Don't Be Sloppy...It's Your Job

I believe it started a couple of years ago, when the first of their kind made its first appearance on the big screen. Blood sucking creatures of the night, with pale faces and handsome features doing a cat walk in front of the camera. You need nothing more than that, to make millions of female teenagers’ underwear get wet. Having them by your side, well you have a sure success in the business.

Then after the cat-walk and the so called “forbidden romance and love” between a mortal and an immortal -that could be criticized by many as necrophilia at its finest- there are the pointless stupid vampire vs other vampire fights.

That till the end of the movie where the prettiest immortal falls in love with the prettiest mortal but something comes along ruining their plans for eternal love and sunshine and you have to wait for the sequel to find out what it is.

Well, I was absolutely fine with these “movies”, “stories” or whatever you want to call them. As long as I was staying away from them at the movie theatre and at the video store they would leave me alone. They wouldn’t try to get in my brain or try to offend my intelligence or feelings.

Tonight, I was flicking through the channels on Television after I finished watching a movie that I picked from the video store. After some intense channel-changing, I decide to stop on a show that was on at that time.

The set, is the one of a bar/ restaurant. A man in a uniform walks in and towards the table where two elderly women are sat. He has an argument with one of these two ladies that it turns out to be his “mom”. The reason was that his girlfriend was calling him at late night hours and his “mom” was trying to “protect” him by cancelling his cell-phone contract.

So till now, we have a 30 year old man that is told by his mom what to do and what not to. I decide to light up another cigarette and stick around to see what happens next. The man finally realizes that he does have some sort of male genitalia hidden somewhere in his pants and says to his mom: “You should make my cell-phone work again or else…oh and by the way if you have to know why my girlfriend is calling at late night hours…It’s because she’s a vampire”.

Now that’s what I call a punch line. “My girlfriend calls me late at night because she’s a VAMPIRE and I broke my leg trying to jump off the fifth floor because I am Superman but my superpowers didn’t work because way too many people were watching me. OKAY MOM?! “

I know what you’re going to say “it’s a T.V show blah blah” and “get over yourself blah blah blah”. Well, first of all, the fact that it is a T.V show doesn’t excuse the dialogues and ESPECIALLY the punch lines to be worse than the ones one can hear in porn movies. And secondly, since when does a T.V show have an overall pardon to be lame and dumb?

Since when did love stories become so cliché? They killed it and now they try to kill it some more. Now that I got it off my chest, I’m going to go to bed and think of tall lilies- I’m talking tree size big ass lilies- and green grass and loud chill music and puppies that can talk and walking sky-scrapers and maybe slimmed down cows and all of them planning an attack against the people who write vampire stories and turn them into movies or T.V shows.

We Can Raise The Titanic

The riots are over. Or so it seems. No signs of Molotov cocktails, broken windows or trashcans that were set on fire. The scent of tear gas has disappeared and the channels have forgotten all about the three people that died. It seems like both fashion anarchists and looters and fresh to the profession photo-reporters are waiting for their next chance to break through and shine. Wear their hoods/ armed with their cameras ready to give their own fight for equality and righteousness.

It’s that feeling you get after you read a feature on the web about how all these were “the calm before the storm” that actually makes you believe it. Makes you believe that the city centre of your country is actually going to turn in to a battlefield. But then I see a miracle somewhere in the horizon. To be honest, it feels like I’m the only one who sees it. There is a way out of this mess.

Many people say IMF, some others talk about help from the European Union but I say no. We can stand on our own. Let me tell you how. It seems like all the Greek female “celebrities”, will start becoming porn stars after the humble start that came from a famous pop singer/ model and whatever she thinks she is. Believe it or not, the copies of her porn movie sold like crazy. After that, another female “celebrity” made a porn movie, which came out like two days ago, while the sequel of the first celebrity’s movie is on its way. See where I’m coming from? Apart from an economical messed up country. Are you getting what I’m trying to say here? We could gather the money by making porn movies!!!!

