Marie Antoinette 08.09.10

Melrose Arch how I love thee

Melrose arch is a living, not a way to live. It is not a lifestyle but a life we’ve lived for centuries. Melrose Arch unearths natural city living, the natural comfortable human existence.
It is nothing new, but on the brains of joburgers it’s etched as something brilliant something extra ordinary. Walking to buy a carton of milk is liberating, it’s freedom and it is the expression of Melrose arch.
MA is about all sorts, it’s about the bustling meet-your-mates-for-a-pint watering hole at the end of the curved street, next door the linger even longer lingerie store.
MA is the unexpected turn, the hidden happened-upon, the surface scratched, it is not fake, it is real to touch, to feel.
The old quarter exhibits architecture, texture, soft and hard, it is tangible, one looks up and one looks down round back and forth.it is a kaleidoscope. The eyeball is engaged in a gymnastically entwined rapturous explosion of intricacy. It’s the grainy bits, the nooks and even the grannies. The square is pedestrianised, navigable by foot, its enlarged paving-space to rest your hand upon an ice cold bev.
As I cruise northwards juggling my coins in my pocket, glancing at the gallery, the pizzeria and the europa, I feel kinda cool, kinda breezy but then..

I cross the road, I trip heavily on the chainlink barrier, tearing my stomach, ahernia never hurt this much. the edge of the jewellery store knicks me on the chin, I stumble on a Swedish Tiger, phoxyyy. the stroll is pleasant and then into the bowels of the underworld I go- well that’d be exciting. But I turn sideways to mount the moving narrow stairway, rolling rolling down. like a stale 3day old tuna sarmy I cringe, struggling to devour the experience.
The mall-its clinical white insipid colours scream to me the dentist chair. Chewing glass I’d rather do. The floor nicely smooth, Michael Jackson woulda moonwalked this journey.
Ive seen this all before, it aint the dvd I’ll rent again. Im stunned by the deep spaces, maybe 9 of them. The post boxes, are they going for an industrial look, kinda new yorky, niice ,reeeal niiice.
The glassed mall, gsus. Its ‘floating glass roof, a scene out of wills smith’s Independence Day flick, frightening
I need colour, my eyes need an explosion of things to see to explore, to trawl, to engage. my eyes need something I’ve seldom seen before. Images of bleached facials and pimply, zitty mugs, the beauty salon makes me lurch. The Hairdressers sleeper wall, great touch and now…
There are greater places to enjoy an ice cream sundae on a summery Sunday in October.
I just wanna cry at what could have been. just as I sweated through the spine riveting crack of my wisdom tooth being extracted, so I endure the pain of the journey through the ‘mall’

The little record joint, the second hand book store, the corner café, the Gucci shop and Luis Vuitton they’re all integral to a network, to a fabric of excitement. You can’t have one without the other. if you do it’s a half baked egg. Integration fosters societies, breeds networks , links people, binds relationships.

Urban art enlightens, attracts crowds and passersby. Pleasant environs, spectacles, innovation, good planning, little hubs, urban furniture, little joints attracts a lad like me, a design enthusiast and heaps of my like minded honey bees. Show me the honey. goddamit.
Woolworths you make a pretty package, you’re now the face of a precinct, funk yourself up. You’re a canvass for a dream art work, a kentridge, a preller, or dumile feni sketch, be bold be brazen, grab the cherries.
MA is an innovation in SA, it’s a hub for flash. MA is a launch pad, it’s a pandoras box for innovation, for showcasing, for educating-lets scratch the surface.

The cultured crowd frown because there is nothing enticing, nothing to grip them by the brain stem and drag them from the bedraggled cracked beer bottled melville. give them an open art exhibition, a fractal of grey matter and they will swarm like fat bastards to a shmorgasbord. Mary Antoinette has an art gallery,’ ‘is there anybody out there’, what was pink Floyd thinking. Expose the gallery, is it on my monthly gallery trawl, I don’t think so.

