Talking today with my brother’s partners in his real estate development company, both of whom are fluent Spanish speakers, I flashed on a friend from college who couldn’t speak Spanish at all, but who, after spending a summer in Mexico, returned able to say exactly four phrases:
– “There’s a little man dancing in my pants”
– “Where are the lesbian girls we love?”
– “Show me the way to the nearest keg”
– “May I kiss the baby?”
Apparently, it was the best summer of his life.
A lot of my life seems to revolve around playing money middleman; waiting for investor dollars to come in for a project so I can turn around and send those dollars back out the door.
And the problem is, while Cyan and everything it does is hugely, consumingly important to me, it’s absolutely not so to our angel and institutional investors. So, even when they want to move ahead, even once they’re fully committed, it inevitably takes weeks and weeks and months to drag through trading documents and sending wire information and refreshing and refreshing and refreshing our bank’s web site to see if the funds have hit.
In the meantime, then, I’m forced to tell the people waiting on the other end, ‘any day now,’ and ‘really, any day,’ while I wait and they wait and we all wait together and they start to hate my guts for how long this is all taking even though I swear to god I’m just the middleman and none of this is my fault.
New Yorkers generally maintain that our reputation for standoffishness is unfounded, that we’re actually a rather friendly group.
And, by and large, I’d agree.
Except for in my apartment building, where none of the tenants talk to any of the other tenants. Ever.
I’d noticed this when I first moved into the building three or four years back, but hadn’t thought of it again since, until Jess observed the same thing a month or so back.
In her prior Murray Hill digs, she pointed out, neighbors would say hello waiting for the elevator, chat idly on their way to and from their front doors. But, in our current building, a veil of silence descends at the lobby, and doesn’t let up until people slam their apartment doors behind them.
We’ve tried to bend that unwritten rule – a simple ‘have a good day’ on the way out of the elevator, a ‘how are you?’ on the way in – with zero results. The tenants stare at us blankly, or continue to intently examine the walls.
At this point, I’m considering options for upping the ante – breaking into song and dance in the lobby, doing elevator handstands – but I’m a bit worried even that might not yield a response. Stepford, indeed.
Last month, Jess and I spent four or five hours one weekend afternoon trekking up and down the avenues of Midtown, trying on suits (or, rather, me trying on suits and she critiquing them) at every department store and boutique we could find.
We were off hunting for a wedding suit for me, something at once sufficiently fun and fashionable for such a big event, yet informal enough for an early-autumn Sunday afternoon.
By the end of the stretch, I still didn’t have a new suit. But I did miss my old ones.
On rare occasion over the past five years, I’ve donned a suit for work purposes. But, when I did, I’d always felt it a step back to my pre-film days, rather than a step forward.
By now, however, Cyan (and by extension me) lives at the wonkiest end of the film world, a place where our pitch to filmmakers includes phrases like ‘real-time web dashboard’ and ‘econometric research-driven screen selection’.
Our latest endeavor, the MovieSTAR Fund, is so dorked out that it’s now patent-pending. (Which, as an aside, makes me exceedingly happy – I’ve always wanted to author a patent.)
So perhaps it’s only natural that our clothing should swing business-ward, too.
It started small – an ‘anti-casual Friday’ policy of donning ties and cufflinks one day a week, with us disclaiming the attire at meetings. But, rather quickly, we discovered that people took us more seriously when it looked like we were taking things seriously ourselves. So we started donning suits on other days we had investor meetings. And, then, even on ones we didn’t.
It’s a bit of a change, especially in a world where calling someone a ‘suit’ is rarely meant as a compliment. But it’s one that seems to be working for us – investors think we look responsible enough to manage their money, filmmakers that we’re competent enough to release their films better than they could themselves.
So, this evening, I’m headed back to Barneys and Saks, fleshing out a wishlist of up-to-date additions to my business wardrobe. I’m not sure exactly what I’m looking for. Except for, still, that wedding suit.