Wednesday, April 29

there is a world waiting for us to live in it





Today was fucking boss. A bunch of cool shit went down. Too tired to summarise it all, so I'm just gonna go to sleep.

Here's a funny thing though, I brought two cameras with me, didn't realise until today that one of them didn't have any film in and I'd been taking pictures with it since I got here.

Ha ha. x

Tuesday, April 28

Hello everybody


I didn't really do much today, or yesterday for that matter but I had some really nice, long and satisfying walks around the city.

Checked out an exhibition at the fondation cartier that was really great. Upstairs were these pieces by this Brazilian artist called Beatriz Milhazes. I don't pretend to know much about art but what I liked a lot about them was that at times the pieces seemed to be really quite abstract explosions of simple circular shapes and bright colours, but the circular shapes and paterns would start to instersect like a ven diagram and the overlaps of colour would look like flowers or something. Sort of like a kalidescope maybe?

That's what it looked like to me anyway! The pieces were huge and really quite awesome to look at but also quite easy to take in and easy to relate to. The gallery commisioned two installations from her which covered two seperate walls of the glass building, its a shame the weather was so horendously muggy, I would have liked to have seen what they would have looked like from the inside of the gallery with the sun hitting the glass walls (the paintings on the walls were semi transparent)

Downstairs were these photographs by this American guy named William Eggleston. Jack highly recomended it to me and it was really awesome. William Eggleston was commisioned by the gallery to do a series of photographs of Paris, and I think the commision is still on going. There were three years worth of photographs, and a quite a few abstract sketches and paintings to accompany many of them.

The photos were excellent, I thought he really manged to create/capture something that was alluring, romantic and at times quite dark about Paris, and I guess cities in general. What I liked espescially was that each of the photographs looked like they could be a little snippet of a short story or a still from a film. Sort of inspiring in the way that everyday city life inspires people to create something out of nothing.

Whatever, enough navel gazing.

I spent a lot of time drinking outside the Pompidou and walking around St. Paul, took a peak in a couple of vintage shops and boutiques as well. It rained a lot but I didn't really mind, places always look nice just after its rained and the sun shines off of the pavements and buildings. And paris has some fucking gorgeous pavements (ha) and buildings.

Tomorrow I'll see a band and maybe check out the eifel. xx

Monday, April 27

Boom, there she was

Ah! So here I am at Cleo's house just outside of Paris, chilling for the moment as I had to get up at eight or something this morning because Cleo had to give me directions and junk before she went to school.

Plans for today are to meet a friend later on in the evening at Chatelet station, but in the mean time I'm gonna head over the Oberkampf, which is where I stayed last summer, check out the Pompideu(?) for a bit, relax a little, check out some vintage shop I heard was near by and then if I've got time before meeting the aformentioned friend check out this awesome sounding exhibition at the Fondation Cartier.

Should be pretty fucking cash.

Yesterday I didn't do much at all, got a little tour around Cleo's town, Créteil. Hung out near the Orsay with a friend of her's and checked out this pretty cool second hand shop which had loads of records, video tapes and old books. Found a letter in one of them actually, but once translated from french it was one of the dullest corresponances I'd read in a while.

Find of the day was a really fucking old (1926!) copy of The Tempest. Only 80 cents.

Gotta go easy on the money actually.

Sunday, April 26

And just like that a millipide walks across my bedroom floor.

Beatniks were the only good hipsters.

I'm up now and have been for hours, I went out yesterday with a friend for drinks in the sun and all that summer time malarkey, it was good, great even, but spending the day solidly drinking had tuckered me about a real treat and as soon as I got home, I immediately hit the big grey sack.

Up and refreshed now though and like I say, have been up for a while doing absolutely nothing actually. Barely even packed, barely even thought about any of this little trip, and every time I tried to devote a little bit of grey matter to the endeavour I felt a little sick and a little nervous...but I guess that's the nature of unaffordable, romantic excursions for one. The more you think about it, the closer you find yourself to heart palpitations and the Big Bad Breakdowns.

Probably best for everyone involved if I don't think about it until I get there.

I'm staying with a friend Cleo, who we met when we went to Paris last year, right before we climbed the Bercy fucking stadium. Hoo boy.
My plan is to hang out a little, walk around, bike around, take in the sights, maybe hit a night spot or two and definitely take as many pictures as I can, write as much as I can and get as soused as possible whenever possible.

I'll be another guy for a week, walk around with a cigerette in the corner of my mouth at all times, maybe improve my posture and breathe better too. Let my booze do the talking for me and forget about embarrased walks home at three o'clock in the morning, rat traps, rent payments and the world in general. For a week.

But that's a whole other story.

Saturday, April 25

Paris

Tomorrow/

Friday, April 24

Mostly, I'm silent.