MA is a destination, not a one stop mosey on shop.
Its aimed at the high heeled,but they can only purchase so many Shermans.
Im the guy, the regular guy the architect, the trendy tshirt wearing sneaker pimp that needs a local, a pint in a hand and an opportunity to say hi to spidermans sweet mary jane.
I can buy an olive or a pickle from a jar, lets innovate. we aint a mall, we aint a suburban dive, we’re a living sprawling amoeba, integrated innovative, pedestrianised living working playing entity that wants to engage to be inclusive.
The trump card , the royal flush-the merlose arch address no longer wins bets, its real action that is needed.-dancing in the square, architecture pavilions, cutting edge innovative design, entice me and my whacky advertising architecturing mates to spend time, to tread foot.

Why given the platform, the canvass to be outrageous, courageous, ballsy do we go on and create a regular sponge cake.
Show us your balls caster, show uuuuusss

Rock, paper, scissors 18.01.09

Swimming in the goo that surrounds my brain, the boat of my thoughts harboured the idea of someday sitting on the saddle and churning the peddles of a bicycle. I had this plumbers blockade telling me it’d never happen. but then my bingo numbers came up while living on the Island. it was fire engine red, as quick as an insane Bolt and 70 squids. it livened me up to the joys of two wheels, of having the cold icey wind cut through my hair. it replaced my imaginary friend and together we rode into the sunset.
but then i flogged in for 80 quid, made me a quick buck and bought a tube of Mcvities biscuits.

After returning to jozi, my boss chewed my ear urging me to saddle up. it was time. i harvested my nuts, sent an electronic transfer and all of a sudden I had this beast in the back seat of my car. Wheels rugged for off road, the frame matt silver- indiscretely welded together to give it the AArrghh effect, the brakes holding anchor at the gentlest of clutches, the shocks turning this ride into a moon walk. these great components all came together to create a machine the great Jackie ickx wouldn’t recognise.
Yes the afrikaaners strolled in to the hinterland to start the great city of jozi, but this my friends is the true Great TREK

It was off to the spruit on a bright sunnyside up Sunday.my padded shorts clinging to me, the paddding reminding me of days on the beach when my trunks were full of sand.
We were going off road, a narrow beaten path tracked its lengthy way mimicking the snaking river path. the flora bushy from the nights rain, the fauna, the rat on a stick.
i was really shyte on a bike, but i figured how hard could it really be. I sat behind my posse peddling, mimicking their every movement , the long wet grass slapping me around, the air of crushed eucalyptus billowing in my flared nostrils, snot cascading from my snout dribbling to a fine pool at the top of my lip, my heart screaming to be emancpiated from its rib cage, my eyes honed, zeroed in on the front mans movements, but then like the smoked salmon at a shmorgasbord, they were gone amongst the trees, vapourised/scotty -beamed up.
i was alone,my thoughts, my friend. all of a sudden the theme music raced,i took no notice. there in the clearing, a rock the size of Gibralatar lurched up at me. there was no retreating now, i was 300 AARRGG. my rubbered tyres attemptin a bite at the rock, rock paper scissors it was a no brainer. the rock gripping and flinging my tire which is connected to the shocks which is connected to the frame which is connected to the handle bars which is connected to ,well, me. sent me and my components on a stairway to heaven, but the return home was a horoshima fallout. I was over my handle bars flyin through the air like a pre blazing zeppelin staring down into the cavernous precipice and waiting for the rock bed to knock me out. My landing was made for tv. my arms were my airbags. the slow motion button released. i was back in real time and hurting like a hammered thumb.
'nah im fine, ill ride through the treachourous pain.' I got back on my chariot,whipped my legs into action and charlton hestoned my way on.
this was no march into the sunset but rather a treacherous road to ammarillo.

