I totally dissed Gwen Stefani.

So last month I wrote a snarky letter to the editors of BUST magazine to complain about them putting dumb-ass Gwen Stefani on the cover....and this month they printed it in their "International issue".

Those of you who know me and my crazy-complaint-letterwriting crusades, realise that I just couldn't stop myself from properly scolding my favorite magazine for featuring such a cheeseball.

My original letter:

Dear BUST peoples~
I’m an ex-pat living in France and I gladly pay big bucks to have BUST
magazine delivered here because it’s just so good that I can’t live without
it. But I just finished reading the BUST interview with Gwen Stefani
and it absolutely made my skin crawl.

Let's face it; Margaret Cho isn't the only one seeing red over Stefani's use of Japanese girls as cute and stylish human props. I love Tokyo street culture as much as the next gal, but that doesn't give a privileged White American pop-star from Orange County California the right to exploit it and then to tell an Asian woman that she needs to do some "research" before she can recognize blatant exoticism and objectification.

As a fan of No Doubt’s music I've tolerated Gwen's bindis, and then the
chola make-up. I was even supportive when they suddenly went dancehall,
but Stefani should stop believing her own hype, and start listening to her fans
when they tell her she's gone too far. Her little fantasy “art project”
has officially stepped out of bounds.

Frankly it doesn’t surprise me that Gwen just doesn’t quite get it, but
for her to suggest that people of color need to do "research" to prove they’re
being oppressed is down right despicable.

Someone needs to tell Stefani to do some "research" on the definition
of the term: “Cultural Appropriation”, then Holla back with an apology,
because with many of her fans of color, she’s about one geisha away from wearing out her welcome.

As you can see, they edited it down, but even so I think the diss is equally as effective. At any rate it made my day. Hell, anyday when I get to diss Gwen Stefani is a good day.

Grilled Cheese anyone?

Doin' the wheel barrow.

I'm leaving for New York in exactly one week and 1.5 hours so I'm really busy and super stressed out, but I wanted to post these pics at least.

Saturday we kidnapped French mother & father-in-law and broke into the construction site of our new apartment building and actually went INTO our apartment!

We checked out the 4th floor and then of course realized that DUH---there were no stairs yet so we climbed up to the 5th floor to see the bedrooms on an old rusty and wet aluminum ladder. Thank God I have my tentinus updated.

After I climbed the ladder MIL got sick (really bad vertigo) and had to go back down and wait for us in the building lobby.

I have no idea why my hat says "MoMo", but here were are in OUR BEDROOM.....which looks about the size of a closet.

Luckily cousins Seb & Sandrine, who just had their apartment built last year, had warned us months ago that when you see the load bearing walls at first it looks tiny and you just have to trust that it matches the blueprint.------otherwise I would have panicked. In fact I did panic and we ended up moving some walls around on the blue-print the next day.

But whatever, the view from the terrace kicks fat asses and that was just from the side I wasn't too chicken to go onto. (It was pissing rain and the guard rails aren't installed yet!)

In other news, our Star Trek Master Bathroom:

Et Voila!

Almost Feels Like Spring has Sprung.

It seems that I'm always blogging about stuff 5-6 days after it happens lately. You'll have to forgive me for being so absent these days, but I seem to be at one of those grand junctions in life where everything speeds up exponentially like a big highway entrance ramp. Luckily I drive an Alfa Romea 147 with a big engine, so I'm managing to keep up---most of the time.

Anyway, last weekend FrenchBoy and I stumbled upon a delightful surprise at le Centre Culturel Jacques Brel. The exhibition was a series of recent sculptures and works on paper by French artist Pierre Gaucher.

Needless to say I was completely taken by surprise on this one. I’ve visited the Brel center many times during my time here in Thionville and quite frankly this is the best exposition I’ve seen to date. My husband and I immediately fell in love with these larger works.

The show also included a few other freestanding sculptures, but we were smitten with the wall pieces. We’re not exactly in the market for adding a new piece to our collection this year, but these works have already been added to our newly created 2008 art budget.

After we left the Brel center, we bumped into FrenchBoy's work colleague Lotfi and his lovely daughter Thaïs . (Not pictured is twin sister Salomé, who was busy at a birthday party.)

Lotfi and his family live in our neighborhood, but this was the first time I had actually met them, so naturally I whip out my camera and demand a photo. Isn't Thaïs just adorable?

