Thanks for all my great jpg-formatted birthday presents yesterday, everybody!



Here's the first picture of me at age 34, last night just before heading out to the Mysteries of Paris Ghost Tour. It was fun!

On Sunday I went with my mom and sister to Rockwood Mansion in Delaware. We had lunch there and then toured the house, and we were super lucky to be there by chance on the last day of a special Halloween-related event: The house was decorated in mourning and the tour focused on the complex mourning traditions of the 19th century; black sheets over the mirrors, beautiful mourning clothing on display in the bedrooms, even a body laid out in the parlor. Unfortunately they didn't allow photography on the tour, so all I got were these pictures from the reception area.


Amanda, Mom


Me

Rockwood is a beautiful place and the tour was fantastic; they're finished with the mourning exhibit now but the history of the house and the family who lived there are really interesting on their own. I encourage you to check it out if you're in the area. Me, I'm heading back to Paris tomorrow.

Happy Halloween! Here's my costume for Steve and Trish's party Saturday night. When people asked me what I was exactly, if I suspected they were a geek, I'd tell them I was Manning Belmont, least talented of the Belmonts (that's the Paris Belmonts, formerly Beaumont). I do have a whip on my belt but it's obscured in this picture. And if they weren't a geek, I'd just say I was a vampire hunter who really sucked at his job.

The stakes were expertly made by Ben, by the way, whom I realized later was basically Kris Kristofferson to my Wesley Snipes. He also suggested I put just a tiny drop of blood on the tip of one of the stakes to make it look like one time I'd just barely nicked a vampire, but I ended up not having time/forgetting. Also, man, Halloween really is the one time of year when redeye can actually enhance a picture. I'd thought about buying weird contact lenses again this year and it turns out I didn't have to!

I'll post more pics from the party when I have a better internet connection! One party down, two or three to go...

Speaking of killing monsters, if you haven't known me on LJ for very long it's possible you've never seen Curses!, the Castlevania-style video game I made with my friend Patrick a while back. We never got past building the one-level demo, unfortunately (although I'd love to pick up where we left off someday) but it's still a lot of fun to play if you're in the monster-hunting mood, which, if you're anything like me, when are you not?

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.

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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.

This afternoon I joined my favorite American in Paris, Courtney (kocici), at the Grande Galerie de l'Évolution, part of the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle. Neither of us had ever been there before, but I'd read a bit about it here and there and I'd always heard that the place was very old and a little bit run-down and creepy. Turns out it is all of those things and more, and I really dug the vibe of the place...


No evolution museum would be complete without a caveman.
The building itself is beautiful, and the exhibits are reminiscent of earlier times; not much information is given about anything and you can tell the displays were designed a long time ago for people who'd probably never had the chance to see a dead elephant or a giraffe before (let alone a live one!); heavy on the spectacle and light on the science. The building is extremely dark, and I couldn't tell if this was in keeping with the original old-timey feel of the museum, or more to hide the fact that most of the dead animals' fur was falling out. Anyway, the poor lighting made photography pretty difficult, but here are a few of my feeble efforts anyway...

( A few more... )

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.

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?

While riding the Metro today, a lady dropped her dog on me, and she didn't even apologize — she pretended not to notice she dropped her dog on me. It's been that kind of day.

But I got to have dinner with Courtney and Agnes, and I went to see American Gangster with Ashley. And I took another silly self-portrait in my apartment. Never in a million years would I have predicted I'd ever end up living someplace this colorful.



I like to imagine one of these days I'll get my face shot off and it'll have to be a closed-casket funeral and everything, so they'll have to print out a big poster-sized photo of me and put it on an easel in front of my coffin, you know?, and someone will have the job of finding an appropriate photo of me and they'll poke around my LiveJournal/website and go, oh jesus christ...

Unrelated to any of the above, it has come to my attention that the best anagram for my full name is Nondrinker Llama Lung.

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.

As some of you already know, I snuck back to Philadelphia around the end of October after just a month in Paris, which was much sooner than I'd planned on winding up in the United Snakes again. But I had a totally great reason for rushing back: My best friend Ben married his amazing girlfriend Corri. I was the best man, and I had to read stuff during the ceremony and also hold onto the wedding rings until it was time for the bride and groom to exchange them, just like Slash in the November Rain video. (After I handed over the rings, I went out into the desert and played a screeching, bittersweet guitar solo.) I'm waiting for permission to post a couple more pictures from the wedding itself. [Edit: boom.] For now you just get me and my awesome new suit.

During my stay in Philly/New Jersey, I also managed to draw a short Halloween comic, go to two spooky Halloween parties (my gang and I went as zombie Laverne and Shirley and Lenny and Squiggy), work a lot, buy lots of clothes, receive a few birthday presents, see my family, and most importantly, go out for sushi four times. That's a very good way to fill up a little less than two weeks.

I'm exhausted and very happy to be going home to Paris tonight. Here's a picture I took in a shiny window in my neighborhood a couple weeks ago, and forgot to post 'til now.



See you next time, America.

You can really see in my reaction here that no one in the history of human civilization has ever been more excited to see a cake.

( One more )

Lots more party photos by Megan here.

And I only took this one picture, of Alexis and Lada and me:

All kinds of assorted creeps and undesirables hang out in the Paris Metro. And some of those creeps and undesirables have digital cameras and are trying to look cool all the time. Some of them even have Photoshop and know how to adjust levels. Please heed this warning.

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... )

I still don't have a reliable internet connection, which is making life a little complicated right now, but here are a few random pictures from my new life in Paris...


This is Café Cannibale, one of the few places I've found with free wifi where I can also plug my computer in. It also happens to be where I'm sitting right now, although this was taken a couple days ago.

( Three more... )

After a long mostly-dry spell in the freelance department while still trying to save for France, I just started this new gig yesterday building a website for the New Jersey Lottery, and then I went out today and spent over $200 on very gay shoes (two pairs) and very gay sunglasses (um, four pairs) and some pants and a shirt, and then I was like, oh wait, I didn't actually win the lottery... Ha. Hmm. I almost didn't buy all the stuff I had in my arms, and then Blondie came on and I thought, fuck it, Debbie Harry would want me to have nice things.


Edit: By request, photos of said shoes and sunglasses in the comments...