characters of my new novel

I spent the last 3 wonderfully hectic days with Mark Edward Harris and his people. This is what I think of them-- I'll start the gossip with the youngest person in this crowd.

Océan Spiess-- cutest boy I've ever met! He shared his room with me the last 2 nights when the metro strike kept me from going home. He celebrated his 5th birthday yesterday. He's well-behaved and mature (other than his favorite conversation being of poop! ha!)

Laurent Spiess-- Océan's dad, whom I didn't think much of him the first time we met--he was simply Nahoko's husband. But yesterday morning, he really impressed me and I don't think he even knew it. He's the best dad I've ever met (other than my own of course), besides his day-to-day parenting methods, it's really special when he's traveling for work: he makes Océan a video for everyday that he's gone, and sometimes hides treasures around the house and gives clues to those treasures on those videos; so everyday, Océan would be able to see his dad on screen.

Nahoko Spiess-- I adore this woman! well I already knew that before, but now even more than before after having chatted for hours last night. [content of conversation not to be disclosed, wink wink]. she just landed an ad (I think) job on tuesday--yay!!

Kayshonne-- Nahoko's muse, she's the model in the last picture in this blog from september: http://cherpar.blogspot.com/2007/09/my-other-career.html She seems very creative herself. I wish I had a chance to talk to her more, but we had a large table and she sat far away.

Romain-- super friendly; has ghetto-ish American accent; has family in Morocco (yay!); business partner of Kayshonne's boyfriend; sat too far away from me, but hopefully I'll make it to his birthday this friday.

Tatsuki Takino-- Kayshonne's fashion designer boyfriend, whom I did sit next to and had a chance to talk to. He blew me away as soon as he started talking. He's Japanese French, spent the last 14 years in France and has a British accent (when speaking English). Oh AND he's friends with Daisuke Takahashi, subject of my last blog in October.
I learned from him: "thank you" in Japanese, "arigato" came from "obrigado"--who would've thought!! and many such language-culture-history links.
also learned: you don't say the subject in Japanese!! so "I love you" "he loves you" "do you love me?" "do you love her?"... are all the same sentence but said in a different tone! The last of the above created a most awkward silence during which I should've said "of course! everyone in the world is in love with me! it's to be expected!"; but with all hope of comic relief resting upon my shoulders, I only managed "err...awkward turtle" which Mark turned into a political debate over the feelings of turtles being called awkward. I feel so verbally inferior amongst these masters of the rhetoric.

Mark Edward Harris-- He was one of my favorite teachers at Art Center; is an AHMYCING photographer; and is a wonderful person. He is so passionate about life and really believes that everything is attainable for the tireless. I have nothing but the greatest admiration for him. Although sometimes I wish he wouldn't confuse Nahoko so much with all his joking around!

eating more than an american

While busy feeling guilty about eating at midnight instead of sleeping, I observed some packages from Amaury's after-dinner snack:

1 wedge of comté(cheese, almost 1LB (375g))
5 yoplait yogurts
1 box of Special K Apple Crumble
1 large bottle (1.5 liter) Coke Light Lime
1/2 loaf of chocolate walnut cake
1 package of Krab (fake crab) sticks with cream center (350g, still almost 1LB)
these packages were sealed in this morning, and are things that Sabine and Ariane never eat.

No wonder Ariane never eats any produce!

Now I feel worse about being in the kitchen, because I just wasted time doing this instead of eating my carrot and humous (french pronunciation: oo-moo-ce) so i could go to sleep.

EXPENSIVE FLEAS

I went to the very famous flea market today at Porte de Clignancourt; for the size of it, it should be called a flea city!

The clothing of course, was mostly crap, I didn't expect otherwise, but there were a couple of stores with the skirt/pants that I wanted (the ones with the crotch on the floor) but they were 50 euros, and I can't buy unnecessary clothing for $75 right now, I'd rather buy a book.

