Monday, September 22, 2008
Jeff Koons has a really cool show at the Chateau de Versailles and I got to see it on my last weekend in Paris. The show itself was awesome. His art hanging in the gilded salons looked so brilliant and out of place - the contrast was mucho cool.

Now, the Chateau itself is kind of a waste of time. First of, the whole thing is really just kind of gaudy. And then, this being France, everything is extremely poorly organized. You wait in line for over an hour only to be told the Chateau closes early because of a private party which will shut off the entire thing (incidentally, the party was the official opening of the Koons show). The audioguides had the most inane commentary ever. In the Galerie des Glaces, it said something to the effect "there are 13 windows, 13 big mirrors; back in the day it was used as a main corridor for the Chateau". That's it. WTF? Nothing about the gilded panels, the sculptures, the painted ceiling, etc.

Oh well. If anything the show was cool just to hear people's reactions. "You call that art?!" and "They lost their minds!" were the mottos du jour.




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Sunday, August 31, 2008
Went and hit a couple of sights today, since the weather was so amazing (although a tad on the too hot side, which means a Métro smelling even lovelier than usual). Below are some pics from the Jardin du Luxembourg and the Grande Galerie de l'Evolution at the Natural History Museum.


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Thursday, August 21, 2008
Iceland was awesome! Here a bunch of pictures from the trip. They include the Blue Lagoon, which is a semi-artificial hot spring (created by the runoff water from a geothermal plant), a whale-watching trip (Minke whales and white-beaked dolphins), Reykjavik itself, the Gulfoss waterfall, the hot springs and geysers at Geysir, and the Thingvellir National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site that's actually the intercontinental rift between the North American tectonic plate and the EurAsian plate (you can walk from Europe to America!).

Aside from the sights, we met really awesome people. On Friday Adam, a coworker of mine who tagged along, had arranged to meet with the team that creates a world-famous video game. He had told me he would contact them to see if we could meet up to which I had said "yeah, right, they're gonna drop everything and meet us just 'cause we're nice". Well, they did :) We had an atrociously expensive dinner and all hit it off so they invited us over to a house party, after which we all went out and got wasted. I do mean wasted, kids. I got home, somehow, at 6AM, after having consumed red wine, white wine, Brennivin schnapps, dessert wine, beers and rum and cokes. I had to stay in bed the whole next day (the giant jacuzzi in the hotel came in handy!), but it was fun nonetheless!

Few things to note about Iceland:
  • It's cold, even in the Summer
  • It's fucking gorgeous
  • People are very nice but don't always speak the best of English, even though they make it look like they do
  • Everything is atrociously expensive ($9 for a beer at a pub, $20 for a martini at a semi-swanky bar)
  • Their money is cute - looks like Monopoly money
  • Their food is nothing to write home about (whale steak? really just a gamey, chewy steak)
  • They drink - a lot
  • Their hot water smell like sulfur (comes straight up from the very deep underground where it's heated by lava)
  • Their cold water tastes like Evian



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Monday, August 11, 2008
Meat-o-rama from last weekend's Market Days in Chicago. Lost of booze, lots of boys, lots of friends. Great times!!



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Saturday, August 02, 2008
Three days at the house, 3 in Porquerolles, 2 in Port Cros, and a return trip via Pampelonne's crazy concentration of giants yachts. We even saw the Fashion TV "yacht", which looked like they had rescued it from a scrapyard in Bangladesh.



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Monday, July 14, 2008
This was a photography-type of weekend. Went to the see the Annie Leibowitz show at the Maison Européene de la Photographie, and the Avedon show at the Jeu de Paume. Two of my favorite photogs in one weekend :) After the Avedon show I basically walked around and tried a few things...



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Monday, May 26, 2008
Went out this weekend with Scott and Ludovic to my favorite haunts from back in the day - les Bains Douches and la Loco. It was totally awesome, of course, and the boys were quite sexy (deep V-neck T-shirts are mandatory here, apparently). It was wild to be in those clubs again, after, oh, 15 years... La Loco, especially, was exactly as I remembered it. The barman even made a mistake on my drink and served me a Malibu and Orange, which was my drink of choice as a teen (so sickly sweet!). Ah... Memories!!


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Sunday, May 18, 2008
The stunning Promenade piece by Richard Serra at the Grand Palais. in one of the most imposing interior spaces in the city, the artist erected five 75-ton metal plates, engaging the visitor to stroll through the 14,000 sqm floor and gaze at the sun's reflections on the Cor Ten steel. Wild.




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Saturday, May 17, 2008
Sorry for the lack of posts. Here's a bunch of photos from when Josh was in town.





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Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Montmartre and a door to the Grand Palais.

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Trying out some fake tilt shift techniques with my new favorite app (Pixelmator) on a picture of Ground Zero.

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Friday, January 25, 2008
Not a whole lot of pictures, since it was freezing and I only had my small point-and-shoot, but here it is... Click the photo below to get the gallery.

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Monday, October 08, 2007


Taken last weekend while touring NY harbor with my parents. I know, the purple's a bit cheezy - I'm experimenting...

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Sunday, September 23, 2007

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Better late than never... Working on the San Francisco pictures now.

Oh, and this is Southern Decadence, so some pictures may be NSFW... ;)

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Monday, July 02, 2007
OK, so I'm a little late with my Pride pictures this year... But here they are, in all their glory, from friends itching to show their butts n' abs, peeing against building, or just smiling, to strangers baring all (notice the recurrent Roman theme this year?), old people in jockstraps (my auto-focus tried to spare me that one by not focusing properly), lesbians galore and cute dogs with sunglasses...

