THE FOURTH WALL

VERY VERY HOT

2009-09-27T15:12:00.001-08:00

The past few week has been really, really hot, it got over 37 degrees celcius in the afternoon and it didn't cool off at night enough to get a comfortable temperature in my bedroom. Couldn't sleep much.

So we went to the beach somewhere between Santa Monica and Malibu to get some air and such. It was almost twenty degrees colder up there and there was a grey fog, and it made me not want to go into the ocean but it was extremely nice to be in a more or less normal temperature and the ocean is always beautiful.

After this we had a paella party at Daniel Porras, a painter, 's place, which has a fantastic garden and a lot of cocktails and mixed drinks. The crowd was also mixed. There was a Spanish cinematographer - at almost every party there's someone from the film industry.

I didn't really feel like sleeping when we got back to RAID, so I climbed the stairs of the building next to RAID to make some photos of the view.

RANDOM

2009-09-27T15:02:00.000-08:00

We went to an opening in the Pacific Design Centre in Westwood, I think, were some galeries had free spaces to use for exhibitions and Max Presneill was in two of them. It was a strange combination of a warehouse with design furniture and art but it was quite enjoyable. Many people from the LA artscene were there and I met a guy, a curator, Carl Berg (I'm not entirely sure of the name) who did some lectures at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. That was quite interesting. This was one of the most interesting works in the exhibitions, I don't know who made it:

This is Polly, Scott's cat. Scott is the guy who owns the Delorean, the Back to the Future car. Polly is a fat cat, she wiggles downstairs almost every night and rolls around on the pavement, which makes her so dirty I have to wash my hands everytime I stroke her. But she's adorable:

On a very very hot afternoon Brian Getnick played his accordeon for me in the kitchen of his lovely fairytale like house. There are lizards and even Black Widow spiders in his garden. This was magical:

OCCULT BUILDINGS

2009-09-27T12:24:00.001-08:00

Next to Sunset Wilshire is my favorite boulevard, especially the part closest to Downtown. It has an unusual amount of churches and strange buildings, built in the 1920's and '30's. Some of these were used as headquarters of peculiar societies like the freemasons and the elks. The Elks seem to have been reduced to some sort of lame club for old people, judging by their website but at some point they were able to build a huge unproportional temple-like construction like this one:

It was turned into a hotel later - which seems a bit ridiculous, a hotel like an occult temple with this inscription right above the entrance. It means something like: an eye for an eye.

The building is now not in use anymore, except for private Hollywoodparties for celebrities and as a movielocation.

A bit further down the road there's a gigantic building that's been empty for years. It used to be a mason-'church'. These are the doors:

There was a homeless guy sleeping on the grass next to it. He was talking absolute religious jibberish and gave Jeremy and I both a piece of paper of which he said: this is important for you and your families or something. The text didn't make any sense also, but the homeless guy looked extremely sweet in an almost eh divine way.

Next up was a visit to the Playboy Mansion (and why not, we were closeby anyway). We didn't see any bunnies - they were hidden in the high hedges and shrubberies, I presume. The house was invisible due to the plants and the hill. The voicebox, though it was harassed continuously by this stream of playboytourists, never lost its cool like the Spielberg voicebox did. This voicebox didn't speak at all. It was built into a rock.

MONOTONIX!

2009-09-17T15:58:00.000-08:00

We went to see the Monotonix at the Smell the other night. Jason and Max Moore have seen them before and were quite prepared but for me it was a big surprise. The Monotonics are from Israel and play very basic garage rock but it's not particularly the music that draws the crowd, though I bought their record after the show.

Jason and Max after the show:

DUNSMUIR

2009-09-17T15:55:00.000-08:00

In the mean time I started to become increasingly obsessed by this town Dunsmuir. I couldn't make any photos of the town at the time so I made some drawings from my memory:

I've also started to work on an animation about Dunsmuir. I've written a short story. I hope to finish it before I get back to Antwerp, it's all about keeping it simple (which is difficult, actually).

RANDOM 2

2009-09-17T15:27:00.000-08:00

I went with Chris and Rufus to this place called The Smell in Downtown. This venue is known internationally for their great and cheap evenings filled with bigger and smaller bands. Because The Smell is an 'all ages' venue, they don't serve alcohol, but that's fine. The Smell is the LA version of Scheld'apen, musically, but it's a bit bigger. There were four bands this evening of which UpUp was absolutely the best. Upup is, I think, a San Diego based duo from Japan. They sound like a, well, jazzier Japanese version of Napalm Death.

Chris and Rufus went back to Europe, but not before Rufus made a drawing on the rock that keeps the sidedoor of RAID open:

It used to be a cone that kept the door open, but many changes are being made at RAID at the moment. Two new guys, Dave and Ryan, are going to run RAID and they're rebuilding the exhibitionspace. Their first show is due right after I've left, unfortunately. The space already looks much cleaner and better now. They had to make a lot of noise during their constructionwork.

I went with Jenny, Jason, Max and some woman - a friend of Jenny's - to a party of a free artmagazine, Artillery, at a bar next to the beautiful Union Station in Downtown.

After this party we went back to RAID to drink some champagne because Jenny was going back to Chicago. Sinds Nakhee left RAID to stay in New York for one-and-a-half months everyone just seems to leave. Margit and Persijn are also gone. With all the constructionwork at RAID and people leaving all the time I get a strange sense of an 'Ending'.

Anyway, this evening resulted in me snapping at Jenny's friend and making her cry.

Certain social dynamics are impossible to avoid when living for a couple of months in a place like this.

Also marine-reservist Max Moore seemed a bit off; he was wandering around RAID in the middle of the night, sleepless because he's leaving for Afghanistan soon.

Another story is this girls car that got stolen from the parkinglot. The police found it a few days later, ten blocks from here with most of her belongings replaced with mysterious objects:

BISSY BUNDER AT MARC SELWYN

2009-09-17T14:57:00.000-08:00

Kati Heck had an opening at her gallery, Marc Selwyn, where Bissy Bunder did a performance. They'd been travelling across California the past weeks and made a movie, which was projected on a screen, held by two of the Bissies. The performance started out like this:

This was in between:

And it ended like so:

I definately liked Kati's paintings. The performance was Bunderish as always and had some really good moments. The audience was also very interesting; one could smell the money on a lot of the people who were there. People tend to overdress for these openings, there are more buyers and friends of buyers who seem to think it's really cool to be at these openings, than artists. I don't really understand why it's the other way around in Antwerp. In a way it's a shame, because this way you rarely get a chance to see who exactly the people are who are actually buying art.

There was also a recently finished painting of Harry Heirmans and Herman, which is one of my favorites of the exhibition:

After the opening Chris, Rufus and me were invited for a dinner at Marc Selwyns house, which was up in Beverly Hills, close to Sunset Boulevard. There were about fifty people there, some of them I already saw at the opening. The house and the area was beautiful, lots of trees and very quiet. There was some good art in the house also, but that was not very surprising. There was a small garden, surrounded by high trees and a modest swimming pool. Ofcourse Kati got into the pool, they filmed some stuff and so on. All in all I wasn't that comfortable at this 'party'.

Marc Selwyn is the guy in the blue robe.

On our way back Rufus got very sick and eventually had to throw up on the parkinglot in front of RAID. This was possibly due to the free wine and a heavy burrito breakfast.

RANDOM

2009-09-17T14:36:00.000-08:00

Rufus discovered TOP Tobacco. I showed Chris and Rufus around the touristic attractions of Los Angeles, Hollywood Boulevard, that is.

We met up with the Bissy Bunder kids, the performance group of German/Belgian artists Rani Bageria, Kati Heck, Michèle Matyn, Tina Schott and Johanna Trudzinski at a performance/poetry evening in a gallery in Chinatown. This was rather uninteresting although the performance of this German (?) guy with some help of the audience and some of the Bunders was not that bad maybe. It was called 'Von'.

A shot of the spectacular sunset sky while driving to some openings in Santa Monica:

A drawing I made some time ago already of Jason and a portrait I did more recently of Ashley:

LIGHTING BOLT!

2009-09-17T14:18:00.000-08:00

On september 5th the so called FYF Fest took place in Chinatown, close to RAID. I was going to meet Chris and Rufus over there, who had been driving around in California for three weeks already. More or less by chance we met up in the line in front of the Fest - Chris told me she barely recognized me because of my extremely tanned skin and my ridiculously light hair due to the past months of sunshine.

Jeremy and Jason were also at the fest. We saw many bands and many hipsters (for an accurate description of 'hipster', please visit this website. Smoking was allowed, but you could only drink alcohol within the boundaries of a fence, which felt somewhat odd. Drinks were very expensive and even water became hard to find because you couldn't take any food or drinks to the festival and the water there was sold out rather quickly because it was very, very hot this day.

My main goal was to finally see Lighting Bolt live, because somehow I always missed them play in Antwerp. They were phenomenal! The bassplayer is my new hero. The highest two strings on his five string bass are banjo strings.

I've made a somewhat messy video of parts of the gig, a guitarhero on bass, people!

Chris and I making shadows at the festival terrain:

Jason got a bit cold towards the end of the day.

There were more bands ofcourse: here's the list.
The Black Lips and No Age were alright I guess, but none of them can be compared to the Lighting Bolt show.

SAN DIEGO NOUVEAU RICHE

2009-09-04T20:12:00.000-08:00

The day after we got back to RAID Ashley flew to Baton Rouge (no-one can say 'Baton Rouge' like Jason can by the way) to photograph a wedding and I went with Jenny and Nakhee to an art fair in San Diego.

San Diego is about one-and-a-half hours away - maybe two, depending on traffic. When we finally got to this art fair - it was the special opening and tickets were apparently 350 dollar but we just walked in without tickets - it turned out to be taken place in a very kitschy nouveau riche hotel in a more or less Spanish hacienda style palace. It looked like the set of a high class but still sleazy porn movie, I suppose.

The visitors were overdressed (cocktaildresses) and the women were blonde (fake) and busty (also fake). The men had unbuttoned a little bit too many of their shirt buttons and were too tanned. The fair was sponsored by several companies, amongst which Maserati, so there were a lot of Maseratis parked in front of this hotel.

