Yes -- a very bright fellow! (by Manning, 12:01pm)

Dizzy Dali Dinner (by Manning, 4:35pm)

Parisian Proto-Goth Beauties, 1910 (by Manning, 6:14pm)

Jon Morris in Seattle, Washington writes:

DEAR MANNING

ARE THESE UR GRANDMOMS???

(Parisian Proto-Goth Beauties, 1910, from http://chrisarrant.tumblr.com)

Dear Jon,

Yes, they are.

Frosty the Snowman, or the Modern Prometheus (by Manning, 1:51pm)

The most French-Colonial thing I have ever seen (by Manning, 5:58pm)

Imagine a beautiful African beach covered with a mixture of tourists from mainland France and local Créole folks, all melting under a boiling sun in front of an impossibly blue ocean, framed by swaying palm trees. A tiny old man comes by, carrying a platter with a huge silver urn and little paper cups, calling, "Caféeeee... Caféeeee... Caféeeee..."

Things that remind me I'm technically in Africa (by Manning, 12:33pm)

Things that remind me I'm technically in Africa:

• Unattended goats grazing on the side of the highway
  
  
• Neighborhood bars every few hundred meters consisting of nothing more than a corrugated tin counter and roof, often spraypainted crazy bright colors, often with a couple drunks lying in the street in front, regardless of the time of day.
  
  
• M and I went out for a scenic motorcycle ride with her parents yesterday; M on the back of her mom's bike, and me on the back of her dad's bike, both Harleys. (Si vous pouvez lire ça, l'Americain est tombé.) As we cruised down a rural road, I noticed two guys standing at the side of the road up ahead, both rugged-looking Créole guys, one holding a macheté. In my dumb nervous brain I was was like, "uh, is this, are we, um, oh man," and then I saw the second guy lift a chopped-open coconut up to his lips to drink from it, and then I noticed the coconut tree next to them. Ha.

My reunion with Réunion (by Manning, 5:03pm)

I'm on Réunion Island! The last time Marjorie and I came here we were living in Paris, and the eleven-hour overnight flight was pretty tough. But this time, since we're living much farther away, way over in New York, we had to endure an even longer trip. The most direct way to get here was to leave JFK at 11:30 Wednesday night, arrive in Paris at noon on Thursday, spend all day at the airport in Paris, and then take the overnight flight to Réunion, making a total of something like thirty hours' travel time. Absolutely exhausting. We arrived on Réunion about 10:30 Friday morning, after two nights with very little sleep. I took a nap in M's parents' guest room around noon, and when I woke up I was slightly alarmed to see that the sun was down!

As I got up to look for Marjorie and her parents, I realized with some surprise that the house was in total darkness. Was it the middle of the night? Was everyone asleep? No, it turned out; it was only about 7pm, and everyone was sitting in darkness on the patio. Every evening during this time of year, M's parents turn the lights out for about half an hour, evidently to dissuade tons of beetles from flying into the house. M's parents' house is an L-shape with the entire interior made up of sliding glass doors that are always open, weirdly with no screens whatsoever — you'd think on an island where bugs are enough of a nuisance that you turn the lights off every night to keep them from flying in, someone would've thought to install some screens, but no. I asked what kind of beetles we were talking about here, and M's dad got up and quickly found one crawling on the patio and brought it to me; it was basically the exact same size and shape as a Japanese beetle, but dull and black instead of shiny green. Not dangerous at all, just creepy and annoying and noisy.

This morning I woke up a little before sunrise thanks to jetlag, and from my bed I stared at the Indian Ocean in the distance while the sky got lighter. The house is up on a hill, and the island's main port is way down below us in the distance. The image from where I lay is almost unreal; I can stare out the back door (all of the rooms have sliding glass doors that lead out to the patio and pool and garden), across the yard, over a low fence, and in the space between two enormous banana(?) trees I can just barely see boats and huge machinery way down below, with the dark, calm sea trailing out beyond them for miles and miles. It's hard to absorb the fact that I'm looking at the Indian Ocean, and that a few hours' boat ride in that direction would put me in Madagascar. Wow.