It must sound like I'm full of shit when I talk about the few trivial things that I'm interested in, but it surprises even me just how much I''m motivated, inspired and sometimes even moved by films, comic books and music.

A fresh new student loan came in this week and against my better judgement I hopped on the good foot and did the bad thing and splashed out on a couple trades.

Mike Allred's Madman is pretty much one of the best comic book series I've ever read. It's basically about this guy whose dead body is found and brought back to life by two kooky scientists. He has no memory of who he was before he died, but it's discovered that he has latent psychic abilities that are activated when he touches certain people, and he's also inhumanly strong, fast and agile.

As a result of this he learns things at a very advanced rate, and the scientists who gave him life primarily as an experiment grow closer and closer to him, becoming his best (and at first only) friends and father figures. They name him Frank Einstein after their two personal heroes, Frank Sinatra and Albert Einstein and they promise to help him uncover the true nature of his death and who he was before he died in exchange for his help with various scientific experiments and endeavours.

Before any of this can be done however, one of the scientists is killed by some secret shady organisation and thus begins the adventures of The Madman of Snap City. Along the way, he falls in love with a girl called Joe Lombard who works in the office next door to his. Lots of insane, absolutely balls out crazy shit happens to Frank as the series progresses and the best thing about it all is how the writer and artist Mike Allred manages to take existentialism, romance, science fiction and adventure and present it all as this light hearted, yet incredibly esoteric adventure story.

Part of its charm lies in the art, which is heavily influenced by Lichtenstein, Jack Kirby and Pop Art and the 60s in general; Mike inks the whole thing whilst his wife Laura does the colours and she really does compliment his style so well with her use of bold, stand out colours which get more and more intricate, psychedelic and all together breath taking as the series goes on.

Not just that but the writing and the stories themselves really are something incredible; Allred somehow manages to delve in to some pretty insane realms of story telling and narrative, all the while maintaining this incredibly hip and sassy 60s-silverage-beatnik vibe to it. There's intrigue, mystery, drama and a whole lot of questions about existence that we all find ourselves asking, but its all done in this incredibly easy to digest format. The creation of story arcs is so subtle that you're almost fooled in to thinking that each story is self contained.

The romance element is also pretty amazing too, in the sense that you can tell it comes from a really genuine and loving place in the writer's heart. Generally comic book romances can seem a little tacked on, and for the most part they really are. It's very rare that you get two believably in love characters in a super hero comic espescially.

There was one issue I was reading yesterday night actually where Madman/Frank is accused of murder and as he's in the middle of some weird fight with a circus freak he has an internal monolgoue where he starts questioning the nature of good and evil, whether such a thing as a God could exist in a world where atrocities happen every day, and if there would be any point existing in a world where we didn't have evil, because then we wouldn't able to appreciate what was good in the world.

Obviously he doesn't really reach a conclusion on that matter in particular but he reconciles it within himself by ultimately deciding that, if he did live forever in a world without good, or better yet a world without evil, so long as he was with Joe, forever wouldn't really be long enough...Corny as hell, but cute none the less.

There's also an incident where Frank finds himself lost in a bunch of weird false realities he's created and has to find his way back to the real world, and back to Joe. He and his robot clone Astroman (I know, right?) are struggling to find their way back home, talking even more philosophical psychobable and talking about the history of his existence. The best thing about this story was that, in each individual panel Allred would draw in a completely different style and each style was a homage to a different artist or era in comic book history.

The guy manages to pay homages to Popeye, Richey Rich and Casper the friendly ghost, Where the wild things are, Jack Kirby's fourth world and a whole bunch of other shit I didn't get in the space of a page or two. It was pretty much a crash course in philosophy and the history of illustration done in less than ten pages. Pretty incredible if you're in to that sort of thing.

So yeah, head out and buy everything you can find by Mike Allred, or anything featuring Madman. It all sounds dumb as hell but some how it just fucking works. What's best is that pretty much every big name in comics loves this fucking guy.

Hundreds of neck beareded geeks can't be wrong, can they?

Saturday, April 18

1. I didn't mean to turn you on - Cherrelle

2. Burnin' Up - Michael Jonzun

3. Midas touch - Midnight Star

4. Is It Love? - Gang of Four

5. Slow Dancin' - Chaka Khan

6. Love Come Down - Evelyn "Champagne" King

7. Candy - Cameo

8. Lady Cab Driver - Prince

9. Why Should I love you? - Kate Bush ft. Prince

10. What You Won't Do For Love - Bobby Caldwell

11. Boat Party - Haircut 100

http://www.mediafire.com/?myj1lkivptx

Saturday, April 11

Be still my beating heart


http://www.myspace.com/penspenspenis


The one in the middle is my favourite.