Sexy Fish in Miami is a new restaurant and night lounge that's gained instant popularity since it officially opened in February 2022. While many of the reviews are five stars, one TikToker posted a viral video that she didn't have the same experience.
Actually, she said she wasn't even allowed inside, and she let the Internet know in a post that received over one million views after publishing it one week ago.
"Sexy Fish in Miami won't let me in with a YSL [Yves Saint Laurent] purse & heels because I don't fit their 'image'... You would never get this service in NYC," she wrote online. "Stay away from this racist, pretentious tacky, restaurant."
STAY AWAY FROM SEXY FISH IN . BRICKELL, MIAMI. THEY ARE RACIST AF. NEVER EXPERIENCED THIS BEFORE. #fyp #10MillionAdoptions #FindYourEdge #racism #miami #blm #miami #305 #racist #discrimination #awareness
We reached out to Sexy Fish for comment, and here's what they told Narcity:
"We take guest complaints of this nature extremely seriously and have thoroughly investigated the situation for the entire party. We have a clear dress code, which is noted on our website, and we respectfully ask guests to follow it. Everyone following the dress code is welcome at Sexy Fish Miami."
The dress code online says you can't wear shorts after a certain time, visibly revealing clothing, beachwear, sportswear, party accessories, flip flops, sliders and hats.
The woman in the TikTok revealed her outfit in the video and showed that she was in heels, leather pants, a tied long-sleeve buttoned top with a black shirt under and, as mentioned, a YSL purse.
The creator goes on to make another post of people who she said were dressed like her and her friends and were putting photos on social media of themselves inside the establishment.
After publishing this content, she got a response from her followers, some of them saying they had a similar problem.
We reached out to TikTok user @sai_sippin for comment, and we will update this article upon response.
Welcome to It’s a Hit! In this series, IndieWire speaks to creators and showrunners behind a few of our favorite television programs about the moment they realized their show was breaking big.
While the standard-issue escapist costume drama grows a tad long in the tooth (see “Downton Abbey”), one recent romp in the lives of the entitled rich still feels fresh and smart. Credit for the continued success of “Bridgerton” Season 2 (Netflix) goes to Shondaland vet showrunner Chris Van Dusen, who shoved aside his anxiety about meeting expectations set by Season 1 and forged ahead with his diverse writers room to follow the second Julia Quinn marital romance, “The Viscount Who Loved Me,” focused on the eldest son, Lord Anthony Bridgerton (Jonathan Bailey).
“It was important going into the season that all the magic from Season 1, everything we fell in love with, was still there,” Van Dusen said on the phone. “But I wanted to bring it back in a new and exciting way, still immersed in that world of excess decadence and beauty and glamor, which is set up to bring in new characters and new romances, season after season.”
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The showrunner needn’t have worried. Twenty-eight days after the series’ March 25 debut, Netflix met with Shonda Rhimes and Van Dusen to go over the numbers. Word was that Season 2 had performed even better than Season 1. Sure enough: the show broke Season 1’s 28-day record with 627 million hours viewed, marking the most popular English-language series in Netflix history. Emmy nominations morning on July 12 will reveal if the drama series outperforms Season 1’s eleven nominations (including Best Drama Series) and one win (Character Hairstyle).
For his last stint as “Bridgerton” showrunner, Van Dusen tried to create Season 2 “in a bubble,” he said, “trying to tune out the amazing reception that the show got. But everywhere I looked, I saw something about the show: a meme, SNL parodies, an amazing musical on TikTok. We were embracing the pressure and expectations to make the best show we could.”
Jonathan Bailey in “Bridgerton.”
Netflix
Van Dusen and his mostly female writers, using the novel as a starting point, outlined and broke down each episode, putting the characters through their paces. “This is a diverse world on ‘Bridgerton,'” said Van Dusen, “with many voices and characters from all walks of life. The show looks like the world we are living in today. We wanted that for the writers room as well. They are all ages, backgrounds, levels of experience. Some people are diehard fans of the book, others are new to the books and the world. This all works to tell expansive stories from multiple points of view. Having myriad voices and opinions and perspectives is what makes a show great.”
