TITLE: Please update your RSS links AUTHOR: Rick Bruner DATE: 3/21/2004 01:43:21 PM ----- BODY: I have switched from using Blogger.com to MovableType to produce the Bruner Blog. If you subscribe to my RSS file, the old URL you have is now defunct (this will be the last post made with this RSS URL).

Please use one of the following XML syndication feeds instead going forward:

-------- TITLE: The Day After Tomorrow AUTHOR: Rick Bruner DATE: 3/15/2004 06:49:00 PM ----- BODY:

NY Public Library

Dad emails this Guardian story about the upcoming film The Day After Tomorrow, from Independence Day director Roland Emmerich, which the Guardian speculates could rock the Bush campaign with its terrifying depiction of extreme weather events caused by global warming and the presidential adminstration that moves too slowly to take the threat seriously.

Sounds like wishful thinking on the part of the Guardian to believe that the movie could actually help unseat the Bush administration in November, but the trailer is cool.

-------- TITLE: Million Dollar Baby AUTHOR: Rick Bruner DATE: 3/14/2004 12:03:15 AM ----- BODY:

By now, I'm sure you've heard about the woman in Georgia who tried to buy $1,675 worth of crap at Wal-mart and pay for it with a $1 million bill, eager for her change. I wouldn't have bothered mentioning it, but this afternoon I heard NPR's news quiz show Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me reference this tidbit, followed by the brilliantly apt musical interlude of Fred Waring's "I found a Million Dollar Baby (in a Five and Ten Cent Store)": MP3 | Lyrics.
-------- TITLE: More Blogger Party Notes AUTHOR: Rick Bruner DATE: 3/13/2004 12:49:39 PM ----- BODY: Random observations on another night of boozy blogger fun:

If you have no friends, blog. It's a great way to meet interesting people, get drunk and have sex. (I'm imaging that's where it leads for all the other younger people coupling up around me at these parties. Blogs have not played a major role in my own sex life since Adi quit hers a year ago.) Unless, of course, you live in Detroit or Chicago or Boston or wherever. This theory works in NYC, where there are lots of bloggers who like to party together. I can't attest to the rest of Amerika.
Happy birthday Lindsay
I keep wishing that Harlem would become the new Lower East Side, in terms of hip night life, because it would be so much more convenient for me to go out then, and for once I'd be ahead of a trend. The rent is right, but sadly, my experience has been the bars up here mostly suck. After last night, however, I'm wondering whether Hell's Kitchen might not be the new Lower East Side. Lindsay said she picked the locale in part because it had less of a bridge and tunnel crowd than L.E.S., which was true, although ironically it is right at the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel. (BTW, since Bloomberg came to office, I can't remember anyone calling the neighborhood "Clinton" anymore, thank God, as that was the most insincere effort of municipal rebranding in recent memory. Or maybe after the Lewinsky thing, President Clinton didn't like further association of his name with cheap blowjobs and had Hillary pull some strings with map makers and metro desks.)
The bar we gathered in, Siberia, on 40th St. near 9th Ave (across the street from the ass end of the Port Authority), certainly fits the bill for grunge chic. (For whatever reason, the bouncer's consistent instructions to all (men, anyway) who enter is, "No cursing and no hitting on women." I wonder if he say the same to women.) For Budapesters, it's somewhat reminiscent of Tilos Az A, with the downstairs music room and the tables that grow steadily more cluttered with empty beer bottles throughout the night, though it's not quite as cool as that legendary Magyar scene. Siberia's owner, Tracy Westmoreland, is a bear of a guy whom I suspect no one has ever teased for having a girl's name since he reached puberty. PR savvy, he confessed to me that he never reads anything that patrons frequently write about the bar, but he has made the place (around the corner from the Times's offices) a somewhat unlikely hangout for journalists, given his reputed policy that journalists drink for free (I got my last round on the house after I pointed out that I was the author of the Ladies of Blogging piece in the Daily News, which featured a photo of Lindsay set in Siberia). Tracy's not-so-secret new ambition, however, is an acting career, which he's already kicked off with an indie film, "A Perfect Fit."
Around the corner from Siberia is another bar I plan to explore further, the Bellevue Bar, which looks like the place where all Tracy's real friends would be hanging out. A tough but ironic Goth-metal-biker atmosphere, notably accented by two '60s-era Cadillac hearses parked out front, one with an Intel-spoof sticker in the window, "Pimp Inside." No hipsters in site.
If you are wont to pickpocket debit cards, there is an ATM in the deli across the street from Bellevue Bar that gives out money without prompting you for a PIN code.
As a further reminder never to leave home without my digital camera (which, nonetheless, I've managed to do yet again today), there is a Chinese take-out place down the street from Siberia called Top Broccoli. I wonder if there was much competition for that title.
Inside Siberia, various addled blogger behavior to amuse but little worth noting or at least ruining burgeoning friendships over, though this did stand out: a celebrated blogger entered the sole unisex bathroom in the establishment conspicuously together with her would-be boyfriend. This act alone, while brassy in front of a long line of fellow bloggers eager to drain their bladders, probably wouldn't have merited betrayal of their privacy for the sake of a cheap laugh, but but they lost any such gossip-protection claim by tumbling out together giggling like school girls a mere 45 seconds later. Hmmm, we on line speculated, what was that time enough to do? Confronted, the would-be boyfriend mused, "So, is [Xxxxxx] dating a two-pump chump, or does she have a drug problem?" Exactly.
A personal shout out: Yo, Batman, lighten up. I was more than half kidding about the handsome thing. Like Dana said, there's hot and then there's blog hot. Besides, I'm straight and married. And, as you noted, no one really read my blog, anyway. Your secret identity is safe with me, stud.
On the way home, more evidence that Hell's Kitchen deserves to be the new Mecca of late night Manhattan post-ironic cool (and did I mention that I don't have to change trains to get there?): at Teriyaki Bowl on 42nd between 8th & 9th, the staff consisted of a young black woman and an Arab guy (?), with gansta rap blaring at night-club volumes. Nonetheless, half of the clientele appeared Japanese. As I'm walking out, a threadbare-yet-dapper black guy maybe 55-65 years old beseeches of me, "Aren't there any all-night movie places around here?" Across the street is the giant AMC and next door is another massive multiplex (Loews?). But it's 3am, and I doubt either has showings still. Maybe the city really does sleep? "Sorry, pal, can't help you."
I mean, L.E.S. is hip, but really, how NY is it? It's the rundown part of town that young people with retro haircuts have claimed as their own, and a plethora of fun bars has risen out of the grime to meet their essential needs. But really, if someone scooped you out of Middle Amerika and plopped you down in the middle of it and took off your blindfold, would you really know it's New York, as opposed to, say, some funky part of Austin or Chicago or Atlanta or wherever? But walking back from Hell's Kitchen at 3am down 42nd Street to the Time Square subway station, past a McDonald's with a giant sign made up of hundreds of flashing light bulbs to the subways station that similarly blinks like the entrance to a Disneyland ride, where else could you be but NYC?
On the 1 train, all the seats taken at 3:30am, north of 96th St., I notice that the guy sitting next to me, white, mid-30s, is listening to some punk music, with classic over-the-top-of-your-head, ear-muff-style headphones, held together with scotch tape, from a cassette player, no less. A well-worn, commercially produced cassette tape at that. Kicking it old school.

I suspect I'd blog a lot more if I got out of the basement apartment more often. Perhaps in everyone's best interest that I don't. -------- TITLE: I'm Sorry, But I Love Fox AUTHOR: Rick Bruner DATE: 3/12/2004 06:43:47 PM ----- BODY: I honestly don't know new Fox series premiering tonight I like better:

Playing It Straight - Classic reality TV: God forbid (literally?) homos ever have the chance to marry, but Amerika sure does love them for family entertainment.
or
Wonderfalls - Funny, odd new series: Is it magical realism or is it schizophrenia? You decide. (Think Joan of Arcadia meets Northern Exposure)

-------- TITLE: Very Presidential AUTHOR: Rick Bruner DATE: 3/12/2004 06:26:43 PM ----- BODY:

All I can say is, "No fucking duh, morons."

Someone please recreate this, now that they stopped making it work.
-------- TITLE: Unlikely Poetry AUTHOR: Rick Bruner DATE: 3/12/2004 05:19:28 PM ----- BODY: Two stories on NPR in the past 24 hours about unorthodox poetry. The first was by one of my favorite NPR commentators, Romanian poet Andrei Codrescu with a delightful accent that goes perfectly with his sardonic style, commenting, in this case, on the dada-ist nature of spam poetry. Very funny. I elaborated on MarketingWonk, or here's the direct link. The other, today, is the poetry of Donald Rumsfeld in art song. -------- TITLE: Political TV Ads Through the Ages AUTHOR: Rick Bruner DATE: 3/11/2004 02:33:08 PM ----- BODY:

Just came across the site of the Museum of the Moving Image which has a great online exhibition, The Livingroom Candidate, a walk down memory lane of classic presidential attack advertising, TV commericals from 1952 to 2000. Who can forget classics such as Reagan's Morning in America, Bush the First's Willie Horton and Dukakis Tank Ride or the still shocking mother of all attack ads Daisy Girl for LBJ ("we must either love each other or we must die")?