While I ate breakfast on the patio this morning I watched a long green lizard run sideways along the back fence, and two little yellow and black birds flitted around the banana trees and screeched unhappily at each other. I'm getting bit here and there by tiny invisible bugs that leave little itchy bumps like mosquito bites but much smaller. I saw a huge something or other like a cross between a spider and an impossibly large ant climbing around one of the columns of the house. I hear roosters crowing and birds chirping and insects clicking, and I swear I heard something like a donkey braying in the distance a little while ago, but I'm too shy to ask about it because I'm probably completely wrong and M's parents will make fun of me for being a city boy, and I can't say I wouldn't deserve it. M mentioned that her mom found a tiny scorpion in the bathtub last year, and that certainly changes the way I navigate around the house and makes me think consciously for the first time in my life about any surface I'm about to sit on.

Okay, time to shower and figure out how the hell I need to dress for dinner in a fancy restaurant in the tropics. Where's Lord Whimsy when you need him...?

Hey, an illustration of mine is in Wired (by Manning, 8:55am)

Hey, neat, my pal Culann just noticed that an old freelance illustration I did is in a Wired article! Check it out: Arcade Improv: Humans Pretending to Be Videogames — I illustrated that there Action Castle logo a couple years ago, for a game designed by my old friend and client Jared Sorensen. The logo was Jared's idea, and closely based on the old Zork logo. Fun!

That's actually my second time in Wired; they mentioned my Cool Stuff in Paris website a while back. It's like, man, get up off me, Wired, you know? Enough is enough!

Halloween outing #3, costume #3 (by Manning, 7:08pm)

Boo.

Either the wallpaper goes, or I do (by Manning, 10:21am)

Happy Halloween!!!

A lot of people have asked me how I made the wallpaper for our party. It was a lot of work, but fun! Most folks figured I'd made a stencil, but I actually did the opposite; I made a big stamp. Here's what I done did:

• Google-image-searched Victorian wallpaper, found a good pattern
  
• Edited the pattern in Photoshop to clean it up, added seahorses and a skull, and converted it to solid black on white.
  
• Printed it out at 8.5" x 11" at work
  
• Cut out the pattern with scissors
  
• Traced the cut-out pattern with a pen onto a sheet of flexible foam rubber that I found at the art store
  
• Cut out the foam rubber pattern
  
• Glued the foam rubber pattern onto foam core, and cut away most of the excess foam core to make a rough diamond shape

And that was my stamp! Then, I bought a bunch of big rolls of cheap brown wrapping paper. I measured the height of our walls, and cut out long sheets of paper at that length, and laid them on the floor. (I'd thought about hanging the paper first and stamping the paint onto the paper right on the walls, but then I realized that the paint might bleed through a bit!) I bought a gigantic bottle of cheap black tempera paint and a cheap wide paintbrush. I put the paint into a plastic bowl and used the paintbrush to paint the paint onto the stamp, then pressed that onto the paper. I just eyeballed the distance and positioning for the pattern; I didn't measure anything or try to make the pattern perfectly straight and even or anything. I knew that the overall effect would be very imperfect; paper not cut to exactly the right size, pattern a bit willy-nilly, some prints from the stamp all black and solid and drippy, and others faint and patchy with lots of holes. All of this was fine; we're in a messed-up old underwater ship, you know? The painted paper got a bit warped and didn't hang flat on the walls, and it was totally fine.



I was really pleased with how the wallpaper came out, and I only wish I'd had the time to start earlier on this particular project, because I was still making and hanging wallpaper half an hour before the party started, and I only had time to do about half as many walls as I'd wanted to. No one could tell, of course, so it was fine. I think it's funny that we had guests enjoying our decorations in our apartment while the paint was still wet, but (I think) nobody touched it and noticed. If I'd had more time I would've made the pattern tighter as well, with less empty space on the paper, but I was trying to save time and whip up the maximum wall coverage in the least amount of time. It was all good in the end. The work involved in making the stamp itself probably took more total time then printing all the nine or ten sheets of wallpaper we ended up with.



