Bruner Blog

Heideeflower Power

Spent Tuesday afternoon honored to watch my good friend Heideeflower Stoller graduate as valedictorian of my own alma mater, Columbia University’s School of General Studies. (Sorry to say GS’s site is lame, so I can’t find any place to link on Heidee’s name as valedictorian.)

GS, as the School of General Studies is affectionately know, is a remarkable college. It is part of the same university system that includes Columbia College and Barnard, and students from all the colleges mix among each other’s classes. What distinguishes GS, however, is that it focuses on giving second chances to adults students returning from lapsed college careers. Per the site stinking, I can’t link to the school’s history, but an assistant dean at Heidee’s party told me that GS was set up after World War II to accommodate soldiers who wanted to continue their educations on the GI bill but who didn’t feel they quite fit in with the general student body at most schools. They were older and richer in life experience, which still typifies most GS students today.

When I went to GS in ‘87-90, I think the average age of students was around 30 or 35 — dunno what the stat is today. Starting at age 22, after dropping out of college from the University of Montana for two years myself, I was younger than most of my GS peers. For me, the school was a life saver. Really. I guess I’m what you might call a late bloomer. I was a chronic screw-up in high school (constantly critiqued by teachers as “so bright, but he doesn’t apply himself”). I took the same attitude on with me to Montana, having a great time with my friends (including several life-long friendships), but not taking my classes seriously. In fact, when I left, I deliberately sabotaged my record, blowing off several final exams and incomplete classes. That stroke of brilliance left me with a 1.94 GPA.

As my story played out, I ended up working for a year and a half on a small newspaper in the British Virgin Islands, where I got my act together enough to realize I wanted to complete my degree. I applied to three colleges: The University of Washington, in Seattle, University of Missouri (in Columbia, MO), and Columbia’s GS. The two state schools rejected me. Only GS decided to take a chance on me. I can never be more grateful to any institution, because I took that second chance seriously. I ended up on the dean’s list (incredibly, although they transferred many credits from Montana, they gave me a clean GPA to start anew) and I left with a first-rate education and an Ivy League diploma for my resume.

I always have had a guilty feeling that they somehow made a mistake letting me in, but listening to the speeches from the dean, graduating seniors and alumna made me realize that my story is typical, or even tame. The college really does take life experience into account and goes out of it’s way to giving second chances to people it thinks will value it.

No one could embody the payoff of that mission better than my Heidee. I met Heidee when she first moved to NYC, and we became great bike buddies (she supported herself her first year in the city as a bike messenger) and running partners. I know all her secrets. The dean, in introducing her for her speech, mentioned that she had been a high school drop out, but they don’t know the half of it. First of all, her real name is Heideeflower, not Heidee Flower, as was printed in the program. Her parents were first-class hippies (wonderful people, both of whom I met this week), and for years the family lived out of a van, touring around the Northwest and Alaska. By her teens, she and her mom had settled in Seattle, and at age 15 Heidee decided to drop out of the flaky hippie school she had attended. The dean neglected to mention that she spent the next several years just hanging out as an urchin, punk, raver, etc.

To cut to the chase, in her mid/late 20s, she decided to move on, ended up in Tucson, AZ, worked at some environmental and women’s movement non-profits, got her GED and started school at the University of Arizona before transferring to GS. Once at GS, she seemed to have found her life’s mission, to dedicate herself to NGO policy work. Finally given the intellectual challenge she apparently craved, she aced virtually every class, ending up with an astonishing 4.16 GPA — i.e., she averaged A+s. And we’re talking Columbia. Needless to say, she was accepted all over the place for post-graduate work, including MIT for an PhD in Economics, but she decided on Yale Law School.

Best of luck, girl! And as for the rest of the world, get ready for Heideeflower Power!

Shout out to Dope J. Interesting stuff, but I’ve lost the trail after May 10. Another hint? FYI, this one’s my favorite:

$11,000 Spelling Mistake

Been away from the blog for a few days in part due to a fun-filled visit from an old college buddy who was my best man at my wedding. Mike, a furniture maker and master woodworker, is pretty much computer illiterate (ironic, since both his brother and father made small fortunes in the computer industries). Nonetheless, he just pulled off such a brilliant move on eBay I have to share it with you. Mike and his brother recently bought a huge farm in Maryland, some 400 acres. So naturally, he was in the market for a tractor. As with computers, Mike similiarly knows little about tractors, but in his quest to buy one, he had determined that John Deere was the best brand and that the model they were looking at was going to run about $40,000, even for a 10-year-old used one, down from about $65,000 new. So he and his brother were surfing eBay and getting discouraged at the prices when Mike suggested, “We’re looking for someone selling a tractor who knows even less about tractors than we do. Let’s try searching with the spelling ‘John Deer.’” Sure enough, some poor schlub has exactly the model they’re looking for listed under that spelling, with zero bids. They dropped him a note and suggested he call them. The guy was behind on his mortgage and desperate to raise money and was at a complete loss to understand why no one on eBay had even made a bid so far. Best of all, he lived only a couple hours away. $29,000 later, Mike owns a tractor but still no computer.

