Bruner Blog

Sean Harvey is a genius. Good buddy, colleague, buddy uke master, he performs a bluesy original here, “Crime Pays,” recorded in my apartment with my Flip camera earlier this evening. It’s hysterical. Please click through to its YouTube page and give it 5 stars, favorite, leave comments and tell all your friends!

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.

One of the best business trips ever: conference in Barcelona, España (preceded by a couple of days in Madrid). Both beautiful cities, but Barcelona in particular captured my heart. I’ve been to both cities before, but it’s been quite a while.

A highlight was certainly the calçot festival in a neighborhood barrio, organized in part by Jazz, the boyfriend of a friend of ours who moved a year ago to Barcelona. A Catalan tradition, the festivals are done in the winter months around the region, wherein heaps of the calçot, a kind of leek, are roasted over an open fire then dipped in a salvitxada or romesco sauce, which is one of the most delicious things I’ve ever eaten (the sauce in particular). Pictures of the festival here and Barcelona trip in general here.

If it makes you feel any better, now I’m sitting in a drab hotel room in Düsseldorf preparing to do several months worth of back travel expenses.

Mommy, I don’t feel so good.

It was a New Year’s Eve celebration as they are meant to be celebrated, I supposed, at least in some debauched fantasy of how New Year’s Eve should be celebrated in downtown NYC. With Adi not feeling well, but an out-of-town buddy to entertain, along with two other stags, we pretty much ripped it up old-skool. Luckily, I had my camera with me, so the elements of today’s hangover are captured forever on Flickr.

We started at a J’s Greenwich Village bachelor pad. We decided to get an early move on the night, figuring we should pack in a big meal before too late or we’d never get a seat, as we didn’t have reservations anywhere, so we hit the pavement looking for a restaurant around 6pm. We hit on Lupa Osterio Romana, on Thompson just north of Houston. It looked great but they couldn’t take us till 7:30, so we killed around an hour at Aturo’s Cafe (pictures), around the corner on Houston, where bartender Tony looked after us. We ate the warm antipasto, with the questionable inclusion of scungilli (aka whelk), an acquired taste apparently. We then had dinner at Lupa’s, which was excellent (pictures).

From there hit our first party of the night, at the parent’s place friends of a friend. Very swanky West Village locale. (We felt under-dressed. I literally missed the memo.) There was a ton of food and booze, including a suckling pig, which looked amazing but we were stuffed. It was a cool scene, but we were planning to hit the Bulgarian Bar, so we thought we should get there before midnight.

The Bulgarian was pretty dead when we arrived, though, about 11:30, which was a bummer, as we had just paid a large sum to gain entrance. Then I remembered I was invited to another party not far away, so we quickly decamped for a highrise party with a great view over the Lower East Side. We rang in the new year among relative strangers who made us feel most welcome. We discovered only after we were already pretty lit the amazing scotch collection of the host.

We eventually made our way back to the Bulgarian for another hour or more of dancing and fun. On the way home, I needlessly consumed a huge shwarma sandwich, falling asleep bloated and awaking with killer indigestion. All in all, a swell New Year’s celebration.

Adi and I have a history of throwing fun parties. I can think of at least two marriages, with four kids between them, that can trace their hook-up to one of our parties.

I don’t know the marriage count yet, but last night’s shindig was in good keeping with tradition. By 10pm, we had the usual doubts as to whether this party would ever quite take off, as there were only 6 guests an hour after the scheduled start.Compounding the anxiety were a week’s warnings of the onslaught of a massive Nor’Easter due at midnight.

By midnight, the weather was confirmed by sleet, but enough of our guest list stayed true to the party spirit, and the joint was officially jumping.

I’m not sure what time we formally cranked the dance music and moved the coffee table into the bedroom (by coincidence, I landed on the CD that begins with Salt ‘n’ Pepa’s “Let’s Get This Party Started”) — maybe 1ish — but the dancing ran pretty solidly for 2-3 hours. TBone plaid backup DJ but ultimately came to trust the funkitude of the house mixes. The one bummer was the usual: my speakers are better than my receiver, and the latter takes frequent breaks, typically at the crescendo of an ass-shattering groove. Thankfully, a quick reboot rectified this deficiency , picking up at nearly the same spot in the song. TBone wisely observed this was an excellent opportunity for an Xmas gift: a new receiver (hint, hint).

The crowd included the usual mix of mix of artists and East Europeans, and what it lacked in bloggerati it made up for in would-be Googlers.

A highlight was the 45 minute ukulelaoke jam, a dozen or so of us singing and me strumming my solid body Japanese Eleuke with the fabulous Roland Micro-CUBE amp in our funky little utility room.

The best of the night for me, though, was sledding for 45 min with two colleagues at 4am on slushy hills behind Grant’s Tomb. Of the many grades and slopes we tried, the most thrilling by far was a steep hill that shot you across a southbound stretch of Riverside Drive highway. We bombed it 7-9 times varying pairings. The biggest hazard was the curb on the other side of the road, which came up fast. Heading home, we sledded Tiemann Place, veering at the last moment to avoid shooting straight into Broadway at 125th. Loads of fun.

I only thought to pull out the camera after that, for the remaining stragglers, predictably mostly East Euros, plus the crazy Israeli. Somewhere in there, we busted out the vinyl collection.

The evening ended with Adi and I alone at 6am dancing the robot dance to Kraftwerk’s “The Robot’s,” off The Man-Machine (which may have been the first album I ever bought with my own money). “That’s marriage,” Adi said this morning at the recollection. I left her dancing alone to Trans-Europe Express and went to bed.

If you were invited and skipped it, you missed out on fun. But there’s always next time.

Oh, and if any readers are gluttons for party photos, here are shots from the company holiday party.

Happy Holidays!