Bruner Blog

Sadly, I can see that after Ashlee Simpson’s debacle last week on Saturday Night Live, everyone’s going to be scrutinizing musicians on SNL. Well, as the act following the Simposon scandal, Eminem didn’t do himself any favors by obviously lip-synching his new hot song Mosh. Not only was it not nearly as as cool as his animated video, he did move the mike down from his mouth clearly before his “singing” stopped. I’m sure you’ll see clips on it around the blogosphere shortly.

UPDATE:

At least one other blogger caught it, plus a bunch of folks on NBC’s official SNL discussion board also complaining about it. Lame.

This is a long, pointless story, but it’s my blog, so lump it.

This afternoon, I bicycled all the way down to the East Village to the Irving Plaza to buy tickets for tonight’s Gogol Bordello concert ($23.50 from the box office vs. $35 from Ticket Fucker), but I got there at 4:03, and they nominally closed the doors at 4:00 (though another guy also disappointed said he got there at 4:01 and there was every sign the metal gates had been closed more than a minute earlier). Fuckers. Gogol Bordello is fun, but I’ll be damned if I’ll pay $35 to see them just because I was three minutes late.

Aaanyway, on my dejected ride home I cut through the Union Square farmer’s market and found a woman selling Concord grapes.

Concord grapes smell like about eight years old to me. Our next door neighbor had a grape arbor and grew Concord grapes, and my grandmother made jelly from them. I loved my grandmother very much. She lived with us through all of my childhood.

In a fit of nostalgia, I decided I’d make grape jelly. All you need, really, is Concord grapes, sugar, pectin and cheese cloth. So, I had Concord grapes and sugar, all I needed was cheese cloth and pectin.

But where the hell do you get cheese cloth and pectin at 9pm on a Saturday night in Harlem? I jumped on my queer little Strida bicycle and decided to head off to Fairway Market, which bills itself simply as “Like no other market.” Upper West Side New Yorkers get all hot and trembly when they talk about Fairway; it’s got a huge cold room for meat and everything. I am lucky enough to live just a few blocks from the 132nd St. Fairway, which is actually even bigger (and cheaper!) than the 74th St. one. But, “like no other market?” Well, inasmuch as the large supermarkets I grew up patronizing in suburban New Jersey had fucking pectin, yes, Fairway is not like those markets. (In fairness, they did have cheese cloth. Big whoop.)

Next stop, a Pioneer market on Lenox at 116th, the largest supermarket I know of in Manhattan, quite like the big suburban markets of my youth…in every respect except for the fucking pectin!

If you want snouts, Harlem is for you. If you want pickled herring (another recent quest) or pectin, you need to shop downtown or west of the Hudson. Tomorrow moring: Zabar’s.

UPDATE:
Zabar’s, much to my surprise, was also a bust, though some nearby health food store finally came through.

FURTHER UPDATE:
You’ll all be pleased to know that the jelly came out great.

The CEO of my new company really likes Halloween and encourages the whole office to dress up. So maybe a couple of hundred folks did. Martha in Prison was the crowd favorite.

Myself, I dressed as a blogger: ratty bathrobe, gym shorts (might look a bit like boxers), very ratty slippers, my I’m Bloggin This t-shirt, and, for good measure, a teddy bear. I also didn’t shave or wash my hair for two days. I’d include a photo but it’s not a pretty picture. The irony is that this is exactly how I dressed (minus the gym shorts) for the past three years while freelancing. (Kind of Odd Todd, though that seemed too 2001 to reference.)

Turned out the joke was on me: even at this most Internet-savvy of firms, one of the original dot-coms, quite a few people gave me a blank stare when I told them I was a blogger. “Uh…nevermind, let’s just say I’m a tele-commuter.”

I took a bunch of photos of other folks and made mental notes of ironies, but I don’t plan to be one of these folks who gets fired for blogging, so I’ll keep it to myself.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking of attending a costume party Saturday that promises to be full of bloggers. I’ll have to think of something else to wear; I don’t think the blogger=slacker costume would work so well there.

UPDATE:
Uh-oh. Apparently enough people here are savvy enough about blogs that two people at work have mentioned this blog entry to me already Monday morning. I think my new policy is never blogging about my job at all.

From Mark. Who else?

Last spring I redesigned this blog. One of the features I added at that time was the “Ever-Changing Miscellaneous Items of Interest” links in the left-hand column. Very much in the spirit of Anil Dash’s Links blog (which, I just notice, he inexplicably seems to have retired a month ago??).

I don’t know whether Anil was the first to do a links-only sidebar blog-within-a-blog like that, but his was the first I’d seen and is very well known, although I now notice lots of other bloggers do the same. It’s indeed a very handy idea; sometimes you just don’t have a lot to say, are pressed for time or a link with a headline just speaks for itself (especially using a bonus mouse-over comment in the anchor tag’s optional title field, which I also copped from Anil).

