I'll also be taking that big green statue back. (12:57pm)

All right, that's it, the cat's been away for too long and the mice are binge drinking, breakdancing, LARPing, et cetera, so I'm coming back over there to straighten you all out. (Actually, I have a wedding to attend and a housewarming party and some work to do.) Much like Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall, I'm coming to America! I'll be in the United Snakes from June 19th to all the way 'til July 14th. I'll be staying in New Jersey and Philadelphia with assorted good friends, and also spending a week at the shore. Coincidentally, there is a decent chance my roommate Alexis will be playing a few gigs in New York with the Dead Sexy Inc around the same time, so some of you might get to meet him in NYC or Philly or Wildwood. I expect to be super busy with work and social engagements throughout my stay in any case; my calendar is already quickly filling up. I'll try to do an everyone's-invited thing at Tattooed Mom's or some other bar in Philly like the last few times I was in town; that's worked out nicely so far. More details on all of this as things come together. See you soon-ish, America!

I'll be bringing an empty suitcase to fill with American hairspray.

Mad Ape Den: Zig, Tom, et al (7:49pm)

We are seriously nerding it up bigtime today over in the brand new Mad Ape Den community, founded by my friend Ben after I linked up a few of his brilliant M.A.D. efforts in my post the other day. Today has somehow accidentally turned into David Bowie day over there! I encourage you to join and participate!

P.S. Please donate to Ben's bike ride for MS! Well, technically, it's against MS, but you know what I mean.

Un peu narcisiste (9:16am)

For a few years now, I've had a feature on the About Me page of my website where random photos of me are displayed each time the page is loaded. (It's the ghetto-est web wizardry of all time; I just name the images numerically and have a couple lines of javascript that call a random number from 1 to x and tack ".jpg" on the end.) I started out with maybe twenty pictures, and I add a few more from time to time whenever someone (usually me!) takes an especially flattering or glamorous or interesting or funny picture of me. It's really indefensibly vain of me, but it's fun.

Today I added the 100th picture of me to the random rotation. Balloons with my  face  abs on them fell out of the ceiling and everything.

I keep a hidden page with all the pictures together on it, just to keep track all of them. It's a weird walk down vanity lane, mostly chronomologicamable, sometimes not, with many changing hairstyles and hair colors, questionable fashion statements, exotic locales, inexplicable circumstances and behaviors, et cetera. For me it's mostly just a heartbreaking look at all the sunglasses I've lost or broken over the years. Anyway, the page with all one hundred pictures together is here, if you'd like to see. Like that weepy Hindenburg announcer guy said, "Oh, the huge vanity..."

I wouldn't be surprised if Johnny Cash announces a tour too. (5:33pm)

I saw Nick Cave with Marjorie a couple weeks ago, and then my friend Courtney scored us tickets to see Leonard Cohen in Nice this summer! Nice is going to be kind of inconvenient, but seeing Leonard Cohen is totally a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity so I'm going to make it happen; I'd regret it forever if I didn't.

And now I learn that Tom Waits is also going on tour this summer for the first time in a million years, and European dates are going to be announced soon! Good heavens. This here press conference is fantastic and very much worth watching:

That makes three of my favorite singers, two of whom I've never seen before, and I definitely would've lost a lot of money on a bet that I would never get the chance. Instead, I'll lose a lot of money buying tickets on eBay and taking a train to who-knows-where. I say this because Leonard Cohen isn't playing in Paris, which is somewhat perplexing, and that makes me think it's very possible Tom Waits won't either; I don't think he's very well-known in France at all. I know he was huge in Germany in the seventies and eightes (huge in relative Tom Waits terms, I mean) so it's very possible I'll end up hopping over there to see him, which would suit me just fine. Or maybe I'll get lucky and he'll play Paris and he can crash on my couch. Hell, if it's good enough for Ladyfingers, the Dead Sexy Inc, et cetera, I imagine it's good enough for him.

BensMSRide.com (3:07pm)

My best friend in the whole world, Ben Barnett, is riding his bicycle many dozens of miles along the Jersey shore in a couple weeks in order to raise money for Multiple Sclerosis research. He's been performing this death-defying feat every year for a long time now and he's raised something like fifty zillion dollars so far. MS hates Ben so bad.

If you know Ben, then you already know he's the best guy in the world and I'm sure you'll happily donate to his ride if you can, just based on this fact! If you don't know Ben, I encourage you to read his astounding rewritings of the books of Genesis and Exodus (including the Ten Commandments) in Mad Ape Den (i.e. using only words containing three letters or less). Surely nerdery of this caliber is worth a couple bucks, no?

Please donate to Ben's ride and fight MS! I got the guy a domain name and everything.

Un peu maladroit (10:06am)

I own very few things. I try to own as few things as possible. The only things of any value that I own are my laptop and my guitar. The only things I have any sense of attachment to are my laptop and my guitar. The only breakable things I have are my laptop and my guitar. The only things I'm ever afraid of dropping are my laptop and my guitar.

