MIAMI BEACH—To the Mecca of brutalism, a place that rivals Marbella for vulgarity, with sprawling, marble-clad palaces, boxy condo blocks, and concrete lumps replacing Old World wrought iron and glass canopies. Clubs down here mean strippers and dancing poles, none of that all-white tennis garb and polite applause after a passing shot down the line. People order jumbo daiquiris in giant glasses and swallow them quicker than ...
By the time you read this, the longest run-up ever to an election will be over, thank God, and the usual bores will be pontificating over the results. The irony is that for the first time ever I couldn’t care less who won. Nothing will change in the Land of the Depraved, and Big Business will continue to call the tune in DC. I watched all three debates between Obama and Romney and counted the word Israel mentioned 35 times, ...
Back in 1840, an Englishman by the name of Alexander Walker wrote a manual by the name of Woman, in which he quoted David Hume and from which I quote: Among the inferior creatures, nature herself, being the supreme legislator, prescribes all the laws which regulate their marriages, and varies those laws according to the different circumstances of the creature. So far, so good. Nature is the supreme arbiter, and unnatural ...
NEW YORK—Trains and buses have shut down, people have been evacuated from eastern New Jersey and the southern tip of Manhattan, and as of this writing Hurricane Sandy has hit and hit hard. Sixty-five million residents in the Northeast have been affected, hospital generators have failed, and skeleton crews have carried out seriously ill patients in the middle of the night. Supermarkets are empty, their shelves stripped by ...
A Greek football team has been warned it will be kicked off the field if its players wear uniforms advertising its two new sponsors. The shirts have been bright pink since the team was founded and bear the names of local brothels, “Villa Erotica” and “Soula’s House of History.” The hypocrisy involved is mind-boggling. Football in Greece has been as corrupt an institution as Greek politics, with referees known to have ...
NEW YORK—It’s a black-and-white 1939 oldie starring Barbara Stanwyck and William Holden in his first credited film role. She is thin, ballsy, bawdy, beautiful, and talks with a Brooklyn accent. He’s tall, good-looking, and a professional boxer whose real love is playing the violin. He gives up the beak-busting business after he kills the Chocolate Drop Kid in the ring. His name is Joe Bonaparte. Joe and Babs are on the ...
Bernie Ecclestone is a gnomish Brit ex-grease monkey. He is my neighbor in Gstaad, the small alpine Swiss village which once upon a time was the Mecca of the old rich and titled but is now slowly turning into the playground of the nouveaux riches and vulgar. I"ve often written about Bernie because for a very short man, he has a very long reach. About ten years or so ago he bought a beautiful old inn, a Gstaad landmark used ...
“Your future is in Hollywood—I can make you the next Bela Lugosi,” said James Toback looking at me straight in the eye. Jimmy Toback is a hell of a fellow. An obsessive with an encyclopedic knowledge of sports and other data, he directed such great films as The Gambler, Fingers (which made Harvey Keitel into a star), wrote the screenplay for Bugsy, and has just wrapped Seduced & Abandoned, starring Taki and Alec ...
I don’t know who was the dumber of the two: the Greek banker who was in a hurry to spend 100 million big ones for a London pad or the American woman who accidentally walked off a cliff in Alaska while texting. Both dummies survived, which goes to show the Almighty must have a weakness for the desperate. All I know is that the Alaskan broke some bones after falling 60 feet off a cliff while texting. Apparently she had ...
NEW YORK—Ten years ago this week I put my money down and The American Conservative magazine was born. They say that owning a yacht is like sitting under a shower tearing up hundred-dollar bills. Owning an opinion magazine based in Washington, DC is like sitting in a dull hotel room throwing thousand-dollar bills to the fire. A boat will at least get you some attention from the fairer sex—if it’s large and vulgar enough, ...
I stopped reading novels long ago. When those arch-phonies writing magic realism became household words, I dropped out quicker than you can say, "Raymond Chandler." Now that's what I call a novel"the stuff Chandler churned out about old El Lay, everyone gulping booze and puffing away like steam engines, and only exercising between the sheets. Crime writers have always had an inferiority complex about their work, but ...
NUEVA YORK–The dateline is in Spanish because I have yet to hear any English spoken here in the Bagel, and I landed in some style more than 24 hours ago. Never mind. Flying at 47,000 feet at close to 500 knots per hour on a G550 is as close to perfection in traveling as it gets. The G550 is the Mozart / Beethoven / Schubert / Schumann / Edward Hopper / Degas / William Holden / Burt Lancaster / John Wayne / Papa Hemingway / F. ...
GSTAAD—It was far, far worse than the Rodney King El Lay riots of twenty years ago, and it made the London summer fires of 2011 look like a kindergarten’s Guy Fawkes party. This was our Kristallnacht, and then some. They had hard faces, harder than a hedge-fund manager’s when told a good corner table is unavailable. They came early and there were lots of them. They were squat and dark, tall and wide, their fists at the ...
Forty-five years ago two Greek shipowners and the most famous diva of her time squared off in a British High Court over a financial dispute. Panaghis Vergottis, a gentleman and philanthropist, had sued Aristotle Socrates Onassis and Maria Callas over the ownership of a tanker the two men had bought for la Callas back when they were best friends. I suspect Vergottis had fallen in love with the fiery coloratura, and once Onassis ...
Here we go again! Scary sofa samurai Robert Kagan, a neocon so-called foreign-policy scholar, is also an expert on war, having watched a lot of Hollywood movies. Kagan says that if Obama were to use force against Iran, the election is over and he would win overwhelmingly. Kagan and his brother are inside-the-Beltway hucksters, always hustling and doing Israel's bidding, although not necessarily for cash. Zionists have countless ...
GSTAAD—Now is the time of sultry August days and nights, with the gift of privacy an added bonus. In summer the village contains the die-hards, the locals, and a few tourists. Bucolic freedom, fresh air, and sunshine were once anathema—foul-smelling, airless dives such as New Jimmy’s were the real McCoy—but now the sound of bells on roaming cows means instant happiness. It’s called old age. I can now walk from my ...
