Well , i must admit that it is difficult to compete with odd socks and fakeclaws!!! Thankyou for that O pasty faced one. I can somehow imagine your day to day life a bit more. I do not really have an interesting story to tell about my trip back because he was a really friendly czech driver( boring !) who lives in Antwerp but drives to Prague to visit his family every month. It turned out he was from the same village as the guy who drove me to Brussels with the dog and that he knew his family , he told me that his grandmother always walked barefoot as it was healthier in those days (?) We mainly spoke about strange czech characters like one guy who travelled around Czech Republic selling his dog to strangers, but as he trained it to always come back to him he made a little fortune , or that he once made a circus tent and people had to pay to go inside one by one and then got slapped and then a bit dazzled came out of the tent and told their friends to go aswell as they were too ashamed to admit they had paid to be slapped and so the journey went.
interesting. so you can imagine i felt a bit strange arriving back in this land of the absurd but i was greeted with homemade veggie soup by my new swiss flatmate , she is very nice and we speak the same language so all is well, oui oui. My room was full of bellorussian paintings and three living goldfish in a gurkin bowl my friend had left behind , this is a story in itself which i will later write seperately about , maybe in the next episode. anyway , the next day i went to an exhibition in the old town square of this czech woman who makes prints from drawings on metal , they were very nice . i especially liked the ones she made of the sea and a figure diving in it, it was very simply done with just dots into the metal, but you could feel the cleansiness of the water. it was a warm and sunny day and i just relaxed at home . I am now preparing for a little exhibition in Brno which is in the east of Czech in may , i have decided to make painted postcards of different sizes and send each picture to a friend and write a little poem on the back , yes sisters you are also included. So i am supposedly busy on that and also a new puppetshow which will be in two weeks ....Im looking for stories by the way so feel free to send me some . Im looking for a nice fairytale which is clever and fun at the same time . I have converted an old tv to a puppettheatre, with little curtains on it , all i need now are the puppets. Ofcourse i already have some puppets from other shows but i feel like doing something different like paperpuppets which are
light to carry and look nice too. I would like a story with animals , furniture that speaks and that is intended for everyone but essentially for kiddiewinks. So if you find any really good fairystory let me know.
While i am drastically busy reading fairystories at home i do go out now and again for example to do some babysitting as one does. I have found a replacement nephew who is seven months young and his mom is a good friend of mine ( who was born in San Francisco and lived on Russian Hill ! ) my friend is now studying directing at the film school which is just facing the river and we often go for lunch and walks after baby and film sitting. The school offered a room with a bed where she can nurse him , but only after granny bribed the keymen ( apperently that is a way of functioning here in the east difficult to get rid of ) Anyway as they sip brandy and drink english tea they are very friendly to us. So i am now discovering all the nice places to eat jummy food and have leisurly walks. I enjoy babysitting as he is sometimes very talkable and tells me a lot of worldly truths in babybrabble. And i am fascinated to discover how babies can experiment with high pitched whelps of crying...and laughing ofcourse ! When i get him to sleep i usually read. Im now reading the autobiography of Luis Bunuel which is very interesting, i recommend it, its called My last breath. I have also just discovered that i can watch films for free there in their library which is nice. Oh before this gets too boring for you i just want to share with you what i did on saturday;
I got up early and went to this really funny outside flea market, where you can buy anything from rinosponges to oranges to tintoys to german harps to birdcages to portable radios, of which i bought one and my friend bought another and we deejayed all the way home tuning into fifty years ago. I will take a picture of it and send you it as soon as i figure out how to work the photo part. I also bought some old postcards and a leather bag to go with my new Paddington bear coat to make the trainspotting look complete. Oh and then we went swimming in the cleanest pool of Prague , only it is ten metres long and it resembles the kiddie pool more than the real thing but it was good to move and get out and then eat an icecream to celebrate my first day of loosing weight. Okaleedokalee, write to you soon !
Love from even more blotchy faced than usual due to the Chlorine .
kisses !
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Monday, March 26, 2007
CHEETAHBAT AND SOCKS
Dear sisters,
Yesterday I saw Chinatown for the second time in two days. The first time had left a few blackholes, after I dropped off somewhere in the middle. This is not an unusual course of events in this stage of my life. Anyway, Faye Dunaway plays an important role in this film and looks pretty good throughout. Once I was told I looked like her. Unfortunately this was not for her role in Chinatown but for her role in the film Barfly with Mickey Rourke, in which she plays an admirable drunk. At the time it was meant as a compliment, an outing of awe; a compliment which I took in good grace. That is a long time ago, in days when I was younger and even more pasty faced than I am now. No longer do I linger at the bar. I am now Jip and Rosie's MOTHER and spend many hours peddling to and from different destinations, discussing, fully sober, the merits of various super heroes and their weapon arsenal. Did you know that CHEETAHBAT (who?) has a disk that he throws, and that this disk emits laser beams at the same time? Cheetahbat is in fact on the same (good) team as CLAWFAKE (?). Uhh? Well did you know that?
Now Rosie hasn't fully entered the conversation yet. She has, for the time being, developed a unique and very effective high pitched shriek, which she likes to throw in at opportune moments. It is particularly fun in the supermarket, when she catches her mother momentarily(!) distracted by the gossip magazines at the check-out counter. In fact any public space is fun to experiment with a high pitched shriek.
On the days my lovely children are away for some hours, I panick slightly. What to do with my time? What do I talk about? To whom? What do I take pictures of and what should I go and see to get insipired?
WHAT I SHOULD BE DOING IS LOOKING FOR SOCKS.
These are the socks that are currently missing a partner in our household. And the matching ones are NOWHERE to be found. The American washing machines appear to be more vicious than the European ones.
Greetings,
the Roman Nosed one.
Yesterday I saw Chinatown for the second time in two days. The first time had left a few blackholes, after I dropped off somewhere in the middle. This is not an unusual course of events in this stage of my life. Anyway, Faye Dunaway plays an important role in this film and looks pretty good throughout. Once I was told I looked like her. Unfortunately this was not for her role in Chinatown but for her role in the film Barfly with Mickey Rourke, in which she plays an admirable drunk. At the time it was meant as a compliment, an outing of awe; a compliment which I took in good grace. That is a long time ago, in days when I was younger and even more pasty faced than I am now. No longer do I linger at the bar. I am now Jip and Rosie's MOTHER and spend many hours peddling to and from different destinations, discussing, fully sober, the merits of various super heroes and their weapon arsenal. Did you know that CHEETAHBAT (who?) has a disk that he throws, and that this disk emits laser beams at the same time? Cheetahbat is in fact on the same (good) team as CLAWFAKE (?). Uhh? Well did you know that?
Now Rosie hasn't fully entered the conversation yet. She has, for the time being, developed a unique and very effective high pitched shriek, which she likes to throw in at opportune moments. It is particularly fun in the supermarket, when she catches her mother momentarily(!) distracted by the gossip magazines at the check-out counter. In fact any public space is fun to experiment with a high pitched shriek.
On the days my lovely children are away for some hours, I panick slightly. What to do with my time? What do I talk about? To whom? What do I take pictures of and what should I go and see to get insipired?
WHAT I SHOULD BE DOING IS LOOKING FOR SOCKS.
These are the socks that are currently missing a partner in our household. And the matching ones are NOWHERE to be found. The American washing machines appear to be more vicious than the European ones.
Greetings,
the Roman Nosed one.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Sheperds Pie
Wow !
Well here i am, last but not least, blotchy faced sister ! It took me some time to figure it out as i am bit disorientated from being back on a visit at the parents in belgium for a week now.
Instead of an expensive , uncomfortable , smelly twelve hour busride i opted for carsharing where you pay part of the petrol and usually have more legroom. I thought this was quite brave of myself seeming as the last time i did this i almost missed christmas due to the drivers being stopped at the german borders in possesion of 2blobs of hash and having to keep awake the driver who had swallowed 1 handful of grass ( i mean ganja , not the stuff cows eat )
Well this time round i arrived safely, just, in Brussels after a ten hour drive in a black BMW with a dribbling bulldog.
As i was only aware of these two bits of information before i left i was prepared for a mafia ride and put my anorak on tight to protect me from the possible dangers of dog drool.
Well the car was cool and comfy, lots of legroom. The driver turned out to be the son of the lover of the pubowner from a village in the czech mountains , whom we both knew; as i had lived there for two months doing ceramics and teaching english. So that was a funny coincidence. And an interesting bit of gossip if you dont have a tv like me. (actually i do have a small yellow russian black and white tv i bought in a secondhand shop, which i very rarely watch, just for special occasions when im thirsty to learn some tv czech language and on one arty channel they show lots of arty foreign french films )
I thought all was going good departing Prague , the sun was shining bright late afternoon and i was getting all dreamy and in the mood for travelling looking from the window at the river and people and trams moving synchronisingly to the radio music.
When the conversation went a bit dry on the motorway, after telling each other where we came from and where we were going, the driver decided he wanted to share his favourite cd with us on full blast ; its called Gypsy and hes a young Praguan gypsy rapping hiphop romantically blending all the synonyms of the words shit and fuck together one cd long. Believe me there are many variants but i was quite chuffed that i understood it all except i wish i couldnt. And full blast really means full volume, i could hear the windows thumping. But the worst was still to come. We were all getting on fine, but then the Bulldog with a half black face, piggy nose and white rabbit tail made his presence known .
He farted , the owner smiled made her apologies and opened the window. JezusmariaJoseppo what a stink ! apparently he had eaten something special the night before. And this continued about every fifteen minutes, the window was opened each time but there was always this sour after smell that came to the back where i was sitting. This dog could really be used as a nuclear weopon. When the driver went for a midnight snooze on a german tankstation , not only did he leave his music on full blast , he also fell asleep ditto dogowner and ofcourse doggy farted and i was intoxicated , i had to get out of the car and go for a leisurly walk around the gas station; interesting i know.
But i survived and was safely dropped off on the ring of brussels at four in the morning. And here i am now.
Its lovely to be back and speak the same language as the poeople around me. Have been to see my best friends new twins, she is like mama Afrika with over fertile boobs squirting milk all over the ceiling. But smiling and radiant.
Have been to France with our mother and discovered the pleusures (woops scusi por my bad lithuanian spelling ) of gardening.
Its really therapeutic working with earth and planting new life; I reccomend it.
I dont really have big life issues to write about yet except take it easy, dogsmells and gardens. Oh lastnight i did my first oriental dance class and it was amazing! Its called wild and free forever ! its great! I reccomend it also for anyone who want to appreciate their feminine round shapes.Apparently it attract the opposite sex and on my way home i thought the hairy bus driver was going to propose to me, but i had to decline due to my busy lifestyle.
On saturday i will be travelling back to Prague from Antwerp with another mystery driver yet to be revealed so i am sure i will have another story to tell ! I bet you cant wait; ok thats all for now , write to you soon ! Peace.
hugs from ,i already mentioned, the blotchy faced one.
Well here i am, last but not least, blotchy faced sister ! It took me some time to figure it out as i am bit disorientated from being back on a visit at the parents in belgium for a week now.
Instead of an expensive , uncomfortable , smelly twelve hour busride i opted for carsharing where you pay part of the petrol and usually have more legroom. I thought this was quite brave of myself seeming as the last time i did this i almost missed christmas due to the drivers being stopped at the german borders in possesion of 2blobs of hash and having to keep awake the driver who had swallowed 1 handful of grass ( i mean ganja , not the stuff cows eat )
Well this time round i arrived safely, just, in Brussels after a ten hour drive in a black BMW with a dribbling bulldog.
As i was only aware of these two bits of information before i left i was prepared for a mafia ride and put my anorak on tight to protect me from the possible dangers of dog drool.
Well the car was cool and comfy, lots of legroom. The driver turned out to be the son of the lover of the pubowner from a village in the czech mountains , whom we both knew; as i had lived there for two months doing ceramics and teaching english. So that was a funny coincidence. And an interesting bit of gossip if you dont have a tv like me. (actually i do have a small yellow russian black and white tv i bought in a secondhand shop, which i very rarely watch, just for special occasions when im thirsty to learn some tv czech language and on one arty channel they show lots of arty foreign french films )
I thought all was going good departing Prague , the sun was shining bright late afternoon and i was getting all dreamy and in the mood for travelling looking from the window at the river and people and trams moving synchronisingly to the radio music.
When the conversation went a bit dry on the motorway, after telling each other where we came from and where we were going, the driver decided he wanted to share his favourite cd with us on full blast ; its called Gypsy and hes a young Praguan gypsy rapping hiphop romantically blending all the synonyms of the words shit and fuck together one cd long. Believe me there are many variants but i was quite chuffed that i understood it all except i wish i couldnt. And full blast really means full volume, i could hear the windows thumping. But the worst was still to come. We were all getting on fine, but then the Bulldog with a half black face, piggy nose and white rabbit tail made his presence known .
He farted , the owner smiled made her apologies and opened the window. JezusmariaJoseppo what a stink ! apparently he had eaten something special the night before. And this continued about every fifteen minutes, the window was opened each time but there was always this sour after smell that came to the back where i was sitting. This dog could really be used as a nuclear weopon. When the driver went for a midnight snooze on a german tankstation , not only did he leave his music on full blast , he also fell asleep ditto dogowner and ofcourse doggy farted and i was intoxicated , i had to get out of the car and go for a leisurly walk around the gas station; interesting i know.
But i survived and was safely dropped off on the ring of brussels at four in the morning. And here i am now.
Its lovely to be back and speak the same language as the poeople around me. Have been to see my best friends new twins, she is like mama Afrika with over fertile boobs squirting milk all over the ceiling. But smiling and radiant.
Have been to France with our mother and discovered the pleusures (woops scusi por my bad lithuanian spelling ) of gardening.
Its really therapeutic working with earth and planting new life; I reccomend it.
I dont really have big life issues to write about yet except take it easy, dogsmells and gardens. Oh lastnight i did my first oriental dance class and it was amazing! Its called wild and free forever ! its great! I reccomend it also for anyone who want to appreciate their feminine round shapes.Apparently it attract the opposite sex and on my way home i thought the hairy bus driver was going to propose to me, but i had to decline due to my busy lifestyle.
On saturday i will be travelling back to Prague from Antwerp with another mystery driver yet to be revealed so i am sure i will have another story to tell ! I bet you cant wait; ok thats all for now , write to you soon ! Peace.
hugs from ,i already mentioned, the blotchy faced one.
Sunday, March 18, 2007
sint niklaas
Hello Girls,
Yesterday I strayed out into the outskirts of Antwerp, into another town in fact. That of Sint Niklaas. As you can imagine, in the middle of the town there is a square with a church which has a golden statue of St. Nicholas on its towering spire, as a beacon for the town and its identity. I have yet to go inside the church and see - our common Dutch history of celebrating sinterklaas, dear sisters, obliges me to - but as I am bound to return there quite frequently in coming weeks for a project I've just started, and a cellist who lives there whom I am yet to meet, this will be no difficult resolution to fulfill.
The person with whom I had met (prime St Nick contact!) has a brother who was being hounded by the media, because he is to perform a mass wedding ceremony, after some other people said they didn't want him to perform their marriage ceremony because he is black. This kind of thing happens frequently these days because people seem to be getting more and more racist in red-neck flanders. As a response loads of people came forward saying they want my friend's brother to renew their vows. Just to show that it is not all red neck, thank goodness. When I left the camera crew came in because they wanted to meet his brother - my friend - too. I like both of them -although brother just from first sight - because they are being so terribly down to earth and unimpressed about it all.
There is, I noticed, a very beautiful statue of a golden angel with outspread wings, near my prime St Niklaas contact's house. The wings, brilliantly reflecting the setting sun as I left, are topped with spikes to prevent pigeons from making them less brilliant.
I was quite hungry so I decided, before driving home, to stop for a bite to eat. By the time I had found my way back to the motorway I was so hungry I stopped at the shopping centre. I have heard of it by name but nothing could have prepared me for the sprawling consumption city state that lay before me. People wandering by as if in a street, looking serious, as if engaged in a fascinating activity of some urgency. As if, indeed, being there was an essential source of their wellbeing and happiness. A fulfillment of a certain destiny.
There are shops, broad avenues, restaurants (expensive ones!) dotted here and there. Whether it was my spaced-outness induced by hunger, or the novelty of the muzak-drenched experience of walking around this accomplishment of shopper's bliss, I do not know. One thing I do know is, that, when I wondered if art could exist here, I assumed it couldn't. Because everything in this enclosed place is programmed in function of this: the comfortable shopping experience geared towards profit. Most artists I know would wish to subvert this set-up, but in a closed system such as this it is hard to think how anything could be other than a lure for more and new consumers, perhaps even from the cultural class!
I, too, was tempted, and settled for a meal and a coffee. It was okay, the service was excellent, the food was so-so, the floors were shiny, the muzak sang in my head, as I tried to reach the door...I was drawn back in by curiosity, I kept saying to myself, chance brought me here, what am I doing? Until eventually I found myself back on the motorway to the sanctity of home and the grungy streets of Borgerhout.
Peace,
The Middle, equally pasty-faced, One
Yesterday I strayed out into the outskirts of Antwerp, into another town in fact. That of Sint Niklaas. As you can imagine, in the middle of the town there is a square with a church which has a golden statue of St. Nicholas on its towering spire, as a beacon for the town and its identity. I have yet to go inside the church and see - our common Dutch history of celebrating sinterklaas, dear sisters, obliges me to - but as I am bound to return there quite frequently in coming weeks for a project I've just started, and a cellist who lives there whom I am yet to meet, this will be no difficult resolution to fulfill.
The person with whom I had met (prime St Nick contact!) has a brother who was being hounded by the media, because he is to perform a mass wedding ceremony, after some other people said they didn't want him to perform their marriage ceremony because he is black. This kind of thing happens frequently these days because people seem to be getting more and more racist in red-neck flanders. As a response loads of people came forward saying they want my friend's brother to renew their vows. Just to show that it is not all red neck, thank goodness. When I left the camera crew came in because they wanted to meet his brother - my friend - too. I like both of them -although brother just from first sight - because they are being so terribly down to earth and unimpressed about it all.
There is, I noticed, a very beautiful statue of a golden angel with outspread wings, near my prime St Niklaas contact's house. The wings, brilliantly reflecting the setting sun as I left, are topped with spikes to prevent pigeons from making them less brilliant.
I was quite hungry so I decided, before driving home, to stop for a bite to eat. By the time I had found my way back to the motorway I was so hungry I stopped at the shopping centre. I have heard of it by name but nothing could have prepared me for the sprawling consumption city state that lay before me. People wandering by as if in a street, looking serious, as if engaged in a fascinating activity of some urgency. As if, indeed, being there was an essential source of their wellbeing and happiness. A fulfillment of a certain destiny.
There are shops, broad avenues, restaurants (expensive ones!) dotted here and there. Whether it was my spaced-outness induced by hunger, or the novelty of the muzak-drenched experience of walking around this accomplishment of shopper's bliss, I do not know. One thing I do know is, that, when I wondered if art could exist here, I assumed it couldn't. Because everything in this enclosed place is programmed in function of this: the comfortable shopping experience geared towards profit. Most artists I know would wish to subvert this set-up, but in a closed system such as this it is hard to think how anything could be other than a lure for more and new consumers, perhaps even from the cultural class!
I, too, was tempted, and settled for a meal and a coffee. It was okay, the service was excellent, the food was so-so, the floors were shiny, the muzak sang in my head, as I tried to reach the door...I was drawn back in by curiosity, I kept saying to myself, chance brought me here, what am I doing? Until eventually I found myself back on the motorway to the sanctity of home and the grungy streets of Borgerhout.
Peace,
The Middle, equally pasty-faced, One
Thursday, March 15, 2007
To get us started
Dear sisters,
This is a glimpse of San Francisco, as I see it.
It is not a coincidence that it was filmed in a coffee shop. I find myself there often. That is when I am not braving the hills in my silver PT Cruiser.
Where and how do you find yourselfs?
Love,
The Pasty Faced One
This is a glimpse of San Francisco, as I see it.
It is not a coincidence that it was filmed in a coffee shop. I find myself there often. That is when I am not braving the hills in my silver PT Cruiser.
Where and how do you find yourselfs?
Love,
The Pasty Faced One
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