As many of you know, I grew up in New Jersey. A tremendous amount of folks in NJ make it a priority to spend at least part of every summer at the shore, and most of us have our favorite shore towns we visit more often than others. I spent a huge amount of time during my teens and twenties in Wildwood, which is by far the trashiest of the south Jersey shore towns, and definitely my favorite. I still try to go every summer whenever I'm in the States. Anyway, I just ran across this delightful compilation of clips from a 1994 documentary about Wildwood, shot on my beloved boardwalk the year I graduated highschool...

Man, Marjorie and I can't wait for our trip to the States next month! I just spent the last couple days teaching her about the words "douchebag" and "guido."

This picture of me and Marjorie just ended up on Facebook. It's from the "Elvis is Alive" party a few weeks back, at some bar near the Bastille.


This is basically where my hand can be found most of the time.

I should mention, that's Lada with her back to us on the left, and Lady Flo in white.

And here's another picture that I just plain like:


I cut my hair super short a couple days ago for my upcoming trip to la Réunion, and seeing this picture now, I kind of can't believe it was ever that long/tall/crazy, when in fact that's actually my normal length. You know, I walk through my life pretty much not being aware at all that I look weird, and once in a while I see a picture that reminds me. It's always a candid shot where I see how other people see me. Anyway, this sure is one of those times.

The toughest part about being simultaneously A) Manning Krull, and B) a little hung over, is the sixty seconds of holding my head upside-down whilst arranging my coiffure. Hooboy.

Happy 2009! I'm back in Paris and looking forward to the new best year ever. Last year was truly fantastic, but eulogizing 2008 is sooo last year...

Last night while my roommates were being recruited by Kiss, I prepared for my trip to the States that's coming up way too fast (tomorrow). I always back up my computer before I fly, you know, so if Air India flight 191 crashes in the ocean and I'm eaten by sharks, at least my clients will still be able to track down their Photoshop files on my external drive in Paris. Anyway, whilst computering, I remembered I had a stack of poorly-labeled cds I'd been meaning to sort through and figure out, and I discovered that one of them was a huge collection of photos from my friend Frederick. Frederick is my colleague in Philly; we worked in the office together for about five years and nowadays I see him whenever I'm in town, since he still works at the same company and they're now my biggest freelance client. Frederick is one of those guys who always has his digital camera in hand and is always snapping photos of everything all the time. Since he and I went to lunch together most days, I ended up in hundreds of his pictures, and I'd asked him to burn me a cd of them one time when I was back in Philly recently, and I guess I forgot he actually did that and gave it to me; I never realized I had the thing 'til last night. So I went through all of the photos while my computer was backing (that ass) up, and some of them are great and some of them are hilarious.


First, interestingly, I ran across this photo (above) of me in Rittenhouse Square in the snow in 2004. It's the same photo that was later printed out and hung up at my going away party at the office in 2005, which is the photo I ran across on another colleague's Facebook gallery a few days ago.



Then I found this photo (above) that was taken a few months later in the same park; we worked literally across the street from the park and cut through there every day on our way to lunch. Those of you who knew me at the time will probably remember I came down chickenpox that spring, and this photo must have been taken right after I returned to work, because you can see one of my last remaining spots on my cheek there. I have a small, smooth white scar there now, one of about five left on my body by that terrible week of chickenpox. I swear I didn't scratch!

I bought those horrible women's sunglasses at a vintage shop in New Orleans and wore the heck out of 'em. I was devastated when they broke a couple years later.


( A bunch more riduculous photos, all out of order and stuff... )

For a few years now, I've had a feature on the About Me page of my website where random photos of me are displayed each time the page is loaded. (It's the ghetto-est web wizardry of all time; I just name the images numerically and have a couple lines of javascript that call a random number from 1 to x and tack ".jpg" on the end.) I started out with maybe twenty pictures, and I add a few more from time to time whenever someone (usually me!) takes an especially flattering or glamorous or interesting or funny picture of me. It's really indefensibly vain of me, but it's fun.

Today I added the 100th picture of me to the random rotation. Balloons with my  face  abs on them fell out of the ceiling and everything.

I keep a hidden page with all the pictures together on it, just to keep track all of them. It's a weird walk down vanity lane, mostly chronomologicamable, sometimes not, with many changing hairstyles and hair colors, questionable fashion statements, exotic locales, inexplicable circumstances and behaviors, et cetera. For me it's mostly just a heartbreaking look at all the sunglasses I've lost or broken over the years. Anyway, the page with all one hundred pictures together is here, if you'd like to see. Like that weepy Hindenburg announcer guy said, "Oh, the huge vanity..."