Imagine that. I’ve never thought about it. Apart from a form of “entertainment” I’ve never thought that the porn industry had something more to offer. But here it is. Our rescue! Embrace it. As it seems by the polls 3 out of 4 Greeks have watched – either by downloading or by buying- the movies of these two so called celebrities.

So if all these so called celebrities came out and said “we’ll work our ass off (literally speaking) to save our country” EVERY GREEK, no matter political beliefs and social background, would be right behind them supporting what they’d be doing. Plus, we the Greeks are famous about spreading the love and hospitality.

So, here’s a proposal that I bet our government would love too: Drop the molotov cocktails, quit spending energy on riots and marches, shouting about justice and start making porn movies. Loads of them! Grab your camera and start shooting. Stop downloading the movies of these honest celebrities of ours that do their best in this dire time of our country and buy them. Give all your money and support them. Support your country. Watch porn.

I don’t mean that. I don’t know. We’re sinking slowly and soon enough- hopefully not- we’ll have to salute and go down with the sinking ship that they created. Enjoy your time and your summer. Hopefully I’ll find the nerve to write another entry during or before the summer. Till then take care.

Mixtapes Childhood And Musical Scars

Alright I got to do this real quick as I'm at my uncle's house in Zante for the weekend and I came down to take a shower as right now I smell worst than I usualy smell (which is VERY good.)

Anyway, this one's about music. How from the very moment we enter this world a melody acompanies us through the best and worst moments of our lives. Hollywood has confirmed it as well with the movie soundtracks, the mellow background music they put in "the first kiss" scenes, the loud-fast music in action scenes etc.

I remember long road trips with my family, and the first thing my father used to do before we begin is to slide one of his cassettes in the car's tape-player. Even if there was a variety of songs in these tapes I can still hear myself humming the melody of Bob Dylan's songs and some of Bruce Springsteen's. If I listen to a song that used to play during road trips, of one of those two artists, I can assure you that I'll be able to tell you where I first listened to it, what my reactions were and what I was seeing through the back-seat's window.

I also remember the very first mix-tape I ever made during Junior Highschool. Here's my top 5: Bob Dylan- If you see her say hello, Bruce Springsteen- The river, Bright Eyes- at the bottom of everything, Sting- Roxanne, Simon and Garfunkel - Sound of Silence/ Red Rubber Ball.

It is undoubtful, that no one can live without music. I must admit that I am a hopeless romantic when it comes down to mix tapes and I firmly believe that no cd compilation can beat a mix-tape. Cliche? Maybe. But I still believe it.

Other than that, I also believe that music scars us deep and that's one of its beauties. Well I gotta go now, I said that I had to keep it short. Till next time, here's something that will definately leave you with a scar:

Against Me! "White Crosses"

After 2 or so years of absence, Against Me! return with a new release “White Crosses”. I don't know if it needs more listening time for me to appreciate it but till now it's kind of weird and goes a bit unnoticed. On the other hand, I can assure you, like all the previous Against Me! albums, it still has this “come back and listen to me some more” feeling after the first time you listen to it.

Tom Gabel's vocals still don’t fail to give you goose bumps and make the hair on the back of your neck to stand up. The back-up vocals fall right into the right places, strategically placed and carefully chosen giving you a better feeling of every song.

More melodic than their previous albums, one could say too melodic and maybe different for the band’s past releases, Against Me! manage with the finest of lyrical content to give you a glimpse of how you’d see the world through their eyes –“Bamboo Bones”- and a browse through their current thoughts -“I Was A Teenage Anarchist”-.

A definitely need to listen to album if not for the music just for the lyrics. Nothing can beat music combined with intelligent lyrical material.

"Suffocation"

Hello There Pretty!

