Postmillennial Ink-Stained Wretch

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A magazine editor, ghostwriter, and literary gun-for-hire living in NYC, Nick Kolakowski specializes in writing about gizmos, travel, business, liquor, cigars, celebrity, and various other things wiser heads would tell you to stay away from.

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Archive for June, 2009

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Lee Marvin vs. the Decepticons

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Forty years ago, the biggest movie star in the U.S. was Lee Marvin, a dude so hardcore that a director once said of him: “Not since Attila the Hun swept across Europe leaving 500 years of total blackness has there been a man like Lee Marvin.”

Even before he wiped out dozens of film [...]

Honduras Goes Boom

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

The first rule of running a factory-based business in a Latin American country is, make sure you have a contingency plan on the other side of a border. The last time I was in Honduras, late last year, a number of the businessmen in Danli emphasized how they had mirror facilities just over the Nicaraguan [...]

Michael Jackson

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

In your heart of hearts you must have expected it: the tragically dead celebrity is as quintessentially American as apple pie and the teenage sniper on the roof. How could his story, really, have ended any other way?
I’m moseying through the launch event at Marquee, after one of the Nokia N97s, when I realize that [...]

The Testosterone Guide to Summer Grilling

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

Borges once talked about what he saw as the fundamental division of the human race: those who sleep, and those who do not. T.S. Eliot hinted at a similar existential bifurcation when he wrote about how his postwar generation had devolved into Hollow Men, with headpieces full of straw.
There’s also another fundamental separation, at least [...]

Kindle In Zombieland

Friday, June 19th, 2009

I enjoy books. Not only because the hefty weight of a 900-page hardcover makes it an ideal bludgeoning tool for cockroaches and/or Newt Gingrich, not only because having a bookshelf of them suggests to anyone entering your abode that your interests extend beyond beer and movies starring Bruce Willis, but because they represent an understated [...]

Novel Soundtrack

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

1. “Boogie on the Beach,” The Red Elvises
2. “NARC,” Interpol
3. “A Good Woman Is Hard to Find,” Morphine
4. “The Bottomless Hole,” The Handsome Family
5. “Medication (acoustic)” Garbage
6. “Call It A Day,” Raconteurs
7. “Wrong Side of Town,” Ginger Baker
8. “The Man Comes Around,” Johnny Cash
9. “Someone Must Get Hurt,” She Wants Revenge
10. “Not Guilty,” The Beatles
11. [...]

Tasteless

Friday, June 12th, 2009

I really should do it. Post the email, in its gruesome entirety, sent to me yesterday by a PR firm, touting about how their client’s technology is being used in the search for pieces of that Air France flight that crashed off the coast of Brazil the other week. The worst part is that [...]

The Rundown, Part II

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

Worth reading (in four parts).
Worth watching.
Worth ‘listening‘ to.

Nick vs. The American Girl Store

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

My littlest cousin would, apparently, explode into a ball of fire if she wasn’t deeded, for her upcoming birthday, a very specific doll dress for a very specific doll from the American Girl store on Fifth Avenue. Cue the ‘Mission: Impossible’ music. My mom utilized all her massive skills of persuasion and logistics to secure [...]

Ah, This Place

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

Ah, New York City. You have to love a place where, in a club in the shadow of the Brooklyn bridge, during a fundraiser for libraries in Kenya, at the height of a dance number set to the beats of some bigshot DJ, the dancers onstage pause in twirling their light-sticks long enough to strip [...]

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