The section of the flea city that I fell in love with, which I didn't expect at all, was the antique section. I never even knew that I had an weakness for antiques and I wanted everything in every store! fortunately, I'm poor enough that I don't even have the price of any one object in my french bank account, so I couldn't commit any rash acts of acquisition.

Newly roused desires aside, I could write a novel on those; I've been searching for the perfect cardholder and chainmaille purse since I was in NY, and today, I saw THE purse of my dreams: hallmarked-sterling 945-ruby clasps-fine maille-ornate frame-perfect in every aspect except the price tag: 950 euros. I went back to the store 4 times! the proprietress was nice enough to take it out of the case and let me examine the hallmark with a loupe even though I wasn't going to come home with it. I took a picture of it on my cellphone. I also came across quite a few cigarette holders that I wanted to use as a cardholder. They ranged from 200-500 euros. yea my budget for a cardholder is 10% that.

I wish I were an antique dealer, then I could buy all these things without feeling guilty.

forecast: LIGHT SNOW

AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! according to weather.com, it is currently 36 deg. Farh; feels like 27; light snow! althought it's actually currently raining, not snowing, it's means that Sabine and Amaury are right! there should be snow this year because it's only november and already freezing! YAY!!! I saw frost for the first time the day before yesterday, it was like someone took a can of glitter graffiti and sprayed it all over the lawns and cars and rooftops.
lawn chair

lawn chair detail

looking out of my front door

car in front of my house

a bamboo leaf in my yard

my kids

It's so horrible and selfish of me to feel a slight tinge of pleasure when I see Juliette cry in other people's arms and smile when I take her.

No matter what I tell her, she still thinks my hand is food. But then so is everything else in the world.

She likes having her feet in the air.

Ariane has the worst ADD I've ever seen. She can never do one thing or talk about one subject for more than 1 whole minute.

Ariane hides Kinderbars in her drawer so that 1) her dad doesn't eat them, 2) she can eat them while we do yoga.

Yes, Ariane is cross-eyed all the time. except when I'm not taking pictures.

model language

I just realized a technical difficulty with my photoshoot tomorrow.....(other than the fact that nothing really is working)
--I'd already decided to talk in French and only in French. so how am I going to direct my model?? how will I direct models in the future???
ugh... and my french friend Van is helping me with the shoot, and I'd already denounced all use of English with him, and if i talk to the model in English, that's going to loosen our French Only Pact, which was made yesterday and already broken today, no need to break it further tomorrow.

Daisuke Takahashi

he's AHMAICING! coolest skater of the moment, if not ever!
i wish things were as exciting on the ladies side! i guess we'll just have to wait until caroline and mirai grow up.

I quit dancing--I drum now!

aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!!!!!! so excited i no longer know english or french! nor even remember that i'm hungry! i got my darbouka/doumbek/tabla/thing!! got up at 6:30 am so i could go to gare St. Lazare to meet the ebay guy who sold it to me. and the entire way back on the train, my fingers were turning purple from their yearning to start playing it. but its a bit moist right now, so i need to wait a few seconds for the top to dry and get more taught.
... now if only i knew how to play it.

--------------
2.5 hours later
grrrr!! I can't play a clean KA no matter what I do!! if I don't stop and take a nap now, I'll be remembered as "the girl who used to have a middle finger and a ring finger on her left hand until she decided to become a tabla player"

--------------
14 minutes more
ugh......right hand hurts from the TEKs, which sounds half ok, but the KA die KA! I think it's louder from my palm slapping the rim than my finger tapping it.
on the other hand (hehe) my DOUM sounds good! and the PA sounds ok when I remember to do it. =)

--------------
14 hours later
YAEA! I rock at this! my tek ka's feel like I've been doing them all my life! and I can play all of 4 different rhythms.

