Hey hey, check out my cameo in the new video by The Dead Sexy Inc — The Simple Things!



I linked up this video on Facebook the other day when it was posted there, but I had to wait 'til it appeared on YouTube to be able to embed it here on LiveJournal. Complicated! Anyway, I'd mentioned here back in June that my friend Alexis (Dead Sexy's drummer) had asked me to appear briefly in a new video, and this is it! For those of you who're new to my blog, I used to live with Alexis and his girlfriend Lada in my previous apartment in Paris.

The video was shot in three different cities: Alexis' scenes are in Paris, Emmanuel's scenes are in Berlin (where he lives now), and Stephane's scenes were shot in Tokyo, where Dead Sexy have played a few times and where they apparently have a bit of a following.

My cameo is about half a second long, and it's at 1:40 if you're impatient. Since June, I've been crossing my fingers that my amazing shoes would be visible! They are not.

There's also a surprise cameo by Lada from 2:34 to 2:40!

And here's a fun piece of trivia: When the whole group is suddenly playing together at 3:06, they're rocking in the same Paris parking garage where I played Père Noël in Toxic Zonic's video for Can't Stand Christmas last year.

One last thing, I just helped Dead Sexy set up a new online store, so if you like their music, get yourself a cd or something! Kamikaze is a fantastic album and totally great for the gym, I've found.

Text message from Alexis last night:

"Want to be in the video for The Dead Sexy Inc. - The Simple Things - tomorrow night? You must look dandy rock. Let me know."

Is this a rhetorical question?! I'm bleaching my roots and picking out clothes now.

Quick update: The Dead Sexy Inc have added another NYC show, this Sunday the 29th at midnight at Trashbar, 256 Grand Street, in Williamsburg. Here's the flyer...


I'll definitely be at the other show, this Friday night. ( Here's the flyer. ) I'm not sure yet about the Sunday night show, but if you can't make it Friday, I encourage you to come out Sunday!

P.S. I'm in America! Hello!

Hey New Yorkers! My pal Alexis just e-mailed me to let me know that The Dead Sexy Inc. are playing in NYC on Friday the 27th!!! Holy shit! So, I'm writing this post for two important reasons...

1. You should go to the show! I'll be there! Amazingly, this concert lines up perfectly with my trip to Philly/NJ. I wasn't 100% sure I was going to head up to NYC this time, but now it's definite.
   
   
2. Alexis and the guys need a place to stay! If you or anyone you know can host them for any night(s) between March 23rd and the 30th, please contact Alexis (araknidrecords@yahoo.fr) asap. They're looking for space for four people to crash; the three guys in the group plus the sound engineer. I'm sure they're not looking for anything fancy, and couches and floors would be fine. Even if you can only host one or two people, or only for a night or two, please contact Alexis! I can vouch that the three band members are extremely nice guys, they all speak excellent English, and they'll be good guests.

For those of you who don't know, Alexis is my old roomate from when I lived in Pigalle, the red light district of Paris, from 2007-2008 (my beloved pink bedroom was at his place). Alexis is one of my best friends in Paris, and one of my best friends anywhere, for that matter. The Dead Sexy Inc. are an awesome Parisian rock n' roll band, and they're extremely fun in conert; I've probably seen them about ten times. They're glam and energetic and crazy. I guarantee you'll have a great time at the show. You can check out a bunch of their songs on their MySpace.

The show is Friday, March 27th at The Ruff Club, which is apparently a weekly party at a club called The Annex, at 152 Orchard Street in Manhattan (map). I will definitely be there.

And if you haven't seen it already, check out this awesome animated video for the Dead Sexy's single, Kamikaze!

I know I've mentioned a bunch of times that my roommate Alexis is a French rockstar and plays in a band called The Dead Sexy Inc. A few months ago Alexis brought me by the office of a design/multimedia shop called Studio Nekome so he could introduce me to the guys who work there and show me a sneak preview of an all-animated video they were working on for the title track of The Dead Sexy Inc's new album, Kamikaze (I was working on illustrating a poster for the album around the same time, you may recall). They finished the clip a month or so later and I've been looking for it on YouTube every couple weeks so I could post it here. It finally got uploaded recently...

