originally intended to make a film called Nub City, a nickname for the tiny Panhandle town where, in the

Above: Central Florida real estate developer Rodney Hyden, the main subject of truecrime documentary White Tide

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

57

58

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

ERROL MORRIS

1950s and ’60s, residents took to crudely amputating their own limbs for insurance payouts. When his life was threatened during a 1977 visit, the filmmaker fled.

“It’s the only time that I’ve been beaten up,” Morris confesses in an interview from the Criterion Collection’s 2015 rerelease of the film. “I sort of got the idea that interviewing nubbies was not the way to go.” He circled back years later, this time focused on some of Vernon’s more colorful citizens.

Four decades after Morris first set eyes on it, there still isn’t a lot to Vernon. The population estimate falls shy of 700 souls, a sum that hasn’t wavered significantly in 70 years. The opening frames of the documentary offer a template of Panhandle Floridiana: A battered Ford pickup truck rolls down an empty, ill-maintained street, insecticide billowing out in mosquito-killing clouds behind it. Yellow caution lights blink in vacant witness, shaded by oak trees dripping with Spanish moss. If there’s not much to see, there’s plenty to talk about, it seems, as Morris engages an array of indefatigable conversationalists and one quavery-voiced codger he calls “the epistemologist of the swamp.” Many of them are elderly and sweetly out of their heads. They include an obsessive hunter who discourses on “that turkey feeling” (“They’re a smart bird, … the smartest we got in this country”), a sand collector, a connoisseur of wrigglers and a minister who runs unlikely analytical circles around the word “therefore.”

Above: White Tide Their logic may be peculiar, yet it is rarely less filmmaker Theo Love than fantastic, even magical. As the film’s resiRight: dent deep thinker, Albert Bitterling, says at the Citizens of start of the film, “Reality … you mean this is the Vernon real world? I never thought of that.”

The characters in White Tide exist between the crosshairs of those two movies, as the true-crime doc reenacts an outlandish drug caper gone haywire. The film reconstructs its shaggy dog saga with the full participation of its main subject, guileless and big-hearted Central Florida real estate developer Rodney Hyden, whose fortunes tumbled in the aftermath of the 2008 financial meltdown. Down on his luck and giddy with get-rich-quick-again dreams, Hyden hears a far-fetched campfire story from one of his beer-drinking, pot-smoking buddies. The friend is an aging hippie who claims to have discovered some 15 years before a $2 million stash of cocaine on the beach of an obscure Puerto Rican island, then freaked out and buried it under the sand.

Hyden enlists his drug-addled slacker sidekick Andy in a quest to recover this seemingly mythic—and utterly illegal— treasure, which puts them both in contact with some dubi-

I sort of got the idea that interviewing nubbies was not the way to go. — Errol Morris

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

59

It’s the false promise of the sun and the fake happiness of Disney World.

—Larry Fessenden

ous new acquaintances.

Do not, repeat do not, run to Google now and type in Hyden’s name. You’ll spoil all the fun that White Tide intends to swamp you with. I’m not going to ease the suspense with too many more plot points, which unfold in a manner as methodical and attenuated as any good fish story—or the best novel Carl Hiaasen never wrote. Hyden’s everyman cha-

60

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

risma and filmmaker Theo Love’s attention to microscopic detail hook the audience well past any sensible suspension of disbelief. By the time the film’s portly protagonist delivers his impersonation of Al Pacino in Scarface and recounts his meetings with a mysterious pilot named “Carlos,” it’s fair to wonder if the whole production isn’t some extravagant gag. White Tide is designed as pure entertainment, not philosophical discourse, yet, as with Morris’s work, the film functions as an interrogation of the “truth,” as the bumbling —to me, anyway—conspirators get helplessly caught up in something that is plainly an outrageous fabrication, yet can’t reason their way out of it and just keep digging themselves into a deeper hole. What’s tricky to discern is whether they have taken insane risks for the lure of forbidden cash, or because it’s the best campfire hoohah they’ll ever be able to relate. It’s

a wild ride and a quintessential Florida epic.

“There seems to be some sort of underbelly,” says Larry Fessenden, a New York-based genre film producer who also co-starred in one of the classic Florida outlaw movies, River of Grass. The 1994 debut film of writer-director Kelly Reichardt (Wendy and Lucy, Certain Women), rereleased in 2016 and widely available to stream, emulates vintage film noir in the desperate tale of two lovers on the lam, fleeing the fuzz after a random act of violence. Except no one is dead, the lovers aren’t in love and the police aren’t looking that hard to find them.

“It’s kids on the run without them getting anywhere.” The anti-drama, as Fessenden calls it, evokes Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s 1947 book about the Everglades as it soaks in the ambience of fringy Dade County, where Reichardt, daughter of a crime scene investigator and a narcotics agent, grew

up. It’s the best sort of Florida movie, one that uses a familiar plot formula, but discards predictability like a lukewarm Icee to capture something essential in the humid, mosquito-ridden, sun-bleached, nothing-much of it all.

A Violent Paradise

Above: A sampling of

the dozens of films, from documentaries and indie dramas to creature features and action flicks, in which Florida plays a vivid lead role

There’s something raw and existential in the Florida landscape that has a potent appeal to independent filmmakers; a sense of lostness, of kitsch masquerading as dreams.

“It’s the false promise of the sun and the fake happiness of Disney World,” Fessenden suggests. “I love that alligators crawl across the golf courses as a matter of routine.”

Filmmakers from Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise) to Sean Baker (The Florida Project) would likely agree. And it’s not only hipster New Yorkers who fetishize Florida’s exotic

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

61

BRIT TON F0STER, COURTESY CRITERION COLLEC TION, COURTESY A 24, ERROL MORRIS

locales. Exploitation film legend William Grefé made a career maximizing the moccasin-infested funk of the Everglades, producing a string of sordid thrillers and creature features in the 1960s and ’70s. He scandalized and titillated a generation of drive-in date nights with movies like The Wild Rebels, The Psychedelic Priest, The The heat is so oppressive and it Death Curse of Tartu and The makes you crazy.

Naked Zoo (which starred Rita Hayworth in her penultimate It builds up so much angst. screen role). Along with such — Amy Seimetz aesthetic outliers as splatter horror pioneer Herschell Gordon Lewis and Doris Wishman, the grande dame of 1960s sexploitation, Grefé captured something of Florida’s untamable mystery, unconsciously elevated by low budgets and grindhouse excess.

Decades later, that mystery abides. St. Petersburg native Amy Seimetz, part of the same Florida State University crew that includes Oscar-winning Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, made her own Florida project in 2012. Sun Don’t Shine—a perfect title for a latter-day noir shot along U.S. Highway 19 as it ramps down toward Tampa Bay. Seimetz and her cinematographer Jay Keitel make humid poetry of tacky beach motels and sticky car seats. The film steers its blood-simple lovers, speeding away from the scene of their crime with the evidence weighing heavy in the trunk of their car, toward Weeki Wachee Springs, mapping coastal peculiarities with a sensitivity to both myth and consequence.

As Seimetz told a journalist around the time her film premiered at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas, it wasn’t as if she had to stretch the facts for the sake of fiction. “Growing up in Florida, most of the insane crimes I would read about were all taking place in Florida. All of the stuff where you’d read about it and say, ‘What the fuck? Who would do that?’—that happens in Florida. To me, the main factor is that the heat is so oppressive and it makes you crazy.

It builds up so much angst, and you can’t think during it. The crime rate goes up in the middle of summer. Florida is this amazing clash of paradise and violence.”

Florida Man may not have a date with Oscar anytime soon. So many of the most pungent, er … evocative screen incarnations of his Opposite from rowdy-ass soul have been in low-budtop to bottom: get horror, action and crime films Scenes from the films White Tide, that don’t usually get a lot of industry Stranger Than Paradise, Spring respect. Yet, as even a brief survey of Breakers, Vernon, Florida film history reveals, he’s more Florida and The Florida Project than a meme; he’s a movie star.

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

63

BRINGING BACK

THE FUNK

For 50 years, George Clinton and his super-group ParliamentFunkadelic, aka P-Funk, have reigned as the mother ship of funk music, inspiring contemporary hip-hop artists the world over. For the last 20 years, Clinton has found sobriety and solace living at his home near Tallahassee.

With the release of his latest album and a world tour, the 77-year-old proves he can still rock sequins and “tear the roof off the sucker.”

By ROB RUSHIN // Photography by MARK WALLHEISER // Illustrations by OVERTON LOYD

Fame, inducted

by Prince, a close friend and collaborator. In 2014, a replica of the Mothership went on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Conventional wisdom holds that Clinton, along with James Brown and Sly Stone, deserves credit as the creator of modern funk. Too simple to be the whole story, sure. Also: inarguably true.

Now he says it is time for one last tour around the world before he hangs up his traveling shoes in 2019.

I finally find the Clinton property by following my ears. An outdoor sound system pumps “Pain Management,” a track from Medicaid Fraud Dogg, Parliament’s latest album. I wander by the fleet of touring vans and cars with “C Funk” and “P-Funk” on the license plates, past the tennis court and swimming pool, and up the path to a seriously huge front door.

His wife, Carlon, early 50s, who has a closely shorn scalp and is wearing a P-Funk T-shirt and exquisite dangling earrings, greets me with a warm welcome, even after I mistake her for one of George’s daughters. She laughs.

“I get that all the time. I just look 20 years younger than I am,” Carlon says.

(A little while later, a woman delivering groceries—right after she realizes she is in the presence of George Oh-My-God Clinton, who gathers her up in a bear hug that pretty much made her day, year and lifetime— makes the same mistake.)

She leads me into the living room, where the legend was relaxing in standard Panhandle uniform: flip-flops, shorts, ball cap. But his ultra stylish eyeglasses—round plastic frames rimmed with gold—and Washington Capitals jersey (“I met the team’s owner on a train. Turns out he’s a big fan,” Clinton says) suggest that the man greeting us with a big smile is not your typical Florida man.

OVERTON LOYD ILLUSTR ATOR, WILLIAM THOREN PHOTOGR APHY

i

I am a few miles north of Florida’s capital city, driving down a dirt road, well off the main drag.

I’m looking for the home of one of American culture’s true originals, the one true Dr. Funkenstein, captain of the Mothership.

George Clinton is a living bridge across seven decades of popular music. Filling roles from Jersey street-corner singer and staff composer for the pop music machines of the Brill Building to reigning mastermind of Parliament-Funkadelic and godfather of hip-hop, George Clinton. Of Clinton’s 65 singles, five hit No. 1 on the R&B charts. Some of popular music’s most memorable (and highly sampled) songs include Clinton’s hits “Tear the Roof Off the Sucker,” “Flash Light” and “Atomic Dog.” The Previous spread: sound of P-Funk—feaClinton at his Tallahassee home in tured in dozens of movie, June 2018 television, and video Above: Overton game soundtracks—has Loyd’s Hair Band illustration lists the deeply influenced several members of P-Funk generations of musicians. in George’s iconic dreadlocks In 1997, the ParliamentBelow: Clinton in Funkadelic gang joined the studio with family and friends the Rock & Roll Hall of

There’s nothing that the proper attitude won’t render … funkable

How the founding father of One Nation Under a Groove came to live in a remote and superficially unfunky outpost in North Florida is a rags-toriches-to-rags-to-redemption tale. In the mid-90s, a serious crack addiction left Clinton with limited options when he hit Tallahassee for a gig.

Clinton had lost his family farm in a messy legal dispute with a former business partner. “It was a mess, but I’m not gonna boohoo about it because nobody wants to hear that shit,” Clinton says during an expansive conversation at his eightacre property north of Tallahassee, several miles from his downtown recording studio.

Clockwise from the After years of rentright: Clinton moved to Tallahassee in ing around the area, the mid-’90s with a they bought this spread serious crack addiction; Artwork for albums five years ago. Massive Dope Dogs and Uncle Jam Wants You live oaks blanket the

sky. They have dozens of birdhouses, a sizable carp pond, a pool house that serves as George’s painting studio and a huge garden. “This is my peace,” Carlon remarks as she digs up some large onions and pinches off some fresh mint.

Carlon explains that she spotted this house and made her husband take a look. He was resistant until he walked into the living room and saw the built-in pipe organ.

“I knew I had to live here when I saw that,” he says.

“Do you play the organ?” I ask.

“Man, I don’t play shit. Never have. I know what I need to hear, though, and I know how to get players to do it.”

So many kids and grandkids come and go they call it Camp Clinton. When I inquire about the Wi-Fi password, Carlon hands me a multipage brochure with a Camp Clinton logo. Once they complete their on-site recording studio, this will be a self-contained world apart.

