This Is It (This Is Really Happening)
All the way from JFK to LAX (the part I was awake, anyway), all I could hear was the voice of Ryan Adams screaming in my ears.
"Don't waste my time; this is it! This is really happening!!! This is really happening!!!"
My brain was on the right lyric, but the alt-country singer/songwriter's seminal 2003 single, "This Is It," was the wrong track. This week, anyway, Michael Jackson owns the phrase. Hence my 5,922-mile, 34-hour trip to the red carpet premiere of "Michael Jackson: This Is It."
You've read my musings on life within ...
Radio City Station
For at least a day now (it's been tough to keep track, frankly; the last few have been punctuated by black holes where my memory used to be), my email inbox has been slammed by a steady flow of identical, potentially editorially-salient spam comments: Buy Valium.
For my mother, whose graduation from Columbus High School had been celebrated with a then-unheard of trip to New York, Radio City Music Hall was a white-gloved, hi-balled Mecca, thousands of miles in every way from Waterloo, Iowa. I must've been about twelve-years-old when she ...
Breaking The News: Michael Jackson
Sadly, breaking news doesn't surprises me much anymore. It is immediately what it is.
I was in a seventeenth floor corner office overlooking Times Square on a conference call with a blogger from VH1's Best Week Ever (of all media entities) when I heard the news.
"Michael Jackson had a heart attack."
Now, I was never a huge fan, but I remember the first time I heard "Thriller." I was sitting on my cousin Jimmy's bed in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, wearing big, puffy headphones when I first heard Vincent Price's sinister cackle. A few months ...
Living In The Fish-Eyed Lens
Forget the speech I gave when I ran for student council president, that night I performed in front of five thousand Iowa State Fairgoers, or even my wedding day; I hadn't experienced pressure until I've been locked into a 6 x 12 foot trailer with ten colleagues, 66 monitors, and two and a half hours of live television.
Our fifty-three foot Sweetwater Double-Expando, Multi-Format, High Definition/Standard Definition Truck was the nerve center of the entire MTV News Movie Awards Pre-Show operation. Everything was wired into it: dozens of ...
My American Idols
I shuttled between mixing "Feels Like Home" in my bedroom studio and "American Idol" on my living room flat screen tonight.
I caught Black Eyed Peas "performance" (freaky nails, Fergie), Cyndi Lauper and Allison Iraheta's "Time After Time (like the pants, Cyndi, but not nearly as deep as Tiff and my version), Rod Stewart's "Maggie May" (great sport coat), and Kara DioGuardi's bikini moment (no complaints).
As a media executive (especially one with a hand in a few not-insignificant live events himself), I had to appreciate the ...
Live From 2009 Oscar Red Carpet!
There was something oddly normal about standing there in the shadow of The Kodak Theater tonight as Hollywood's most-celebrated walked Oscar red carpet.
Maybe it was the light; the typically sun-dappled, Technicolor California sky was choked with clouds. Maybe it was that I've done a few of these before (see also Grammys, VMAs, etc). Or maybe it was optical fatigue; I mean, we've all seen a few million red carpets on E!, right?
Either way, I was wound pretty tightly as Josh Horowitz and I pulled into the press parking lot on Sunset & ...
Live From The 2009 Grammy Awards!
Well, kind of.
It's been three years since I last walked the Grammy red carpet.
Of course, truth is that I walked the carpet (which was Heineken green, as I recall) well in advance of the actual celebrities. The rest of the night, I was working across the street in a corrugated aluminum trailer.
We have a small crew at The Staples Center tonight. Most of us, however, are working from our Times Square newsroom. Which is just fine with me. Because it may be a late night, but at least it ends at home with Abbi.
Anyway, here are ...
Golden Globes! Golden Globes! Golden Globes!
Just watching the red carpet of the 66th Annual Hollywood Foreign Press Association's Golden Globe Awards stressed me out. T-minus four months until we're all up in the MTV Movie Awards, and seven until the Video Music Awards.
Tonight, though, I'm on the couch keeping on eye on MTV News' terrific online coverage, and NBC's middling effort on air.
If you've read my Oscar or Grammy live blogs, you know I'm not that funny. Still, here are some random notes...
8:01 - J Lo with the, "Momma's talkin', momma's talkin'!" Well ...
Twenty-four Hours Of “Twilight”
The red eye may be as close as we get to time travel. Without it, there's far less of a chance that I would have volunteered to fly to Los Angeles for twenty-four hours (well, 12 in the air, and 12 in L.A., anyway).
What would motivate such a trip at the end of a week that included my ninth New York City Marathon and twenty straight hours of election coverage? Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight."
At one point this summer, all four novels in Meyer's "Twilight" series topped USA Today's top seller's list. She's sold more than 17 million copies ...
Sometimes I Wish I Was An Academic
Just days after graduating from Syracuse, I took two of my most beloved professors, Bob Gates and Tobias Wolff, to lunch to quiz them on the pros and cons of academia.
I loved college. I loved the lectures, the discussions, the reading and writing. I loved all the newness, excitement of ideas, and that sometimes my brain hurt. And I was pretty good at it (particularly in contrast to my fairly-average high school performance). So I thought it might be the life for me.
That is, until they both individually warned me that university ...
