Back from the dead

I am getting quieter and quieter. Yes. Partly because I've been away and working. Partly because I have no inspiration whatsoever.

I have been compiling a few things. Chocolates, for one... Which I couldn't find on my own, nooo... Had to read about in the Cool Hunting newsletter. Charlemagne have the crappiest site ever, but apparently make hemp-flavored milk chocolate, among other things. Here's what CH has to say about it.

Photography... Philippe Chancel, so unapologetically French, in the intimacy of a falsely modest woman (who you kidding, lady), so playful in Angkor, tyrannically geometric in North Korea... And Denis Darzacq, with his amazing series on free-falling.

The sis, bless her, had the good grace of not waiting a second to share her latest find. Here's PeekVid, thanks to which I was able to watch the new episodes of Scrubs. The last two are hilarious - the musical one, especially, deserves to be mentioned. It was written with the help of the team of Avenue Q. A similar idea: alluc.org.

Sorry, people. All I can do for now. More soon, hopefully.

Only a week

It's only been a week. Too intense for me to even go into details. Here are the highlights.

I saw sweet, grey London covered in snow, where I went for work.


Paris in turn, was as sad as it was sunny.


Then life began again, early Monday morning.


It doesn't wait for anybody, does it.


Tête la première et en plein coeur. Merci.

B&W

There's a town in Flanders called Sint Niklaas. It seems like a nice enough place for kids to grow up and grown-ups to live and work. Interesting fact, though: 11 of the 39 seats of the city council are held by the far-right party, Vlaams Belang - some anti-immigration organization (and I would love to give you more details, except I don't speak Flemish and apparently, their stuff is exclusively targeted at Flemish-speaking Flemings, which in a country like Belgium, is, erm... quite eloquent). 11 out of 39, that's a tad more than 28 percent. Respectable score.

But, you know, to hell with contradictions. The mayor of this town is a Socialist, who was elected along with a list of deputies and other aides. Among whom a man called Wouter Van Bellingen. The guy grew up in the region, adopted, like his siblings, by a local family. Elected fair and square by the people of Sint Niklaas. So now he's an "Echevin", as they call them in the old schoolness that characterizes the Belgian version of French, a deputy-mayor.

Here, like in France, all couples have to stop by city hall to get married. And part of Mr. Van Bellingen's responsibilities is to perform weddings.

To the point. Three couples refused to have him as a registrar. Why, you ask? Simple. He's black. More precisely, he is the first black man elected in Flanders.

He's had to deal with quite a bit of shit in his life. He has colorful anecdotes, such as that time where he went after a lady who'd forgotten her purse in the train and she didn't know whether to tip him, and another man told her: "you're lucky, usually they go home with it." Or these people in the street who make monkey noises when they see him.

You'd think he'd let that bring him down. I know it would me. I'd get angry and throw a dozen tantrums (I would, I have, I swear, got witnesses). No. His response? Performing a mass-wedding ceremony on March 21st, the Day Against Racism. See how they like it.

I haven't seen much about that. Expatica, Le Monde, some TV station in New Zealand... Picked that up from AFP and Reuters. It depresses me.

But you see, it's snowing tonight. Big-ass flakes. My lovely neighbor Erick cooked a hot prawn curry and got me drunk on half a bottle of white Italian wine. And that, I like. So I'm going to bed. A wide, tired smile on my face.

With tree-hugging, hippy, Scandinavian love (and thanks to the sis):

Of shoes and other nothings

A week without a post and no one to complain about it. Wonder what that says about the readership. One, I know, was toasting herself in Cuba. Due to this, a couple of others were working overtime. Miss Y is probably on a roll in Melbourne. The sis is preoccupied by the job search (and that'll be the perfect excuse to never check this). Busy boy Alex is running around in NY... As for the rest, I'm simply assuming they've given up on trying to keep up with me if it means reading in English. Pack of lazy asses.


But the kids came to visit last weekend. We skipped the 15th Erotic Festival and successfully went shoe-shopping. Yes. Proud Euro-fashion victims. Won't have none of that big sneakers crap.


There was a lot of walking around (so comfortable, so cool, great shoes). The weather, for once, cooperated. Pictures were taken. We later stopped at Brüsel, one of'em big ol' comic stores. Ideas of images were jotted down for decorating the hostess's (me - I'm in a third person crisis today) place.


I sat in the stairs, waiting for the tourists to finish browsing.


Girl - Hey, do you like my picture?"
Boy 1 - Not bad. Except the socks and the shoes don't go together."
Boy 2 - Well that's the point, isn't it."

Yeah, man. Exactly.


On the new rules of privacy: an interesting piece in the New York Mag. They will tell you anything...