Spurred on by the strong reviews and ongoing box office, the Two Boots Pioneer Theater has extended the run of Ever Since the World Ended by a week.
If you meant to see the film last weekend but never got around to it, here’s your second chance.
If I’m slinging other people’s wisdom today, here’s the best business quote I’ve come across in ages:
“It doesn’t matter what your competitors are doing. The only thing that matters is if they are keeping you from getting to your client.”
— Gerry Lemberg (investor in Apple, Intel & Oracle)
As it’s his birthday today:
“If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten,
either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing. ”
– Ben Franklin
This Thursday, I head off to the Sundance Film Festival, during which I will not be blogging at all. Before each such film festival, I usually say that I’ll be covering things online, day by day. And then, I get there, post once or twice, stop posting completely, and end up guiltily summarizing the rest of the fest after the fact. So, lest it be said I never learn from my mistakes, this year, I make no such promises. If I post something during, consider it icing on the self-aggrandizement cake.
But, to set the stage for any possible though certainly not promised posts, allow me to repeat an observation I make yearly: by most counts, Sundance, Slamdance, and the other concurrent festivals bring some 70,000 people to Park City, Utah. And while that’s not far off from the numbers the Toronto or Tribeca festivals attract, dropping 70,000 bodies into New York or Toronto barely makes a dent. Whereas with 70,000 people added to a city of 7,882, like Park CIty, the infrastructure is completely overwhelmed, everything starts falling apart, and life more or less grinds to a functional halt.
That, along with countless other factors – certainly not the least of which being the nature of all too many of those 70,000 attendees – similarly leads me yearly to the same conclusion about Sundance: it’s everything I love about movies, and everything I hate about the movie industry.
Should be ‘fun’.
They say it takes seven years to become a New Yorker. And though I’ve only been here for five and a half, I am now, officially speaking at least, a good step closer. As of last week, I no longer have a California drivers license, and am instead awaiting the mailed arrival of my first New York license.
Granted, this a step most people take within the mandated thirty days of arriving in a new state. But I’ve been lazy. Without a car, I’ve had no need to hit the local DMV, and California allowed renewal of my expired prior license by mail.
Of course, I’ve thought about getting a New York license before. In fact, shortly after I moved here, when September 11th hit and I was living a half block from the UN, I took to carrying my telephone bill in my pocket so police officers would let me through UN barricades and back to my own apartment. And it occurred to me then that I should probably make the license switch to something bearing my actual address.
So, in September 2001, I printed the requisite forms out online, and put them in a folder atop my desk. Where, I am ashamed to say, they sat for the five years since. Sat despite the desk itself having been twice moved to new apartments.
Perhaps the delay has been psychological, symptom of my conflicted feelings about abandoning my West Coast roots. Give up a California I.D., and, at least in some small way, give up my tie to California.
I don’t know if I believe that less now, or if I just feel a bit more ready to declare allegiance to this city. But, for whatever reason, at the end of last week, something snapped. Enough seemed enough. I picked up the folder, headed to the DMV License Express, sat, sat, sat, sat, had a bad picture taken, filled out some forms, only winced slightly when they stapled my yielded California license to those forms, and walked out the door with a bona-fide, verified NYS Department of Motor Vehicles Interim License (as the piece of folded paper proudly proclaims).
New York, New York. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere, indeed.
Two antennas met on a roof, fell in love and got married. The ceremony wasn’t much, but the reception was excellent.
A jumper cable walks into a bar. The bartender says, “I’ll serve you, but don’t start anything.”
A man walks into a bar with a slab of asphalt under his arm, and says “A beer please, and one for the road.”
“Doc, I can’t stop singing ‘The Green, Green Grass of Home.”
“That sounds like Tom Jones Syndrome.”
“Is it common?”
“Well, it’s not unusual.”
An invisible man marries an invisible woman. The kids were nothing to look at either.
Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, so they lit a fire in the craft. Unsurprisingly it sank, proving once again that you can’t have your kayak and heat it too.
A group of chess enthusiasts checked into a hotel, and were standing in the lobby discussing their recent tournament victories. After about an hour, the manager came out of the office, and asked them to disperse.
“But why?” they asked, as they moved off.
“Because,” he said, “I can’t stand chess-nuts boasting in an open foyer.”
A woman has twins, and gives them up for adoption. One of them goes to a family in Egypt, and is named “Ahmal.” The other goes to a family in Spain; they name him “Juan.” Years later, Juan sends a picture of himself to his birth mother. Upon receiving the picture, she tells her husband that she wishes she also had a picture of Ahmal. Her husband responds, “They’re twins! If you’ve seen Juan, you’ve seen Ahmal.”
And finally, there was the person who sent twenty different puns to his friends, with the hope that at least ten of the puns would make them laugh. No pun in ten did.
While I’m using this blog as a bulletin board to announce various facets of my life: CrossFit NYC, the workout group I’ve been helping run, just opened a gym of its very own, The Black Box, in midtown Manhattan.
The gym is essentially a nonprofit, so I don’t make any money by pimping it out. Instead, I just honestly believe CrossFit is simply the most effective and most efficient way to get in excellent shape.
We have CrossFit NYC members of every fitness level – from military special forces guys on through to eighty-year-old grandmothers – and as I’m fairly sure you fall somewhere between those two, you should fit right in.
The CrossFit approach has been praised in publications from Skiing Magazine to Men’s Fitness (though, conversely, the NY Times did make us sound a bit like whack-jobs). And we have member testimonials galore (consider an attorney who came to us barely able to do a pullup, and was banging out sets of nearly twenty inside of eight months).
So, come on down, and give it a try. Classes are free throughout January, giving you the perfect chance to actually stick to your New Years resolution for a change.
I mentioned it once before, but Ever Since the World Ended opens tonight in NYC.
We didn’t shoot it ourselves, but our distribution arm is putting it out because we think it’s great and it deserves to be seen.
Ever Since the World Ended is set twelve years after a plague has wiped out most of the world’s population. Two filmmakers set out through a deserted San Francisco, filming a documentary about the tiny community of 186 people still living there.
It’s a small film, with a no-name cast. But it’s also remarkably good. The New York Times liked it quite a bit, and Time Out New York gave it four stars. Plus, a slew of other publications glowingly reviewed it at earlier screenings.
The film is playing from today (Wednesday 1/10) through Wednesday 1/17 at the Two Boots Pioneer Theater (E. 3rd St and Ave A, ).
Do me and yourself the favor of checking it out.
Gawker linked to my recent post on holiday tipping, with the helpful comment:
Furthermore, you live in a building with six fucking doormen. You SHOULD tip those guys for keeping out the crazies. It’s not like you can’t afford it. Asshole.
To which I say, since when is the editorial staff of Gawker reading my blog?
Jess moved in bearing largely two kinds of items: clothing and books. And while, fortunately, my apartment has ample closet space, leaving room for both her and my own (albeit now slightly more compressed) apparel, I had previously filled my own large bookshelf to near bursting, leaving certainly no room in which to store her many, many tomes.
So, to accommodate, we added a second bookshelf and some magazine baskets, commandeered a section of windowsill for library lineup. And, in the process, I also started going through all of my books, to see what I wanted to keep, and with what I might be willing to part.
And while it turned out, unfortunately, that I did want to keep most of my books, I also discovered there were a rather shockingly large number I had never finished, or, worse, even begun. Apparently, armed with an Amazon Prime account, my eyes are bigger than my literary stomach, with even my relatively voracious pace of book consumption falling steadily behind my pace of online book accumulation.
So, making a belated resolution that, in all honesty, I still won’t be able to keep: no new books until I catch back up on the old ones. Or, at least, no new books until I’m satisfied having simply judged each unread one by its cover instead.