Bruner Blog

My birthday’s in less than two weeks. You’d best not delay.

On the Pope’s visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau WWII death camp in Poland yesterday, a vivid rainbow appeared overhead.

Yay! “The Treatment,” the feature film Adi worked on recently, just got picked up by an international distributor at Cannes:

CMG Scoops Int’l Rights to 2005 Tribeca Fest Winner, “The Treatment”

Cinema Management Group (CMG) has acquired all international rights to the romantic comedy, “The Treatment” which won the Tribeca Film Festival’s “Made in New York - Best Narrative Feature” award recently. The film, which will be offered at the Cannes Market, was directed by Oren Rudavsky (”Hiding and Seeking”) and is described as a “moving and funny love story about a nerdy but likeable intellectual who finds the woman of his dreams, with an eccentric Freudian psychoanalyst.” Chris Eigeman (”The Last Days of Disco”) and Ian Holm (”The Lord of the Rings”) star in the film. “We are thrilled to have discovered ‘The Treatment’ at Tribeca,” commented GMG president Edward Noeltner in a statement. “It’s the perfect New York City-set movie, a little neurotic, very attaching, and in the end you just can’t get enough of the characters.”

This is sooooo irritating. I flew up to Boston and back on business Tuesday. Of course it was an e-ticket, and because I wasn’t checking any baggage, I got my boarding pass printed out at one of those kiosks, which is my routine. I fly a lot, so I have the drill down pretty well. But this was a new one.

Today, I look at my bank statement online, and see that I somehow managed to buy a one-way ticket from the kiosk for my return flight from Boston. The effing kiosk ran a con on me!

I remember nothing unusual about the kiosk interface. It all seemed routine. I entered my personal credit card in the kiosk as its means of identifying me, I noted my flight, and it printed the boarding pass. All perfectly normaly. No “Please enter your PIN code now,” no “Are you sure you want to purchase this ticket?” Just, “Okay, Mr. Bruner, you’re all set, have a nice day” (not an actual quote, but you get the idea).

So now I have to spend half my morning fighting on the phone with Delta reps, I’m sure. Meanwhile, my company’s travel agency has confirmed that my return ticket is still open.

Be warned: the airlines have found yet another way to screw their customers: the shell game.

UPDATE:
Thanks to the efforts of the excellent team of travel agents at my company, it looks like Delta will refund me for the snafu. Thanks Joanne!

FURTHER UPDATE:
They paid up. Thanks again, Joanne!

Oh yeah, now I remember what I wanted to post.

As usual, I’m incredibly late to this story — six to nine months late or so, I guess. A year or so ago, like a lot of people at the time I found online the illegally released MP3 version of Fiona Apple’s long-shelved third album “Extraordinary Machine.” I downloaded the MP3s and fell in love with the album. Although I only noted it in my Links Blog at the time and not here on the main blog, I raved about the album to a lot of friends and listened to it incessently for weeks. Before that, I was barely aware of who Fiona Apple was (and I still don’t know her earlier music).

As a rule, I don’t like to pirate music, but since this album wasn’t available commercially at the time (owing to disagreements between Apple and Epic/Sony), I had little choice. (Wikipedia has the whole backstory, of course.)

Somewhere along the lines, however, I did a boneheaded thing and deleted my MP3s of the album (thinking, erroneously, that I had it backed up), and by then the pirate directory where I had found it was gone. But by then, Epic had also seen fit to release the album after all, owing to the outpouring of enthusiasm for it online, after which it promptly went gold as Apple’s best-selling album to date. So I went out and bought a copy of the album the other day.

But here’s the deal: they reworked most of the songs from the album, and I really like the MP3 version better. Anyone else agree? Better yet, does anyone else know where I can get copies of those earlier versions of the songs?

I had something in mind to blog last night but I was too tired. Now I’m on a boring conference call (at 9pm, with a Hong Kong partner), but I can’t remember what I wanted to blog.

Man, I’m a crappy blogger these days. I’m going to try to get on that.

OMFG. This is the bravest comedy routine in history. The last gasp of democracy, one may well fear.

I am so depressed about politics these days, I can’t bear to think of it. If this administration is able to walk away from this latest outrage of monitoring the calls of 200 million Amerikans, I am going to blow a gasket. I am definitely ready to pick up a sign and march in the streets this weekend, if there’s the slightest opportunity. Maybe I’ll just have to have a protest of one and see if I can get the ball rolling.

