In our long and not especially illustrious career of social reporting, the rich and famous have always proved to be something of an enigma. Once removed from the trappings of privilege, they are often unimpressive and even patently ridiculous, resolutely banal in their thinking. Their grand palaces are all quiet…
When fun is your business, clubs can become just another night on the job, a life’s work that tends to vaporize all the honest pleasures of the experience. Stay in the game too long and eventually it’s all a free-floating office with a great benefits package. Overexposed personalities sick to…
Frank “Rat Bastard” Falestra came out to watch our basketball team (formerly known as “New Times” but dubbed “Foghat” this season) play the other night. After the game my wife spotted the Ratboy, and I told her he was our new coach. Rat: “If I was your coach, I would’ve…
We’re getting real close. Thanks to everyone for not leaving me alone. I need your cards and letters and phone calls and internal memos. I respect Johnny Punk Rock Potash much more than I’d ever (or ever will) respect Kurt Cobain (he’s dead), not just for living on but for…
To the ancients life was short and brutish, but the simplistic scheme of existence must have been a great consolation: functional clothing beyond the tyranny of fashion, a jolly fire, the occasional slab of meat and cup of mead. Sex, before the Victorian era, was generally straightforward and properly primal,…
This week I’d like to explain the meaning of life. Someday I’ll explain the meaning of this column. No, wait. I already did that. Life is about being young, being old, being rock and roll. It is, Sartre might say, the absence of death, but then again, he’s dead. And…
The last party, the cartoon universe of Planet Hollywood, the ultimate 21st-century city — weaned on cheap glitz and operating beyond the pull of the past — leaping into the next evolution of social history in one long glorious wallow. An unfortunate prelude coming with a series of degrading phone…
Out where people actually work for a living, the saying goes like this: Let’s done get the job did. Or, past tense: We done got the job did. The rest of us just get lucky sometimes, get by. I’m about ten hours from deadline and I have no idea what…
The late and very great Henry James, in between cranking out epicene masterpieces, prided himself on a rigorous public life, dining out every night with assorted royals, intellectuals, and fellow tortured homosexuals. Bloomsbury was one long feast of high teas, musicales, and petty snits. Marcel Proust sat for eternity in…
Remember that old Silos lyric that went “people will talk about/What’s important to them”? Thanks for all your calls and letters. Don’t stop now. The great Art Grace (Thoroughbred writer, edge-music connoisseur, legend) wrote to recommend Lucy’s Fur Coat, for both the music and the cover photo on Jaundice. “The…
A filthy little business, the pop parade, crawling with fame-fuckers-I-have-known and other permutations of conceptual humanity. But then, somebody has to provide all the unseemly personal services mankind requires, and even in pimping, there are enduring guidelines for professional conduct. A carefully nurtured grudge can be good theater and also…
I’ll take your words even if you won’t tell me your name: “This is a crass and insensitive article I just read in New Times about Kurt Cobain. There’s no place for writing something like that. You don’t like the guy’s music, that’s fine. You’ve got to glorify that a…
At a certain professional level in social reporting, going out is almost beside the point. The world, in all it’s horror and glory, comes pouring in over the phone. An irritating way to spend your time, but unfortunately, the grunts of pop journalism A like their financial betters in the…
I’m pretty sure Kurt Cobain never got to see the Chant live, but Charlie Van Tuggle did. The Chant was my favorite band when they were a South Florida band, when they were a band. This was one of the annual homecoming shows, after the members had moved to Atlanta…
Adult life, pretty much like high school with more money, an absurd popularity contest waged on a lethal playground, charged with disaster and petty triumph. All the really cool kids mobilizing for the International Jeanswear Show kick-off party at the Marlin, the triumvirate of hosts A Island Trading Company, Vibe…
Well, let’s see. We’ve tried massive drug abuse. Profane violence. Riding the bus. Animal photos. Baby photos. Baby animal photos. Tried to start fights with people who couldn’t care less, which is why we tried to start fights with them. I spend hours some people don’t even know exist A…
So I’m on the bus, not the real bus, an independent thing, but like a bus, just me and the driver, near the last stop, which is my stop. He points out how there’s many people walking around downtown Miami. “Uh, it’s a nice day,” I say. He’s some kind…
In theory, the life of a social columnist should be unutterably fabulous, what with all the random celebrity collusions and the great gravy train of the complementary life. Unfortunately, the glorious era of Cholly Knickerbocker working the Stork Club is long gone. Now it’s all short-order stars and unworthy fame…
The pop life, one vast theater of the irate, a glorified children’s playground where the battles for popularity assume loathsome proportions. Adults, lacking the good sense of children, remaining incapable of taking turns and sharing stardom, forever unwilling to graciously accept the stature of anyone for very long. And so…
How beautifully perfectly ironic it is to get your ass kicked by your own damn livelihood. I mean, all day hanging in the ‘hood with the big dogs, all night floundering around South Beach, no problems really, no injuries certainly, finally to the safety of home, where I walk into…
Spalding Gray, the noted monologist, is pacing around a Park Central hotel room at eleven o’clock in the morning, looking thoroughly Protestant and faintly deranged: socks without shoes, dirty khaki pants, a rumpled and deeply stained blue cotton shirt. The room is a pocket-size arena of chaos — the bed…
Up and down, mostly up, as in no sleep, but who needs that anyway? So you get a little dizzy, a few hallucinations and some way strange pains in your ears and the back of your head, and your body feels like it’s filled with live wasps and your eyes…