“I used to think I had to be up and out, all the time,” Clinton muses beneath his personal oak

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

67

canopy. “But when I got here, I realized I could just sit down and be. I used to stay up ’til dawn.

Now I like to go to bed at 8 o’clock and get up at dawn to listen to the birds singing.”

The situation clearly suits him.

In 2014, he dropped the first newly recorded Funkadelic album in 33 years, the 33-song First Ya Gotta Shake the Gate. This year brought Medicaid Fraud Dogg, a 23-song epic about the disastrous state of health care in an over-medicated society. This fall, Clinton promises another couple dozen tracks under the P-Funk All Stars banner, tentatively titled One Nation Under Sedation. All this while taking that planetary victory lap ahead of retirement.

There’s a whole lot of rhythm going ’round

Tallahassee gives Clinton access to a deep pool of local talent. Percussionist Michael Bakan, a Florida State University professor of ethnomusicology, got to know Clinton after featuring him as a guest artist at FSU’s annual Rainbow Concert.

68

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

I realized that essentially when you’re in the studio with George, you’re like his hands.

But he’s not a percussionist, so he doesn’t physically have the chops, but he knows exactly what he wants to happen once he’s heard it. Once he hears the sound, it’s like he immediately has an entire road map of where that sound is going to be.

— Michael Bakan

OVERTON LOYD ILLUSTR ATOR, WILLIAM THOREN PHOTOGR APHY

That collaboration peaked with a wild version of “Atomic Dog” arranged for gamelan, a traditional Indonesian music ensemble. It also led to Bakan and a few students cutting tracks for Medicaid Fraud Dogg.

“It seemed like he wasn’t really paying attention, so I figured I’ll just try some things out,” says Bakan. “He’s looking off in space, and suddenly he says, ‘That.’ So I start again and he says, ‘No, no, no. Wait. Now. Now stop. Now keep going.

Stop.’ As the day unfolded, I realized that essentially when you’re in the studio with George, you’re like his hands. But he’s not a percussionist, so he doesn’t physically have the chops, but he knows exactly what he wants to happen once he’s heard it. Once he hears the sound, it’s like he immediately has an entire road map of where that sound is going to be.”

Bakan laughs. “I’ve worked with [avant-garde composer] John Cage, and the strange thing is that you would think there couldn’t be two more different kinds of musical artists than John Cage and George Clinton. But that’s the closest I’ve ever experienced.”

Along with the abundant local talent, Clinton holds longtime P-Funk family close, guys like bassist Lige Curry and Dewayne “Blackbyrd” McKnight—a genuine guitar hero in the mold of P-Funk legend Eddie Hazel. Clinton Opposite: Loyd, who lives on Clinton’s says they keep the property, created this original Mothership drawing titled Dawn.

Connection alive and This page from top: Motor Booty Affair vital. Drummer Benzel album cover; Clinton, Cowan, son of longon stage, insists P-Funk is about time P-Funk trumthe group, not the peter Bennie Cowan, individual.

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

69

70

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

“I’m still hard as steel”

Friends, inquisitive friends Are asking what’s come over me These opening lines from Parliament’s first hit, 1967’s “(I Wanna) Testify,” about a man transformed by love, resonate with George Clinton in 2018. After a lifetime of elaborate theatrics and ferocious mountains of sound, the man I visit seems at peace with himself and his legacy, surrounded by family and nature. Yet even as Clinton prepares to leave touring to the next generations, he plans to work the studio “hard as steel. Started hard as steel,

OVERTON LOYD ILLUSTR ATOR, WILLIAM THOREN PHOTOGR APHY

was dandled on the knee of Above: Clinton and his wife Bootsy Collins as an infant, Carlon by the pipe organ at a man born to funk. People their home in who come into George’s Tallahassee orbit tend to stay there.

Right: Clinton at home, toking Case in point: As we wanpoolside der the property, George Below: Funk Girl points at the house. illustration by Loyd, who has “See that apartment there? created P-Funk Overton lives there. He’s still comics since the ’70s living with us.”

Overton Loyd created the comic book insert, depicting the eternal battle between Sir Nose D’Voidoffunk and Star Child, for Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome. He also designed the cover for Motor Booty Affair, the “Atomic Dog” video, and the artwork for Medicaid Fraud Dogg.

“P-Funk is a family thing,” Clinton says, not for the first or last time during our afternoon together.

Camp Clinton’s secret weapon is Carlon, a savvy administrator, promoter and self-taught legal eagle who makes sure that Clinton’s visitors enjoy the finest hospitality. They met at a concert in the ’80s. Later on, Clinton needed some help sorting out contract entanglements, and the two fell in love over legal documents.

“You can’t spend time with George and not fall in love with him,” she says like a love-struck schoolgirl.

So George fell in love with his lawyer?

“No, I’m not a lawyer. But I taught myself how to be one, and we won that case in LA court, too.

Still kicking that guy’s ass,” she said with a laugh.

and I’m still hard as steel.”

And still sharp as a razor. He is a mesmerizing storyteller with an astonishing recall of detail. For example, shortly after “Testify” hit the charts, it became clear that the music world—hell, the whole damned world—was changing. George knew he needed to change with it.

“I’m just thinking about this today. I went and saw Fantasia and 2001 at the same time. 1968.

You know, you’re talking about Disney’s animated visual concepts showing primordial ooze with classical music, and then you got 2001, Arthur C. Clarke, you know, past the primordial and out the

other end into that star baby.”

So that’s where the whole Mothership idea comes from?

“I got a whole bunch of other stuff too, you know. I must have just got loaded with all the information to whatever was going on through that period of time.”

Clinton has always been a cultural omnivore.

Our conversation covers Smokey Robinson, Star Trek, Jimi Hendrix, Iron Butterfly, Blade Runner, Chariot of the Gods, King Crimson, Frank Zappa and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, whom he calls “the P-Funk of jazz.” And Kanye West. Asked whether Kanye might be turning into the funkless seducer described in his song “Sir Nose D’Voidoffunk,” Clinton laughs, a beautiful chortle rising from his belly.

“That’s the best way to say it. Sir Nose, yeah.

His nose is definitely kind of growing,” he says.

“He’s going to have to watch his nose, going to have to check his nose out.”

We talk about Clinton’s fellow astral traveler Sun Ra, the legendary pianist and leader of the band the Arkestra. When they met in the ’80s, Clinton realized they were basically up to the same thing.

“They were doing what we do—the costumes, the space travel—just doing it in jazz. It’s beautiful.”

Reminded of their shared background in doowop, Clinton flips through his encyclopedic mind that fires his musical imagination.

“Yeah, he was in Chicago then. Those harmonies he was after were deep. Nobody was doing that kind of thing except maybe Smokey. We were all singing unisons, nothing like that.”

Younger Clintons keep him up to date on new trends and talent, leading him to collaborations with the likes of Scarface, Thundercat, and Kendrick Lamar, whose album Damn was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for music.

George also collaborated on Lamar’s 2015 album, To Pimp a Butterfly, which earned Lamar the Grammy Award for best rap album. “I was telling Kendrick jazz was going to be the next thing Right: Clinton’s in hip-hop, not knowing songs are among the most that his record was all in sampled of all time. that. I don’t know if he

Is There Life After Funk?

already had it like that, but there’s lots of jazz in his ammo. I use a lot of that flavor on Medicaid Fraud Dogg.

“You know that kind of music gives it an elevation. It’s still hip-hop, still storytelling, but he actually had some arrangement. You can’t just call it making beats, you know, just making a beat on the computer. That shit had to be written. Somebody went to school for a lot of that stuff he’s putting down. You didn’t get that from no Casio.”

Meanwhile, Carlon begins livestreaming Clinton on Periscope, while Clinton sits at the pipe organ, sporting a stunning sequin ensemble, singing along with Sinatra in some funky ba da bing.

That’s the beginning—just one of the clues You’ve had your first lesson in learnin’ the blues

Above: Clinton, known

for his outrageous wardrobe, has an entire room at home dedicated to clothing, shoes and accessories.

Right: Earlier this year, Clinton released his latest album, Medicaid Fraud Dogg, calling out big pharmaceutical companies and the prescription drug addiction gripping America.

In his memoir, Clinton writes that, “Getting high laid me low. I’m not especially judgmental about drugs, but I can’t ignore the fact that they interfered with my ability to do what needed to be done.”

Beyond all the humor on Medicaid Fraud Dogg, Clinton is dead serious about the themes behind the new album. Looking at addiction through the lens of someone who knows, he compares Big Pharma to street dealers.

“Drugs are really more dangerous now,” he says. “I quit, but I can still see all the people my age walking around, you know, that same dazed look like it was street drugs. And most of them got prescriptions. Now it’s legal. So the pharmaceutical companies, same as though it was still street drugs, they get people hooked on stuff, but now they got a legal way of doing it with prescriptions and stuff, people don’t have a chance.

If you stop taking them, you’re in trouble. So they get a captive audience and they can advertise that shit on the radio and TV and internet.

They give you the cure for the pill they gave you for something else and that happens three or four times before you realize you taking meds for other meds.”

Clinton’s 29-year crack addiction nearly killed him. Hospitalized in 2011, he kicked his habit.

Aside from medical marijuana, Clinton takes no drugs at all.

“I’m glad I got out of it,” he explains. “I still had enough energy and inspiration to write all this. That was my energy for fighting harder again, along with my life, you know, family and everything. It was fun just building up the energy to get going again.”

At age 77, he remains a vital force, his imprint on rock, funk, soul and certain gauzy corners of jazz as extensive as any artist of his time. Aside from being among the most frequently sampled songs, the P-Funk melange also spawned a mythology that established both the recognizable tenets of Afrofuturism and a philosophical ethos that boils down to a bold declaration of psychophysical liberation: “Free your mind, and your ass will follow.”

While P-Funk’s indisputable creative peak

WILLIAM THOREN

remains their string of roughly two dozen ’70s masterpieces, the recent material is lighting up a new, international generation of listeners. First Ya Gotta Shake the Gate has been streamed or downloaded 2.5 million times since its 2014 release. Medicaid Fraud Dogg drew about half a million streams and downloads in its first month of release.

Clinton maintains a relentless touring schedule: A week after our visit, he embarked for Europe, Scandinavia, Iceland and the British Isles. This year he and the band will barnstorm the States and take a trip to Japan.

More important, with trusted family handling both creative and administrative duties—playing and singing, running the office and keeping a steady stream of treats coming off the grill— P-Funk can keep funking after Clinton is gone, much like the Ellington and Basie organizations have kept those torches burning. If we— and they—are lucky, our kids’ grandkids will be shouting “Make my funk the P-Funk” while fourth- and fifth-generation Clintons navigate the Mothership.

Then again, King Lear had only three daughters, and that situation got pretty messy. Over 60 years, George Clinton emerged as keeper of the funk and one of the most recognizable frontmen in pop music. So what about succession? Who will fill Dr. Funkenstein’s shoes?

“They all know they’re doing it as a group, and the group has been set up to function as a group,” Clinton says over a feast of steaks, ribs and garden-fresh vegetables poolside. “They’ll find the focal point. They can figure out how they want to keep it going forward because the group is the group. Long as they don’t get it twisted and think it is them individually, don’t let those trivial things that usually get in the way of groups. … Some of those excuses be good as hell, but you ain’t really thinking about the big picture.”

Clinton passes the baton with a clear mandate: Maintain the funk, the whole funk and nothing but the funk.

“Ain’t nothing better than when that music is coming together on stage. There is comradery you developed, whether you know it or not. Despite the bullshit, that tightness you got

supersedes everything,” he says.

But what will George do when he leaves that life behind?

“Man, I’ma go fishing, like every day. And I’m gonna write another book. I’m thinking about calling it Stupid Shit I Did on Drugs. I’ll get all my friends to tell me about all the stupid stuff we did and collect it all in a book.”

He laughs again, that same up-from-the-rootsof-his-soul laugh we have been digging all afternoon. He might be serious. Maybe. You never know until that funk comes down.

Fantasy is reality in the world today I’ll keep hanging in there That’s the only way —“Fantasy is Reality,” Parliament, 1977

HOW A HANDFUL OF ART FAIRS, AND THE PEOPLE BEHIND THEM, CONVERGED TO CREATE A MASSIVE GLOBAL ART MOVEMENT

Miami mA

By NILA DO SIMON • Illustrations by JENNA ALEXANDER

This page: Louis Vuitton’s Objetes Nomades collection at Design Miami 2017.

