like my grand grandpa used to say, “sweet things never made me bitter!” :D

(from our xmas party, 2 years ago in groningen. more sweetness and nostalgie, on flickr).

you know love
causes such misery and pain
i guess i’ll never be the same
since i fell for you

oh i guess i’ll never see the light
i get the blues most everynight
since i felt for you

“I used to know this girl named Suzy Montelongo. And her brother’s name was Joe Montelongo. Joe always wanted to kill me. He sang in a band called the Rodbenders. Suzy Montelongo used to wear these angora sweaters. I’m crazy about angora sweaters. I guess it’s kind of a hang-up of mine. She had angora socks, and angora shoes. I believe she was originally *from* Angora. I don’t know where she is anymore, but every time I see an angora sweater, I think, maybe, *inside* will be Suzy Montelongo. Eh-he-he…”

mr. tom waits, in repeat mode.

mimo, directamente da holanda, na forma de mini-stroopwaffles. perfeitas para o dia cinzento de hoje. obrigado cláudia, chegaram inteiras! :)

* bonuses: design*sponge guide to online shopping, made by bloggers: part 1 and part 2. filled with link goodness and lots of interesting suggestions for different kinds of gifts (artwork, lightning, ceramics, vintage, hidden gems, etc). worth a check.

it’s been almost 2 years since our trip to schiermonnikoog, a dutch island on the northern sea.

a mix of laziness, lack of budget or decent photography shops made me lose interest in developing the film i shot in the island back then. i was curious to see the pictures, but while i still had the memory of the events i shot, and all the people with me… there was no real need to “see” them again… (i guess i’ll never understand the people that peek at the pictures when they’ve just taken them, on the backscreen of digital cameras). so i let the film stay in the shelf.

i have quite a few of these “forgotten” films. they have travelled all the way to the netherlands and back, to the states and back, and now here they are in china. they’re stored in identical canisters, with no reference to what’s in each one of them. little pandora boxes, with with unknown age or stories.

to me, photography is not about rules, big lenses and trendy bags, keeping negatives in the fridge and looking out for x-rays on the airport. it’s about fun and framing. i shoot when i feel inspired, when friends are around, when i feel like being a tourist, when there are not many cameras in the area. i develop when i have the time, the patience, or whenever i itch to discover what forgotten secrets are hiding in one of those black canisters. what about you? do you develop your films right away, or not so much? do you peek on the back screen of your digital camera? :)

more, on flickr.

* bonus: two weeks with garry winogrand, by mason resnic. garry winogrand was a prolific photographer who died on 1984, leaving a total of 12000 rolls of film that he never looked at. peculiar philosophy.

dear friends.
after six months here in portugal to wrap things up at the university, i am now, officially, an “engineer”. a pretty clueless one, career-wise, but i’m working on that bit. ideally, i would like to develop my designing skills, as i realize i still have a long way to go to get any good. i like information visualization and interface designing, but i want to explore a lot more before i choose what i really want to focus my attention on.

on a different (but related) subject, and since i’ve told it to my parents and most friends, i can give the rest of the internet the big news too: we’re moving to shanghai, me and p.
yes, shanghai. the biggest city in china, the 8th in the world, the “pearl of the orient”.
after my one year in the netherlands, and p’s 6+9 months in the netherlands and the usa, i think the “exploring bug” really got into us.
it just seems right. the right timing, the right city, the right person to hold my hand on the plane. and besides, if you don’t trust your intuition, what else do you have?

the details of the process of moving there include job hunting, a house, plane tickets and luggage allowance, visas and plenty other details that will keep us busy on the next few weeks. i’ll try to keep you posted. wish us luck! :)

on the follow-up of the previous post:

* i remember reading an(other) interview at lecool about amsterdam based artist laser 3.14 (pi), who writes sentences in containers and other temporary surfaces. i spotted a few phrases when i was there - he’s hard to miss if you get a bit away of the main streets. take a look at his huge gallery.

* which on second thoughts, remembers me of the “wall poems” in leiden.

hipolito, l’écrivain raté from amélie’s movie should have gone to the netherlands. they would have understood him. :)

explanation: sometimes, wherever i am, i pop the ibook and open a stickie to write something. my stickies are filled with waiting hours, or post-insomniac considerations of places and situations. this is one of those, probably from mid-august, as i was looking back to mid-july.

“schipol is a special airport to me. it marks the first plane landing, the first night on a foreign country, the beggining of a year filled with surprises. but despite the personal attachments, it’s still a messy place, with sound warnings against smoking on forbidden places or biking inside the airport and people from everywhere specially teenage tourists eager to get stoned on the nearest coffeeshop. if you add a big strange meeting point, tiled in red and white squares with some pictures of formula one races (correct me if i’m wrong), lots of shops with tulips and clogs, a large amount of air hostesses dressing in blue, and miles to walk, you’ll get the picture.
a month ago i was sitting by the luggage belt, waiting for my stuff, when i noticed once again the vertical display on one of the staircase wells, with its green and red led’s displaying phrases, as the letters shifted from top to bottom or vice-versa. i’d seen it before, but not long enough to read any of it.

nevertheless, i expected something like “welcome to amsterdam” or “please beware of thieves, don’t let you luggage unguarded” or even a sort of quiz of the “did you know that…?” type.
no. the messages were weird, unrelated but equally disturbing, in a funny sense. i was surprised and for a moment thought of allucinations, or someone having fun messing with the system. one of those thoughts that crosses your mind when tiredness settles in and you think you’re starting to see things. one after another, they made me more and more curious, until i got the moleskine out and started scribbling them fast.

“the mouth is interesting because it’s one of those places where the dry outside moves towards the slippery inside”.

or “sometimes you have no other choice but to watch something gruesome occur yet don’t have the option of closing your eyes, because it happens fast and enters your memory.”

or “the rich knifing victim can flip and feel like the agressor if the thinks about previledge. he can also find the cut symbolic or prophetic”.

:|

leaves you thinking, right?
i didn’t know it yet, but that was exactly the point of artist jenny holzer, who developed some sort of text-art, to be printed or exhibited in public spaces.
more of her impressive work in washington, amsterdam (schipol) or paris.