Tag: France

L’Impératrice – Submarine (2021)

L'Impératrice — Submarine (audio)

 

 

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✓ 3 years ago

1992: Spellbound from take to mistake!

The body soon knows where the nose goes!

(updated: 16 February 2025)

Timbertop next year (early 90's - Sep + Feb)

* In the video above, I mention using my brother Luke’s stereo and bike accessories (tyre pump) after he left for boarding school.

That clip was shot in February ’92 and when he returned for term 1 holidays, I admitted to using his stereo and other stuff. It was just a casual conversation we had. Sharing is caring, right?

My mother was somewhat okay with me doing so, but only under certain conditions.

He also used some of my stuff in the following year. We ultimately shared our stuff… within reasonable limits under the constraints of the time.

Also, from 1989 onward we used to share a number of things including a single 8088 XT clone for school work and gaming. Luke had the computer in his room for a while (so I was in there a bit) until it was moved into the family room, and it was often a source for conflict or disagreement.

[ colorized ]

Who knows, maybe it caused my visual short-sightedness (I got glasses in 1994) and derailed my handwriting but I was handing in printed assignments at school before anyone else and topped the class consistently, except for Hebrew.

So in around 1990, my mum was kind enough to bring home a pair of Bauer rollerblades from the USA (around a decade after giving birth to me.)

Then by 1992, Bar Mitzvah = gifts = much unused clutter.

1 2 ..

At the end of that year, I broke my nose snowboarding in France and I had only just started out shredding

[Buller, 1992]

And before that, Jeremy had initially lent me his board – an early Burton.

That was a year or two earlier and the boots weren’t great – I think they were rentals, though.

 

So I didn’t find snowboarding easy, but it was fresh and fun. So I ended up with a bump, like so many others.

[ Courchevel, early 1993 ]

Like being in Luke’s room, maybe I shouldn’t have ever ventured onto that steep run. I think it was Face de Bellevarde (Val-d’Isère) the Olympic downhill run and it was so foggy that day that I never intended to board there. Also, I lost my way and ended up tumbling over some rocks on the the side of the run at the bottom section. It really hurt.

Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should. Unless you’re nosy.

It was a week or two after the pics below.

1 2

So my grandfather once told me he broke his nose, I think during the war, and he just used his bare hands to snap it back into place. There were no doctors around. He laughed about it.

But for me, I didn’t think of that. When I told my mum a few days later she suggested seeing a doctor. But I didn’t want an operation, and if I could still breathe through it, and it looked okay, I’d be fine. Yet perhaps the doctor could’ve manually reset it like with Fred. That’s possible if done within a week of breakage – but they could also wreck it more. Interestingly, I recently learned that mouth-breathing is actually risky to dental health, as it disrupts the oral microbiome.

“France is not really herself unless she is in the front rank,” wrote de Gaulle at the start of his war memoirs The Call to Honor. Only the French ?!?

As with de Gaulle, Freddy too also fought in the French resistance, whereby some fighters helped him cross the Pyrenees on his escape to Barcelona from Toulouse where he learned Spanish. I don’t think he handled a gun and am not sure how long he was with the group, though. I think he said his nose was broken in a battle – not sure. So he left in January, 1944. His younger brother (Jacques,) sister (Lily) and mother (Manya) followed in July with the help of “passeurs.” It took them 4 days and nights to make the trip over the Pyrenees to rendezvous with Freddy in Spain (see below.)

As a child, Fred showed me once at Mount Buller how to pierce an egg and drink the contents through it, which the resistance fighters did. Must’ve worked. Interestingly, to this day (Nov 2024) my mother speaks French and Spanish – both very well, as did her father.

Anyway, prior to the ’92 trip, I had also skied in France in 85/86.

With ski instructor Lionel at Club Med, Tignes Val Claret, for a 2-star award… great teacher and person.

So I had two other risky falls that trip while skiing in early 1993.

On the first day, I took a minor fall but a single ski catapulted almost to the height of the chairlift and almost landed on my head. I didn’t see any of it, but that’s what I was told. Some time later, I took a fall and ended up sliding down a steep run (in Val Thorens?) with only one ski attached, but picking up speed.

