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.

Hey, neat, one of Marjorie's colleagues just gave her this picture of us from the Diesel 30th anniversary party back in October. I really like it! I sort of can't believe my head is that huge, but I think that every time I see a picture of me next to anybody. And Marjorie and I are exactly the same height! I must be proportioned like a Tootsie Pop.

Saturday night I went to Diesel clothing's huge 30th birthday party in Paris. Marjorie's been a buyer for Diesel since about the time we met, and I was excited to be invited along to the party at the last minute. They event was enormous and extravagant; they rented out a convention-type room in a stadium on the edge of Paris and turned it into a giant nightclub for three thousand people (and then invited eight thousand). Many of the other Diesel headquarters all over the world celebrated at the same time, with huge video screens on the wall flipping from party to party every couple minutes; Tokyo, London, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Athens, et cetera. There were DJs and crazy lights and weird dancers in weird costumes and a gigantic open bar serving the tiniest drinks in human history. (I weigh 135 pounds and I had eight shots of vodka over the course of a few hours and failed to get even a little bit drunk, if that tells you anything. It's not like I have any kind of tolerance for alcohol; last night I had one generous glass of red wine and felt completely woozy and wanted to tell everybody I loved them.) We were a little bit disappointed and jealous to see that a lot of the other parties had live rock bands, while Paris only had DJs and techno music, but this goes along with my opinion that France is among the least-rocking countries in Europe, and they do love their techno. However, Paris made up for being the un-rocking-est party by also being the party with gorgeous and mostly-naked dancers, which is what they do best. Vive la France. Incidentally, the theme of the party was "XXX," taken from the fact that it was Diesel's 30th birthday and warped into an excuse to use porno chic as the aesthetic for the event (and entirely unrelated to the Vin Diesel film XXX, haha). You may or may not want to check out the hilarious but not-at-all-safe-for-work video invitation, which uses tons of porno clips with crappy cartoon animation mixed in to creatively cover up all the nudity and sex.


The party was open to employees of Diesel, their guests, and a few thousand winners of free tickets. I've never been amongst such a group of beautiful, exquisitely-dressed people in my life. Marjorie and I were both freaking out the day before and the day of the party about what to wear, and I told her I was actually grateful she invited me at the last minute because if I'd known about the party for a couple weeks I'd have been stressed out the whole time. I've been rocking suits (or least a jacket and tie) every day for a very long time now, and I wasn't exactly casual before then, and all of that makes it much harder to feel more dressed up than usual when there's a special occasion. I wanted Marjorie to tell me what to wear since it was her event at her relatively new job and I wanted to impress her boss and colleagues exactly as she'd want me to. She, of course, told me to wear whatever I wanted and stressed that I should think rock n' roll, which told me this wasn't a suit kind of affair. So I wore a t-shirt for the first time in ages, and my stupid black and white striped pants and black and white polka dot scarf and white alligator shoes. Parisians, while typically much better-dressed than Americans, are also generally much more conservative in their style, and I stood out a bit more than I expected to. Over the course of the night, I got photographed by the staff photographers a zillion times, ended up on the big screen once or twice, and at least five different strangers asked if they could take pictures of/with me. These were the folks you could tell had won the free tickets; they were wide-eyed and excited and seemed a little bit out of their element and I'm absolutely sure they had heard there would be stars at the party and wanted to take my picture just in case so they could show their friends later and ask them if this jerkoff was famous or not. Incidentally, I'm barely familiar with any French celebrities so I have no idea if I saw or even talked to any French stars, but I did hear afterward that Sarkozy's son had been in attendance, woo-hoo, blah.

The party started out not crowded enough to feel like a party, which is normal (and you can see this in the photos below) and then when it finally did pick up and get crowded and hot and loud, there was still something missing; it's possible the room was simply too big to feel like a club and not a tradeshow, and the line at the bar was so long and the drinks were so small, nobody could get drunk enough to forget they were mingling with work people. So we cut out relatively early, maybe about 2am, and took a taxi back to the Marais. Then we went out for crepes in the neighborhood and went to sleep, amazed that it was Saturday night and we'd been at out a huge party but were not drunk or exhausted and the sun wasn't up yet. It was actually a pleasant change. I wonder how many Parisians' Flickr pages I'm on now? (Answer: ha ha ha, good Googling, zantimisfit! There's a great gallery of somebody's party photos here.)

( A few more pictures from Marjorie's iPhone... )

This is one of my favorite things ever recorded in the history of human civilization; one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite musicians, and a great performance. Bowie is so young and ridiculous and not coked up too bad yet (it's 1972), and Mick and the other guys sound amazing when the whole band comes in. Wow. I go back and find this clip every couple of months and I'm surprised at how much of a thrill I get from it every time.

