Bruner Blog

I’ve spent the morning browsing Flickr. Bayat’s Middleman series is by far the highlight.

Turns out, it’s part of a movement.

I used to love Daypop Top 40. It went away for a while. It’s back. Yay.

This week is “Go See Friends Do Standup Comedy Week.” There is doubtless a joke somewhere in the concept of going to see friends do standup routines. I like live comedy, but it’s a hard sell to get other friends to go see it with you. Up there with karaoke. There are those who do and those who don’t. When I invited a friend to see the Upright Citizens Brigade recently, she was dubious, saying, “The only comedy I’ve seen recently is friends who begged me to come see their act, and then they weren’t very good. What are you supposed to say?” Exactly.

Two weeks ago a group of colleagues and I went to see the amateur improv stylings of our workmate “Downtown” Jacob Brown. We had so much fun with our pre-show warm-up drinks at a nearby bar that when we arrived 15 minutes late for his show, the unprecedented happened: an amateur improv comedy show was sold out! I guess the laugh was on us. (Oh, come on, I’m sure that wasn’t the only laugh.) So we’re recommitted for this Thursday. Sober. We’re practicing our heckles. (”Booooo! Your spreadsheets are funnier than that joke!”)

Tonight, however, was the standup debut of dear friend Elizabeth Spiers, of one-time Gawker fame, and more recently of her own commercial blog empire including Dealbreaker, AboveTheLaw and, as of an hour or so ago, Fashionista. To my relief, as I told her after the show, “Thank God, you didn’t suck!” Seriously, not to damn with faint praise, she was quite funny and had the audience with her the whole routine (which was more than at least one other comic could say). Of course, it is no surprise to me that she is funny. In person, very deadpan but always on, and in her writing she may as well have invented snarky. But standup was a new form. No quite sure how she got roped into it, but she nailed it, mostly working with material of her incongruous Southern Baptist childhood.

The venue was a new club with an old-skool cabaret ambiance literally around the corner from my office, Comix. Strangely the menu had many more Comix than the stage had comics: a third of the menu items were dubbed Comix (because it’s funnier with an “x”) this or that food item, such as “Comix fries” (a virtual laugh riot of fried potato strips), while all but one of the five acts in the evening’s line-up were in fact humor writers but not standup comics. The one exception was Jessi Klein, who was quite hilarious (especially her routine as Andrew Dice Clay’s little sister). David Rakoff was characteristically dry as cremation ash in ripping on Rent; Jonathan Ames killed with a story of his small teenage penis, plus Monica Lewinsky ogling a sausage at Veselka ; spunky/scary host Catie Lazarus kept things humming with stories of failed relationship and clips of on-the-street Dr. Lazurus videos (yikes); and the other comic, not so much.

After party with NY bloggerati, including Alex Balk, Lindsay Robertson, Mark Graham, Kambri Crews, and others at Pop Burger.

The evening almost ended with a dance-off between me and some attention-starved hottie at the bar who kept busting a conspicuous grove thing to every weak-ass hip hop song that came on, but thankfully the DJ couldn’t be bothered to play my requested funktastic dance anthem, Flashlight. Just as well. One threat of comic disaster among friends per night is plenty.

Her: Didn’t you hear my melodious voice calling ‘Hold the bus!’?

Me: No, I didn’t. I’m sorry.

Her: Me too!

Me: You’re in luck. Here comes another one.

Her: I hope it’s not the same driver as this morning. I had diarrhea. She kicked me off the bus. It took me an hour to clean myself up. I had a delicious shrimp salad at Whole Foods in the morning.

Me. Apparently it wasn’t that good.

Her: I don’t care. I lost 110 pounds last year! I had bariatric surgery. It literally saved my life. I felt bad for inconveniencing those people, though.

I was really mad at the M6 driver. He wouldn’t give me a transfer! I left him a “little something.” How was I supposed to get to 96th Street without a transfer??

Me: Well, I hope your day gets better.

A friend sent an annual holiday card today, noting that, yes, it’s fairly well past the holiday season, but so what. I wrote her a reply with an update from our family. I figured, since I don’t post often enough to this blog, some of you might also enjoy it.

I’m still at DoubleClick and loving it. [I wrote more stuff about my job in this section, but I don’t like to blog about my job, so I’ll just skip that, but it was all good. I prefer to keep the blog to fart jokes and sexual innuendos so I can maintain some sense of professionalism at the office (by contrast).]

Meanwhile, Adi has been pursuing a career as a film editor the last few years, which is a long slog, lots of dues to pay (literal and figurative; she joined the Editor’s Guild union last year). She’ worked on interesting projects, tho, including assisting on a feature by Ethan Hawke and editing two short films that are likely to do well on the festival circuit. She’s also working with some underground film artists, which she’s loving, namely Nick Zedd and Nate Hill.

With no kids of our own (we love kids, especially the part where they go home with someone else at the end of the day), I have the spare time to pursue various hobbies. Lately these include (don’t laugh) unicycle riding (I can go a hundred feet or two, but I’m still kinda wobbly; seemed like a fun thing to learn after 40 tho), ukulele playing (no, it’s not all stuff with “U”s; I like to sing and wanted something to accompany myself on, and it’s small and cute and easy to take on biz trips), and photography. Plus other stuff. 2007 plans include lessons in the following:

• Ballroom dancing
• Cooking (I love to cook but am pretty much self-taught)
• Magic (studied as a kid and can still amaze with a few card tricks
  but want to learn a few more)

• Improv (figure it would be good for biz skills to think on my feet, as well as indulge a youthful fancy: acting)
• and a few other equally ridiculous things that I forget at the
  moment but have written down in a notebook.

That’s about as close as I came to resolutions this year. I recently clipped out a cartoon from the New Yorker and hung on the fridge that says, “Honey, do you think we’ll ever regret having two houseplants and a bowl of pebbles instead of kids?” Somehow I doubt it. Besides, we also have two charming kitties.

[In retrospect, this seems like a bad idea to post. We, or rather I, sound like a ridiculous looser. But, when it’s all you got and you got a blog, the truth beckons.]

The bad smell that engulfed most of Manhattan yesterday, spreading anxiety to mild panic among city residents, whose thoughts of course went to terrorism (because of the wide range of areas reporting the smell): New Jersey. The EPA is blaming it on swamp gas somewhere around Secaucus. Mmmm, mercaptan.