New tramp stamp

As in "Henri Desgrange", newspaperman and founder of the Tour de France.

Also, have you ever seen so many mangoes?!



I'll miss this place.

Talking Pullin' Up Stumps Blues

Ugh! G and I have been doing late nights cleaning out the house on Mitchell St. Nothin to make you hate a place you formerly loved like cleaning every square, grimey inch of it. Sadly our property manager is a total cow, so when she walks through this arvo on the final inspection, criticising everything, we're gonna have to kill her.

We leave Darwin in ten days! Back in Melbourne in, like, twenty or so. Currently camping at the cramped domicile on the busy arterial that Jess and Henry have rented off an army doctor mate of theirs. Big change from our leafy mansion in town. But I've got the travel bug and not a care in the world. Woohoo!

Sasquatch is camping at Emma and Will's. When we get back to Melbourne we're gonna buy her a ticket on the pet jet and put her up in Sarah Garnick's homespun hostel for strays.

Bec: if there's one thing better than Burroughs' mellifluous prose it's his gravelly voice.

Gus: that's quite a conk you've got on yer! I'm a measly 52. I think Deutsche bag is a winner. The world's just not ready for it.

Love: T

$350! Nice! One-way petrol money ticket to Melbourne? Speaking of garage sales look what I found at a happy little garage sale/gathering in some boozy-hipster's Northcote front yard. I purchased for the title but I'll stay for the juicy western tales. Tales from a time when gays weren't gays, they were poofs, queers and homos. Cowboys, now they were gay, gay as a lark!


unrelated footnote:

Deutsche-bag (n)

1. A foreign "hipster" entrenched in the Berlin lifestyle:

Cathy - " Did you hear about Joe? He's decided to stay on a while in Berlin, he says it's the place that was born to be the place that he was born to be in. "

Ange - " What a Deutsche-bag. "

NT Noir

G and I made $350 from our garage sale yesterday, which has reinvigorated old fantasies of owning a junk store - anyone want in? Spent the second half of the day sitting amidst the debris getting progressively drunker as the last few stragglers wandered through. My favourites were the young Indian-Chinese couple who bought a table and made trippy, broken banter with us about nightclubs and buying a new girlfriend.



Hot and Sour soup is my Dish of 2010. If you've never tried it, do yourself a favour and get down to a Chinese restaurant today. Tasty House in the Smith St Mall does a great one. The four of us rolled down there last night and had Peking Duck and Salt and Pepper Tofu. I really like the names of Chinese dishes. They possess a certain minimalist cool.



Walked down the Esplanade last night on the way home from tea. It has a certain Raymond Chandler, LA noir feel to it sometimes. Rode back down there this morning and there was a crime scene investigation taking place in a Wicked Camper. Police tape, jumpsuits and all. Must have been a full moon - Henry got bashed by some school kids on the bus on the way home. Mango madness is here again.

Italian baby food

Meat flavoured.

Posted from Blogium for iPhone

Stuff i wanna show you

Here are some illustrations of my most astounding discoveries abroad.
Guide to pictures
ABerlin is amazing- they have even re-established dinosaurs in the wild and they are now a tasty treat!
B.The outside table at tavo. Got some cool filters on my iphone, clearly!
C.Nonna hanging out with a little dude i found in the vegetable patch at Kate's house.
D. my favourite german pun (my only german pun). This picture of a white baby flamingo in Miami had this amusing headline. Geddit!?
More to come.

Furnishings

In Kiev we went to pay a visit to Gina's old house.



"Very much as I remember it, but smaller," she said. It's in a pleasant, quiet, leafy neighbourhood on the edge of the old city. 5 people used to live in this 2 bedroom apartment. There is a playground and a caged in synthetic soccer pitch from which emanated the sounds of the local men in their Sunday exertions.

"Around the corner there was a furniture store which was an object of my fascination." So we went to look for the store. We see a bus shelter ad:


And then we found the store. You couldn't miss it, really: a twelve story concrete ziggurat plonked down in the middle of suburbia. "Wow, looks the same," she said.

And then we saw this clock.


Priced at around 250,000 grivny, that's about 60,000 AUD in a country where the average monthly wage is 3000 grivny. "Wow, this place has changed!"

The place was a treasure trove, an Ali Baba's cave full of tasteless, hideous and disgustingly priced crap. There was an abundance of monkey themed furniture, especially monkeys holding up little tables. This snazzy little number was my personal favourite.

You've been warned

Poor sue

I like to thiink sue's whole family all pitched in to buy her a vanity plate for her 40th. Poor sue.


Pozted from grigsby bear's iPhone

Banyo

Livin on a banjo! Yeehaw!

The head wasn't originally gold it used to be blackish and say 'epiphone'. I stripped it, sanded it and goldy-loxd it BOOYAH!