My left elbow as able as a beached ship was sent to the clinic, the blood pressure reading extracted in LED from the velcro wrapped around my arm, my bp good enough to 'keep me moving'
I had xrays, my arm laid out on the chilled stainless steel gurney,im sure dead bodies had shared this same experience as my arm. miss Xray nukes my limp panelled elbow. tzdt dzzt and there before my very eyes I could see in inside myself, I could see the bones that stretch my skin, that give me shape and form. it was a truely outer bodyily experience. and there too was the hairline crack, an addict would be proud of.

apart from eating a 3 day over expired yoghurt, im proud to say im truelly extreme.

yours truelly on a fine autumnal eve,
the russian bear hunter, master swordsman and soon to be proud donator of his name to a new series of gut splitting leatherman tools

coolio iglesias 16.10.08

so last night i had a wet dream, i was doing lengths in the pool at the gym, but my arms weren't moving so lekker. i didnt drown, but i didnt take 8 gold medals either.

after very very lil sleep and rushin around africa like a seedless pomegranate i awoke to see the world through a china mans eyes -half closed and watery. i flew in to Japan after a mammoth flight from jozi to dubai(what a dump) and then swiftly onto Kensai Airport, Osaka. i rolled my knuckles over my eyeballs, the tears washed the past away and i set my red streaked adidas
onto the tarmac of the future. after a fashion shoot and having been inked i moseyed on through passport control into a new world, a cultural shock to my linux system.

Japan was me detaching me from the velcro of familiarity. as neil armstrong on a bicyle in a space suit in the tour de france would feel,with chafed legs and calloused hands, well that was me. phew japan was a foreign movie and there were no subtitles to decipher what the hell was going on. i never handled a knife or fork for 2 weeks, never slept more than 2 feet off the ground, never ate anything harder than a jelly baby and never spoke more than 2 words of grade two english. trying to harpoon my food with a wooden spear was a game i struggled with. trying sign language without giving the middle finger was hard, real hard.before japan, the most japanese characters id seen was on some over sized bird on the beach in cape town before the war. my vocabulary extended from konichiwa to bruce lee. short and concise like the oxford dictionary. Going to the bog left me with 2 choices, the squatter or the contraption that was straight outta Robotech with fully functioning seat warmer, fountain spray and blow dry. It was a no brainer

from osaka to tokyo and a whole stash between i blazed a trail.

like a cape town bergie without his two front teeth to box wine i chugged the city of Osaka. man i punished it hard, the residue spilling from my mouth down my chin, it was thirst quenching, moist to my dry mouth, washing away the desert that is joburg. i unloaded my back pack in a wee 5 storey, jammed between two buildings.i nearly didnt see it. the door to my room smaller than me but larger than a hobbits.a pair of blue granny styled slippers sat neatly perpendicular to the tiny sunken lobby of the room.my room as deep as the 1970's long jump world record and as wide as an israeli gherkin (the vegetable that is). my bed neat as an ironed sheet and the vhs
ready for action. i unpacked my spongey eyeballs, the ones that soak up stuff,tied my sneaker
laces and headed out into this foreign world.

Osaka is a city careering in 3 dimensions-it swoops below ground, glides along the ground, hovers above ground, beams you 173 meters up and drops you back to earth at a rate of a blitz. the city streets are a book stack with spines jammed, and fudged into place-it'd be a right royal task to squeeze your finger between two buildings. as my eyes caressed the stores, the shops, and the bars,the labels emblazoned upon the spines emerged as pure design pure excitement, pure eclecticism.

rolling my eyeballs like a township kid with a tire and two sticks, i stubbed my toe on Americamura Americamura, its a shaken bottle of coca cola waiting to be uncapped. it's osakas camden town, wet streets, throbbing stores, outrageous clothing, girls in teeny red tartan, white buttoned shirts and sculpted, caressed moulded hair. guys in stove pipes, elvin path beaters and Thriller jackets, hair architecturally cut, grafted and set. a wave of design, an insight into the future.if you wanna see the edge cut, bleed americamura.

