Bruner Blog

So, since my earlier report about the fire in the post-production offices of Ethan Hawke’s upcoming film The Hottest State, I am delighted to update with the news that the rough cut and much of the equipment involved with the project seems to have survived the fire intact! (So did some lucky guy’s massive CD collection.) (BTW, I hedge, because this is a second-hand report and I’m not an insurance adjuster, so if you really have a need to know, don’t take my word for it.)

My wife just visited the building with some of the rest of the production team where they were overjoyed to find that the fire was concentrated in the front side of the building, while the editing offices were at the back. Soot and grime, but all the editing work of the past few weeks was recovered.

Yay!

Big congratulations to Ari Paparo and his wife Dorie on the birth of their son Asa. I love that Asa, like Kira Lee, has his own blog, with a great mission statement: “It is primarily meant to embarrass him as a teenager, but for now it can also serve as a nice spot for friends and relatives to keep up with the little guy.”

Ari is one of my favorite people these days. I’m very happy for him.

And while I’m at it, a shout out to Jen Chung, of Gothamist fame, who just tied the knot last weekend (I’m always impressed by those whose weddings get a write-up in the Times.) Jen and I are only acquaintances, but she’s a nice gal, and I wish her and her new hubby, Jay Wilkins, all the best.

Oh, and congrats to Dave Frankland and his wife Domenica on the birth of Angela Dora a few weeks ago. No offense at the slight (I already congratulated him via email and in person), but if you don’t have a blog for your kid, for Christ sake, I can’t promise you a timely shout out.

Now would you all stop having babies for a few weeks so I can get some work done around here!?

File under “Labor of Love.” I discovered Wine Cellar Sorbets the other day, so I figured I’d give them a shout out. I was shopping at West Side Market and a guy offered me a taste, so I stopped, and he gave me the whole shpiel, and had me taste all six vintages. Basically, it is sorbet made from real wine, complete with alcohol content (~5%). The wine is from upstate NY, CA or OR, depending on the varietel, and the sorbet is made in a factory in Brooklyn.

It’s a peculiar taste, at first, as it’s not sweet, like you would expect from a sorbet, and the flavor is quite distinctly of wine. I’m not sure it’s an everyday desert, but it would certainly me a distinctive finish to a swell dinner party, and it’s just begging for further interpretation in some fancy compound desert concoction. I wouldn’t be surprised if some snooty restaurant in SoHo or someplace were already on that.

So far its retail availability is limited to just a few gourmet stores in NYC.

Ethan Hawke’s fire-gutted offices
5th Ave at 20th St.
Photo by Nated via Flickr

My wife’s latest project in the film world is as assistant editor on The Hottest State, written and directed by indie heart-throb actor Ethan Hawke. This weekend we were distressed to learn that Mr. Hawke’s offices and post-production studio caught fire and were pretty much destroyed. (Among the many losses, one colleague there had a CD collection of thousands of titles.) Details of the fire on Gothamist.

In some small consolation, the night before the fire she decided to take all of the master tapes of the film home for safe keeping. That will save some time in the re-editing and expense had they otherwise needed to re-master from the negatives (which were, thankfully, also stored elsewhere).

My sympathies to Mr. Hawke and all others involved. We’re still looking forward to a great film, although maybe a few weeks later than originally planned.

A perfect end to an otherwise shitty week began with sirens.

It’s Friday night and I’m 10 blocks away from home in my six mile bicycle commute when I hear the whoop-whoop of a cop car behind me. So I pull over to let it go by and am then struck by that awful realization that it’s whooping for me.

To cut to the chase, as it were, the cop (a woman with an Irish accent, thereby two opposite cop stereotypes canceling each other out) asks me if I realize that I just ran three red lights. (On my bicycle, mind you, in NYC.) Since it’s second nature for me to run red lights on my bike, I don’t know how to answer. I’m not saying here in writing that I did or I didn’t, but I may as well confess that I could easily believe that I did. In any event, I take a contrite attitude, basically apologizing, because what else am I going to do, deny what she believes she just witnessed? Or argue that “everybody does it.”

So I stand there for 15 minutes while she writes out two tickets. At first, I understood her to be giving me a warning and I’m unsure why she needs to actually write up a warning in ticket form, but since I’ve never been given a traffic summons before as far as I can recall I figure maybe this is how a warning is done.

She actually says, “I bet you’re thinking I have better things I should be doing,” which was pretty much exactly what I was thinking, but again, I just mutely neither agree nor disagree. I actually kept thanking her for patronizingly lecturing me that she was doing this for my own good, given that a bicyclist was killed just on the same street corner a couple of months ago after running a red light, or so she tells me about four times.

Finally, as she hands me the tickets, I naively ask, “Are there fines associated with these?” “Oh yes,” she says with a grin, “there are fines.”

The fucker gave me not one, but two tickets (for lights at two separate intersections, and since she began by telling me that I ran three lights, I guess I’m supposed to be grateful that she cut me a break on the third).

