Photo credit: World Red Eye. The first floor gallery at the headquarters of the National YoungArts Foundation in Miami suggested an archeological site Thursday. There were mounds of seemingly freshly unearthed artifacts, ghostly white chalk replicas of objects that, not that long ago, were the symbols of modernity: Walkmans, Polaroid cameras, BlackBerrys, boom boxes, the bodies of Fender Stratocaster guitars and video cameras. This was the future then. Now visitors use pieces of that past-turned-chalk to write on the black walls about the next future. It's now there, in words and drawings, some already blurred, some already covered by other writing. On the second floor, replicas of a couple of pay phones, a rack of basketballs, a flag and an electric guitar are shown like archeological pieces — broken, pieces ripped and torn. The overall effect is made stronger by the fact that these are all ordinary yet iconic objects, cultural markers of yesterday’s invincible future. “This is not just any Polaroid camera; it's the one that we all remember,” said visual artist Daniel Arsham, picking up a chalk replica while playing guide to a group of visitors to the “site.”  “All the objects were selected with that in mind. And upstairs there are other works; those are made of geological materials like volcanic ash, crystal and elements which really convey the sense of time.” “The Future Was Written,” an exhibit by YoungArts alum Arsham curated by Franklin Sirmans, the incoming director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, opened Thursday at YoungArts. Arsham and Sirmans were also part of the first installment this season of the Young Arts Salon Series, sponsored by Knight Foundation. The two events were part of the second annual YoungArts Awareness Day, a national effort to encourage emerging artists to pursue careers in the arts. 

Photo by Sara McCranie/The Center for Writing and Literature at Miami Dade College It was only fitting that a reading by author Salman Rushdie of his latest book, “Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights,” a novel whose central character is a genie named Lightning Princess, was preceded by a sudden South Florida tropical storm that included pouring rain, thunder and, of course, lightning. The book in hand, why stop magic realism at the page’s edge? “Actually, the special effects of the evening are completely appropriate,” deadpanned Rushdie in his opening remarks at the Miami Dade College, Wolfson Campus in downtown Miami. “As you see, there's a thunderbolt on the cover and there’s a great deal of lightning in this novel.” The Sept. 18 event opened this year’s “Countdown to Miami Book Fair with Pre-Fair Author Events,” presented by Miami Book Fair  and Books & Books. The fair, now in its 32nd year, is part of The Center for Writing and Literature at Miami Dade College, an initiative that promotes the advancement and appreciation of literature throughout the year. Knight Foundation supports several initiatives at the book fair, including The Swamp, a pop-up lounge exploring life in Florida through words, music and more. Witty, erudite and seemingly totally at ease before a standing-room-only audience, Rushdie not only discussed and read from “Two Years …” but took time, during the question-and-answer period, to zig and zag, like in the novel, between fiction, such as the life of jinns (genies) and life in Fairyland (“in the end, quite boring”) and the realities of the human-inhabited world, including the order to Muslims by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran in 1989 to kill Rushdie over his book “The Satanic Verses,” and life on the television talk show circuit. Rushdie, who put the question “What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?” at the heart of  his 1990 novel “Haroun and the Sea of Stories”—it was asked again by a member of the audience—opened his remarks by addressing that very point. “Good to be back. This time is fiction. Last time I was here it was non-fiction. This is better,” he said.  “I arrived in New York 16 years ago with all these fairytales in my luggage so I thought maybe it’s time to unpack, throw this at Manhattan and see what happens. So, genies attack Manhattan. That's the short of it. That’s the — how do you call it? — high concept,” he deadpanned, before turning serious.