Bruner Blog

Ugh. I could cry.

How do people keep up with their email? Seriously? It’s the bane of my existence, that and T&E expenses, which have cost me a personal fortune. I could make a down payment on a 3 bedroom in NYC with what I’ve mismanaged in T&E expenses.

Where was I? Oh yes, how ESOMAR ruined my night. ESOMAR is some French acronym for a prestigious international research body. A few years ago I spoke at one of their annual conferences in Montreal. Since then, I’ve routinely ignored their emails, since they haven’t invited me to speak again.

If I didn’t mention, I get a lot of email. I don’t know how many; I don’t like to count. Hundreds a day, I’m sure, including newsletters (from organizations like ESOMAR) and lots of other stuff. Most of it I file without reading. Such as ESOMAR.

But reading an email from a colleague, she mentions that she’s going to be out next week at the annual ESOMAR conference, being held in Budapest.

Hello? Or should I say Halo? (Hungarians will tell you that “hello” is derived from a Hungarian world based on Alexander Graham Bell’s assistant, who was Hungarian, who answered the first phone call. Hungarians say “halo” for “hello” and claim it has something to do with the verb to hear, halni, but I think it’s all a dubious wishful thinking. In fact, I seem to recall it dates back to Shakespeare.)

Point is, I lived in Budapest for five frickin’ years! I have tons of friends there. Had I known ESOMAR was taking place in Budapest this year, I definitely would have boondoggled it! Why, why, why did no one tell me? <sob>

I hadn’t updated my Flickr account in a few months. So I just got around to it. If you been around me with a camera any time in the last few months, there may be picks of you here.

Here’s the complete set. Also, San Francisco, Palo Alto, Amsterdam.

They’ve got the lip syncing on all the silly banter down pretty impressively.

This shit is insane. By random JukeTube surfing, I stumbled upon Zack Kim, a Korean kid is so inanely talented on the guitar it’s mind boggling. Here’s his blog. Here’s a bunch of his stuff on YouTube. According to his blog, he’s in the army, having recently completed basic training, until December 2009! And he says he has almost no time to practice guitar, which is criminal when you see the amazing music he makes.

He’s got this technique I’ve never seen before, where he plays two guitars, one mounted on a clamp, and the other slung around his neck almost like a normal guitar, except that he plays them simultaneously almost like a keyboard, tapping out two parallel melody lines and chords, like two people playing together from the same mind. I showed a few of these to a guitarist/composer/professor friend of mine, who was blown away, saying what this kid is doing is fantastically difficult.

Yet he does it effortlessly. I honestly think he’s the best guitarist I’ve ever seen. It’s like he’s separated the two hemispheres of his brain to play two independent melody lines ambidextrously.

He specializes in classical (e.g., Beethoven’s Fur Elise, Mozart’s Sonata in Cmajor K545, Bach’s Goldberg Variation 1), jazz (e.g., Take Five, Fly Me to the Moon and Autumn Leaves), and TV and video game themes (e.g., Super Mario, Tetris and The Simpsons, below).

Normally, I don’t post UkeTube videos of instrumentalists, as I’m a singer/strummer myself. (Which reminds me, Joe Strummer of Clash fame got his start in music during his hippie youth busking on the streets of London with a ukulele, a factoid I picked up in the documentary Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten.)

But, I do keep track of hot ladies of ukulele, and Brittni Paiva qualifies. She’s cute and she’s a shreader on the uke, as this terrific rendition of Over the Rainbow attests.