Alexis, the drummer, is the guy in the sunglasses with the red scarf. Stéphane, the lead singer, is the guy with the shaved head, and Emmanuel the guitarist is the girly-looking one. I believe this whole video was animated by just two guys, one doing most of the artwork and the other doing all of the animation. I saw a little bit of their process while I was at their office and it looked really fun, and laborious. I've made little 30-second Flash cartoons here and there but I can barely imagine doing something of this magnitude. I'd love to give it a shot someday. But all that aside, I'm really proud to have hard-working musician friends who are making fun rock n' roll music and are involved in cool projects like this; it was neat to see how excited Alexis was about the video, and his excitement about this kind of stuff is always infectious. Incidentally, The Dead Sexy Inc. are currently recording a new album (already?!) and I can't wait to hear it. I'll sure as heck post about it when it comes out.

Hey, my roommate Alexis' band, The Dead Sexy Inc., was on French tv the other day, and I just bumped into the clip on YouTube. Stéphane does all the talking in this segment, but you can see Alexis on the right, wearing sunglasses, and that's Emmanuel in the middle. The performance footage is from a show I went to with Carly (flyingnakedtofu) a couple weeks ago (I'm kind of surprised you can't see my hair sticking up in the front row)...

Even if you don't understand French, it's funny to hear Stép say "sexee" a million times in a row in the second half there. If you want, you can check out the video and compare the guys with the Kamikaze poster I drew recently and see how I did. You will notice in the clip, however, that they are not actually undead kamikaze pilots.

Click for bigger version! It is dead sexy.

Hey look, I actually still draw stuff from time to time! I just finally finished this illustration for The Dead Sexy Inc. after working on it off and on for a few weeks. It's a poster to promote their new album, Kamikaze, which just came out in France this week. The concept got totally out of control; we started off with Alexis' idea of drawing the band members (left to right: Alexis, Stéphane, Emmanuel) as generic zombies shambling toward the viewer, as zombies are wont to do. Then I got the idea to tie the poster art into the name of the new album, Kamikaze, and so the whole thing mutated into a scene of glam rock zombie kamikaze pilots who've just crashed their plane into a ship and are now shambling toward the viewer, as glam rock zombie kamikaze pilots are wont to do. Don't ask me where they're standing. It's high-concept.

In researching the hell out of WW2 ships, planes, and kamikaze uniforms, I noticed that most pictures of kamikaze pilots had these ribbons hanging off the front of their uniforms, and I assumed they were the prayers that I'd always heard kamikazes carried into battle with them. I wanted to try to do something cool with that idea for the drawing, so I e-mailed my friend Josh (masterninja66), who happens to live in Japan, and asked him to help me out. I sent him some photos I'd found to show him what I was talking about, and he got back to me and informed me that the ribbons actually carried the names and ranks of the pilots. So I asked him to phonetically put the guys' names into Japanese characters, along with military ranks we arbitrarily assigned to them, and he typed them out digitally and then I redrew them by hand, probably very inaccurately. Thanks for your help with that stuff, Josh!

Let's see, what else? Normally the armband would've been white with a big red dot on it, so I (not-so-)cleverly replaced that with the Dead Sexy 6-6-6 die insignia. Also, the pilots normally wore a scarf with the rising sun symbol on it, so I changed that into a different kind of accessory for each of the guys. Alexis and Emanuel are pretty much always wearing dandy-ish scarves exactly as shown, and then I just threw one on Stéphane's arm to complete the look for all three of them. Oh yeah, and the blank button on Alexis' uniform is a shout-out to my friend Steve. Hi, Steve.

This is an unusual drawing for me because it's a composite; the three guys were drawn separately, as were the ship and the plane(s), and even the two layers of fire in the foreground. I normally prefer to do everything in one shot, all organic, but there was so much going on in the composition I knew the end product would benefit greatly from the ability to slide stuff around a little bit afterward and get it all fitting perfectly.

There might still be some small changes coming, but I think this thing is 99% done. It'll be printed up pretty big, 45x60 centimeters, which I think is about ten square miles.