-------- TITLE: Not Porn AUTHOR: Rick Bruner DATE: 3/10/2004 09:10:00 PM ----- BODY:

The scene: [bad funk music soundtrack] women gets out of the shower, wraps a towel around herself, answers the door to the plumber. Plumber, a hunk, has to take off his shirt to reveal his washboard abs, in order to tie off the leak (some plumber, eh?). Unfortunately, she doesn't have a check and asks if there's any other way she can pay him. He say, "That's okay, this one's on me." The end.

Via Fleshbot
-------- TITLE: Law & Order: Embedded AUTHOR: Rick Bruner DATE: 3/10/2004 08:21:16 PM ----- BODY: There's a reason why Law & Order is one of the most popular shows on TV. I just saw a repeat of an episode titled Embedded, which involves a Geraldo Rivera-like journalist character who is shot, presumably by a soldier angry at his exposing troop locations in Iraq. One thing that was remarkable about the episode was how politically controversial it was -- beloved characters fighting over whether the war in Iraq is a good idea or not. It's hardly PC in general -- I am now watching a rerun on TNT where Lt. Anita Van Buren shoots an unarmed retarded kid, Competence, in which an internal police investigator says, "I got an A in sensitivity training. I like Afro-Americans and I love Gyno-Americans." Can't get dialog like that even on Fox.

The other thing that sets the show apart from all other cop shows is that they don't always get their man. Frequently, they lose, get the wrong guy and can't find the right one or just are screwed by politics. Something that always bugs me about NYPD Blue, how easily they always extract confessions from suspects.

That and lots of episodes are filmed in my neighborhood. This Competence episode had an arrest go down at my subway stop, a stone's throw from our apartment, and an episode the other day (don't remember which) had an interview at the corner of Riverside and Tiemann, a few doors down from our place. -------- TITLE: Pearl Gluck, Internationally Celebrated Film Maker AUTHOR: Rick Bruner DATE: 3/9/2004 03:45:39 PM ----- BODY:

Our dear friend Pearl Gluck is an inspiration on many levels. Not only is her hilarious and touching documentary film Divan inspirational in its story, but she has done an amazing job in pulling every string within her reach to get the film made and now distributed and marketed. After its debut last year at the Tribeca Film Festival, it is now slated to have a two week run at NYC's Film Forum from March 17-30.

Not surprisingly, the media love the story of her film, about her family history growing up in and then leaving the orthodoxy of Hasidic Judiasm and her quest to regain a family heirloom couch (aka, divan) in rural Hungary. Today, she was featured on NPR's All Things Considered. You go, girl!

More details on PalinkaPictures.com (which I'm currently in the process of adding a blog to; please stand by). -------- TITLE: Lights Dimming for Cuban-Chinese Restaurants, Tacita de Oro Closes AUTHOR: Rick Bruner DATE: 3/9/2004 03:22:51 PM ----- BODY: Bummer. My favorite place for rotisserie chicken, Tacita de Oro ("The Golden Cup"), a hole-in-the-wall restaurant at 2625 Broadway at 99th Street, has closed. A sign in the window says that after 30 years in that location, their landlord has refused to renew their lease. The restaurant graciously thanks their customers for their years loyal patronage, and...that's it.

What's particularly poignant about the closure is that the place was part of a curious, dying breed of restaurant classified as Cuban Chinese. I don't know how common Cuban Chinese restaurants are elsewhere -- Miami is the only other place I could imagine them -- but they're a NYC phenomenon I've appreciated since visiting the city in my childhood. As far as I can tell, not only are they primarily a NY phenomenon but they seem to be particularly an Upper West Side phenomenon. This article on Cuban Chinese restaurants explains that Havana had a large Chinese population, but many of those folks fled to the U.S. when Castro took over. A small number of them opened restaurants in NY where they served a combination of Chinese and Cuban fare. The most famous of these is La Caridad on Broadway and 79th Street, but their likes are dotted up into the 90s around Broadway and Amsterdam. Now, the proprietors of such places are getting on in years and I fear, as the article I link to suggests, more and more will be going the way of Tacita de Oro in the coming years.