The UK Guardian ran a piece recently speculating about whether the the anthrax investigation has gone cold because the FBI knows too much. Similar to my own wonderings the other day. Props to Mark Haas for the link (who should really be blogging!).

Ah, the age we live in

I just came across MrSkin.com, run by a guy whose long obession it has been to record just the naughty sections of PG and R-rated films. Now he sells the clips online and by the looks of it is making good money doing so. It’s actually quite a well designed site w/ a vast archive. His slogan is “fast forward to the good parts.” I like that he notes on the homepage, “Boy, are my parents proud.”

Too freakin’ funny (tho of questionable taste for viewing at the office).

More fun with Rick at the movies

Been getting to the moving pictures quite a bit these days. Last night was “About a Boy.” I had read this terrric novel by Nick Hornby before I even saw the earlier movie made of his novel “High Fidelity.” Interestingly, the two movies didn’t share any prominent crew members — different directors, screenwriters, cinematographers and editors — but to my eye, the two films had a common feel in terms of the approach to the editing, cinematography, narration and soundtrack. Perhaps Hornby thoroughly injects his stories with these filmmaker’s choices, or maybe this film was a bit derivative stylistically of “High Fidelity,” or possibly I’m just imagining it. Whatever, it’s not a problem. It works. I liked “High Fidelity” a lot, and I liked “About a Boy,” too. I’m not generally a big Hugh Grant fan, but I thought he was excellent in the role of Will Freeman, the deliberately shallow 38-year-old bachelor sucked into an extended family of strangers through gawky 12-year-old Marcus, who is desperately in need of a father figure to teach him how to be cool.

I hope the film does reasonably well. My concern is that it’s a hard movie to categorize in terms of its target audience. Despite the parallel coming-of-age plots, it’s certainly not a teen film (although rated PG 13): no violence, slapstick or nudity. It’s really about a 38-year-old man learning to grow up. It’s off-center by Hollywood standards, but it’s definitely no independent art film. It’s also distinctly not an American film, set effectively in London, so that American audiences will need to keep their ears tuned more sharply than normal in order to negotiate the Brit accents and colloquialisms. It’s also borderline for a date film, as, like “High Fidelity,” it’s ultimately a morality tale about committed relationships. And while it’s consistently very funny, it’s poignant to the point of schmaltzy, suffused with themes such as depression and suicide, public humiliation, the pain of honesty, emotional bonding and the purpose of life. The best I could come up would be it is an “adult feel-good film,” which doesn’t sound like that hot of a ticket. Reminds me a bit of the excellent “Secrets & Lies,” tho more Hollywood. Word of mouth and Grant’s star power are its best hope. Good sign was the theater was nearly sold out on opening night at a 10:15 pm showing.

Also saw “Cat’s Meow” the other night, the new film from Peter Bogdanovich (of “The Last Picture Show,” “What’s Up Doc” and “Paper Moon” fame). This new film takes for its plot a speculation on how a real Hollywood mystery played out when William Randolph Hearst was host aboard his luxury yacht to a celebrity weekend cruise that included his mistress actress Marion Davies (played by the charming Kirsten Dunst), Charlie Chaplin and once legendary gossip columnist Louella Parsons, among others. During the voyage, film producer Thomas Ince died under mysterious circumstances that were never investigated or discussed by the witness in the years to follow.

The movie had its appeal, including a really enjoyable performance by Edward Herrmann as Hearst, as well as its period charm, a great set, lots of colorful characters and a sufficiently complicated plot. Ultimately, however, it fell a bit flat for me. It was rather slow in parts and conspicuously a dramatic staging — I never lost to illusion the recognition that I was watching actors playing characters in a film. I see that Yahoo! Movies categorizes it as a “thriller.” That’s one thing I would not call it. Doubtful it will do much to revive Bogdanovich’s long career slide.

Finally, as long as I’m at it, last weekend I rewatched Preston Sturges’s “Miracle of Morgan’s Creek” at the Film Forum’s ongoing Great America Comedy Series. It still had its share of laugh-out-loud moments, but it was slower and a bit more obvious in many of its gags and slapstick than I had remembered (I recall fits of hyperventilation when I saw it first in my early 20s). By and large, the absurdity and ribald nature of story itself delivers most of the laughs — Trudy Kockenlocker (played wonderfully by Betty Hutton), forces her nerdy admirer Norval to cover for her while she spends all night at a bon voyage dance for departing WWII soldiers, whereupon she gets so drunk that she marries a soldier but forgets both his name and the fake name she used during the ceremony (for no logical reason), but not before consummating the matrimony. The screwball antics just mount from there. Eddie Bracken’s pie-eyed double-takes and frequent stuttering get a bit tiresome, but performances were fun all around, including the quintessential brassy younger sister by Diana Lynn, and William Demarest (of “My Three Sons” fame) delivering some outstanding pratfalls as exasperated father Constable Kockenlocker.