Driving down the street where the prostitutes hang and sell themselves, makes you feel like a rock-star or some sort of a fly celebrity. If you exclude the dirty and sketchy scenery, the sad dimming lightning from the streetlights behind the empty at night time, large meat market and imagine you’re driving down Hollywood Boulevard or someplace where all the hot shots find themselves and girls go crazy at the sight of them, then you might get what I mean. I’ve said this way too many times but every time we drive down that area to get to where our regular bar is, the same thought hits me every time. But it’s also kind of tragic and ironic, how they picked that certain area to exercise the oldest of all professions. Behind the meat market. OOOOOOH POETIC.

Young girls not older than 25, knock on your car’s window smiling at you, asking if they could join you and keep you company. I’m not trying to advertise prostitution here, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that some of them are REALLY pretty and when I say REALLY pretty, I don’t mean the “less clothes more flesh” kind of really pretty. Because let’s just be honest and true here. If you’re a guy and you see a girl not wearing much, besides the “slut” you’ll think “she’s pretty”. Do you get the two different kinds of the meaning of the word “pretty” that I’m trying to make? Wait I gotta find my lighter dudez. BRB. AlRiGht. Found it.

So, obviously the reason why I made this long intro, talking about prostitutes, sketchy parts of my city and meat markets, is because we did drive down that part of Athens last night to get to a bar that was hosting a punk-rock night. Not many people were there. We ordered our drinks and took a seat on the side barstools of the bar. The drinks arrived and I left a tip to the bartender that served us. TIP YOUR BARTENDER SO SHE/HE WON’T SPIT IN YOUR DRINK OR SERVE YOUR DRINK IN A DIRTY GLASS. After 45 mins my glass got empty. I ordered another drink.

She -37 or something years old- brought my drink again. Again I left a tip and smiled politely and thanked her. I continued the conversation I was having with my friend. A couple of songs and stupid jokes later, we ordered another round. She again brought our drinks. I smiled and thanked her. She leaned forward and said the most original starting line for a conversation EVER. “So…do you come here often?”. I answered “yes.” Conversation ended with an awkward silence. She wasn’t saying anything she was just staring at me and smiling.

I looked away and went back to irritating my friend with stupid jokes. I took out a cigarette and lit it. She was standing from the inside of the bar right next to me, she was staring and smiling at me. I was pretending that I hadn’t realized. My friend, looks at her then he looks at me that I was looking down at my drink and then back at him. He grins and we burst out laughing. That was one of the creepiest experiences I’ve ever had.

The rest of the night consisted of sing alongs, watching guys trying to sing songs that they didn’t know the words of and they were just opening their mouths like their trying to fit something in it, a few more drinks and ended with some freshly made bread we bought at 5 am from a small shop.

If I ever become a tour guide, I won’t take my group to the Acropolis or Parthenon. I’ll take them for a ride down the streets that I described at the very beginning of this text. Because this is what reflects Greece nowadays. That’s what Greece is nowadays. A beautiful girl in a cheap whorehouse that instead of doing something with her life she lets every kind of asshole fucking her for pennies and falls asleep alone at night. –well some girls might enjoy this life-style. But oh well…-

B IS FOR BUMDOG

The rhetorical question “you don’t want to grow up and be a bum now do you?” , is one of the most common phrases that parents threaten their children with in their effort to motivate them and do something with their lives. Of course 99% of children will say “No!”. But what would happen if a child said “Yes!”

He is the living proof that art does not inhabit only the expensive galleries and halls and does not derive only from wealth. There is a bum on the corner of your street that might have something of significance to say.

He is a self described “career homeless bum”. But he owns a cell phone, iPod, and a Macbook Pro. He has traveled in through out America and Europe, self-published a book, he has hundreds of thousands of views on his videos on youtube, he made a movie about his life, he is acknowledged as an artist, and he goes by the name “Bumdog”.

“When I was 22 I left LA to travel. You know in this world there’s only two ways you can really travel, with lots of money or no money. There was never any hope of my ever making allot of money so I decided to do it with no money and just started bumming around (which is how I eventually got my nickname)

“I traveled across the United States then I was in England (London), Amsterdam, Paris, South of France, Spain and North Africa” says Bumdog about his life so far.
As a “complete nobody” he has emerged as edgy art-figure, Bumdog manages to deliver the vibe of living in the streets and every day struggling, in his film “Sketches of Nothing By A Complete Nobody” sections of which are featured on his personal Youtube channel.