AStERS

76

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

Above: The entrance to Wynwood Walls

response to Art Cologne. Even then, early shows set the tone for greatness, showcasing pieces by Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso. In the early 2000s, Art Basel officials felt the call to expand internationally. Art Basel Miami Beach launched in 2002 in a region considered the cultural intersection between the United States and Latin America. From there, the fair has spawned other celebrations around art and design,

ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH, GOLDMAN GLOBAL ARTS, JAMES HARRIS (THIS SPREAD AND PREVIOUS)

I

f Miami collectively knows one thing, it’s how to throw an extravagant affair.

Think block parties on Miami Beach, burlesque shows, Diplo performances at the hottest club in the city and so much more. But over the last 15 years, the Magic City has proved that it’s not all style and no substance with a multiday fete in early December, when high and pop culture comfortably collide in the celebration (and sale) of art.

It began in 2002 with the launch of Art Basel Miami Beach, a celebration of envelope-pushing art and design. The event created a lifestyle movement for an entire city, a focus on art like Florida had never seen. In recent years it trickled through Biscayne Bay to downtown Miami, helped launch the Miami Design District and brought attention to Wynwood before it was a center for alternative South Florida. Now, it’s something larger, a unified movement known as Miami Art Week.

To better understand the spectacle that is Miami Art Week, it’s necessary to know the history of the event that began it all: Art Basel. The fair was founded in the culturally rich Swiss town of Basel in 1970 by a trio of local art dealers in

notably major fairs such as Design Miami, Pulse and Art Miami. Each year, tens of thousands of collectors, gallerists, spectators, celebrities (Will Smith, Swizz Beatz, Alicia Keys, Owen Wilson and Rosario Dawson, to name-drop a few) and everyone in between descend upon Miami during this week.

As with everything Miami-related, elaborate parties naturally accompany these art shows, including invite-only private affairs honoring visionary artists, nightclub gatherings and late-night debauchery.

Miami resident and passionate art collector Gail Feldman has been attending the art fairs since their beginnings and remembers how a satellite show in its early years drove her to begin buying art. Since moving to the area more than 35 years ago from Philadelphia, she has seen firsthand how Miami developed into an art and design mecca.

“Over the years, the Miami environment has seen an exciting Above from left: evolution created by the demand Works on display for luxury housing,” she says. “The at the Gagosian galleries at Art Basel growth was exponential, causing 2017; fairgoers at the buyers to flock to the Miami area, Hammer galleries at Art Basel 2017; a and now, proudly Miami is a Norwegian curio at Design Miami 2017 global destination. As the market

continued to expand, art became the focus, and Art Week unquestionably ranks as the premier art show of the Americas.”

Here, we focus on what makes Miami Art Week so special, as well as the players who bring this spectacle to the Sunshine State.

Noah Horowitz art basel Director of the Americas

Art Basel Miami Beach Like Madonna, Bono and Pelé, Art Basel Miami Beach goes by only one word. “Basel,” as the locals call it, is the art fair that brought Miami’s art scene into global prominence, rejecting the notion that the Magic City was only for nightclubs and beaches. To art collectors, it’s the chance to meet gallerists and designers who bring rare works of art valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Sixteen years after it began, Art Basel Miami Beach sees over 80,000 attendees from around the world every year and representatives from more than 250 galleries. Exhibitors showcase paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs, films and other works throughout the four-day event.

The man behind the fair is Noah Horowitz, the director of the Americas for Art Basel since 2015. The former executive director of The Armory Show in New York, Horowitz

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

77

Above from left: Daniel Buren’s Les Guirlandes (The Garlands) crisscrosses the lawn with flags in the artist’s signature stripes outside

Miami’s Bass Museum of Art at Art Basel 2017; attendees gather at the entrance to the Pulse fair during Miami Art Week 2017.

Design Miami Despite its proximity to Art Basel Miami Beach, a short walk from the Miami Beach Convention Center, Design Miami has carved its own place in the Art Week sand with innovative talks, collaborations and curio environments, which showcase thought-provoking “cabinets of curiosity” that range from technological research to handcrafted works. Now entering its 14th year, Design Miami has become one of the most important fairs for established and emerging artists. Those up-and-comers are highlighted from the get-go at the entrance, with the fair commissioning early-career architects to design the environment. Such work includes an ovalshaped green space with 101 wooden logs from trees toppled by Hurricane Irma by international landscape architects West 8. Last year, more

78

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

Jen Roberts Design Miami Chief Executive Officer

than 38,000 visitors came to Design Miami to experience 34 galleries from nine countries, along with 11 curios.

Design Miami’s CEO Jen Roberts has been at the forefront of pushing the organization forward, both at the Miami Beach fair and at its sister show in Switzerland during the summer.

In office since September 2015, Roberts has been a part of three Design Miami fairs, and for her fourth event in December, she expects to continue educating and inspiring the Miami fairgoers with this year’s vast array of 20thcentury contemporary design, functional objects and rare pieces.

For the casual observer, she notes that Design Miami is an opportunity to gain exceptional insights into the design world, even from the most unexpected sources. This year’s design talks will feature speakers from a hot springs wellness center in Bucharest called Therme. Working with an architect, Therme will create a space to serve as a location for its talk about design and water.

“We’re here to inspire and surprise,” she says.

“I mean, who expects to see a thermal spa at a design show?”

Along with its design talks, Roberts says the fair is a place for the best of the best to flex their creative muscles. For example, last year’s show partner Fendi worked with Italian designer Chiara Andreatti to create an experiential branding moment. The leather goods company and Andreatti designed a reimagined living room space expressing the core philosophies of the Roman Maison. Roberts says the work will affect

ART BASEL IN MIAMI BEACH

VIP: Dec. 5–9 General: Dec. 6–9 Location: Miami Beach Convention Center, 1900 Washington Drive Ave.

ART MIAMI, AQUA ART MIAMI & CONTEXT ART MIAMI

VIP: Dec. 4-9 General: Dec. 6–9 Locations: Art Miami and Context: 1 Herald Plaza, NE 14th St. Aqua Art Miami: 1530 Collins Ave.

PULSE CONTEMPORARY ART FAIR VIP and General Dec. 6–9 Location: Indian Beach Park, 4601 Collins Ave.

DESIGN MIAMI/

VIP: Dec. 4–9 General: Dec. 5–9 Location: Adjacent to Miami Beach Convention Center, Meridian Ave. and 19th St.

ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH, CHARLES ROUSSEL /BFA .COM, FAENA HOTEL MIAMI BEACH, GROVE BAY HOSPITALIT Y, MACCHIALINA , 50 EGGS, INC , ROBIN HILL, GOLDMAN GLOBAL ARTS

came to Art Basel with a lot of clout, some of which came from his authoring Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market and earning a Ph.D. in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Though he’s based in New York, on any given day Horowitz can be found traveling through most of the Americas, from Mexico to Philadelphia to Los Angeles, connecting with gallerists and art influencers, in addition to completing his on-site work in Miami Beach. Even with Horowitz’s relentless globe trotting, there always seems to be a constant: an Art Basel Miami Beach program filled with what many say is among the strongest art on the planet.

Miami Vibes What to do and where to eat in three artsy neighborhoods MIAMI BEACH

DO THIS: Indulge at Faena’s Tierra Santa Healing House Enjoy an over-the-top spa treatment at the uber-luxurious, art-filled Faena Hotel.

3201 Collins Ave. faena.com/miami-beach

EAT HERE: Naiyara To-die-for Thai 1854 Bay Road naiyara.com

MIAMI DESIGN DISTRICT

DO THIS: Work out at Rise Nation Rise Nation is known for its VersaClimber, a vertical climbing machine that can burn over 600 calories in 30 minutes. Jennifer Aniston and even Miami’s own Dwayne Wade use this workout to stay fit.

3814 NE First Ave. rise-nation.com/miami

DO THIS: Lounge and Learn at Wynwood Yard At this entrepreneurial hub, culinary incubator and beer garden, listen to live music, shop from local artisan vendors and view anything from independent films to major motion pictures.

The Lots at 56, 64, 70, 82 NW 29th St. thewynwoodyard.com Wander Wynwood Walls Walk through the labyrinth of iconic and changing murals at the heart of the neighborhood.

2520 NW Second Ave. thewynwoodwalls.com

Stubborn Seed Gourmet goodness 101 Washington Ave. stubbornseed.com Pao Haute Asian 3201 Collins Ave. faena.com/miami-beach

EAT HERE: Beaker & Gray American fusion 2637 N. Miami Ave. beakerandgray.com Alter An icon in the making 223 NW 23rd St. altermiami.com

Above: Hammam inside Faena’s spa

Skate or Bowl at Basement Inside The Edition hotel lives Basement, an entertainment center featuring a “micro-club” beside an indoor ice skating rink and a bowling alley set to a killer soundtrack.

2901 Collins Ave. editionhotels.com/miami-beach Sip Cocktails at Broken Shaker An award-winning bar tucked behind a hostel, where skilled mixologists turn out handcrafted beverages amid tropical foliage 2727 Indian Creek Drive freehandhotels.com/miami/ broken-shaker

WYNWOOD

Above: Paradise Plaza in the Miami

Design District

Above: Beet mezzaluna at

Macchialina at the beach

Macchialina Casual Italian 820 Alton Road macchialina.com

Tour the Public Art Take a free guided tour, led by art expert Margery Gordon, of the area’s public art installations and buildings.

140 NE 39th St. miamidesigndistrict.net/ calendar/

KYU Asian fusion 251 NW 25th St. kyurestaurants.com R House Food, art and music 2727 NW Second Ave. rhousewynwood.com Wynwood Kitcen & Bar Classic low-high mix 2550 NW Second Ave. wynwoodkitchenandbar.com

EAT HERE: Ghee Indian Kitchen Hot table to get 3620 NE Second Ave. gheemiami.com St. Roch’s Market Food hall fabulous 140 NE 39th St., Suite 241 miami.strochmarket.com

Above: Yardbird’s eclectic brews

Above: Chef Ford of Stubborn Seed

and his JoJo Tea Cured Snapper

Yardbird Southern comfort 1600 Lenox Ave. runchickenrun.com/location/ miami

Estefan Kitchen Cuban hit parade 140 NE 39th St., Suite 133 estefankitchen.com Mandolin Aegean Bistro Greek chic 4312 NE 2nd Ave. mandolinmiami.com

Above: Wynwood Walls public murals

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

79

Pulse CONTEMPORARY ART FAIR Director

Pulse Contemporary Art Fair If the main fairs are the heart of Miami Art Week, then the satellite fairs are its soul. Slightly off the beaten path, satellite

fairs such as Pulse Contemporary Art Fair focus on emerging artists. As one of the leading satellite fairs, Pulse has set the stage for connecting new talents with a global audience since its founding in 2005.

A short drive north on Collins Avenue from the Miami Beach Convention Center, Pulse’s on-the-sand setting at Indian Beach Park is filled with swaying palm trees and undulating beach waves, giving way to a relaxed, vibrant environment in and around the massive fair tent, a stark contrast from the convention-like walls of the main fairs.

Pulse Director Katelijne De Backer took the helm last year after tenures at Art New York and Aqua Art Miami. She says harnessing the beach’s energy and calming vibe is one way to separate Pulse from the other fairs. “Pulse is distinctively able to provide art collectors with a truly unique environment— lush with the vegetation native to Miami Beach—to discover the next big artist while also developing lasting relationships with longstanding contemporary galleries,” she says.

From left to right: Underneath the veranda with hanging gardens at the Perez Art Museum Miami; palm court and the geodesic dome by Buckminster Fuller at

the heart of the Miami Design District; the Marian Goodman Gallery at Art Basel Miami Beach 2017

80

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

ROBIN HILL; R A HAUS; ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH

Katelijne De Backer

the brand’s bottom line in the future. “Even though Fendi doesn’t sell one handbag at Design Miami, the space allowed people to engage with the brand differently than they would inside a boutique. People could get a glimpse of what it’s like behind the doors of a Fendi customer, and that vision and feeling stays with them,” Roberts says.

“Design affects us every day,” she continues. “And the fair makes you think a different way. Once you develop your eye, you never look at things the same way. It’s a different way of being in the world. You start to treat things better, whether at the airport or in your car, because you start noticing the exceptional functional nuances and thought process behind each design.”

Nick Korniloff art Miami Founder

Art Miami, Context and Aqua Known as the locals’ art fair, Art Miami launched in 1989 when Art Basel Miami Beach wasn’t yet a brush stroke on blank canvas. Art Miami presents blue-chip works ranging from Pablo Picasso to Damien Hirst at its new downtown setting. What began as a fair mostly frequented by Miami residents has ballooned into one of the can’t-miss events of Art Week.

Art Miami gave way to two other spin-off fairs, Context Art Miami and Aqua Art Miami. The sister shows focus on new and emerging artists, allowing the burgeoning collector, not quite ready for blue-chip acquisitions, to take home fine art.