The showrunner commands the writers room. “At the beginning, we start out together discussing the season’s goal posts, the huge moments we want to get to,” he said. “It’s about getting more granular every single day. We start with a birds-eye-view of the second season, and get down the smallest of details of each episode. We break the outline together, we write the script together. The scripts all go through my computer and out into the world of production.”
The characters drive the narrative. “I challenge myself and the writers,” said Van Dusen. “We put these characters in the most unimaginable and impossible situations and watch how they get out of them. That’s what I like to watch on screen: it’s compelling, riveting, and engrossing.”
“Bridgerton”
Liam Daniel / Netflix
To the colorful fantasy universe that Van Dusen created by adding to Quinn’s conventionally white British world the real-life biracial Queen Charlotte (Golda Rosheuvel), who enabled people of color to thrive as titled nobility with wealth and land holdings, come the sisters Edwina and Kate Sharma (Charithra Chandran and Simone Ashley), who enter society under the tutelage of Queen’s favorite Lady Danbury (Adjoah Andoh). Anthony sets his cap for pliant, eager-to-please younger sister Edwina, but soon feels pulled toward her headstrong older sibling, Kate, who enjoys beating him at croquet and rides her horse at full gallop. Both try to suppress their inconvenient attraction. Kate wants her sister to make an advantageous match, and Anthony doesn’t want emotions to get in the way at all.
Critics who admired Season 1 were also transported by Season 2, although they noted the absence of breakout sex object Regé-Jean Page, who signed for just one go-round. Van Dusen cast for chemistry and made sure that Bailey and Ashley brought back the heat. At first “Sex Education” breakout Ashley wasn’t available, but pandemic delays worked in the schedule’s favor. “We needed an actress who could portray the fierce, take-no-prisoners side of Kate Sharma,” said Van Dusen. “We needed her to be vulnerable as well. That’s Simone: you root for her, want her to put Tony Bridgerton in his place, and want her to fall in love.”
“Bridgerton” Season 2
Netflix
This time, Van Dusen prolonged the sexual tension between the enemies-turned-lovers as long possible, almost straining credulity. But when Anthony and Kate finally succumb to their lusty desires, the steamy sex is worth the wait. “It’s a different story and different characters, but our approach to intimacy and the sex scenes was the same for Season 2,” said Van Dusen. “We don’t do a sex scene for the sake of it, and never will. It has to have a larger purpose and tell a story, whether it’s about Daphne and her awakening, or in Season 2, delayed gratification. That can be just as sexy as anything else: the stolen glances, the fingers grazing against each other, the powerful looks. Their chemistry is electric and palpable. Like the eight delicious romance novels, we wanted the experience of the show to be like reading a romance novel: things are sexy and dangerous and fun. We take the audience on a wild ride at times.”
In creating this alternate Regency setting, Van Dusen relied on Costume Designer Sophie Canale to build on the stellar work of last season’s veteran Ellen Mirojnick. Canale brought an even more vivid palette, thanks to the introduction of the colorful Sharma sisters from India. Defiantly period inaccurate, “Bridgerton” continues to be a feast for the eyes.
Golda Rosheuvel as Queen Charlotte in “Bridgerton.”
LIAM DANIEL/NETFLIX
The creation of Queen Charlotte, who adds dimension, diversity, and vivid color to a rigidly stratified society, is Van Dusen’s pride and joy. He’s thrilled that Shondaland is spinning off a series for the Queen (he will not be involved). “We introduced her in the pilot, she’s not part of the book,” he said. “I knew going into this project I wanted a fresh spin on the books and the genre itself. I wanted the show to be the period piece I wanted to see, and it wasn’t going to look or feel like any other. In cracking this series the key was making a beautiful multi-cultural ethnic-hued world. The Queen provided an approach to race on the show. We built the world from there, including all the women who hold the power, especially Queen Charlotte, Lady Whistledown, and Lady Danbury.”
