Swelter 26

O.J. ruined my day, my week, and if his sorry story keeps being chewed over in the media, he'll possibly ruin my life. Overnight America entered a terminal phase of short-order lunacy, something less than human and past the redemption of the divine, illuminated from within by the evil eye of television, the cameras going up everyone's ass like a proctologist on an ill-advised exploratory mission. Nothing is impossible any more, but nothing matters either, and it's all shit, a big whimper fit for the cheesier strains of docudrama. At a certain stage of life, even the most bewitched, bothered, and bewildered student of society begins to sense that everything human is inherently crummy.

And yet it's important to keep going out, merely as an act of assertion against the void. Tuesday, the night of the verdict, imprisoned within a happiness embargo, and still lured downtown for the Butterfly Lightning reading series at Tobacco Road, taking a momentary respite from the squalid within the great well of literature. Back to Dodge City for dinner at the Sport Cafe, just missing a nasty little incident. In front of the restaurant, a policeman getting shot by some deranged gun-waving fool. As a news-bite appetizer, our waitress talking about the officer dying in a pool of blood before her eyes. Shortly thereafter a hush descended over the establishment, Big Brother going live at 11:00. The real story, thank God, slightly less sordid -- the officer simply wounded -- and we all settle back, snuggled in with O.J. Simpson reports and a comforting police cordon.

Thursday evening, a prime alignment of sitcoms, but the manifest destiny of ruinous development calls for a three-hour engagement at the Miami Beach City Commission public hearing on the Portofino land-swap deal, enough to drive anyone insane. A foregone conclusion, sort of like the Simpson trial, and Thomas Kramer's condo metropolis is more or less approved -- now Miami Beach is terminal,too. Given all the aspiring cop killers, generalized unwholesomeness, and apocalyptic visions, the possibilities of another Beach weekend paling to the beyond.

Friday night, the David Barton Gym opening at the Delano, without equipment but with plenty of mirrors -- the important thing -- and all the usual preening suspects mobilize for the lineup of photo opportunities. David Barton and wife Suzanne Bartsch greasing the wheels of hype, designer Donna Karan coming in the following day: No Babs, alas, but her personal yoga instructor did make it. The Delano agog with tales of Cindy Crawford taking the cure at the hotel's spa between shooting episodes of MTV's House of Style, and the ongoing cellular whirl of Def Jam's Russell Simmons, in town for the hip-hop Woodstock, improbably named How Can I Be Down?

Maybe it's ethnocentric insensitivity, but someone definitely dropped the ball on that convention title, although this summit of rap did offer rare visuals: At long last, real live black people in the district. The down nation awash in the calculus of pop culture, from seminars such as "How to Stay Paid" to a slew of slaphappy events over the weekend. The press of entertainments encompassed a Street Wear fashion show at the Raleigh with rappers/temporary models Doug E. Fresh and Yo-Yo and Simmons redux, also celebrating a birthday at the Forge. In the Raleigh audience, a universe of black culture: the groups De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Digable Planets, Naughty by Nature, and the Wu Tang Clan, along with director John Singleton and Motown's Andre Herrell. The names of O.J., and more specifically miracle worker Johnnie Cochran, cheered at the Salute to Excellence awards dinner at the Fontainebleau.

In the interest of How Can I Stay Amused? it seemed only fitting to take in something lighthearted on Friday night, like, say, a good old-fashioned postmodernist musical. Kiss of the Spider Woman at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, even by my gloomy barely-up-from-the-bog Irish standards, coming off as a tad depressing. Normally musicals aren't set in South American prisons rife with torture, degradation, and chorus boys, but Chita Rivera A as a game hybrid of Dolores Del Rio, Carmen Miranda, and Rita Hayworth A generates pure pizzazz, drawing on everything from West Side Story to the sinister chill of The Threepenny Opera. It's not Call Me Madam, but some of the lyrics have a personal resonance ("Everything grim is grand now/You have to learn to not be where you are"), and there are tasty doses of Sunset Boulevard and The Iceman Cometh. The necessity of illusion and its crippling debilitations, the small deaths at the heart of glamour, the subjugation and release within the worship of celebrity.