I love making Halloween stuff! But sometimes it's a relief that I can only get tied up in these crazy projects one month a year.

P.S. I got a bat for my birthday.

Snow on Halloween is a bit of a nightmare before Christmas (by Manning, 11:10am)

So, I'm still trying to find out if anybody got a good photo of my makeup and hair and contact lenses from my drowned zombie costume from last week's undersea ball. Meanwhile, last night Marjorie and Audrey got dressed up as Black Swan and White Swan and braved the snow and wind and cold and went all the way uptown to watch some roller derby championship match or something, and I stayed in a while in order to go out here in the neighborhood with our friends Francisco and Melanie and Katie. I didn't want to do the same makeup again, so I grabbed a few items that were left over after our Halloween party and went as, I guess, a Mexican wrestler designed by Jean Paul Gaultier.

Francisco got me that mask for my birthday last week! It was awesome to have a reason to use it. The sailor cap was part of an abandoned costume idea by Marjorie from last weekend. Oops, and I forgot to put on my skeleton gloves for this pic. Nuts.

We went out to a local bar that was doing a surprisingly fun Halloween party with a good turnout of costumed people despite the crazy snow and cold. The French girls joined us later, and they and their swan get-ups took second place in the costume contest! (First place was an awesome couple dressed as Walt and Jesse from Breaking Bad; they were handing out blue rock candy from a big ziploc bag and the young lady dressed as Jesse kept yelling at everybody and calling them "bitches!") A bit later, a very proud moment for me was watching Marjorie and Audrey convince the hipster-ish dj to play The Monster Mash — it worked, and I was proud of them for being brave and successfully employing their French feminine wiles, and also proud for how much they've taken to this holiday that is so foreign to them and so dear to me. It was a very good and very strange pre-Halloween night, and I'm hoping that we'll have more options on the real-ass night of the 31st; I wanna get really decked out and do some ridiculous things for that one. Man, Halloween still remains the very best reason I've found for staying in America for a few years. I want to do this all the time.

Some photos of our Halloween party, by my friend Francisco (by Manning, 5:59pm)

( A bunch more!Collapse )

Portraits from the undersea ball (by Manning, 5:31pm)

In coming up with decorating projects for the undersea Halloween ball, I figured it might be fun to do something with these nine picture frames on our living room wall. The images we have in there normally are already slightly spooky — eight of them are weird black and white postcards from the medical history museum in Berlin, and then I made a deer skull graphic for the big oval frame in the middle. (You can see them in this post about our apartment.) So last year we just left them alone for the party.

This year, for the nautical theme, I had the idea of Photoshopping some old-timey photos of the ship's crew and displaying them in the frames. I started with the idea of our pet rabbits as the captain and first mate, and then added me and Marjorie as the hosts of the ball, and then our friend Audrey who's visiting from Paris for Halloween, and then my buddy Francisco, since he had told me a while back that he wanted to do up a steampunk costume for our party so he could be the ship's engineer. We had asked our friends Heather and Mike to help out with the party, so they got a spot in one of the frames too. At that point I'd pretty much run out of people who were directly involved in the party, so I decided to fill up the last frame with just a generic picture of a (zombified) ship's crew and stick that one way up out of the way where nobody would really look like it.

Anyway, the project involved lots and lots of Google image searching and lots of Photoshopping. I really enjoy this kind of work and I kept wanting to add more and more stuff to all these things. Seeing as how these would be printed out pretty dark and displayed in a pretty dark room, I knew I could get away with being a little bit sloppy with the details, so that's probably a little more visible when you're looking at these online.

