i took the above video with my digital camera. the song is “Nantes” by Beirut. most of the video consists of a 45 minute giant elephant ride that Kourtney and i took. the first part of the video features a bunch of french high school students riding some prototypes for a giant marine carousel that they are planning to build.
Les Machines was created after founding artist, François Delarozière split up with Royal de Luxe, a company responsible for this shit.
i saw this french info-graphic at a customer service phone at Paris CDG airport. i’m really interested in the symbol in the top right corner with the two overlapping faces. it reminds me of this (check out 1:26).
i think it’s supposed to mean “meeting point.” weird.
stop by blick art materials on bond st. in manhattan on September 24th, 2009 for awesome deals and free stuff.
from their site :
Mark your calendars for Blick Madness on Thursday, September 24th! Come to the store for goodies, music, giveaways, and product demos. Also enter for a chance to win a 72-count Studio Set of Prismacolor Premier Double-Ended Markers — over a $300 value! The store will be hosting a Montana Cans spray paint demo as well. Contact the store for more details.
i bought this chapstick at a duane reade the other day and nathan noticed that the receipt was unnecessarily larger than the actual chapstick. we started brainstorming about ways receipts could somehow be emailed to you, like they do at the apple store. maybe if you had a microchip in your finger (that you could actually also pay with, maybe) that linked to your email and you would tap it on some keypad and a receipt would be emailed to you. something.
Josh Fox is working on this amazing documentary that’s exposing the extremely criminal acts of “clean” natural gas drilling companies. tonight i’m going to TOXIC SPLASH BASH, a benefit for the film which will featuring phenomenal performances by Reverend Billy, Rude Mechanical Orchestra, and a whole bunch of other awesome activist art folk. and there’s apparently a ton of free food. and it’s only $15.
hope to see you there. but if not, please check out waterunderattack.com to learn more about this important film, and to be completely freaked out and motivated to do something about it.
Dan Savage, Village Voice columnist responsible for the amazing weekly, Savage Love writes this in today’s issue :
HAPPY ANNIVERSARY: The police in Fort Worth, Texas, marked the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion—three nights of rioting sparked by a “routine” police raid on a gay bar in New York City—by raiding a gay bar called the Rainbow Lounge. One of the men arrested, Chad Gibson, was so brutally assaulted by the police that, as of this writing, he remains hospitalized with a life-threatening brain injury.
Police Chief Jeff Halstead claims that the men at the Rainbow Lounge made lewd advances toward his officers and specifically accused Gibson, a slight 26-year-old, of groping one of his cops. This preposterous claim is contradicted by eyewitness accounts and photographic evidence.
We can’t let the police in Fort Worth use the Gay Panic Defense (”That fag touched me, so of course I beat him nearly to death!”) to excuse this brutal violation of the civil rights of Fort Worth’s gay community. If you’re on Facebook, please show your support by joining the Rainbow Lounge Raid group (www.tinyurl.com/lavecu). And please e-mail or call the mayor of Fort Worth—Mike Moncrief, 817-392-6118, mike.moncrief@fortworthgov.org—and demand a full investigation into the raid on the Rainbow Lounge and that charges be brought against the officers who assaulted Chad Gibson.
that was my quote of the day as we walked down this street in barceloneta on monday, my last full day in barcelona. apparently, twenty years ago there was no beach. barcelona was just a massive port of trade, but now the beach is a draw and augments the city’s debaucherous reputation - giving a daytime leisure equivalent to bcn’s world class nightlife. it’s like los angeles but spanish - and with more art. cities are like cake batter. you add various elements to affect sweetness, texture, etc. the addition of hollywood to any beautiful beach town will inevitably lead to a kind of sourdough, bitter, fluffy cake. in other words - barcelona is like the los angeles you can actually live in.
but would i actually live there?
that’s the question i ask whenever i go to a new city. barcelona was kind of my main reason for coming to spain at all. i had heard so much about it and i wanted to see if it lived up to all the hype. as you may have read here, my first impressions of barcelona were not necessarily the best. thankfully i was able to meet some amazing people that showed me an amazing time, and now i have a markedly higher opinion of the city. as for permanent residence, i can’t really say. madrid seems to still be my spanish love, but the art scene in spain definitely lives in barcelona. as a designer, it would absolutely be the most fruitful place for me to be in spain. from the galleries and shops in el born, to the contemporary art museum in el raval to poble nau’s open studios, barcelona is a perfect climate for new and innovative design.
my new friends in barcelona include print-makers, painters, documentary film-makers and dj’s and they all absolutely rock. from lovely dinner parties to tapas to all-nighters at razzmatazz, every social interaction i experienced was genuine, non-pretentious and fascinating. if by any chance any of you are reading this : you’ve got a place to crash in nyc! (that means you, clare, becks, tom, james, dix, ninian, john, hiroshi, steve & all you other awesome folk!)
so we got to barcelona yesterday, via ryan air from madrid to girona - a small airport about an hour and a half south of barcelona - and then a cheap bus ride. apparently it’s very expensive to fly directly to barcelona (which of course has it’s own airport) so most people fly to girona or reus.
yesterday i was in a pissy mood for some reason. maybe it was our frat-house hostel, homesickness or worries of spending my last dime on tapas and having to sell my body on the street to get back to lyon at the end of the month. in order to ease my pain, jess and i had dinner with the gays in the gay-borhood of barcelona which has a catalan name that means “left of the example” at this fabulous and cheap cafeteria that was packed. an injection of gayness got me through the night and today, after doing some much-needed laundry, i booked it over to casa mila by gaudí.
learning about this building in high school got me pumped, and i gotta say, the slides just don’t do it justice.