no muscle-soreness has occurred...BUT

interestingly enough, the prophecy was not fulfilled, and my muscles were not at all sore which is strange because I'm never not right ;). It either means that I either didn't really get that much workout and was only tired because I'm way out of shape...boo! OR I'm in much better shape than I thought and the bit of work out just didn't make any difference on my body of steel--ha!
backtrack: I should've been sore because....
... I made 50 euros by skating with 2 wobbly kids the height, after 5 minutes of which I started feeling my ab muscles squeezing lemon juice out of themselves. this lasted 1 hour. I skated2 more hours on my own after that.
... the next morning, Ariane, 3 of her friends to Aquaboulevard and I went to a half indoor, half outdoor water park. We left the house at 8:10AM (sunrise forecasted at 8:43AM). It felt like a refrigerator when we first got in, but this was soon cured by going OUTSIDE to get a 3-person float (for us 5). It was 1-degree outside, which was 1 DEGREE FROM FREEZING! what adult in their right mind would go OUTSIDE WET IN A BIKINI BEFORE SUNRISE?!! (yours truly, thank you). Needless to say, the refrigerator immediately felt like the the Bahamas when we returned with the raft. Little did I know that we were only in transit in the Bahamas, it was just a path to another door which led to the outside again! only this time, we were had to run up 5 FLIGHTS OF ALUMINUM STAIRS STILL WET STILL IN BIKINIS AND STILL MORE FREEZING to get to the ride for which we got the raft in the first place.
5 flights of stairs in a bikini at 0-degree weather (it was literally forecasted to be 1 degree--not exaggerating!!) my brain was too congealed to remember the ride, but---- I do remember us getting another floating device at the end of the ride (indoors), and we took that device to none other place than that aluminum freezer, for yet another ride. If you think that certainly by now I'd come to my senses and that once this second ride ended, I would stay inside..well I guess brain gelato isn't that quick to make decisions because we REPEATED THIS 5 TIMES UNTIL WE DID ALL THE RIDES!
After the 5th, we went to the jacuzzi, which, after 2 minutes we realized was just lukewarm-4-hour-old-tea MASQUERADING AS JACUZZI! it actually had the nerves to eject COLD WATER!
so when the jacuzzi got too cold, we swam in the cold pool to warm up. and when that got too warm/cold/boring/iCouldn'tFeelAnymore we went outside to do the rides and the cycle went on until I bribed Ariane to go start leaving at 2:45pm.

oh but I WAS SORE! I just remembered! one muscle on the left side of my neck was sore the first part of the week, it was v. difficult to drink out of a bottle. good thing I'm don't converse much with my ceiling.

So I never got to the "no muscle soreness...BUT all this other stuff happened" part, just the prelude. so I might as well change the title of this blog entry.

I'll do that tomorrow, too tired now, picking up my drum in paris at 7:40am, which gives me 3 hours to sleep, if I sleep now, which I won't. It's ok, I'll come home and sleep during the day. I have the week off...yes!!

skate america

I just checked the lineup for Skate America and it's going to be so exciting this year! a lot of amazing skaters! it's saturday night in the US. Icenetwork.com is going to do a webcast it in the US, and have it available later here...boo..I have to wait...and by the time I watch it, I'll probably already know the results.

I feel really good about the US team:
Caroline Zhang won the Jr. World's, earning her a place to compete in senior's for the first time, which I'm excited about. I have high hopes for her--she's technically perfect (minus the hammer-foot toe jumps, which is minor anyway), plus she's from my rink back home, so of course I take full credit for her victory. But seriously though, she's my fav in the competition not because I think she's the best yet, but she's only 13 and most def. has the potential to mature.
Kimmie Meissner won World's last year, but I hated that performance, so stiff and bland. I did see her skate another competition this year, which I liked much better, so I hope that good style wasn't a fluke.
Emily Hughes is the one US skater that I don't care for at all.... but then I didn't like her sis much either and she won the Olympic gold...so...... I dunno. I wish the 3rd US skater were Mirai Nagasu...

