Get-Up

As on most Halloweens past, tomorrow night I’ll be playing big band jazz at the venerable Theater for the New City’s Vintage Halloween Costume Ball, a masquerade party replete with liquor, food, live music, and weird, weird East Village types.

And, setting aside how my lack of trumpet practice time over the past month may leave my chops worse than mangled by the end of a two hour set holding down the solo trumpet chair, I’m primarily concerned about my lack of appropriate apparel. In prior years, the tuxedo dress code left me with little choice on the costume front, aside from toting toy gun and martini glass in my best attempt at Bond chic. This morning however, the bandleader emailed to say that we’d now be free to costume ourselves however our swinging hearts desire. Which leaves me, in short order, to come up with my best attempts at items-already-available-in-closet assembly.

As my backup choice is to wrap a bow and ribbon around my neck, going as god’s gift to women, I’d better think fast.

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Sayonara Carbonation

Why is it that waitresses at Japanese restaurants always insist on pouring bottled beer into glasses while holding said bottles a solid foot above said glasses?

Check, prease.

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For the Film Biz Dorks

A quick note for all aspiring film entrepeneurs in New York City:

The Institute for International Film Financing, based in San Francisco, is now branching out to our fair city. It’s a great group in which to network with other business-minded film folks, and their inaugural NYC event this Thursday evening has an impressive lineup of speakers. Plus, me.

I’ll be talking about finding and seducing investors, and I promise the talk itself is far better than the name (which I didn’t come up with myself), “THE FILM ENTREPRENEUR’S GUIDE TO SUCCESS: Strategies for Funding Your Film Co & Keeping Investors Happy”.

Other folks will be talking about deal structure, courting hedge funds, tax credits, profitably distributing documentaries, and approaching film investment from a quantitative perspective.

While I realize most of you fell asleep even just reading that last sentence, I also don’t doubt there are a handful of folks who wet their pants a little bit at the prospect of that lineup. If you’re one of them, come on down, and certainly pop over to say hello.

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Hooked on Crack(Berry)

Over the past four years, I’ve gone through six Treos. One, admittedly, I lost while making out drunk in the back of a cab. But the other five, through no fault of my own, and after merely standard smart-phone use, self-destructed in sudden, unexpected, work-derailing ways. So, this time through, when my latest Treo stopped answering incoming phone calls, I decided to look into other options. I may be slow, but eventually I catch on.

For a few weeks, I Googled cellphone reviews obsessively, and even considered leaving behind my long-loved T-Mobile (with whom I’ve been since their Voicestream days), in search of the perfect smartphone. Fortunately, however, the bluebird – or, rather, the BlackBerry – of happiness was in my own backyard, as I eventually settled in on the spanking new T-Mobile BlackBerry Pearl.

During my Treo years, I endured countless ‘refrigerator phone’ jokes, was often forced to reply, “actually, that is a phone in my pocket, and I’m not just happy to see you.” So the Pearl’s form factor alone was nearly enough to convert me. Thinner than a Razr, swankily silver and black, it had a look that, refreshingly, implied ‘indie film hip’ rather than ‘corporate tech support worker not-so-much’. In fact, it didn’t even include a belt clip.

And, it turns out, it works well, too. The phone sounds clear, the email functionality has been far better than the Treo’s, the PDA software syncs cleanly with my Mac, the weird two-letter-to-a-key QWERTY is far, far better than I feared, and the Google Maps application has more than serviceably replaced Vindigo, a piece of software I’d previously assume I couldn’t possibly live without.

Plus, as an added bonus, Jess’ corporate BlackBerry is apparently attached to her like a pacemaker, allowing me to harass her via BlackBerry Messenger IM throughout the day or evening. Which is good, as we’re both inexplicably semi-retarded when we speak to each other via phone.

So, in short, the BlackBerry Pearl = crazy delicious. If you’re carrying any other smartphone, do your dorky self a favor, trade in for one of these suckers, and get as close as you can – while still, frankly, remaining kind of a smartphone-carrying loser – to looking at least passably cool.

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Cohabitation

Rob Barnum, who heads up Cyan’s West Coast office, arrives in town early early early tomorrow morning via JetBlue red-eye, with his fiance Sophie in tow.

On past such trips, with both of us decidedly more single, and with our company equally bastardly cheap, Rob opted out of hotel booking, instead taking over my living room’s fold-out couch.

So, out of old habit, we didn’t book him somewhere to stay at the time he booked his flight for this trip, about a month or so back. We thought nothing of it, until late last week, when we realized that wedging a nearly-married couple along with me into my Manhattan-size apartment would, in short, be remarkably, awkwardly cramped.

So, for the balance of the week, I’m essentially gifting my home to those two crazy kids, and invading Jess’ instead. It will be, by far, the longest contiguous stretch of nights she’s had to put up with me; I give it four nights, tops, before my insisting on alternative pronunciations of words like ‘equinox’ leads her to punch me in the face.

Update: Jess texted to say she wouldn’t punch me in the face. She’d kick me instead.

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CringeyWYG

While I’ve read at Cringe in the past, next week I’m returning for a special quasi-Cringe roadshow, being held here in Manhattan (rather than out in Brooklyn, Manhattan’s waiting room), in conjunction with the WYSIWYG reading series.

From the producer:

The WYSIWYG Talent Show, NYC’s first and only all-blogger reading and performance series, teams up with the diary-readin’, poetry-spoutin’, full-on adolescent angst of Brooklyn’s Cringe reading series for the first time ever at 8 p.m. on October 18, 2006 with CringeyWYG!