Why, you might wonder, do I bother posting these film reviews to my site? Do I think I’m some kind of film expert? Well, if I ever held such illusions, that bubble was popped fairly decisively last night by my friend who openly mocked me as a film ignoramus for not knowing what Dogma 95 was. (For those as dimwitted as me, it’s more than a film genre, it’s a film certification program with a strict set of 10 guidelines (the “Vow of Chastity”), co-designed by Danish director Lars von Trier and epitomized by his torturous film “Breaking the Waves.” The whole idea is so pretentious it makes me laugh. An attempt the reinvigorate creativity in film-making, the movement seems pretty formulaic in its own Euro-trash way: inductees must shoot only in natural light (fine); all music must be part of the scene being filmed (whatever); the director cannot take a credit (oh, puh-lease — how we must suffer for our art), but stupidest of all, the camera must be hand-held. How does this possibly make the film more natural? You can’t help but to be aware of the jittering picture frame throughout the whole movie. It’s nauseating. I felt sea sick all the way through “Breaking the Waves.” The opposite of entertaining, despite a brilliant performance by Emily Watson, “Breaking the Waves” was just unpleasant to watch, which is why I avoided Bjork in von Trier’s subsequent “Dancer in the Dark” and why I will probably also avoid Nicole Kidman in his upcoming “Dogville.”) The only silver lining in my humiliating education is that I’m apparently so behind the times that the genre or whatever it is has already become passe. I’m glad I missed it.

So, having clearly established that I’m such an amateur film fan I don’t even deserve to be called a “buff,” why the hell do I bother subjecting my invisible friends to read my film proscriptions? Well, obviously part of the answer is that I just love the sound of my own voice (even if it’s in my head I as blog in silence). Why the hell else would I keep a blog, if I didn’t? Writing this made me remember that as a kid, I didn’t have so much an imaginary friend as I did an imaginary audience (a bit like De Niro in “The King of Comedy”). No wonder I became a writer, public speaker and failed actor.

Here’s the real secret. It occurred to me that if I am a “reviewer” (albeit a blogviewer), I might be able to write movies, books and CDs off on my taxes. Haven’t talked it over with the accountant yet, but I figured it might be worth a try. Lucky you.

Anewsment

• NASA uses eBay and Yahoo! to find spare parts.
• The Pentagon is using bomb-sniffing bees to protect us against terrorism.

Singing With Dictionaries and Corporate America

This is great — Dictionaraoke, a site where they’ve set voice dictionary software to read the lyrics of pop hits along w/ the sountracks. Bob Marley “Jamming” is outstanding, and Devo’s “It’s a Beautiful World” is pretty good. I also enjoyed The Beatles’ “Martha My Dear.”

I think I prefer this site even to the ZDNet UK’s Top 20 Corporate Anthems page, where disgruntled employees send in their companies’ morale-boosting corporate anthems. My favorite: “KPMG, we’re strong as can be, A team of power and energy, We go for the gold, Together we hold onto our vision of global strategy!”

FlavorPill

Just discoverd FlavorPill, a weekly email newsletter of hip cultural events in NYC. There is also a San Francisco edition, either currently or in the works.

Top 10 Signs Your Cat Is Trying to Kill You

Per my note the other day about the story of the Nova Scotia family that was terrorized by their Siamese cat, Letterman did his Top 10 List on the subject last night. Note to self: check litterbox for hidden weapons.

Thanks to reader Jeff Rutherford for pointing out that the photo I use below of Robert Johnson was the subject of a silly controversy in 1994 when the U.S. Post Office used the photo to issue a stamp of him, but they edited out the cigarette, to be PC. It was the first time they ever edited a photo for a stamp. Found a picture of ex-SNLer Norm Macdonald mocking the incident.

Celebrating Robert Johnson

Click here to hear a clip of Pat Donohue playing Robert Johnson on PHC; scroll down to “44:04 Robert Johnson segment.”

In case I haven’t made my politics clear yet on this blog, I think so-called President Bush is a big fat jerk. Say what you will about the “war on terrorism,” but while he’s keeping everyone focused on that hand, with the other he’s totally selling environmental concerns down river. This piece from the latest New Yorker does a nice job summing up the damage.

Siamese cats are so cool. My scanner’s not working, or I’d upload here one of our many pics or our two charmers. It’s stories like this one, however, that give them a bad rap. They’re like the pitbull of cats, tragically misunderstood and maligned in the media.