The Tipping Point

A few weeks back, a card slid under the door of my apartment, wishing me Happy Holidays, and listing out the twenty-seven people who work in my building. That’s right, twenty-seven. Six doormen, eight porters, seven handy-men, etc., etc.

The message was clear, and it wasn’t that those twenty-seven people were sincerely hoping I was enjoying my December.

In any other area of my life, I pride myself on being a big tipper. It costs relatively little in the grand scheme of things, and I feel happily magnanimous any time I give a cab driver an extra two dollars, tip a waiter beyond twenty percent.

But in this situation, I felt a bit odd. I knew five or six of the folks on that list, and had never even seen, much less interacted with, most of the rest. Did I therefore just assume that those unnoticed people – say, security guards I’d never found about at even the darkest hours of the night – were still providing some secret yet equally valuable, tip-worthy service? Did I consequently dump my holiday tip wad into one undifferentiated pool? Or did I fork over the bills more strategically, rewarding those I knew, those who had actually improved my life in some way over the past year, and – more selfishly – those who might remember the tip as having come from me, and treat me accordingly through the year ahead?

On top of that, I wondered, how much was I talking about here? Scouring the web, I found building staff tip recommendations ranging from $50-100 a head. Most, however, seemed to refer to places with four- or five-person staffs, rather than for a giant apartment coterie such as mine, where such tipping could total nearly three grand.

In the end, and after much angsting, I split the difference: I tipped very well he five guys I knew, tipped more modestly the super and the rest, and overall still probably spent enough to rent an apartment for much of the year in any less ridiculously priced part of the country. Even so, alongside the smiles I’m receiving from those happily tipped folks, I’m also bracing myself for whatever quiet retribution their more cheaply rewarded brethren might devise.

Mainly, however, I’m just jealous of the old, crazy guy down the hall. Sure, he might be totally batshit. But I suspect he pleased the staff immensely with tips of buttons and sticks of chewing gum. And, at this time of year, that’s peace of mind no amount of sanity can buy.

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Home Alone

Over the past few months, as I found myself spending more and more time with Jess, I also found more and more of her stuff migrating its way into my apartment. My shower – which formerly contained one shampoo, one face wash, and one body wash – exploded with a proliferation of indistinguishable bottles, tubs and tubes. Dresses, shirts and shoes began to crowd my closet. Books and books and more books and magazines began to appear bedside and on shelves and windowsills.

All of which, actually, made perfect sense – my bed being more comfortable than hers, we were spending pretty much every night together in my place, and it seemed silly for her to head back continually to hers just to pick up clothing and other odds and ends.

So, when we determined that her lease was ending at the end of this month, we decided to simply cut to the chase and move in together.

I repeat: we are moving in together. Or, rather, we more or less already have; after countless duffel bag trips by taxi throughout December, nearly everything she wants to keep is now here in my / our apartment.

Nonetheless, the point of this entry isn’t Jess moving in, but rather her (temporarily) heading back out. As her sister is home from college, Jess trained up yesterday to Boston to spend time with her family for the week. And I, in turn, with my parents in from California, am staying here in New York to wrangle my own kin – immediate and extended.

So, now, my apartment is back to the way it was before – just me. And as much as it’s the moving in together that seems like it should be a big deal, should be totally freaking me out, it’s the being here by myself that actually seems strange, not quite right.

Which, when I think about, is probably an excellent sign.

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Coming Attractions

With the DVD release of The Oh in Ohio well underway, and early preparations beginning for our next two similarly large releases (both hitting theaters nationwide in the first half of 2007), we’re also taking a bit of time to release an art-house science fiction film that we really love, beginning with a New York theatrical run opening January 10th.

