News

While googling for myself I found out there's now another Godsmurf who's making hip-hop music, check out his music on Godsmurf.net. My favourite is track 10 because it begins with "This is a Godsmurf production", haha.

I'll have to eliminate this impostor though. There can be only one.

Went to the Portishead concert in Brussels yesterday. It was good - how could it be otherwise when this band has only great songs - but yet another concert where I'm thinking that I could just have well listened to the CD's at home. While there were 5 musicians on stage besides Beth Gibbons, much of the music was clearly played on tape and almost nothing was different from the recorded songs. Still, 90' of great music, and reconfirmation that the new album can hold its own against the previous ones which is rather amazing after 10 years and a clear change of style. 7/10

This collection of pics with photobombers (people who ruin someone else's picture) had me laughing through lunch break today :)

A Tim Burton movie starring Johnny Depp - sounds great. However, it's a musical, and that turned out to be as big a negative as I'd feared. While some of the singing is nice, much of it is ridiculously bad, as if the actors had to improvise it on the spot. Beautiful Burtonesque visuals and over-the-top bloodshedding add some value though. 5/10

Portishead's third album comes 11 years after the second and 14 years after the 1994 classic Dummy. Beth Gibbons sounds the same as ever, but the music is now much cruder and sounds dirtier - sometimes resembling the more psychedelic work of dEUS, and sometimes sounding a lot like 80s band the Klinik (electro new wave), strangely. While I loved the sound immediately, the music needed to grow on me, but it is doing just that; I've heard the album about 10 times now and am liking it more and more. 9/10

On May 8th I'll see Portishead live in Brussels, yay! I'll have seen 5 of my 10 all-time favourite bands live then (also Depeche Mode, Front 242, Nitzer Ebb and Tool).

Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction are two of my favourite movies, but since then Tarantino has been steadily declining imo - I thought the Kill Bill movies were mediocre. However, Death Proof pleasantly surprised me, probably because it is more about dialogue, atmosphere and crazy behaviour than about violence. The bits of violence are as extreme as you'd expect though. This is the ultimate girl power movie btw, more so than Kill Bill. 8/10

Parts 4 and 5 of my East Africa photo report are up. Part 4 is about southern Rwanda, where we visited the Nyungwe forest and the macabre genocide memorial in Gikongoro, and part 5 is about our short but enjoyable passage through Burundi.

After passing through Burundi we arrived in Tanzania, where we spent the second half of this journey. I'm not sure when I'll get to finishing this photo report; Tanzania is much traveled so those pictures aren't as special, and I want to focus on my site about the Antwerp language again for the next few weeks.

It's been six months since I returned from Africa, but I finally found the time to start on the photo report! I've put up parts 1, 2 and 3 about Uganda, northern Rwanda and Congo respectively. The definite highlight of this journey was climbing the active volcano Nyiragongo in Congo, and I've got pictures and two movies of the lava lake for you.

Here are the usual teasers...

After a very intense month in which we first painted the whole house we've now both moved our stuff so I'm officially living in Antwerp again. Most of my stuff is still in boxes in the garage though so it'll be a while before I'm really settled. I've made pictures throughout the whole month, I'll make an album about it later.

Happy 2008 etc! I have a lot of news to share already.

First of all, Lotte and me are going to live together in a house with garden in Antwerp, in the neighbourheid called "Kiel" which was added to the city for the 1920 Olympics. It's not in the city center but it's an excellent location to reach the major highways out of Antwerp, and that's exactly what I wanted after all my traffic misery in recent months. We're gonna start painting the whole house later this week and will move in in early february. I'll post some pictures soon.

Secondly we've just bought tickets for what will be my next big trip. On July 10th we'll fly to Ho Chi Minh City (aka Saigon) in southern Vietnam. From there we'll go through Cambodia and perhaps Laos to Thailand, where we'll leave from Bangkok on August 4th. The highlight of our trip should be Angkor Wat, the one really great historic monument that I haven't visited yet.

Meanwhile I still haven't put up any pictures of my Africa trip last summer, but I still hope to get to that soon - I'm slowly sorting and filtering the thousands of pictures me and Danny took.

Lotte, Puk and me spent the last three days in the Ardennes, relaxing in the hotel sauna and swimming pool, visiting the towns of Durbuy and La Roche, and making a few nature walks. On the way home we also visited Tongeren. Here are the pictures already!

In the USA many houses put on spectacular sound & light shows during the christmas period, which makes for nice YouTube movies. This one is entirely different though: two Tesla coils that emit long sparks and electric noise are controlled in such a way that they sing Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.