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,…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The frenzy of show business, permeating and corrupting ordinary existence like a plague. Every level of society lately — the talented and valid, the common and just plain lame — behaving like imperious movie stars. Modern life nothing but a vast popularity contest, the contenders eventually willing themselves into the…
September song in the great banquet of life, the roundelay of chance and opportunity narrowing with the passage of time. Some of our older friends, maddeningly enough, remaining steadfast in the game: one wallowing in visions throughout a two-week peyote tour of Mexico; another off to Bosnia; a beloved filmmaker…
Ambition, the secret passion, transmogrifying an overhyped sandbar into a floating crap game played out in the killing grounds. The nightclub variety of overweening hubris running rampant at the opening of Amnesia, the sister club to the Cap D’Agde institution, yet another beachhead of Eurocentric glitz in the war zone…
Into the new Grub Street of gossip, the practitioners of the trade losing perspective in the whirl. A true party in the old-fashioned sense of the term — friends who actually like each other, getting together for no other reason than untainted good cheer A becoming faintly ridiculous to the…
The NATPE convention, turbocharged and running wild down the info superhighway wasteland, the week of a thousand stars you never really thought about but suddenly had to meet. A glorious idyll in television heaven with the National Association of Television Programming Executives, fame fever spreading all over the city like…
Nothing human is entirely foreign, although the recognition of la condition humaine somehow offers small comfort in the interactive zoo of Miami, a jungle habitat freed from the constraints of normal society. The animals rule, lawlessness prevails, and the polite are left in the dirt like so many spoor droppings…
The siren song of nightlife, an alluring chimera of torment and inspiration, the denizens of the night seized by endless hungers: hook me up with power and sex, put my name in boldface, fix my life. — nervy program requiring stamina and a high tolerance for debasement, the pop press…
Dusk is descending, the hour of promise and possibility, and the English writer Alexander Stuart is bouncing around his apartment in the falling light, pointing out the treasured artifacts of his life, the semiotic sign posts that somehow led to a strange new life on South Beach. At age 38…