From city to city i rode shot gun on the shinkansen. The shinkansen, the bullet train is flaming sambuca fast. as the train rolls into the station its nose a grave yard for bloodied splattered insects that weren't quick off the mark. Every take off and every landing is a sight one ought to capture albeit, a blurred moment.

a day out of osaka, and it had to be Kobe, the port, Japans largest. the earthquake shattered city, resurrected to once again walk the seas. when Kobe was ruptured, japans economy faltered, the next so many years were end of the month salticrax. but she emerged, she grew back, the lizards tail always does. i hugged the coast as i strolled the waterfront, i made my way uphill to find a treasure of swooping roads, new and old japanese, white buildings, cobbled streets and bouganvillea.I was lured to the cable cars, pondering my fear of heights, my vertigo, I dropped my 1000 yen and boarded ship. It was a sweaty escapade I knew id hate. I let my camera lensbe my eyeballs as I looked down upon my sneakers.back on earth, my pits a sweaty coalmine and my back drenched like in hollywood movies. my knees trembling, i found a bench, i cried into my
sushi or was it just the wasabi.

In a square box, sat my 12 upright uniformed soldiers,straight as a set square, each enwrapped in a rice jacket, hugging a burst of pink salmon, itching, crying for a salty gush of soy and a nose tingling whip of algae green wasabi. I sat upon the bench, as ungenteel as mr miyagi and handling the sticks like a claw handed invalid, I stabbed, drowned and crushed the sushi between my teeth. It was nice, real nice
kobe was a shoppers dream, with her tiny meandering back alley streets harbouring clothing gems and itsy trinkets, gaming cafes and bordellos. her high street fashion attracted the finest, it was beautiful. i left kobe, had me a shower, dropped a cupla yens for a can oh green tea and tucked me into bed.

Kyoto-imagine a place where the apples are the size of footballs and the grapes the size of swollen testicles. i saw it with my very own eye balls. a temple, a cathedral, precision carved out of timbers , there's one for every day of the year-burnt incences, a buddha or two, red lanterns and timber flops. theyre the meat between the high risers. Kyoto is a bellowing city, it’s an outdoor museum tracing japan's history centuries back. Here I could caress the long gone past of a mighty nation.my hands were calloused. i set my eyeballs on a gold clad temple perched in the middle of a lake, it was indeed a treat, but the experience was a henry ford production line. i got my photo, you bet ya. I needed silence, contemplation time. I needed to wrest my wary feet from the call of the lengthy tarmac. i made a meal of a day and went to visit tadao ando's Asahi art gallery, there was no beer but Monets lillies. the concrete gallery sits upon a hilltop within a range of mountains, barry peppered by maple trees squeezing hard, turning red in the autumnal breeze, bamboo forests, vertical, the shoots thick and tall-a chinese torturers dream, khoi ponds and bonsai trees.this day was a welcome retreat and a piece of architecture i kinda said, 'oh well' to.

kyoto had excruciating moments. finding things i wanted to see became torturous.mapping here is so advanced, me with my hand sketch directions smacked of using a telephone book in the age of mobile phones.i was directionless, an untravelled rat in a maze. going 15 riotous rounds with the festering nightmare of heaves of tourists flashing lights and constant movement, i was beaten into submission. i needed quiet time, time off the beaten tarmac. i rapidly made tracks for
Yokohama

Yokohama, we know it as a tire. i knew it as a city harbouring an architectural master piece-the Yokohama Port Terminal it was a quieter retreat from the tourist mad frenzy that kyoto is. my
hostel was in an area set aside for ex war vets and looneys. it was zombied freaks in hospital gowns with mobile drips cruising the streets picking up litter that gave me the heebeegeeebees. daily i found myself just running as fast as i could to my hostel door,my hands shakin as i tried to force the key into the hole.i was in a horror movie and i wasnt loving it. apart from that, yokohama was rather tasty. i made a blazing trail for the Terminal. a port designed by Foreign office Architects. a piece of urban landscaping fullly functional for sea traffic. a place of leisure and contemplation- lovers licking ice creams, couples getting married, picnics on the grassy knoll and strollers strolling.ah the sea breeze and blue skies. It was a total retreat from the last three cities i'd licked.