I wonder if they'd sell the recipe for that chicken marinade... -------- TITLE: Nat. King Coal AUTHOR: Rick Bruner DATE: 3/8/2004 11:00:46 PM ----- BODY: In the midst of a very boring business assignment, I came across this bizarre fact: there is a company out there called National King Coal. What kind of twisted sense of humor did someone have to name a mining company after a soul singing legend? -------- TITLE: Blogger Party Notes AUTHOR: Rick Bruner DATE: 3/5/2004 09:30:27 AM ----- BODY: Last night's blogger party at Public was fun, if nothing for the history books (at least not when I left around 1am). Moderate turnout, maybe 20+ bloggers and friends of bloggers. Conspicuously missing where Dana, Blaise and a few others from my profile whom I was looking forward to meeting. No table dancing, no nakedness, no projectile vomiting, but a few recollections of note:

Some law student blogger I've never met before apparently did a face plant into a coffee table full of drinks. I didn't witness it first hand, but the young lady I was chatting up at the time was facing the incident and was profoundly affected, noting "Normally when you say someone fell 'face first' you're not talking literally." But, as it has been described to me, the young woman in question apparently lost the function of her knees and cleared the two-foot-high table of drinks with her nose and ears. She had more or less recovered, with the help of friends, by the time I swung my head around to gape at her, and she sat unhappily in the corner for the next hour or so avoiding our obvious gestures to people around us to the effect of, "Her, that one, over there!"
While we were a smaller group waiting for more bloggers to show, a guy at a nearby table, there with his own group of friends, came over, having observed my "New York Bloggers" shirt, and asks me with shy reverence, "Are you a New York City blogger?" "Er, yes," I said. He asked my what was my blog, and I told him. He then started gushing about how much he loved TMFTML and Gawker and other blogs. I told him that TMFTML, Chorie and Spiers might show up later, and he was positively star struck. Him: late 30s, seemingly a professional, already fairly drunk (or possibly just plain insane). Chorie didn't make it, but Elizabeth and TMFTML did. Loony fan didn't track down TMFTML, as far as I know, but he did corner Elizabeth for about 20 minutes, much to the displeasure of his equally drunken girlfriend. I don't think Elizabeth was too thrilled with the fawning, either, but I didn't get a full debriefing yet.
I was pleased to meet TMFTML at last. Actually, he believes we met already at the Fleshbot party, but I don't remember much from the Fleshbot party, and he remembers me from the hat I was wearing, though I'm pretty sure I wasn't wearing a hat that night. Anyway, he seems to be a guy eager to guard his privacy, so I'll reveal only three things that struck me, which do not give away his secret-hero identity:
1. He's quite handsome, for all you TMFTML stalkers out there.
2. He is adamant that the obscure title of his blog comes from the Leonard Cohen version of the song "Hallelujah," not the (to my ears better) Jeff Buckley version, which TMFTML reviles as womanly. Go figure. (Part of his handsome guy mystique, perhaps, that he feels compelled to identify with the manly version of the song. Oh the burdens beautiful people have to bear that the likes of you and I shall never know.)
3. He had the best line of the evening on the subject of masturbation: "I've been married so long, I masturbate to images of earlier masturbation."
  UPDATE: I've since been advised that he's used the line before. Hence the pat delivery.

-------- TITLE: The Old Mind/Body Metaphysical Switcheroo AUTHOR: Rick Bruner DATE: 3/5/2004 08:54:37 AM ----- BODY: I love when I wake up laughing at something I've dreamt. Last night, I had some convoluted dream, and I don't even recall at this point the larger scope of it, but one character left and then came back a while later, and, in common dream form, had by then transformed into someone else, though I knew it was the same character from earlier.

I asked him, "Weren't you a different person last time we met?" He seemed perplexed. "You know," I went on, "the old mind/body metaphysical switcheroo?" He seemed even more perplexed, so just to fuck with him, I added, "Oh, I see they've finished the personality and memory uploads. Nevermind."

I want to try that line on someone at a party soon. -------- TITLE: NYC Ladies of Blogging AUTHOR: Rick Bruner DATE: 3/4/2004 01:18:04 AM ----- BODY: My latest Daily News piece: "I am woman, hear me blog". Short profiles of the following NYC female bloggers:

Jen Chung
Eurotrash
Meg Hourihan
Blaise Kearsley
Amy Langfield
Maccers
Megan McArdle
Maud Newton
Lindsay Robertson
Elizabeth Spiers

I wrote the piece too long and the lead got kind of squeezed in the final edit (sorry Dana, you had more quotes and context originally than you got!) (Also, Liz, I didn't call you "shy," my editor did. You're positively effusive in my book!)