My beautiful friend Alexandra is one of the few people I know who likes being photographed (and likes photographing herself) as much as I do. I have agreed to make her extremely famous by posting her pics in my blog. These were taken the other night as a bunch of us were getting ready to go out. The other folks present, including her man, all ran and hid as soon as the camera came out.


My roommate Lada has informed me several times in the last week that I need a haircut. She may be right.

( Two more... )

In the future everyone will be Andy Warhol for fifteen minutes.


I get the idea to take this picture every single day during the five-second period between blowdrying my hair and putting hairspray in. I don't even particularly like Andy Warhol very much. I just had to get this thing out of my system.

( Photoshoppery notes and other miscellany... )

It was very tempting to call this entry Songs for Krulla but that's just too obscure.

My pal Leonard (ludickid) took some pictures while he was here! Finally, someone thought to photograph Paris!

This picture is incredibly stupid but my hair looks amazing. Those are dozens of American wrestling action figures on leashes, for some reason.



I really like this one, but I think my eyes might be closed. Mickey Mouse is saying Tous tes amis sont là! — All your friends are here! He is wrong.

You think that's scary? Listen, kid, I've seen things that would make your hair turn very, very light yellow...

 

( Bigger, blonder... )

I hereby conclude my one-year (and then some) experiment with keeping my natural hair color. Whew. It's good to be back; before I started this experiment in December 2006, I hadn't seen my real hair color in a good six or seven years. I'd forgotten how hard it is to bleach all the natural redness out of my hair; this undertaking today involved three actual bleaching sessions, two bleach kits, three showers, and a total of about two hours with the decolorant in my hair, and it's still nowhere near as white as I was going for. I'll give my scalp a break and continue in a few days. Fortunately my individual hairs are super thick and don't break too easily from all the bleaching; two hours is way, way, way too long to leave harsh chemicals like this in your hair. You hear horror stories about people's hair breaking off completely after leaving the bleach in for an hour or so. I've been lucky so far. It's going to take a while to get used to being this blond again. I have to remember how to do the things that blonds are supposed to do, like be stupid and also sleep with everyone. I don't know which of those is going to be more difficult for me.

I'm not sure why I do these things.

( Side )

I'm in Philadelphia! Well, technically I'm in New Jersey at the moment, chez Steve et Trish (that's their shower curtain, above). So much is going on — work, friends, artwork, booze, strippers, parties, meetings, shopping, modeling, snow, family, songwriting, movies, haircut(s), sushi, planning trips, anticipating concerts, Ventrilo Harassment, Joe Pesci rapping, et cetera — that I don't have time to write about anything in detail. I wish I did! I've been in town a week and I haven't even hung out with Ben yet, for crying out loud, that's how busy I've been. I'll see him and Corri tonight. Artistic genius jenniferrodgers posted a photo of me and her and Steve along with a little bit of info about the Dr. Sketchy's party the other night (Jenn's man Russ not pictured, sadly). I'm tempted to spend an hour typing up a big update from my first week back home but I have too much freelance work to catch up on at the moment. Calamity Jon just joked on another message board that I'm probably dead, which reminded me I should probably mention to everyone that I'm not dead, just stretched thin and generally worn out. The rumors of my death have been greatly exasperated.

Hi. How are you?

After a few months of experimenting, I think I may have finally found the magic formula: Hairspray, comb through, blowdry and tease, apply styling wax, then apply styling gel, then more hairspray and more blowdrying and more teasing. Boom. Looks incredible for about... fifteen minutes.



( Side view... )

This is my real hair color! Most of you have never seen this before! Hell, I've hardly ever seen this before. I took this picture a few days ago, chez Ben. My last couple haircuts, I got all the bleached parts chopped off, and decided to let this grow out for a while, after many, many years of constant bleaching and/or dying. I wanted to get a good picture of my dazzling strawberry-blond plumage in direct sunlight, but the sun was way too bright for me to look up without squinting, so all you get is this mopey-looking MySpace: Backyard Barbecue Edition pic. Not what I was going for, I swear.

Anyhow, I've got this bleach kit and these couple of bottles of Special Effects sitting here and I'm dying to use them, but something tells me it might be neat to keep the real color for a little while longer. It's certainly less trouble. But I've got this lifelong problem where if I can find a way to add even more grooming time and maintenance to my daily life, I'm all over it. Yeesh.

Incidentally, I just watched this clip from Dune, and Steeng's color isn't that far off from mine at all. He's dressed a lot better than I am, though.