When Nick Korniloff started Art Miami 29 years ago, the city wasn’t the cultural vortex that it is today, and global investors weren’t a part of the mix as they are now. He took a chance debuting the show—a decision that paid off thanks in part to the emergence of Art Basel Miami Beach and the spectacle and money that it brings. But Korniloff

PEREZ ART MUSEUM MIAMI; MIAMI DE

Despite its status as a satellite fair, Pulse still delivers on high-end art and exclusive services, including live performances during a cocktail event for young collectors and a complimentary shuttle service to and from Art Basel. This year’s show looks to be no different, featuring its ever-popular Play series for new media that encourages discovery within the current digital realm. This year’s theme is “A Violence,” which encourages artists to submit work that can range from contextual concepts, including internalized, traumatic, political and societal violence.

Even though De Backer has been attending Miami Art Week from its inception, the excitement of it all isn’t lost on her. “As always, it will be a week jam-packed with meetings and a plethora of art to take in,” she says. “While I love exploring Miami and seeing the multitudes of hungry art collectors and extraordinary exhibitions, I also look forward to the quiet moments of celebration with my team and the galleries exhibiting at Pulse.”

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

81

From left to right: Elastika installation by Zaha Hadid inside the historic Moore building in the Miami Design District; Nuage by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec

isn’t resting. Since creating the trio of art fairs, last year he debuted Palm Beach Modern + Contemporary, an art fair taking place in January, a time considered a tranquil respite for art enthusiasts.

Miami Design District Originally a plot of land used as a pineapple farm, today the Miami Design District’s innovative works of public art are only rivaled by its array of high-end retail boutiques and restaurants. The area has had a roller-coaster of a lifespan, becoming a go-to center for design shops and showrooms in the 1970s and ’80s before being abandoned a few years later.

The atmosphere has changed in the neighborhood’s latest incarnation, a process decades in the making.

All of this is thanks in part to Craig Robins, the president, founder and CEO of Dacra, a real estate development firm. After helping to revitalize South Beach’s Art Deco neighborhood, Robins turned his attention to the Miami Design District, buying empty buildings and seeing its potential as an art-filled retail destination. He and Dacra helped bring in retailers such as Hermès, Louis Vuitton, Bulgari and Dior, in addition to lauded chefs Brad Kilgore and Michael Schwartz.

Craig Robins Dacra President, Founder, Chief Executive Officer

But the neighborhood isn’t all haute heavyweights. Along with several high-end galleries, the district is home to public art, including Daniel Toole’s Jade Alley and Marc Newson’s Dash Fence. It’s no surprise that Robins—an avid art collector who bought his first work of art, a Salvador Dali sketch, at 19 years old while living abroad in Barcelona—saw art as a way to engage locals and visitors.

“Miami Design District allows the public to interact with art on a daily basis through one-of-a-kind architecture by world-renowned designers, various public art pieces by celebrated artists and a plethora of public cultural programming,” says Robins, who is a founder of the Design Miami fair.

While the district is a year-round mainstay attraction for art lovers, during Miami Art Week, it comes alive with complimentary events and art installations. Last year the Miami Design District welcomed its largest-ever Art Basel crowd during the inauguration of its Paradise Plaza. With a building by architects Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, Paradise Plaza anchors the neighborhood’s northern side. It simultaneously showcased several new public art installations, including works by Urs Fischer and Sol LeWitt, a shading structure designed by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, and

ROBIN HILL; MIAMI DESIGN DISTRIC T

provides shelter and shade in the Miami Design District; Jade Alley by Daneil Toole in the Miami Design District

White Rain, a special holiday commission by Charlap Hyman & Herrero, which transformed the district’s palm trees with silver tinsel.

Robins says he expects this year to be no different, unveiling new site-specific sculptures, pop-up exhibitions, live performances, public art tours, a special holiday commission and architectural highlights.

“We want the Miami Design District to be a place where you can spend the day and be inspired,” he says.

Alexandra Cunningham Cameron The Miami Rail Editor in Chief

The Miami Rail If the South Florida art scene had a voice and a body, it would be The Miami Rail, an independent newspaper providing critical coverage of the region’s arts and politics. Published nearly every quarter, the paper’s unorthodox editorial coverage at times questions the very nature of art.

In a recent essay, The Miami Rail offered a long-form discussion of Iranian filmmaker and visual artist Shirin Neshat and her works challenging traditional gender roles in the Middle East. In a separate story, the paper boldly questioned lauded artist Dara Friedman on whether or not her art originated for audiences or the performers themselves.

Helmed by Editor in Chief Alexandra Cunningham

Cameron since 2017, The Miami Rail has become a resource for Miami’s art and culture, before and after Miami Art Week.

Cunningham Cameron spent 10 years with Design Miami, during which she served as its creative director. Today the curator and content producer sees her role with The Miami Rail during Art Week as a way to connect the paper through its editorial content and events.

“We play,” she says. “We’re a bit more event-driven that week than we normally are. For example, last year we hosted events at architect Terrence Riley’s home during Art Week that coincided with works of art presented.”

Still, she can’t ignore the impact that week has on the region and on art-seekers. “I love how there is an emphasis on finding ways to bring people together and share ideas,” she says. “That’s the extraordinary thing about the fairs. I’m fascinated by the idea that people are still interested in going to fairs. Sales happen, and people are focused on the market.

Despite so many digital and virtual platforms, people still need to see each other and have conversations.”

Parties and art—they both propogate personal connections.

And in the midst of what might seem like an utterly material world, the Miamians behind the city’s ultimate culture bash have created a masterwork of their own.

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

83

P RO M O T I O N

Museums, Culture & Entertainment

84

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

MARY BETH KOETH

B

eyond Florida's sandy shores, sunny skies and iconic palm-tree-lined boulevards, the Sunshine State is home to some of the nation’s most sophisticated cultural centers. In Flamingo's FALL FÊTE: A Guide to Florida’s Museums, Culture and Entertainment we turn the spotlight on a diverse selection of the state's must-see venues celebrating visual arts, performing arts, science, botanical gardens, architecture, history and more. With so many world-class organizations dedicated to education and creativity, the possibilities for cultural adventures from the Atlantic to the Gulf are endless. We hope we inspire you to take a trip, across town or across the state, to visit one of Florida's cultural gems.

P RO M O T I O N

David and Leila Centner & the Centner Academy present the Arsht Families

with supporting sponsor

A family benefit event for all ages supporting the Arsht Center’s Arts Education and Community Engagement programs.

Sunday, October 14, 2018

For additional information, please call 786-468-2020 or email Cmontano@arshtcenterfoundation.org

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

85

P RO M O T I O N

MUSEUM

AQUARIUM

PLANETARIUM

Explore more and buy tickets at frostscience.org.

Located in Museum Park, Downtown Miami.

1101 Biscayne Blvd, Miami, FL 33132 | 305-434-9600 | frostscience.org The Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science is supported by the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners of Miami-Dade County. This project is supported by the Building Better Communities Bond Program and the City of Miami. Sponsored in part by the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs, and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture. The museum is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums, is an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution and a member of the Association of Science and Technology Centers. Frost Science is an accessible facility. All contents ŠPhillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science. All rights reserved.

86

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

P RO M O T I O N

Gideon Mendel: Drowning world SEPTEMBER 1 – DECEMBER 9, 2018

From Brazil to Florida and beyond, Gideon Mendel: Drowning World explores the devastating personal impact of climate change within a global context.

MOCAJACKSONVILLE .UNF.EDU 333 NORTH LAURA STREET, JACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA 32202 PHONE 904-366-6911 © GIDEON MENDEL, Vilian Sousa da Silva, Taquari District, Rio Branco, Brazil, March 2015.

C-print, 47 1/4 x 47 1/4 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

EXPLORE the Gardens of the Globe

No Passport Required.

You’ll discover more than just stunning plants and landscapes on this 170-acre property. With lush, tropical cultivated gardens and native preserve inspired by plants and cultures from around the globe between the 26th latitude north and 26th latitude south, Naples Botanical Garden is a truly unique destination.

Nine Cultivated Gardens | Nature Preserve | Walking Trails Smith Children’s Garden | Splash Fountain & Butterfly House Chabraja Visitor Center | Berger Shop in the Garden | Fogg Café

4820 Bayshore Drive / 239.643.7275

NAPLESGARDEN.ORG

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

87

P RO M O T I O N

A major anthology of art made in Florida and inspired by Florida, demonstrated through more than 200 artworks from significant public and private collections nationwide.

In Mizner Park 501 Plaza Real, Boca Raton BOCAMUSEUM.ORG

88

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

Marion Post Wolcott, Winter Visitors from Nearby Trailer Park, Picnicking Beside Car on Beach, Near Sarasota, Florida [detail], 1941, Gelatin silver print.

Acquired 2018. Museum purchase with funding provided by the Isadore and Kelly Friedman Bequest.

P RO M O T I O N

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

89

P RO M O T I O N

See the World Through the Diversity of Florida’s Museums Visit a Florida Museum Today!

FLORIDA ASSOCIATION OF MUSEUMS

www.flamuseums.org

850.222.6028

• Art Museums • Science Centers • Zoos • Aquariums • Botanical Gardens • Planetariums • Children’s Museums • Historic • Arboretums • Lighthouses • Historic Houses Museums • Natural History Museums • Cultural History

CLUTCH YOUR PEARLS

& FILL YOUR GLASSES

ANNOUNCING THE CUMMER MUSEUM’S 2019 INSPIRED PALATES DINNER PARTY SERIES Inspire your palate and spark your creative energies, all to support exhibitions and related programming for the Jacksonville community.

Join the Museum in celebration of the stories behind the artwork featured in the museum’s annual exhibition calendar.

VISIT CUMMERMUSEUM.ORG FOR MORE DETAILS AND TO PURCHASE TICKETS

90

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

SAVE THE DATES FOR THE 2019 SERIES: ARTFUL UMAMI: A JAPANESE DINNER PARTY

A CAPTIVATING SOIRÉE BOHÈME: CAPER: A MYSTERY A FRENCH DINNER PARTY DINNER PARTY

THU•01•10

THU•04•11

6 to 9 p.m.

6 to 9 p.m.

THU•06•14 6 to 9 p.m.

ALL GUESTS WILL ENJOY: • Beer, wine, and hors d’oeuvres • Themed music • Artful experiences

• Full dinner • VIP guests will also enjoy a private art tour and signature cocktail

— sunny dispatches from NW FLA —

Panhandling B y P ri ssy E l ro d

portrait parade A family tradition haunting a younger generation

GARRET T ROBINSON

W

hat’s the deal with you people?” My husband was dragging another portrait across our Brazilian cherry floor. I was one of those people he was referring to.

“No boxes—and you can’t put them in the garage. It’s too hot.

Or the storage locker. They’ll get ruined,” I said.

“Then where? Please, tell me. where do you want the things?” he asked.

“Stop saying things, they’re people. I don’t know!”

And here I pretend to know everything.

Beads of sweat dripped from his forehead, onto the face of my sweet 5-year-old as she grinned from the portrait. I grabbed a paper towel Above: Prissy’s mother in The Drive To Sit. and wiped perspiration off the angelic lips of her curved smile.

He pulled another portrait off the wall, sure didn’t know what it meant. mumbling under his breath.

For sale − sold = chaos + exhaustion + stress.

“I heard that,” I said.

Somehow that formula never seeded inside We were moving. Which, by the way, is right my fairytale brain. I pictured myself sliding from up there with death and divorce. It’s their ugly one house to the next, just waking up and strollcousin, and that’s a damn fact. ing into the foreign kitchen with a morning yawn I mean, seriously, you knew the house would stretched across my face. Fresh flowers spilling sell, right, Prissy? OK, maybe I did. But I darn from the bright yellow vase would be my focal

point as the scent of fresh-brewed coffee welcomed me. Delusional— that’s the word you’re looking for.

I married a Midwesterner. He was a lifetime bachelor until I snagged him at 51. He was also a minimalist. I kid you not, the man could live inside a toothpaste box and be happy. He flat-out is not accustomed to Southern traditions or our idiosyncrasies. I’ve been told we have a few.

I read an interview with Matthew Norman, author of We’re All Damaged. In it, he wrote, “I tend to see the world through a humor lens. I use it as a defense mechanism.

That may be a personality flaw, but it makes me the writer I am.”

Humor is the very fuel that feeds my heart. It makes the unbearable more bearable. I happen to think it’s better for the complexion and aging process. All those stretched smiles may add a few extra lines. Big deal—it’s good for the heart. A fair trade, if you ask me.

I’ll be honest, though. Selling, packing and moving showed me no humor. I was ensconced in a nest of boxes—sorting, discarding and whining. The packers and movers were circling around me like squirrels on meth. Then right in the middle of crazy I was

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

91

Panhandling

slapped by ridiculous.

