S'leb Twatter

S'lebs have taken to Twitter like it's in their contracts. I guess it gives 'em something to do on their BlackBerrys besides Google themselves and talk to their therapist. This is great because it means you can finally read what the Hollywood elite have to say without the annoying interference of their publicists (and maybe even see Demi's unphotoshopped ass): Yes, Lindsay Lohan has the mind of a dyslexic 8-year-old. No, that hot kid from Star Trek did not age well but has eerily retained a lot of smarts.

Twitter has even unleashed a whole new scourage of "social change/empowerment" obsessed s'lebs on the world, urging us to donate mosquito nets to Africans and wear condoms. We all heard about how Ashton beat CNN to getting 1 million followers last week (omg it's like reformed jackass vs. Goliath, ppl!), and if you follow P. Diddy, he'll continually spam your Tweetfeed with messages lilke "LET'S GO PEOPLE, LOCK IN! Follow your dreams! work hard!" and "I've been in the studio for 48h ppl, and haven't ridden in my jag for 3, let's go ppl, LOCK IN!"

...and God knows what kind of post-menopausal world domination havoc Oprah will wreak when she finally fires up her tweeting this week. These hyperactive s'leb attention-seekers are all entertaining and junk, but my personal favourite has got to be the shrivel-headed fashion marvel Karl Lagerfeld himself.

Monsieur Lagerfeld doesn't Tweet often, but his posts are always quality - a perfect reflection of his style persona: subtle yet dramatic, pseudo-profound, and full of arrogant French flair.

Some choice KL tweets:

1. I have no scene. I go everywhere. I adapt.4:24 PM Apr 11th from web
2. I only wear the latest thing. It's my job.10:49 PM Mar 28th from web


3. Nothing scares me more than people with some doll collection. As a child, I never played with anything like toys. I wanted to be a grown-up.12:14 PM Feb 10th from web
   
   
4. After the couture, I am spending a quiet weekend in my all-glass apartment, floating over the river on Quai Voltaire.2:55 PM Jan 31st from web
5. Florals are for middle-aged women with weight problems.5:15 AM Jan 27th from web
6. I hate the word “avant-garde.” It was used, overused, and often used for useless things. So I do not use that word any longer.3:30 PM Jan 23rd from web
7. Believe it or not, I love rap. 3:46 PM Jan 19th from web
8. Fur is not murder, but it is quite expensive.12:53 AM Jan 4th from web
9. The best Christmas gift I received this year? A platinum pogo stick.1:41 PM Jan 2nd from web
10. On this day each year, I soak the previous year's calendar in my mother's favorite perfume and then set it ablaze. Here's to a fresh start

Wherefore art thou, Micachu?

My friend Will Parish, who is currently tour managing next-best-thing-to-happen-to-Brit-art-pop band Micachu and The Shapes, invited me to hop in the van with them and come to Bristol. A day retreat to Bristol turned into an overnight stay, with a trip to Stratford-upon-Avon and some tractor traipsing thrown in for good measure.





Dis where Shakeseare birthed, yo.

Old as the town may be, the local HMV boasts quite a selection of modern tunes:


The shores of river Avon are decked with boats affectionately named after characters from plays of its most famous former resident:


This enterprising gentleman is 91 years young. He sells farm fresh eggs to the locals and listens to the newspaper on digital usb keys while sipping lager. I want to be him.

Fun with Photobooth Pt 1: I believe I can fly

Back in Toronto I was part of a loose collective called Random Steps, mostly comprising of professional ballet dancers with an affinity for shitty dance music (and hallucinogens), who would create mini-flash mobs in the middle of open public spaces like mall atriums or metro passageways and perform improvised dance routines to Paul Van Dyk.

As an homage to Random Steps, or perhaps out of sheer creative boredom, below for your awe and inspiration are some cleverly timed photos of me jumping around the office while not at all high on anything, I swear mom:









Good fun. Now imagine I was jumping around in the nude and this was actually shot on a Holga; Ryan McGinley would shit himself, right? Ha.

Rankin vs. Ritchie-Kobilansky

The Veils are really rad, you would like them. They are friends of mine, and a while ago Ritchie Harvey (who has since returned to NZ) and I tag-teamed a photoshoot with them. I recently re-Photoshopped the pics, and remembered how much fun we had. First we played around with these video projections, which didn't really show up well in photos

Then I tried to convince the band to sit around pretending to have a tea party. Finn wasn't havin' it (but LOOK at how cute Soph's ribbon/eyes look next to that periwinkle wall!) :


Then we got animated and threw balls (aka Soph's painted styrofoam planets):


Probably not the best idea unless you've got a good wide-angle lens - otherwise it's pretty hard to get everyone and their balls in the shot. Next we switched it up for some owl actionz:

And then some skull actionz:

And some individual shots:
And topped it off with a nice warm photo:

Ritchie and I were damn chuffed with ourselves, but of course two days later The Veils had a shoot with Rankin and his medium-format magical kingdom of photo gadgetry at the Dazed & Confused offices, where he promptly shat on all our work within 5 seconds of having a camera handed to him by an assistant:

THE END

P.S.
The Veils' third album called Sun Gangs drops April 6th on Rough Trade records. Czech it.

The harsh truth about soft pastels

My old flatmate gave me a brand new box of soft pastels when he moved out, about a year ago now, and so they sat, untouched, at the bottom of my sock drawer...until I moved to Shoreditch and noticed them there, incongruous and forgotten at 2am on a Tuesday morning, and decided to give the chalky bits of rainbow poo a whirl. But fountainous creativity that I thought would produce a delicate smudgy portrait fizzed into disgusting pop art:



I totally got overzealous and ended up with too many colours mixing and harsh cartoony lines...I mean, in theory, pastels are rad - they're chalky but saturated, so it misleads you into thinking you can almost-erase colours by "painting" over each other - not quite so. The shit gets messy. You gotta keep blowing on what you're drawing or else it turns into a sand mandala after a tornado.

Reckon minimalism is the way forward in the realm of pastels, in terms of both colours and strokes...I still heart Chewy though - see? Heart on lower right.

Next session slated for Wednesday at 3am.