Other NYC fem blogs of note, which didn't make the article, include these:

numberonehitsong.com
thefolddrop.typepad.com
whatsnextblog.com
rion.nu
lauraholder.com
rachelleb.com
andreaharner.com
catwoman.pitas.com
morethandonuts.blogspot.com
themodernage.org
ultragrrrl.blogspot.com
melodynelson.com

Also, don't forget about tonight's blogger party!

UPDATE:
For the record, here is the paragraph with Dana's quote on the prom as I submitted it, before it got cut:

Dana, who uses only her first name at her blog NumberOneHitSong.com, notes that blogging has its benefits on the dating scene: "If you're even remotely attractive in real life, in the blog circles you're really hot. Anytime you go to a blogger get-together you see that in action. For all of us who never got asked to the prom, it's really gratifying."

-------- TITLE: The Joke Is on AdBusters as Shoe Parody Turns to Farce AUTHOR: Rick Bruner DATE: 3/3/2004 08:23:41 AM ----- BODY:

Oh, this is rich. In a rare example of original reporting, MarketingWonk has learned has discovered that AdBusters is learning it's harder to be a good global citizen than liberal knee-jerk orthodoxy would have us believe. Here's the back-story. AdBusters is an anti-commercial magazine, which, if I'm not mistaken, was actually founded by people in the ad industry to give them an outlet (albeit it hipocritical) to vent so that they could feel better about their day jobs. Some months ago, they came up with the idea of marketing their own brand of shoe, the Black Spot, to redefine "cool" and undermine the likes of Nike (yeah, right), who are obviously evil because of their use of sweatshops and slave labor.

So far, so good. But then MarketingWonk's Tig Tillinghast sent a sarcastic order for 3,700 pairs, claiming that "we intend to use them in lieu of cash in order to pay the Pinkertons we hired to bust a nascent MarketingWonk unionization effort." The reply Tig received, however, was surprisingly ernest, in which AdBusters acknowledged that, first of all, they were not looking to manufacture the sneakers here in the U.S. but went straight to Asia for cheaper labor, like everyone else ~~and were surprised to learn that their first manufacturer lied to them and was indeed a non-union sweat shop~~. [SEE CORRECTION BELOW] Subsequent attempts to find an Asian union manufacturer have failed to meet AdBusters' requirements for "working conditions, shoe quality and overall excellence," so they've given up on Asia altogether and are still searching for a manufacturer elsewhere.

CORRECTION:
I was afraid of this. I read too much into a cryptic comment Tig made and jumped to the erroneous conclusion that they had engaged a sweat shop. Tig has since sent me the entire email he received, which reads thusly:

Dear blackspotters,
Six months of searching in Asia for the right factory to produce the blackspot sneaker have turned up a big zero. None of the recommended "union" shops we checked and visited in Korea, China and Indonesia met our standards for working conditions, shoe quality and overall excellence. We've now given up on Asia, and have reset our sights on Poland and the traditional shoe manufacturing areas of Spain and Portugal.
On the artistic front, an indie shoe company renowned for its cutting edge work is collaborating with us on the blackspot's design and production. They say there's a good chance of being able to use hemp and other earth-friendly materials to make it. Despite delays, the first blackspots should be on sale by September. Stay tuned for more updates in our quest to kick Phil's ass and revolutionize the sneaker industry.
A hot new idea just came from an email saying:
"Blackspot sneakers. What an intriguing idea. A non-brand. An anti-brand. Its own brand. A shoe whose only advertising is the word of mouth of its owners, and the impact of the image of its wearers.
"But then, I thought, why stop there? Why be an organization marketing an anti-brand, when it can become so much more than just that? Why not turn blackspot sneakers into an anti-corporation? Fight fire with fire. Make the shoes' owners the company's owners. Whenever someone buys a pair of blackspots, he or she is buying a share in blackspot sneakers. A cooperative. An anti-corporation."
What do you think? Should we sell shares and hold shareholder votes on critical issues of design, production and how to spend the profits?

Yeah, how to spend the profits, indeed. Here's an idea: let's make those profits first, then worry about how to spend them. -------- TITLE: NYC + Bloggers + This Thursday = Booze & Fun AUTHOR: Rick Bruner DATE: 3/1/2004 08:05:03 AM ----- BODY: I have a piece coming out this Thursday in the NY Daily News having to do with blogging, so I figured, what better excuse does one need to get NYC bloggers together to quaff and self-aggrandize?

Thursday, 8pm - onward
Public (back room)
210 Elizabeth Street (at Prince Street)

Consider yourself invited. Spread the word. --------