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In my younger and more vulnerable years, I often walked home along Ninth Avenue. I lived just east of Tenth then. The extra few steps mattered. Though real estate agents will tell you otherwise, the neighborhood between 34th and 57th Streets west of Eight Avenue has long been referred to as Hell’s Kitchen. This, it…

I was discussing the installation of lipstick, keyhole, and robotic cameras at yet another entertainment awards show when a colleague looked down at his Blackberry and said, “I think the fact that the number of dead just rose from two to twenty-two warrants our coverage.” Barely twenty-four hours later, we have a crew of ten…

“Cartagena? Angel, you are hell and gone from Cartagena!” Michael Douglas issued that reality check to Kathleen Turner from the side of a muddy, Columbian hillside in the 1984 20th Century Fox film, “Romancing The Stone,” which I’m watching on WE as I type. My best friend, Sibby, and I used to recite portions of…

Making a great playlist is hard to do. First, you need to nail the music. Pissed off? Try a little Rage Against The Machine. Confounded? Death Cab For Cutie. Crestfallen? Sprinkle in some Laura Veirs. Next you need to find the perfect lyric. Intense love might call for Chris Carrabba’s “Hands Down” (“Your kiss might…

It was my third to last load: a sixty-seven pound air conditioner. I had stripped to jeans and a t-shirt, was breathing heavily and sweating vigorously as my right foot touched down on the last step. “You’re not going to throw that out, are you?” I had called Chris Sunday night. “Man, I hate to…

I’ve read all of Douglas Coupland’s books. I love his seemless marriage of pop culture currency and left-of-center magical realism. He looks just beneath the curated lawns of suburbia to expose everything from Yuppies adrift (“Generation X”) to Boomer grow ops (“Jpod”) with a dash of wit, whimsy, and a light sprinkling of symbolic absurdity…