Mai Asada and Miki Ando from Japan are both AMAZING (pronounced ah-my-cing)!! they're the only ones that could take medals away from the US..and I think they will, which I don't mind because they're AHMYCING.....but even if they do, we'll still place. (like how I say we? as if I had anything to do with them)

TURKEY!!! no turkey.....OLAF!!! yes grief!!

I woke up at 2:33am with the a sudden, unbearable surge of warmth and excitement.
Warmth because the heater was on at about 2.82 instead of about 2.76 where I normally estimate it to be.
and excitement because I suddenly had the great idea to go to Turkey next week for my All Saints vacation!

I don't know which of the 2 actually woke me up, but going to Turkey definitely kept me up until about 7:21am! I went on every budget travel website you could think of, and 27 more that I didn't know of, plus every link, to find the cheapest flights to Istanbul. but the earliest flight under 900 euros would be leaving next Friday, and coming back whenever.

For some reason, maybe it was the reminant heat making me delirius (the excitement couldn't possibly have been the culprit!), I thought that would be ok to leave on Friday and come back Tuesday--since Ariane has 2 weeks off and is at her grandma's in Switzerland until Wednesday!

I was living in a perfect bubble! I immediately announced my departure on Bhuz.com (bellydance forum), and had a whole bunch of people email me about getting them Sim and Bella costumes. and I was going to get myself a doumbek and some cheapo costumes to sell on ebay to offset the 240-euro plane tickets.

When I woke up for the second time this morning, at 10:28am, I remembered that I'm responsible for 2 kids! not just Ariane! and at the age of ~120 days, Juliette doesn't go to school and I still have to be home once Sabine's week-long vacation is over! so that leaves me a day and a half in Istabul--leaving friday and returning sunday...which I might as well do any weekend BUT the next one! which means I'm never going to Turkey because I would never want to be there for JUST 1 weekend anyway!

I was totally bummed--but when you're a shopaholic, there's always Retail Therapy to the rescue!
I dragged Ryan and his friend Charlotte to Centre Pompidou with me to buy the Erwin Olaf limited edition book, Grief, which I'd been lusting after since I got here.
I prayed to every book goddess that I knew by name to let there be a copy left. and held my breath for an entire 17 minutes while I took the one remaining store demo to the counter to have them search for it and held my breath some more when they searched through a cabinet in the back and couldn't find it and then held it even longer when they went to another cabinet...and FOUND THE LAST COPY!! whew... I just almost fainted again (my 1st fainting experience blogged in september).

I have Erwin Olaf...the Turkey can wait.

aaaah! kids everywhere!

oh so tired...fingers and brain equally frozen.

but I thought I would come here and announce my prophecy of the near future: muscle soreness will occur throughout the land! land as in er..the amount of space I occupy.

I thought I'd have sore abs and arms after teaching a full hour of ice skating to 2 kids whose collective age was 10. but I didn't know "going swimming" with 4 12-year olds would be 40 times more exhausting! if the age to energy-required ratio keeps going, I'm glad I don't work at a nursing home!

must sleep now....

10 hour journey/ 2 hour class

a regular school day can be such an adventure in a city with over-active worker's unions!

Normally it takes about 30 minutes of train & metro to get to class. but thanks to the wonderful transportation strike, I spent 10 hours out AND came home on a seatless bicycle.

My class was to start at 10:30am. I had signed up for language lab at 9:00am, so I got up at 6am. (1 hour yoga, 1/2 hour getting ready, 1.5 hour enroute). For the first time, I rode my bike (well Sabine's bike) to the train station because I wasn't sure which train out of which station would actually function. The train delay wasn't too bad, 15-minute wait instead of the usual 5; the metro wait from Paris Montparnasse station was about 30 minutes instead of the usual 3.

...and the language lab was closed, the teacher probably didn't have any way of getting there; i got up at 6am so that I could sit and pick my nose for an hour and half.

