Okay, I got sidetracked for a few days there, but I'm excited to continue with my vacation pics now! After our afternoon in the swamp, we had a couple more days in New Orleans, and visited some more cemeteries, hung out on Bourbon Street, etc...


This is from the intro of my new show on the Food network where, every week, I teach you how to get drunk. (Actually, this was taken at an amazing cocktail bar called Cure, which is Kevin's favorite bar, and is certainly in my top ten as well now.)


( I miss New Orleans a lot already... )

The morning after the barbecue, we hopped on a plane for New Orleans, to visit my friends Kevin (misterscarecrow) and Casey, and Patrick (zombiepatrick) and Melanie, and also to meet up with our friend Leonard (ludickid), who drove all the way from San Antonio to see us! Well, to see New Orleans and us. They first day we were on our own until the evening, and I'd been to New Orleans a few times already, so I had fun showing Marjorie around the French Quarter...


Here's Marjorie in Jackson Square. You can see the statue of Andrew Jackson on horseback in the background; I think two hooves off the ground means genocidal maniac?

( Lots of New Orleans... )

My good friend Kevin L. O'Mara is a photographer in New Orleans, and I'm currently the featured image on his website, KLOPhoto.com (designed by me, incidentally).


Kevin and I have a long-running inside joke regarding the word citrus, which I'd explain here if I remembered anything about how it started or why it's funny to us. It just is. This picture was taken in one of a handful of cemeteries we visited in New Orleans earlier this month, and Kevin noticed some limes or what have you that had fallen from the trees in the cemetery and got the idea for this picture. I surely do like it.

Walked all the way to Montparnasse Cemetery yesterday with Marjorie and Jenny and visited the usual knuckleheads: Baudelaire, Gainsbourg, Bartholdi, Beckett, Dreyfus, etc. It's always really tempting to go around shouting (in French and/or English), Where the hell is Jim Morrison?! After we left, I realized I'd forgotten to find Sartre and Man Ray this time and hoped they didn't think I dissed them.

I'm finally getting around to posting some pictures from La Réunion! I'll be breaking them up into sets by day/location/activity/et cetera. Marjorie and I arrived on La Réunion after our 11-hour flight from Paris totally wiped out, so we mostly relaxed at her parents' place the first day and then began all our adventuring the next morning. The first thing M's dad, P, took us to see was the naval cemetery! And seeing as how La Réunion was completely lousy with pirates during the 18th century, the naval cemetery is pretty much the pirate cemetery!



( Pirate graves and lots more! )

In between errands today I hung out with (my friend Andrea and) Serge Gainsbourg.


Here's Serge's grave at the Cimitière du Montparnasse. Someone apparently left a cabbage in reference to the song/album L'homme à tête de chou. No relation to petit_chou.



Serge's house, a couple streets below the river, due south of the Louvre. I don't think he was the one who decorated it like that. (It rained on us a bunch so my hair isn't as huge as usual. My apologies.)

( Here is a wonderful song by Serge Gainsbourg back when he really had it goin' on. )

And here are a million more on YouTube.

A couple pictures taken by my friend Maura a few weeks back:


Alexis and me at this insane Russian restaurant in my neighborhood...


... And me in Père Lachaise Cemetery, trying my damnedest to out-rockstar Jim Morrison and out-dandy Oscar Wilde. Later on I also tried to outdrink both of them, and Edith Piaf, too. I'd say I failed pretty miserably, but another way to look at is: which of us are buried in Père Lachaise and which of us are sitting here updating our LiveJournals? Hmm?

I'm now cozily nestled back in my apartment in Paris again after a couple crazy weeks of entertaining a friend around town and doing a bit of traveling; I went to Brussels for a few days, which is neat because I'd never properly been to Belgium before (other than a half-hour rest stop between Amsterdam and Paris a couple years ago).

This is me in Brussels in front of the little peeing fountain guy, the delightfully named Manneken Pis.


The night we arrived in Brussels, we stumbled upon Manneken Pis by accident, as he's pretty small and there's no big sign in front of him or anything. Later on, we happened by the area again and discovered that some prankster had dressed him up in a sheet and pointy hood exactly like the infamous photo of the Iraqi prisoner being tortured. A bold and provocative political statement, to be sure, and made all the more poignant by appearing on... an adorable statue of a baby who is peeing incessantly.

Brussels has a wonderful atmosphere, despite being a pretty small town with not a lot of things to actually do. But I really enjoyed it a lot more than I expected to; the tiny winding streets and cobblestones and beautifully ornate buildings really charmed the heck out of me.

Anyway, get a load of this, this was my Thanksgiving: Woke up in Brussels, stopped by Manneken Pis to say good-bye, ate a heavenly Belgian waffle with strawberry jam for breakfast, hopped on a bus to France, ate Belgian chocolate truffels on the bus for lunch, arrived in Paris, ate a ham and cheese crepe for dinner (at a Muslim crepe place, so it was turkey ham!), then went up to the top of the goddamn Eiffel Tower. Now that's the way to celebrate Thanksgiving. God bless America.

Other highlights of the last two weeks:

• Getting upgraded to some sort of luxury suite in Brussels, and hanging out in the room and watching some hilarious Dutch tv show about two ridiculous toughguy detectives who are partners on the force and also gay lovers. You go on with your bad selves, the Netherlands. [Edit: Turns out it's German.]
  
  
• Eating all of the chocolate in France and Belgium.
  
  
• Dining with my gang last night at a delightful Russian restaurant right up the street. The owner, a former "champion wrestler" according to Alexis, treated us to shots of weird vodka (berry, grass-flavored?, chili-flavored, and peach) before, throughout, and after the meal. We were the only customers in the joint, and there was a dvd of traditional Russian music blasting from the big flatscreen tv. The whole thing was basically exactly the same as the birthday party scene in Eastern Promises.
  
  
• Having my phone vibrate in my pocket right while I was standing at Jim Morisson's grave. It was Lada, and I didn't answer, of course, but it would have been hilarious and wonderfully crass to announce to all the assorted pretending-to-be-sombre tourists around me, "YO, I'M BLOWIN' UP" and then pick up and say "HEY LADA I'M AT SOME NO-TALENT HACK'S GRAVE, LET ME CALL YOU RIGHT BACK." It's the thought that counts.
  

So I'm back. I owe a lot of people a lot of e-mails. I'll get on it.

Wow man, It's about 6pm here and I just got in from the art store with a ton of art stuff (plus a power strip and a lighter with a naked lady on it), and I passed a guy sitting right on the steps at the entrance of my street, shooting smack into the back of his forearm. That's a first. Then I bid good-day to the lovely trans hooker on the corner and slipped into my building to drag my packages up five flights of stairs in unreasonable shoes. I surely do love the feeling of coming home with a giant slab of Bristol board and an arsenal of beautiful new pens. I've got fucking comics to draw, man, and that is a very fine and very serious feeling indeed.

On the way to the art store, I walked through one of my favorite scenes in Paris — there's this overpass that goes over top of the Cimetiere de Montmartre, and you can see hundreds of elaborate tombs and graves sticking up everywhere all over this weirdly-terraced lot. I glanced down though the railing of the bridge and noticed this cat sitting on one of the graves, completely still...




( Two more pics of the cat... )

Spooky, huh? I watched him for about five minutes and then let him be. I'm really glad I remembered to bring my camera today.