People on the chair were shouting at me but I didn’t know what they were saying. I managed to break my slide by doing some kind of self-arrest with the poles. Later from the chair I saw I would’ve dropped and slammed really hard into a traverse track had I kept going, maybe over the edge of a cliff.

Around this time, Rikka’s father saw me fall at the bottom of Bull Run chair amongst the moguls, when he stood there and said “Nice Stack” in a French accent. At least he was honest.

I had taken big falls on race courses too, unwilling or unable to ride the big ruts when they emerged in the fog.

[ 1993 ? – Shakey Knees, Mount Buller ]

Yet, I had been skiing since I was two so how could I overcome the discontent?

Maybe the equipment was the problem. Why carry poles if they were never even planted? I wasn’t using poles while rollerblading. My uncle once suggested to wear weighted gloves as an experiment. But in the end, the ‘right’ technique was dictated by the ski shape – yet that wasn’t enabling me to become the endorphin machine I know was possible.

1994 05 05 Endorphinmachine

So a little over a decade later in 2002, I did an introductory ski instructor’s course at Mount Buller, but didn’t end up teaching. A good thing as ski schools have very clear ideas of what’s right and wrong regarding technique. Yet so did I. I have the certificate somewhere.

That year I had started to Heartcarve in New Zealand (Mt Ruapehu) on some of the earlier parabolic skis and basically never fell from then onward as a result of my quiet revolution in style.

[ Salt Lake City + Snowbird – March 2003 ]

So skiing then became a sport about endorphins for me rather than adrenaline and that became possible due to my rollerblading practice and analysing the planes of Heart-motion, which I ended up describing in an article in 2008.

[ diagram ~2003 | March 2008 ]

And people on the Newschoolers site wondered if I was serious or not.

There are actually 6 separate carving styles within these planes. This deconstruction and re-imagining of skiing occurred consciously as I thought about new ways to use the parabolic skis that began arriving in the late 90’s from Elan which I had yet to use. I wanted a way to abstract myself away from the micro-management of movement that can lead to rigid thinking and limit flow-states. As mentioned elsewhere, “if nothing else, free the left-hand,” yet “free the heart” would also be great.

So Heartcarving was enabled by an evolution in ski design.

[ 2007 Buller x 2 | 2008 Whistler ]

And by January 2013 I was fortunate enough to be able to head to Zermatt with a pair of custom skis that I designed in snoCAD-X, were built in France and then sent to me in Jerusalem.

[  2012 Chamonix (Idris) ]

Skis on roof [Jerusalem late 2012]

Just ask Pierre.

"I've never seen skis like that!" [Jan, 2013]

Because who wants to break a leg?

[ Aug, 2017 ]

Furthermore, upon returning I started buying inexpensive crystals from ebay to help continue with this shift to the heart in day-to-day life – well that’s what I believed or wanted.

Heart Rhythm Meditation was something I came across in 1999 – and to me it makes sense to be aware of the heart and lungs simultaneously – along with everything else going on. The idea is to get more exit from the mind and more presence into the body because the body is always present. That’s what St Germain spoke about also in 1999.

"Rhodizite is an amplification stone." #crystal #rhodizite

[July 2014]

Others have said that the heart chakra is the most important one because it keeps the others in balance.

And even though I haven’t skied since 2013, (as of 2024) I feel I am possibly 50 years ahead of my time. Time will tell. And those custom skis ended up warping anyway, so perhaps the delay can mean better materials to construct true super-skis.

To this day, I don’t see why the body can’t naturally restructure itself to its original blueprint. Perhaps it never will whilst under a Witch’s Spell.

AC/DC - Witch's Spell (Official Video)

The original blueprint – can carving take me there?
✓ 6 months ago

Lifelike

Life is what you make of it …or paint of it!

(updated: 27 July 2025)

I saw my late maternal grandmother, Ina Rose at the Tel Aviv Hilton in November 2009 with my mum. I recorded an interview with her during the morning of the 25th. I saw her again that night after TechAviv after a lift back there from Boris.

In our discussion, she describes her meeting with Albert Einstein in the USA sometime between 1945-1947. It was her being an artist that sparked Einstein’s interest to meet her.