Luckily - because I was very hungry - there was free risotto, several kinds of cookies, some appetizers and free cocktails. My margherita was extremely weak and tasteless, but well, one musn't complain because it was free.

The fair was set up in a large space with strange flooring. It all was a bit weird. So we headed back to LA as soon as we could. I didn't get to see much of the art that was presented there, a friend of Max Presneill and Jenny seemed to have a nice gallery but that was more or less it.

When we left, the clocktower (this building had a clocktower for god's sake) played 'The Star Spangled Banner'.

ROAD TRIP - THE '1' - second part

2009-09-04T15:43:00.000-08:00

Ashley and I continued down the '1'. We underestimated the time it would take us to get to the normal 101 highway because the '1' is not everywhere a big and fast highway track. We got stuck in traffic in Santa Cruz for almost an hour, which didn't help much. When we finally got to the most interesting part of the 1, it was already late in the afternoon.

We passed Big Sur, which is supposed to be the most beautiful place of the U.S.. We couldn't really drive fast along the sharp bends and made some stops to take photographs - so it took a long time before we finally got to the 101 freeway and made some progress but it was absolutely worth it.

As you can tell from the photo below it was rather windy - the black blur in the left corner is the belt to carry my camera, it blew in the lens.

It was around 12 at night when we arrived back at RAID, after a more than 10 hour drive. Usually it's 5 to 6 hours to get from SF to LA.

ROAD TRIP - THE '1' - first part

2009-09-04T15:14:00.000-08:00

The next day Ashley and I left rather late for our drive back to LA but we had already decided we would take the famous route nr. 1 instead of the fastest freeway nr. 5. The '1' runs all the way along the westcoast and is well known to be the one of the most beautiful roads to drive of the US.

We first followed Jeremy to a beach along the '1' right below San Francisco.

This is not a beach like normal beaches - it was rather cold and very windy (just like the rest of this part of the West Coast, I found out). But it was absolutely and impressively breathtaking.

I've made so many photos, I had some trouble choosing the right ones for this blog. I decided not to show the 'regular' landscapes because I suppose google images can provide those. I saw a flock of pelicans and a herd (?) of sea lions that was rather close to the shore. I also saw an eagle hovering in one place for quite some time, using the wind to keep him steady. The noise of the ocean was overwhelming. There was a worldwar 2 bunker on a rock, built to keep an eye at potential Japanese invasion troups. Jeremy climbed on one of the rocks in the water. A seagull guarded the bags. There was almost no-one around.

After an hour or so we left Jeremy at this beach and Ashley and I continued our trip along the '1'. Jeremy would get his stuff together in San Francisco, because he's moving to Los Angeles.

ROAD TRIP - SAN FRANCISCO

2009-09-04T14:51:00.000-08:00

We arrived late at night in San Francisco, at the place Jeremy was staying. Jeremy makes beautiful photos by the way, using a Mamiya medium format camera. The next day we had one day to visit the city because we were one a somewhat tight schedule because busy Ashley was due for a photoshoot in Baton Rouge (like I mentioned earlier: Ashley is going places).

San Francisco is absolutely gorgious. Every morning most of the city is covered in mist, which kind of defines the weather. It's not very hot in San Francisco. The mist is rather weird: it doesn't really touch the ground. The fog more or less hovers above the ground at a height of, I don't know, maybe only 20 to 100 meters. Because of this, when you drive, you're driving just below a cloud and you can clearly see the turbulence when it hits trees or hills. This is very, well, unreal and magical in a way.

This was the house we stayed in - on the ground floor:

In the morning I went for a short walk, and I stumbled upon this drama (o, the cruelty of nature):

An eagle got hold of a baby crow, which was clearly dead at this point, but the eagle seemed to have trouble taking off with it (maybe it was too heavy). The parent-crows were shouting at the eagle, trying to get it to release their offspring. It was of no use. This took place in a very densely populated area, right next to some sort of church.

We went to the MOMA, where we saw the Richard Avedon exhibition, which was quite good. Beautiful prints. San Francisco has a European feel somehow. People in Downtown looked well-styled, but they were a bit snotty. The guys running the MOMA coffeestore ignored Ashley for minutes while she was right in front of them.

We drove right through downtown SF to get to Little Italy. The streets are incredibly steep, SF is build on hills. I would highly recommend San Francisco for a city trip.

At Little Italy we had some - well - Italian food at a small restaurant. The food was great, I'm going to try to reproduce some of the dishes we had.

ROAD TRIP - BACK TO SAN FRANCISCO

2009-09-04T14:01:00.000-08:00

It's about a ten hour drive from Portland to San Francisco and the landscapes are not that spectacular untill you get to the north of California, near Mount Shasta. We got in this mountainous area around sunset and the light was absolutely gorgeous. The whole landscape has a surreal sort of beauty: very flat valleys surrounded by very round hills and some breathtaking mountains. Yellow fields of dry grass and dark green trees. Black cows. White wooden square buildings. A hazy atmosphere, which softens the light in purple and pink. We had to pull over somewhere to take photos.

Mount Shasta is quite a high mountain, an anomaly in the area actually. It's a lonely mountain accompanied by another mountain, which is not that high but has a very peculiar summit, this is Mount Bradley, I think.

By the time we drove through the mountains, the sun had disappeared and it started to get dark. We had to make a stop to get some gas.

View Larger Map

On our way to Portland I first took notice of the town of Dunsmuir, right after I found out the largest company where one can rent vans or trucks is named 'U-Haul'. It's pronounced 'You holl' or something and it just means 'you pull' or 'you move'. As I am European and not unfamiliar with German pronounciations I kept reading U (just 'oe') Haul, which makes this company name sound rather dark, somewhat like the Star Wars character 'Darth Maul'.

We were close to Dunsmuir, which is located almost exactly halfway the mountainrange we were passing. We needed to get some gas for the car and took the Dunsmuir exit down. Immediately a sense of gloom came over us. It was very dark, there were almost no streetlights. Pick up trucks were parked in front of wooden houses in between the black pine trees. A car was behind us. "Are we being followed?" Ashley said. The gasstation was nowhere to be seen. We turned around. The town of Dunsmuir was a bit too much of a Steven King novel.

We were relieved to see a gasstation at the second exit of Dunsmuir, but the prices were too high and again we went back to the '5', the highway we were on. Right on the ramp of the highway entrance we got pulled over by a sherrif, a woman. This was a very dark part of the highway, right at the second Dunsmuil exit. The woman asked us all where we were from. She had pulled us over because one of the blinkers of Ashleys car was not working. Ashley explained she had recently been in an accident. The sherrif let us go with a warning.

We were all very much relieved.

It was too dark to make photos so I made a drawing after I got back to RAID.

The Dunsmuir website states this:

Welcome to the City of Dunsmuir
Home to the best water on Earth

Welcome home to Dunsmuir, the small-town home of 2,000 you wished you had grown up in.

Whether you are looking for adventure and excitement... or rest and relaxation... your adventure begins in Dunsmuir. One warning: If you visit Dunsmuir, you may never want to leave your "new home" again.

ROAD TRIP - PORTLAND

2009-09-04T13:39:00.000-08:00

Ashley's Hood to Coast race team needed some extra volunteers and therefor Jeremy and I were scheduled to volunteer at two of the 36 so called 'exchange points' between the 'legs' of the race. Jeremy and I felt a bit out of place, but we managed. We had one day to hang around in Portland so we could do some sightseeing. We noticed the food is quite alright. There are less fast food chains. I had some fantastic fries and a burger and at another place I drank, I think, the best beer I've ever had. Some sort of whitebeer, it was absolutely delicious. Portland in itself is not really worth photographing - I mean, if you want to know what it looks like, just google image it.

There was some rain in Portland, by the way! It was refreshing after a couple of months of blazing LA sunshine.

This was the most interesting photo I made during the race (we didn't get to see Ashley run at all - she ran 4 'legs' instead of 3, which is quite an accomplishment):

I did see some coyotes (they eat babies!) at night. Even the flash of my camera didn't scare them off.

At a supermarket I saw an old skinny guy with a voicebox in his throat wearing a cap that said: "I hate seagulls" and a t-shirt that said: "Treachery and old age triomph over youth and beauty".

Jeremy and I went to see 'Inglorious Bastards', the latest Quinten Tarantino movie. I thought it was horrible. It was boring and it was very very 'flat'. I even got a bit angry with Tarantino. I understand what he tried to do: "Oh well," he must have tought "why not rewrite the ending of the second world war into a comic book kind of way.". For some reason I felt embarrassed. I still need to look up what the German film critics wrote about the movie. When we got out of the theatre, which was way out of the centre of Portland, I overheard a fat hillbilly woman say: "I liked the movie because Germans got blown up!".

We again stayed at friends of Ashleys. I saw a racoon in their garden. It looked adorable but apparently they're bad-tempered. The next morning we had breakfast at a place called the Doug Fur, which is a tree - I mean, the Doug Fur is a tree, but the place where we had breakfast is a diner, ofcourse. After this we went on our way to San Francisco.

ROAD TRIP - TO A VOLCANO

2009-08-28T23:50:00.000-08:00

We had a day of either hanging around in Portland or doing something else and because I got my mind set on seeing a volcano we went to see the Mighty Mount Saint Helens, which is a two hour drive from Portland. We took another friend of Ashley with us, a physicist called Justin, who has a tattoo of the sleeve of the Joy Division album Unknown Pleasures on one arm and on the other a tattoo of an Esher drawing:

Again I was driving so I couldn't really take any photos on the way there except for at this place where we pulled over for a photo-moment. We got much closer, though.

Though it's been almost 30 years sinds the big eruption which more or less destroyed one third of the mountain, you can still see the treetrunks on the surrounding hills. It's a 30 year old disaster area with a completely reshaped landscape. It sure got me quiet for a while.

It's impossible to photograph such a thing because then this whole area is reduced to a nice picture. I'm very happy I saw this.