Pozted from grigsby bear's iPhone

Sick! II

(Had to do two installments or else my phone would crash).

Now here's a perfect example of "they don't make 'em like they used to" and dammit, if I wasn't such a progressive-minded young fella I'd make a pretty good conservative cos they just don't!



These windows are amazing: they're double windows, with a foot-long gap between the outer windows and the inner. Combine that with some good curtains and that fine old radiator and you've got a Berlin winter-proof apartment. This is the room that G and I stayed in and it is very much in keeping with the minimalist aesthetic of the test of the place. In fact it was so minimalist that there wasn't even any soap in the bathroom - just a bath, a sink and a toilet, all immaculate and white like the jeans and tshirt of our towering host Dortmut.

And check this out: no right angles!



Speaking of the "olden days" (which is where kids at the high school think I'm from, by the way) getting stuck at shitty Charles de Gaulle airport was kind of a drag, but on the other hand they put us up in a hotel and we got to spend an extra afternoon in Paris (plus they refunded our tickets!). There we had a chance to see the Louvre (from the outside) and the Tuileries and this old sign.


[insert mournful howling sax here]



What a city! Perfect selection for the second act of "Inception". So dreamy and yet so controlled.

Sick! I

Have you guys seen "Superbad"?I saw this on Mitchell St on my first night home.


The season has finally changed for real which means the mercury is dropping below 20 at nights and I'm on my arse with a cold. This happens everytime the weather changes, whatever climate I'm in. I reckon I should donate my body to the BOM.

Sunrise...


...sunset.



One of the few things that I wish I'd done more of on the trip OS is take more photos of the interiors of places we stayed in. We were lucky enough to stay in apartments everywhere we went (albeit serviced in the case of the place we stayed in in Kiev). The last place we stayed in in Berlin was so sweet. Here's some studies.



Situated in the outer-inner South Eastern suburb of Neuköln - which like Northcote has that feeling of being the next..., with its combination of the crumbling with the gentrified - it's an example of prewar archtecture. 5 stories with every flat backing onto a kind of courtyard which is really just a conduit for light since there's no doors or places to sit or anything. One suspects that it may have once served as a common drainage system as well, since all the kitchens in the building look out onto it.

It's mixin tiiime

My new 'mixing suite'! (my loungeroom + beautiful old speakers non&ken gave me :)


Pozted from grigsby bear's iPhone

The potatoes

3D!!!

Well it was at the time.

Bec, Oscar, pepi and myself are double dating behind the camera.


Pozted from grigsby bear's iPhone

The Sweat Shop

"On demand we will realise any album cover in sweater form!"

We stayed near this place for a couple of days in Annette Becker's daughter's place. Good area, close to Little Africa.

We've done a bit of evrything here including views, galleries, classical music in churches and, of course, excellent food (for me - Gina has struggled to find anything vego).

Gotta go!

Love

T

Location:Paris, France

Laugh, Ukraine!

Ukrainian uses the Cyrillic alphabet — i.e. The same funny letters as in Russian. In fact, Ukrainian is quite a similar language to Russian but it's just different enough that Gina can't read the newspapers or most of the street signs in this, her home town. The pilot of our Air Ukraine flight struggled with speaking in Ukrainian during his spiels over the PA, but gave up shortly after takeoff, reverting to Russian.





Have been learning the letters from Gina, plus some helpful words. I practise by Reading signs and menus. It's hilarious to come across "Long Island Ice Tea" or "Club Sandwich" in Cyrillic characters. Here's a bus shelter advertisement I saw the other day.


That's right: it's Joe Cocker!

Ukrainians don't like to smile a lot. This guy — who is some kind of Steve Fielding-type politician — is a choice specimen.


The metros are full of these ads which appears to be some kind of government program. They all feature funky young folks holding up handwritten gags. The slogan says "Laugh, Ukraine!".


Even the souvenir industry are doing their bit to change Ukrainians' dour image.


The fridge magnet is dressed in trad costume and holding a piece of pig fat — one of this country's favourite dishes.

Location:Kiev, Ukraine

Marrameko

Our model wears a Raw Cloth dress in Marrameko fabric. Ukelele by Mahalo.

Mopping up operation

Painting over the wall at the old venue for Happy Yess.

It's moving to a place around the corner where it'll fit more people.

It's a shame y'all won't get a chance to see the inside of this old place.

The end of an era that I'm glad to have had the opportunity to witness.

i'll see you're cute pet photos and raise you

Enjoying the RDL (relaxed Darwin lifestyle)

Cat + Chopin

Ben Vautier

I recently rediscovered one of my favourite art works. This banner, hung up outside the artist's own exhibition, says "Art is useless go home". I loved it so much when I saw it in high school that I wrote "Music is useless" on my bass guitar.


This is another of his works: the slogan is "The museums don't serve (for) anything". The dude just wants a tall frosty!