Though I’ll be posting a bit more detail in the next week or two, here’s enough to hopefully whet your appetite:

“It’s The Blair Witch Project with brains and a social conscience.”
– Box Office Magazine

“Wow! The acting is fantastic. I was mesmerized by these performances.”
– Hollywood Report Card

“Powerful…a fascinating saga… superbly executed, surprisingly ambitious, and looks smashing on a big screen”
– Hollywood Reporter

“It’s an intriguing idea, ingeniously done.”
– Time Out, London

“A clever new take on the genre.”
– Ain’t it Cool News

“Evokes memories of the best Twilight Zone tales, employing a powerful narrative and minimum of special effects to create a chilling vision of the not so distant future.”
– Independent Film & Video Monthly

“Powerful”
– Filmmaker Magazine

“A hugely convincing portrait of a largely-collapsed civilization. After this was over, it was an enormous relief to walk out onto Sunset Boulevard and discover there were still people around.”
– Trash City

“An engaging drama that raises intriguing questions”
– LA Weekly

“A brilliant movie with a mesmerizing atmosphere of realism and sometimes disconcertingly relevant insight”
– Movie Pie

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Like a Blind Date

I’ve been going to a bunch of biz dev meetings of late, with people I’ve previously only met via email. And, inevitably, just before such meetings, I end up standing at the front of the restaurant or coffee shop, looking at each middle aged man coming in the door, trying to divine whether he looks like a DVD distributor, casting director or foreign sales agent I’d be meeting.

Ninety percent of the time, oddly, I get it right. Oh, I think. Of course he’s the guy I’m meeting. But the other ten percent, I don’t have a clue. So, five or ten minutes after the appointed hour, I start asking anyone standing around, from most likely candidate to least, whether they’re Bob or Ted or Chris. Usually, I don’t get it right until the fifth or sixth ask. And, on each I get wrong, the guy who isn’t Bob or Ted or Chris quickly and vigorously explains that I’ve most definitely got the wrong guy. It took me a while to realize, from the weird face they also give me at the time, that they’re assuming I’m not looking for a potential business partnership, but rather for a discreet tryst with an older sugar daddy I’ve met somehow on Craig’s List.

Just one of the many dangerous side effects, it seems, of dressing filmmaker-hip business casual.

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Pancake Suit

The first night of Chanukah upon us, I’m once again returning to my now yearly tradition of making latkes.

Also per tradition, I’ve picked up a few excellent Chanukah gifts for myself (a surefire way to make sure you end the holiday happy with what you’ve received), and will therefore be using the kitchen opportunity to simultaneously test out my brand spanking new chef’s jacket.

I’m hoping that, beyond a debonaire air of officiality, the jacket may also lend an additional measure of cooking skill. As, in years past, I’ve inadvertently ended up with latkes more akin to hash browns or hockey pucks, I could use all I can get.

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One Down

Whenever I walk past Bryant Park and see the speed chess players contemplating their next moves, it occurs to me that I should be good at chess. I don’t really know why I should, except that it just sort of seems like the kind of thing at which I’d excel.

In reality, however, I am a terrible, terrible chess player. Atrociously bad. Perhaps due to an early lack of practice – through my entire childhood, I played less than five games. But, a few years back, thinking it might still not be too late, I even downloaded a chess game for my then Palm smartphone. And after a month or so of practice, I was just as pathetic, the computer opponent continuing to easily manhandle me at even the easiest level.

Still, last night, watching the documentary Wordplay, it similarly occurred to me that I should probably be good at crossword puzzles. On this one, I even had justification: I like wordplay. I know a lot of words and stupid facts. And I secretly like puzzles, despite rarely having the patience to figure out more involved ones.

But, like with chess, and perhaps due to that very lack of patience, I’d actually never before completed a crossword puzzle – not even a Monday USA Today. So, this afternoon, with documentary-driven determination, I pulled up an online crossword collection, and set off on a Monday New York Times.

And while, admittedly, it took me nearly twenty minutes, I got the damn thing done, and done right. With a little practice, I’m fairly sure I could even work my way through later, harder days of the week.

But, of course, if it turns out I can’t, I’m not overly concerned. As I did with chess, I’ll simply declare it a pursuit for pasty losers, and claim I never really wanted to be any good at it in the first place.