In some places there was smoke coming from the crater and the wind blew dust up high in the air. It looked like another planet. It sort of disappointed me that there was a high tech (and too expensive) visitorscentre at the viewpoint with a lot of tourists running around. I would like to see the volcano some time at night but I doubt the parkwatchers would allow people to stay there in the dark.

We were entertained by a local and very cheeky chipmunk. It crawled on my lap.

When driving down from the vulcano the radio first played some Black Sabbath and then Van Halens Running with the Devil, which was a bit hallucinating. Everyone was tired, so we didn't really talk much. Ashley and Justin fell asleep in the back of the car.

We went back to Portland where we stayed with some other friends of Ashley.

By the way, on Portland:
It's a bit of a hippie city. It looks extremely civilised, very neat and clean and cute but also very boring and bourgois. It's green and hilly and it has a beautiful view on Mount Hood, which is also a volcano apparently. Portland has many bridges.

ROAD TRIP - DRIVING TO OREGON

2009-08-28T23:29:00.000-08:00

The nice thing about driving opposed to flying is the fact that you can actually see the landscape change, although it is slowly. The landscape the first one hundred miles after we left San Francisco looked like above. After that I was driving so I couldn't make any photos - there were some landscapes that were absolutely breathtaking (I sometimes got so shocked with awe that I suddenly slowed down. Luckily my passengers didn't really notice much of that because they were sleeping mostly. I wish I could sleep in a car, if I could do that I wouldn't be so incredibly tired with only half of my brain left working at the moment (I'm still in Portland as I'm writing this).

When it was someone else's turn to drive it was already getting quite dark. The landscape changed to more green and pinetrees. There were some mountainous areas and I could sense the car having a bit of trouble with going uphill but it seems to be fine. It makes a very stirdy impression, the car.

It was around eleven at night that we arrived in Portland at another friend of Ashley's place. We had to leave quite early in the morning, before she went to work. Her cat Simon slept next to me on my pillow that night.

ROAD TRIP - UP TO SAN FRAN

2009-08-28T22:22:00.000-08:00

Tuesdaynight, the 25th of august, around 11 PM Ashley and I left RAID Projects for a drive to Portland, Oregon, which is about 1600 kilometres away and takes about 18 hours of driving in total. Ashley has been training for months for a race called 'Hood to Coast', which is an almost 200 miles long running race from Mount Hood to - well - the West coast. Tenthousands of runners, organisators and volunteers are part of it. I agreed to be a volunteer, after all Ashley knows a lot of people where we could stay for free. To me it also seemed a great way to see some of the country.

We first drove up to San Francisco, where we slept for about three or four hours in a house where Ashley's friend Jeremy is staying. He joined us on the trip. Ashley and Jeremy are both photographers and I'm also walking around with my camera all the time so this trip is quite well documented I guess.

On our way back we'll hopefully get a chance to see something more of San Francisco but we're on quite a tight time-schedule because we have to be back in LA the night of the 2nd of september.

This is Ashley's car:

As you can see, it doesn't look much better than my own car. That's because it's actually total loss due to an accident a month or so ago. Also, the car has a small oil and a small breakfluid leak. Still, this car is a better option than my car. So we went.

It was dark (because it was night, you know) so much of the landscape I didn't see. There are no streetlights so you kind of have to follow the taillights of the cars in front of you. I did see, for the first time ever, very clearly the milky way through the sunroof of the car. It's that dark in the Californian countryside. We got to San Francisco around 4.30 AM. We had a beer:

We slept for a couple of hours at Jeremy's place and then we went on our way again. We made a small detour on purpose just to drive over the famous Golden Gate Bridge. Which was magically covered in the fog. San Francisco in general made an extremely pittoreske city but I didn't get to see much of it because we needed to keep going.

Well, everyone knows what that bridge looks like but here it is:

STUDIO

2009-08-23T17:49:00.001-08:00

A POOL PARTY IN BEL AIR

2009-08-23T17:45:00.000-08:00

JURASSIC TECHNOLOGY

2009-08-21T02:48:00.000-08:00

Nahkee, Jason, Jenny and I went to the Museum of Jurassic Technology which curiously enough has little or nothing to do with anything the Jurassic area might have contributed technology-wise. It's more of a collection of curiosities maybe. Take a look yourself:

After this I went with a guy called James, a photographer living in the Brewery complex, to see the movie 'District 9', which at this point hasn't been released yet in Belgium. It was AWESOME!

Right before the film there were five or six trailers for other movies, which all involved serialkillers, vampires or saws and were extremely (but really seriously extremely) violent, so it made me wonder in what kind of society we're living in. Oh well.

BIKING

2009-08-21T02:35:00.000-08:00

I went for a couple of bikerides - one took me to Sunset, which in itself is not very difficult to bike on except for the first part at the Downtown area, where you have to go uphill for quite a bit.

I also went biking along the LA river, which flows close to RAID and I think that area might be where scenes from 'Grease' and 'Terminator' have been filmed. The river is not much more than a concrete ditch over here in this season. It gets a bit more riverlike upstream.

This is as much nature as I've seen up there. You can't really go down to the LA river itself, because it has these very steep concrete banks. I treated myself to a Frappucino (an iceblended coffee) at Little Tokio's Starbucks after that. You might not be able to tell from this photo but the bike I'm using is fortified with metal extras which makes the bike extremely heavy and a bit out of balance. So my muscles are being tested.

ITALIANS

2009-08-21T02:03:00.000-08:00

Jenny has a job babysitting three Italians, two of which are more or less middle-aged men, the other one is Sicillian. They are working on a two million dollar house, they're the plastering experts, especially flown in for this job. They cooked for us in their rental home near Santa Monica.

The Italians didn't speak any English, except for the Sicillian guy. Nonetheless Max Moore bonded with Nino? Tito? quite quickly after a few drinks. They more or less had a conversation about women and the army. The food was very good. There was pasta and a lot of meat. After this most of the gang left but sinds I was Max's driver this afternoon I stayed with Max, Jenny and the Italians. Then the plan of going to a stripclub kind of popped up, but first we went to Santa Monica beach. The guy on the right is bad ass, I'll get back to that later.

I couldn't make any photos in the stripclub. This club was somewhat fancy. It almost looked like a filmset, but not quite. It was very dark. I shot some pictures while hiding my camera under my jacket.

Which explains why the photos are not very good, to say the least.

It goes like this: the entrance fee was ten dollars and there's a minimum of one drink per person which is seven dollars and this club didn't serve any alcohol, which pissed the Italians off a bit. It's more expensive to sit in a booth, with nice seats, but our table and chairs were quite comfortable. Then every girl does her bit - they all have their own routine. Most of them had quite a good choice in music and they seemed to move well. The light was dim, which was good because they would get completely naked. After their routine they collect the money the costumers put on the dancefloor (with pole). One girl didn't get any money... Then the costumers can order private lapdances.

Jenny and I left Max and the Italians inside to smoke a cigarette which gave me the opportunity to actually talk to some of the girls - some were smoking outside too. They were not very attractive, I suppose and not very bright, but they were nice and very informative. Apparently they don't get paid by the club, but just earn the money the costumers give them (for the dancing and tips and such) and of that they have to give half up to the club. Still it's apparently a good job to do on the side for the money but none of the girls seemed to like the job. In the club it's just dancing, there's no prostitution involved and touching the girls isn't even allowed. In most cases.

Because at a certain point Max came out of the club wanting to leave because the bad ass Italian bit a girl in her ass and tried to do something else too. He was sure they would be thrown out. This girl came out a bit later for a smoke. She seemed a bit upset, mostly because the management of the club decided to let the Italians stay a bit longer on account of the fact that they were 'old school Italian guys who don't speak English'. The girls seemed angry because of the Italians didn't even give her a tip after this. It was all a bit confusing, so Max and I drove back to RAID.

JACKET

2009-08-15T23:43:00.000-08:00

Not that it's important but I forgot to mention this jacket by the way:

It used to be an ordinary and very cheap H&M jacket but there was a sale-out of a theatre right across the street where I found this piece of glitter for only one dollar. I sowed it right on the back and now this jacket is pimped.

Which is good, I seem to need it sometimes. Though in the daytime it still can get hot, the evenings and nights can be chilly. I'm told this summer is extremely cool, compared to regular summers. I'm alright with that.

GOOD TIMES

2009-08-15T16:27:00.000-08:00

Through the internet Jason met a girl from Colorado, Danielle, who's a folksinger. She had a gig in a place in Hollywood and she and her boyfriend were staying at RAID that night so we went to see her performance. She sings while playing the ukelele or guitar. She has a really nice voice and especially her lyrics are quite good. Very humoresk.

Above is the back-alley entrance to the Hotel Bar venue in Hollywood. Below some shots of Danielle on the stage.

The band right after her was absolute horror, so we left for Amoeba Records, which was close by and unfortunately I bought a pile of records again... After this we went back to RAID, where Ashley was setting up lights to make a photoportrait of Danielle and where Jason made a pile of pasta for us.

By the way: Ashley had to turn down a job assisting photographer Nan Goldin because she was on another shoot in New York. Ashley is going places!

Here's Ashley setting up the lights for the shoot:

In this photo you can really get a nice view of the 'cadillac amongst all stoves', by the way.

These are taken during the shoot. Danielle was actually playing her music while Ashley did the shoot. The light was beautiful. It was quite magical.

Danielle and her boyfriend were such pleasant people and everyone was here: Jason, Max, other Max, Nakhee and even some guys from studios upstairs dropped by.

These are the Maxes, listening to Danielle singing in the kitchen:

This is a discussion concerning art and semantics between Max Presneill and Jason:

This is the Maxes and Danielle's boyfriend (forgot his name) discussing martial art movements in the parkinglot. There was some actual wrestling going one earlier:

I didn't see much of that because I went to a studio across the street, where a guy called Sean builds theatrical light objects. His roommate has a beautiful car stalled inside the studio, I don't know the make but it's from 1972 and it's very reflective.

