Posts in category "Photos"

France, Day 3: Paris

The hotel man­ag­er is some­thing of a bum­bling old man who bare­ly speaks a lick of English and wears a check­ered sweater and cap even though it’s boil­ing out­side. When I asked him for his name, he said, “Monsieur ________”. “And you”, he said, “are Mr. Laenin”?, as the room was booked under Karin’s name. I laughed and shook my head. “Better you with a girl than a boy with a boy”, he said, touch­ing the tips of his index fin­gers to rep­re­sent some non­de­script rela­tion he did­n’t approve of. Even though it was a com­plete­ly homo­pho­bic com­ment, his Parisian charm almost let him get away with it. Almost.

Every time I see him now, he asks me if she slept over last night. I think he assumes I came to Paris for some kind of booty call.

faces on Belleville wall

 

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France, Day 2: Paris

It has­n’t quite clicked in that I’m here yet. I was occu­pied with so much back home that this trip for­ev­er felt like it was far away, even when I was fly­ing out the next day. It’s Ascension Day in France — a coun­try made up most­ly of Roman Catholics — so every­one has the day off and most shops are closed.

Paris at night

9:30pm and it’s still bright out.

During the day it’s close to 30°C, and the heat makes cer­tain smells come out in Montmatre, rem­i­nis­cent of Chinese mar­ket­places (though nowhere near as pun­gent). The tem­per­a­ture drops to a brisk tem­per­a­ture in the evening though, and one needs to car­ry a coat or sweater when trav­el­ing at night.

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France, Day 1: Paris

I find myself in Paris once again, this time for a video con­tract over the next 10 days. Karin approached me to work with her in cre­at­ing sev­er­al films around this beau­ti­ful city, and I have the plea­sure of being involved with this amaz­ing per­son­al project of hers.

view from Sacre Coeur

This is only the sec­ond time I’ve been at Basilique du Sacré-Cœur, and both times there’s been weed in the air. I even passed by a man try­ing to roll a joint while sit­ting on a park bench, his paper mad­ly flap­ping in the wind. There must be some­thing real­ly trip­py about the church.

I’m doing it bet­ter this time. More effi­cient, lighter lug­gage. Luckily, I’ve made this trip before and the expe­ri­ence is pay­ing off. Pushing my lim­its last vis­it has giv­en me the con­fi­dence to han­dle any­thing that may hap­pen. I can retrace my steps with­out a map, remem­ber­ing where I took what pho­tos on which walks.

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Dear Lisa

It was this suc­cinct wit. She could say so much in a line or two, and any­thing left unsaid would only serve to feed your curios­i­ty. You’d be giv­en the punch­line, this blow that would knock the wind out of you, then won­der what cir­cum­stances could have led up to that. I’ve always been after that style, that abil­i­ty to move peo­ple with words the way hers used to move me.

Dolly and Lisa

Of course Dolly has to sleep on any­thing new in the house, regard­less of whether it’s your sweater or not. It’s part of the sass, and yet one can’t help but reward her with cud­dles and love.

For a few years, I lost her to the hap­pi­ness (where I hope to lose myself one day) until we spent a rainy day togeth­er, blissed out and hope­ful­ly obvi­ous only to the check-out lady who scanned all our vari­eties of choco­late.

Dear Lisa believes in me, and that’s the only rea­son I believe in myself too.

Humble & Brilliant

Jesse’s Dangerously’s lat­est knock­out album, Humble & Brilliant1, has been released as a dig­i­tal down­load only with no phys­i­cal media. However, you can also pur­chase a chap­book for those of us who enjoy the tac­tile feel­ing of lin­er notes, lyrics, and kick-ass illus­tra­tions. Included in the dig­i­tal down­load is this top­less pic­ture of Jesse I took to pro­mote the album.

Jesse Dangerously — shirtless

 

I have so many amaz­ing mem­o­ries of these songs, back before the album was released and I was doing back­up ukulele parts for a few of his acoustic sets. That was when I was just start­ing to get into play­ing an instru­ment again, except this time it was in my adult­hood and it was for reals. He gave me a draft of the album last year when all the ideas were there but he had yet to decide on how some of them were going to be exe­cut­ed, so it’s very sat­is­fy­ing to hear how pol­ished and com­plete it is now.

There were a bunch of shots we did but did­n’t end using, and they were all real­ly fun to do.

Pictures more bril­liant than hum­ble

  1. Proper pro­nun­ci­a­tion has the empha­sis on the last syl­la­ble of “Brilliant”. [↩]