Bruner Blog

What an honor it is to play in the halls of Ukulele Mansion. If only every day were Ukulele Mansion days. More photos from the last Uke Mansion, last Sunday, here’s the whole set.

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.

More.

Fearing the worst for Coney Island’s inimitable Astroland Amusement Park, which may or may not open again next year after being sold for a mere $30 million to greedy real estate developers who plan to tear it down, I decided to go alone to the place tonight for a photo excursion. Holy shit, is the Cyclone fun!