Furthermore, I've been drawing a bit and I'm working on getting into a party at the Playboy Mansion. Not that I really want to go, but if it would be possible, why not? I heard the place is much, much smaller than you would expect and the parties are boring. To many people it's a modern mythical place, so I do want to at least get a glimpse of the premises, while I'm here.

UP

2009-08-15T16:10:00.000-08:00

I went with Scott, who's renting a studio-loft some floors up from RAID and is working as a 3D-animator to a lecture of the supervisor of the Effects department of the Pixar Studios at a place that's part of a school for 3D-students up in Hollywood. He explained a lot of technical stuff of how the balloons for instance were developed for the movie 'UP'. It was very interesting. It was lucky I knew exactly what he was talking about, it would have been really boring if I didn't. It was funny when he showed a test that was made in a special program, the first test that made the bunch of balloons behave like real balloons. The whole crowd was like 'wow!' and applauding. I have to admit, I also got excited.

Scott drives a Delorean. It was an experience to be driving around in that car (well, being driven actually). Scott has a metal leg, he lost his right leg in a train accident three years ago. He didn't experience phantome-pains.

People shout at the car all the time. Scott told me people sometimes almost drive him off the road when they're trying to take pictures on the highway. He got pulled over once by cops just because they wanted to ask him where he got the car from. Right after we parked the car at the Pixar lecture, there was a guy on his knees in front of the car, bowing to it - worshipping it, so to speak. Strange things. Luckily I'd already seen two Deloreans in Asten, where my parents live, parked in a garage. And the car is in front of RAID all the time, so I've gotten quite used to the sight. Still, it's a nice car.

Like a lot of other activities, venues, bars and clubs, the entrance to this lecture was in an alley that looked like nothing. There were many people attending the lecture. We were sitting in a good spot, the photo was taken during the question-round.

It wasn't allowed to take photos during the lecture.

I wasn't allowed to take photos at the sleazy stripclub I went to afterwards with Scott. We drove by it and he suggested we went inside, he was there once when he scouted for filmlocations, he said. I'd never been into a stripclub before so I said, well, why not.

It was quite horrible. The place was painted black and there was a golden curtain of some sort to bright the space up a bit but that didn't help much. It was small and almost empty. This girl went dancing - she kept her bikini on by the way - and I gave her a dollar after she was hanging upside down on the pole. She landed on her back, which got really dirty because of that. The music was horrible. So after ten minutes we left (I couldn't really watch the dancing anyway, it was too ucky for a straight girl like me). But well, that was that.

NOTHING MUCH 2

2009-08-12T23:42:00.000-08:00

Sinds we got the new stove everyone at RAID seems to be more active in terms of cooking. I actually made a Tabouleh salad. It was the first time I did some more or less 'real' cooking, though the stove doesn't work yet. The workstation around the 'new' stove is apparently very inspiring.

Below some typical Los Angeles views. The contours of the hills are amazing. They are like drawings.

This might be a good idea for all of my cars (last week I realized I have three cars registered to my name. Non of them is working like they're supposed to):

So I've washed the Geo Prizm and now I'm driving around with a plaque on it that sais: For Sale. We'll see what happens. It actually looks a bit sellable now, the car. I feel a little awkward driving around with the damn thing, not only because of the For Sale sign but mostly because I'm afraid it'll get me stuck again.

Anyway, I drove up to Beverly Hills today, to hang around there but it wasn't that adventurous. People stare at me everywhere, maybe because I'm quite tall around here. I got a lot of comments on my boots. That's sometimes a bit of an annoying thing around here: whenever you enter a shop someone asks you: 'Hi how are you?' and you're supposed to answer that with: 'I'm fine, how are you?', but it doesn't mean anything. So I just kind of smile a bit. The same with walking down the street, people make remarks, that come out of nowhere but out of some sort of politeness you are expected to give a quick reply. If you don't - when I'm walking, I'm minding my own business and I'm not that fast with witty replies so I'm usually not reacting - they'll reply for you. It's like walking around in Amsterdam, where everyone seems to have something to say.

The guy lying down on this bench on a street in Beverly Hills didn't seem to care for anything, though:

He was sleeping in front of a store that shouted out 'Rock 'n Roll' in big letters on the windows. It was fake and lame as hell. Beverly Hills is defenitely not the place to be, but hanging around places in general is my speciality so I sort of enjoyed myself anyway.

This is the place to be:

It's a recordstore called 'The Record Collector' - same name as one of the recordstores in Antwerp. But this is a whole other level. I was there for one hour, just before closing time and I only went through the soundtracks-area. I ended up with a pile that was worth over 2000 dollars, so I had to make some serious decisions. Still, I spent more money over there than I did at an earlier visit at Amoeba Records. When I entered 'The Record Collector' I couldn't breathe or move for over ten seconds. I've been to a lot of recordstores but you can sense the value of the records in that space somehow. The owner was fantastic, a great guy. The place is on 7809 Melrose avenue. Someone needs to keep me out of recordstores because I'll be as broke as the state of California if I go into another one. You can order special requests through the internet: www.therecordcollector.net (THE RECORD COLLECTOR, his businesscard sais: RARE & UNUSUAL RECORDS, the owner is called Sanders Chase).

On his site there's this text:
"You can find any record using our special vinyl service to
submit wish list.

You will not have to look anywhere else."

NOTHING MUCH

2009-08-11T21:32:00.000-08:00

I've been drawing mostly and haven't been going outside so much. There was a possibility for me to drive along to the north of Nebraska - I almost drove off to a farm over there tonight with a musician who's staying in a studio in the Brewery, a trip that takes about 24 hours of driving and goes right through the Rocky Mountains. I would have flown back (for only 60 dollars or even less) to LA. Unfortunately his car is completely packed with musical equipment so there's no room for me left.

Instead I just got offered the fantastic opportunity to drive to Portland, Oregon and back with Ashley, who's going to be in a running-race of 200 miles (!) which takes place at the end of august. We just need to find a car, sinds her car got totalled in an accident a few weeks ago and my car doesn't seem to be able to last for more than thirty miles before it gets stuck.

I hope I can sell this vehicle for the best price possible - which is not much probably. Just washed it, now it actually looks like a real car and, apart from maybe the bodywork, it looks kinda sellable.

All these prospects on trips make me geographically rollercoasteral. Not that there's something wrong with being in LA but there's a lot more to see and it makes me anxious to go somewhere else, especially sinds there are apparently sometimes great opportunities flying by.

UP TO NO GOOD

2009-08-08T00:53:00.000-08:00

We went for a lunch at a place named The Bright Spot and afterwards we went to see the new exhibition of parts of the collection in Moca, the museum. Which was great. I don't remember seeing a Pollock painting 'live' before. Good collection. Afterwards Max and I had a good idea which turned out in to a surprisingly great plan:

RAID didn't have a good stove, you know. So this was a really lucky find.

DRAWINGS PART 2

2009-08-08T00:48:00.001-08:00

Here are a few of the latest drawings involving the Spielberg adventure. This is what happened:

This is what I really should have done (warning: contains strong language!):

This is what the envelope with the drawing and the prints looked like when we drove away from the estate:

DRAWINGS

2009-08-05T20:23:00.000-08:00

This is just a part of the drawings I've been working on, they're in colour but I'd rather not show them on a computerscreen at this point. So this is a very rough version of the Spielberg Adventure, part 1:

SPIEONLBOLIBERRGG: THE SEQUEL

2009-08-05T19:47:00.000-08:00

I had been postponing the second part of the Spielberg drawing/letter-delivery a bit. I had a lot of drawing to do anyway and the 'voicebox' of the security in front of (supposedly) his house scared me off a bit. But today I decided it was time to try to hand over the drawing > and the story of the drawing, which I drew right after this 'adventure' in black and white prints (printed on an old laserjet b/w printer here). I put them all in an envelope. I took Nakhee along for moral support, because I started to get more and more nervous about the whole thing while it was supposed to be funny. Anyway, we got on our way, which meant driving all the way down Sunset Boulevard again.

On our way I noticed the temperature of the car got higher and higher. So we got stuck. Again. The car bursted out into steamclouds. Again. Luckily there was a garage just where we got stuck.

The damn car needed a new radiator, something had ruptured. It took them hours to repair it, so Nakhee and I strolled along Sunset, aimlessly. We went for a drink and a sorbet in a legendary hotel - a lot of interviews with famous actors and directors have been held there, Nakhee told me. It's called the Chateau Marmont. The ginger ale in the picture costs 8 dollars. It was a pleasant place. The conversations at the tables next to us were about films and financing films and scripts. I had to carry the Spielberg envelope around all the time.

We also went to some big and serious comic book store. Even though I seem to be drawing some sort of comic book at the moment, I don't feel any connection with the books I've seen up there. But the exhibition they had in the back was one of the best I've seen up to now around here. Starting point was the image in the left bottom corner:

The car got fixed. I'm going to sell it as soon as possible, to hell with the kolerewagen. I need to get as much money for it as I can so I'll need to wash it and fix some small parts like the windscreenwipers. I've had it up to here with the barrel. Strangely enough the garage-people keep telling me it's a good car.

Anyway, I wanted to finish the mission, so late in the afternoon we finally arrived at the electrical gates of Spielbergs mansion. I was quite surprised the voicebox remembered me! I asked him if I could hand this over to him in person sinds the envelope contained original art work but he just said that the last time I was there he really did call 911 (I'm not sure if that's true ofcourse). There was no reasoning with the voicebox. He wished me a glorious afternoon. He was British, judging by his accent, and he obviously was being sarcastic. I told or gestured to Nakhee, who stayed in the background, something like: see what I'm dealing with here? But I'm afraid I wasn't eloquent enough to make some smart remark to the voicebox so I showed the camera - this time I could clearly make out the camera - the envelope and slipped it under the gate.

That was that. It was a quite exhausting day. I'm going to have to draw this also, there will be a lot of devils, horns and skulls in the drawings, I think. The latest post is the black and white version of the first part of the Spielberg Adventure.

