Nightlife, a dicey proposition of plugs, hugs, and drugs, hubris and horrors, fair-weather friends and unsavory courtesies. A trade with certain charms, this chasing of trifles, chimeras, and cheesiness: Stick around long enough and the great pageant unravels in a pleasantly deranged manner, a kind of sustaining brain candy. Been…

The real-life follies, clinging to the sanctity of good clean fun, faith tested time and again. Till death, or worse yet, unemployment, entrapped within the bell jar of gossip, the cutting wire that dices, dissects, and taints every circumstance. But then, the razor’s edge of columning cuts both ways, the…

Vacation time, a brief reprieve from these deranged metropolitan diaries A in truth, we don’t even know what the hell they’re all about A inspiring a curious strain of holiday anomie, the workaday world suddenly robbed of meaning, authenticity, and dramatic interest. Without the small deaths of deadlines, the daily…

Another week, another frolic with mirthmakers of every imaginable breed. A Noah’s ark of dark pleasures, touched by a higher force. On the rounds Saturday night, trudging up and down Washington Avenue, a penitent dragging the cross of gossip through Sodom, witness to the eternal passion play of nightlife. The…

It’s a great life, these postcards filed from the apocalypse, these rhapsodies to a permanent — albeit spectacularly unsuccessful — vacation in Hell. One of our bleaker colleagues encouraging an addiction to darkness, noting that the next angst report may well serve as a handy obituary, rich fodder suitable for…

Unfortunately, a free and vigorous press requires a touch of scandalmongering on the side, something of an unseemly decline from the noble ideals of Thomas Jefferson, a rich, famous, and powerful statesman (think Dallas set on a plantation) whose randy appetite for interracial dating might have made him the perfect…

God help us, but we love this filthy business, despite the inevitable toll of the dungheap: metamorphosing into an unhealthy alien existing on earthly junk food, nothing but a blob of numb ectoplasm with an engorged brainpan, continually force-fed a diet of the unwholesome. Home at last for a quiet…

A city under siege, immersed in the commercial pageantry of Super Bowl, the ultimate arena of power, money, and sex. High-roller time, the juiceless groveling and the connected — from the swinish Rush Limbaugh to Stevie Wonder — tooling down the hookup highway, taking a turboglide run into the heart…

Life’s a banquet, most poor suckers are starving, and the world’s out of whack, past proportion and reason. And now, dear God, even money — pretty much the only thing we care about lately — coming under fire. Socialites rioting in Mexico, all in a tizzy over the failing luxury…

A world spinning out of control, the merry-go-round of moral decay lurching along heedlessly, civilization collapsing in a compost heap beyond the reckoning of Nostradamus. Qubilah Shabazz, one of Malcolm X’s lovely daughters, charged with plotting to kill Louis Farrakhan, proving once again that people of taste prefer their revenge…

A cruel business, this gossip game. With every attention paid to the rich and celebrated, every moment of slack-jawed stupefaction before their banal utterances, their pointless travels and grotesque indulgences, we are, one and all, diminished, crippled by the very act of being a witness, reduced to nothingness. The puerile…

Actually there were just a few of us in town for the holidays, going from party to party. Sylvester Stallone. Madonna. Emilio Estefan. Ingrid Casares, always in the right places. Daisy Fuentes and her floating house of discord. Gianni Versace, traveling with sister Donatella, her husband, Paul Beck, and the…

At a certain level of spiritual coarseness, the nobler aspirations of humanity are stripped of meaning, made ridiculous, and life becomes mere agitation, a wonderment over trifles: the deceits of glamour, the frenzy of renown, the opiate of dissipation. As with the pursuit of religious epiphanies, devotees must suspend disbelief…

Some people say life’s the thing, but of late we’ve been seeking solace in air-conditioning and reading, taking comfort in the vast historical continuum of the social graces A from the obscenely rich matrons of the gilded age to the calculated pseudonihilism of the Warhol crowd A attempting to place…

Miami, the ultimate 21st-century city, a portable prison of twisted culture in the vanguard of the bizarre. The demon seed offspring of the American family, an incorrigible distant relation who lowers the tone and drives everyone nuts, dangerous but undeniably interesting. A city careening along with the invincible logic of…

It’s a great life, especially on paper, this play of light and darkness, ferreting out scraps of nourishing filth for a curious sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde existence. Evenings in the bowels of America, restrained at the vast banquet of nightlife like reined-in livestock, held back by domestic circumstance and a pernicious…

The summer of discontent, tainted and debased as a leper, taking an immersion course in alien surroundings with an idyll in Atlanta: polite, humanistic, charged up with neo-Babbittry and all-American positivism, a brave new city with Coca-Cola as the munificent Big Brother. A boomtown landscape gathering strength for the Olympics…

The dead zone of summer, fraying tempers and unfortunate behaviors, and yet the interior landscape somehow turns cheery, the system adapting to an inhospitable environment like a beast fighting for survival. To be both hot and depressed, after all, is to risk extinction. And so it’s a policy of disengagement,…

The great advantage of these half-baked atrocities of guerrilla journalism sewn in the shadows of life is the enriching horror of being forced to regularly confront the real world: the lust and greed, the rage and madness that spring from thwarted longings, the fumblings toward charity and redemption. The darker-urges…

A song of August, the dirge of sweat, exhaustion, and derangement, ready to embrace the new cachet of heroin addiction and serial murder. The months, years, and epochs spent in the trenches of trash blending into one vast well of spite and noise, a wail of longing, desire, and general…

An impossible vacation taken in the killing fields of ambition, all anticlimax and dashed desires, overhyped and incapable of escaping the specter of work and the insidious barbarism of Miami. The Hamptons, New York with trees, first stop on the folly-of-mankind tour, the Gods of the connected life delivering an…