What’s a bit lame is that Movable Type does not allow this kind of Remaindered Links Blog as a standard feature; neither does any other blog publishing platform that I’m aware of. Even more lame, as Anil now works at Six Apart, which produces Movable Type, although he was doing that feature before he joined the staff there.

So, like the rest of those who enable this feature, I kludged it back in March when I switched over to MT from Blogger. I did so at the time using a flaky work-around with MT categories. It worked kinda okay, but the archives were a bit screwy, and it didn’t publish right to RSS (the ultimate point of this message). So, I just asked my favorite MT jockey, Nick Aster, to straighten it out for me, and he just did so the other day. To be honest, I didn’t pay close attention to how he did so (something along the lines of creating it as a separate blog and using the tag <MTOtherBlog> and a server-side include; I’ll have him explain it in more detail, if anyone actually gives a shit).

Anyway, the real point of this post is that if you are among the rarified Bruner Blog readers who actually subscribes to the XML feed, and you are also interested in receiving the Miscellaneous Links, you’ll now need to subscribe to those separately:

I’ve always been a fan of Chris Elliott. He might be best known for his roles in
There’s Something About Mary, Groundhog Day, a recurring role on Everybody Love Raymond and, apparently, a stint on Saturday Night Live (news to me), but to me he’ll always be The Guy Under the Seats on Letterman (where he was a staff writer for a few years).

Kind of a surprise then to see him while channel surfing in a bit of a departure role in the first of a two-part episode on Third Watch as a serial rapist/murderer.

I’ve been sorry that he’s never taken off to the extent I have always thought he deserved. I hope he’s just a big fan of a rather mediocre cop show or yearning to try to expand his acting skills and that this isn’t a sign of his career heading down the toilet.

Listen Up offers more evidence of my theory that life on TV isn’t real.

I’ve been on a tear seeing Chinese films recently. This isn’t really because I have any special love for Chinese films. I saw Hero on the advice of my friend Andras, and it is my top pick of the bunch , with a relatively big budget and slick production values, a epic set some several hundred years ago. Great stuff. Adi recommended the other two: Infernal Affairs — we saw one of a three-part series (I can’t tell you which part we saw, though), at a normal art theater, which I wasn’t so crazy about — and The World (Shijie) (2004), a quite dreamy, arty film about modern youth in Beijing (quite true to my own limited experience there), which we saw at the NY Film Festival (which has an
astonishingly shitty web site).

Hard to say anything definitive about the nation’s film industry or film culture based on three films, but I did like them all (Hero most, Infernal Affairs least). More grist for my theory that they’re going to buy and sell our asses before breakfast in a couple of years. Anyway, a culture worth getting to know. Now playing at a theater near you (if you live in NYC or LA, anyway).

I’m looking forward to the polls next week on the debate. Granted, Bush didn’t wet himself or start throwing furniture and crying, but, in addition to calling Kerry “Kennedy” and the Internet “the Internets,” my favorite moment was the last question, when the woman asked Bush to name three mistakes he’s made, and he refused to concede a single one. I was glad to see the NY Times picked up on it in their editorial today.

Fun party last night. If I forgot to invite you, really sorry. Slipped my mind, but I do value your friendship.

Reasonable turn out. Nothing for the record books, but probably 40 or so passed thru the doors, including a few from the popular crowd who may have made little more than a token appearance, but that was appreciated nonetheless, considering what a miserable schlep it is to my neighborhood from the hipper parts of town.

A highlight of the evening was the appearance of a guy I went to high school with. I can’t really call him a friend from high school as he was a year younger, the brother of a guy in my class, and I (to be generous) barely remember him from then. But in the last couple of years, we’ve met a few times; turns out we work in the same industry. I spent an evening with him and his brother a year or so ago, but frankly I was paying more attention to his brother on that occasion, who I knew reasonably well (in fact, I think we go all the way back to grade school together). Well, older brother is now a boring family man, but younger brother is life-of-the-party material. Really. Not only charming, stylishly dressed, and not fewer five people wondered if he and I were brothers (did I mention devilishly handsome?), but he also came bearing gifts. Granted, they probably cost him not more than $5 at a party supply shop — heart and flower stickers than he affixed to many a lapel, Mardi Gras beads, a blinking psychedelic ring (for moi) — but the point was no one else showed up with cute gifts that made people smile. Class act.

The dancing wasn’t quite as ferocious and sweaty as I had hoped, but it was fun. After the ranks thinned out and everyone had repaired to the kitchen for a while, I forced them all back onto the dance floor for one hellishly great dance song: “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” as done by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Only drawback is it’s an 11-minute jam. Someone really needs to do a remix of that and shorten it to 5-7 minutes; 11 minutes is a bit long to hold a groove (given that this wasn’t a rave and no chemicals that I was aware of).

Place didn’t get trashed, no hysterical dramas, reasonable amount of dancing, last stragglers out by three, and, best of all, enough leftover wine to last me (it’s mostly red; Adi drinks only white) at least two months (yes, that’s a lot of wine, not personal restraint).