PERFORMANCE

2009-08-05T19:31:00.000-08:00

I went to visit Margìt and Persijn. They live at Silverlake. Hills are steep there as somewhat shown on the photos above. I didn't dare to drive my car up there because I feel it lost a lot of its power and it would just slide down. Very steep hills indeed. Margìt and Persijn are staying in a cellar/gardenhouse of some soap actress. It's completely the opposite of RAID, which is more industrial and around RAID Projects, where I'm staying, there are no trees at all. M&P are living in a fairytale house, with a garden and such:

That same evening I went to see Brian Getnick's performance ballet at a nightclub in Downtown called LaCita. It was your typical mondaynight nightclub night, with half-naked male dancers and a sweaty audience. Strangely enough the videoprojection in the background was some sort of documentary about the 1992 Los Angeles riots:

There was a lot of gold and red and glitter, it was very Amsterdam Gay:

Below, there's Brian, who was playing the mouth-harp during the whole performance, and that made his mouth bleed in the end (he needs to improve his technique). In the performance there was also Max Moore as one of the 'pumpkins'. The other pumpkin is Max friend Josh. I think they're both in the army. Max is in the US special forces, which might have inspired Brian for the performance. Brian is wearing a real squid around his neck, by the way.

I filmed the last part with my photocamera. It's of poor quality, but believe me, it was a quite impressive performance, especially in the setting of this nightclub. I think Brian should do this kind of 'army'performances in daytime, outside, unexpected in Downtown LA. The 'pumpkinheads' were saluting on the music and 'recruting' members from the audience:

KICK ASS

2009-08-03T18:23:00.000-08:00

By coincidence Margít and Persijn were also at the police interference as described in a former blogpost so this is the other side of the event:

Further, I bought some kick ass boots for only 50 dollars and yes, that is real snake skin:

ANOTHER PARTY

2009-08-02T13:27:00.001-08:00

After the rooftop-party we went to another party closeby in a house that was quite amazing. It was either one of David Lynches houses that was rented out to some guy who worked for him or it was this guys own house, I'm still not sure. The house was near Silver Lake, which is a hilly area. You had to walk up some strange steps to get into the house, which was more of a collection of inside and outside spaces with stairs in between than an actual house. Which made it difficult to make photos.

The party was for guests only but we got in through this Christina. There were some somewhat familiar faces, some B-actors maybe, I guess. There was a nice guy who's working in Japan as a dancemusic producer and there was Peaches's US manager. There were some people dressed up because it apparently was some sort of dressup party with a theme: 'surrealism'. The whole thing was very laid back, there was no dancing, it was just people drinking and talking on all levels of the building. It was actually incredibly boring and very Hollywood cliché. It was all about talking about air, sniffing coke in the toilet or in the dark corners of the 'house' and drinking badly mixed cocktails. It was interesting for half an hour, just to see what it looked like, but in the end those people as a group seemed to be mostly 'aanstellers'. Once you got to talk to someone alone, they were in fact nice enough, but there was a big 'we all know eachother and this is a really cool party'-vibe. The party was really neither that cool nor that surreal, so we left. The guy who lived there had a nice record collection, by the way. Unfortunately there was some arty computermusic playing in the background.

Funny enough Nakhee, who was not dressed up at all and was wearing the most normal outfit of the whole party bunch, was asked several times what she was supposed to be in terms of surrealism.

In short: I was highly unimpressed by this whole evening. Which probably sais a lot about the people I know, cheers for them.

CURIOUS EVENTS

2009-08-02T12:55:00.000-08:00

Nakhee and I went to some parties with a girl who lives in the Brewery. She's called Christina and she's a bit odd but we promised her we would hang out with her so we did.

The first party was an arty rooftop party on Sunset blv. (I never seem to get to any other part of town lately). The view was fantastic, the performances more than horrible. Very cliché and incomprehensible. First there was this guy reciting Rimbaud while wearing a mask (I had no idea people still did such things), then he did some gothperformance which didn't make any sense to me.

Luckily there suddenly was something going on in the street, on the bridge in front of the building. There was a helicoptre with a searchlight and a lot of policecars. This is what went down:

A couple of young guys were pulled over with a big display of police authority. The guys looked like they were college students. They were very coöperative, I guess.

It all made the impression some terrorist attack was at hand. There were approximately 30 cops with guns surrounding the bridge. The guy in the fabulous car got involved somehow. It was all very confusing but also very cinematic. Someone on our rooftop claimed to know one of the guys, someone else apparently knew the guy in the fabulous car.

Then another performance started:

Which was just plain weird. This monkeylike guy with an outfit that was probably the ugliest I'd ever seen, well, 'sang' on a Giorgio Moroder-like beat. That was more or less entertaining for a while, but it became extremely funny when his computer apparently went amok and automatically switched halfway through one song to another. The guy tried to keep up with this computer but in the end he got discouraged and he gave up.

After this there was another performance, which was not funny at all, it just got me extremely annoyed. It was a 'band' who played for the first time together but none of the members was any good at his or hers instrument so it was mostly arty people fucking things up.

But the view was absolutely breathtaking as you can see:

Above there's Downtown (the skyscrapers), below there's Sunset blv.:

Then I went to see what happened with the whole policeforce on the bridge in front of the building.

Apparently the cops had been chasing some innocent guys. They were released on the spot. The guys seemed shaken up, which is quite understandable. After a while they started laughing a bit. Their friends turned up. The cops drove off. For some reason the car didn't work anymore (the cops were tearing it apart at the 'raid', maybe it had something to do with that). They had to push the car off the road. I waved. They waved back, they'd noticed there were people on a rooftop witnessing the whole spectacle. Several curses were used regarding the LAPD.

35 part 2

2009-08-02T12:27:00.001-08:00

On my birthday I was mostly drawing but in the evening we went for a birthdaydrink first at the Gold Room and later at The Short Stop, both on Sunset blv. Above there's Margit, Persijn, Jason, Max and Jenny, who's organizing the Los Angeles and Chicago art fairs.

This is Ashley, she's Jasons girlfriend and an assistant to a photographer who's currently working on a series of photos which are taken in homes where there has been a homicide. For the photo's a spray is used to light up the remains of the bloodspatters on the walls and floors. I'm quite curious about the photos.

After the Short Stop we went for some excellent real American food at some place closeby, I had onionrings and some sort of potatomush. When we got home everybody went to sleep except for me. There were some people on the stairs of the studiobuilding next to RAID and they invited me for some cocktails. We ended up in a studio of some guy called Scott, who has only one-and-a-half leg, made an arcade-game corner in his studio with a floor like in the movie Tron (blacklit ofcourse), works with 3D animation on enormous computerscreens in another corner of the space which looks like the cockpit of a spaceship, drives a Delorean, is 42 years old or something (and probably still a virgin, I'm not quite sure but it's highly possible), collects actionfigures and puts his own moulded head on them (!) and owns a bunch of computergames which he plays on this giant projectionscreen. In short: he's the übergeek. Or, as Nakhee explained, an otaku (it's Japanese for übergeek). I forgot to make a lot of photos of the studio, but I'll do that later. I'm Scotts 'golden bikini', by the way, whatever that title means. His friends were a bit less geeky, but still.

In the early morning when I went back to my studio I secretly and subtily pimped the Delorean. I hope it's not permanent, I bet Scott would immediately take away my new 'golden bikini' title.

35

2009-07-30T17:30:00.000-08:00

Today (well, technically yesterday actually, because of the nine hours of time difference between Europe and California) it's my birthday and now I'm 35 years old, which means that according to some rules and restrictions regarding to several art-prizes and grants I've officially lost my status of being a 'young artist'. So. Well.

Yesterday I went with Brian, Nakhee and some of Brians friends to see the latest Harry Potter movie. After watching Harry Potter I always feel a bit disappointed because the 'real' world is so incredibly ordinairy. Lights in the real world need cables and are subdued to gravity laws for instance. In Harry Potter lights can fly around and such.

Despite this disapointment in real life (pf) I had a great time because the theatre we went to see the movie in was absolutely breathtaking. It was the Chinese Theatre on Hollywood blvd., in front of it there are all these hands and feetprints of famous people in these concrete tiles. With their autographs and such. It's a major tourist-attraction but for some reason nobody gets inside the theater itself.

The photo above shows a part of the ladies restroom (!)

One of Brian's friends is called Tan and he's from Thailand. After the movie he took us to Palms, a Thai restaurant also on Hollywood blv. He ordered for all of us and it was incredible, especially the coconutsoup swept me off of my chair so to speak. Go to Palms if you're ever around (and take Tan with you).

There was a Thai Elvis entertaining us. He wore high heels. He wasn't that good. The guy next to Nakhee (I forgot his name...) is a toy-designer for Mattel. Apparently there's a toy-design-academy somewhere and he graduated from it. He assured me that being a toy-designer is not that much fun. I still find that hard to believe, especially sinds the guy looked really happy.

Today I was drawing a bit and then I went for a bikeride to get some coffee beans (the 'Volcano'beans Nakhee bought last sunday at Trader Joe's seem to have magically disappeared). I chose to buy beans named 'Bitches Brew'. I tried this coffee at the coffeeplace that selled these beans but the coffee tasted like coffee flavoured tea - like most coffees in public places in Los Angeles. I think I can make them work the way they're supposed to.

Then I went to explore Toy Town where all toy shops are (convenient! this LA naming-of-areas-and-stick-to-the-content-of-the-particular-name-thing). I got so overwhelmed I forgot to take photos. Too much, too much. I just took this one:

SOME NNAAMMELDROPPING

2009-07-29T10:25:00.001-08:00

Nakhee Sung, Jason Ramos and I went to a club called the Roxy on Sunset to see a free show and party of the British comedy duo The Mighty Boosh. Jason was driving so I had some time to look around - when I'm driving on Sunset I have to attend to the traffic mostly of course so this was some nice sightseeing. We noticed a small crowd at some movie theatre and there was The Fonz! Fonzy from Happy Days, that is, the actor's name is Henry Winkler. He was greyhaired. It's my second celebrity sighting so I took some photos through the window of the car.