Today I dropped my guitar on my laptop!

Adam and the Ants — Stand and Deliver (5:00pm)

This video may be the best thing that happens to you today, even if you're already having the best day of your life.

The indignity of fitness (2:10pm)

I've been going running in hilly Montmartre every other day or so for a few weeks now. I hadn't been running at all since last summer in New Jersey when I hurt my knee so bad I had to stop for a few months (which turned into all of autumn and winter). The weather in Paris is finally absolutely amazing, and I love being outside and feeling like I'm not being lazy and old and fat.

The only thing I hate about going running is wearing normal-people clothes.

Here's me stretching before running, with no product in my hair and sporting the least-terrible of all the terrible sneakers and terrible gym clothes available down the street at Tati (basically France's K-Mart). Not shown: tiny orange iPod chock full of Marilyn Manson and Iggy Pop. You can see how the dead animals on the wall are so disgusted with my attire they can't even ( look at me. ) This is my price for being in shape.


And here are a couple pictures I took in my Metro station the other day ( that didn't come out great but so what... )

Ça Plane Pour Moi (2:55pm)

• The other day I got called Plastic Bertrand for the second time in my life! This time it was some skater kids near the Parc de Bercy. (The first time was by a crazy guy almost three years ago.) Amazingly and much to my delight, no one has called me Sting or Billy Idol in the whole time I've been back in France. Bonus: Here's my roommate Alexis' band, The Dead Sexy Inc, covering Ça Plane Pour Moi with Askan.
  
  
• I was at the home of three French sisters over the weekend (the place with the rats), and one of them had left a funny/mean message as the desktop wallpaper of the communal computer; a short French expression that I didn't recognize. I asked what the words meant exactly, and the youngest sister ran to check in a French/English dictionary in her bedroom. She then hollered from the other room, "ARE - YOU - WANT - CANNONBALL?!"
  
  
• I have four identical, evenly spaced, deep scratches on my hip, like someone stabbed me with a large fork or like I was bitten by a small dinosaur, and I have absolutely no idea where they came from. I've been trying to figure it out all day. Weirdly, I had a dream last night about swimming in shark-infested waters. (I think the scratches might actually be from my iPod when I was running yesterday.)
  
  
• Which celebrities do you share your birthday with? I knew mine was the same as Weird Al's and Johnny Carson's. But Ben e-mailed me last night to inform me of the following:

  Forgive me if you already know this, but in all of the times that you see a list of celebrities with the same birthday as you, did you ever see The Earth on the list?
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ussher_chronology

  Whoa.
  
  

Absurdité (9:04pm)

There are many brief moments in my existence where I stop for a second to appreciate the fact that my life is fantastic and absurd. The latest was:

Very very late Saturday night, post-picnic, unbelievably drunk, alone in an unfamiliar bedroom, trying to feed someone's pet rats for them because they asked me to, dropping the container of rat food all over the floor and scrambling to pick it all up while making as little noise as possible, as the rats strain against the bars of their cage and pretty much obviously laugh at me. The room is spinning and I'm on my hands and knees picking up rat food one piece at a time amongst clothing and other junk on the floor, barely able to contain my laughter. It seems like a moment ago I was a kid working at the mall in New Jersey and suddenly I'm old and in France and can't hold my head straight and there are French rats squeaking at me.

I would like to hear your absurd moments too; the situations that seemed so natural as you were getting into them, but then you suddenly wonder how on earth you ended up there.

The Sexiest Barbecue Of All Time (11:49am)

This is how we barbecue in France.

My roommate Lada knocked on my bedroom door Saturday morning to invite me a barbecue outside Paris in the not-quite-countryside, not-quite-suburbs, at the beautiful summer home of our friend Lisa...

( A feast for the eyes; vanity, food, and the Loch Ness Monster... )

Carly and me (12:23pm)

Me and my friend Carly


Me and my friend Coffee

Carly's mom is visiting her in Paris, so I took the two of them on a brief tour of Pigalle and Montmartre the other day. Carly has some more pictures from their visit to my neighborhood — and some much more interesting pictures from their time in Rome and Venice (sans moi, of course) — here. But anyway, the above photos are from when we stopped for coffee at a cafe on the Rues des Abbesses, a stone's throw from Van Gogh's apartment.

I never drank coffee in my life 'til about six months ago. Okay, well, that's not exactly accurate; I was never a coffee drinker 'til about six months ago. I had a sip of my mom's coffee once when I was about ten years old and totally freaked out at how gross it was. It tasted like getting punched in the spine. I vowed never to drink coffee again.

Fast forward about twenty years and I'm in Bosnia in August 2006. Normally I always drink tea to wake up in the morning, but every time I ordered tea in Sarajevo I was served some sort of bright red herbal tea without caffeine*. Turns out black tea is not at all popular and therefore non-existent (or at least somewhat rare) in that region. So I started drinking Bosnian coffee in the morning, which is a pretty neat experience. It's super strong and there's a semi-elaborate ritual to preparing/serving/drinking it. And best of all, it comes with candy! So I got used to coffee in Bosnia and drank it every day for the month or so that I was in the Balkans, but then I stopped drinking it when I returned to France.

