Where are you? It's between 4 a.m. and whenever, and you're under attack. By strobe lights flashing like Morse code. By clusters of people jumping like fleas trapped in a petri dish. By the music banging against the walls of your ears. No wonder you can't tell time -- it's all you can do to [...]
This city is so caffeinated you can hardly blame an outsider for viewing it as a rainy-day parade of Starbucks, the coffee-chain colossus that began here. Java shops large and small rule Seattle, but, if the personnel shake-ups at two of its coffee kings are any indication, a backlash of sorts may be brewing. Seattle-based [...]
I've come to the Paris Red Light District to kiss the Green Fairy full on the mouth, to sample the city's absinthe houses, where the notorious and powerful liquor is still cloaked in mystery. Absinthe's supposed hallucinogenic properties once caused people to equate it with a sinister Tinker Bell, and it is this legacy that [...]
If the windows separating the terminal from the tarmac suddenly shattered, and if the weakness I felt after the previous night's debauchery suddenly dissipated, I could've hit the plane with a spitball. It was that close. The time: 9:15 p.m. Scheduled take-off time out of Sao Paulo: 9:45 p.m. In 30 minutes the plane was [...]
Three years ago, I published “The Wow Factor,” an article about the grand opening of the nightclub and restaurant, Tao, inside Las Vegas’ Venetian hotel-casino. The story, like most of the clubland dispatches I filed at the time for CityLife, Vegas’ alternative weekly paper, was unremarkable—another metaphor-laden, borderline-turgid essay describing another new venue—save for the [...]