I quickly learned these are not $25 fines we’re talking about. According to the ticket, the fine for running a red light is “1st offence: $150 plus $50 surcharge.” (Why “plus $50 surcharge”? Why the hell not simply $200?) But then it says, “2nd offence: $300 plus $50 surcharge.”

So on Monday I have to call the Motor Vehicles Department (which promises to be fun *) to see whether receiving two tickets at once counts as a compound 1st offence or a 1st and 2nd offence to determine whether I merely owe $400 or in fact $550 in fines for running red lights on my bicycle.

(I actually thanked the bitch.)

If they’re going to start enforcing laws that for years they have ignored, shouldn’t they at least put out a press release first or something? Could I actually use that as a defense? Shouldn’t there be a statute of limitations on statutes?

What about jay walking? Have you visited New York in the last 60 years or so? Have you ever seen a bicyclist stop at a red light or a pedestrian care about what color the little man on the sign is? What about chewing gum or whistling on Sunday? Isn’t there something on the books about that, too? (I see there is a law against talking on a handheld cell phone while driving in NYC. I wonder how often they ticket people for that.)

It’s almost enough to make me want to go out and buy and SUV and choke the air with soot so that her grandchildren get painful rectal cancer and the ozone hole drops a fucking glacial ice shelf on her ass.

UPDATE

So, it’s Monday and I’ve tried answering my question above (whether my two tickets count as one or two offenses for the purposes of the graduated fines), and here’s a big surprise: the NYS Department of Motor Vehicles Moving Violation and Traffic Ticket Assistance help line (718 488-5710) is a piece of shit.

My experience was that for an hour the number was mostly busy with the occasional change of pace of unanswered ringing for 50 rings or so which then aborts into a busy signal. Finally, I actually get through to a message that tells me that my calls may be monitored, which is pointless, as it then dumps me into a purely automated system (so why are they going to record my call, just for jollies listening to me curse at the automated system?). Like the best of such automated systems, it’s an endless tree of options, none of which provides the answer to my question, of course.

So I’m thinking I’ll just mail them $200 and hope they go away. Thoughts?

My new favorite blog. I especially love this blog post headline.

Big congrats to Kevin, Allison and, of course, Kira!

After a year and a half of working a real job again after seven years of working out of my house, I’ve gotten into the swing of the normal routine pretty well: shaving every day, waking up before noon, working with clothes on, etc. But I’m still a fan of the afternoon nap.

I’m not alone in this. Plenty of research suggests that napping increases productivity. (Just look at how productive siesta-loving Spain and Mexico are…er, never mind.) So, yes, every now and then I doze off in my chair at the office for 15-20 minutes or so. Since I have a relatively isolated cube, I thought I could get away with it. Until today…

In my defense, I got up at 4:30 this morning, in Chicago on a biz trip, to finish a presentation for later in the day. (Let’s not dwell on the fact that I was supposed to have finished it a couple of days ago.) So I flew back, presented the material, which was well received, and then after the addrenline wore off, well, I got sleepy. So, I dozed.

Woke up, somewhat less refreshed than I’d hoped, and finished working on another document (a rewrite of something from a partner firm). I sent it to my boss and told her it still needed a bit of work, but I was really tired. “So I heard,” she said. “Apparently you were really snoring earlier.” Heads turned and quickly went back to their computer screens, quaking with stifled sniggering.

I’ve since been informed that my colleagues all gathered around me and had a good laugh. And yes, God help me, I’m a snorer! I’m just lucky they didn’t put chili peppers in my agape mouth or some such.

Well…at least I wasn’t drooling!!!

This has to be my favorite charity:

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 9/10 correct!

Yay for me. The annoying thing about this test is that it doesn’t tell you what answers you got wrong. But I figured out which was my mistake (question 2). I got all the actual math questions right. Thank goodness! (Further evidence of how mighty my brain is, I did all these while talking on the phone with my wife!)

Great homemade short documentary (5 min or so on Google Video), “A Meditation On the Speed Limit,” where a group of students drive in formation at 55 MPH on a highway while the drivers behind them go ballastic at having to abide by the legally posted speed limit.

In the Phoenix airport on Wednesday afternoon, I was leaving the baggage claim area when I noticed a group of female soldiers dressed in clean desert fatigues. In particular, I was struck by the beauty of one soldier in particular: tall, athletic, blond, fresh-faced, classic All-American wholesome beauty. She was being greeted by a tall handsome man with a cleanly shaven head and military bearing of his own, though he was dressed in civilian clothes. She was holding a bouquet of roses.

Just then, he lowered himself to one knee and opened and presented her with a small black jewelry box. I frantically scrambled to get my camera out of its bag and her friends shrieked with delight. Too soon for my reflexes, he stood and she tearfully embraced him, her face buried in his neck.

“She said ‘Yes,’” he announced to their friends.

It would have made an awesome picture.