( Click for a much bigger version! I dare you. )

I'm back in Paris. I brought two full cans of Giga Hold Freeze Spray with me. God bless America.

It was wonderful to be reunited with my BFF-in-France, Alexis; I really missed the guy a lot, even after spending the last three weeks in Philadelphia listening to every woman I know tell me how hot he is. I know, I know, but thanks for reminding me anyhow. When I got home yesterday morning there were two strange guys asleep on our living room floor, and Alexis himself was nowhere to be found, so I just tip-toed past them and went to bed. Turns out they're the sound guy and lighting guy who're working the Dead Sexy Inc show tonight. Last night all of us went to dinner at a tiny Lebanese place in our neighborhood where Alexis has become a regular, and I think I'm going to, too. We all talked about rock n' roll and travel and work and other stuff, and I taught Alexis the expression "corporate whore," (in reference to myself) which delighted him. It's very strange to be back in Paris, and as usual just before I left Philadelphia I started to feel like I didn't want to go; it's a weird feeling I can never really explain, but I'm sure part of it is knowing that I'm going to miss my friends from back home, and also that I'm just generally going to miss being in a city where I know a lot of people; for example, at my soiree at Tattooed Mom's the other night I ran into four separate parties who I knew but who didn't know I was going to be at the bar that night, let alone in America. I sure as heck don't have those kinds of chance meetings with old friends in Paris. I'm mostly happy to be back, though, and today I'm just laying around and taking care of some small freelance projects and catching up on e-mail. It'll be good for me to go to the show tonight with my friend Carly and rock out; it's fun to be on a guest list, as I know I've mentioned before. What to wear, what to wear...

Hey, guess what? I'm suddenly the singer in a rock n' roll band.

This is an announcement that I'm pretty excited to make, but at the same time I don't want to blow it out of proportion. Here's the skinny: Ever since I met my roommate Alexis a couple years ago, we've talked about playing music together someday. He's been the drummer in a few bands since I've known him (first Lycosia, and now the Dead Sexy Inc. and Pravda), and actually on the night we first met he tried to arrange for me to fill in for Lycosia's bass player on a short European tour, but that fell through, unfortunately. Still, we've always talked about someday starting a new music project together. Alexis' bands have always been really exciting and glam — rocking and noisy and partially electronic and techno-y — which is all extremely fun, but not exactly my style. I love the glam part, and I do like rocking, energetic music a lot, but for my own tastes when it comes to actually playing music myself I've always preferred things that are more organic and acoustic and simple and quiet, less fun and more soulful and melancholy, less rocking and more folky and weird and dark. In a nutshell, I prefer music that's extremely sad, and if it's creepy too then that's a bonus. For most of my life I've been a pretty happy person, but sad music has always been my favorite, and I'm always seeking out artists and songs that are able to capture the kind of intense sadness that I most enjoy in music. Anyway, I've explained all this to Alexis a few times, and he's always responded that sad music is his favorite too, and that we should start a band someday and only play sad songs. He even jokingly said we should call the band "Only Sad Songs."

( A little long, but at least I get killed at the end... )

I've mentioned in this journal several times that I'm a huge fan of coincidences. This here's a two-parter, and I guess neither story is really much of a coincidence on its own, but the one-two punch of the whole thing makes for a pretty good coincidence overall.

A couple years ago, I went to London to see my Parisian friend Alexis' band, the Dead Sexy Inc., play at a small club. There was a woman dancing in front of the stage who looked very familiar to me, which was startling because I was in London, where I know almost no one. I then guessed she must be Parisian; a friend of the band who made the trip to England to see them, just like I did. And then, after a while, I remembered very specifically seeing her at one of the Dead Sexy's shows in Paris, at La Fleche D'or. So, that settles that, I thought, and I was proud of myself for being Good With Faces, as I usually am. After the show, people were still hanging around, so I approached her and asked her in French, "Hey, you live in Paris, right?" She responded in Queen's English and said, "Sorry, I don't speak French." Hey, neither do I, really. So I asked her again, in English, "But you live in Paris, right?" — "No, I live in London." Gah! Okay. We spoke for a minute and straightened it out. She had indeed been in Paris at the time of the previous show, and she was there because she knows the band, and in fact, she was the promoter for the London show that night. So it totally makes sense; mystery solved.