But the downside of any court dominated by strict social mores is the danger of being at the whim of a powerful royal, and the ultimate must-to-avoid, being frozen out of society. This happens when the Bridgertons and Sharmas are buried in scandal. In one great scene, Lady Danbury and Lady Bridgerton (Ruth Gemmel) cannot figure out how to extricate their families from being ostracized; all their best-laid plans are tumbling down. “It’s a human moment, my favorite of the season,” said Van Dusen. “Here they are in an impossible situation with nothing they can do about it. It’s about human folly.”
“Bridgerton”
Netflix
In Season 2, the rapier pen of Penelope Featherstone, aka gossipmonger Lady Whistledown (Nicola Coughlan), continues to wreak havoc on the court, as Penelope’s inquisitive best pal Eloise Bridgerton (Claudia Jessie) moves closer to unveiling her identity, and Penelope makes tough choices about what to reveal to the world at large. That brings the two friends to a terrible reckoning. “The fight between Penelope and Eloise is brutal and devastating, as I wanted it to be,” said Van Dusen. “The confrontation between them was a long time coming. Penelope is stripped of everything, she has lost her best friend, her crush, and her alter ego. I’m fascinated to figure out what’s next, as she picks up her pen again in the final moments.”
Next up: Whatever that turns out to be, Van Dusen won’t have anything to do with it. As he looks in the rear view on “Bridgerton,” he moves on to consulting executive producer status, available to help when needed, as a new showrunner takes over on Season 3, which is moving on to “Bridgerton” Book Four, “The Amazing Mr. Bridgerton.” This time they are skipping forward to the Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton) and Penelope Featherstone romance. “I did a lot of work setting these characters up and creating the worlds,” said Van Dusen. “I’m excited to see what happens. It blows my mind that I was able to create this franchise.”
Now that he is free to pursue other projects, the writer is adapting Adam Silvera’s young adult novel “They Both Die At the End,” which is in development with E-One, about two teenage boys who find out that they both have one day left to live. “It’s such an amazing queer romance,” he said. “There are a few other things I am not allowed to talk about.”
Her name is Roxy, but the village girls call her Toxic. With peroxide-blond hair and the Lolita-like naiveté of a vintage sexploitation-movie heroine, Roxy wanders through a post-apocalyptic world as unfamiliar to us as it is to her — for we have all stepped into the parallel dimension that is underground filmmaker Bertrand Mandico’s erotic imagination. Welcome to the dirty paradise of “After Blue.”
Humans have poisoned Earth and fled to a new planet, which they’ve dubbed After Blue (a slightly awkward use of English in this otherwise-French-language production, no doubt intended to sound chic to Gallic audiences). Screens and machines have since been banished, making way for a kind of old-world mysticism of sparkling dust, psychedelic lights and occult symbols — like a third eye, superimposed over the pubic triangle of the most enlightened. Operating in the mode of Polish porno-surrealist Walerian Borowczyk, Mandico creates sensual mood trips using only practical effects (this one could be the “Barbarella”-style sci-fi film-within-a-film being produced in Mandico’s 2018 meta-textual short “Ultra Pulpe”).
Though its weak bounty-hunter plot makes almost no sense, “After Blue” satisfies that thirsty spot in our psyche too few films succeed in tickling, where dreams are born, hormones churn and logic simply doesn’t apply. The actors are stiff and the dialogue silly, but it’s intuitive enough. Mandico sets the stage via a chorus of overlapping narrators, their disembodied heads (and naked hirsute shoulders) floating in space: The atmosphere on After Blue is toxic to men, whose hair grew inward and killed them off. Only women remain, adapting to this new matriarchal world of self-heating sex robots and artificial insemination.
The few survivors form small clans, doing their best to maintain some kind of social order, wherein lawbreakers are hunted down and killed before such evil can spread and ruin another planet. Roxy (Paula Luna) is too inexperienced to understand such things, alas, though the same goes for audiences, who drift along on a series of woozy set-pieces, trying to make sense of the movie’s out-there visuals. Picture a mashup of Raquel Welch wet dream “One Million Years B.C.” and kitsch space opera “Flash Gordon,” executed by an art school prodigy on an acid trip. It’s not something one watches sober, but rather projected on the wall of an avant-garde gay bar.