Hooboy, I already know I'm going to fail to express this idea properly... I am sometimes freaked out by the permanence, or realness, of physical objects. This frequently becomes acute when I'm bouncing back and forth between France and the United Snakes all the time. In my mind, the things in my France life are here, completely separate from the things back in my America life; they don't touch, they don't overlap; like two separate worlds, or like the difference between being awake and dreaming. From time to time an item crosses over from one of those worlds into the other, and it freaks me out, like waking up from a dream and finding a souvenir from the dream in your hand. (Or, I guess, like waking up from a dream about eating a giant marshmallow and finding that your pillow is gone! Goodness gracious!)

In Wildwood NJ a few weeks ago I was riding in littlewashu's car and playing with her collection of absurd sunglasses. I distributed sunglasses to the three other people in the car and selected Washu's heart-shaped Lolita glasses for myself. I wore them for about twenty minutes and then absent-mindedly put them in my jacket pocket. Later at a diner with the whole gang, I found the Lolita glasses in my pocket and I made Ben wear them so I could take a picture (with Hayce wearing my normal sunglasses). The picture is in this post I made about the whole Wildwood trip, about halfway down. In the post, I apologized to Washu for accidentally stealing her glasses and promised to return them when I saw her again a few days later.

Back in France, my roommate Lada read my blog and fired off this urgent e-mail to me:

Subject: miss you
From: Lada

Mannnniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing!!!

We miss you.
The house misses you.
I miss you.

I saw your Forêtsauvage [That's Wildwood, get it? -MLK] pictures. Man... come back soon to a non-plastic world.

Ben is so sweet in all the pictures with his stupid face. [Oh snap! Ha! -MLK]
I want, I need these glasses. Don't give them back to Washu.

Let us know when are you getting back to see if we can come to pick you up.

Lovelovelove,

xxxladaxxx

When I saw Washu again at Ben and Corri's barbecue, I jokingly mentioned Lada's e-mail, and Washu generously offered to let me give the glasses to Lada. (I'd actually already looked for them in about a dozen stores in Philly, to no avail.) I wrapped them up safely and brought them back to Paris with me and presented them to Lada, and she was delighted. She asked me immediately to thank Washu. Then yesterday while I was in my bedroom Lada sent me this e-mail from the living room:

Subject: Heart shaped glasses
From: Lada

To thank your friend for the present!

LADA

Ha! Man, I know this is silly but I can't believe those are the same glasses that were on Washu's dashboard that she presumably wore at some point and then I wore while we were driving around and then they were in my jacket pocket and then they got passed around at a diner in Wildwood and Ben (and Hayce) wore them and then they were in my bags and on a plane and now Lada has them and has gone out on the town in Paris wearing them and looking hot. I bet a ton of Washu's friends wore them before I ever saw the things, and they'll probably never know a Bosnian-Italian woman in France is wearing them now. Why does it seem so impossible to me that they're the same glasses? It's like I woke up from my New Jersey dream to my real life in Paris and the glasses were sitting there winking at me. I'm gonna have a headache every time I see them around the apartment now; I'm too dumb to wrap my head around this stuff. But I'm happy to have the fun memory/story anyway.

If you've done anything extremely good lately, you deserve to listen to Adam Ant rap while he frolics in a suit of armor. You've earned it.

If you've done anything extremely bad lately, you deserve to listen to Adam Ant rap while he frolics in a suit of armor. It's time to face the music.

Believe me, this hurts or delights me more than it hurts or delights you. This is... maybe the worst song ever recorded.

This video may be the best thing that happens to you today, even if you're already having the best day of your life.

This is how we barbecue in France.

My roommate Lada knocked on my bedroom door Saturday morning to invite me a barbecue outside Paris in the not-quite-countryside, not-quite-suburbs, at the beautiful summer home of our friend Lisa...

( A feast for the eyes; vanity, food, and the Loch Ness Monster... )

What's your best thrift store find of all time? Mine is a tie with little New Jerseys on it. I bought it for a dollar — which, honestly, is a complete rip-off for a tie with little New Jerseys on it — at Village Thrift in Pennsauken, NJ, about ten years ago. You can imagine my delight! Years later, the tie got packed away at my mom's house when I first moved to France in March of 2005, and I forgot all about it. Then, last time I was in town I was rooting around for something in my boxes in Mom's garage (my giant earrings, if you must know) and happened upon the tie, and decided to bring it back to Paris with me.



( Closeup... )

... And while we're at it, new(-ish) ( shoes. ) Pay no mind to the pink stripes on my socks. I'd... I'd hoped you wouldn't have to see that.

I'm committing the cardinal sin here of wearing black with (three slightly different shades of) blue. You'll note however that I look awesome anyway. Like I always say with regard to fashion, I (or you!) can make anything work. Or, all things are possible with Christ, take your pick.

Some interesting stuff in the background of the first photo, now that I look at it: On the wall on the left that's a Venetian carnival mask made by Aaron Cromie as a thank-you for the website I designed for him, and over on the right you can halfway see lord_whimsy's book, The Affected Provincial's Companion, Volume One, which was a gift from abinka. And I think you've seen all the rest of this junk in my original post about my pink bedroom. As is dictated by my somewhat vagabond-esque lifestyle, I try not to accumulate a lot of non-clothing possessions, but beautiful and interesting things keep finding their way into my life, and I'm not going to argue with that.

