I was waiting in my Salle Debussy seat for the 7 pm screening of Alice Rohrbacker‘s Le Meravaglie when my iPhone slipped off my lap and through the crack at the the rear of the seat. I realized it was missing a minute or two later and started searching around. I got down and reached around on the floor…nothing. Then I sat down again. I noticed my seat wasn’t collapsing all the way to a sitting position, and — genius engineer that I am — it didn’t occur to me that the missing phone, which was lying inside the seat-hinge mechanism, might be the cause. So like an idiot I flopped down on the seat and in so doing crushed my iPhone to death. I reached into the seat crack and pulled out the damaged remains. Lights off, inoperable, glass cracked, ruined Mophie charger — totally destroyed.

Now the same process that I went through in Germany last year begins again — buy a new iPhone for the maximum price in New York, have my son send it over via Fed Ex for God knows how much money…an instant death-hit of $1200 or more.

Until the new phone arrives I’ll just have to make calls on Skype. A pain but not that much of a problem — just expensive. It would be a howling nightmare if all this had happened, say, five or ten years ago. Synching issues are not the problem they used to be. It’s not that bad. Tonight so far this problem has eaten Le Meravaglie and the 9 pm screening of Abel Ferrara‘s Welcome to New York.