Bruner Blog

Another weird fetishist site from Jay (a bubble gum blowers’ photo gallery, in this case). I don’t know, Jay, what is the difference between a teacher and a train?

Interesting futurist page (thanks to Jay for the tip).

I’m bloated. Adi’s out of town for two weeks, and I have lots and lots cake left over from the party. I may soon no longer be buff.

I’ve been out of town a couple of days, so I’m late on this, but Nick Denton, who frequently tries to offer a European point of view on American issues (and in this post admits to being a “European nationalist”), offered this interesting “Declaration of European Independence” on Monday that’s worth reading. A couple of excerpts:

First, the US rightly suspects that European multilateralism is a devious way to inhibit its power; it might better respect open rivalry. The aversion to armed conflict is deep within the European psyche; it is time for Europe to exorcise the ghosts of the two world wars. Finally, the US has become complacent and arrogant: a bit of real competition would do it good.

…

People say that Europe doesn’t have the will or resources to build up an independent military, but it doesn’t need to match US military spending. Remember that the majority of US military expenditure goes on expensive toys for spoilt airmen, and bases in the districts of influential congressmen. By starting from scratch, a common European defense force could achieve substantial efficiencies. For a blueprint, just take some of Rumsfeld’s more radical notions, which will never make it through the military-industrial complex in the US. So here’s the plan…

Nick Denton points out this piece in the NY Post saying:

Israel has canceled an Albert Einstein exhibit in China after Beijing officials insisted there be no reference to his being Jewish or a supporter of the Jewish state, a government spokesman said yesterday.

After hanging out with bloggers intensively for the last month or so, I can assure you that bloggers are not cool, as Jeff Jarvis observed recently (thanks to Elizabeth for the tip).

Elizabeth and Jeff are among the bloggers I’ve been hanging out with frequently of late, and I mean them and the rest of the gang no offense. It’s just…”cool”? I don’t think so. And bear in mind, I include myself in the category. I like these people, which is why I am hanging around with them of late, but they’re pretty much like the nerds I hung out with in high school, only older and frequently drunker.

This lack of cool was in evidence last Saturday at Adi & Miki’s birthday party at our house this weekend. The bloggers, about eight of them including several “well known” bloggers (I’ll spare the who’s who), were the first to arrive (how cool is that?) and spent virtually the entire night talking about Dave Winer whinings and other recent bloggossip. With only one gratefully acknowledged exception, none of them danced. And the Hungarians (who, simply by virtue of their European-ness and the fact that they are a generally beautiful breed, must be recognized as having some greater “cool” status) were observed at least once to be mocking the bloggers for our blog talk.

No, we bloggers aren’t cool, not since the 25th writing of the “blogs are neat” story in the mainstream press. But I’m happy to contribute the Bruner Blog to the blogosphere and hang out with my NYC blog posse on the weekends nonetheless, because that’s just that kind of middle-to-late early adopter kind of nerd I am.

Here is another example of why computers and the Internet are just too hard to use, or rather, how incredibly stupid and dysfunctional Microsoft is.

I am not a great fan of instant messenging, but a friend has been bugging me to get MSN Messenger. I already have Yahoo’s and AOL’s IM tools, and I generally think Microsoft has too much control of my life already, but he’s hung up that MSN Messenger is the best, so I relented and decided to install MSN Messenger today after he bugged me about it again. So I download and install it and am prompted for my .Net Passport password, thusly:

Again, I’m not thrilled about giving Microsoft any more information about me, but I’ve got to register to use it, so I click the link that reads “Don’t have a Passport? Get one here” and I am met with this error message:

It’s telling me I don’t have a browser installed. I’m using Microsoft Explorer 6.0 and Microsoft Windows 2000, and Microsoft MSN Messenger can’t find a browswer on my computer? I’ve searched throughout the settings in IE to make sure it’s the default browser, but I can’t find any such. Besides, though, it’s the only browser on my machine. I can even generate the error message starting in the browser, selecting “Messenger” under the tools menu and then try to create a new Passport that way. How absurd.

Sorry friend, you’ll just have to call or email me.

An Update

This is a sad comment on the economy. I remember when I was a kid in Northern Jersey and my older sister would go into NYC to the Russia Tea Room as a teenager, I thought that sounded really cool and sophisticated. I never actually made it there myself.

Is it just me, or have telemarketers gotten even worse since the collapse of WorldCom? I’ve had the same phone number for three years, but telemarketers have been on a bananza in recent weeks. After two calls so far this morning, I finally got around to signing up on the NY No Call List, which, thanks to Pataki’s legislation a couple of years ago, means they’re liable for a $5,000 fine if keep you on their lists after you’re registered with this service of the New York State Consumer Protection Board.

