hello world

We're connected again. Yesterday ten minutes before midnight the last piece of junk was unloaded from the truck. We almost dropped dead in our beds. Today I gradually started unpacking, despite aches and pains everywhere, especially my back, my right knee, and both index fingers. And we're cold, we can't get the furnace to work. The furnace guy couldn't either. Now I'm waiting for the electrician. As long as I keep busy I'm not cold, but I'm too tired to keep busy. All went well by the way, only the basement stairs are too narrow for the washer and the dryer, darn. And Piffin will have to do without a lot of things, because the attic entrance is also ridiculously narrow. And I see some water stains here and there I don't completely trust, and smell an odour I don't completely trust, we'll see. The corner store woman is funny. "Again!" she shouted as I came in. "Yeah, I'll be here a lot." "So good, Canadian people come live here, area gets more clean." "I am not Canadian, I am from Holland." "Aaaah! Like me!! I am from Hong Kong. Hong Kong multicultural! Multicultural is gooooood!"

Multicultural update: A genius from Trinidad fixed our heating problem. The fancy programmable thermostat was fucked up. He took it down and hooked up a vintage one. We tipped him good.

absorbent

Life in Chinatown. "You again!" When I come to buy a bucket and a cloth in the shop where I bought a broom a couple of hours earlier. "Very good cloth, very good, very absorbent". "What you pay for that house?" "Not bad, not bad". Michiel and Piffin have done Otger's floor today, Otger and I were sent on errands all the time. When they sent us out for ginger ale we brought back lychee juice, which was delicious.

voici les clés

YES!

huib maaskant

I found another model railroad website. Last month I found American model railroads, this time it is genuine Marklin. I say genuine, because Marklin used to be the one and only. In Europe. In our house. I was never allowed to even touch it and I imagine my brother is protecting his Marklin with his life to this day.

peyo

Yay, winter's here! Just what we need. Who would want to move without snow?

Piffin (at school) just emailed me this picture with her new camera phone.

annie proulx

Famous moves #2, a rigorous move. It's a still from "the shipping news", the movie after Annie Proulx's book. Laura gave me that book. Laura said in the day before yesterday's comments that she is reading my blog regularly, which pleases me a lot. It's mostly blog people who read my blog, not so much personal friends or family. Or they don't tell me, that's possible too. But anyway, I know Annie Proulx through Laura, who used to be an editor at the publishing company that publishes Proulx in Holland. She even gave me the tickets to see the movie. So when I think of Annie, I think of Laura. Annie's website is worth a visit, very interesting essay on Edward Hopper.

queen mary

Category famous moves: this is queen Mary's doll house being packed up for transport in 1924. Meanwhile I am sitting between ever growing piles of cardboard boxes. But today I didn't do any packing, I went to the new house. To meet the furnace guy, but he didn't show up. And I am having my gynaecological thing, so I stood there cramping for nothing. Oh well, having some white wine now, and cooking dinner. Rice & bean sprouts, I'm getting ready for Chinatown.

sainte wilgeforte

My two previous posts led to this one. Sorry for the poor quality of the picture, I challenge you hereby to find me a better one. The pastor of the church in Wissant sure is getting his way. He is protecting this statue vehemently. When you enter the church there's a sign "l'eglise n'est pas une musee", and I don't think he allows camera's. Hence the unfindability of Wilgeforte on the net. Legend has it that Wilgeforte's father (11th century) wanted to marry her off against her will. To avoid the marriage, she grew a full beard overnight. Thereupon her father crucified her. And thus, I can draw your attention to the child abuse awareness week on Dutch television. Great initiative.

I just received this explanation (in Dutch, so don't bother if you don't read Dutch) from a reader. Same saint, but not Wissant.

gustave courbet

Gustave Courbet (Ornans, 1819 - La Tour de Peilz, 1877) : L'Origine du monde (1866). Ce tableau fut peint en 1866 pour Khalil-Bey, ancien ambassadeur Ottoman à Saint-Petersbourg. Sulfureux dans sa provocation, il resta pendant longtemps enfoui dans l'oubli des pudeurs choquées. Il est désormais visible dans l'équivoque splendide de son titre et la splendeur provocante de sa représentation au Musée d'Orsay.

In Belgium I had a neighbour with a postcard of this painting on his window sill. This morning the Jehovah's Witnesses bakery woman was asking me about a Renoir painting. I advised her to just type "Renoir" in Google images. Suddenly I hoped so much that she would stumble upon that postcard image I used to see daily. But when I looked it up, it turned out that "the origin of the world" is not by Renoir, as I had wrongly assumed. It is Courbet. Lucky bakery woman.

jezus & jebroer

The things I find packing our belongings! I didn't fabricate this lovely artefact, my brother did. By the time I was in kindergarten, stuff like this was already way too old fashioned. But I vividly remember being so jealous of my brothers because they did get to twist (weave? twine?) paper. Which, by the way, had nothing to do with the subject matter.

Real estate surrealism: We didn't understand why the replacement value of our house in the quotation for property insurance was so much lower than the purchase price. Turns out that if the house burns down, we still own the land, which is worth the difference. I think you need a very morbid imagination to understand these things without triple explanations.

OMG, this is the neighbourhood we're moving to.

andy warhol

Our boxes are not as pretty as Andy's, but I don't want our move to end up in an art gallery anyway.

Otger went to school this morning:
Me: "Get another A for math!" He: "I'll get A's for everything!" Me: "You don't have to get A's for everything, really you don't." He: "Okay, for everything except French then."

Piffin went to school this morning:
"School starts late today, but I'll take the 8 o'clock bus anyway, because after 8 o'clock my body wants to be at school."

variety pack

I realise that this photo is probably completely uninteresting to a lot of people. But I like it, and moreover, in two weeks time he will be in a totally different school. To be honest I wanted to show you a different image, but it is so hideous that I condemn it to pop-up.

brian warner

Piffin is going to a concert tonight.

Depending on which internet rumour you believe, Manson has either murdered a Mexican teenager and cut off his own genitals on stage or ritually sacrificed an elephant and had two ribs removed in order to fellate himself.

But then again:

These days, Manson is close to his parents and has moved them to California, so that they can be near and he can financially support them. Would he like to be a father himself? There's a long pause. 'Possibly,' he says eventually. 'But only at a time when I could dedicate the proper attention it would need. It would be the ultimate art form to raise a child. That would be your immortality right there.'

what's up doc?

Boxomania. We scored two carloads of boxes on curbs around the city, and they're filling up fast.

show and tell

I am so looking forward to living like this.

I found this record sleeve in the show and tell galleries. I was planning on linking to some more gems on that site, but there are just too many. Candy for the eyes, go visit. Parbleu, I would love to do an outrageous CD sleeve, but all the musicians I know prefer to wack some typography on a photo. If I have to believe Will at showandtellmusic freeking parakeet training records had more exiting covers some decades ago.

Update: I just noticed that Bezembinder blogged showandtellmusic on October 25. So I'll credit him, although I swear I found the site by myself :-)

joko

I decided to do a sequel on yesterday, the Eliane comix are too funny to not show them. I can sequel on Picasso too: through Eamelje I found this requiem by the one and only Kurt Vonnegut (my, some people are so damn good at getting old). Quote:

TROUT: You ever meet anybody who was really smart?

KV: Only one: Saul Steinberg, the graphic artist who’s dead now. Everybody I know is dead now, present company excepted. I could ask Saul anything, and six seconds would pass, and then he would give me a perfect answer. He growled a perfect answer. He was born in Rumania, and, according to him, he was born into a house where “the geese peeked in the windows.”

TROUT: Like what kind of questions?

KV: I said, “Saul, what should I think about Picasso?” Six seconds went by, and then he growled, “God put him on Earth to show us what it’s like to be really rich.” I said, “Saul, I’m a novelist, and many of my friends are novelists, but I can’t help feeling that some of them are in a very different business from mine, even though I like their books a lot. What would make me feel that way?” Six seconds went by, and then he growled, “It is very simple: There are two kinds of artists, and one is not superior to the other. But one kind responds to the history of his or her art so far, and the other responds to life itself.”

I said, “Saul, are you gifted?” Six seconds went by, and then he growled, “No. But what we respond to in any work of art is the artist’s struggle against his or her limitations.”

prince shervashidze

From PeoplePlay UK (1500 images on British theatre history, goldmine alarm!):

Serge Diaghilev asked the painter Pablo Picasso for permission to reproduce a small painting of two giantesses running along a beach. It was to appear on a drop curtain hanging in front of the stage during the overture. The scene painter Prince Shervashidze painstakingly copied the original, and with such precision that Picasso himself was delighted. He wrote on it 'Dedie a Diaghilew. Picasso' (dedicated to Diaghilev) in the corner. The curtain is 10.3 x 11.7m, with a painted area about 7 x 8m, which makes it the largest canvas ever signed by Picasso.

I found this incredible website through Ramage.

Funny funny funny: bel blog! molto belli i colori!

Even funnier: I discovered comic strips about me! (via)

jim henson

Some good news from our southern neighbours for a change, a new series of U.S. stamps will be issued in 2005 featuring images of Kermit the Frog and the rest of the Muppet gang. In all, there are 11 Muppet stamps. Miss Piggy, Kermit's sometime love, gets a stamp of her own, as does the nonsense-spouting Swedish Chef, who was a supporting character on The Muppet Show known for his offbeat cooking techniques. I found out about this through Bianca, who was so lovely as to snail mail me a sketch book! I received it today and immediately snail mailed her a sketch back.

Oh, and of course I finished the dinner drawing, I'll show it as soon as it's published. I am ready to pack now!

almost done

Just some minor things left, food on the plates, changing the colour of some contours, slipping and sliding to change contrasts, a whole list in fact, I wrote it on a print out, won't bore you with it. That's for tomorrow.
Update on our move: We're going to have a different phone number as of November 29, tell me if you need to know.

j h lynch

From the website I found through happy famous artists:
Does this painting look familiar? The chances that you have seen it before are pretty high. The chances you also know that its name is "Tina" are a bit lower. The chances that you know anything about the artist who created it are close to zero.

I never knew that these images were published in "de Lach", a very shabby shady shoddy Dutch magazine in the sixties. I don't think I ever even saw a copy, but I do remember that the parents of a girl in my class had a subscription. The things one remembers... This was the girl who knew all about sex before anybody else did.

New R.A.M episode, about the graphic novel. Interviews with Will Eisner, Art Spiegelman, Craig Thompson and Dominique Goblet. The narrated in between parts are in Dutch. The stream hasn't yet been uploaded to the website, but you can acces it here.

colouring

This is a layer of flat colours. I lock it and keep using it to select parts of the drawing when working on shades and contrasts. But first it's time for some weekend.

dinner

This is what happened to the sketches so far. Lines are done, I have to start the colouring. And I can, even though my monitor died this morning. We visited Otger's new school, the Queen Alex, seems a perfectly alright school! The vast majority of the kids is Chinese, so I guess things will be just fine on the academic side. And the school's steel band always comes in first or second at contests, how's that for multiculturalism? There's a nice pool too.

super fast

My publisher likes super fast marketing, I don't think the house is even printed yet, I sent them the files five days ago!

thinkpad

This is my very low tech thinkpad. Tomorrow I'll try to construct a more or less correct and intelligent composition for these seven characters. The in-brain image is already very beautiful, a candle light dinner with lots of atmospheric shadow effects. I'm experiencing voorpret. I looked up voorpret in the dictionary, it sais anticipation, bwah. I guess I can't say fore fun, can I? Haha, I looked up fore fun, it's got something to do with golf. O, and I made moving reservations! It's getting serious...

rogier klomp

Beautifully drawn animation film by Rogier Klomp. An artschool graduation project, an animated documentary. (Click the second film icon on this website for viewing, film is in English with Dutch subtitles, the first film icon shows a short statement by Rogier in Dutch.) Posting this today is appropriate, in more than one way. The film is about US politics, presidential campaigns and conspiracy theories. Klomp doesn't claim objectivity, but I don't think anybody is amazed by anything coming from the US anymore. Or Holland, for that matter. Where a film maker was murdered today.

lynd ward

Otger bought this book at a second hand book sale this weekend. He is now frantically reading it. Otger is a victim of the gender neutral times formal education is going through, he craves for real boy books. He reads everything from Treasure Island to Dik Trom, from Pietje Bel to Jules Vernes. This version of Robinson Crusoe is being sold online for 30 dollars US, haha, he paid 3 Canadian I think. Unfortunately his copy doesn't have the interesting footprints cover, but other than that it's the same book. Otger loves the illustrations and the archaic language, he had to look up how much a "league" is: A unit of distance equal to 3.0 statute miles (4.8 kilometers). Now that's learning, eat that, schoolboard people weeding the school libraries for "outdated" books!