Champagne!

Went to see Avatar at 3D cinema, and it’s WOW…. a goa trance party!
It’s set in a tropical forest, with UV fluo plants and specimens floating around, cyber animals and UV body painted tribe people with dread locks…. all this with a “peace and eco” feel, a bit of yoga thrown in (Jake learns to master a dragon and has to concentrate on the body parts and merge with the animal) and lot’s of shamanic buddhism.
The story line is of course, a bit predictable, with a “white man” infiltrating alien culture, getting accepted and turning against his own to save them, thus leading “the others” from the inside instead of from the outside.
But it’s delightful for the eyes, the animation is awesome and you get totally dragged into it…
A shame they didn’t hire Aphex Twin, DJ Tsuyoshi and Zakir Hussein for the sound track, because it’s f*** awful!
(it’s that terrible new age stuff with indian flute and tribal singing + strings, that you can hear in beauty centers and zen shops, yeurk!)

Part 2 of the “Radiance” experiment with the students: try to re-create the silk-screened samples with tie-dye technique.

Last week, HoNeT, Gues and SE payed for their Brussels lodging by playing at being professeurs at the ERG art school, Brussels.
Honet started the session off with a talk on one of his graffiti related passions: the Catacombes. He likes going under Paris, to shoot photos of the 300km long galleries containing old inscriptions made by the engineers and catacomb workers over the decades but also graffiti, the earliest dating back to the 80’s.
You can see lots of picts on this old school Honet website, but you have to be lucky and hit Paris in the flickering city menu, which ain’t easy.
Check out some of his travel diaries here.

Otherwise a few catacombe picts can be found here.

After the skull and bones trip, Gues and SE gave a brief introduction on the notion of “Flop” (“Throw up”), a graffiti practice with the aim of covering the largest area possible (and other tags) with one’s name using a filling colour and an outline.
The students were then asked to mark the wall with a chosen name (blaze) using sticky tape…

gues

This isn’t a book just for graffiti and typography nerds, the photos and texts can capture any reader and have a contagious exciting energy to them.

François Chastanet, author of “Pixação: São Paulo Signature”, has freshly published a new book on graffiti typo research under the title “Cholo Writing: Latino gang graffiti in L.A”.
During our Paris trip, we met up with him in a bar and he had just got the copies from the printer.
It’s a super cool book, the first part features black and white photos by Howard Gribble, who as a young artist in the 70’s, got interested in the cholo writing and decided to document it.


The second part, are colour photos taken by François Chastanet during his L.A trip. There is also an essay where he analyses the Cholo writing, tracing the origins of the style all the way back to the Textura and Fraktur typeface omnipresent in Mexico.

Chastanet told us a few stories from his trip, how dangerous the guys are in theses gangs, how they go out at night marking their quarter with gang names + members in the Cholo writing. There is nothing intellectual (actually the guys are pretty brain dead) or aesthetic in this practice, it’s just purely a traditional gang thing, a bit like cats mark their territory with piss, only these guys aren’t fluffy and cute but carry arms.
To document the writing, he had to get up early and collect as many pictures as possible before noon, when the L.A city cleaning service would go round erasing all the graffiti. After 1pm, the cholos would be up and back on the streets, meaning that photo shooting wasn’t safe anymore. Chastanet told us that the only bloke he met on the street and was able to have a chat to was a dude in a wheel chair, he’d got himself shot and lost the use of his legs, he was therefore considered harmless and “allowed” to cross the different neighborhoods without getting hassled.
Hopefully, Chastanet will be making it to Brussels for a conference some time in 2010, in the mean time, his book is available here.
Also find here an interview of François Chastanet on his book.

Frédéric Platéus‘ new show at espace Uhoda in Liège opened on 26.11, where he presents 2 floors of very pro, well finished, clean diagonal sculptures in metal, shiny wood, mirror and lazer. The result is a spacy, futuristic feeling influenced by the world of car tuning. In the background, the sound of a roaring exhaust pipe with big bass vibrates the space.
We love it!

Shiny wood and mirror sculpture, large and small version + neon tag.

Metal space ships with flickering neon underneath.

Dark room featuring white cube with projected red lazer beams.

This friday and saturday…..
featuring the 2009 Warrior Girl collection and more..

Ugh! This is a tricky post… gonna have to admit my female weakness for a, luckily rare, shopping desire.
Anyway got an obsession with a certain handbag from Marc by Marc Jacobs and wanted to take the Parisan opportunity to get my hands on it. Unfortunatly for them, the boyzs got draggged into the treasure hunt…. 2 days of phoning, searching, whealing and dealing… we even went to the flagship store, whose entrance was full of cheap and kitsch merchandising featuring the MA initials and felt like a chinatown hole.
Anyway on the third attempt, we found it, in the right size and color, in a chic department store.