So long, and thanks for all the fish. NY loves you. You’re not far, just a Fung Wah ride away, come back for the good parties.

The NYT’s respected language columnist William Safire has a column today about blogs, calling the word “a useful addition to the lexicon.”

Is my blog HOT or NOT?

Have been remiss in blogging on films I’ve seen recently. Can’t claim them as a biz expense for taxes if I don’t review them, so here’s a quick catch-up:

• Men in Black II - to hell with everyone who panned this film, I thought it was great, the only summer blockbuster I’ve enjoyed so far. My friend and I were laughing about it again the next day, and we howled throughout the film. Laura Flynn Bolye was excellent as the evil space monster threatening earth, and even if Will Smith was a bit over the top, he’s earned the right and the film delivered lots of laughs. Tommy Lee Jones was excellent as always, and the effects were superb. Cameos by the likes of Michael Jackson and Martha Stewart as alien imposters were great. If you liked the first one, go see it while it’s still in the theaters.
• Sunshine State - Very good film by director/writer John Sayles (Men with Guns and Lone Star) with a great cast, including Agela Bassett (who over-acts a bit), Edie Falco (an excellent performance), Timothy Hutton and many others. Reminiscent of Short Cuts in its stringing together several overlapping narratives of many characters. Set on a Florida island with a history of a prominent black middle class, the story revolves around two women (Bassett and Falco) facing their pasts in the face of a massive real estate development project. Beautifully acted, filmed and edited, it’s slow and rewarding.
• Until the End of the World - Ugh. Adi brought this 1991 Wim Wenders film home on video the other night. She loved it — her whole Euro art thing — but I found it really hard to stick with. Starring William Hurt, Solveig Dommartin (also in Wenders’s 1987 masterpiece Wings of Desire) and Max von Sydow (who is also in Minority Report) and a cast of many more (including, I see on IMDB, uncredited cameos I missed by Tom Waits and David Byrne). The photography and editing were beautiful, but the tortured plot just left me in the dust: woman crashes into bank robbers, carries their stash to Paris for a 30% cut, meets Hurt, a mysterious hitchhiker who steals a small bit of her loot and she becomes obsessed, following him around the world (Tokyo, San Francisco, Paris and 12 other cities on four continents), in a nonsensical cat-and-mouse chase that includes her ex-boyfriend, a detective, a bounty hunter and others. Then the second half of the film is set in the Australian desert with a team of aboriginal scientists helping Hurt’s maniacal father, von Sydow, with his neuro-computer lab to let his blind wife see and, later, after her death, to record people’s dreams (driving them mad)… Visually very stimulating, and amazing all-star soundtrack, but it was impossible to take seriously. Maybe it makes more sense in the five-hour director’s cut, but Adi will be watching that without me.
• Minority Report - Eh. I’d rate it a B-. The effects were cool and the basic premise was vaguely interesting, but my Tom Cruise aversion remains intact, and the plot was just too stupid to be tolerated. I have something like a three-strike policy for plot holes before my suspension of disbelief collapses. There were so many, I’ll just name a few: with no weapons, he beats up 10 cops with jet packs and a wide assortment of futuristic pain inflicting devices and makes a clean getaway; immediately afterwards, he beats up 10 feds, including doing battle in the midst of a robotic car manufacturing plant, and no factory employee is anywhere to be seen to stop the dangerous assembly process the two are battling through before Cruise is pinned under the front seat that a robotic arm slams down on top of him and a bed of spikes, yet Cruise then sits up in the car (an extremely cool ride, I’ll confess; a Lexus) and finds it fully fueled with keys in the ignition so that he could just drive off and make a clean getaway; he continues to drive this very conspicous car throughout the rest of the movie, and no one in this Big Brother landscape can track it?; retinal scans are everywhere, and his eyeballs are the most sought after, yet they continue to grant him unfettered access to his own top-secret agency (even after they’re torn out of his head); three crack-baby psychics are going to police all crime in the entire U.S., if the evildoers would prevail… I liked Spielberg’s vision of 2054, with its sarcastic comment on the horrific future of advertising (yet ironically all the annoying 3D ad holograms are illustrated by product placement from a long list of 20th Century brands), and all the super high-tech jive was cool, but it was just too silly. Oh, also, once you understand what a “minority report” is according to the film’s convoluted logic, Cruise’s case doesn’t even turn out to be one, so why’d they call the movie that?
• Borne Identity - Big disappointment. I’m a fan of this kind of spy/psychological thriller genre, but the really good ones (Conspiracy Theory, Enemy of the State, The Conversation, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, The Third Man) are few and far between, and this definitely is not one of them. So many plot problems, where to begin? In the first five minutes, Matt Damon is dragged out of the ocean by a fishing boat, and while he’s passed out the ship’s captain (?) digs two bullets out of his back (with no anesthesia), which have only just broken the skin and are removed with tweasers, and out of curiousity (?) the captain also pries out a microchip embedded under the skin on Damon’s hip. Damon, who has amnesia, is content to hang out on the ship for two weeks (no one thought he could use some real medical attention after being shot and half-drowned?). And on and on, it just gets more implausible as it goes.

