gloating

About three years back, on a whim, I bought a record player and started collecting LP’s.

And while, for two and three quarters of those years, I enjoyed record listening immensely, it all came to an abrupt and painful end two months back, when the movers dropped my trusty Sony spinner on the way into the new apartment. Even after my best attempts at stereophonic surgery, I couldn’t get the thing up and running. Which left me with a decent pile of vinyl, and absolutely no way to play it.

Though I looked briefly for a replacement, I was disappointed to discover that the record player market (small as it likely is) seems to have completely bifurcated: on one end, sub-$100 pieces of crap, on the other, $1000+ DJ specials, with pretty much nothing in between. Ah, the pain of the excluded middle!

On clever recommendation of recent house-guest Josh L., however, I today headed onto eBay in search of old Bang & Olufsen Beogram players. Bang & Olufsen! For years, I was obsessed with that company, with their beautifully designed speakers and stereo components, each one a near-perfect estimation of Danish neo-minimalism’s Platonic ideal. Throughout high school, I’d walk their store in the Stanford Shopping Center, swearing that, if I ever had the cash, I’d undoubtedly buy one of their systems.

And then, amazingly, one day I did have the cash. At the high point of my dot-com swing (before the money I made turned back from actual money to paper ‘money’ that I’ll quite plausibly never again see as actual money), I decided to buy one extravagant thing for myself, one object on which I would spend waaaaaay more than justified and not feel guilty and simply enjoy for years to come. As a musician, music lover, and aspirant audiophile, a stereo system – or, more pointedly, a B&O stereo system – seemed the only way to go.

But, wisely, my father suggested that, before I buy, I at least compare similarly priced components from other vendors. And so, with sheath of CDs in tow, I trekked from high-end audio shop to high-end audio shop, listening to speaker after speaker after speaker, trying to make sense of what made Miles Davis or Mahler or Sonic Youth sound richer or purer or kickier or whatever. By the end, I’d realized that B&O’s stuff was really, really good. But some of the other vendors were putting out speakers that were leagues past ‘really, really good’, all the way in ‘truly, astoundingly remarkable’ territory.

Despite my initial Danish-driven intentions, I instead ended up detouring slightly westward in product origin, picking up a load of stuff from Irish boutique audio design company Linn. In most respects, it was one of the greatest decisions I’ve ever made. To this day, just dropping in a CD and hearing the first perfectly-rendered strains from those Linn speakers literally brings a smile to my face. But, at some level, I’ve always felt disloyal to my initial B&O intentions, have always secretly wished I could find some way to buy at least a little bit of B&O cool, if for no other reason than to impress whatever remnants of the 15-year old me still float in the dark corners of my own subconscious.

Which brings me back to today, to eBay, to searching for Bang & Olufsen Beograms, and to discovering and subsequently winning a restored Beogram 3404, for $86. For eighty-six dollars!!!! I mean, this is a record player that retailed for slightly less than $1200 of today’s dollars back in 1980. Hello, 93% mark-down!

Once again, Internet, I am humbled by your power. Without you, there’s no way vinyl vindication could be had so cheap.

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disclaimer

Based on some of the misadventures about which I’ve blogged in months and years past, a number of readers (by which I mean, my mother) have likely begun to look into A.A. chapters that meet near my apartment, or perhaps see if they might, as a birthday gift, enroll me early on the liver transplant list.

So, before I come home one evening to a living room intervention, I thought I’d better set the record straight: In point of fact, not only do the vast majority of my evenings not involve liquor at all, most are, further, rather dull. I end up at inane business dinners, or while away evenings banging out emails while curled up on the couch, besweatpantsed, simultaneously (occupational hazard) screening a film.

It’s just that, the other nights, that small minority when I likely am, in fact, causing irreparable biotic harm, tend to be far, far more interesting. So they show up disproportionately in posts on this fair site.

From those intermittent posts, it’s understandable that readers might extrapolate to my leading a life involving a permanent alcohol I.V. (though, actually, if anyone has some good leads on where I can get that set up, certainly shoot me an email). Instead, my life is pretty, remarkably bland, with just enough excitement to, at least occasionally, yield a retelling good enough to warrant your risking corporate wrath by tuning in over lunch break.

In service to that, I figure, the rare bout of cirrhosis is a small price to pay indeed.

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captain obvious

With my Airport Express intermittently on the fritz, I’ve fallen off of streaming music from iTunes, and back to an older technology involving music on plastic saucer-shaped objects I vaguely recall being named ‘compact discs’. And, the crazy thing is, the music on those discs sounds much, much better than the same stuff compressed to 192kbps MP3s. Who knew?