For Acide and Kyubi, I just Googled old sea captains and sailors and Photoshopped their heads on.
( See the rest after the cut!Collapse )

Video of our undersea Halloween ball aboard the R.M.S. Albatross (by Manning, 10:50am)

My buddy Francisco took video of our decorations! Holy crap! That's me in the suit near the beginning. Check out our place!

Photos soon!

Halloween Ball aboard the R.M.S. Albatross (by Manning, 7:13pm)

Hey folks! It's been a while! Marjorie and I just had our second annual pre-Halloween Halloween party last night, and it was a total graveyard smash. As usual, I wanna show off the animated invitation I made! Please check it out:

Click!
Whew, this animation represents a pretty intense two days of my life right there. I love that Halloween has basically become the one time a year when I try to remember how to do some Flash. Otherwise I never really touch the stuff.

Anyway, about the party. We got really heavy into the theme this year, and the decorations we put together were even more elaborate than we usually do. Marjorie and I were also fortunate to have our friend Audrey visiting from France, and that girl has a real talent for putting up some fake seaweed, it turns out. I'll be taking lots of pictures of all the decorations tonight so I can get them online asap. The party was really a blast, and I'm very excited that there's still a whole week and then some of Halloween stuff left to do!

ADAM MOTHERFUCKING ANT (by Manning, 5:18pm)

ADAM MOTHERFUCKING ANT

Vegas (by Manning, 9:35pm)

Las Vegas last week. More pictures and stories and things soon. Hello, LiveJournal! I miss you.

( Unrelated vanity...Collapse )

Behold -- A Krull Starship! (by Manning, 6:09pm)

(Thanks, calamityjon.)

Beavis and Butt-head — Lou Reed, No Money Down (by Manning, 10:23am)

Funky But Chic (by Manning, 9:00am)

Hey hey! My photoshoot for the Time Out New York — Most Stylish New Yorkers article is up!

Click to see the whole set!
Haha, oh man, well, okay, I hate these photos less than I thought I would, but I still feel pretty silly about a lot of them. Some of these outfits worked better back when I had crazy wild hairsprayed hair, and I didn't realize that when I was throwing clothes in a suitcase to head over to the Time Out New York offices. All in all they're fine I guess.

Make sure to read all my captions about the items to see how much of an asshole I am! Oh man. Filling out their questionnaire afterward was fun, and I think I might've gone a bit overboard.

When you get to the 16th photo — one of a scarf by itself — that's no longer my stuff, but rather a selection of items the style editor(s) are suggesting you pick up if you want to dress like me (and who in their right mind would want to do that?). Interestingly enough, I hate most of these items and would never be caught dead wearing any of them, the only two exceptions being the ones that look exactly like my own stuff, those being the simple aviator shades, and the pink dress shirt. I guess the stripey scarf's not bad. The other stuff, ugh: jeans? Casual shoes? Trendy bowtie and zipper cuff? Ick. No no no. Not on me, not ever. But hey, that's fashion for ya.

By the way, I wouldn't want anyone to think some fashion editor ran up to me in the street and said, "Please, I must photograph you!" (Although that did sort of happen once.*) My good pal Heather (petit_chou) works for Time Out and recommended the fashion folks check me out and see if they were interested in using me for the stylish New Yorkers issue. The next day I got an e-mail. So that's that. Thanks Heather!

*(One time a long time ago a fashion blogger lady came up to me in the subway station at 8th Avenue and asked to take my picture. This happens a lot in New York. Here you go, scroll down a bit. I wasn't wearin' nothin' special. I'd actually just woken up and hadn't showered or done my hair; that's yesterday's hairspray still standing tall.)

You can see all the other clowns from the the 2011 Most Stylish issue here. You can click the thumbnails to see each person, and then click their larger photo to go to their whole set.

Anyway, the actual style issue came out in print a couple months ago, but the issue with my spread comes out today! I'm gonna go find me a couple copies. I'm suddenly sad for the first time that fridge magnets don't work on my fridge. Fucking aluminum or whatever.

Recommended soundtrack for this post: