disco biscuits

No seriously, 82, from one night out on the town. One 16 hour night out on the town, ok, but…have you noticed that Friendster blogs now have ads? Guugh almighty. www.lebestcapades.blogspot.com

So what, am I gonna keep posting the same link every time I update le blog? Thats g4p. How bout this, you scroll down and find the link to my actual blog, go there, and read and laugh.

http://lebestcapades.blogspot.com/

There she blows kids. Tales of pool parties in the winter, photos of wee me as a boy, an INCREDIBLY annoying video to do with me and a squeaky toy, and the usual banter..it’s been a while.

seriously, it had to happen. f-in friendster thinks its ok to limit you to 50 photos a month for your blogging. Nah so cool. I’m on to bigger and better things. I’ll post links up here when there’s an update on the other one. Here’s the link:

http://lebestcapades.blogspot.com/

Check it now for a funny tale of yesteryear/day.

DAY 4
One of the better things about staying on old street was being within walking distance to Brick lane, and one of the better things about Brick Lane were the ‘beigel’ shops (no joke, that’s how they spell it). Two warring bagel shops separated by a small newsstand kiosk, both hawking super chewy bagels, pastries, and a particularly lovely British delicacy called Hot Salt Beef which one can have as is, on a bagel or in proper sandwich form. Naturally it was my duty as a good tourist to sample the Hot Salt Beef Beigel in my first days there, and god damn was it good. The juicy salty beef that is so cooked it literally melts apart, the chewy bagel slathered in mustard topped with pickles. The PERFECT late night snack in fits of drunkenness. So naturally, upon waking on Sunday morning with just 6 hours sleep under my belt I was craving one of these puppies.
Mariette was in a shitty mood (something to do with a missing boyfriend) so I waltzed off to Brick lane to my beigel shop and past it down to Mark’s house where Elph had crashed the night before.
I stole a wifi signal, handled some bullshit and we continued waltzing to eventually meet up with Mariette and complete our second day of shooting with Elph. This time we taped his characters to a rusty fence and planted him in the sun in front of it.

A word for the wise: if you plan on going somewhere remotely cold, and you plan on ever being outside for a remotely extended period of time, bring some other shoes besides low top converses. It takes about 30 minutes before you can’t feel your feet at all, heel to toe. Fuck, even if you don’t plan on it, bring some other shoes.

Oh, and maybe a sweater that completely covers your torso and a jacket that has a lining…and some gloves..and maybe even a hat! Yeah, I’m a smart one.

After a painstaking hour and a half of making double sided tape and holding makeshift reflectors we retreated to Mark’s house again to warm up and regroup.
I passed out on the armrest of the couch…

Around 6:30 I jolted back to life with the sudden realization that Sven and Maja (Switzerland and Swiss Miss – obviously my Swiss friends) were arriving any minute and I’d promised to meet them at the hotel. In a practically drunken daze I mumbled to the 5 other people in the room a garbled ‘excuse me…the swiss are coming..’ and fell back asleep. Someone pressed a phone into my hand and it all sorted itself out.

A posse of 8 of us went for the best pizza in London which ended up being the most expensive meal I had there (9 pounds), and with bellies full, we headed out to find some after hours entertainment which really consisted of smuggling the Swiss contingent into our twin hotel room.

PICTURES ON WALLS
I awoke early on Monday morning (what else is new) despite our late bedtime and extended slumber party discussions (we pushed the two twin mattresses together and slept four of us, sideways, on both). By ten I’d had breakfast, brainstormed a new project, and headed out for my first interview of the day with Ben who runs www.picturesonwalls.com. POW is essentially a screenprinting shop with a great website. They are the only people to sell Banksy prints (www.banksy.com) along with many other notable street art names. Again, walking distance from the hotel.
It was a lovely interview, short and sweet. I befriended Ben, made plans to work together on events in the future and Mariette showed up to snap some portrait shots just as I was leaving. Entirely a successful morning.

I headed out to meet dface (www.dface.co.uk) who was kind enough to come to our hotel. He is already a huge man, but when he showed up he sported a mammoth motorcycle jacket and helmet which only added to the jolly green giant effect.

Dface is a sticker celebrity in the street art world. He is the founder of the outside Institute, London’s only 100% street art gallery, and he had just come back from a few days at the Ice Hotel in Sweden.
We first met in London last summer when I was there with my brother. At the time he was swamped and stressed out and we only had time for an interview, but nevertheless we were able to bond on our feelings about street art and the community.
This time we actually had time for him to show me the 2 metre tall winged spray can he had sculpted out of a block of ice, have some burgers, and just chill before we headed out to our scheduled photo shoot which went off with barely a hitch.

Entirely a successful afternoon.

About 4 o’clock Mariette and I got back to the hotel where the Swiss contingent had been designing flyers all day. Amazingly…I FELL ASLEEP. Fuck ME. I wasted an entire day passed out. 4:30 to 10pm I sleeping beauty’ed it while Mariette’s boyfriend Benny showed up, they smoked weed and napped (maybe it was his sleepy energy wearing off on me) and the Swiss kids made posters for wheatpasting that night. An entire evening! Gone!

When I woke up I was so furious with myself that I was determined to make up for it with a slamming night on the town and I set out to rally the troops. But hey…it was a Monday night..in London..where shit closes at midnight all the time. I realized we’d have to race out of there if we wanted to get any drinking done. I called Mark, my valiant and faithful Irish steed, always up for a drink, and we agreed to meet at The Old Blue Lass, a pub that Vice magazine owns. I texted Michael ‘Drinks. Vice bar. Be there. Now.’ An hour later, there we all were, Swiss kids with wheatpaste they mixed in the shower, Michael with no credit on his phone lucky to have run into us, Mark exhausted from the weekend but out although he had to work at 8 the next morning, and no plan of where to go when the pub closed after our first beer.
We ended up circling a club called The Mother Bar on Old Street. A shitty seedy place swarming with idiot chavs, off duty nightclub workers and hairdressers off on Tuesdays.
While waiting at the bar to order myself a pint I noticed a shock of bright red hair and an incredible grey trench coat in front of me. She turned around halfway seconds later and I suavely said ‘that’s a beautiful coat’. She turned around completely, sized me up and said ‘the dress is even better’ and flashed me her vintage dress. It was almost as good as the coat.

We got to talking and I discovered that her name was Ginger Jane (aka Maaika), she was half Dutch, half British and half of a known DJ duo called Jack and Ginger. They put on what sound like amazing shows mixing Burlesque with hipster rock with classics with instruments and live performances. It turns out Mark had stalked one of her parties all summer (literally went there every week to stare at her) so he shit a brick when I brought her back to the posse with me.
We exchanged myspace info (…holy shit that’s depressing…) and I dragged the party to the dance floor. There I found the ugliest man in the place and made him think he was the hottest thing on earth, I forced everyone to dance to Prince and Michael Jackson remixes and I absolutely shamelessly flirted the boys into staying out 2 hours longer than they should have.

Eventually, around 3am, the Swiss kids got anxious to go pasting and we all took off. We walked Mark home, painting and pasting everything on the way, Michael, Mark and I trailing behind Sven and Maja who were on a mission from God to cover everything in site with sticky art. I put up so many tags I lost count. I got myself a hot salt beef beigel on Brick Lane, Mark went home and Michael, Sven, Maja and I started the trek back.

Somehow the Swiss kids needed much longer than we could stand in the cold and Michael ended up coming back to the hotel with me. 4am.
When we arrived, Mariette and Benny’s feet were dangling off the bed. That means there would be 6 of us in a room for two. Not so insane by street art standards. Michael lay down with all his clothes and his shoes on (for which he got MUCH slack the next day) and we giggled ourselves to sleep around half five.

BALLS TO THE WALL FOR LAST CALL
At 7:30 Michael’s alarm goes off. Mariette and Benny bounced at 6am and the Swiss kids took over their post on the bed next to us. Somehow, with only 2 hours sleep, he convinced me to take him downstairs and have breakfast with him. Why not, every experience is worth having right? Somehow I enjoy the grinding teeth and bone crushing feeling that is sleep deprivation, if it means I’ll get more work done. Is that sick or what?
Over breakfast he told me he wanted to give me babies, I fled to find more grapefruit and I sent him off to work.
I stayed up packing and writing the first chapter of this mad novella from 9 til 12:30 when I was forced to get the Swiss kids out of bed because we had to be out of the room.
The initial plan was that we would stay at the hotel the entire time in London, but something fucked up with the booking and we ended up being homeless for the afternoon.
We put our bags in lock up, went to an internet café for an hour and met up with the man I refer to as ‘my baby daddy’, Colin Chan, for lunch.

He is the art director and co founder of Overspray. A small half Chinese, half British graphic design genius/painter, based out of Oxford. He’s one of those super zen presences that you notice the same way you notice Mr. Miyagi – with respect.
Essentially we plotted and planned and whiled the time away until 7 when Mark got home from work (we were set to crash at his place). Poor kid only slept 3 hours before he had to get up (entirely my fault) and he had to take a nap when he got home.
The plan was to meet almost everyone I’d hung out with in London at the Dragon Bar for drinks. The Dragon Bar is London’s most street art friendly bar, covered floor to ceiling in tags and stickers and paste ups. The bathrooms are literally fully covered in art to the point where you cant find a clean spot to tag, anywhere.
We arrived fashionably an hour late, to find 5 or 6 people already there waiting for us, including Mariette and Benny, back from their roadtrip to Leeds (hence why they got up at 6am). I brought Colin, Mark, Sven, Maja and Michael showed up shortly thereafter, bringing the head count to 11.
We busted out the black books (right little graf rip offs aren’t we) and the drink began to flow.

I ended up taking a full on nap in the middle of it all, on Michael’s shoulder before getting my second wind and finding the one place that wasn’t tagged in the bathrooms. The toilet seats. I scribbled a drunken ‘S–k and –e give you wet dreams’ on the men’s and who knows what all over the girls, before downing two vodka red bulls merely to stay awake.
I spent a good half hour trying to convince Michael to let me cut his hair off with scissors from behind the bar (he refused, saying he wanted to treat himself to a fancy haircut after so long. Snob.) and I unwittingly smoked a million cigarettes.

A t-shirt and two black books later Jim and Mati appeared, and showed me the upstairs space in the bar where they want us to throw an Overspray event in the summer (which I will).

Long after last call and the light’s came on we stumbled back out and off to Mark’s house. We managed to watch all of Napoleon Dynamite before passing out again, then it got really interesting.
Colin decided to stay instead of catching the late bus back to Oxford (yay!) just around the time I started to suspiciously eye the couch we were on.

‘Mark, does this thing fold out?’
‘Nope.’
‘Uhm…oh.’

Upon someone’s genius suggestion, Colin and I pulled Mark’s small wooden coffee table to the front edge of the couch, put some towels on it for padding and planted our legs on it, bodies half on the couch, half on the table. The Swiss kids dismantled everything they could find and stripped all the armchairs of their padding, creating makeshift beds for themselves on the floor. I doubt Mark has ever seen his living room in such a shambles. Then he drops the bomb:

‘Oh by the way, I’m meant to at work early tomorrow, so we’ll have to be up and out by 8. I cant leave you here cuz you need a key to get out the door.’

It was 4:30am, and we had nowhere to stash the bags. Fresh.

PINKY AND THE BRAIN GOT NOTHIN ON US

After teary goodbyes the next day, the posse was whittled down to just Colin and myself. We spent a good two hours in a specialty book store staring at the covers of magazines, discussing the impact of black and white images and different ink types.
We landed in a coffee shop down Brick Lane where I hatched a plan to bring him to New York for a month as soon as possible, to cement our takeover of the world. It will happen.
My shitty $19 dollar suitcase bestowed death upon one of it’s wheels on the way to the airport, forcing me to drag it all the way from East London to Heathrow, where I managed to get on my flight despite them misspelling my name.

I beat out two British girls for a row of empty seats as soon as the seatbelt sign went off (this is becoming routine), read some of my book and promptly passed the fuck out for the duration of the flight. Literally, I slept through both meals, all the drinks, snacks and movies and woke up just in time to finish my book, eat a mint, give a sleepy scowl and fasten my seatbelt for landing.

I dragged my suitcase onto the A train, the F train and up second Avenue to my house. I finally got the shower and fruit I had been craving, gave my mom a hug and PASSED THE FUCK OUT.

Entirely a successful trip.

I feel much like Hunter S. Thompson must have felt on many a very early morning in a foreign country, climbing over piles of people and their belongings, sneaking breakfast for five up to a room for two, trying to chase away a hangover by washing his hands, clicking away at a keyboard by a dawn filled window overlooking a newly familiar street. In fact, outside my window I have a perfect view of a bus stop, a large two-way street, a parking lot that looks like it’s out of ‘Snatch’ and a probably 20 foot banksy rat nibbling on something on a wall across the way. The British accent that I tend to affect (which realistically lands itself somewhere between English cockney swears and Irish intonation) has infiltrated not just my speech but also my thoughts at this point. Spending too much time with my new friend Michael has thrown some Australian L’s in the mix too. Very odd to be thinking this way.

It’s been an incredible couple of days. I got in on Wednesday morning. Mariette picked me up at Heathrow wearing a hand sewn trucker hat she got on a beach in Bali that reads ‘Fuck Terroris. Bali, Oktober, 2001’.

We sat down and she immediately launched into her tales of Indonesian travels, American friendship dramas and newfound international loves (she was traveling in Bali for the two weeks prior to London). A few hours later we made our way to the tube where we were instantly separated, I on a train and her on the tube. We reunited at the next stop and got to the hotel.
I had an opening we had to attend, of a photographer who’s just put out a book documenting his travels and stays with street artists over the last year, named JR. It was at a bar called Dreambagsjaguarshoes (<– just an amazing name) that was supposed to be in the heart of all the cultural everything, so we were on a bit of a schedule. When we finally got to room 239 at the Holiday Inn on Old street we found a quaint twin room with horrid blue and yellow curtains and a faint smell of disinfectant. Immediately Mariette busted out the incense she’d brought from a Balinese church, I banished the use of the overhead light and angled all the lamps onto the wall, the tv was unplugged and replaced with her ipod speakers and I propped up the Overspray blackbook as makeshift art. After unpacking and a dutiful celebratory cup of tea we headed out to find the JR opening, and guess what..it was right around the corner. You see, Benny (Mariette’s new boyfriend) was not only thoughtful enough to know that I’d need to be in the inner city, he was also smart enough (without knowing me) to guess that I’d need to be in the heart of London’s street art scene. Thank god for the small Chinese girl who stood at the ticket window at the Heathrow tube station for 40 minutes who surreptitiously (and accidentally) saw to it that we didn’t get a weekly tube card but only a one trip ticket, saving both of us at least 18 pounds. We haven’t taken a tube or bus once since we’ve been here.
So out we go to the JR opening. It would have been hard to miss-even in the freezing weather there was a crowd of kids spilled onto the street outside the bar, and you can smoke inside here mind you.

I was supposed to be meeting this kid Mark (aka Mjar – www.invisiblemadevisible.com) at the bar that I met there last summer with my little brother. He knows absolutely everything there is to know about East London street art. He’s a small Irish kid with kind eyes and a sort of tartan look to him.
After getting to the bar, accidentally being discovered by my old friend Luis (from when I was 14 in Germany) that happened to be bartending, we spotted Mark and a few others. (I also spotted the man I surmised must be JR, a handsome young Frenchman with a nice big camera, whom I approached and asked for an interview immediately.) Mark was lovely, as usually, and he introduced us to his Australian friend Michael who is one half of the young street art duo Goldtooth.

Michael is even smaller than Mark (did I mention that he was about a foot smaller than me?). He sports almost shoulder length tight black curls, black framed glasses, an army pea coat and a LOT of energy. Sort of that almost fey rock and roll fabulousness. In fact, he reminds me suspiciously much of my friend Josh in LA. (Note to self: tell Joshy that I’ve found his doppelganger.) After a couple of drinks and a lot of talking Mariette and I headed out for some Thai food with numbers in pocket and promises to meet the next day.

The next day was spent locating internet cafes, preparing interview questions for that evening, figuring out what the fuck our phone number actually was, setting up the cell phone, and further boring shit. In the evening I took off to meet up with an incredible artist called Adam Neate (www.adamneate.co.uk) while Mariette went to get a beer with Michael from Goldtooth. Adam Neate puts all his work on cardboard and leaves it in the streets. He’d just come back from a month in Brazil where he had been painting with his wife, Waleska so we went for a quick beer (again, right around the corner from the hotel). He was the quietest, sweetest guy, and he might have intrigued me more than anyone else I interviewed in my time here.
Afterwards I caught up with Mariette and Michael who whisked me off down Brick Lane to meet Nick, a friend of another friend of Mariette’s from NY. None of us really wanted to go, but Nick insisted we stop by ‘his studio’.

NICK

This is a man who absolutely deserves a chapter of his own in anything anyone ever (poorly) chooses to write about him.
Some people just give you the feeling that they’ve got their town wired. They seem to know everyone, have all the hookups for free drinks, they’re on a first name basis with all the bouncers, and they’ve got a dope space to work in that someone’s just given them. You know the type? Thought so. Some of those people make you envious, or like you just might not fall under the ‘cool enough’ radar, and some make you want to run for the hills while stripping all your clothes off because you feel like insects are crawling up your spine. That’s more Nick’s type.
There’s a compound of buildings here, down Brick Lane, called The Truman Brewery that includes 20-odd buildings housing innumerable popular cafes, bars and trendy little shops, include one huge nightclub type deal, complete with a long gate outside, four bouncers and a three pound fifty cover charge ($7). Michael and I were content to carry on photographing street art in the neighborhood but apparently this was something we had to do. Shortly Nick appeared, clutching a cocktail, leaned in close to the door girl’s ear and whispered some magical ‘open sesame’ that got us all waved in.
Nick is one of those types of men that barely shake your hand if you’re not wearing heels, so Michael and I pretty much got the chilly shoulder while he focused in on Mariette. We couldn’t have cared less. We headed inside the club and down some stairs to Nick’s studio, a small room absolutely coated in a layer of photographs of girls that he had taken. Apparently this is his art. I hesitantly thumbed through some of the shots laying on his desk of a pretty brunette in a pea green Victorian dress, hiking one side up her left thigh in what looked like a poorly lit basement. Doing a bad job of hiding his excitement at someone actually looking at ‘his work’ he leans over and purrs ‘that’s Lilly’. I nodded, and unfortunately made eye contact with Michael which made it increasingly hard to stifle my giggles.
We soon went up into the bar (because I had to pee), a large room with low couches and a load of noticeably laughable ‘graffiti’ style characters covering an entire wall. Upon entering ‘the loo’ I noticed a horrible poster of Ron Jeremy with a ‘censored’ sticker covering his massive penis ‘hanging’ on the door, further convincing me that the place was a nightmare.
At the bar I found that indeed, London is vastly more expensive than New York. Drinks here cost about the same amount of pounds as dollars in NY, but the pound is double the dollar. So a six pound drink sounds reasonable until you notice that that’s twelve bucks (thank you Mr. Bush for the STRENGTH of our dollar). So I sipped Mariette’s drink and chatted with Michael for a while as Nick did his coked up best to serenade her. I ventured a ‘what do you really do?’ at one point, and to Mike and my equal horror and amusement he pointed towards the wall with the ‘graffiti’. ‘The graf??’ I spluttered. ‘No no, the posters on the way into the bathrooms. The one in the ladies is Ron Jeremy!’.
I could have cried.

Eventually the drinks were gone and Mike and I took to checking if my white tattoo glows under blacklight. By the time the film ‘pi’ being projected on one large wall got to the scene where the protagonist drills into his own skull with an electric drill we knew we had to get out of there. Mariette insisted on one last dutiful joint with the Nick so we followed them downstairs. That’s when I got my first real look at the man. As Nick stood to spin some records I sized him up properly. About 6’ 2”, full beard and mustache hiding a wet little mouth that you secretly hope Santa doesn’t have, receding hairline that leads to shoulder length stringy brown hair that is permanently greasy, a little bit of a beer belly, some silver jewelry and sort of box cut blue jeans – the wicked nerd that someone made the mistake of telling he could finally get laid if he told girls he was an artist.
He showed us more of his ‘art’ - some photos of pouty eastern European girls pulling various clothing articles back just enough to let you know there were tits under there, that he had photoshoped a few splotches of yellow or red onto. They all had impossible to ignore bags under their eyes, and one couldn’t escape the feeling that he had promised stardom to every waitress from upstairs at one point in their careers.
He started to give me a bit of the eyeball and Mariette seemed blissfully oblivious to how shady he was so I felt the call of the young buck with the need to BOLT. Mike walked us back to our hotel after a failed attempt to go to the pub that Vice magazine owns. We made promises to promises to meet again very soon, and I retired to our room with every intention of getting some work done and going to sleep. Ha…I bet that’s how every great night out story begins.

JR

It’s midnight, I’m just sitting down in the hotel room (literally, jacket still on), and I get a call from the elusive handsome young French photographer we know as JR.

‘You must come out. I am here at Jhagooarshoos with two other artists, we go pahsting. You must come out now, have a drink.’
‘Uhm, is there any way you could come here?’
‘Ah mais non, I can not leave zem. We find a place here for the interview. Come out, but you must come now.’
‘Well ok.’

You don’t have to ask 3 times. I grabbed my purse and hot footed it around the corner. I found JR in the company of street artist and (apparently) legend, PMH and a girl named Vickie who had organized the exhibition for the bar. After cordial introductions we were lead behind the bar into the back office for the sake of silence. There I conducted my brief, unprepared interview (it’s called winging it y’all) and got to know a lot more about JR.
A half hour later I’m behind the DJ booth with PMH screaming in my ear that I’ve ‘GOT to stay for a drink!’ Again, I wont make you twist my arm, especially if it’s free. While JR mixes wheatpaste in the tiny sink behind the bar, PMH gives me the lowdown on the real beef between Fafi and Miss Van, two (apparently) warring French street artist women. It might have been the charm with which he brandished his extendable five foot broom stick, but somehow JR manages to convince me to come out pasting with them, so off we go down Brick Lane again. Complete with three male groupies JR has acquired along the way, we stop in front of a massively popular club called Cargo. This wall looks familiar to me. There used to be a famous Banksy piece here, but now the wall has been freshly painted black. Jr, brazen in his French way, simply throws down his posters, hands PMH his camera with loose instructions on how to shoot, and puts the brush to the wall.
JR proceeds to take 20 minutes putting up 5 two metre tall strips of paper showing a black and white photo he’s taken of a French Mafioso pulling his sunglasses down, giving his eyes to the camera, from the driver’s seat of his car. The fucking paste up is MASSIVE. It is now 1:30 am on a Friday night, and it’s some strange rendition of British pub closing time so the street is filled with people. The 6 bouncers behind us just sort of glance over every once in a while as the image is pieced together, but don’t interfere. A gaggle of English girls in riding boots, mini skirts and wool coats pause for a second, size JR up, obviously consider being groupies, give him a giggle and googley eye and take off.
Finally it’s done, my camera is full and Pure Evil (another London street artist I met last summer) is convincing me to come back to his place around the corner with them to watch a Spanish street art documentary.

‘It’s only 15 minutes long.’

Why do I fall for these lies?
We get to his (beautiful) apartment, he cracks some very large cans of redstripe for all of us and we get comfy watching a documentary about street art in Barcelona that is entirely in Spanish with no subtitles. At least it was projected on his wall. Me being the only person that understood any Spanish at all, I was delegated the job of translator. An hour and a half later we’re all fairly drunk and the film still hasn’t finished. My jet lag is kicking my ass so I stand to leave and everyone follows suit. Somehow I’ve gotten into the joking with PMH and he ends up literally throwing me across the room onto the couch sending my foot crashing into Pure Evil’s stove. I laughed so hard I thought I might pee in my pants.
They tried to convince me to stay on for further drinks but I just took off as soon as we got to my street and waved back from the corner. I made it to bed by 2:30.

Day 3
On day three we were scheduled to have our first official photo shoot with one of the featured artists in the issue, Elph (www.akaelph.com), a Scottish guy named Brian. He was taking the mail train down from Edinburgh and getting in at 7am. Around 5:30 I woke up with a start. Some machinery kicked in somewhere in my brain and the wheels just started a-turnin’. There was no way I could keep sleeping. I forced myself to stay in bed until 6:30, a half hour after the hotel’s free breakfast started, then headed downstairs with my computer and notebooks. It was so fucking early the cleaning guy was still vacuuming the café floor when I got down there. I still have the remnants of a head cold so my sinuses were throbbing, my eyes were puffy and I hadn’t showered so it was a blessing that I was the only person in the dining area for the next two hours.
I sat there wringing my brain of all it’s ideas like a wet towel until 8:30 when Mariette came down, looking surprisingly fresh, to tell me that Elph would be there any minute. In a fit of panic I tore upstairs, threw myself into the shower, washed my hair, found some remotely presentable clothes and attempted to piece together my brain before heading back downstairs. I grabbed a cappuccino, put on my calmest face and went and met the sweetest street artist I think I’ve come across yet.
Elph (nee Brian) is a small, bright eyed man, with a dollop of unremarkable brown hair that hangs shaggily over his ears, who sits with his elbows on the table, extremely hunched over, and speaks in an exceedingly quiet and thick Scottish accent. He reminded me of a small boy on his first day at school, the way he almost tried to hide behind his plate. He’s not used to being interviewed or given too much attention it seems, so two New York women giving him their full on 100% seemed to be a lot for him, plus he was exhausted from just having taken the mail train down overnight. Apparently the mail train is the cheapest way to go, but about the rockiest ride you can get. For chrissake, They have seatbelts with which you are meant to strap yourself into the beds so you don’t fall out on a short stop.
We interviewed the poor boy in the hotel room and headed out to meet Mjar (Mark) and scout for a location for our photo shoot, somewhere down near Brick Lane. Mark took us to a miraculously perfect spot near the city farm (yes, literally donkeys and shit just roaming around in the middle of the city). It was a spot underneath an old train track where kids bring cars they’ve stolen and burn them out, so all the walls were blackened and the ground was covered in debris. Perfect. Why am I obsessed with filth and decay?

A few hours and freezing limbs later we ended up in a gigantic second hand shop called ‘beyond retro’ where I searched in vain for a hat and gloves, diving deep into bins of fur covered shoes and magenta granny sweaters only coming up with an incredible gold….fuck! what’s the word for them? The belt like thing you wrap around your waist under a tuxedo??
And how England is this..as we’re futzing around in there this indie band just picks up and starts playing, the lead singer in an impecably tailored brown wool jacket. Of course we made Elph spring for an impromptu photo shoot on the sly.

Later on we met a guy named Jim (www.cablestreetcollective.co.uk), an incredible street artist, and his girlfriend Mati who we ended up going out to dinner with at a sik place called Noodle King. For 4 pounds we got a HUGE plate of kick ass food. But that’s boring…
Right after eating my lack of sleep kicked in and the table started to look a lot like a comfy bed so I headed back for a nap. All the boys came with…
Around 11pm I got up again and headed out to meet them for drinks at a bar down the road. That ended up being a trip to another two bars and going back to Jim’s house to smoke weed and drink tea until 3:30am, at which point ALL the boys kindly escorted me back to the hotel.

On the way I spotted these strange slats of wood covered in images of palm trees. While I was tagging on them Mark randomly opened a small trashy box that was sitting there and by the grace of some graf god discovered a stash of 5 spray cans! Naturally we used them to cover everything in a five block radius.

Upon arrival outside the hotel at 4am, I mumbled something about noticing that my room looked right out onto the street while walking past it topless a number of times and they fired back with ‘what time does that happen exactly?’ and I went upstairs and passed the fuck out.

My head is absolutely pounding after only 3 hours sleep last night again and we have to get out of the hotel room, so I’ll get to how we ended up in this spot later.

Im at a fancy internet cafe in London with Maja and Sven, the Swiss contingent, and they’re doing construction upstairs with like a jack hammer. I feel like I’m in fucking Iraq. I’ll post up my huge diatribe later.

Yeah..London’s alright..hahahahahaha. I’ll hack out the full story about last night later.
Taking photos with the ugliest men in the club is hands down the new dogs danglies.

In an internet cafe in London, drinking coffees while my hands thaw. It’s effin cold here. Everything’s lovely. Our hotel room has been completely transformed from a stale Holiday Inn room to a total haven of draped scarves, nice smells, herb teas, laptops and cameras. And guess what, the hotel is walking distance from EVERYWHERE we need to be.
I shlepped Mariette to an opening last night of a street art photographer, JR. It was awesome, and we met 4 new people. When I went to the bar to get a burr the bartender looks at me and goes ‘you dont recognize me do you?’. ‘Uhh, no?’ ‘I’m Luis, from Freiburg!’. Turns out he was a dancer with my ex stepmother’s company and we lived in Germany together when I was 14. Incredible. That was free beers for the night and I’m gonna tear a hole into a dance floor with him this weekend.
We’re wandering around photographing street art near Brick Lane now and our first interview is tonight. Shooting tomorrow.
I had an absolute epiphany last night in my jet lagged euphoria and came up with the name and logo of the umbrella company for all of our satelite projects. It is PERFECT. You’ll all see.
I dont have any pictures to show because I forgot my cable, but I’ll get that sorted later.
It’s on kids, it’s on.

Ahh airports. $2.70 for a drink. $270 for a piece of cake, and $2.70 an hour for the Pakistani women who say $2.70 nineteen hundred times a day. Sitting eating a bunch of sugary shit to tide yourself over until you get your free meal on the plane because a sandwich costs $8 dollars. Oh and hey, the internet is still charged per minute as though it were running on dial up and every minute would affect the price so no relief there. People are wearing ridiculous sleeper pillows around their necks, everything is totally sterile, they probably made you check the bag you were adamant you HAD to take on the plane with you making you pack that one little carry on bag with all your most fragile belongings so it’s now torn a hole into your shoulder, and god damn is that waiting room airless. But what’s on the other end of that plane ride is so fucking awesome, exciting and fulfilling that not a bit of this shit matters. Every time your phone manages to pick up a signal for a second it beeps with a message from a loved one wishing you a safe flight and a wonderful time reminding you that even the return trip won’t be so easy to taint. Hopefully that $19 piece of shit rolling suitcase you got at Wholesale Liquidators this afternoon will make it home with you and everything in between will fall into place.

I’m on my way to London, and my fabulously overpriced airport of choice is JFK. Who knows why the fuck shit is so much more expensive out here in Queens, it’s only a car ride from the city, not exactly a trek for a delivery truck, but hey, it’s part of the game. I’m trying to ignore the report on the underground fertility drug market blaring above me, but it’s tough.
I just realized that in my stupendous spaced-out-ness I forgot both my microphone for my ipod and the cable to connect my camera to my computer, AS WELL as my favorite hoodie. Hmm. Tard? Ya.
I’m going there to interview about 5 more artists than I’ll actually have time for, and do photoshoots with two of them with Mariette, my photographer number 1 and reporter in training. I also need to squeeze in the setting up of our release party/exhibition for June. Two of the Swiss kids I met in the last two weeks are coming in on Sunday to make a ruckus in my hotel room with me. What? Yes I said it. No way! A hotel? Yep. SWEEET. Mariette’s (very kind) new boyfriend felt (wisely) that I needed to be in the heart of the city and for some reason took it upon himself to (incredibly) book me a hotel room for the entire week. Why? I dunno. But thank you Benny. Bars in London close at a whopping 11pm so a hotel room to house the six packs will come in REAL handy. How FANCY I say! A business trip to London for a week with a hotel room to hold interviews in!

Today went like this:
10am – wake up by myuself, beating my alarm clocks by 4 minutes.
11am – showered, emails answered and tea drunk, wake up my brother.
11:20 – wake up little slumber puss again
11:45 – try to buy little brother some new shoes because his look like a mine field
12:15 – conveniently meet Mariette’s mom on the corner I’m standing on when she calls to get Mariette’s portfolio
12:30 – buy a suitcase my brother has nicknamed ‘piece of shit’ for $20.
12:45 – eat a good luck slice with little bro and send him off to his exams
1:00pm – get another new haircut (keep in stride with my emotions. FRESHNESS.)
2:30 – start to pack but get distracted by a hundred IM’s
4:30 – quickly drop off an I love you t-shirt to the hairstylist
5:15 – meet the TGS crew at the Overspray office so they can finish a mural on said wall
7:45 – watch little brother’s frustrated attempts to buy the sneakers online as the internet refuses to work on ONLY the page he needs
8:00pm – get on the subway (a half hour late) at 77th street with a rolling suitcase, a messenger bag and a 4 foot tube with a primed canvas in it that will soon be adorned with incredible art for the cover of the next issue of my magazine
Exactly right the fuck on time – arrive at JFK
10:55pm – peace kids

I think this is the year of travel, or at least I want it to be. I was in LA in December, I’ll be in London in the morning, Puerto Rico, California, South America (if I play my cards right), and all over Europe by the end of the summer. Don’t roll your eyes and go ‘god Io, I thought you were broke.’ Travel is so fucking cheap nowadays, and sponsors come in incredibly handy for airfare and hotels, and when you’ve got crash spots in these places it’s a piss in the bucket. Get somebody to get you across that ocean and blam! Easyjet.com all the way. 20 bucks London to Barcelona, 30 bucks Barcelona to Rome, 30 bucks Rome to Zurich, and 30 bucks Zurich to London. Ok, give or take 20 bucks for taxes each way and that’s pretty much the flavor. Then find someone’s stove to cook your $3 pasta on, skateboard everywhere and you’re stylin’ and three hundred milin’.

Soooo…I was just checked, three times between the gate and the plane, eyeballed by two Puerto Ricans and an overweight black woman wearing badges, and SNIFFED by two huge dogs, raising the number of checks to 9? Since when is that protocol? You couldn’t get a pellet gun through the checks here, and god forbid somebody in your family once touched a hundred dollar bill that was once used to snort a line and you are screwed, Queen Elizabeth style.
I have been graced with three Indian American twenty something’s immediately in front of me who are absolutely convinced that they are the first Americans to go to London. (Is that even possible? Can anyone be so stupid?) The one knocking his seat back into my knees (complete with red dot on forehead) was eyeballing an empty row of seats to my right saying ‘as soon as we take off, that’s MINE’. Why wait til we take off ol Punjab? I suppose it’s Hindu custom to wait and see if any redheaded lasses nonchalantly plop their Levi’s down and start typing like they’re oblivious to your plight in your two seater.
They just made an announcement ‘to please mind our alcohol consumption because drinking at high altitudes can have a stronger effect’. The shaved headed English guy next to me and I definitely shared a momentary eye-lock and a ‘fuck yeah’ look.
Time to turn the bitch off.
See you when I see you kids.

Sorry this isnt the best of blog entries I’ve ever posted but we’ll all have to deal since it’s 3:30 in the morning again and i was supposed to be asleep 4 hours ago.
I just wrote a whole long thing about the last two weeks of my life but bitch internet erased it. So fuck you Friendster, here it is in the shell of a nut:
The last two weeks have been like a three act epic saga - there has been suspense, drama, death, romance, action, let downs, happiness, sickness, success, fights, parties, tears, laughter ….oh wait, that’s not an epic saga, that’s the entire fucking paramount studios lot.

In the last two weeks I:
-was offered two jobs I didnt ask for
-was the physical peace keeper in a three way fist fight between two older, bigger graf writers and a younger, smaller, foreign street artist with a big fucking mouth, on the subway in the Bronx at 2am
-fought so bitterly with a close friend that I thought I was through with her. Thank god that’s over.
-was astonishingly drunk…very often.
-was profoundly let down by someone who I cared for immensely
-was very pleasantly surprised by a resurfaced ex I had long since given up for dead
-threw 4 parties, three of which turned into sweeet middle school slumber parties complete with manic giggles and newfound crushes
-made a million new friends including an egyptian street artist who was the center of said fist fight, three Swiss kids who I’ve spent nearly every day with and are coming to see me in London, a street artist I call Boston who has taught me the real Boston accent and how to properly scream ‘BAD AASSSS!’, and a sweet young black dude from Queens who I call Revolution because he looks like he should be in the black panthers
-got my first tattoo
-kicked a hole into a wall in a fit of anger
-and that’s just what I can remember when I’m exhausted..