It was that very thing that my husband had complained so much about: p-o-r-t-r-a-i-t-s!

When I was very young, I remember my mother saying , “I have to go to Jacksonville to sit.” She would leave our house in Lake City and drive 100 miles. It would be almost bedtime when she came home.

I was left wondering why she had to go so far just to sit down. We had chairs. That portrait she spent months sitting for ended up on our living room wall. It hung for decades, along with some other portraits. Those being my sisters and me, painted

by Leon Loard, an artist from Montgomery. And seeing myself in a portrait at 11 years old proves I was once flat chested.

Later, as we grew older, my mother captured our changing faces—this time as teenagers. More portraits were hung.

The cream-colored walls of our French-styled living room and dining room were filled with old-world portraits of the females who lived on Montgomery Drive.

Clockwise from top left: Artist Leon Loard captures Prissy’s youngest daughter, Sarah Britton, at age 5; Prissy with both girls ages 2 and 5; Prissy sitting with no panties by unnamed artist; Prissy at age 16; Prissy’s oldest daughter, Garrett, at age 5; Prissy in Flat Chested Evidence

92

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

Time marched on, as it tends to do. I married and birthed two daughters. And, like my mother, I wanted those same Old World–style paintings of my own daughters. Mothers and daughters have a thing.

I located the same Montgomery artist who’d painted my sisters and me. I urged him to come to Tallahassee and paint my daughter Garrett’s portrait. In exchange for his travel, I agreed to contract four of my friends to have their children’s portraits painted as well. He agreed and offered to pay a commission for my efforts. It was the beginning of our 15-year business. I procured three oil paintings in my consulting arrangement with Leon Loard: both of my daughters at 5 years old (20 by 30 inches) and the three of us snuggled together (30 by 40). The paintings are all wrapped up in ornate, hand-gilded gold leaf frames. And that jewel makes the suckers even larger.

It was somewhere in the middle of my Old World interest that I discovered a watercolorist residing in Maine. I longed to introduce her lovely work to a Florida clientele—just as I had with my Montgomery partner. I contacted her and asked that she send me a small sample portrait.

“Just send me a picture, and I’ll paint you,” she offered.

Holy wow! I hung up, ran to the door and hollered outside toward the backyard.

“Girls, come inside—now.”

They were about 5 and 8 years old then, scurrying around in calico bonnets, toting tin pails and playing Little House on the Prairie.

I searched my closet for something to wear for my sample shot. I reached for a fancy dress I’d worn on New Year’s Eve a few months earlier. I slipped off my nightgown and pulled the dress over my head. Garrett and Sara came in, unbrushed hair falling from beneath the old fading bonnets.

Whining accompanied them.

“Garrett, can you zip mommy up, please?” I bent down so she could reach the back of my dress. They watched as I slid my feet inside black high heels. I wobbled to the formal living room.

I never even bothered to put on a bra or panties.

No one would know.

“Say cheese,” Garrett said. She pointed the camera from across the room as I sat erect on the pink chintz sofa. Her tiny finger clicked the shutter button on the Kodak camera.

I had the image developed the next day, then mailed it to the stranger I hoped to represent.

When the sample arrived—ugh—we had a huge problem. I mean that literally. It was gargantuan: 41 by 48 inches. I needed a dolly just to get it inside the double front doors. And I’d asked for a small sample. I didn’t expect a ballroom-size painting of me based on a photo taken by an 8-yearold dressed like Laura Ingalls.

Afterwards, the only client I ever tried to commission for the watercolorist in Maine was my mother. And hers came even bigger, a life-size 40-by-60. But, I

GARRET T ROBINSON

sunny dispatches from NW FLA

Experience and compassion you can trust.

believe in second, well, third chances. So I commissioned a painting of my daughters with their black tea cup poodle, Puddles. “Please, not real big, okay?” It arrived: 30-by-40. Lovely as her art was, the word small just was not in her vocabulary.

Sadly, my beloved mother died last year. But, as always, humor lurked in the shadows and found me. I inherited her portraits – the lifesize and the one she sat for in Jacksonville.

The portrait parade has now been passed down to the next generation. My daughter has portraits of her two daughters stair-stepping the wall. The oldest one was painted by her cousin, Katie Campbell, who also designed the cover of my two books. And the younger daughter’s portrait was painted by me. I know. Ridiculous.

One day my granddaughters may ask, “What the heck were you thinking, Mama?”

Or, they may follow the same Southern cycle of crazy.

That move is behind us.

We rented a house while we build the new home of our dreams. Wait, that must mean it’s not behind you, Prissy.

All the while, the plethora of portraits lie horizontally on racked shelves awaiting their final resting place. Well, not all of them. I

T&C Pet Photography

Board-certified veterinary surgeon at the beaches

W. Thomas McNicholas, Jr., DVM

Diplomate, American College of Veterinary Surgeons

lobbied my daughter to house the two portraits of my mother until we move again.

Neither one of my daughters, Garrett or Sarah Britton, will take the portraits of themselves. The very ones that started this whole mess, the ones I commissioned when they were children. As for the portraits of me, nobody wants them. Including me. Not the one of me as a little girl or the Kodak-clicked watercolor. Face it, nobody wants anybody.

That’s our tragic comedy. I see a television series somewhere.

Prissy Elrod is a professional speaker, artist and humorist and the author of Far Outside the Ordinary. She was born and raised in Lake City and now lives in Tallahassee with her husband, Dale. Chasing Ordinary, the sequel to Far Outside the Ordinary, will be released in 2018.

Orthopedics/ Arthroscopy

Oral/Maxillofacial Surgery

Soft tissue/Oncologic Laparoscopy

Arthrex Synergy UHDA™ 4K system

Neurosurgery

In-house helical CT scanner

Regenerative Medicine Arthrex Angel System™

(904) 853-6310 301 Jacksonville Dr. Jacksonville Beach

Doctors on-site for 24 hour patient monitoring

HOURS Monday - Friday 7:30 am – 6:00 pm

FCVE TS.COM FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

93

[ — fin e arts, favor ites, f lings —

ON THE FLY — FLEDGLINGS —

F l o r i d i a n C a s e y S h e a ’s We s t C o a s t p r o j e c t

— FLORIDA WILD —

C a r l t o n Wa r d J r. r e v e a l s w h e r e t h e r e d d r u m h i d e

— GROVE STAND —

C h e f J i m S h i r l e y ’s P a n h a n d l e p a r a d i s e

— BIRD’S-EYE VIEW —

The perfect day out in Seaside

— THE ROOST —

Real estate with space to create

— THE TIDE —

[

This page: Delicate embroidered linenes by Lettermade. Read the full story on page 21.

94

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

LET TERMADE

Can’t-miss events across the state this fall

THE SLICE P R O D UC TS + EVENTS + PROMOTIONS

CHOPPED Jacksonville’s Cowford Chophouse, sitauted in a restored 116-year-old historic building, presents its Eat & Greet series led by executive chef Ian Lynch, featuring decadent multi-course meals with wine and cocktail pairings. The glittering restaurant and rooftop bar toasts its oneyear anniversary in October. cowfordchophouse.com

POUR ME ANOTHER ONE

BIRGIT SINGH, WARREN HENRY AUTO GROUP, COWFORD CHOPHOUSE

The insulated cup and lifestyle brand SIC Cups came to life when two friends wanted to keep their beers “seriously ice cold.” Today the Florida-fide line of drink containers keeps beverages hot or chilled for up to 24 hours and comes in dozens of colors, sizes and styles, including travel-friendly bottles, tumblers and stemless wine glasses. Flamingo editors fell in love with the 30-ounce SIC tumbler, which converts into a cocktail shaker with the switch of a lid. siccups.com

EENY, MEENY, MINY, MOE The hardest thing about the new FlexWheels membership is deciding which luxury ride to drive. Feel like a Range Rover on Monday and a Maserati on Tuesday? No problem. The new automotive app developed by Warren Henry Auto Group offers easy access to a wide selection of elite cars as a monthly subscription, similar to renting. Of course, the service is only available in South Florida at this point, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use it on your next jaunt to Miami, Fort Lauderdale or Palm Beach. flexwheels.com

F O R T H E L AT E S T H A P P E N I N G S , P H O T O S & V I D E O S , F O L L O W @ T H E F L A M I N G O M A G

Be part of our winter Shop FLA Gift Guide promotion. Email ads@flaminogmag.com.

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

95

ON THE FLY:FLEDGLINGS FLO RIDA MUSICIANS ON THE R ISE B y R o b R u sh i n

Keepin’ It Classic Long on his own as a singer-songwriter, Ponte Vedra’s Casey Shea travels down a new road with Grand Canyon

C

asey Shea grew up near Jacksonville in Ponte Vedra Beach before striking out to New York and Nashville to pursue his musical dreams as a singer-songwriter and guitarist. After three solo albums, Shea finds himself a member of Los Angeles–based Grand Canyon, creating a lush classic rock brew that echoes Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, Fleetwood Mac and the Stones. Now Shea and Grand Canyon are hanging their hopes on a hit with their debut single, “Lucinda.”

CS: I was pretty sheltered growing up in Ponte Vedra. The older I get, the more I realize how lucky I was. In terms of artistic vision, I think the innocence and boredom of suburbia-by-the-beach probably kept my imagination healthy. I live in Los Angeles now, which is a nice mix of that laid-back lifestyle and big city life.

5

AFTER THREE SOLO ALBUMS, HOW’S LIFE IN A BAND?

CS: The idea of a band has always been more attractive to me [than being on my own]. I love the mystique, imagery and drama that come when a group is greater than the sum of its parts.

However, being in a band is like being married to four or five people at once.

Finding the right personalities that can survive one rehearsal, let alone an album cycle, is about impossible. When you’re solo, what you say goes. That’s great if you’re a one-in-a-billion genius, but I think compromise and outside opinions

96

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

TOP SONGS

by Casey Shea and Grand Canyon

1 2 3

STANDING IN THE SHADOWS” “ Single by Grand Canyon GOOD MAN” “ Love Is Here To Stay by C.S. IT IS WHAT IT IS” “ In Your Head by C.S.

4 5

ROLL YOUR WINDOWS DOWN” “ Love Is Here To Stay by C. S.

CAN’T GET ENOUGH” “ In Your Head by C.S.

This page: After

attending Florida State University, Shea left Florida to forge a career in music.

AMANDA ROWAN

HOW DOES THE SMALL TOWN OF PONTE VEDRA BEACH FIGURE INTO YOUR WORK?

Equal treatment should include your paycheck, too. Call Kelly.

Above: Grand Canyon’s West

Coast rock ’n’ roll sound draws from artists like Tom Petty and Fleetwood Mac

ChanfrauLaw.com 386.258.7313

can sometimes be just what an artist or band needs to reach new heights.

GRAND CANYON DESCRIBES ITS SOUND AS “THE ANTITHESIS OF MODERN POP MUSIC.”

CS: Well, for one thing, we play instruments! Also, when we play live, we don’t play to tracks [in the background], which is sadly the exception rather than the norm in today’s world. At the heart of it, we’re a classic West Coast rock ’n’ roll band trying to pay homage to The Byrds, Tom Petty and Fleetwood Mac and pick up where they left off.

Unfortunately, I can’t think of many modern acts trying to keep that dream alive.

ATTORNEYS | OFFICES IN DAYTONA BEACH & PALM COAST

DOWNTOWN HAMPTON INN & SUITES

Experience the Heart of Amelia Island

WHAT THREE MUSICIANS WOULD YOU INVITE TO DINNER? CS: John, Paul and George, because, the Beatles. If Ringo could be the server, that would be a plus.

WHERE ARE YOU IN FIVE YEARS?

CS: The toppermost of the poppermost! The initial goal is to tour and tour and tour, developing a loyal fan base so we can play and release music until we’re old and gray.

The real long game is to be successful enough musically to have a tequila company and a chain of West Coast classic rock–themed clubs and bars named after our song “ShangriLa La Land.” If anyone who’s reading can help make that a reality, hit me up.

For more info: caseysheamusic.com

BE FRONT AND CENTER IN THE HISTORIC DISTRICT • Take a peaceful sunrise stroll on the beach or a breathtaking sunset cruise on the river • Relax with a quaint buggy ride through the historic district • Walk to 50-plus restaurants, shops, galleries, attractions, and spa services • Enjoy specialty suites, spacious rooms, fireplaces and balconies • Take in spectacular views of the marina and river from our 2nd floor pool deck

Call to book your stay at (904) 491-4911 Historic Fernandina Beach | 19 South 2nd Street | ameliaislandharborfrontsuites.hamptoninn.com

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

97

ON THE FLY: FLORIDA WILD P H OTOGR APHS & F IELD NOTES B y C ar lton War d Jr.