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sequestered

Recently, I’ve been finding that I’m actually far more productive on weekends than I am during the work week. In a quasi-observance of Shabbat, I take Saturday off from doing any Cyan or Long Tail work, instead banging out all the other details of my life; then, Sunday, I start cranking through the upcoming week’s works tasks. Holed up inside for those two days, I inevitably get more done than in the next five combined.

Though I don’t know why, exactly, that’s the case, I’ve started to take advantage of it as much as possible: clearing out my weekends of brunches and dinners and even Saturday evening parties in favor of long, uninterrupted stretches where I can crank through my backlog of tasks. Which, I suppose, I’d feel worse about, were I not making up for that lost social time (by which I mean, binge drinking) through the rest of the week.

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so i’ve been told

Though I don’t watch much TV, what little I do consists mainly of Law & Order and The Daily Show. So I was particularly bummed to have missed Christina Ricci last night plugging I Love Your Work to John Stewart.

Fortunately, as no fewer than twenty of my friends and internet acquaintances did see the show, and emailed in to say as much, I managed to wrangle up a download via BitTorrent, and got to watch Ms. Ricci proclaim, several times, that the film is ‘really, really good.’

We think ILYW should finally be in theaters later this spring, but, given the overall mess the process has been so far, we honestly have pretty much no idea anymore. Join us in keeping our fingers collectively crossed.

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helping hand

Ed. Note: Due to insanity at work over the last few days, I’m committing the faux pas of all faux pas: cross-posting between my own two blogs. This appears also on Cyan’s site, but as it’s a plea for outside opinion, including opinion outside the film industry, I thought I’d re-post it here.

About two years back, I coined Newman’s First Law of Filmblogging, which got written about a bit on a number of film-centric blogs. The law, essentially, states that a filmmaker or production company’s ability to blog at a given point is inversely proportional to how interesting things are at that point. In other words, when progress is cranking ahead, there’s almost never time to actually sit down and write about it.

That’s been the case recently, with several Cyan and Long Tail projects all surging ahead at once. I’m blogging briefly, however, to ask for your help with one of them:

The DVD of LT’s first film, This is Not a Film, is nearly ready to head off to the duplicator; before it does, however, I’d really love some outside opinion on the box design and the trailer. In short, I want to know whether you’d be likely to rent, buy, or head out to the theater to watch the film based on either of them. So, if you’d be willing to volunteer criticism, shoot me an email and I’ll send both your way. The first ten to pitch in will score a free copy of the finalized DVD.

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a bit like being ceo

“Upon the king! let us our lives, our souls, Our debts, our careful wives, Our children and our sins lay on the king! We must bear all. O hard condition, Twin-born with greatness, subject to the breath Of every fool, whose sense no more can feel But his own wringing! What infinite heart’s-ease Must kings neglect, that private men enjoy!”
– Wm. Shakespeare, in Henry V

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recapped

Apologies, kids, for the recent silence and relatively crap posts; real life, as it’s sometimes wont to do, has been getting in the way.

On the work front, we’re getting ready to launch into pre-production on Earthquake Weather with Cyan, and prepping This is Not a Film to head off to the DVD presser with Long Tail.

But, more detrimentally to my regular raconteuring, I’ve also been drinking the nights away, with nary a free minute of ‘me time’. A quick run-down, for those looking for some vicarious liver damage:

Wednesday night, headed out to celebrate The Girl’s birthday. As she quoted me saying on her own blog (and, no, I won’t link it, because heaven knows my mother doesn’t want that much detail about my sex life. Not that we’ve had sex. I’m, um, saving myself until marriage. Yes, that’s it! Saving myself until marriage…), there are two traumatic events that can fall within the first few weeks of dating someone: Valentine’s Day, and their birthday. And, wowsers, there’s nothing like getting both in the span of a single week.

Still, I think I stumbled through both reasonably competently, as I’ll be seeing her again this evening. (More on that later.) We started the natal evening at a Nerve bash, largely because it involved free wine. As she ran into train trouble, I headed into the party alone for a half hour or so, and emerged just in time to discover that the doorman wasn’t letting her (or anyone else) in, despite her repeated protestation that she was actually on the guest list, and that her +1 was waiting patiently (albeitly already slightly drunkenly) inside. Fortunately, as I had come out sans-overcoat, I managed to get us both inside with the old ‘I need to retrieve my coat’ and Jedi mind-trick stare one-two punch. Though, frankly, it wouldn’t have been worth much more effort. The small bar, Odea, was packed well past the confines of fire code, and moving from one end of the narrow bar to the other made me thankful for years of practice on thrown-elbow dodging. We did, however, manage to get onto Gawker, as Team Party Crash was stalking the event; add back-of-the-head picture of me making out to the growing list of incriminating artifacts trailing me around the Internets.

