Dave Raphael

The fine guys at Crack For Your Eyes spreading the gospel on 18 March 2010.

Check out CYFE !

I have a three page editorial in the second issue of Geil Magazine out now.

Shot this last Summer in Amsterdam with a wonderful team: Jeroen Kamphorst stylist, Joke Kroon Makeup Artist and model Dennis Gijsbers.

check out the issue online, the layout is on pages 57-59.  Geil Magazine Issue Two!

We thought we might fly on Wednesday.  Wind.  White.  No surprise there…

Thursday morning popped up and I met John over at Burning Sky to check the weather and see about our flight.  This comes after a morning of pacing around my camp, my neighbors camp, the camp across the street and the camp next to them, extolling my calmness while chewing my fingers down to the cuticle…  After they announced the second weather hold, we headed back to Mystical Misfits, I hadnt spent much time over there yet and was clearly missing out on some fun.

Backing up just a bit, John is, I suppose one could finally say, a dear old friend.  I met him on my first job in the movies plugging in lights when I was 20 or 21 and this guy is absolutely the reason I first attended Burning Man in 2006.  As my good fortune would have it, John is a sky diver and jumping at Burning Man is as much of the ritual for him as is going in the first place.  You can scroll back through my blog to find a bit more history on this fine character in my circus.  Last year I shot him packing up his chute after a jump.  This year, there was a different story to tell.

There are a few different ways to jump at Burning Man, I think that if you have a plane or can talk a pilot into getting you in the air, nobody is really going to stop you however most people jump through Burning Sky.  Its a fairly well organized camp and they charter a plane and pilot for a few days for the express purpose of skydiving at Burning Man.  I am not a skydiver, so have never gone through the process, but from what I understand, you buy jump tickets during the winter in packages of five.  I also think you need a significant number of jumps under your belt before they’ll sell you a ticket at all.  John was not planning to use all his tickets jumping and that’s where things would get Juicy Junior, real Juicy (in a black suited kind of way).  Burning Sky might not let you jump with no experience, but if you get a ticket from a jumper they will let you fly in an observer seat providing you land with the plane.  And thats where I was this morning, holding a poker chip that would finally get me on a plane to see this madness in the center of the ghost of Lake Lahontan from about 11,000 feet.

Back at Mystical Misfits, I got a good look of what the camp has grown into.  Now two flatbeds worth of scaffolding large, slowly hauled up from the bowels of LA County, they were a sight to see in 2009 and easily the biggest camp on the block.

The big addition to the camp this year was a swing.  Safest swing in Black Rock City.

There was much discussion that morning about truss welds, the joys of rigging, trust and ultimately, hope.

We killed about an hour enjoying the view, trying to find more coffee and eating some bar-b-que sausage creation before heading back to check on the weather.

The scene back at burning sky was exactly as we left it, a bunch of bored skydivers and two anxious people, rocking on their heels, looking at the sky, hoping to trade white for blue.  We had made the decision to get on the plane if there was a plane to get on, and twenty mintues after checking in, a walkie squawked and we lucked out with word that there was a clear enough opening to fly.  With that announcement, there was madness in the camp as everyone scrambled to get their rigs together and hop the ride that would drop us at the airport.

Next thing I know Ive been handed a parachute, walked the plank into the back of the burning sky art car and am trying to balance the adrenaline surge and quell the freak out of the summer.  After months of waiting, this was actually happening…

increased heart rate.  check.  sweaty palms.  check.  tunnelvision.  check.  and this was just the van…

The best part of the mad dash into this van so we could make it into the air before the weather changed was the breakneck five miles per hour speed which hurled us towards the airport.  There are few things that I know of that can stretch time quite like driving in a car really, really, really, really slow.  Just what the doctor ordered…

End of the road and a long walk back.  Welcome to Nevada’s own wretched hive of scum and villany.

come on home, little bear.

someone else’s dog.