Below there's the Viper Room, where poor River Phoenix died. They don't really have any interesting shows (rockbands are playing there) so I'm not sure if I'll be going in there.

The show at The Roxy was free but we were forced to pay 5 dollars for parking the car because finding a parking spot on or near Sunset is apparently quite difficult. There was a stubborn tree in the parking lot:

Because the Mighty Boosh has some really enthousiastic fans there was a line of apprx. 500 people in front of the Roxy. Which is not clear on this photo, but well.

We waited on a corner for more than one hour. There was this guy with a lightsaber waving for cars to make them go to 'his' private parking lot. It's his job.

While we were in line there was a small cameracrew interviewing the Mighty Boosh line. Jason got very excited because he recognized the woman, she's from a popular blog, Boing Boing, apparently. She passed us by and Jason shouted: 'She's from Belgium!', while pointing at me. Which made the woman go: 'She's from Belgium?!' and immediately I got a camera and a microphone put in my face. I'm not very good with cameras, at least not in front of them, so I kinda turned away, which made Jason point to Nakhee: 'And she's from Korea'. Nakhee also was camerashy so they ended up interviewing Jason. He was doing great on camera, the mini-documentary is not online yet at this point but we do hope Jason will be in it.

While in line Jason was perfecting his 'mad professor' look.

After more than one hour on this streetcorner we were told there was no chance in hell that we would get in to the party because the Roxy was already full. Apparently they'd been giving away wristbands and made some sort of guestlist so most of the people in line didn't get in anyway.

We went for a beer at The Rainbow Room instead. Guns 'n Roses used to hang out there and all these other rockbands from the 80's. It was really small, but the diner, that is attached to it, seemed very nice and spacious. I heard they've got great burgers. There was a Dutch couple complaining about another Dutch couple that they were on holiday with. I translated the conversation to Jason and Nakhee. On the tv screen at the counter the show '1000 ways to die' was on.

PIMPED MY RIDE

2009-07-28T13:53:00.000-08:00

DOWNTOWN MOONDOWN

2009-07-27T23:31:00.000-08:00

A very nice moon behind the skyline of Downtown LA, taken from the steps in front of RAID.

A WEDDING PARTY

2009-07-27T18:09:00.000-08:00

The past week most of the activities around RAID were concentrated on the wedding of Max Presneill and Lalena (I'm not sure if her name is written correctly). There was his bachelor party and the arrival of his brother (simply named 'D') from England. All of these actions resulted in somewhat noisy nights in the building, but och, one doesn't get married every day. Above there's 'D' and Max Moore moving all the drinks and the piles of brie, camembert and tapenade into the partyplace. There's still enough brie, camembert and tapenade left to keep us eating that stuff for a month.

J.J., who has his atelier in the RAID building and whose audio equipment was displayed proudly in the main entry space, was going to be the DJ of the wedding party and I suggested I could join him. So we teamed up for this. I brought my laptop - which I never use for DJ'ing - I think it's very lazy to DJ from a laptop and it kind of takes away the magic of searching for the records of cd's and handling the music phycially.

It was good I had some Northern Soul, because both Max and his brother are great soulfans. They dance with complicated steps, it's very impressive to watch them dance.

It took a while before there was any dancing anyway. The party took place in a space in the Brewery complex; a very very large space, with smaller spaces built against the ceiling almost. It was also very very hot in there, even though there were gigantic ventilators trying to blow the eveningair into the dancefloor. Within an hour everybody was soakingly sweaty.

I made an attempt, a fairly succesful one, to introduce some Belgian dancemusic and to emphasize the quality of this music I started dancing with Brian Getnick, who from now on is my favourite dancepartner. The black and white photos are a bit modified pictures Jason took that night.

Because of the out of control proportions of the wodka/juices (2/3 wodka, 1/3 ice and juice) in giant cups and a bit of a lack of sleep the building of RAID was really quiet the next day. Everyone was sleeping off their hangovers. Nakhee and I went for a trip to the supermarket anyway. It's called 'Trader Joe's' and they don't sell any regular beverages like Coke, but they've got some pretty good salades and even some (not plain) fresh pastas. They also sell this, which doesn't seem to make any sense to me:

When I got back I watched a show on tv which was called: '1000 ways to die'. It involved amongst many other ways to die the misfortunate adventure of two Ozzy Osbourne fans who snorted fire-ants before going to the Ozzfest. They were under the impression Ozzy himself had once snorted fire-ants. They died a horrible, horrible death.

The next day, this monday actually, I've been drawing most of the day because I had a lot of catching up to do. My Spielberg adventure is practically finished now in drawings except for the fact that part 2 - the actual deliverance of the drawing - still needs to take place. I'm going to continue on my carproblem adventure next, probably. Also I had a nice skypechat with Lisa over in Sweden, sometimes this technologything is really fantastic.

STEIVEN SP[IELGENBERG

2009-07-23T18:20:00.000-08:00

Yesterday Margit & Persijn dropped by. We were at the postgraduate Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam at about the same time. They're staying in the US for six months. They'd been travelling through the US with a truck and a caravan and now they're staying and working in Los Angeles untill halfway through september. It was really nice to see them again. They live closeby so I'll visit them soon.

The Maxes made a barbeque which was quite elaborate with chicken, pork chops, chillibeans, coleslaw and such.

I saw so many people I just wanted to hang out by myself today, so I just started driving. First stop was 'Amoeba records', one of the biggest recordstores I've ever seen but they kind of disappointed me a bit in terms of second hand vinyl. Nevertheless I spent way too much money there. I don't think I've ever spend so much money at the same time on records. I bought ten records, some doubles, three second hand ones, mostly psychedelica compilations on colored vinyl. This store is just way too dangerous, I couldn't help myself. Luckily I don't spend anything on clothes ($3 is the most I spent in that division up to now - and that was a vintage 60's dress!).

Then I decided to just follow Sunset Boulevard (Amoeba is on Sunset). Sunset is about 35 kilometres in total and starts closeby RAID, in Downtown. It ends near Santa Monica beach. It changes all the time: from being just a more or less boring wide street into a businessstreet, into a very chique street (at Beverly Hills), into a mountainroad. I stopped at the first guy selling a 'map of the stars'. I bought an old map for 5 dollar. The new map was 10 and the only difference was the location of Michael Jacksons real house - where he died, but I've had it with MJ for now and my primary focus was now completely on Steven Spielberg.

His house is in a street further down Sunset, but it was much easier to find than I expected. I wanted to write him a note.

I've always been a big Spielberg fan, his 'Close Encounters of the IIIrd Kind' was immensely important for my work because of the way light is being used. When I watch 'Schindler's list' I always cry at exactly the same scenes. I even really like 'War of the Worlds', except for the fact Tom Cruise is in it. But what Spielberg did to the most recent Indiana Jones is just horrible. Last year I took my friend Jess to 'Indiana Jones and the Chrystal Skull' for his birthday and I've rarely seen anybody so disappointed after watching a movie. I also was quite shocked. And now Spielberg is busy doing a new Indiana Jones...

So I wanted to write him a note; a genuine expression of my (and Jess') admiration but also with a small remark concerning this Indiana Jones thing. I took out my drawing paper and my pens and sat down in front of the house next to one of the electrical fences. There was some landscaping going on in his garden so trucks drove in and out all the time. I didn't see anyone except for the workpeople.

I started 'drawing' this note when behind me a voice from this security voicebox asked me: "Can I help you m'am?". I had to move up to the voicebox to explain what I was doing: "I'm drawing.".
"Are you drawing the house across the street?" (I was facing the other side of the street). Offcourse I told him the truth (I'm a bad actor).
"No, I'm drawing a letter to mister Spielberg. This is his house, isn't it?"
"I can't comment on that m'am." the voice spoke
"I'm just going to sit here and draw, is that ok?"
"Alright"

So I continued the drawing/letter, which turned out quite nicely - a bit graphic novelly, some humour, nice colours. I must have been busy drawing for quite a while, maybe an hour when I decided it was almost finished and I needed to make a photo of it before I would hand it over to, well, the securityvoice. This was a mistake.

I quickly took two photos of the drawing, they were both not in focus but I didn't get a chance to make another one because immediately the voice from the voicebox said:
"M'am, you have just crossed the line, we're calling 911 right now and you are to leave the premises immediately."

I tried to explain to the voicebox how I didn't care for the house, but just for the drawing but the voicebox wouldn't give in so I quietly went back to my car. I really had to go to a bathroom anyway, otherwise I would have waited - maybe - to find out what would happen. I don't think they actually called 911, I think they just got tired of keeping an eye on me and I was hanging out way too long in front of the house. So I'm going to go back to the house next week or so and try to get the drawing/letter to mr. Spielberg somehow.

Well, I went back to the car - I needed to find a bathroom, some Starbucks would be best, I thought - when some guy on a racing bike started talking to me: "I just have to say that you're incredibly sexy, I'm soandso and I'm a moviedirector, here is my businesscard."

It was such an idiotic situation that I got a bit pissed off, so I explained to him not so nicely that I'm really not interested in getting into the moviebusiness (the guy was pretty old and not very attractive anyways, haha). Then he tried to tell me that he made a documentary about some wheelchairrace but, like I mentioned before, I had only a bathroom on my mind.

Which I found back on Sunset, where I hung around a bit. I didn't feel quite comfortable at this area. Too much money. The local supermarket was alright though. They didn't have any good fresh pasta - it is almost impossible to find fresh, undried pasta (not of Buitoni, that's horrible 'fresh' pasta) and this quest is my next priority. Tomorrow I'm going to try to find fresh pasta!

FIREWORKS

2009-07-22T10:36:00.000-08:00

I'm just going to stop with the whole 'day so-and-so much' because I'm losing track anyway.

My skin is peeling off like snakeskin and because the wind doesn't blow as much as it did the first week I got here, the heat is sometimes almost unbearable. The sun is extremely bright, so I need to adjust my plans to staying in during the daytime (or driving in the airconditioned car to airconditioned places) and going out at night, or drawing at night on a chair on the - er - porch of RAID.