Then I went back to America for the better part of a year, and then returned to France last year. For some reason I decided to start drinking normal French coffee this time, part of an effort to try to get used to more typical French stuff and let go of some of my American habits (although I suppose drinking tea is actually a very very English habit; no idea how that happened). I actually like coffee now, and that's great as I'm always happy to acquire a new taste and thereby expand the realm of things I enjoy. Wine was easy, coffee not too bad. Absinthe, now, that's been a tough one.


* Fun fact: The French call the stimulant in coffee (café) caféine and in tea (thé) it's théine. I have no idea why they make this distinction and we don't. Note: It does not follow that the stimulant in Coca-Cola is cocaine. Not these days, anyway.

Cue the Silver Shamrock song... (4:14pm)

May 1st always means one thing to me: we're halfway to Halloween!

"Ian Fraiser Kilmister dit Lemmy Kilmister est un bassiste et chanteur de heavy metal." (5:10pm)

Lada and I were discussing various rockers this afternoon and got into a debate about Lemmy's age. Lada ran to fr.wikipedia.org to check (turns out he's 62) and then I heard her cracking up, and she yelled to me that there was something I had to see. She insisted that I post this on my LiveJournal, which she complains has become totally boring:

Selon Lemmy, un jour où il se baladait dans les rues de Los Angeles, il croisa une femme qui était en train de se faire enlever dans une camionnette sous la menace d'un pistolet. Lemmy accourut, désarma l'homme à l'intérieur et lui dit juste "fuck off!".

That is to say...

According to Lemmy, one day while strolling the streets of Los Angeles, he happened upon a woman who was in the process of being forced into a van at gunpoint. Lemmy ran, disarmed the man inside, and simply said "Fuck off!"

Action like that will turn any blog into a heart-pounding thriller. Lada and I are both absolutely enchanted by the fact that Lemmy simply said "Fuck off!" Anyway, wow, imagine being saved by Lemmy! Talk about out of the frying pan and into the fire.

French lessons, Nick Cave concert, et cetera (11:35am)

Two very important things I learned last night (completely unrelated to the Nick Cave concert):

1. The French don't have the Tooth Fairy, they have "the little mouse." Otherwise, it's the same exact procedure here inre: tooth, pillow, cash. I still have no idea why a fairy or a mouse would want little kids' teeth.
   
   
2. French cats only have seven lives, as opposed to nine lives for cats in the States. GOD BLESS AMERICA!

Anyhow, The Nick Cave show was great! Concert recaps are boring so I'll skip it for the most part. It was an amazing night, and I was no more than twenty feet from Dr. Cave for the whole show. He played a lot of guitar, surprisingly, and they mostly focused on faster, rocking, noisy songs. I usually prefer the sad/quiet/slow stuff, but it was okay, I was in the mood to rock. Papa Won't Leave You Henry was probably the hightlight of the night for me; they tore the house down with that one. Mick Harvey looks (more than ever) like somebody's dad hanging out with all these creepy rockers. And I miss Blixa. And Warren Ellis is downright amazing. Okay, that's enough.

Les Égouts de Paris (3:10pm)

My friend Andrea is an American student who's finishing up her time in Paris in a month or two, so she's made a project recently of taking in a bunch of Paris sights before she heads home, and she's been kind enough to invite me along for a lot of stuff. Hence our mostly-pointless trip to La Defense last week, wherein we were rewarded with a giant thumb. Yesterday, I joined Andrea for a tour of Le Musée des Égouts de Paris — that is, The Paris Sewer Museum.

Manning Leonard Krull (left), Jean Valjean.
Here's me, either just before or just after throwing the devil horns; the Paris sewers have never rocked harder than when we two glamorous Americans were down there. Something I should have thought of: the sewers are maybe not the best place for a germaphobe like me. My roommate Lada made fun of me before I went out yesterday, "You are wearing a suit and tie to the sewers?" Hey, it's all part of the plan.

It turns out the sewer tour winds around under Paris and spits you out in right in front of the ( Eiffel Tower... )

(Next to) last post about this guy for a long time, I promise (9:08am)

I woke up at five o'clock this morning and couldn't get back to sleep.

It might be because Marjorie and I are going to see Nick Cave tonight oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god.

(What on earth am I going to wear?)

(12:12pm)

Whenever I die, however I die, I hope it's in such a way that the officer who arrives on the scene has no idea how to call it in.

THINGS I WOULD LIKE TO UN-SEE PART ONE (6:25pm)

GOD IN HEAVEN, THOSE EYES, THOSE EYES



Thanks(?), okaree.

La Defense (6:15pm)

My friend Andrea and I took the Metro waaay over to La Defense today, basically just to enjoy the gorgeous weather and to see what they got over there.

What they got over there is a ( giant thumb. )