After our chance meeting, FrenchBoy and I made the mistake of wandering down to Centreville (Fancy French for "downtown") for a show put on by a local art group under the theme “Fantasy”.

It was underwhelming to say the least—full of saccharine watercolors and lace doilies made by retired schoolteachers I would guess. But way in the back of the room, jammed into a corner, I found these darling little drawings by Laurence Schluth. (Yeah-sorry. I know the photo is crazy blurry.)

Maybe it was some of the euphoria left over from seeing the earlier show, but I just fell for these little darlings that were done on scrap paper and ripped pieces of notebook paper.

Unfortunately the artist wasn’t around, so I couldn’t ask her questions about her work in my broken French, but I just found these little works to be absolute gems---like being allowed to peek into the diary of an angst ridden 13 year old girl. You can’t fabricate this type of charm. It just is what it is. Sadly the artist didn’t make her return before we got bored and left. Too bad, so sad.

Dream Big

Last night I killed Jean Claude Van Damme .

We were wrestling for the gun, but I got control of it by spraying Sarah Jessica Parker's perfume "Lovely" into his eyes like mace.

After I got the gun, slowly checked to make sure the safety wasn't on, and then while Van Damme was screaming in agony and rubbing his eyes, I shot his sorry Franglais-speaking-ass right through the heart.

But he deserved it---He had just kidnapped me and taken me out to the woods to kill me and bury me under a bunch of fluffy white styrofoam packing peanuts.

After I was caught for his murder I was sent to a teenage girls' reform school from out of the 1950s.

As I was being booked for murder when another girl came in handcuffed. I asked her what she was in for. She said she had escaped and tried to leave the country but she had forgotten to take her passport. I told her I wouldn't make the same mistake.

WARNING: Mom, stop reading here and scroll down to “Note”.

Later in that night in the cafeteria, I was eating dinner with the "probie" from the TV show Rescue me. We discussed gay porn for awhile and then I asked him if he wanted to get it on with me and Brian Kinney from the TV show Queer as Folk.

He said yes, but our plan was foiled when my best friend from 4th grade, April, showed up and cock blocked.


NOTE: Mom, you can start reading again here….although I know you read the above part anyway.

After dark, I made my escape and fled to Mexico---without my passport. The next day in Mexico, I was sitting on the beach watching a group of children play. One by one they were taking turns running to leap off a cliff and diving into the deep sea water below. It looked really fun...until I noticed that just below the surface of the water was a GI-normous mutant Japanese Koi with its mouth wide open. Each child that dove off the cliff would land safely in the water, only to be gobbled up whole by the giant fish.

As I sat and watched each child be swallowed whole by the giant fish I sat and pondered how somehow this whole scene was a metaphor for life in general.

And then I woke up.

Where Are You?

Over the past 2 weeks or so I've been swamped. I have alot on my plate and my cup runneth over:

1. A friend of friend of a friend managed to mention my work to a man who runs a gallery in Luxembourg and I was subsequently invited to be in an exposition which is scheduled for June. We haven't yet decided which works or how many will be in the show, but I will keep you posted on the progress.

In the meantime I'm busting my ass to get as much work as possible done before the show so I can really choose my "best of the best" for my first show in Europe. But I haven't been able to get as much work done as I want because...

2. I have this side business ya see. I paint these little decorative paintings and I sell them online and by word of mouth.

They're small and relatively low priced, and they take less time and thought. Quite frankly they aren't the type of art I'd hang in my own home, but they sell like hot-cakes and they're paying off my student loans, so I can't really afford to diss them. The only problem is that they take up a ton of time to photograph and put them up on the website. but I want to get as much "inventory" as possible finished this month because...

3. At the end of this month I will be leaving for the Vermont Studio Center!

I'll be an Artist-in-Residence the entire month of April, which means if I don't get work done in advance, I'll basically lose a month of sales. And that's just not OK. Uncle Sam wants his Benjamins, so I must deliver. On top of all this...

4. The Barbie Dream House is advancing by leaps and bounds. Get this--construction is not on schedule, but due to this being one of the warmest winters on record in France, the building is ahead of schedule.

So much so that we had to choose our electrical plan for the 1st floor weeks before we were ready. Next week they build our floor. By the end of March we should be able to actually walk inside our apartment. This makes me smile alot.

So that's where I'm at folks. I'm exhausted. I'm going to take a nap.