Admittedly, the perks are great in this job but it can work on your nerves, and everyone seems to being trapped in an interactive mystery thriller. Nothing is quite what it seems. No one knows what’s going on, who to trust, or where their enemies are. And everyone lies, friend…

Night and day, a psyche at war with itself: In darkness the inner sanctum becomes a vast lollipop of lowbrow magical realism; by day all the short-order fairy tales yield to the cold crunch of truth. And so it’s another night on Earth, twelve straight hours on the job –…

September song, and the angst of August — if the heat doesn’t get you, the stupidity will — dwindles down to a foul psychic sinkhole, infested with boredom, futility, and the remains of wasted flesh. Yet again the same old dirge of hopelessness is everywhere at once: Miami’s really over…

The signs were all there, a red alert of bad karma and a quiet death instinct warned against a spontaneous trip to California. All the essential discount glamour hookups had fallen apart, and given some petty pecuniary circumstances, the travel budget barely covered cigarettes, booze, and Diet Coke. In the…

The glamour drought of August, a kind of purgatory for normal social columnists. Though to our way of thinking, admittedly not an advisable sensibility, Miami once again has festered into civic perfection, chaos theory in motion, ripe for tales of the wasteland. In this dodgy discipline, either you use the…

What with the truly feminine pathology of Hurricane Erin A she might fuck you up, and then again, she might not A the week turned out to be slightly less satisfying than we would have liked, remarkably similar to a nonorgasmic sex thrash with a mean witch you couldn’t stand…

Sometimes you just get lucky, and lately life’s just been coming up roses: Expecting nothing, and for once getting back everything in return. Curiously enough the recent glamour drought ended overnight with the National Urban League Conference, which turned out to be a virtual firestorm of bliss. And so we…

There’s a certain pathology to this pop life, this culture of the damned, a sick compulsion shrouding the worship of the superficial. Once you’re trapped in the lower orders of the glamour mafia, it’s impossible to escape the pernicious pall of the cartoon void and the trivial — all the…

Maybe it’s in the air, all this churning of spiritual anorexia, these studies in dumbed-down concerns, but then, they’re always good for a snarky remark or two. Miami entering a new plateau in its continuing evolution as a low-wattage version of Los Angeles — not a pleasant prospect — an…

America the ugly, darkness visible, an eternal pinball journey through the seven circles of a tabloid Hades. The final exorcism may be at hand, but in the meantime, gossip’s a growth industry and Miami remains in the vanguard of the filth follies. Reality unplugged, a bumpy ride on a breaking…

And so we all go, to and fro, talking of Michelangelo and the Delano, the media locusts drifting momentarily from the Hugh Grant mess to little old Miami, always good for a junket and a breaking trend story. The phoenix of fashion mutating into a new incarnation of tenuous postcoital…

Home sweet home, immersed in a dangerous fallow period, nurturing our pet obsessions — sex, fame, making a living — and taking a breather from the tabernacle of degradation, these loathsome adventures in the societal trenches, this ring of fire and fury signifying nothing. It’s all one big celebrity circle…

And so there we lurk on an unfathomably hot Saturday evening, at play with the Brothers Gibb on N. Bay Road for “The Gypsy Party,” another installment of the Miami social waltz, a dance on the precipice between heaven and hell. The Rangoon-like air clutching the throat like an evil…

Lately the surreal dementia of the world has come to resemble thoroughly ill-conceived porno, past all common sense, dramatic plausibility, and redeeming social values. Something on the order of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude rethought as a comeback vehicle for filth farmer-talk show hostess Jenny Jones. Throw…

In a world without distinctions, nothing, save for television, seems real any more, and given the prevailing moral weather, nothing is impossible. Grade-Z celeb Kato Kaelin becomes obscenely rich as well as absurdly famous with an enormous book advance. Former all-American sweetheart Nancy Kerrigan steals another’s woman’s husband, proving to…

There’s a sad expanse of oiled flesh by the Fontainebleau Hilton pool, sizzling like bacon in the sun, and the Peck’s Bad Boy of England, author Martin Amis, is rolling another cigarette by a high camp mural of rearing horses, eerily composed for a man in the eye of a…

Home in bed with the vapors, overcome by existential futility and retreating from the social fray — who are these people? why are these people? A society assuming the qualities of a 3-D interactive round-the-clock tabloid, hardwired to the cornea. And then the whims of destiny dictating two consecutive nights…

And so there we are at The Forge, the palace of excess, working the great game show of American life. Another week in the popularity sweepstakes, another a-star-is-stillborn story, another feast on the gravy train. The clean-living Tommy Pooch celebrating a birthday amid the nomadic beasts of pleasure, dodging an…

Dateline Palm Beach, a flight from local society, working the shortcuts of the American dream. The endless journalistic scramble, the hustles, the protocol phone calls paying off with a stray Saturday night at Mar-A-Lago, returning to command headquarters of Donald Trump, the All-American survivor. Donald and Marla Maples celebrating yet…

Maybe it’s just us, but lately parties seem like one vast theater of the ridiculous, riddled with bad taste, dysfunction, and assorted societal diseases. Accordingly, taking the path of high culture and hauling a shattered carcass down to the Gusman Center for the Performing Arts, eager to bask in the…

Nightlife, over time, renders everyone walking obsessive-compulsive voids, feckless and hopeless, lab rats in a B.F. Skinner universe of degradation. One long wasting in appetite, rats and humanoids doomed to press eager little noses against a pleasure bar, searching for sensation, sustenance, cocaine, and endorphin rushes, accepting rude shocks and…

Another dream of the night, another chaotic cesspool of delights, diversions, and close encounters of the unfortunate kind, the past, present, and future jelling into a tortured narrative, a monologue of narcissism and hurt, the cheap melodramas of darkness. You take a beating out here every day, but the pros…