During the war, Ini was freed from an internment camp and ended up hiding in Toulouse, France. There she learned French and followed the painting style of French Impressionism. Ini went to the USA after the war to meet her mother and sister.

[ Einstein ’46 | Ina’s WWII story | Australian naturalization ’56 | Marriage to Frederick ’47 in Melbourne ]

Ini mentions Fred (my grandfather) and Toulouse in her 2000 postcard to Luke and I below:

They met in Toulouse and even spoke French to each other at home in Australia as the norm. My mother, Jacqueline, speaks French very well to this day. I learned it for 3 years but struggled with it, unfortunately.

Anyway, my immediate family actually lived in an apartment down in the dip of Washington Street (but before I was born) before we moved up the hill to #38 that was sold in 2006.

[pic 2 – 2006 | pic 3, 4 – early 2000’s]

Continuing, Ini’s second home in Melbourne overlooked the ocean in Alimart Court (she actually named it after her children), Brighton, where she lived for many decades.

I have fond memories of going there a lot as a child.

Watching National Lampoon's Vacation in late 80s (Wally World)

I rode a two-wheeler bike there for the first time – in an Austrian ski helmet, ghostbusters tee, no socks and sweat-band watch.

[ 1984? ]

… I ain’t afraid of no ghost!

Ray Parker Jr. - Ghostbusters - Iris Face Remaster

So the house was filled with her art and that was her main line of work for many years.

She held a couple of exhibitions over the years, one even well into her nineties.

The last time I saw her was in July 2013 back at the Hilton (below left) and to her, Israel was fantastic and that was a great realization. She had gone to Germany a few years prior and that really stirred up negative memories.

Also, the first and only time I met her mother, Elizabeth Kaplan was in January 1986, in Boca Raton, Florida.

Elizabeth had a concentration camp number tattooed on her forearm and survived it by being enslaved as a translator for the Nazis. Also, that trip took us to Disney World and EPCOT in Orlando, which was a very fortunate experience to have.

17 years later in 2003 I reconnected with the late Stewart Springfield again in New York City who was Elizabeth’s grandson from Ina’s sister Rita, and a really nice guy – at least he was to me. He was walking with a limp but I didn’t ask him about it.

Wait, isn’t that VP Kamala Harris schmoozing Hillary Clinton behind me? That’s not a photoshop either.

In the 80s he sent us a box of sunglasses for no charge as that was his line of work.

In 1986, Stewart told me that his mum was listed in the phone book as “R Springfield” and ended up getting a lot of phone calls from female fans looking for Rick Springfield and he ended up hanging the phone up on a few.

But ladies were checking Stewie out anyhow down at the beach when I went down there with him in Florida, and he popped off his shirt too. Later in the day he showed us cable TV and we settled on WWF.

Stewart’s mother was Rita (blue pocket below, and striped shirt) and father was Steve.

I think he committed suicide around 2010, but in truth, I don’t know the full story as yet. I may be out by a few years too.

src [ link inactive July  2025 ]

Anyway, at Venice Beach on Superbowl day, (26 January 1986) some sort of street comedian pulled me out in front of a crowd and said I looked like Dan Quayle (“Who was that?” I thought) and then people cracked up laughing because I was Australian. I was an instant hit.

[src]

The wild thing was that as a result, Andrew saw me and came over and said hello, and he was in the extended family (below, red tie.)

The four of us only had 2 nights in LA waiting for a connecting flight and the Challenger space-shuttle blew up around the time we were leaving the country although I’m still somewhat perplexed as to the final sequence of cities eventually reached.

I remember it being really cold in Florida and being told to “put on layers,” and that the weather ended up taking its toll on Challenger.

Also, on that trip at either Vail (Westin) or Copper Mountain (Club Med,) someone pulled out a dollar bill and showed me the “All Seeing Eye” and warned me about it, yet I didn’t really get the gist of all his fear.

It was a lot for a young guy to take in. He could’ve given me the dollar bill too, I would’ve taken it.

I also met some guys making a ski movie in the lounge and they wanted me to intro “Teton Gravity Research” or some words very hard for me to remember and I kept messing up as they filmed me. Was TGR even a thing back then – it couldn’t have been that!? I might’ve ended up on a bloopers reel.

