this sunday will be the biggest challenge for my club “”the weekly day of things we have not done before – club.”"!

we will be part of a tennis tournament.
double tennis.!
two against two!

we will play against the hackney tennis club.

wish us luck!

a few days ago i left my house in london – exactly a year has past since i left antwerp.

NOW many memories and thoughts are coming back. thoughts of my travel to london and my farewell from belgium.

shortly after i left belgium i wrote a text about my farewell party in antwerp.

i thought it would be a nice occasion to share it with you.

*********

In 2009, shortly after turning 30, I read a slightly dubious article stating that men start to change their body smell in their 30´s. Apparently we start to smell similar to baked things. I started to wonder what I would smell like. Fig & raisin bread would be wonderful.

Shortly after I turned 30, I meet Jovan. He turned 8 that year. We met at the flat of our friend Charlotte. We were there to celebrate my farewell from Antwerp. It was the first time that I met him.

The best way to make new friends is to solve a riddle together.
Jovan and I found a tangram in charlotte’s flat; a puzzle consisting of seven wooden shapes, called tans, which once put together can form silhouette shapes of different things.

While trying to form the cat (or the fox, as I called it that day), we decided to be friends.

My friends and I decided to celebrate with a fairytale dinner, where each guest was asked to prepare a dish from a children’s story. Mieke prepared porridge inspired by The Three Bears (of course in three different sized bowls), Hadas prepared some tasty beans from The Little House on the Prairie. I made some fake poisonous mushrooms along with plenty of other dishes. To compliment the dinner, we played old records of children songs, sung by the great Ella Jenkins.

My friend Charlotte prepared a dish from the book Danny the Champion of the World, by Roald Dahl.

“… I was about your age then, maybe a little older, and in those days we always had a hot tea in the kitchen at five o`clock. I can remember exactly what was on the table that evening. It was my favorite thing of all, toad-in-the-hole, and my mum could make toad-in-the-hole like nobody else in the world… “ Roald Dahl´s Danny the Champion of the World

I asked Charlotte for the recipe of her “toad-in-the-hole”:

Toad in the Hole

For the Toad:

Oil (olive)

8 sausages of your choice

rosemary

2 onions : fried

garlic : fried

2 knobs of butter

6 tblsp balsamico

For the Hole:

285 ml milk

115 gr plain flour

a pinch of salt

3 eggs

Put a baking tray in the middle of the oven with a one centimetre layer of oil 240° Celsius when the oil is hot add the sausages and let them fry a little bit. Then put the HOLE over (including rosemary and fried garlic & onions), it will sizzle dangerously. Don’t open the oven for at least 20 minutes. Eat with onion gravy,

Jovans’ favourites were the forest berries from The Moomins and porridge from The Three Bears. That evening, he and I spoke about photography and he told me that he liked to take pictures. That evening he borrowed Mieke’s camera. He took a picture of me and it became one of my favourite portraits.

Months later, I thought of asking Jovan how my work makes him feel. I always liked the honesty and direct language of children.

I wrote an email to Jovan’s mother, asking if Jovan could look at my work. Two weeks later I received his reply:

Dear Daniel,

I was really wondering how did you made these pictures.

Because they don’t look so real.

They look very impossible.

And very interesting.

I find them interesting because they don’t show just a normal picture, but it is like imagination.

Sometimes they are a little bit like a drawing, and they can be very funny. Like the skeleton who is sitting on the chair!

I don’t like when there are naked people.

Some pictures look very strange because they are very unreal and they make me feel like I am on carnival.

I see a lot of light and shadows in your pictures.

Sometimes they are scary.

I was also wondering what is that turtle doing on the head of that man?

There are things in your pictures, in the things in your picture.

see you next time.

Greetings,

Zmaj Jovan TatiĆ

“There are things in your pictures, in the things in your picture.”

As a farewell gift, my dear friend Hadas gave me a small notebook filled with little secrets and wishes. On the first page was a handwritten message:

“at last winter is finished

and, from the ground

where the seed has dropped

a vertical green shoots

grow. It is a tree, but

so small no one recognize

it yet.”

last night me and my friends decided to have a night of the fennel.
if you want to have a night of the fennel there are two essential places in london you need to go to. ( the best italian and best ice cream place in town)

1. bocca di lupo

to eat: fennel with orange

2. gelupo

to eat: pine nut + fennel ice cream

to dress appropriately me and all the men amongst my friends dresses in italian striped shirts, of course !

today enrique and me danced madly while cooking. i added our playlist to this post!

we prepared a dish together and divided into:

enrique : fried rice with vegetables
daniel : fried duck eggs to place on top of the rice

we needed 4 songs to cook our lunch! sound and taste bonanza!

today i started to work on my children´s book and it makes me so happy that it feels almost like small fire works exploding inside of me. the book will talk about happiness and photography.

today i got an email telling me:

San Diego zookeepers report male pandas, on average, do eight exuberant handstands per day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGV9G2okC8I&feature=player_embedded

on request of my mother and some friends i will continue my blog at once…

much has happen already since i moved out…

but not much talking tonight as i am having a night with my friend enrique and we are having a spanish and latin american night.

we are learning salsa cumbia!

today is my last day in my house in london – its time for a new adventure.
i still havent decided where i will move next.

there are many places i would like to go and see.
….but thats another story and shall be told another time!

today i had lunch with my friend adam in the rochelle canteen and alcaeus (the nice waiter in the canteen) thought we are brothers.

then i thought okay fine – if i cant find a fake aunt its also nice to have a fake brother.

we been laughing and i took adam to work and introduced him as my brother…

adam.! its nice to have you as my fake brother. especially because i think you are a great person.

i will need to make a fake PAST up next time i meet him. so we can tell stories to strangers about us. oh how nice.!

today my friend corinna and i had lunch at cecconi´s.