Post-Odea, we cabbed down Broome to the excellent Ivo & Lulu, a closet of a restaurant with truly excellent food they inexplicably sell for about a third the rate of similar gastronomic delights elsewhere. (For potential visitors, it’s BYOB, so either buy in advance, or [as I was forced to do] head next door to the oddly-named Monkey Temple bar and sweet-talk them into selling you a whole bottle of cabernet at wholesale) Then over to Circa Tabac, where I first pissed off and then befriended the owner by requesting two empty wine glasses to finish off the remains of the cabernet bottle.

I’m pretty sure we cabbed back to my apartment following that, though the combined effects of wine, more wine, and a stiff Sidecar left details sketchy until the following morning, when, waking up at 9:00, we discovered a lawyer nearly pressed up against the glass in his office across the street, admiring the show through my aquarium-like bedroom windows. Thank you, but no, life-imitating-Hitchcock.

Despite barely staggering through the rest of the day, and repeatedly swearing off liquor, I nonetheless found myself at Russian Samovar later that evening (drinking problem; what drinking problem?) for a sipping vodka carafe with the visiting Dan Birdwhistile, founder of the Dropstone Group, a new and rather cool young-people-driven nonprofit. Then, after a brief glass-of-water respite in my apartment, I was out yet again to B.B. Doyles, to meet up with long-standing friend Mike Hoevel, in town for the weekend from L.A. (and, before that, China), as well as recent-ex-roommate Colin and his lovely girlfriend Carrie.

As ever, there’s nothing like an evening of bad beer with good friends to pass the time, though Hoevel at one point launched into a retelling of a story I’d long since forgotten: in the Yale dining hall, over dinner one evening, I accepted a five dollar bet to stand on a chair and de-shirt. Though, contrary to the name of the site, I try to steer clear of too much narcissistic back-patting, I must admit I was thrilled that Hoevel described the event as a bit like Flanders shirtlessly mowing the lawn: I was ‘unexpectedly ripped’.

As the evening rolled on, Colin excused Carrie and himself, to nurse the start of a winter cold, and both were replaced by Hoevel’s man-du-jour, who trekked down 9th from Julliard. Eventually,after several TableTaps of YuengLing, and much flirting all around with middle-aged Irish waitress Regina, I made it back home to once again fruitlessly swear off ever drinking again.

Yesterday evening, in penance for the prior two nights, I met my friend Tova to take in some art at the Met, where she works, as well as some behind-the-scenes gossip on the Rubens exhibit and newly-redone modern art mezzanine. Then went with her to meet her friend Joel, a TV writer, for moulles, frittes, and more frittes, at Petite Abeille. (I may eat healthfully most of the time, but a french fry so rich you can feel your arteries clogging as you chew is certainly not to be missed.)

After crashing at home early, I spent most of the day cleaning my apartment and re-doing work I’d been too hung over to do well the first time through in the past few days. Now, I’m off to dinner with ex-girlfriend Kate, having lost a steak dinner bet that she wouldn’t still be dating the guy she’s in fact still dating after three months. And, then, up to Morningside Heights for the Girl’s official birthday extravaganza, as well as a second chance at ruining the good first impression I made on all her friends.

But, at least, I won’t be drinking much.

[Famous last words.]

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easy fun

Don vaguely futuristic apparel. Then, on a crowded street, run up to someone and shout, “What’s the date today?! Quickly, tell me!”

When they respond, shout, “What YEAR, man, what YEAR is this?!”

When they respond again, shout, “Noooo!! They’ve sent me back too far!” and sprint away, clutching your head in your hands.

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eat my [own] shorts

On occasion, I’ll refer to myself as an underachiever.

Which, inevitably, draws a round of guffaws. But, honestly, I am.

Not, perhaps, against some external standard, against some outside set of average expectations. But, certainly, against my own expectations, against my sense of what I could be getting done if I didn’t piss away huge percentages of each of my days.

Over the past few years, I’ve pulled together a collection of anal-retentive organization systems and pro-productivity mind hacks to fight that. But my gains have been, to be honest, incremental at best.

Very recently, however, I’ve come to realize that a focus on building the right tools means little until I’m ready to wield them. Sure, those elaborate systems can help me work far more effectively, but only if I can actually force myself to sit down and get to work in the first place.

So, as of today, I’m officially launching a war on procrastination. (Or maybe as of tomorrow. [Hah! I kid. Just a bit of procrastination humor there.]) For the next few weeks, at least, I’ll be keeping a minute-by-minute time journal of my work day, tracking my ‘billable hours’, even if I’m just billing those hours to myself. If, indeed, awareness is the first step in the process of change, then perhaps by becoming fully aware of how I actually spend and waste time, by regularly rubbing my own nose in the stupid shit I manage to convince myself to do instead of productive work, I can actually set myself on the path to getting things done.

Wish me luck.

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