Blog Posts

My college band, Smokey Junglefrog, performed its first show in the fall of 1991 at a shady rock venue on Erie Boulevard in Syracuse called The Lost Horizon (don’t look for it, it’s not there; the venue closed in 2005, then re-opened elsewhere this year). Though The Lost Horizon was home to touring metal bands…

Thirteen years at MTV News, and finally I get my close up! Ok, so it was a two-shot, but still. I knew today was special from the moment I forced myself from my warm sheets: my pre-order of U2’s “No Line On The Horizon” was waiting on iTunes. I spent the few minutes it took…

When it comes to inspired festivity, Chris and Megan Abad don’t mess around. Chris’ thirtieth birthday celebration, AbadFest ’08, put me in the hospital (well, kinda’). A casual afternoon football game at Chris and Meg’s Hell’s Kitchen apartment once turned to a wildly-competitive beer pong tournament in a heartbeat. They’ve even make presidential debates fun.…

In May of 1992, I drove my red Nissan Sentra from Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, to Telluride, Colorado. I was a twenty-year-old child philosopher, whiling away the summer between my junior and senior year on highways and mountain tops of The Great American West in search of answers for love and life and everything else. The…

The modern twist on the old cliche that “The phone began ringing off the hook” is “My Blackberry inbox was stacked like a bad game of Tetris.” And so it was Monday at 5:49 pm, incoming messages fall like straight, horizontal bricks in the moments between landing and unloading at the gate, one after another…

The afternoon before I left for Los Angeles, I walked into my boss’ offices for our weekly meeting. He was turned away from the door, staring at his laptop, captivated by a music video. “Do you know these guys?” he asked. Quick cuts and violent camera movement showed a masked group of lean, totooed, scrappy…