“IF BUMDOG CAN DO IT…YOU HAVE NO EXCUSES” is written at the end of the trailer of his film “Sketches of Nothing By A Complete Nobody”. Can really a Bum(dog) be better than any of us?



Bumdog, armed with his imagination, experiences and passion for art, turned his life into a feature length film that managed to touch thousands of people in L.A and across the world.

I stumbled upon his video of Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolllin’ Stone” during one of my endless time-killing explorations on Youtube. I tend to read the description on the side and it never seems to fail that its usually another ramble about what the song means to the person that posted it online. but this time the story of the homeless owner of the channel and the creator of the video intrigued me to keep on reading.
It went over some of the detail of the creation of the video. How the creator had heard the song as a teenager and had an instant vision of what it should look like. This vision lead to the creation of a two and half hour movie based on three days of his life.

Bumdog, since he was a teenager showed his interest in fine arts and especially writing. After reading works of the most acknowledged barflies and constant travelers, the likes of Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac, he decided after the several other professions that used to attract his interest, that he wanted to be a writer… and a bum.

“I wanted to do allot of things. Wanted to be a basketball player, real estate, movie director. But all those things seemed to take up too much time to achieve. I eventually realized I had a talent for writing. I also realize I didnt want to under any circumstances wanted any kind regular job. That left only writer or bum” reading Bukowski and Kerouac he realized “I could do both.”

“If this man is so talented to win an artist grant why would he become a bum?” you might wonder, as I did when I first started talking with him and researching about him. And came upon his myspace page.

He dropped out of school after finishing the 7th grade, because he “didn’t learn anything new that wasn’t taught in 6th

“I am a career homeless Bum. Always wanted to be a bum ever since I was a teenager. It was my destiny. Reading books on Buddhism, Christianity, Socrates and books by other authors that I mentioned before simply gave me the intellectual justification for this otherwise insane bent in my brain.”

The situations that he’s been through might be similar with every other bum’s, like eating from trash-cans, sleeping on the street, been jailed but as one of his favorite authors would say “he’s got class for a bum.” The way he puts it is this:

“I got in a lot of trouble when I was younger but as I get older I consciously avoid jail. I’m too proud to beg, too lazy to work, and too dumb to steal. So I create ‘art’ and sell it on the street. CONart is what I like to call it.”

Before he focuses completely on his art he spent some time as a reporter having a monthly column in an L.A local newspaper for exactly one month. “The second month the publisher objected to the word "cunt" in my story. So I changed it. But she REALLY didn’t like what I changed it into. At which time our two paths were amputated. “

The “CONartist’s” talent and love for art, apart from his feature film and videos, can also be detected in his small stories about his everyday life adventures and unusual situations like in the tale “A Christmas Carol: A Real Story” or “Job And Punishment”.

Bumdog carries with him a limited amount of copies of his self-published book call “Sketches of Nothing By A Complete Nobody” and he also sells his 2 ½ hours feature film for $25 to people who contact him over the internet but as he says “his buyers are becoming less and less as youtube keeps putting down his videos”. He had printed up 300 copies of his book but most of them were sold, so now he sells his last copies for $250 to rare book collectors.

“Its not a thick book, mainly just beginnings of things I didnt finish (I was hoping to get some interest in it somewhere and get the money to settle down and finish it all). I printed the book cover in real sketching paper, Which means you can draw or even do water colors on it. I often have artists do work one them. I photoshoped each book differently, so each one is like a unique work of art. Theres only 300 in existence, I only have about 20 left myself. I think it could be worth something someday. Harry Potter only had 300 copies in its first edition.People scoffed at me when I jacked it up from $20 to $50.”