Early on, Roxy encounters an outlaw who calls herself Kate Bush (Agata Buzek) buried up to her neck in sand. Not knowing better, she frees this stranger, and the two women share an intense, homoerotic moment on the beach. Kate Bush then escapes, but not before zapping Roxy’s friends with her rifle — all the weapons on After Blue have designer names, though that detail is better discovered in context — which creates problems for Roxy and her overprotective mother Zora (Elina Löwensohn) back home.
Roxy and Zora are banished together, ordered to hunt down Kate Bush. But the longer Roxy spends exploring the world beyond her tribe’s claustrophobic cave, the harder it will be for her to return to the sheltered existence she knew before. This archetypal quest doesn’t amount to much, but it’s more than enough for Mandico to work his magic. His imagery can be mesmerizing, from absinthe-hued dinner parties where the host spits “cosmic urine” to the smoldering landscapes from which giant seedpods and jagged crystals erupt.
“After Blue” is only the director’s second feature, following 2017’s “The Wild Boys” (a queer twist on “the Lord of the Flies” full of borderline-pedophilic imagery). Story is not his strong point, but the experience of more than a dozen shorts made over nearly two decades has given Mandico the chance to hone his style, arriving at a playful form of pastiche. Track down his half-hour “Our Lady of Hormones,” if you can. It’s the project that best demonstrates Mandico’s unique mix of absurdist humor and psychosexual tension: a campy ménage-à-trois comedy in which two lesbians adopt a curiously endowed alien organism that looks like something David Cronenberg or David Lynch might have ordered, and which both want all to themselves.
Though “After Blue” has spent nearly a year on the festival circuit, the film made its world premiere at Locarno a month before “Dune,” and in a way, Mandico’s transgressive fantasia provides the ultimate art-house counterprogramming option: Instead of testosterone-driven star wars over sandworm-infested spice fields, we find Toxic femininity trying to find her place on a planet full of screaming caterpillars and madness-inducing mountain powder. Those parallels can hardly be accidental, though Mandico’s allusions to other artists and influences are so myriad, it doesn’t feel as if he’s attacking “Dune” directly. In a way, he’s queering the entire canon of masculine-made sci-fi, offering a more sensual, Sapphic alternative. For those brainwashed into thinking the genre can only be one thing, the experience just might open your third eye to other ideas.
Lithium is one of many components of the salty brine, or produced water, that accompanies natural gas and oil production. It is also a key component of battery production for electric vehicles (EVs), power grid storage, and numerous other manifestations of the energy transition.
Recovering commercial volumes of lithium from the oil and gas byproduct would bolster the United States’ domestic supply of the valuable mineral, but it won’t be easy.
“Lithium is the target du jour,” Nick Pingitore, geochemistry professor at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), told NGI. “Sexy, so to speak, because of the critical need for batteries. So decision makers focus on it.”
In February, the US Geological Survey (USGS) included lithium on its list of mineral commodities that it deems “critical” to national and economic security and susceptible to supply chain disruptions.
According to USGS, the United States’ domestic lithium production encompasses a single “brine operation in Nevada.” Moreover, the agency said the country last year relied on imports for more than one-quarter of lithium consumption.
There is no shortage of lithium worldwide, but there is a shortage of the metal in the global marketplace and “its price has fluctuated significantly in recent years,” the University of Houston (UH) reported last month.
From early 2020 to early 2022, the price of lithium from major supplier China surged from $6,000/ton to $40,000/ton, UH noted. In mid-May, the university said lithium on the spot markets was trading at $70,000/ton.
UH said the lithium shortage stems from several factors: supply chain bottlenecks, growing business demand and the reluctance by governments to approve new lithium mines.
B3 Insight’s Kylie Wright, technical product and content manager with the Colorado-based water data firm, told NGI that lithium “can be found in some produced water or oilfield brines at relatively high concentrations…”
More frequently, however, lithium is found “in fairly low concentrations,” she said. As a result, recovering lithium “from brines that contain numerous other constituents” tends to be a “complicated” task.
