Oh boy did we have a blast last night at Brooklyn Bowl. Where else can you watch clips of Bruce Springsteen live as well as Stop Making Sense and old Kraftwerk videos on big screens and bowl with your comrades at the same time? Here are some photos from our awesome outing:

The gang arrives and Marilyn Laverty takes down highest score predictions. Prize winners for the night included the winning score for Chris Chafin whose score of 219 truly amazed everyone, and Andy Silva who believed in his Shore Fire teammates enough to bet that someone would bowl 200 or over.
(Carrie Tolles, Diana D’Angelo, Emily Rosenblum)
(Andy Silva)
(Mark Satlof, Chris Taillie)
(Yum)
(Nick Baily, Rebecca Shapiro, Matt Hanks)
(Nora Lyons and Elizabeth Lutz)
(Diana, celebrating a strike)
(Chris “I bowl over 200″ Chafin)
(Chris Brudzinski and Brendan Gilmartin)
That’s gorgeous Shore Fire director Rebecca Shapiro, front in center with the black top, whose husband Peter Shapiro, picture with bowling ball, is the owner of this fantastic place.

(An aside: dancing in bowling shoes is really really fun)

Not only do I get to represent TuneCore but I’m a happy customer too. I signed up in cognito with TuneCore a while back to test it out.

I used a song, VU’s Sister Ray from my college band The Lawn Service, taken off the long-in-the-works box set ‘Livin’ Lovin’ Lawn Service.’ That’s Steve Sherman on vocals with me and Karl “Precoda” Ochi on the duelin’ guitars.

Now, I took TuneCore’s new widget out for a test drive and it’s even better than I’d expected.

Easy to use and took me about one minute (literally). So here you go. Let’s see how my sales stack up!

http://widgets.clearspring.com/o/4a37fac83c457251/4a68c3d864302af1/4a381495a8801718/8b48a9c6/-cpid/97eb2a2221dcfd4

As a publicist, I’m constantly inviting writers to concerts, so it’s a nice change when situations are reversed and a writer invites me to a show, and it’s even better when the writer is Time Out NY’s Jay Ruttenberg and the show includes a set from one of my favorite bands, The Fiery Furnaces.

When he’s not busy writing for TONY, Jay edits the fantastic Lowbrow Reader, and last night’s event (officially called The Lowbrow Reader Variety Hour and held at the amazingly altruistic Housing Works Bookstore) celebrating the new issue.

The night started off with banjo antics from Peter Stampfel and the Ether Frolic Mob, followed by an amazing reading from Gilbert Rogin, and music from Larkin Grimm. I loved comedian John Mulaney’s set (wish I could find a YouTube clip of his routine on ‘Law & Order,’ which cracks me up), but the Furnaces were the real highlight of the evening.

I was sitting about four feet from the stage and snapped this picture as Jay was introducing Eleanor and Matthew.

Seeing the Friedberger kids play with just Matthew’s acoustic guitar was amazing, and so wildly intimate. It felt like a family reunion almost, but the only people who were actually related were the performers themselves. Their set focused mostly on material from their new album ‘I’m Going Away,’ which all sounded great (especially “Cut the Cake”), but they also played one of my old favorites “Teach Me Sweetheart” from ‘Bitter Tea.’

Here’s hoping there’s another Variety Hour in the works!

Hat tip to Mike Lavigne for forwarding the link, but I was briefly transfixed last night looking at this gallery of screenshots posted on The Daily Beast of the web in all its 1.0 (or even pre-1.0) glory. Highly worth checking out the gallery.

The Daily Beast calls it a flashback to “ugly” websites, but that doesn’t seem fair. They weren’t badly designed, that’s what everything looked like early on. This one though was my favorite, especially since it was taken in 2005.

That’s an entire decade after the Netscape IPO (usually credited as the Lexington & Concord of the dot com era) and well into the Web 2.0 era. Things sure do move fast, checking Google’s handy de facto EKG meter for the news media you can see that it wasn’t long before it was one of the biggest tech phenomena going.

And a year from now the story is bound to have changed and morphed yet again. We have a suspicion our client SuperFan.com might just be a big part of it, but in any case if you can forgive the cliche — the one thing that’s certain to be constant is constant change.

And a side note, this image was my runner up favorite. It may not have resonance unless you were living in Manhattan in 1999-2000 or so, but the Kozmo/UrbanFetch wars were epic. My first apartment in the city was a lovely single room with a sweeping (nearly half block wide) first floor view of the Lincoln Tunnel entrance on 34th street.

But one thing I had going for me was being about 100 yards from the old UrbanFetch distro facility next to Javits. Ever find yourself at 2am needing two razor blades, a snickers bar, and a 60 watt GE lightbulb delivered to your door, at low prices with no minimum order, and tipping strictly prohibited? That one’s still sorely missed.