photo seshes are a good time

So I'm doing publicity stills on set for school, and getting gallery stills are just a pain. its some kinda tough to make a digital SLR have the same kinda look as a miniDV camera, especially if you are trying to cram one's 6'7" self in front of a tripod while trying to match up the frame with video villiage, which is just always out of eyesight because shit happens like that.

but every now and then you surprise yourself and come up with a tasty little morsel like this. the whole gallery stills thing was just not working out, but this one kinda picked me up for the rest of the day. thinking that you haven't taken anything good forever makes me love photography, cause you end up making something like this to tell off your puny little mind.

fuck valentines

the 22nd valentines i'm around for is another one alone. totally fucked. it seems as though i'm cursed to have this day as a reminder of such things. 

no page from the book this time, as i'm writing this from school and there is neither a scanner nor the effort needed to scan that shit, but i'm pretty sure i'll post my illustrated reply to my little brothers epic zombie drawing that ended up being an ad for 'ZOMBIE-O's'.

that kid is so much more talented than me in damn near every way, but not anymore. our band kubla khan is proving this otherwise.

First page posted

this page was from a while back. i saw a plastic casey-thing with the label "STAINLESS STEEL CHEESE PLANE" and thought of an actual plane made of cheese, but then i realized this was for a cheese cutting tool. telling this story over and over again is kind of a pain, so i drew it.

lets get to bidness

I havent blogged for a bit, but then again, i haven't really cared to. it seems that these minutes of typing are doomed to stay unread besides my own proofreading, but the same can be said about the black book that i so much love, so i said fuck it.

my book is becoming more words and phrases than drawings and funny shit, so i think i'll keep the journal-y entries to the blog, and i'll throw in a page or two from the book.

i went to see tegan and sara and broken social scene on the 6th, that was a toally awesome show. i was pretty much indifferent to tegan and sara, i spose i just don't get it. but i did notice how fuckin small they were. when a parlour guitar is bigger than your torso, that is small.

on a side note, 1 of 2 friends i met at the concert LEFT BEFORE BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE. this is a load of bullshit. i wish i knew he left for more than just a piss, then i could have snaked his bitchin seat on the lower balcony instead of being 4 rows shy of the back wall with all the other peons, and i could have chilled with the one friend who actually has a taste in music.*

broken social scene was fucking dope. they started the show in a really neat way, they started playing an instrumental song ive never heard before the lights started to dim, and they all kind of casually walked in before blowing the roof of the place with some bodacious tunes. i wanted them to open with "Farewell to the Pressure Kids", but this opener was equally was impressive ( i got my wish about 3-4 songs in.)

one of the dudes in the band whose name constantly escapes me (he plays a wicked orange danelectro) has this thing called the happiness project, which is like music using people's speech and mannerisms. he presented it with this interview of a really intresting older foreign person, then they played it over again with a guy on a tenor sax, playing with the same cadence and tone and whatnot as this stange person. sounds cool, right?

well some really cool girl 2 seats over from me wasn't getting it, and wanted everyone around her to know this. my homeboy carson was closer to her, and he suggested that she wait for the sax part. she was up in his grill about how he would know, and he said he heard it on the guy's myspace page. she responded (while adorned with retro red lipstick and thickrimmed glasses) with something to the effect of "oh. myspace. thats really indie of you". this is when i had to do something, so i threw chivalry to the wind and suggested that she shut the fuck up. it worked cause she didn't seem to have a good time for the rest of the show and i was rocking out in my chair the rest of the show. people of her ilk can really make life a pain in the ass, but bands like Broken Social Scene cancel out their bad vibes like the dickens.

* and i'm talking an uncanny taste in music, not to mention our mutual sense of humour, similar black books of consciousness and tendencies to think and say the exact same thing about really funny/strange situations that no one else would find funny or strange. come to think of it, there is no one else that have met in vancouver who shares more in common with me than her.

maiden voyage

So I've got this book, a little black blank sketchbook with thick paper that i got in my first few weeks at college. I always littered all the important papers the my instructors gave me with ridiculous drawings, doing my best to be a modern day Gary Larson, so i figured it might be an idea to have a book dedicated to the drawings. I didn't have anyone to really talk to in that particular school, Kwantlen, so I ended up putting a journal entry of sorts in every day or two.

The entries often were in the form of a single line, not much more than a thought that swimmed through my head at the time I had a pen and the book at hand. It seems strange to say, but the characters that I would put into the pages of that book, the logic (or lack therof) of it's content, they were my friends in this new and relativley alien atmosphere.

I say strange because I never thought of myself as a hermit-like type of a guy, not to say that I was the traditional fashion of popular when I was still at home. The fact I had a book like this where i could record any ideas I had was reassuring. The people that I shared classrooms with seemed as disintrested as I was and we would meet only once a week for these classes, so apart from one or two people who might have one or two classes you have, it was tough to make any real connection with people. Thinking of it now, it was one of the first times i was exposed to such a large amount of people at once without scratching the surface of their character.

After a few weeks, I found myself checking my bag on the way to school, just in case i had the urge to scratch something in the little black blank sketchbook with thick paper. When waiting for a class to start, I would take out a notebook, pen, and the needed text, but I never felt ready for class without it. An unwilling anchor for my sanity sitting on my desk's fake plastic woodgrain.

I'm now in my last year of school, at a different school with different people. My peers are genuine people, the kind of people where you often think how easily you could have registered a year earlier before, and you would have never known any one of them and how much that would suck. Now that i have real relationships with real friends at my school, things are a lot better, but I am still removed from all of them geographically, them in North Vancouver and I and Richmond.

My book is still as important to me as it was before, but it is geting near the end of its life (running out of pages), so i figured i would start this here blog to have a showcase for my ideas and thoughts, like an electronic form of my trusty book. I'll still use it and get another when it is full, you can't beat the realness and intimacy of it, but there are things on here that i just can't do in the confines of a pen and paper. Pretty soon i'll put up some pages from it, then a whole bunch of other shit. So there it is, general public. Jes Raymond Matthiesen's first blog.





ps grammar and spelling mistakes add character