Enzo Cecconi – the youngest ever general manager of the famous Cipriani restaurant in Venice – came to London in 1978 and opened Cecconi’s. It became an overnight success and in the 80s it was a Mecca for the rich and the royal (one lunchtime, during Ascot week, one waiter remembers serving members of four different royal families on four different tables).

i eat:

courgette flowers with smoked ricotta
smoked goose with black truffle
lemon tart with mascarpone ice cream

on my way to work i found a show window display with a statue covered by a tiger photo carpet. i liked it a lot.

after work i went to see a opera “Tomorrow, in a year” with the music by “the knife”, with my club the “weekly day of things we have not done before” club (click here to read more about us)..
i wanted to close my eyes as i felt slightly embarrassed by the visuals of the show.

before i went to bed i had a thought:
in addition to my belief in my powers as a photographer – i had an idea that i was equal to writing a nice children book.

i decided i will start writing this august…

i am happy that i have a friend such as enrique in my life. yesterday he showed me some of his nice drawings and a text he wrote about his dream house.

******

My dream house

When I was a kid, a friend of mine used to live in a golf community just south of Mexico City. We used to hang out there a lot and take his dog for walks. She was a collie and we’d call her “Attila” in a real loud voice, hoping to spook some of the neighbours, as if she were some fierce Doberman or something. The dog’s name was actually “Cookie” and the people were simple unfazed. Still, though, it was one of my favourite games.

We would also talk about house; there were tons of different styles. Our favourites were the English-style homes –or at least that’s what they looked like to us- with their green ceramic brick façades and rigid forms, and gardens with tall pine trees and lots of shade. There were others with horizontally cut sandstone and small cantilevers that harboured these ridiculous water tanks; there was little vegetation, just a few low shrubs that accentuated their horizontal form. We didn’t like those, and it took me a while to realize that they would have been the Frank Lloyd Wrights of the neighbourhood. The Mies van der Rohe-style houses were also typical in that neighbourhood, but we thought those were the worst. They weren’t exactly boxes made exclusively out of glass and aluminium, nor were there any clean marble slabs. Actually, what stood out most were the textured concrete walls in shades of salmon.

My judgment was often influenced by the cars that were parked outside, since they had the effect of a second façade. A metallic blue Ford Topaz didn’t help things any, nor did an AMC Gremlin. Citrus coloured Datsuns were quite subtle, maybe because there were so many of them; same thing with VW Beetles. The English houses usually had a Jeep Wagoneer parked out front-black with the wood panelling. It’s been a long time since I’ve passed by there, and I wonder how the streets look with the newer, more rounded cars, most being silver with large headlights.

Those houses must have all been hideous inside: fully covered in brown carpeting, with embroidered rugs and porcelain figures on the electrical appliances, concealing them into these complex sculptures that accumulate dust and make the place more welcoming. All of those houses, regardless of their exteriors, must have been identical on the inside. I imagine that today they all have a big TV room with different generations of video consoles piled up one on top of another.

My mother always thought it was funny how that place was a field for study; she thought it was horrible, false and simply mediocre. She got excited about places that had an industrial air, the first local examples of minimalism and the more recent idea of the loft. Though the truth is that she didn’t have any better places for studies. I guess she based her ideas on the interior designs of certain shops at that time, which would be like the John Pawsons of the shopping mall.

Her ideas, exemplified in shop windows, had a major influence on me.

And my ideas haven’t changed much since then. I may have learned to distinguish plasterboard from a real wall, and an industrial space from a shopping mall, but I still enjoy seeing inconsistencies in an aesthetic discourse.

My dream house is a baroque mélange of Modern ideals. Orthogonal spaces arranged so as to avoid hallways and create almost a single space.

White walls and large windows facing a forest like garden… and no neighbours. It would

be supported by large concrete pillars with a Brutalist aesthetic, mildewy and some covered with ivy. On the inside there would be little more than plants with wood flooring and some concrete. The main bed and other elements would have angular geometric forms in cold, dark marble, like something from the Planet Krypton. A black and tattered Frank Stella. Books and records, some organized in a small bookcase and the rest piled on the floor. The house would try to give the feeling that someone recently came to live there. I would walk around the house wearing loose, colourful, Africa-inspired clothing.

A bedroom below the kitchen –warm with shades of brown- would be where I’d put all the things that mean something to me but don’t have a place in my new universe. There would definitely be a rug and some portraits, and a hazy with light filtered by the curtains.

Enrique Giner de los Ríos

i am back.!

after a weekend full of wonderful adventures.

oh and

i was eating green tomato + strawberry salad.

i was riding bikes at night trough paris with sylvian.!

i was doing a couture shoot which was beyond my imagination…

i was and i am really happy ( my mood ring is : blue! = calm and happy!)

more stories soon!

PS.:
i am playing with the thought of moving to paris for the summer.

hello.

i am off to paris for the next 3 days to do the haute couture story. i will come back monday with stories about dark bars and edith piaf songs, long baguettes and small croissants, lot of cheese and glasses of red wine, meetings with old and new friends… ( and some stories about wild dresses and colourful sets).