98

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

Back to School

I

often use the phrase “hidden in plain sight” to describe wild Florida, especially the overlooked forests, swamps, ranches and wildlife corridors that make up our state’s interior. While our coastlines have much higher billing in Florida’s identity, our coastal nature can be hidden in plain sight too. Such is the case with the thousands of red drum that begin to spawn late each summer near the mouth of Tampa Bay, just a mile offshore.

I had the privilege of experiencing this phenomenon with biologists from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, who teamed up with NOTES commercial fishermen from Cortez using purse seine nets to catch, measure and — HABITAT— release more than a thousand large reds in GULF OF MEXICO a single day. The commission tagged some of the fish with transmitters, and several — SEASON — were caught wearing transmitters from the FALL previous summer. The tags help scientists discover where the red drum migrate.

I grew up in the Gulf Coast town of — TIME OF DAY— 1:00 P.M. Clearwater, where pursuing red drum with spinning and fly rods became an early passion. Casting lines was my way — SUBJECT— to connect with nature. I later traded RED DRUM RESEARCH CONDUCTED BY THE fishing rods for cameras as my passport FLORIDA FISH AND WILDLIFE to adventure, but I never lost my love CONSERVATION COMMISSION for the Gulf and the wildlife beneath its surface. This photo shoot awakened the young angler in me. The first day, I flew over the netting operation in a helicopter and witnessed the enormous schools of golden scales flashing near the surface, with sharks lurking below and birds flocking above.

A day after my helicopter flight above the spawning grounds, I went back, this time on a boat. I split my time between standing on the boat’s deck and kayaking while deploying a camera on a pole underwater. I captured this photo from the deck, looking over into the net as it was pulled toward the surface. I was drawn to the concentration of life, color and form, knowing that school extended with that same density for another 20 feet below. Each fish was measured, sampled and released. For some released fish, the schooling instinct was so strong that they gathered outside the net as if they were waiting for their friends.

27°41’43.991” N

82°51’22.476” W

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

99

ON THE FLY: GROVE STAND SEASON’S EATINGS

By Laur a Rei l ey • P h o t o g ra p h y b y C h a n d l er Wi l l i a m s

STIRRING THE POT

With a trove of eight restaurants, a cookbook and countless columns to his name, Chef Jim Shirley has built an empire by infusing good ol’ Southern fare with modern flare and a sustainable mindset

This page: Chef

Shirley grinds corn to make the masa used in his tamales.

100

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

W

hat do you do if you make a dish and it gets restaurant, Jubilee was known for its new Florida cuisine, famous—really famous? If, say, your “Grits à heavy on the chargrilled oysters and fresh Gulf seafood Ya Ya” is named by a statewide publication napped in luxurious beurre blanc. as one of the best Southern dishes in As is the case with so many chefs, Shirley was itinerant, Florida and is marched to Washington, D.C., to be served at refining his craft, signing on at different restaurants “Taste of the South,” a celebration of Southern culture held and taking on more responsibility at each one. In 1995, annually on Capitol Hill? he opened his first restaurant in Pensacola, Madison’s You can ask chef Jim Shirley. His answer, it seems, is keep Diner (named for his daughter), which was followed by making it, make it with some new spin and sass, and always Screaming Coyote in 1997 and the Fish House in 1998. keep moving forward.

Something else was Shirley, 55, is the owner going on in his life, too. of several restaurants in the Shirley became an activist Beaches of South Walton of sorts, promoting local and Destin areas, as well products and lamenting as the co-owner of Great the demise of Pensacola Southern Restaurants, the Bay’s formerly vaunted group that owns eateries seafood industry. including the Fish House, “Local snapper had Atlas Oyster House and the been overfished, and Fish House Deck Bar, all in seafood processing had Pensacola. moved east and west. A Shirley grew up mostly lot of the local seafood in Pensacola, but as the son got packed up and sent to of a Navy pilot, he also did Lettuce Entertain You in stints in Southern California Chicago, the oysters were and Reykjavik, Iceland. gone, and the paper mill “We ate all over the world, and Monsanto had done a whether we wanted to or number on the Bay.” not. In Southern California, Shirley got involved we made our own tortillas. with the Southern We ate strudels in Reykjavik.

Foodways Alliance, I started flipping burgers at started writing for the Tastee Freez when I was 14; Pensacola News Journal I was alone in the kitchen for and became interested $1.10 per hour.” in the tenets of Robert Shirley ended up running Davis’s new urbanism, Above: Chef Jim Shirley manning the smoker outside The Bay a Pensacola pizza place a community design restaurant in Santa Rosa Beach when he was 17. During movement then going full college at Mercer University, steam down state Route he worked at Beall’s 1860, a restaurant in Macon, Georgia 30A in Seaside and the Beaches of South Walton. (totally haunted, ask anyone), among others. He jumped In 2006, he moved from Pensacola to Seaside (you ship from a graduate program in neurology at the University know, the idyllic town depicted in The Truman Show) of California, Davis to work at A.J. Bumps, a biker bar that and began putting down roots, opening restaurants and drew Hells Angels and academics alike. Shirley returned to promulgating his ideas about modern Southern cuisine. his hometown in the early 1990s and doubled down, working Since then, he’s done dinners at the James Beard his way up to culinary director at Jubilee Oyster Bar & Grille House; written a successful cookbook, Good Grits! (he’d worked there immediately after college as a bartender Southern Boy Cooks; and contributed diligently to local and server, too). Long considered Pensacola Beach’s premier charities and celebrity chef events.

S H I R L E Y O N 3 0A THE GREAT SOUTHERN CAFÉ — LOCATION —

83 CENTRAL SQUARE SANTA ROSA BEACH thegreatsoutherncafe.com

45 CENTRAL WINE BAR — LOCATION —

45 CENTRAL SQUARE SANTA ROSA BEACH fortyfivecentral.com

THE MELTDOWN ON 30A — LOCATION —

2235 E. COUNTY HIGHWAY 30A SANTA ROSA BEACH meltdownon30a.com

THE BAY — LOCATION —

24215 HIGHWAY 331 SOUTH SANTA ROSA BEACH baysouthwalton.com

BAYTOWNE PROVISIONS — LOCATION —

109 CANNERY LANE MIRAMAR BEACH baytowneprovisions.com

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

101

ON THE FLY: GROVE STAND SEASON’S EATINGS

But through it all, he’s evolved as a chef, building dishes that already make sense and making them make more sense, keeping up with the zeitgeist as it shifts. He invented “Grits à Ya Ya,” for example (while listening to the Stones’ Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!, naturally), a dish consisting of smoked Gouda cheese grits; a saute of applewood-smoked bacon, portobello, spinach, cream, garlic and shallots; and sweet potato “hay” and spiced shrimp on top. He and partner Kelli Castille do sly spins on grilled cheese at their Meltdown, an Airstream-cum-food-truck turning out combinations like bacon and brie on cranberry walnut and bacon jam, avocado and aged cheddar on Texas toast.

At The Bay, one of Shirley’s South Walton restaurants, dishes have an international flair. “We make ‘Thai-Mollys’ with masa and curries from scratch, plus an Asian pesto with cilantro, basil, peanuts and sesame. Our crab cakes have a hint of fish sauce and Southeast Asian influences.”

Shirley’s about pushing forward. Where can new Southern cuisine take us? He’s toying with the idea of writing a second cookbook and looking at new opportunities, happy with improvements in sourcing and sustainability in the state.

So, what does someone with so many balls in the air do in his downtime?

“Cook. But I’m ready to go fishing.”

Crab Cakes S e rv e s 4

1 pound lump crabmeat 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce 1 teaspoon fish sauce 1 teaspoon freshly squeezed lemon juice 1 teaspoon soy sauce 1 egg 1 tablespoon mayonnaise 1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard 6 saltine crackers, crushed 2 tablespoons green onion, chopped 2 tablespoons basil, chopped 2 tablespoons mint, chopped 2 tablespoons cilantro, chopped Oil or clarified butter PREPARATION: Heat oven to 350 degrees.

Gently inspect crabmeat to ensure there are no shell pieces. Gently work herbs into crabmeat. Add Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, lemon juice, fish sauce, eggs, mayonnaise and Dijon mustard to a blender and pulse until combined. Transfer to a large mixing bowl and gently fold in crabmeat. Fold crushed crackers into crabmeat mixture a third at a time. Portion into 2 1/2-ounce cakes.

Heat a skillet over medium-high heat and add oil or clarified butter. Cook crab cakes until golden brown on each side. Transfer to oven and bake for 5 minutes. Remove crab cakes, plate and serve immediately.

SHIRLEY IN PENSACOLA THE FISH HOUSE & DECK BAR — LOCATION —

600 S. BARRACKS ST. PENSACOLA fishhousepensacola.com

— LOCATION —

600 S. BARRACKS ST. PENSACOLA atlasoysterhouse.com

102

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

COLLIS THOMPSON

THE ATLAS OYSTER HOUSE

Grits à Ya Ya S e rv e s 4

SMOKED GOUDA CHEESE GRITS 1 quart chicken stock 1 cup heavy cream 1 pound Dixie Lily grits 1/4 pound butter 1 pound smoked Gouda cheese, shredded

THE YA YA 8 strips applewood-smoked bacon, diced 1 tablespoon minced garlic 1 tablespoon minced shallots 3 tablespoons butter Splash of white wine 1 pound peeled and deveined jumbo shrimp 1 portobello mushroom cap, sliced 1/4 cup diced scallions 2 cups chopped fresh spinach Salt and freshly ground black pepper Hot sauce 2 cups heavy cream PREPARATION: First, make your grits.

Bring the chicken stock to a boil in a thick-bottomed saucepan over high heat.

Mix in the grits and stir like crazy. Reduce to a simmer and allow to cook for 40 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add cream if it needs more liquid. Then tumble in the butter, drizzle in the rest of the cream and stir until it’s all in the family. Shake in the

Above:

Chef Shirley’s popular “Grits à Ya Ya”

shredded cheese and stir very well until it’s nice and smooth.

While your grits cook, heat a large saucepan over medium. Add bacon and cook for about 3 minutes, and then add garlic and shallots. Saute and then add butter and a splash of white wine. When the butter is half melted, add the shrimp.

When the downsides of the shrimp become

white, flip them and add mushrooms, scallions and spinach. Saute for 2 minutes.

Remove the shrimp. Pour in heavy cream and bring to a simmer, stirring constantly.

When reduced by one-third, add salt, pepper and hot sauce to taste. Return shrimp to the sauce and stir to combine.

Spoon the sauce and shrimp onto heaping mounds of cheese grits.

Below: The Meltdown on 30A; chef Shirley’s grilled pimento cheese with bacon melt; daily specials at The Meltdown put an elevated spin on casual classics

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

103

ON THE FLY:BIRD’S-EYE VIEW

A WA L K I N G G U I D E TO O U R FAVO R I T E N E I G H B O R H O O DS

Finding your sea Legs Explore seaside with this perfect daytrip agenda

1: DUCKIES

Kiddies’ bathing suits, coverups, flip-flops and lollipop floats 45 Central Square

2: 45 CENTRAL WINE BAR

Happy hour hideaway pouring rare and vintage wines 45 Central Square

3: WILLOW + WOODS Beachy boutique with handmade jewelry and chic resort wear 45 Central Square

4: GREAT SOUTHERN CAFÉ Southern flavors and fresh

ingredients elevate the classic coastal fare at top chef Jim Shirley’s Panhandle eatery.

83 Central Square

5: SUNDOG BOOKS & CENTRAL SQUARE RECORDS

An indie bookstore and classic record shop join cultural forces in a shared space.

89 Central Square

6: THE ART OF SIMPLE

Eclectic gift shop carrying bourbon-scented candles and uncouth koozies 20 Seaside Ave.

7: MODICA MARKET

10: CABANA BY THE SEASIDE STYLE

The square’s grocery store makes beach living easy with their popular homemade recipes and gourmet to-go meals.

109 Center Ave.

An open-air market for the fashion-forward set looking for the perfect Seaside piece 2236 E. County Highway 30A

8: THE SEASIDE STYLE

11: SHRIMP SHACK

9: AIRSTREAM ROW

12: BUD AND ALLEY’S

Luxe tees, sweatshirts, hats and anything else that can have a Seaside name imprinted on it 121 Central Square

A collection of gourmet Airstreams serving grilled cheeses, hot dogs and BBQ 2235 E. County Highway 30A 4.

2.

Beachside bungalow slinging shack-style shrimp, oysters and Florida lobster rolls 2236 E. County Highway 30A

The locals’ favorite rooftop spot to sip a cocktail and watch a classic Gulf Coast sunset 2236 E. County Highway 30A

5.

