Posts by Benjamin
Patient
In some strange way, I felt relieved as I strode towards Lenox Hill Hospital’s Emergency Room with my plastic bag full of still-wet CAT scans; at least I knew what was wrong, and what had to be done. It was a strange day from the start. I’d slept scarcely a wink the night before, dragging…
Read MoreEST
“When are you going to get back to our time zone?” Abbi asked. The days following a long, cross-country business trip are always a bit hazy. Factor in the single-biggest, mission-critical, make-or-break event of the year, and a week of twelve-hour days culminating in an all-nighter and transcontinental flight and, well, you get the idea.…
Read MoreThe Electric Company
By the time I got home tonight, my garment bag was somewhere between Los Angeles and New York, my Blackberry was missing, and both my cell phone and iPod were out of power. It was that kind of day. Yesterday’s flight was like the bus home from summer camp. There’s Ryan from news, Jen from…
Read MoreBack In Your Hollywood Arms
I’m gonna argue that Hollywood itself is the biggest brand in the world. In stark contrast to the lush, Technicolor fantasies in which the place trades, though, the town itself is a dirty mess of bleached concrete, dusty stucco, and drought-ridden patches of weeds. Which is a far cry from the Hollywood director D.W. Griffith…
Read More37
Hollywood feeds on its young. To celebrate the thirty-seventh anniversary of my birth here, then, is not without irony. To be away from home and enduring what is typically the most challenging week of the year only added insult to injury. I woke, fittingly, to AT&T’s oft-heard ringtone, a sound that prompts dozens of my…
Read MoreHollywood Roosevelt Hotel #1023
My hotel room is bigger than my apartment. Downtown Los Angeles sparkles outside my east-facing windows. The Hollywood sign is out the north. Last night after work, I pulled my Hyundai into valet as Kate Walsh and the cast of “Private Practice” walked a red carpet across the parking lot. Upstairs, I watched “Wanted” on-demand…
Read MoreIn The Shadow of Seattle
Abbi and I were in Seattle for a pal’s wedding this weekend. We were full-on tourists. We had a great time riding the ferry to and from Bainbridge, jogging along Peugeot Sound, rambling through Pike’s Place Market, and staring out from the Space Needle. We ate fresh seafood and drank local beer at every meal.…
Read MoreSeattle, Washington (Fall 2008)
The Miracle of Showing Up, Part II
Sometimes, when I’m traveling somewhere distinct from my normal routine — say, Nantucket, or Bray’s Island — I find it difficult to imagine anywhere else. I think I even remember when it started. I was sixteen-years-old snapping a photo from the double-yellow lines of a traffic-strewn Champs Elysées when I thought, “I can’t believe this…
Read MoreAt Least We’ll Leave Before We Have To Go
“New York is all about what could be,” says David Cloyd, a 34-year-old musician who moved to the city from Austin ten years ago. “You know: The potential. The possibilities.” New York Magazine is the source of Mr. Cloyd’s quote, at least partially responsible for my sense of urban, upwardly-mobile aspiration. The Intelligencer’s cocktail party…
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