Rense and I were in the same orbit around the soundgarden in June of 2009.  We enjoyed many wonderfully sunny turned freezing dutch summer nights slinging Budels on the best back patio in Amsterdam.  That’s no moon, that’s a bar…

I started hanging around Amsterdam on an increasingly frequent basis in the winter of 2005, one of those bad break up lost weekends that lingered for three years or so…  In March of 2005 I discovered the best thing on television, maybe ever, (obviously discounting Magnum PI) broadcast late night on SBS.  Come the summer of 2009, after being officially ejected from Spain among some scandal, the multi-national scam call in game shows was a news item that people were talking about for many more reasons beyond the muppet-tastic posturing of Gigi Ravelli: second best thing that has ever happened on broadcast television next to Bob Barker.  Not even kidding.  Bob Barker would have completely pwnd Richard Dawson in The Running Man but Gigi could have been in fucking Predator but maybe this is a different discussion all together…

So, one afternoon, I meet this guy, Rrrrrrrensen [who’s name I’ll never be able to say ’cause no Americans can roll a Dutch ‘RRRRR’ worth a dam(n)] and it turns out he’s like, coder, techie, super genius.  I know a guy who writes the satellite uplink code for the BIG cell phone giant in North America (or at least something equivalently mind shattering) and Rense puts that guy to shame…  People make movies about hackers, you know, crap like War Games, or some other garbage with Sandra Bullock in it.  But then, every so often, you meet one of the guys that like, WROTE the fucking matrix…  After long discussions on rapping in Den Haag, graffiti and exodus, he drops the bomb that he worked for the company doing the scam shows.  Oh, you’ve seen Belspelletjes?

had I seen Belspel…  Well, sad to admit, its where I picked up my first bit of conversational Dutch.  After the *fabulous* Dutch curses I learned from Tos, the first Dutch I learned on my own was defintely the words Nul, Zes and Negen.  Yes, I had seen countless hours of Belspel, mistified that such a thing could be broadcast on television and absolutely FLOORED that SBS was able to find a host with the energy and stamina of Gigi Ravelli.  All joking aside, as a guy with a career in the movies and TV and one step removed from radio, I have never *ever* heard anyone carry the energy for the hours that Ravelli did hosting Belspel.  No American in media that I can think of, has done anything approaching what this girl had done, unquestionably the most understated, underestimated and frightfully undertasked media personality from the turn of the century.  Sadly, it was in the small market of NL TV, if this shit was broadcast in North America, she would unquestionably be ruling the world.  Beyond her talent however, the broadcasts were mesmerizing.  They were live, and that meant that hosts were coughing, drinking water, wine, tripping, falling, mics coming off, engineers fixing lavaliers under clothing, chroma key not working, hair getting tweaked, phones not working, all live, on camera, broadcast throughout the Netherlands every night.  It was kinda like the television station at your high school, except broadcast to the country, and bilking that population of a small mountain of Euros every night.  It was, it was pretty amazing to see.   And then it ended.  But every country had their own belspel scam and the companies would operate from other countries making the whole thing very difficult to track and prosecute and of course, there was a technical crew, doing a job not much different than the job I have on American television.  And Rense was one of those guys.

Obviously, he had my immediate respect.  A seriously good time commenced.

There was much more to talk about than some shitty television garbage, and many of our discussions that summer kept reverting to the dutch skies, the quality of the light there and Rembrant.  I suppose if you hang around Amsterdam long enough, you have an absolutely inevitable, fully comprehensible discussion about the national treasure painters in store for you and Rense was nice enough to deliver that to me.  Rembrant, the light collected in the bottom of cumulonimbus reflected off the north sea and hip hop via Den Haag.  No where else but Amsterdam will you find casual communication so specific, so sophisticated and so beautiful.

Rense was the first guy I had ever seen with a Sea Shepherd t-shirt.  This led to days of discussions on the glory of Pirates, the English and Dutch fighting over contracting Hudson to find the Northwest passage and accidentally settle the New World (eat it Columbus), mutiny and why so few Americans read Shorto.

We pondered some kind of mutual respect for Bon Scott and while he was worried that someone would steal his low rider bicycle, I was aggrivated that I didnt have one in the first place.

Fun, fun summer times with very rad people.

I much prefer programming from the 70’s, so I found this nice old Zenith black and white round screen.

sadly, it plays the same crap on TV today.  I guess I shouldnt complain though, it came with this free 12K Texas Instruments computer replete with dot matrix printer.