UTEP’s Pingitore said that a small number of ventures are extracting lithium from subsurface brine deposits, a process also being studied in Canada, but not from produced water.
“I don’t think that anyone is making significant money at it,” he said. “It’s early stages in this.”
Other significant minerals present in produced water include strontium, europium, and cerium, but lithium represents the best candidate for recovery in commercial volumes, sources at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (UL) told NGI.
“Mining lithium requires a highly selective recovery technology, extracting just the lithium from produced water,” said UL’s Daniel Gang, director of the Center for Environmental Engineering and Protection. “The technology is still in the benchtop-laboratory or pilot scale.”
Like conventional mining, entropy figures prominently in the early part of the supply and value chain for extracting lithium from produced water, said Pingitore.
“The target is dilute,” he said, referencing the need to separate low concentrations of lithium from high concentrations of “competing elements” by processing “absolutely huge amounts of produced water” to recover lithium at commercial volumes..
The recovered lithium then needs to reach a 90-95% purity level, he added.
With applications such as lithium batteries, he said purity needs to top 99% and have an “extremely low content” of certain “poisoning” elements.
“This is a tough game,” he said.
Tough But Potentially Handsome
Oil and gas producers that overcome the high set of obstacles to economic lithium production could benefit handsomely, Joseph Triepke, partner with Dallas-based Lium Research, told NGI.
“Today, the world only has a fraction of the lithium production capacity online that it needs to hit some of the widely accepted EV forecasts through 2030,” he said. “The total opportunity around lithium is in the tens of billions of dollars over the next 5-10 years, and so it could be a very significant alternative revenue stream for shale players that are in possession of mineral-rich produced water streams.”
Not all well sites would be good locations for economically extracting lithium from produced water, according to observers of the nascent sub-sector of the oil and gas industry.
“This depends on the basin, since produced water mineral presence and concentrations can vary widely play-by-play, and even within the basins themselves, depending on the geology,” said Triepke.
When asked how the constituents of crude oil, running the gamut from sweet to sour and heavy to light, and natural gas, ranging from various degrees of wet to dry, influence suitability for lithium extraction, Pingitore answered with “good question.
“Crude itself contains various metals – vanadium is well-known, some nickel, and so forth,” he said. “How much, if any, of that gets transferred to the produced waters is probably an open question.”
Adding to the complexity of finding the right candidates for lithium extraction from produced waters, feasibility hinges on a high concentration of the target element – lithium – and a low concentration of competing “elements you don’t need,” said Pingitore.
Moreover, he said that overall water chemistry needs to avoid fouling or damaging the extraction system and the target element should not be “chemically complexed in a form that will hinder separation.”
Although technologies do exist to extract lithium from produced water, many are in early development at the case study and pilot project stages, said B3 Insight’s Commercial Product Manager Patrick Patton.
Market Considerations
Triepke noted the drivers and end markets are “completely different” for lithium extraction and oil and gas production.
The “lithium pricing equilibrium is defined by demand for battery materials,” used in EVs as well as grid-scale storage facilities, as well as lithium mining capacity, he said. “Oil and gas fundamentals are more tied to transportation and power generation.”
Gang and a pair of colleagues at UL, Associate Professor of Petroleum Engineering Mehdi Moktari and Office of Innovation Management Director Alan Cohen, offered NGI a glimpse of how the business of produced water lithium extraction could look within the oil and gas industry.
Gang, Moktari, and Cohen said the produced water miner would likely be an oil and gas company or a joint venture of players such as an oil and gas company, a resource recovery company, and/or a service company.
On the demand side, lithium customers could include electric vehicle battery companies and others, they said.
Patton told NGI that higher brine disposal fees, along with “very limited” availability of produced water injection sites, would improve the commercial viability of recovering lithium.
Extraction would need to be implemented at a large scale, “commingling many oil and gas producers’ waste product to a centralized facility where treatment takes place to concentrate a brine with high enough concentrations of elements to make extraction economically feasible,” he said.