3.

6.

1.

Cen tra l S qu ar e

7.

9.

8.

Scenic Highway 30A

104

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

10.

11.

ILLUSTR ATION: LESLIE CHALFONT

12.

TH E &

F L O R I D A K E Y S K E Y W E S T

S

omething special happens the moment you set sail for an adventure in The Florida Keys. The air shifts and your mood lifts when surrounded by the vibrant water, warm sunshine and blue skies. The Florida Keys’ spirit of freedom envelops you, no matter how many times you make the journey by road or by boat. Known not only for world-class sailing, snorkeling, diving, fishing and outdoor pursuits, but also for fine art galleries, museums and cultural festivals in constant rotation, The Florida Keys and Key West are beloved treasures of our state. Fall ushers in a special energy with the best of what The Keys has to offer on full display. In Flamingo’s FALL TRAVEL SPOTLIGHT 2018, we highlight some of our favorite places to stay, from highstyle five-star resorts to chic boutique hotels and laid-back luxury villas. All that’s left to do is raise the main and head south.

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

105

The journey has just begun.

As longtime home to a vibrant community of artists, performers, musicians and chefs, miles of calm, clear water and some of the most beautiful sunsets on earth, every day in The Florida Keys will renew your sense of adventure.

And there’s never been a better time to visit than right now, with our Keys ValuCation Savings Program*. fla-keys.com 1.800.fla.keys * Expires 10/21/18

106

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

MARRIOTT K E Y

an

d

TAVERN N TOWN

W E S T,

F L O R I D A

Stay In Style and Enjoy an Incredible Dining Experience

S

et on seven lush tropical acres and featuring its own private tanning beach, this spectacular Marriott property is in a class by itself. Beachside is the perfect marriage of contemporary elegance and personalized service, with stunning accommodations, exceptional on-site dining at Tavern N Town and breathtaking waterfront views. In fact, very few properties anywhere in the world offer more upscale amenities at such affordable rates.

Visit www.keywestmarriott.com or call 866-679-5490 for reservations.

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

107

ISLANDER RESORT REOPENING: Fall 2018 HIGHLIGHTS: The Islander Resort offers the perfect accommodations for spending a long weekend or a long winter. Our beautiful oceanfront property features a state-ofthe-art conference center, a pristine private beach with complete water sports offerings, a splash pad, two oceanfront swimming pools, a hot tub, shuffleboard, volleyball, a 200foot fishing pier and Tides Beachside Bar & Grill. Introducing our new culinary experience, Elements, featuring an elegant indoor bar and fine dining. All Islander accommodations offer complimentary wireless internet. We never charge resort fees!

LOCATION: Mile Marker 82, Islamorada (305) 664-2031 islanderfloridakeys. com

108

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

CASA MARINA, A WALDORF ASTORIA RESORT OPENED: New Year’s Eve 1920 HIGHLIGHTS: The Casa Marina is an iconic beachfront property located on Key West’s largest private beach, the perfect destination for water sports and recreation. Enjoy toesin-the-sand dining at Sun Sun Beach Bar & Grill, plus two dazzling pools, a rejuvenating spa, a fitness center and 11,000 square feet of meeting and event space.

LOCATION: Key West (305) 296-3535

casamarinaresort.com

THE REACH, A WALDORF ASTORIA RESORT OPENED: 1984 HIGHLIGHTS: The Reach, a Waldorf Astoria Resort, is situated on Key West’s only private natural white sand beach, just steps away from world-famous Duval Street. Enjoy spectacular amenities like an oceanfront pool, water sports rentals, a fitness center, oceanfront dining at Spencer’s by the Sea and meeting and event space.

LOCATION: Key West (305) 296-5000 reachresort.com

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

109

SUNSET GREEN OPENED: December 2017 HIGHLIGHTS: A new 12,105-square-foot shared multipurpose event lawn serves as the focal point for award-winning boutique lifestyle hotels 24° North and The Gates. The lawn, complete with food truck, provides entertainment for up to 800 seated guests or 1,200 standing guests and can be used to host weddings, yoga, concerts, movie nights or lawn games.

LOCATION: Key West (305) 928-1095

thekeyscollection.com

24° NORTH HOTEL OPENED: November 2015 HIGHLIGHTS: 24° North Hotel ties the historical roots of Cuba and Key West together.

With its authentic island ambience, Cuban theme and splashy pool deck scene, the 145-room boutique lifestyle hotel invites guests to explore what makes the Southernmost City incomparable.

Historically minded adventurers are greeted with vibrant Cuban culture, bits of history and hospitality.

LOCATION: Key West (305) 320-0940

24northhotel.com

110

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

THE GATES HOTEL OPENED: March 2015 HIGHLIGHTS: The soul of Key West is captured in our 100room lifestyle boutique property. Discover an authentic Key West experience that highlights the diversity of cultures that makes this southernmost island so unique. A main attraction is Rum Row, a chic pool, bar and lounge scene.

Be inspired by the selection of rums and experience a modern twist on the Cuban cigar.

LOCATION: Key West (305) 320-0930

gateshotelkeywest.com

FROM PRESTIGIOUS ESTATES TO ISLAND ST YLE VILLAS

Whether you’re staying for a week or longer, we have been helping folks make their dream vacation a reality in the Florida Keys for over 20 years.

Plan your island escape today, and contact Patti Stanley’s Island Villa Rental Properties.

ISLAMORADA, FLORIDA KEYS // (305) 664-3333 // RENTALS@ISLANDVILLA.COM // ISLANDVILLA.COM

KEY LARGO BAY MARRIOTT BEACH RESORT OPENED: 1994 HIGHLIGHTS: Discover the key to paradise with the resort’s endless possibilities. Book a massage, sip a tropical drink by the pool or dive into some water sport activities.

Seventeen waterfront acres, private balconies and three on-site restaurants with spectacular views invite you to taste the Florida Keys in style.

LOCATION: Key Largo (305) 453-0000 keylargomarriott.com

SHERATON SUITES KEY WEST OPENED: 1993 HIGHLIGHTS: Find your paradise at this all-suite hotel adjacent to Smather’s Beach and 1.5 miles from Key West International Airport.

Thrill-seekers enjoy a variety of water activities just steps from your room, while sun seekers relax by the large outdoor resort pool. Discover rich history, flavorful cuisine and unique shops exploring our quaint, colorful island.

LOCATION: Key West (305) 292-9800 sheratonsuiteskeywest.com

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

111

ON THE FLY:THE ROOST RE AL ESTATE DOLLARS & SENSE B y S ea n M cC a u g h a n

artfully appointed

From their frameworthy facades to every detail of their design, these charming chateaus are the perfect abodes for art aficionados

L

112

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

TIM KR AMER

SEASIDE

ocated on the Florida Panhandle in the pioneering new urbanist community of Seaside, this tower house is an easy walk from the Gulf of Mexico and the center of town. The dramatic, fourthstory tower porch also has views of the beach. Built by a developer as his personal home, it spares no expense on details, from the 14-foot Calcutta marble island to the glass elevator.

The 3,084-square-foot house has four bedrooms and 4 1/2 baths, including a spa-like master bath and a bunk room. There’s also plenty of wall space to hold your art collection. The sale price includes custom furnishings and window treatments.

392 Forest St., Santa Rosa Beach $3,250,000

ON THE FLY:THE ROOST RE AL ESTATE DOLLARS & SENSE

D

esigned by iconic Palm Beach architect John Volk, this historic estate in the Mediterranean Revival style is perfect for a wealthy art collector looking for a classic house in which to place his or her collection. It is located in the heart of Palm Beach, blocks away from The Breakers golf course and the beach.

The 9,414-square-foot home is divided between a four-bedroom main house and a two-bedroom guest house, clustered around a tropical courtyard and pool. Original architectural details include an elaborate front facade and pecky cypress ceilings.

255 Clark Ave., Palm Beach $12,950,000

PALM BEACH

A D I F F E R E N T K I N D O F R E A L E S TAT E T E A M

youngandvolen.com $300M+ IN CAREER SALES • $33M+ IN 2017 #1 SALES TEAM • PONTE VEDRA CLUB REALTY

GILES BR ADFORD

THE PENTHOUSE AT COSTA VERANO Offered at $2,250,000 1031 1ST ST. S APT. PH 02, JACKSONVILLE BEACH Experience contemporary oceanfront living in this 4,065-square-foot condominium with views from the Jax Beach Pier to downtown Jacksonville. This recently renovated condo features an owner’s suite, three guest bedrooms and an office. Ten-foot ceilings, modern wet bar and kitchen, and large living areas create a sophisticated environment. Building amenities include a gym, pool, sauna, theater, billiards and nightly guest rooms.

2 8 0 P O N T E V E D R A B LV D , P O N T E V E D R A B E A C H , F L 3 2 0 8 2 (904) 285.6927 • youngandvolen@gmail.com

Jayne Young

Gwinn Volen

(904) 333.1111

(9 0 4 ) 3 1 4 . 5 1 8 8

#13 OUT OF TOP 50 TEAMS JACKSONVILLE BUSINESS JOURNAL BOOK OF LISTS 2017

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

113

ON THE FLY:THE ROOST RE AL ESTATE DOLLARS & SENSE

A

n eclectic Victorian on one of Fernandina Beach’s most classic and historic streets, this old Floridian house was built in 1876. The house recently underwent a total renovation that preserved the historic charm—like elaborate gingerbread millwork, four fireplaces, and heart pine wood floors—while updating it for modern living.

Spread over 3,713 square feet, the main house has four bedrooms and three baths, with a detached guest suite perfect for company or for use as an artist’s studio. Or use the glass pool house, approached by a jasmine-draped pergola walkway with a gurgling fountain, as an even more incredible studio.

120 N. Sixth St., Fernandina Beach $1,425,000

Fernandina Beach

H

TAMPA 114

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

TONY SICA PHOTOGR APHY

ere’s a house built in 2013 that looks so authentically historic it could just as easily have been built in 1923. Perfect for the artistically minded, the 6,823-square-foot, fivebedroom, five-bath house in Tampa oozes Old Florida glamour. Plus, it comes with a spacious 1,100-squarefoot garage apartment that would make a perfect artist’s studio. Classic details abound, including pecky cypress, reclaimed beams, mahogany doors and an outdoor lanai with a wood-burning fireplace. Outside, a large pool sits on the leafy 0.6-acre lot.

2804 W. Parkland Blvd., Tampa $3,999,000

ON THE FLY:THE TIDE ROAD TR IP–WORTHY EVENTS (NORTH) DESTIN SEAFOOD FESTIVAL DESTIN

Oct. 5–7 This culinary fest, brimming with fresh-caught Florida fare from local purveyors, live entertainment and activities for kids, makes for a weekend. destinseafoodfestival.com

AUGUSTA SAVAGE: RENAISSANCE WOMAN JACKSONVILLE

Opens Oct. 12 Displaying nearly 50 works

by Savage, a sculptor active during the Harlem Renaissance, the exhibit is the first to take a comprehensive look at the life, work and impact of the influential Florida artist. cummermuseum.org

ART REPUBLIC

Above: Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit and Rising Appalachia will perform at the Sing Out Loud Festival.

Nov. 1–10

SING OUT LOUD FESTIVAL

Mural installations around Jacksonville’s urban area by local and international artists distinguish this public art showcase, along with an artist lecture series and fashion show. artrepublicglobal.com

sept. 1–23

JACKSONVILLE

FOO FOO FESTIVAL P E N S A C O LA

Nov. 1–12

This 12-day cultural event brings together exceptional, talented and creative artists from all over the Southeast. foofoofest.com

FLORIDA SEAFOOD FESTIVAL A PA LA C H I C O LA

SING OUT LOUD FESTIVAL

Nov. 2–3

Watch the blue crab races and parade from underneath the shady oaks of Battery Park, shop for art and, oh yeah, eat as many Apalachicola oysters as humanly possible. floridaseafoodfestival.com

ST. AUGUSTINE

At the Sing Out Loud Festival, one of the largest free concert series in North Florida, hundreds of national and local bands will take the stage in St. Augustine. Sway to the sounds of country, bluegrass, indie, pop, folk, rock and more at dozens of live music venues scattered across America’s oldest city, known for its Spanish colonial charm and spacious sandy beaches. Highlights include a show by indie duo Rising Appalachia and a performance on the final Saturday night by headliner Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit at the St. Augustine Amphitheatre, located on the edge of picturesque wildlife sanctuary Anastasia State Park. Last year, Isbell’s band won a Grammy award for best Americana album (shared with Isbell, who also took home the award for best American roots song). Their performance is the only ticketed event during the Sing Out Loud Festival, and for a minimum donation of $25, concertgoers score reserved seating or pit tickets. And it’s all for a good cause. Proceeds benefit domestic violence victims in St. Johns County. The Sing Out Loud Festival draws a crowd, so make sure you check the lineup and get there early. singoutloudfestival.com

FRANK BROWN SONGWRITERS’ FESTIVAL

AMELIA ISLAND WELLNESS FESTIVAL

ART & ANTIQUES SHOW

Nov. 8–18

Nov. 9–11

Shop from more than 40 international dealers. Enjoy lectures led by celebrity designers and a children’s fashion show benefitting Wolfson Children’s Hospital.