Oh, that's probably kinda NFSW for most people...





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Thursday, June 21, 2007
Chicago simply has too many things to do in the summer, there's no time for anything, including blogging. But fret not, dear readers, Pride is this weekend, and I will have my camera with me...

In the meantime, here are two shots I took in my hood yesterday:

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Tuesday, April 17, 2007


Max and Hugo being really, really busy...

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Thursday, April 12, 2007
Playing with my new Kick-Ass 50mm f/1.8 Canon lens. Love it!

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Saturday, April 07, 2007
Carol and I goofing off at the Newport Pier. Sigh. What I wouldn't give to be back on the beach...

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Friday, April 06, 2007
I know, I am a bad, bad blogger. But I have a good excuse: I was at the beach, getting some sun, and improving my body-surfing skills (ahem). A bunch of us rented a house in Newport Beach, literally 92 steps from the sand (we counted), for 5 days. The weather was glorious, the waves fun and safe (no deaths to report), and the Jose Cuervo plentiful.

I don't care that Orange County is Republican, boring, and void of any kind of substance (or Black people, for that matter). It's all about the BEACH!



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Sunday, March 11, 2007
Chicago gaves us a nice Spring preview this weekend so I took advantage of it to take some pictures at the Park. I know it'll probably snow again before Spring really is here, but you can feel the change in the air: Winter is coming to an end. And that, in Chicago, is music to everyone's ears.




The Park was awesome, lots of furry and feathery animals everywhere, including a squirrel that kept stalking me in the hopes of scoring some food. It was all cuter than a box of babies wrapped in puppies..

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Monday, February 19, 2007
The Eye and the Tate.


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Sunday, December 03, 2006
So I'm walking down the street today, chatting with my Mom on my cell, when these three girls wave at me. not recognizing them, I wave back, just in case. At the next crossing I catch up with them, curious. Turns out they thought I was cute and just wanted to say hi. Awww. I wish it was an everyday occurence, but that just ain't the case. They made my day..

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Sunday, November 12, 2006
Spent a wonderful weekend in DC visiting American-as-apple-pie Cub (and to celebrate the Democrats' Victory of course).

Saturday was studious (and incredibly warm - in the 70s), as we marked Veterans Day by doing all the Mall's Memorials. We started at the WWII, and then made our way around to the Vitenam, Korea, FDR, and finally the Jefferson Memorial. The FDR memorial was by far the best; its scale was very human and encouraged reflections on the words of one of America's greatest presidents. The current administration would be well advised to re-read a few of the quotes etched in the purple granit. We finished off at the Capitol, stopping short of taking V-of-victory pictures (well, I tried, but it didn't turn out too good).

That night we had dinner at an amazing Thai place, Rice, and then headed out to BeBar. The bar was very cute (an orgy of midcentury furniture + drinks - who wouldn't like that?) and I got to meet some of the cast of FHC's blog, including Thomas B. and Alex S. Nice to put a face to the names after all this time. After managing to escape the annoying drunk guy who kept chasing us around the room, we left for Cobalt (I'm afraid we're too old for that) and a McDonald's nightcap. Sunday was rainy and called for some movie watching at home and good ol' chilling before heading back out to Chicago.

All in all, a fantastic weekend with a great host, whose encyclopedic knowlegde of all things DC proved very educating.





Travel

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Monday, August 28, 2006
We spent the weekend in Marquette, MI, to visit Ben's family. Last time we had stayed at the Holiday Inn, but this time decided renting a cabin on the beach would be a lil' more fun.

They call them "camps" there, and campy they definitely are. We counted, in a house less than 1000 sqf, four different kinds of floor coverings, three different faux wood paneling flavors, 115 pieces of "art" hung on walls, and countless little "deco" items, depicting deer, trout or bears in various poses (and the requisite poster-size dreamcatcher).

Here's a couple of shots from inside the house:



The outside, thankfully, was a bit more peaceful:




And then of course, we decided to do an impromptu photo shoot...


Travel

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Monday, June 26, 2006
As usual with Pride, the fun was more on the street than on the floats. Drinking beer with friends wile watching the mostly weird, boring or just plain lame floats is a good time indeed. Of note were some of the bar floats, with cute boys writhing (I did recognize a few friends...), the, litterally, thousands of drag queens, and the buzz-kills, such as the Gay Hospice or the one for the City Clerk.

Click below for the gallery.


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Sunday, May 28, 2006
Finally some pictures from my weekend in NY last week. In order of appearance: me being a dork at the NYSE; Sara, Sarah, Grace, Eric, and myself at Cafeteria; the blond boy was not in our party, but we felt he was stalkable enough.



Pictures, Travel

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Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Playing around with PhotoBooth at the SoHo Apple Store.



For details about the weekend, the Frog's got all the details.
Travel, Life

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Saturday, April 22, 2006
Wig Party for Steph and Mar's birthdays last weekend.



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Friday, March 03, 2006
Just as I was leaving this morning our little home security webcam captured this shot. Not sure why, but I think it looks kinda cool.


Pictures

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Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Some pics from Cancun. We had such a blast. FrenchBenj the athlete even got to hone his skills at wakeboarding, and did in fact look magnificent doing so. The hotel was gorgeous and, even though most of the area is still under heavy reconstruction from Hurricane Wilma, everything was amazing. Impeccable service, heated pools, scrumptious food, a few cute locals.

Sigh. Sucks to be back in the cold...

The resort:


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Yes, I was the dumbass crouched over the pools, photographing the tiles...