jumble up the letters of Kyoto and you'll find me in Tokyo shawowee, this sprawling megalopolis was more fortune cookie than i could ever get my gnashers around. my eye balls had an outer body experience, dragging themselves around corners along clean streets. Tokyo is a colour
explosion in your brain . the streets jingle as an 80's pop music video, with the vending machines
whistling, and the traffic lights tinkling, the pachinko halls chingling, and the neon signposts flashing. tokyo is a sensual shmorgasboard, overwhelmingly carazy, violently illuminating. as an architect itll make you tremble at your knees, lay down in the foetal position with your large thumb in your mouth. it could either inspire or crush your wee lil soul. Ginza is everything youve never seen, its a faberge egged bedecked in the jewels of architectural mastery.my glazed eyes reflected the tree inspired Tod's, Mikimoto's paper cut out building, de beers sexily mangled extrusion,a crystalline Dior, an irridiscent ghost at night, simply mesmerizing and ofcourse prada's bubble wrapped magnifico.this building stripped me of any notion that anything is unachievable. with its bubble wrap skin and liquid innards it was gob smackingly orgasmic.in my worn jeans and scuffed boots i was a most welcome visitor to the Prada store. 'Diesel store in Sandton, suck my d*ck, you dont even know what exclusivity is.' By day the city appeared gray by night the werewolf begins to mutate, it becomes aggressively vibrant, its skinny back ruptures to sprout new features, its teeth reveal edgy crevices. as i walked the nights streets the pachinko halls enveloped my senses. 'Since i was a young boy i played the silver ball, from Soho down to Brighton i musta played them all, but i aint seen nothing like it...these japs, they sure play a mean silver ball.'
ching ching, theyre going nuts for it


i headed out to mount fuji, together with a bunch of all sorts germans and a frog. We all thought it was up the famed volcano we were to head to singe our nostril hairs, but alas one of the lasses had other ideas. We spent the day at the hotwater springs at the base of the mountain. Ah it was all I needed to rejuvenate my noodle hammered body. I turned into a raisin in the lavender scented hot bath, untied my knots in the jet streams of the Jacuzzi, sweated a river in the sweet smelling sauna, and had my toes nibbled upon by ravenous doctor fish.i got back to Tokyo and slaughtered a couple of premium Asahi beer. ah i was relaxed as as sloppy joe .

rappongi, you gotta see it. rappongi is beluga caviar. this district is lacquered in the finest sheen, well thats after i drooled all over it.
it's beautifully designed. its street furniture, garden paths, galleries, wide pavements, grassy contemplation spaces, babbling brooks and shopping malls expressed to me a city respecting its citizens.
i laid tread upon the paths of ueno and her galleries, museums, street shopping and pachinko halls, i idled over the masses of pedestrians at shinjuku, i was inebriated over hentai porn, i got to shlurp my rhaman noodles and drink straight from the bowl. i traveled sky high on the monorail swooping the city way above ground. i gasped at vertical parking lots, and manga comics. i got to be a spaceman in an alien world

Japan, wham bang apricot jam. it was overwhelming and absolutely foreign.it was infuriating and excruciating, it was beyond my senses. it was another world, it was alien. it was the epitome of human advancement, the pinnacle of evolution. but like my last rolo, id never have given it up.

Its been a while my furry friends, hope your eyeballs enjoyed.
this email was not sent from my blackberry, cos i ate it with my granola this morn. it was sent from my pee cee.
take it easy
the russian bear hunter