P E R D I D O K E Y & P E N S A C O LA

Named for the night watchman at the Flora-Bama bar on the Florida-Alabama state line, the 11-day event brings out some of America’s best songwriters. frankbrownsongwriters.com

A M E L I A I S LA N D

Renowned yoga guru Gurudev Shri Amritji leads a weekend of yoga, meditation, mindfulness sessions and gourmet culinary experiences at The Ritz-Carlton. ameliaislandwellnessfestival.com

JACKSONVILLE

Nov. 30–Dec. 2

womensboardwolfsonchildrens hospital.com

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

115

ON THE FLY:THE TIDE ROAD TR IP–WORTHY EVENTS (C E N T RA L ) SHINE MURAL FESTIVAL ST. PETERSBURG

Oct. 6–14

Witness artists painting vibrant murals that bring the streets of St. Petersburg alive. This art project aims to engage the local community through the power of creativity. stpeteartsalliance.org

FLORIDA BIRDING & NATURE FESTIVAL TA M PA

Oct. 11–14 An exploration of west Central Florida’s wildlife, this four-day fest includes field trips, boat excursions and keynote speakers such as Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jack Davis. floridabirdingandnature festival.org

SARASOTAMOD WEEKEND

AUTUMN ART FESTIVAL

Nov. 9–11

Oct. 13–14

W I N T E R PA R K

Whether you’re an artist, an architecture aficionado or a fan of the hit TV series Mad Men, you can appreciate that the fifth annual SarasotaMod Weekend celebrates midcentury modern design and the spirit of an era that lives on today. This year marks the centennial of Sarasota School of Architecture pioneer Paul Rudolph’s birth, and the Sarasota Architectural Foundation’s festival will celebrate the occasion with lectures, film screenings, an art exhibition, house tours and more. A design aesthetic, midcentury modern architecture produced homes with wide open spaces, large glass windows and flat planes. Popularized by a generation of modern architects who fled to the city during the rise of Nazi Germany, the style focuses on simplicity, integrated with natural elements and stunning style. On Florida’s west coast, the movement helped transform Sarasota into a cultural and artistic hub, establishing a lasting legacy in architecture and design. Highlights of the weekend include a catered dinner at the Umbrella House, one of Paul Rudolph’s most iconic masterpieces in Sarasota, as well as the opportunity to meet Paul Goldberger, an award-winning architectural critic. sarasotamod.com NEW SMYRNA BEACH JAZZ FESTIVAL

CITY: FASHION + ART + CULTURE

MOUNT DORA BICYCLE FESTIVAL

Sept. 20–23

Sept. 22

Oct. 4–7

NEW SMYRNA BEACH

The four-day musical celebration features concerts by local and regional performers, delicious food and the lively atmosphere of Flagler Avenue. nsbjazzfest.com

116

TA M PA

The Tampa Museum of Art hosts this fashion fundraiser highlighting the creations of designer Marc Bouwer, worn

by Beyoncé, Oprah and more. tampamuseum.org

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

MOUNT DORA

Starting with a “Think Pink” social ride for breast cancer, this four-day cycling event offers 16 routes and an reunion party with live music on Friday night. mountdorabicyclefestival.com

Now in its 45th year, this sidewalk show selects 180 Floridian artists to exhibit their paintings, pottery, jewelry and other crafts, offering fun for the whole family. winterpark.org/autumn-artfestival

ST. PETERSBURG FESTIVAL OF THE ARTS ST. PETERSBURG

Oct. 19–28

The lineup of performances throughout the week displays the spectrum of fine arts found in St. Pete, with acts ranging from jazz and dance to opera, improv theater and more. stpeteartsalliance.org/spffestival

JOHN’S PASS SEAFOOD AND MUSIC FESTIVAL MADEIRA BEACH

Oct. 25–28

At this seafood fest on the East Coast, tourists enjoy fresh Gulf

BRYAN SODERLIND

S A R A S O TA

fare, listen to live music and partake in reclaiming the world record for largest Bloody Mary toast. johnspassseafoodfest.com

JERSEY BOYS O R LA N D O

Oct. 30–Nov. 4

ARRIVE & DRIVE

FILL YOUR NEED FOR SPEED

The Tony award–winning musical about the story of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons comes to Walt Disney Theater this fall. See a show before they say “Bye, Bye, Baby.” drphillipscenter.org

CLEARWATER BEACH UNCORKED C L E A R WAT E R B E A C H

Nov. 3–4

The two-day foodie fest features tastings and cooking demonstrations, showcasing the Tampa Bay area’s best culinary fare, craft beer and wine. clearwaterbeachuncorked.com

RENNINGER’S ANTIQUE EXTRAVAGANZA MOUNT DORA

Nov. 16–18

For this three-day retail immersion, nearly 800 vendors convene from across the nation, selling anything imaginable: vintage clothing, books, homewares, antique furniture and other treasures. renningers.net

BARBERVILLE PIONEER SETTLEMENT’S FALL COUNTRY JAMBOREE BARBERVILLE

Nov. 3–4

Set in a 30-acre, oak-hammock park, this old-fashioned family event includes a sugarcane boil, blacksmithing and living history demonstrations. pioneersettlement.org

ARRIVE AND DRIVE local rotax club cart racing series

CORPORATE & PRIVATE EVENTS kart driving school mechanics and tuners onsite

ORANGE BLOSSOM REVUE LA K E WA L E S

Nov. 30–Dec. 1 Floridians flock to the center of the state to experience the tranquil town’s transformation into a jubilee of barbecue, beer, artisans and regional musicians. orangeblossomrevue.com

352-291-0600 OCALAGRANPRIX.COM FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

117

ON THE FLY:THE TIDE ROAD TR IP–WORTHY EVENTS (SOUTH) FORT LAUDERDALE INTERNATIONAL BOAT SHOW F O R T LA U D E R D A L E

Oct. 31–Nov. 4

Displaying more than 1,500 boats from 52 countries, this event in the “Yachting Capital of the World” gives the full nautical experience, complete with fine dining and a kids fishing clinic. flibs.com

SIESTA KEY CRYSTAL CLASSIC S I E S TA K E Y

Nov. 9–12

This festival takes sandcastle building to a whole new level. Watch in amazement as the beach of Siesta Key transforms into an outdoor gallery of the most intricate and elaborate sand sculptures. siestakeycrystalclassic.com

SURROUNDED ISLANDS

MIAMI BOOK FAIR

Opens Oct. 5

Nov. 11–18

MIAMI

Decades ago, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, a pair of married artists, draped 11 islands in Miami with 6.5 million square feet of floating hot pink fabric. Quite a sight to behold, the neon fabric harmonized with the aquamarine waters of Biscayne Bay and the lush green vegetation of the islands for two weeks, exuding a tropical design aesthetic that has stuck with the Magic City since the artists’ big reveal in 1983. Because their undertaking was of such massive proportion, especially for such a short duration, critics say Christo and Jeanne-Claude were the catalysts for Miami’s explosion onto the international art scene, paving the way for the birth of cultural institutions in the region, as well as high-profile events like Art Basel Miami Beach. Located on the downtown waterfront in a striking Herzog & de Meuron– designed structure, Pérez Art Museum Miami is commemorating the 35th anniversary of the installation with Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Surrounded Islands, Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami, Florida, 1980–83: A Documentary Exhibition. Christo and Jeanne-Claude created other large-scale visual works with fabric and other materials around the world fom Paris and Berlin to New York and Sonoma. pamm.org

Readers and writers fill the streets of Miami for an eight-day literary party, where more than 450 internationally renowned authors discuss and read their work. miamibookfair.com

KEY WEST FILM FESTIVAL KEY WEST

Nov. 14–18 This five-day celebration of the best storytelling in film draws filmmakers and fans alike to hear critics speak, attend film master classes and soak up the Key West sunshine. kwfilmfest.com

MIAMI FASHION FILM FESTIVAL

STONE CRAB FESTIVAL

SEED FOOD & WINE WEEK

STORIES OF THE PARADISE COAST

MIAMI

Sept. 20–22

Oct. 26–28

Nov. 7–11

Nov. 17–18

At the intersection of fashion and film, the fest presents movies by local and international filmmakers, highlighting the industry and offering panels and parties. miafff.org

For its ninth year on the waterfront, the iconic fest offers seafood eats, live music, craft vendors, games for kids, an ice cream–eating contest and, of course, plenty of stone crab. stonecrabfestival.com

118

N AP L E S

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

MIAMI

The weeklong culinary festival features tastings of plant-based food, a veggie burger battle, a cruelty-free fashion show, a 5k run, yoga practice and an afterparty finale. seedfoodandwine.com

N AP L E S

A diverse group of local storytellers, authors and artists convene at the Collier Museum to share their stories through performance readings, along with food vendors, craft artisans and art exhibits. colliermuseums.com

WOLFGANG VOLZ; FORT L AUDERDALE BOAT SHOW

MIAMI

THE MUSIC MAN S A R A S O TA

Nov. 17–Dec. 29 The Music Man was a Broadway sensation when it opened in 1957. More than 60 years later, it’s still a hit with one-of-a-kind music, choreography and costuming.

The show comes to the Asolo Repertory Theatre this fall. asolorep.org

ART IN THE PARK STUART

Nov. 24–25 This family-friendly event showcases up to 80 local and national artists in Stuart’s Memorial Park, supplemented this year by live music and a kids arts-and-crafts area. artandcraftfestival.com

SEE AMAZING

UP CLOSE!

Toll Free:

1-877-999-4228 Above: More than 1,500 boats are on display at the

Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show.

WWW.CRAIGCAT.COM Craig Catamaran Corp.

All Rights Reserved

FA L L 2 0 1 8 /// FLAMINGOMAG.COM

119

FLORIDIANA ALL THINGS VINTAGE B y E ri c B a rt o n

Inset: Thomas

Edison and Henry Ford (left to right)

The Estates of Invention

D

ependence on foreign resources seems like a modern-day problem. But in the 1920s, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford were obsessed with it.

Among their worries was rubber, produced only in foreign countries. In 1927, they decided to build a laboratory to determine whether rubber plants could grow in American soil. Searching for a semitropical setting, they chose Fort Myers, where both men had winter homes.

Edison tried to make rubber from plants such as the African sausage tree, eucalyptus and tropical snowball. Seventeen thousand samples later, Edison settled on goldenrod,

120

FLAMINGOMAG.COM /// FA L L 2 0 1 8

a plant naturally containing rubber, which his neighbor Henry needed for his cars. In 1936, five years after Edison died, the work moved to a government facility.

The laboratory, however, remained, with microscopes and beakers lined up as if waiting for another experiment. In 1947, Edison’s widow bequeathed the property to the city, which opened it to the public and later transferred it to a nonprofit.

For nearly a century, the fauna planted during Edison and Ford’s time flourished.

Last year, Hurricane Irma blasted the 20-acre property. The estates closed for 23 days for $187,000 in upgrades, including a new Smithsonian exhibit.

Chief Executive Officer Mike Flanders says he shows up to work every day with the same image in his mind. “You walk past the laboratory, and you imagine Edison and Ford tinkering away in there.”

During a 2010 restoration of the lab, the museum, out of prudence, disposed of hazardous chemicals left over from Edison’s experiments. But the laboratory remains in the age of innovation, with wooden rafters overhead and shelves and workbenches covered with bottles, Bunsen burners and who-knows-whats. Looking through windows clouded by time, it isn’t hard to envision Edison and Ford dreaming up ways to change the world.

FORD & EDISON WINTER ESTATES

In the age when inventors tried to fix everything, Edison and Ford wanted to save the world in Fort Myers

The Greatest Boat Show on the Seven Seas

OCTOBER 31ST - NOVEMBER 4TH SKIP THE LINES, TICKETS AVAILABLE AT FLIBS.COM

1,500+ BOATS ON DISPLAY VIP PACKAGES AVAILABLE NEW CULINARY EXPERIENCE 7 LOCATIONS CITYWIDE NEAR ALL SOUTH FLORIDA AIRPORTS (FLL, MIA, PBI & FBO)