Right now, his travelling path and wonder lead him in Hawaii, in where he’s stuck, and via e-mail he sends me his impressions and thoughts for the place, and his plans for the future.

“My perfect day begins with me having something to eat and ends with having something to eat. But, even at that low threshold, I can’t say I have been having many perfect days lately.

“The money for traveling IS difficult. I get STUCK in allot of places, which is what I am now. Stuck in Hawaii, trying to get to India. But of all the places Ive been stuck in this is easily the most beautiful. But its also one of the most expensive, definitely living out the starving artist routine since Ive been here. I fast 7 days out of the month because I figure if Im gonna go hungry anyway might as well get some health benefits from it.”

Bumdog fought through the toughest situations and till today supports every choice that he made in his life and does not regret about a single thing finding happiness and comfort in music through his iPod.
“Like most people there are many things I regret, but more often then not, I could only change them in retrospect. When they were happening I did the best I could.”
m.f
Like every artist , he too wants to achieve something through art. Every artist has a unique goal. Either that’s fame, money or glory. Bumdog’s target is one and simple and no one could put better than his own words: “a moment that is worth living for”

Leaving The Fortress

There couldn’t be a better example of the old saying “the times are a-changing” but from what happened two days or so ago. I’m saying that for plenty of reasons, not just because I just recently started realizing the full meaning of that phrase and experiencing it but also because just today I reached to a conclusion that I don’t know if it is right or wrong but from what I’ve seen till now it definitely feels right.

I have reached the age where I don’t feel right taking money from my parents to go out or for anything else I want. It feels wrong and when I do that I feel like a bum asking from my mother my cigarette and beer money when she works all day for me to go out and have fun, and I sit on my ass 24/7. Well, not exactly 24/7 but something close to 6-8 hours a day. Which is a lot. Trust me. Add to that, 8 hours of bumming around, the sleeping time plus 8 to 10 hours, plus all the time-out times for food and toilet. If I could, I’d ask from God to …oh shit there’s no such thing as God sorry.

So, after doing an extra 4 months placement for a Greek magazine, while I was in the UK, a few days ago, was the meeting with the editor, where he would finally tell me how much I’d be getting paid and everything would be official. Well long story short, everything went down the gutter. I’m not getting paid regularly just yet because “we live in some really hard economic times” as he put it and I don’t blame him one bit, because we do in a way. But how will my times get better if I don’t get paid? Another eternal question has risen after the “You’re asking for previous work experience to hire me but how will I get that goddamn experience if no one is hiring persons with no previous work experience?”

What I realized from this whole money seeking and independency seeking mini adventure of mine is that I wasn’t really living in any city that I’ve been. I was having fun. I was chilling. I was hanging around. I was at a "party" that I was invited. That is because I didn’t have to pay for anything. But now that I want independency and I don’t want to feel like a bum asking for money, I have to go out there and get it for myself. I kind of feel like a teenage lion that has to go out there and get its pray. Maybe not a lion, maybe a hyena would be a better example. No hyenas go as a pack. Anyway, you got the point of what I wanted to say. Bottom line is that I got kind of bored of this “party” that I am at, the last 21 years and now it’s time to start organizing my own “party” (did you notice the “ “ ? It’s better when I do it in a real life conversation cause I use my fingers and all and I
look really smart. Smart people do that sign right?)

Loads of other things have changed as well but this little path that I’m walking down and we all are, no one could describe it better than Andrew Jackson Jihad in one of his songs, “First we were babies, we're birthing and dying /Then we were children, we were playing and crying / And then we were teenagers we were smoking and fucking/ But now we're all grown up and we're sadly sighing”. Or at least that seems the best way to describe how I see things right now, even though I believe that I’m stuck somewhere in between the third and fourth line. Hopefully I won’t get to that last line till I’m forty years old. I also hope I don’t get bald.

Bottom line of all this, is that I hope I don't get bald when I grow up. That's all I wanted to say, but since I had to do it in a bloggish form...here you go.