And just when you’re sure it can’t get any bleaker, it gets even bleaker. Adi calls my attention now to this: Richard Kelly, director of the subversive Danny Darko movie, is having his long-anticipated second movie premier at Cannes: Southland Tales, which tells the story of a near future in which the U.S. becomes a police state following another major terrorist attack. Except that…this part isn’t the movie, it’s real life…the Department of Homeland Security has reportedly confiscated Kelly’s passport because his name is similar to that of a most-wanted terrorist (and apparently they can’t tell the difference), so he may miss the premier of his own film at Cannes. Needless to say, he’s muttering that it seems like a suspicious coincidence to him, given his film’s subject matter.

There probably isn’t a god, but for the sake of dramatic effect let me say: There is a God. What else could explain Gogol Bordello and Kultur Shock performing together June 9th at the Irving Plaza (buy your tickets today!!!) TWO DAYS BEFORE MY BIRTHDAY?!?!? (Better still, my birthday is on a Sunday — a bad day to lay seed for a hangover &mdash but the concert is on a Friday!!!)

Regular Bruner Blog readers, if there is such a freakish audience segment, may have heard before of Gogol Bordello. Gogol Bordello I know only from a couple of live concerts. (Elizabeth, I’m not dreaming this: you and I saw a poster at one of their concerts that featured an innocent fawn giving cunnilingus to a woodland nymph, right? I’ve never again been able to find that image online, lo though I’ve tried.) Kultur Shock I know only from two CDs. Gogol Bordello, a NYC band, is getting top billing at Irving Plaza, with reference only to “special guests” on Irving Plaza’s site. But, love Gogol Bordello as I do, I’m most interested in seeing Kultur Shock.

Since I first discovered them in the most unlikely medium of NPR’s Fresh Air, I’ve been a raging fan of this insanely great band. Based in Seattle, with two Bosnian members (one Bosnia Serb, one Bosnian Croat), a Bulgarian, a Japanese and two Amerikans, they’re rather hard to categorize. (Here’s their record company’s attempt; here the’s band’s own attempt.) I’d over-simplify by saying, akin to Gogol Bordello (a natural pairing), “Eastern-European-Amerikan punk.” Something like Butthole Surfers meets Boban Markovic

Of their three albums, I have two: their earlier “FUCC the I.N.S.” is amazing (”Montenegro” is one of my all-time favorite songs), but their more recent “Kultura-Diktatura” is also good. I have very high hopes for their upcoming 2006 release, “We Came to Take Your Jobs Away,” which has to be one of the best album titles ever.

Anyway, if you’re a friend of mine or you just want to witness a life-altering concert event, show up at Irving Plaza on June 9. It almost makes me happy to be turning 41. There will be pictures (if I can figure out a good way to slam dance with a digital SLR).

I love having a 17-year-old nephew. He has been telling me who all the cool bands are lately (I closed the IM window, damn; so I have to wait for the CD he’s burning me), and we argue about Selling Out to The Man and the riteousness of pirating music, and so forth. (I love that he actually got busted by his ISP a year or two ago for pirating trading full-length movies with friends; the lesson didn’t seem to stick.)

We are IMing a fair bit lately. My favorite new IM slang I just picked up from him: “w/e.” I got it from context: “whatever.” So Gen Y.

I’m so pleased to report that “The Treatment,” the first feature film by director Oren Rudavsky (and Adi’s first feature film project, credited as “associate editor”), which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last week, was awarded “Best Made in New York Narrative Feature” by the festival! Yay! Major congrats to all involved.

Miki throws a great party. (Congrats, BTW, to Judit and her lucky guy!) Red films over the lights set a great party mood but made for some weird photos.

Lots more party pics here.

This morning at 3am I got out of bed and, as I stood in the hallway, the door clicking shut behind me, I roused from my slumber enough to remembered that I am staying at a hotel this week and, in my misdirected march to the bathroom, I had not taken my room key with me. Down at reception, getting another key, the amused clerk assured me it was hardly the first time she encountered this. “More people than you would think,” she added, sleep in the nude.

UPDATE:
This evening, my receptionist friend declined to let me take her picture (which I would have promptly blogged here, or course). She noted with some glee, however, “I’ve got a picture of you, though,” pointing to the security camera above the counter. “Don’t worry. It gets deleted after a week.” Quite a lot of comfort that is. I just pray the bartender doesn’t upload it to YouTube first!