Dave Raphael

yet, I feel compelled to sit in it.

The Pirate was walking in a show last week and invited me to come along.  It was an interesting event, held at Bohemian National Hall, which is also home to the Czech Consulate.  The show featured predominantly Czech designers.

The event was largely attended by a Czech audience, but there were plenty of Americans there and an open bar as well, so when the festivities commenced with an unamplified opera singer performing three songs (which would have been met with full attention and silence in Europe) it came as kind of no surprise that the room could-not-shut-the-fuck-up.  Cowering beneath the roar of a drunken crowd, I felt kinda bad for these two guys but you know, the show must go on…

Two ballet dancers were featured, and while they were pretty fabulous, there was definitley some bit of confusion as to wether or not their attire was a featured part of the program or not…

Some of these designs are actually quite beautiful:

The show concluded with one of the designers walking up on stage in a space suit (a fake one).  I suppose this was engineered to be the show stopping big deal.  Perhaps Im just really jaded from working in the movies all these years, but this seems like something that Spike Jonze should have been doing and it just seemed oddly out of place at this event.  Regardless, it was a fun night with a good look at some incredible designs and a noteworthy experience stepping off a NYC street and into the heart of a buzz of positive Slovak energy.

summer is coming.

Nitzer, the original smash face, used to live under my bed in college.  Back then, much like these photos, I only remember seeing it (Im not sure if its a boy kitten or a girl kitten and equally confused as to how an 18 year old cat is still a kitten) in silhouette.  The best part about this cat is that it would start to dread if you didnt brush it every forty seven minutes or so.  Occasionally, Nitz would go on an extended under the bed/behind the speaker/in the closet expedition and the next time you’d see the kitten, one leg would be glued to its underbelly in a big, grey, cat dreadlock.  Serious fur.

If this was my cat, I would lets its back fur get strategically dreaded up, shave the rest of it (leaving of course fur boots) and then Id change its name to Predator.  Luckily for Nitzer, it lives in the Mission with my old roommate and his wife (who is too cool for facebook) so its pretty safe to assume Nitz gets to live out its days with soft, luxuriously brushed, dread free kitten fur.

The fine folks at The Artery Magazine are featuring some of my work this month along with an interview, check it out!

I had met Jeff (in glasses) a few years ago in a bar in Amsterdam, a place (the bar) that could well very be the epicenter of cool in the known universe.  Sometimes I feel that everyone that walks through the door in there is just on the right track in life…  We immediately bonded over growing up in NJ and how random it is to have met there.  He’s been living in NL for probably twenty years or something close enough to it.  I had taken some photos of the band he was playing in and when I got back into town last year they were just finishing up a record so we went out to shoot more coverage on a spring afternoon.  Its very rare that I’ll put color film in a camera anymore, let alone c41, but it was their request and  I really like the way these look.  So, obligatory band photo:

This spot was very interesting, it apparently used to be some sort of hospital that was squatted back when you could do things like, you know, squat the abondoned hospital on the edge of town.  For more than a decade now my Dutch friends have been explaining and re-explaining the politics of squatting and how that all works but there is something that growing up American just does not allow for me to fully grasp.  The *right* to housing?  I dont think Americans can fully comprehend the birth right of that idea, ever.  At any rate, if I understand correctly, this place was a huge squat and after going through whatever process, the residents of the squat eventually became legal tenants and now those apartments are worth easily hundreds of thousands of Euros and the people there fully own them.  And all someone did was break a window once…  Worth noting is the size of this place, its huge, especially for Amsterdam, its really a particularly incredible piece of history in that town that is magically left out of the tourist literature.  Well, all the good stuff always is, isnt it?

The plan that day was to meet up in de Pijp, catch up on some laughs and walk around for a bit looking for adventure.  There was some debate about which way the adventure was, but this would get sorted…

Walking by a fairly typical-for-the-neighborhood brown bar, we all simultaneously caught the vibe to stop in there for a drink.

A round of Heineken and Jenever brought us back into the hood.

Mark (in purple) works at the Paradiso, which in many ways is the premiere place to gig in town.  Its also a great place for a free lunch if your friends work there…

It used to be a church and at some point in the 60’s, it was squatted and now its this beautiful club.  There is not a long list of places in the world where you walk out on stage and get to look out over an audience at a room this nice.

Decisions were made about the menu and we convened out back on the private patio.  How many clubs in the world can you play where outside your dressing room there is a completely private terrace against a canal?  The Paradiso is nice.

After a few drinks back there it became increasingly obvious that the only way to progress from this point was by water.  It took us a few minutes but we were eventually able to flag down a boat and catch a lift up the Singelgracht to the Soundgarden.

Last but not least is Freek, who in addition to having the coolest name ever, is the primary songwriter in the band and an interesting source of energy from which Marky and Jeff seem to ‘bound around.  I wasnt planning on posting all these but after scanning this film it just seemed too good not to share.  Or maybe it just reminds me of a great afternoon spent with some rad people.  Regardless, there it is.