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…
Where am I? What floor am I on? Where have I been? Told you about vacay, but then when we got back home I got really sick, some throat virus or something, and it wiped me out. Thanks to a ten-pack-a-day cig habit (I know it’s illegal to smoke tobacco…
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…
Sounds simple, huh? Well, you have to drive all the way across Pennsylvania, the long way, horizontal. Which doesn’t sound bad until you get to the border and find out that the speed limit in all of Pennsylvania is only 55. It rained and rained (throughout the entire 4500 mile…
Now that you’ve all had time to celebrate my demise, it’s time to get back to work. Natch, this week it’s What I Did on My Summer Vacation (Part 1). There sure is a lot of America out there, really a lot of Americas. We drove to Georgia, slept, drove…
Another fling on the food chain of status, happily gearing up for the hard-fought national privilege of summer vacation, content in a suddenly tolerable city. A perfectly pitched Saturday night getting off to a great start with the ACME Acting Company presentation of Jeffrey at the Colony Theater, a well-done…
A rhapsody in darkness, the clarion call of klieg lights from overextended clubs sweeping across the horizon, the insidious urges of the nightlife jump commencing yet again. Past all appetite and pleasure in the addiction of the never-ending party, leaving the pursuit of true fun to amateurs and the young,…
It’s Lionel Goldbart on the phone, dissing me. “Oh, no, I know what this means. We’re going to have to read over and over about how this is the last ‘Program Notes’ forever blah blah.” Of course, the truth is, this is the last ‘Program Notes’ ever. If you don’t…
Endgame, sugarplum visions of the Apocalypse, the Twentieth Century running amok and winding down to a last gasp of absurdity. A nation transfixed by O.J. Simpson, the first celebrity psycho: Dog Day Afternoon meets Hollywood Babylon, as the perfect candidate for Phil Donahue’s televised executions makes the big time. Gloria…
A profound derangement at loose in the world, eerily as if the rampant insanity of Miami — the 21st-century city of alien culture — had colonized the Earth. The formerly warm and fuzzy playwright Neil Simon gets off a rough joke at a theatrical awards dinner in New York (“What’s…
Clarity is the clarion call of great journalism. Okay, so clarion pretty much means clarity, but there’s also the “shrill” part of the definition. It was cool last week that Max Borges, who brought the South Florida Rock Awards to, duh, South Florida, and is a very smart man, calls…
The transformation is complete, I am you, you am I, and boy is it confusing. When you went to Rose’s Bar on South Beach recently to see For Squirrels and the new lineup of Natural Causes, you weren’t sure whether to laugh, cry, or jack somebody’s ass. You had more…
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…