This second part is almost completely unrelated...

Last night Alexis invited me to go with him to some gothic dance party in the middle of Paris, on a boat/nightclub on the Seine. (Another tiny coincidence here, this was the same club where a bunch of us went with Susannah shortly before she left Paris last year.) First Alexis and I hung around the bar for a while looking cool and miserable, and eventually I went out to the floor and tried shaking my booty a little bit. A woman danced her way over to me and shouted to me over the loud music in strangely accented English (not French, not anglophone), "You live in London, yes?" I replied, also in English, "No, I live here in Paris!" — "But you used to live in London?" — "No, never!" — "But I know I have seen you there!" — "The last time I was in London was a couple years ago to see a band play!" — "Ah! Yes! 'Sexy' something! That is where I saw you!" Turns out she's a Russian woman who was living in London at the time and is now living in Paris, and she was indeed at the same show as I. So I guess I'm not the only person who's good with faces.

What an insane week this has been.

( Part 1: Ladyfingers )

( Part 2: Alerte Orange party )

Here are some pictures from the party, from before it really started cookin'...



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And some (mostly crappy, blurry) pictures of Alexis’ bands...

The Dead Sexy Inc.


Stephane, Emmanuel, Alexis.

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Pravda



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The weirdest thing about being at a gothic dance party in Paris isn't the freaks on stilts or the folks with the plastic tubing in their hair and the lights sewn into their clothes, or the seven-foot-tall drag queens or the kids sporting gasmasks and angel wings, no, the weirdest thing about being at a gothic dance party in Paris is that nobody's fat.

Alexis invited me to go to Tokyo Decadence with him and the guys from the Dead Sexy Inc. last night, right around the corner from our apartment at Le Divan du Monde. I always get a guilty thrill out of being on a guest list; you know, you cut the line and tell the bouncer you're on the list and everyone in the whole overdressed crowd cranes their necks to see who (the fuck you think) you are, and it's kind of fun. I'm sure I'm not the only nobody who secretly feels that way. It was weird to be at a nightclub, which is a scene I've tried to studiously avoid for most of my adult life, but it was totally fine. It's also weird to run into people I know in Paris; I keep accidentally feeling like I'm a total alien and have no business here, and then I realize that in fact I've actually sort of become a part of this neighborhood now. And I guess the freaks tend to notice each other and stick together anywhere in the world; throw them all in the same room and some of them are bound to know each other. A French goth girl heard me shouting to Alexis in English over the club noise and grabbed my sleeve and yelled "Welcome!" at me in mid-booty-shaking.

Anyway, I was a good sport and enjoyed being at the club, and it was definitely refreshing to be out of the house, but I did get bored after about an hour of watching kids on drugs dance in plastic clothes, so I came home around 1:30 and accidentally stayed up all night reading White Line Fever, the autobiography of Lemmy from Motörhead, on loan from Alexis. Did you know Hawkwind's first show in America was at the Tower Theater in Philly? Neither did I. That's where I saw my first concert ever, which happened to be Fishbone in 1991, haha. Some band no one ever heard of called Primus opened for them. I was sixteen, and I went with Ben and a couple girls, one of whom liked me and bought the tickets for us. At the time, it was the greatest night of my life, which seems cute and silly now. It was really strange last night to be sitting half-drunk in bed in Paris at age thirty-two and have that memory come flooding back to me. Thanks for that, Lemmy.

Today I'm going to the movies with Courtney and Agnes, and then hopefully finishing a first draft of some poster art for the Dead Sexy Inc., an illustration of the group as oldschool Tales-from-the-Crypt-style zombies. One doesn't really have to twist my arm to convince me to draw monsters.

It's rainy and warm and completely gray today (which is super goth) and I'm pretty happy (which is not).