Curiously enough Margìt and Persijn, who I both know from the postgraduate school Sandberg Institute, are working on a project closeby. We'll meet tonight.

DAY FIFTEEN & SIXTEEN: DRAWING

2009-07-20T13:43:00.000-08:00

It's way too hot to go outside during the daytime, at least to walk or bike anyway, so while I'm waiting for my car to go to the garage tomorrow I started to draw like crazy and it looks like I'm drawing some sort of graphic novel at the moment.

There's not really a subject. It started because Jason of next door called me 'dude'. I wrote down the first part of a conversation that kind of goes nowhere and takes place between two characters: me (a crow) and some guy with a helmet on (somewhat like 'the Stig' from the BBC series 'Top Gear') who had already appeared in some drawings I did a couple of months ago. This is my imaginary friend with whom I have futile conversations that mostly take place in my head.

My working table is in fact a pingpong table, which is very suitable for LA, I think.

DAY FOURTEEN - DANCIN'

2009-07-19T17:17:00.000-08:00

This particular morning my backpain was quite severe, so I couldn't really move for a couple of hours. I had to put my socks on lying on the bed, haha. I spent the day sitting down, drawing.

Max P. took us out at night, dancing. My back was still a bit stiff but it was fun! We went to a bar in Hollywood, but not a touristbar, a bar in one of the more quiet streets. They had a party there, called 'Bullitt'. It's once a month and the music was fantastic: 60's bubblegumpop, psychedelica, garage and Northern Soul and a very small and dark dancefloor. Unfortunately the cheapest beers were still 4 dollars... After this there was an afterparty with a live band in a loft above the bar, but this was a bit boring. The band anyway.

It was nice that most of the people who were there were dressed up as mods and such and the people really seemed to know the right moves for the right music. Especially Max, who used to live in London and Brighton in the eighties where at the time there was already this modrevival, knew all the complicated dancesteps.

My small snapshotcamera didn't really work well because of the lack of light.

DAY THIRTEEN - LITTLE TOKYO

2009-07-19T17:02:00.000-08:00

Nakhee and I biked to Little Tokyo. Sushi! Sushi-heaven! Though Nakhee found the sushi to still be quite expensive, I noticed the prices were less than half to what they are in Belgium, so I bought some sushi for dinner. Unfortunately it got shaken into a mush when I got home because I transported it in the basket on the back of my bike.

We also went to the fashion district, there were a lot of clothes, yep.

When I got back to RAID I got a terrible backpain, because I was moving kind of slow the whole day - I'm used to walk and bike quite fast but Nakhee has a different pace. I took some painkillers and went out at night anyway.

I went with Sarah and Max, who had told us to dress up. I didn't really have a nice dress so I just tried to look like I had a lot of money.

Max M. needed to check out some bars Downtown for Max P., the director of RAID, 's bachelorparty. We went to a lot of 'voze' bars, too expensive and too yuppie. A bit like the bars in the South of Antwerp, but then twice as 'voos'. The last bar was kinda nice, though, it had a secret door in the back, where there was another bar with really expensive but excellent cocktails. I couldn't really afford to buy one, so I just took some sips of other peoples drinks. It was a bit of a 20s bar, but apart from the 'secrecy' it was nothing special except I had my first celebrity sighting here: Donatella Versace. She's easy to recognize.

DAY TWELVE - SKUNK

2009-07-17T00:43:00.000-08:00

The woman above appears to walk her dog, but the dog is in fact fake. She's walking a dogpuppet on strings.

Nakhee and I found some goodwill stores closeby RAID Projects, where I bought a sweater and two shirts for less than 9 dollar and about 13 unreleased R&B and Hiphop 12"es (for promotional use only) for 25 cents a piece. Which is quite amazing - some Timbaland, some Def Jam and such. I have no idea how they got there.

Then we went with Jason and another artist, Sarah, to an opening at a gallery at Venice Beach. It was a presentation of ten young, just graduated, Los Angeles artists. I was not very impressed by the exhibition, the show as a whole was a bit too clean for my taste.

I love driving through downtown LA at night, it's like driving through a christmastree. We went with Jason's car (my car is not leaking motorcooler anymore, it started to leak oil instead. Seriously leaking oil as a matter of fact, so I have to take it to the garage on tuesday again...). For some reason a lot of music sounds better around here - even bad '80's rock seems to make sense. The best music for LA at night is probably 70's progrock. It fits.

* About music: a few nights earlier I was drawing a bit outside and because Nakhee and I already decided to go to the beach the next day I somehow got Steve Miller's 'fly like an eagle' stuck in my head. A song I never think about. When we left Venice Beach the day after I turned on the radio in my car and, yes, there it was: 'fly like an eagle'. I hadn't heard that song for over ten years (I don't listen to the radio usually), so this was quite coincidental. *

After the opening we went to Sarah's house in Pasadena. She's living with her boyfriend in a small house, built at the end of the 19th century. Pasadena as a city is older than Los Angeles and has the look and feel of a big village. Sarah has a garden with vegetables and though the house is rather small, it's really nice. Sarah made pizza, which was cooked on the grill and she had some exellent Scotch to go with that, so everything was fine untill I wanted to take her dog Bentley out for a walk.

Bentley got hold of a baby skunk.

Which was too cute to just leave up there, Sarah thought. So we took it. It sprayed on Bentley, who therefor immediately needed a bath.

We washed him with tomatosauce - Sarah read somewhere that helped to both get rid of the smell and the burning sensation Bentley was probably experiencing because it sprayed in his eyes. After this we washed him with normal soap.

Bentley seemed fine, but the bathroom, the livingroom and our hands even smelled like skunk. As I'm typing this down, sometimes the faint smell of skunk pops up, though I've washed my hands with soap, vinegar and lemon.

Skunk smells like a mixture between burned tyres and rotten eggs.

DAY ELEVEN - BURNS

2009-07-17T00:30:00.001-08:00

The photo above was taken in the civic centre of West Hollywood. The architecture is phenomenal.
The photos below were taken between the Santa Monica Pier and Venice Beach. Venice Beach wasn't really worth photographing because it's just a touristic bunch of hippiestores, though the atmosphere was nice.

My sunglasses got busted on the plane from NY to LA, so I had to find some new ones, which is always much more difficult than it at first glance seems. I tried on so many, but they were mostly too big, though big is in fashion apparently these days. When I found some shades that fit, they were kids-shades. I have a small face or the children of the US have big heads, I don't know. They were cheaper then grown-up sunglasses, so that was a good thing, I suppose.

DAY ELEVEN - POINTING TO JAPAN

2009-07-16T00:01:00.000-08:00

We went to the Santa Monica pier and to Venice beach (through Muscle beach) today, Nakhee and I. At the pier I pointed at the horizon, which means I was pointing directly to Japan, Osaka to be specific. Osaka is on about the same latitude as L.A.(34°) but there's about 9000 kilometres of ocean in between, just ocean, a big, big bucket of water. It is also exactly 9000 kilometres from my house to Los Angeles. The widest part of the Pacific ocean is about 17.700 kilometres wide. The earths circumference is 40,000 kilometres. Not that all this means anything, by the way.

I got terribly sunburned. My clothes hurt. But I saw a couple of pelicans flying in the wild, which was quite fantastic. Unfortunately my camera got confused by the endless bright sky. The photos of those birds are too blurred to use here.
The car seems to have been fixed, although I'm still a bit paranoid about the watercooler (I'm checking it everytime I park somewhere).

DAY NINE - DOUBLE CARTROUBLE

2009-07-13T16:59:00.000-08:00

It's going to cost $ 225 to get the car fixed, but it's still cheaper than renting a car and I really need one over here. It's a bit of a setback.

It wouldn't be so bad if my other car in Antwerp hadn't also broke down today. I gave it to my friend Jess for these three months, but apparently something's up with the carborator. Which leaves me now with two cars registered in my name, that are both broken. It would be funny if I wasn't this depressed about it.

Tomorrow the LA-car should be fixed, so if that keeps working until the end of september I'm already quite satisfied.

Jess is going to send a photo of my Antwerp car in the garage later, just to make things complete.

In the mean time I made a lot of photos, mostly panoramic photos that I'm glueing together in the computer for an animation. I'm also drawing a bit. About car problems, mostly.

DAY EIGHT - HENRY V

2009-07-13T16:38:00.000-08:00

We went to see a Shakespeare play at the Barnsdall Park with some chocolate cake, Kentucky Fried Chicken, cheese, wine and grapes. On the way there Max P. played some really nice old school soul music in his car, which is actually perfect when you're driving down Hollywood Boulevard at sunset. I have to burn some cd's with some of that to play in my car once it's fixed.

After Henry V the other Max, Nakhee, Jason - who's an artist living at RAID - and me went for a drink in a very clean karaoke/truckers/hipsters bar. There were skunk-butts on the wall. At some point smoke came out of them. We left and went to the Golden Room where there's a jukebox, peanuts and free burritos and which is in fact a much cooler bar than the hipster/trucker bar. Damn, they should've paid us to even sit in there.

DAY SEVEN - GALLERY HOP

2009-07-13T16:16:00.000-08:00

There were a lot of openings this particular evening so first we went to some kind of gallery-compound where we went to the Mark Moore Gallery all the way up in Santa Monica. After this we drove to Beverly Hills, to Regen Projects, another gallery of which I forgot the name at this point and finally some galleries at Chinatown. Openings are about the same everywhere as you might expect. Just the distances between the galleries at openingnights in this city are different: for a ten minute gallery visit we drove each time about 40 minutes.

After this we wanted to see Brian Getnicks performance at Phyllis Stein, but we were a bit too late so we only saw the 'backstage' from the streetwindows.

It was part of some sort of 'gender' festival. After the performance we got in to the gallery and saw a horrible, horrible video.

DAY SEVEN - OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR

2009-07-13T16:07:00.001-08:00

My car was towed to a garage at Vermont and Beverly so Max dropped me off there and told me to first take it for a testdrive. The testdrive went fine, but just as I had payed for the repair water started leaking again from under the car, which meant I had to leave it there and find my way back to RAID. I didn't want to take the subwaytrain or something, because then you don't really see anything, so I decided to walk about nine kilometres to home. It was kind of hot, but with some water and some shade it was alright. I saw some nice buildings.