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.

As they pulled me out of the oxygen tent, I asked for the latest party. Holy shit, what a weekend. Okay, let's do pictures first, then stories...

My friend Carly (flyingnakedtofu) drew me and Alexis! We posed on the couch and pretended we were a rock n' roll band. Oh wait, we kind of are.

(Click for bigger version)

( A couple closeups... )

The drawing is beautiful but the photos of it came out pretty bad; sorry about that. It's hanging in a hallway that's too narrow to allow a nice straight shot, and the area doesn't get much light. But it really looks incredible in the apartment, you can take my word for it. It's huge! About four or five feet across.

I asked Carly to take a couple pictures of us while we were being drawn (but not quartered)...

Rock and roll.

( A couple more... )

And that was all just Sunday night! Okay, backing up here... Friday I worked on that poster for The Dead Sexy Inc. pretty much all day long and I kind of lost my mind, as is normal when one draws and Photoshops all day and doesn't eat or drink or interact with human beings. After I finally finished the drawing, Alexis asked me to go catch a late showing of John Rambo with him, and so we did, and it was glorious. We went out to our favorite bar afterward (the one with the crazy pianist from the other night) and drank to John Rambo and to the United States of America; I like to think Rambo would've kicked our queer absinthe-drinking Parisian asses for that. We also talked about band names and songs and touring and all that junk. I'm feeling really good creatively right now, after a pretty long dark period.

Saturday afternoon was mostly uneventful, and then that night I went out dancing at a silly goth party near the Bastille. I went with my friends, and ran into a few more friends there, which is always an amazing feeling; I actually know a few people in this city. The party was a little bit dead (and not just in the goth/Crypt Keeper way), but I had a good time and ended up taking the Metro home at 7am, completely exhausted and drunk on cowboy whiskey. I'd met an interesting French lady at the club who had lived in Japan and was interested in comic books, and she gave me her phone number, but I guess I was drunker than I thought I was when I entered it into my phone, because the next day I went to look for it and all I had was her name and "06," which are the first two digits of every cell phone number in Paris. I despaired at this, because I really and truly don't have enough actual French friends and it's very hard for me to make a connection like that here, but later on Alexis said, "Hey man, you have the first two numbers! You need only the other eight! Just try every combination." Not a bad idea. Anyway, when I got home I thought I'd lost my septum tusk, and I told Alexis as I searched around the house. He soon yelled from the living room, "I found it!" But it turned out he'd made me a new one out of aluminum foil. Fortunately I found the real one a little later.

I slept for a few hours Sunday morning and then had to get up for Courtney's (kocici's) surprise birthday brunch! Agnes had just invited me the previous afternoon. So I crawled over there with a bag of fresh croissants in hand, and spent the afternoon eating a tremendous amount of food (Agnes made American-style pancakes! I think that's illegal here) and lounging around with a few Americans, one Irish woman, one French woman, and a German/American/completely international offspring of an American diplomat who had the most unusual and un-placeable accent I've ever heard. I was the only boy, as usual. Then we tried to go for a walk at Pere Lachaise cemetery, but it was just closing, as were my eyelids, so I dragged myself home again around 6pm. I thought I'd just finish some work, show Alexis the acoustic/country arrangement of Diamond Dogs that I'm working on for us to play, and then go right to bed, but then we ended up doing the big drawing session and then going out for sushi. Alexis and I actually both fell asleep on each other a couple times during our sitting, which is probably adorable. I finally went to bed around 1am and slept for ten hours. I feel like I've been reborn.

My friends Eric Zino and his wife Bridget are visiting Paris this week! I've known Eric and Bridget since we all worked together at a public library in New Jersey when we were in highschool. Eric was the writer of first two comic book series I ever worked on, Jerkbox & Punk'nhead and Silicon Valley of the Kings (which are being translated into French as we speak, for a new publication this Spring!). I hadn't seen the guy in about six years until my get-together at Tattooed Mom's in Philly a couple weeks ago, and that's when he told me he was coming to Paris soon. So, Eric e-mailed me the other day to tell me they'd arrived, and he gave me the phone number of the cousin they're staying with; he's got family here, which is pretty amazing. I just got off the phone with him a minute ago (let's get off phones...), and we're going to have lunch in Montmartre tomorrow! It's truly fascinating how things work out; it's funny to imagine telling the seventeen-year-old versions of us where we'd all end up fifteen years later. This is a game I play in my head a lot.

So that's my weekend (bleeding over into Monday morning). How was yours?

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?

Here're a few pictures of my tiny pink bedroom (finally!). My room faces a courtyard full of tall buildings, so I never get any direct sunlight, which is great for me, but not great for photos. So forgive the bad lighting, but I think you can see how my one pink wall reflects onto everything and lends the whole room a neat pinkish glow. I still need to buy some other stuff to hang up on the empty white walls, probably lots of black stuff to create some contrast and make the room a little darker overall...



( A bunch more... )