Commodity prices are currently high for lithium and other metals needed by the tech industry, and that may foster new development, said Wright.
“But the high prices would have to be stable to encourage development of these projects,” she added. “This definitely would have to take place at scale, so centralized water treatment facilities will be a key part of the opportunity.”
B3 Insight’s CEO Kelly Bennett underscored the link between large scale and commercial viability.
“This is key,” he said. “People often forget that capital recovery can take years, which means that the market will have to trust that the investments will pencil, and that is predicated on price expectations.”
Buick is probably best known as your parents' favorite car brand, but in recent years the GM manufacturer has winnowed its offering to muscular SUVs and burnished its image as a premier combustion-focused automaker.
Now that's all about to change. Buick has unveiled a new brand identity, a big plan to shift its entire lineup to electric by the end of this decade, and a physical illustration of a much livelier design direction in its Wildcat EV concept car.
While the Wildcat sedan (yes, a sedan from an SUV company) will never see the light of day as a consumer product, it's still something to behold.
Buick Wildcat EV Concept interior(Image credit: Buick)
Buick didn't share any performance details regarding the Wildcat EV concept, but the two-door sedan is packed with plenty of high-end, forward-thinking details, like an Artificial Intelligence system that can auto-adjust in-car features. Buick executives also described something called "Zen Mode," which automatically adjusts cabin temperature, audio, and lighting.
The exterior, which features a wrap-around windshield, is all forward-leaning lines (yes, the intention is to make the car look like it wants to "pounce"). The LED lighting system will greet you with an animation when you arrive. The car is balanced on a set of 18-spoke wheels.
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Buick Wildcat EV Concept wheels(Image credit: Buick)
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Buick Wildcat EV Concept interior, second screen(Image credit: Buick)
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Buick Wildcat EV Concept floating headrest(Image credit: Buick)
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Then there are a pair of rather large semi-swing doors that give you access to what appears to be a spacious interior with cockpit-like seats and floating headrests. While Buick didn't describe the dash in any detail, the main screen traverses much of the dash and appears full of compelling graphics (there's a second screen just above the gearshift). Buick promised that the interior is filled with "premium materials," but again, didn't describe if they're leather, fabric, or synthetic materials.
New direction, big plans
Along with the Wildcat EV concept, which points to potential future design directions for the brand, Buick has redesigned its badge, removing the circle, and remaking the tri-shield. That more modern logo is fixed to the front of the Wildcat EV concept.
Buick also plans to fold all future Buick EVs under its "Electra (opens in new tab)" brand, which is a smart and cheeky bit of branding since that name connects to Buick models going all the way back to the 1950s.
Buick's shift to an all-electric lineup by 2030 is not surprising. Its parent company, GM, committed last year to introducing 30 new EVs globally by 2026. This year, GM showed off its 2024 Silverado EV, which features a 400-mile range.
As for when we'll see a Buick Electra EV we can actually buy, we'll have to wait until next year. Hours before Buick's Wildcat EV was unveiled, the brand introduced its Electra-X Crossover EV in China (opens in new tab). It should get a similar reveal in the US later this year and, according to Buick, could ship as soon as 2023.
Analysis: Stop teasing us
US auto manufacturers are now promising a veritable legion of electric vehicles but, as of this year, we're still choosing from just under 30 models (opens in new tab). Teasing us with exciting looks and concepts without any details about range and performance, or even whispers of availability, feels a little like a bait and switch.
Buick's decision to show off a sedan EV concept when it's only selling SUVs is doubly confusing, until you realize that the carmaker sells all sorts of cars in China. Plus, the switch from large combustion engines to one or two small but powerful electric motors (and a large flat battery array that usually sits along the base of the chassis) does offer up a whole host of new design options. Think SUV space in a sedan-sized chassis.
This is exciting, but most of us are tired of waiting for our EV future to arrive. With gas prices skyrocketing around the globe, we need more models (and at more affordable prices) right now.
So, yes, show us your gorgeous new concepts – but sell us your practical EVs today.