Alexis and I communicate in half-French half-English crazytalk, and a lot of the time we don't completely understand each other, or we think we do, but it turns out we don't. He explained to me the other day that he wanted me to come with him somewhere, and I didn't quite follow completely, but it was something about his band (The Dead Sexy Inc.; he quit Lycosia recently) and also something about graphics and websites and comics and pixel art and video games and dvds and some guy named Olivier and also the guy Stéphane from The Dead Sexy Inc. whom I met last year when I saw the band play in London. So I said okay man, let's go, and we jumped in his car and drove down to Place d'Italie, for who-knows-what exactly. Alexis and I are always teaching each other slang from our respective languages, so during the drive I taught him the intricacies of how to say all kinds of stuff sucks; "that sucks," "this sucks," "that fucking guy sucks," "your band totally sucks," etc. The last time I was in Alexis' car was in the Bosnian countryside last year, and I'm constantly sort of stunned by these experiences I'm having now that I'm back in Paris where my life is looping back around and bumping into itself again. Kind of impossible to explain, but it really grabs me sometimes.

Anyway, it turns out we were going to this multimedia production/advertising shop called Alerte Orange, which happens to be where The Dead Sexy Inc. produced their last album, and Stéphane works there sometimes as a freelance photographer. The reception area was full of poster art from dvd releases and video game ads and other cool stuff they've produced there, and then I remembered that this was the place whose website Alexis had shown me the other day so he could make me watch a European Nintendo Wii commercial they'd produced with the Dead Sexy's music in it, which is a pretty amazing thing right there, seeing my roommate's band get huge exposure all over Europe like that. So, obviously they do really high-profile work at this place, and I became more and more excited to be there; I got to see one of the recording studios where some rock n' rollers were editing their album, and some big quiet room full of nerds at computers, probably the graphic design studio. So, Alexis' friend Olivier is the boss and maybe the owner (I think) and an ex-punk rocker, and the whole point of my going with Alexis that day was for me to meet Olivier and talk about how he might be able to use me for web design work or even small Flash-based video games or whatever. Olivier and I talked for a long time and looked through basically everything on my website together, and I was able to express myself really well in French, but I almost never understood anything he said; he's a fast-talking, all-business sort of guy, and Alexis stood next to him the whole time and kept looking at me to make sure I was following, and I'm sure he could tell I wasn't, so I guess he sort of memorized everything Olivier said so he could tell me later on a little bit slower. After Olivier and I were done looking through all my web design and illustration and comics stuff, and even all my pixel art, he stood up and said some stuff and I thanked him for talking to me and he left. As soon as he was gone, Alexis got super excited and asked me if I understood what Olivier had said. I told him I didn't, not really, and Alexis told me that Olivier wants to have all my old comics translated and published in France, and he has a couple websites he wants me to design, for starters, and we'll see how that stuff goes and then talk about some new projects. So, incredible, this is great news, and could be the beginning of my getting more established in France. Nothing is definite, of course, but it was clear that this is a very hip, professional shop they're running, and Olivier is obviously a really professional guy (I've met enough of these guys to know the difference in a second, believe me), so it doesn't feel like bullshit, but of course I'm not counting on anything and we'll see how it works out. In any case, it was a really cool feeling to have this guy who's produced all these extremely high-profile multimedia projects just glance through my work and immediately decide he wanted to work with me.

While Olivier was telling me about the shop and the work they do, he gave me a huge catalog outlining all their projects from the last year or so (which was presumably printed up to show potential clients). Alexis mentioned that there was a picture of him and Lada in there in one of the video game ads, and jokingly warned me, "Rigole pas" ("Don't laugh"). So of course, I went looking for it right away, and voila...




Edit: I'd never heard Lada speak Italian before today (she's Bosnian but spent half her life in Italy and is fluent in about five languages, French and English among them), but I can hear her in the living room right now with an Italian guy and an Italian lady and a (presumably) Italian dog, and the dog is barking and sniffing around my bedroom door and Lada is laughing and saying something about l'Americano and the other folks are laughing too. I'm feeling too shy to go say hi, for some reason, but it's nice to have all this happy Italian chatter in the background while I'm listening to gospel music and working on the website for the puppetmaker in my small, pink, vagina-like bedroom. What a seriously weird life I've ended up with.