After class, it took 1 hour for the metro to arrive, and I was starving, because of all days, this was one day I chose to forget my wallet at home. Of course I was excited to get to the train station, which would've been 20 minutes away from home (food).

...except the trains weren't going to start running for another 3 hours! so I went to fnac the bookstore and read travel books in french, while trying to not be tempted by the ubiquitous cooking books.

Back to the train station at 5pm, the 5:07 and the 5:28 trains were both canceled, so I read magazines until 5:38.

of course it was a slow train, which got to my station just after 6. I was too happy to unlock my bike; but I stopped in my tracks and stared at my bike for a second trying to figure out how to ride it--it suddenly felt all too foreign to me, like staring at that 6-inch slug in my bathroom! then I realized that all the other bikes parked next to me had a seat..........

I scooted the first half of the way home, when that got too slow, I rode the bike standing.

at least Sabine didn't go to work that day due to the strike, so the kids didn't fall out of any cribs or starve. and at least I still had some of the veal jalfrezi that I had made the night before.

paris fashion week - Ivana Helsinki

Ivana Helsinki's designer is Paola Suhonen, from well, Helsinki. I loved the whole Bambi theme, their invites were Bambi shaped, they had these paper Bambi sculptures outside, Bambi print on the clothes. and I like how the show had a progression of color--from neutrals to all pink a the end.
out of the 19 models there were 2 non-blondes! all Finnish, and all the crew was Finnish too. a photog team was photographing with a 4x5 for Glamour. I wish someone would hire me to shoot something backstage with 4x5! but then...I guess I would have to market myself as a 4x5 shooter, which I don't...so i need to stop complaining.

she reminds me of Jessica Lorraine Peterson. =)



Outside after the show, everyone carrying the cavanvas bags.

I looooooooooooooooove this model! I'd have been happy to just shoot her all night. She looks like a Gemma-Vlada hybrid!

I love Paola's haircolor on her! it's white with just a hint of pink/purple....ok that's clown color really, but it looks good!

This is my fav. pic from this show, and of course it features my Gemma-Vlada

Fashion week pictures --Fatima Guerrout

Here's the show that Nahoko took me to. It was such a difference from Mina Perhonen, and definitely not a bit like Rick Owens! It was a much more intimate and friendly atmosphere, not at all pretentious. Fatima was backstage a lot arranging the clothes and chatting and having fun with the models! If all of Paris fashion week were like this, everyone would have a better time.


here's Fatima dressing Amandine

Fatima dressing herself.


The following pictures are an exercise at getting Nahoko on film (well..CF card), I can't have normal pictures because she hates pictures of her. even though we did take a few hundred the first time we met!

here she's testing out a possible career change from Photographer to Fish. =)....awww....Nahoko asked me to take off the fish photo, so whoever got here too late...sorry it's gone!

Nahokoteaching a model how to use her V. complicated 1DS Mark II

Fashion week pictures --Rick Owens

RICK OWENS I was really bummed about not being able to photograph at Rick Owens. I was supposed to meet their PR Olivier an hour before scheduled show starting time. Olivier never came out, but sent Charles; Charles didn't know who I was, and my magazines weren't on the list which was the reason why I needed to see Olivier in the first place. I saw Sasha Pivovarova though; she didn't look that much like Gemma Ward in person, but still alien-ishly tall and insect-like.

and then I saw monsieur Jacques Chirac! so random! he was just walking out in this picture.

.....then I had an incident of:
Bee flying in floor-length skirt
Bee panicking a little too much
thigh feeling immense pain
Bee flopping around on the ground.
I took the picture before moving one inch from where I was stung. within a minute.

nuit blanche photos

The fire installations at Tuilerie garden.

View of Champs Elysee from on top of a ferris wheel! my first ferris wheel ride in ages!~
directly under the ferris wheel.
I can eat the Notre Dame, it's not that big

The poi dancer at Notre Dame , I finally had my camera with me!