Archive for February 2007
Coming Through In Waves
I was face down on the massage table, a masseuse’s elbow deep into my shoulder blades, when it occured to me that the tinkling, piped-in Muzak overhead was Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.” Kind of odd, I thought (between bouts of excruciating pain). Kind of sad, too. But frankly, it kind of worked. Like many before…
Read MoreHave Heart My Dear
Truth is, given how little I’ve run in the last four months, I probably had no business tackling the Hollywood Hills. Runyon Canyon, a 130 acre city park, rises over 700 feet between Hollywood Boulevard and Mullholland Drive. My hotel was less than six blocks from the Fuller Avenue entrance. Straight uphill. Friday morning was…
Read MoreGo Home, Jake
Yesterday it was Kurt Loder. This morning it was Britney Spears. Or maybe it was the traffic on Highland, already gathering to a dull roar before five o’clock. Either way, I’ve slept scarcely seven hours in two nights. I’ve pulled the blinds of my seventh-story, east-facing hotel room wide open. The view stretches from the…
Read MoreThey Love It In Pomona
When I was a kid savoring every page of Rolling Stone magazine, and marveling at “Rebel Without A Cause,” the Capitol Records building and Griffith Observatory seemed about as foreign and glamourous as you could get. This morning, both are in the shadow of the Hollywood sign right outside my window. Duran Duran was on…
Read MoreYou, Me & Us
Packed into a particularly uncomfortably subway on my way home from a particularly uncomfortable week at work, I couldn’t help but notice that I was surrounded by nothing but the first person singular. All around, my fellow passengers clutched their iPods and stared vacantly into space. On the stainless steel, graffiti-proof walls, signage for News…
Read MoreOut Here In The Fields
I was delivered with The Post this morning, arriving on my doorstep just as the familiar, yellow newspaper truck dropped a bundle of tabloids in front of the Andy’s Deli. The time was 5:48. I woke up this morning at 3:31, precisely four hours and thirty-two minutes after laying my exhaustion down for the night.…
Read MoreStill Always Almost There
I just got a call from Syracuse, New York, circa 1993 via Des Moines, Iowa, circa now. I’m at 29 stories above Times Square at The MTV working the Grammys. This is typically our second busiest night of the year (second to our own Video Music Awards). Jon Locker is in his basement in East…
Read More(Un)comfortably Numb
My clothes were in a pile at the foot of the bed. My wrist hurt, my stomach burned, and my head ached. And as I began to piece together the night before, I thought to myself, ‘I’ve got to fight back.’ I woke up on the couch. The room was dark. The clock read 5:19.…
Read MoreMaking Love Understandable
The subway platform is crowded three deep. ‘This,’ I think, ‘is gonna’ be good.’ I lean on an iron support beam deep in the 79th Street station below Broadway. All around me, straphangers crane their necks uptown to catch a glimpse of the oncoming train. My gaze is locked on an article on Tibet in…
Read MoreDead In The Water
This morning’s wake up call, effectively rendering two thirds of my life’s pursuits (rock ‘n roll, and MTV) over the hill and obsolete, came courtesy of New York Magazine. “Consider big media,” columnist Kurt Anderson wrote. “CDs seem so antique,” my 17-year-old daughter remarked the other day. Again and again these days, the record-setting CD…
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