Every month The WYSIWYG TALENT SHOW brings you readings and performances from some of the blogosphere’s best and funniest writers, musicians, comedians and performance artists. And every month Cringe brings readings of teenage diaries, journals, notes, letters, poems, abandoned rock operas, and other general representations of the crushing misery of their humiliating adolescence. Together, they fight crime! Okay, not really, but it WILL be funny.

The WYSIWYG Talent Show’s “CringeyWYG” performs Wednesday, October 18 at Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery between Bleecker and Houston). Doors open at 7:30 p.m., show at 8 p.m. Tickets are $7 at the door. For more information visit wysiwygtalentshow.org, queserasera.org/cringe.html, www.bowerypoetry.com, or call (212) 614-0505.

With performances by:

* Sarah Brown
* Lindsay Robertson
* Marc Balgavy
* Joshua Newman
* Jason Boog
* Chris Hampton
About the performers:

Sarah Brown is the host of the Cringe Reading Series, the editor of the upcoming Cringe book, the executive co-producer of the upcoming Cringe television show, and the 1933 Oklahoma State Ladies’ Trickshoot Champion. She is equal parts eight-year-old girl, 16-year-old boy, and 70-year-old man, so in the movie of her life she will be played by Liza Minelli. You can find her online at queserasera.org.

Lindsay Robertson writes a blog called lindsayism.com. She’s written for GQ, MTV, ComedyCentral.com and Jane, among others. Until she discovered comedy in her late teens, she was planning to be the next Sylvia Plath.

During his final year of college, Marc Balgavy (http://balgavy.com/blog) created business cards for himself. Beyond listing his likes (Hal Hartley and graham crackers) and dislikes (dirty dishes and word searches), they listed his parents’ phone number. The cards also featured a black and white photo of him wearing a bleached blonde goatee. In the intervening years he’s realized those cards were the turning point where “filled with potential” met “easily distracted by go-nowhere projects.”

Though it was for other, equally dorky, reasons that Forbes called him “a veritable Doogie Howser,” Joshua Newman has been keeping a computer diary since the age of ten. He currently posts his entries online at www.self-aggrandizement.com, and spends the rest of his day running indie film studio Cyan Pictures and drinking heavily.

After spending two years on top of a mountain in Peace Corps Guatemala, Jason Boog chased the dream of every skinny Midwestern writer boy with glasses: to starve to death in New York City. He completed the graduate journalism program at NYU in 2004, and now works as a staff writer at the Institute for Judicial Studies (judicialreports.com). He writes the blog The Publishing Spot (thepublishingspot.com).

WYSIWYG creator and curator Chris Hampton has been blogging at Uffish Thoughts (uffish.com) since blogging wasn’t cool. By day, she works at a Big Gay Nonprofit and in her spare time she knits, pimps WYSIWYG at every possible opportunity, and obsesses over Project Runway and punctuation. She grew up in Arkansas but has since fully recovered.

About WYSIWYG:
“Urban Storytelling for the Internet Age” ‚Äì Now in its third year, the WYSIWYG Talent Show is a monthly series of readings and performances by bloggers living in or visiting NYC. Every month WYSIWYG showcases a variety of themed evenings featuring topics on everything from bad bosses and drugs to extreme gayness and summer camp. Each installment is an evening of funny and touching stories, songs, and performances from some of the best writers and most interesting personalities on the Web. More information can be found at wysiwygtalentshow.org.

About Cringe:
Cringe is a monthly reading series hosted by Sarah Brown at Freddy’s Bar & Backroom in Brooklyn. On the first Wednesday of each month, brave souls come forward and read aloud from their teenage diaries, journals, notes, letters, poems, abandoned rock operas, and other general representations of the crushing misery of their humiliating adolescence. It’s better and cheaper than therapy. More information can be found at
queserasera.org/cringe.html.

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GF

As I haven’t blogged about it for several weeks, a handful of readers have written in to ask if I was still seeing The Girl, who I’ll henceforth call Jess, mainly because that’s her name.

And, in short, yes I absolutely still am. In fact, for her birthday last Friday, I gave her a small, metal Eiffel Tower, redeemable for a long weekend trip to Paris. So, yes, still dating, and, yes, still serious. But, at the same time, and contrary to my brother’s strongly held belief, I absolutely, positively, 100% will not be proposing while in Paris, or at any point in the near future. A long-standingly commitment-phobic tiger can only move so fast in changing his stripes.

Also for her birthday, I gave her a cake. About two weeks before the day, she told me that she didn’t really like birthdays, and didn’t really want any presents. The next day, she pointed out that perhaps she’d like a cake. The day after, it was a cake from Carvel. Then a vanilla ice cream Carvel cake. Then, day by successive day, one with some chocolate ice cream at the bottom, and a layer of oreo crunchies, a round cake, one with a ring of blue frosting and rainbow sprinkles and “Happy Birthday Jess!!” in pink icing on top.

On the morning of her birthday, I went to pick up the pre-ordered, pre-specified cake, and discovered that, while almost perfect, it was instead emblazoned with “Happy Birthday Jeff!!” in pink curlique. And though, in the end, I had them fix it, lest her friends think I was a total moron, I was sorely tempted to keep it Jeff-ed, as I was rightly sure she’d think it was uproariously funny.

Which is, in short, why she’s exactly my type.

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