Posts Tagged ‘Work’
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“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 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…
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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 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…
Read MoreCool It Off Before You Burn It Out
In the summer between my sophomore and junior years at Syracuse University, I drove from Philadelphia to San Diego and back, camping and crashing at friend’s and family’s homes in Chicago, Iowa City, Minneapolis, Denver, and points in-between (including an ill-fated layover in Darwin, Minnesota where
Read MoreComic-Con Reconsidered (Or, The Triumph Of The Nerds)
Prevailing wisdom about San Diego’s Comic-Con is that it’s an assembly of misfits, nerds, freaks and geeks salivating over B-listers, back issues, and collectibles. In fact, I traded in that very same simplistic, diminishing description as recently as just last night. Tonight, though, I counter with a new thesis. Comic-Con is an inspirational gathering of…
Read MoreWasting Away Again At Comic-Con
This isn’t the first time I’ve put in an 18-hour day in a generic conference room in a beautiful city. Last week I put in a few days in San Francisco, and I’ve suffered through Las Vegas and Los Angeles numerous times. But this one takes the cake. Inside, it’s Comic-Con, the annual confab of…
Read MoreThe Morning Fog May Chill The Air, I Don’t Care
As I’ve said before, my favorite part about travel is running in a new town. This morning, that town was San Francisco. In fact, a good run had more than a little bit to do with my being here. My primary raison d’etre for this sojourn was the Y-Pulse Mash Up, a conference for teen/tween-centric…
Read MoreDaylight Is Coming (And No One Is Watching But Me)
In 1910, director D.W. Griffith and his acting troop (Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, amongst others) were sent west by the Biograph Company. There, in a small village named after landowner Harvey Wilcox’s summer home, Griffith filmed the first movie ever shot in Hollywood, “In Old California.” Movie-makers began heading west in droves, largely…
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