• Coming Attractions: I Spy
  - My friend and I saw this coming attraction (due out in the fall) for this comedy based on the old Bill Cosby TV series starring Eddie Murphy and Owen Wilson (who was quite good in The Royal Tenenbaums). If the trailer was anything to go by (and they are obvously often not), it looks hilarious. True, Murphy has his string of flops, but he’s also proven his brilliance with films like 48 Hrs., The Nutty Professor and the excellent Bowfinger, so I will give him the benefit of the doubt. Best of all, it’s set in my beloved Budapest!

To quote Nick at Miki’s wild-ass 4th of July party, “I love New York!” Ever since Adi and I moved to Manhattan three years ago, we have had a great time socially. I’ve twice before lived in cities where I’ve been fortunate to belong to a giant gang of friends: at college in Missoula, MT (shout out to Team Rasta!) and in Budapest in the early ’90s. In between Bp and NY, however, was a four-year dead zone known as San Francisco in the dot-com heyday. Feh! I’m having soooo much more fun here, even before Sept. 11, but since then we’ve only been partying harder, like we’re dancing to the Devil’s fiddle.

I couldn’t agree more with Nick (who I must point out has followed me from Budapest first to SF and now NYC) when he slags SF as a soulless backwater. No offense to my friends who do still live there, but I never went for that town. And neither Adi nor I ever really had what you could call a “gang” of friends there — a bunch of individuals and couples who gradually got to know each other through us, but no sense of a posse.

The NYC posse Adi and I are a now a part of is something to behold. Parties nearly every night of the week. For example, I’ll never live it down that I missed Gogol Bordello last Saturday (read Nick, Peter or Elizabeth raves). On Wednesday, Ildi got folks together for the Philharmonic in the park. Then last night… I’d like to think this photo about says it all:

What started out at Nick’s fabu new Soho loft as a big NYC blogger welcome to the Notorious M.E.G. (Jason, come visit, you’ll love it!), ended past 2am some funky dive on E. Houston (Rosi?) after passing in between thru the painfully chic GenArt party (a few thousand would-be glitterati), the venue for the photo above (no idea who the flanking freaks are, just the three in the middle). We were all on the guest list thanks to Pearl, who’s brilliant short film “Great Balls of Fire” was screened at the event.

At the end of the night, looking around the half-drunk group (to be generous) sprawled on the broken-down couches of the dark bar, it dawned on that this was an exceptional group of people. Earlier in the night I had told Meg that almost every one of dozen friends I had visited a few months ago in SF were unemployed and desperate for work. It struck me then, looking at one of these NYers — Cameron (the hottest Cam on the Net by popular vote), Anil (who remained deliberately vague in his irony about the blog-groupie comment), Elizabeth, Pearl, Joan, Ildi, Sapna, Caroline, the other Nick (and anyone else I’m blanking on) — none of them had “normal” jobs (duh, we’re in a bar at 2am on a school night), with the possible exception of Anil (who doesn’t have to show up for work before noon). But none of them were complaining, either. There were all getting by somehow, a bunch of slack-happy freelancer beautiful bohemian freaks, to a person. They were also a microcosm for our extended group of 50+ folks who all regularly hang around together, made up of a motley collection of Gen Expats, Magyars, film makers, journalists, netrepreneurs, artists and, most recently, bloggers (since the welcome social impact of Mr. Denton’s arrival to town, a mere 2 months ago (seems so much longer!)). Whatever it is that unites this group, I’m glad for it and will raise a beer to it at my next opportunity.

Nick, I hear, is doing something again tonight, but I’m going to have to pass, needing one night to recuperate and plan our birthday dance party for Adi and Miki tomorrow night…

Cameron, stay!

Shout out to Gaby D, with her own rap-MC-styling domain and everything.