Don’t let it fool ya. Life, like this column, don’t have a beginning, middle, and end. This ain’t freaking Shake-speare (it takes a hyphen, by the way, because it was actually a nom de plume used by Edward de Vere, the true author of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth…) with…
It might seem petulant and childish, but several powerful music industry sources insist that parochialism — almost to the point of isolationism — can be the best way for a local music scene to prosper. These sources say that a community — in this case, South Florida — needs a…
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…
I am a whore. And I’m not so idiotic as to try to convince myself or anyone else otherwise. I turn word tricks for money. I was talking to someone whose opinion I respect, and this person asked why I’m so “reckless,” intentionally making enemies of people who could help…
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…
Oh, great, now I’m getting complaints from readers because I’m not babbling self-referentially and taking up valuable space with my meaningless meanderings. You’re angry because I’ve been dispensing with the endless blah-blah-blah that generally makes this column about three times longer than it needs to be. Ya gotta understand, partners…
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,…
Let’s talk about the F-word. Buck you, not that F-word, this is a Family newspaper, you Fasshole. Sorry, I meant to call you a Flibbertigibbet. Look it up. I did. Brings me Felicity. Then there’s Fetid. Fetid, which means “stanky,” can be pronounced fehtid or feetid, and can even be…
I know you’re trying, I tried to, too. But I’m tired of playing the game, tired of everything, because it never stops. Pain on top of pain under pain. Bad things happen to good people, bad things happen all the time, every time, and, frankly, I’ve lost interest. So if…
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…
Yellow cabs fry in the sun like eggs. It’s a game and we’ll play more in a minute, but first…. I’m always writing about this column or myself in this column or on myself, but this week it’s time for something new. Public service. Talkin’ phone etiquette. The record command…
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…