This was a few seasons before China Bowl officially opened to skiers – but perhaps backcountry skiers made the trek as I saw badges and T-shirts for sale with that name on it.

It may be worth mentioning that a couple of years later I met some Americans in India – there was Maximilian, a few years older than me, an only-child and with his single mum, ranting about how Def Leppard was the best band ever and Pour Some Sugar on Me was the best song and he mimed it on a dancefloor and attracted a bunch of girls after demanding the DJ play it… something like that anyway.

Def Leppard - Pour Some Sugar On Me - (In The Round In Your Face (HD/1080p)

I ended up buying the cassette. Okay, so they weren’t Metallica.

In the dining room I met a manager from Chrysalis Records, he asked me “What bands do you like?” I told him “Huey Lewis and the News” and a couple of others. He went beserk. He rattled off some other names and I said I knew them. He also mentioned Was (Not Was.) He was so thrilled he ended up sending a box of 30 CDs back to Melbourne for us to play on our new CD player including the entire Huey collection up until Small World, David Sanborn, The Proclaimers, Vinnie Vincent and The Pursuit of Happiness. Very generous and cool guy – a lot of kind people in the USA – great with box shipping too! It could’ve also been guerilla marketing.

Anyhow, back to Venice Beach – the fellow that took us to Venice Beach was an African-American guy who was waiting around the airport working as a city guide: quite a random encounter. I don’t remember much of Venice Beach except for Muscle Beach.

Danny Trejo on Muscle Beach 1986

But I also remember a large T-shirt shop with screen printing which was new to me. It was wall-to-wall with different t-shirt images. I may have even encountered Sky Ferreira’s future dad there – did his shop exist then? Was he old enough? I think there were a number of t-shirt shops in a row. Whoever he was, he demonstrated in front of my eyes how to run a flood-and-stroke T-shirt print.

Our tour guide’s name was Michael – I remember because I personally knew another Michael at the time and of course MJ. Strange stuff. I have my old passport somewhere so I Don’t Forget.

Don't Savanna (2017 + 2022)

So, a couple of years prior to Ini’s passing in 2015, she made this toast after relocating homes – but her art (and husband) came with her!

My mother now paints, and I’m starting to get restless hands myself!

[~’92 | ’93, grandfathers Fred and Oskar | ~mid ’00’s after leaving Brighton]

Brioni | Spring/Summer 2023 Advertising Campaign featuring Jude Law and Raff Law

 

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✓ 1 month ago

Free Fallin’ :

Not everyone sells out! :

Keep calm it’s probably just Unreal Engine:

Unreal Engine 5 Revealed! | Next-Gen Real-Time Demo Running on PlayStation 5
pics
pixabay.com/illustrations/sculpture-man-falling-hanging-2660273/
pixabay.com/illustrations/female-elf-fantasy-woman-magic-4354079/
pixabay.com/illustrations/dragon-rider-woman-fantasy-flying-4354088/
pixabay.com/illustrations/man-king-fantasy-male-crown-1503546/
pixabay.com/illustrations/man-king-fantasy-male-crown-1503544/
pixabay.com/illustrations/woman-portrait-girl-young-people-4585095/
pixabay.com/illustrations/woman-portrait-girl-young-people-4528351/
pixabay.com/illustrations/fee-elf-arch-arrow-objectives-3369015/
pixabay.com/illustrations/fee-elf-arch-arrow-objectives-3366519/
pixabay.com/photos/red-kite-red-milan-milan-3070295/

✓ 3 years ago

Moon Stop: Better never than late!

A crazy alien cult starts pillaging iconic Earth-based objects and places them on the moon in cargo-cult reverence. They then offer moon-tours to nostalgic humans and aliens. One top alien commander defects and an entire intergalactic war ensues.

pics
pixabay.com/illustrations/independence-arch-accra-ghana-915741/
pixabay.com/illustrations/labaranga-mosque-historic-site-ghana-915751/
pixabay.com/photos/alien-moon-space-science-cosmic-2818746/
battlefordreamisland.fandom.com/wiki/Eiffel_Tower
✓ 5 years ago