Like the Californian equivalent of 'Frituur #1'.

DAY SIX - COOLING OFF

2009-07-11T23:41:00.001-08:00

We went for a drink in a few bars at Sunset boulevard after I finally got back to RAID. Above left we recognize Brian Getnick, on the right we see Max.

Bars close at two in the morning, so the drinking habits are a bit, well, again, Skandinavian (a lot in a very short amount of time). First we went to some bar, where you get a free taco with every two drinks you order. The tequilla & beer combination costs, I think, only $3, which is dangerous. Then we went to a dance-bar. We didn't have to stand in line like the other people because we know people who know people, apparently. The music was mediocre until the dj decided to play some real R&B.

DAY SIX - GOING DOWNHILL

2009-07-11T23:20:00.000-08:00

Griffith Park, where the Hollywood sign is and also the Zoo and the Observatory, is quite big and dry. The hills are steep and up to 1400 meters high, I think. Anyway, I drove up there with my car, which already had made a squeeky sound earlier.

So ofcourse I got stuck on top of the hill at the Hollywood sign viewpoint.
I didn't exactly know what was going on - it got overheated - so I poured water in the motorcooler and started to drive downhill. But that didn't help. A bit down the hill, in a residential area smoke came out of the car again and I had to pull over. Some guy working on the installment of a pool (it's quite a nice area) looked under the hood and concluded the belt that makes everything work snapped. Actually, there was no belt left to begin with. The belt is supposed to be over a centimetre wide, this one was just a few millimetres. I decided the best thing to do was to call Max, who lives at RAID. He knows about cars, so he bought a new belt and started driving up to me from the other side of town.

It took him hours because of the maze of bended streets I got myself into. He got lost. Luckily I had my ink and my paper, so I started drawing.

In the end Max couldn't fix the car there, so he called AAA - for this purpose I was his wife - and then the car got towed away.

DAY SIX - TARPITS AND SUCH

2009-07-11T23:00:00.001-08:00

At the La Brea Museum tar is floating on small ponds where methanegas bubbles up once in a while. From some of the pits loads of fossilized bones of sunken mammoths, drowned giant ground sloths and sabertooth tigers are being retrieved.

I really like dioramas. In this one a giant sloth is being attacked by a sabertooth tiger.

Skeleton of a giant ground sloth, this one isn't even that big.

After the tarpitmuseum I visited the LACMA, which is a cluster of museums. Then I accidentaly found a good art-supplies store, where I bought ink, brushes and paper. It was around three in the afternoon when I decided I could go and see how close I could get to the Hollywood Sign, which I more or less found by chance, because there are no indications of how to get there (you can't go up there, but there are some places with a good view) and my map of LA didn't cover that area. Which, as later on became clear, is like a maze, much different from the rest of LA.
In Hollywood Hills you can rent a horse for riding in Griffith park. The horse above was wearing eyes for some reason.

DAY FOUR - DINNER

2009-07-11T22:50:00.001-08:00

DAY FOUR - HOLLYWOOD

2009-07-09T01:39:00.000-08:00

I bought a car from the former resident. It's extremely ugly but it actually drives quite well. Before it could be registered into my name, which at this moment has yet not been taken care of because of the long waiting lines at the DMV, I had to have it 'smog checked'. I decided to take the car to a garage as close as possible to Hollywood, so I could combine the smog check with something more interesting.

Hollywood Boulevard, or The Walk of Fame, is quite a cosy street. Very touristic, but therefor somewhat familiar, because touristic places seem to be a bit alike all over the world. I had to have breakfast and I'm used to having a croissant but in the U.S. a croissant is not a croissant; it's actually five croissants pressed together in a croissant-shape form the size of two and a half croissant.

I was a bit surprised to find this on the sidewalk:

I passed some historical and maybe interesting events and buildings like the Kodak Theatre and this one:

As this week turns out to be some sort of memorial I also took a photo of this:

DAY THREE - SURROUNDINGS

2009-07-07T21:31:00.000-08:00

As I'm still arranging the paperwork for a car I bought, I was, like I mentioned earlier, biking through the city a bit. Biking is really easy around here, just like getting lost around here seems to be really difficult to almost impossible. Both in contrary to Antwerp, by the way.

Somehow the few parts of Los Angeles I saw these days remind me of Scandinavia. I know this sounds strange, but if Scandinavia was in this climate, it would look like Los Angeles. The buildings are in general very low, just a few stories high exept for downtown, there's pick-up trucks and suv's everywhere and the traffic seems quite organised. Also the people are very sweet (the guy at the DMV office, where I had to register 'my' car, told me I had beautiful eyes, haha - 45 percent of LA is hispanic, so I guess light eyes like mine are rare in these parts).

The architecture is a mixture between horrible and awful but in a good way, an almost science fiction like way. Very cinematic, though I don't know if that's because it actually is cinematic or just because I've seen so much of this kind of architecture in movies. After the Michael Jackson thing I went to an Asian supermarket, which was so incredibly big I'm still a bit shocked. The building was the size of a plane-hangar. RAID is close to Chinatown so I assume all the restaurants are shopping at this supermarket.

Also I came by some parks, but it's so dry around here they don't look very appealing. Even though palmtrees are growing everywhere, in summer the grass is yellow and crispy.

DAY THREE - MICHAEL JACKSON

2009-07-07T20:51:00.000-08:00

Well, the King of Pop died a few weeks ago, as we all know and by coincidence I found myself to be just a 30 minute bike ride away from the Staples Centre in Downtown LA where the Memorial Service was being held today. Though I wasn't completely sure whether I should go there or not, I decided I owed it to myself and some of my friends back home to at least try to get as close as possible. Which turned out to be a few hundred metres from the stadium, because the police had completely locked down the area.

It was a bit of a dissapointing experience. Not the bikeride in itself, or Downtown as a neighbourhood, but I expected a bit more of a chaotic crowd with numerous Michael Jackson look-a-likes and crying people and such to be hanging around the Staples Centre. I at least thought there would be more people, I guess there were no more than 10.000. I saw one woman cry and a few people with glittergloves on one hand. Further, there were a lot of police, people who were selling memorial t-shirts, people who were selling hotdogs, people who were selling soda and water or ice, people who were selling memorial buttons, people who were selling memorial framed pictures and people who just happened to be in the neighbourhood, like me. Oh, and I musn't forget the cameracrews. There were people with cameras everywhere. I have to admit I was one of them. I saw this woman who was wearing a very nice vintage 'Beat it' jacket and I asked her if I could take her picture. A second later all the people around me took out their cameras and photographed her too. Which was rather silly.

Some memorial t-shirt seller got asked by a cameracrew to sing his favorite Michael Jackson song, which turned out to be 'Heal the world'. The finger in his ear didn't help make this already horrible song sound any better unfortunately.

DAY TWO - JETLAGGED

2009-07-07T20:23:00.000-08:00

I've never experienced jet-lag, but it was inevitable on this trip, with the almost 24 hours of daylight and almost 24 hours of sleeplessness. I couldn't really sleep on the plane because the chairs made my back hurt every time I did fall asleep.

I got picked up from LAX airport by Max P., director of RAID Projects, where I'm one of the two temporary residents. Nahkee Sung from Korea is already here for a month. She's staying until the end of november.

RAID Projects is part of a 'campus'like area near downtown LA, called The Brewery Complex. There are over 1000 artists, writers and filmmakers working here, which is a bit of a mindblowing idea.

Most of day two I had to hang around the building of RAID, because the airline company had misplaced one of my bags, which they luckily had dropped off in the afternoon, so I could finally get into some fresh clothes. Though it gets quite hot during the daytime around here, so fresh clothes get unfreshed quite quickly. It cools down quite a lot in the evenings, which is a big difference with Antwerp where, when it's hot during the daytime, in the evening and at night the heat sticks to the stones of the houses and gets stuck in between the much more narrow streets. In this part of Los Angeles there seems to be a constant breeze, a flow of incoming fresh air from the ocean.

The evening of day two another Max, who's permanently living at RAID, cooked homemade burgers on a barbeque, which were probably the best and biggest and strangely enough airiest burgers I've ever had. After that I actually managed to make a small drawing of the Appalachian mountains and then I finally fell asleep.

DAY ONE - GETTING THERE

2009-07-07T19:54:00.001-08:00

When I was a child, our family often went on holidays to (former) Czechoslovakia and Hungary. In those days the Iron Curtain still firmly divided Europe in half and entering a communist country was a whole experience in itself. There was a piece of nomansland to be crossed, there were high metal fences with barbed wire, endless lines of waiting vehicles and there were piles of papers to be filled before Western visitors could enter the - well, in those days - Dark Side.

I got a bit of a déja-vu when I entered the U.S. at JFK Airport in New York. Before my trip I had to apply for elegibility to get into the country, on the plane I got the same form and another similar one that I had to fill in (with questions like: have you ever been a member of a terrorist organisation?). At the airport customs a grumpy officer took my fingerprints with some green electronic device and I had to stare into a camera for eye-identification. The grumpy guy also asked me what kind of business I was in - I answered 'art', which luckily stunned him for a while until he found out I was going to stay for three months in Los Angeles and that provoked the question of how I thought I was supposed to pay for all this. My first impulse was to reply that was none of his business, but because I had already heard you don't mess with the U.S. police departement I just mumbled something along the line of: government money. Which made the officer look kind of angry and that made me feel guilty.

Anyway, everything got better when I was on the plane from NY to LA. I flew with the sun, so I had a day of 33 hours of which I was awake for almost 24 hours and most of those hours were filled with sunlight. By the time I flew over the Appalacian Mountains the sun was finally setting a bit.

WHEREABOUTS

2009-06-28T01:04:00.000-08:00

View Larger Map

Through this link you can visit the street, by clicking on 'street view' in the label. Turn around, go forward by clicking 3 times on the arrow, RAID Projects is on your left.