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Sushi, Redux

A little less than three years back, I dashed off a quick post about New York’s best sushi restaurants. And, rather inexplicably, that little compendium became a big hit; it quickly garnered well over a hundred thousand views, and continues to draw a sizable crowd today, remaining atop the Google results for ‘sushi nyc’.

But, in the years since, several of the restaurants I listed have gone out of business, the sushi playing field has shifted, and the entire piece has aged its way further and further out of date. So, to keep the self-aggrandizement flame of service journalism alive, I’m circling back around, resampling old haunts, testing newcomers, and culling recommendations and reviews from fellow fish fanatics.

I’ve already nailed down my early contenders for each of the new piece’s five categories: Uptown, Downtown, Cheap, Not Sushi, and Retardedly Overrated. But, if you, fair reader, have thoughts on places I should be stopping, that might fit in one of those five categories, and that I might have unfortunately overlooked, I’d much appreciate the advice.

Arigato in advance, and itadakimasu.

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Hot & Cold

Winter is finally upon us, with temperatures this weekend dropping to windy low twenties. Which, as I’m reminded every year, is actually very, very cold. Especially if you’re a total pansy who grew up in temperate Northern California.

Indeed, fair Palo Alto prepared me little for life in this city, where each year swings from icily frostbitten January to steamy, sweltering August, and back again. Oddly enough, even the temperature of water out of New York faucets is far more extreme – the hot literally scalding, the cold glacially chilled from miles of subterranean, sub-subway travels. It’s something I remember from my many visits while growing up, and something I painfully relearned in my last apartment, where the shower spray swiftly and continuously swung each morning forty degrees in one direction and then the other.

Fortunately, the shower in my current apartment is rather more stable. But Jess, who may be made of asbestos, tends to leave all faucets cranked to their steaming peak heats. That isn’t all bad, though: boiling water averaged against bitter outdoor freeze apparently leaves me somewhere near that Palo Alto middle ground my wimpy senses still seem to expect.

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Practice

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”
– Aristotle

Friends who read this site often ask: “what the hell is wrong with you?”

Or, more specifically, “why would you possibly want to post random details about yourself online?”

And, indeed, that’s a question I ocassionally ask myself as well. But, in stacking up the few reasons to self-aggrandize against the many sensible reasons to not, I inevitably remember that this site, more than anything else, is meant to shame me into regular writing.

Knowing that, somewhere out there in the ether, several thousands of you are inexplicably checking self-aggrandizement every day, I feel compelled to sit down and write something. Which, as every writing teacher I’ve ever had loved to remind, is more than half the battle, the writerly part of your brain, like a muscle, strengthening with exercise or atrophying from disuse.

So, as we careen towards January 1st, and I begin my standard obsessive process of taking stock of the year past and charting the one ahead, I’ve been considering the easily undervalued importance of doing things – like writing for this site – regularly, the power of habits in chipping away, day in and day out, at the things I most want out of life.

Still, I realize that some habits are more easily stuck to than others. Which leaves me glad that, if nothing else, I can probably retain at least one lauded by the Great Emancipator himself: getting rip-roaring drunk.

“I believe, if we take habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class. There seems ever to have been a proneness in the brilliant and warm-blooded to fall into this vice.”
– Abraham Lincoln

Let us drink to that. And let us do so, like clockwork, each and every day.

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Tooting their Horn

This evening, headed to a special joint concert between the New York Philharmonic and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. The two played, respectively, Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, and Duke Ellington’s arrangements of the same music, switching back and forth to allow the audience to compare the original classical and more newly jazzified versions of each movement.

As the concert also included Copland’s El Salon Mexico, it gave me the chance to hear featured playing from two of my favorite trumpet players in the entire world: the NY Philharmonic’s Phil Smith, and the JLCO’s Wynton Marsalis.

As ever, I headed home not sure whether to start practicing, or give up playing the trumpet completely.

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