SIMPLY FABULOUS

A t-shirt i made for Cameo nightclub

Saturday Wrap up

wow where to begin. nothing but top notch music and friends, saturday started at 12noon at nikkibeach and danced all the way to 9 pm listening to jojo flores. one word WOW! i never dance so this is a big deal. after that went to eat at segafredos after that we headed over to hear the martinez brothes at voyage. Words cant describe how fucking good that party was and once again i danced from 1am-close. amazing djs were in town this weekend and i got the chance to see them all, so im pretty happy about that. now for the rest of the day & week nothing but buckling down and getting all my design work done for my new clients.


ps: what killer weather this weekend, i wish it was like this always! i love miami!

Foward Thinking Nightclub: ZOUK SINGAPORE

Being in the nightlife business i like to look at what other club giants in other contries are doing for inspiration.if i ever had to choose a club to market i would choose ZOUK. Not only bc its famous around the world but because the music is amazing
ad the owner is an art freak.It is everything i love ART//MUSIC//NIGHTLIFE.
here is a quick bio and some pics on zouk. make sure you check out the site aswell


The three old warehouses that make up the original Zouk were built in 1919 on the Singapore River. Thoroughly renovated, the houses now feature three interconnected clubs:

Zouk (1991), with a large dancefloor and state-of-the-art sound and lighting, catering to a variety of artists
Velvet Underground (1994), a quieter, more relaxed lounge that plays house and soul
Phuture (1996), a more avant-garde bar specializing in broken beats.
The clubs have proven popular with Singapore's party-going crowd and regularly attract performers from all over the world. Its famous Mambo Jambo theme nights are considered a must-go for a beginning clubber.

In 2004, Zouk opened a sister club at Ampang Road (Jalan Ampang) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Zouk KL features four rooms: Zouk and Velvet Underground styled on the original, plus the Loft and Terrace bars.

A beach dance party called ZoukOut is organised at Sentosa in December each year. On December 10, 2005, 18,000 people attended the party. ZoukOut 2006 outdone itself once again drawing a record 20,000 party-goers to Sentosa on December 11, 2006.[1]


Mambo Jambo
Mambo Jambo, commonly known as Mambo nights, is a theme clubbing night held every Wednesday at Zouk in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. It is highly popular among the younger segment of the clubbing crowd in Singapore, and a Mambo experience is often regarded as an initiation ritual for many beginners into the local clubbing scene.


Origins and Development as a clubbing institution
While Zouk Club's vision was to introduce house music into Singapore, the concept of house music was not well-entrenched in the Asian clubbing landscape. Thus in order to make house music more appealing to the Singapore crowd, it introduced a blend of music which incorporated pop hits from the 70s and 80s with house music which were to be played every Wednesday night. Never seen as a long term plan, this retro theme night however became increasingly popular with the clubbing crowd and became one of the main highlights of the Singapore’s clubbing week event list. It eventually became the most well patronised weekday event in the Singapore clubbing scene.


Music Type
Mambo Jambo is a spin of the term mumbo jumbo which fittingly described the type of music peculiar to the theme night. It began with a somewhat unorthodox mix of 70s and 80s pop hits and house and over the years, it evolved and incorporated rock, dance and hip hop. A huge hit with the local clubbers, many imitators tried to follow the ‘retro’ theme formula with relatively lesser success. Zouk remained the standard bearer for this unique clubbing experience in Singapore.

Best place to have lunch durring the day

Inspirations: OBEY THE GIANT

by Stephen Lemons Salon Magazine

From London to L.A., Tokyo to Philly, guerrilla artist Shepard Fairey’s ironic, iconic postering blitz featuring the long-dead WWF star has become a global phenomenon.
June 22, 2000 | LOS ANGELES — It’s late on a muggy Saturday night in Hollywood, and guerrilla artist Shepard Fairey is hanging by his fingers from the ledge of an abandoned building. Moments earlier Fairey was pasting an 8-foot-high portrait of the late World Wrestling Federation star Andre the Giant on the building’s wall, but things have suddenly taken a dramatic turn.

Fairey got about half of the colossal poster up before some rent-a-cops came a-callin’. In full Wu Tang-ninja “they’ll never take me alive” mode, he hid from view, scrambling to the edge of the ledge while the private security guards radioed for backup.

Before the donut patrol surrounds the block, Fairey drops 12 feet to the concrete sidewalk below and hightails it across the street where other members of “the posse” wait.

“This kind of thing almost never happens,” explains Fairey, 30, panting from the run. “It’s very rare that I have any problems in L.A. — especially this soon out.”

>Fairey, who looks like a smaller, less menacing version of punk-rocker Henry Rollins, had just begun a weekend of “bombing” L.A. — rolling with his crew and a carload of posters featuring the homely mug of monolithic wrestler Andre Roussimoff, who died in 1993, rendered in Fairey’s totemic style and emblazoned with such Orwellian slogans as “Obey Giant,” “You Are Under Surveillance” or simply “Obey.”

It’s a few minutes shy of midnight on a run that’s supposed to flow until dawn. But already the posse’s attracted heat. Fairey’s had to temporarily abandon both his car, on a corner near the building, and a ladder and bucket of wheat paste up on the ledge.

“If they want to arrest me, they’ll have to catch me,” says Fairey of cops, rented or otherwise. “And I don’t plan to let them catch me.” He can abandon the ladder, but he doesn’t have that option with the car. If he leaves it, it might get impounded. But if he or any of his crew approach the vehicle, they risk being nabbed as the car is full of Giant paraphernalia. That’s when Fairey’s girlfriend, Amanda, a saucy brunette with more moxie than a ’40s-era gun moll, grabs the keys and offers to give it a whirl. Knowing the value of a pretty face and trusting his girlfriend’s gift of gab, Fairey lets her go.

Sure enough, about 20 minutes later, Fairey’s gal speeds to the corner, tires screeching, where the posse’s cooling its heels. When the security guys asked her about the Andre stickers stacked on the back seat, she told them it was for a local band. They grilled her a bit but didn’t seem motivated enough to get the real cops involved.

The evening is saved, and Fairey’s band of merry pranksters is off to paper L.A. red, white and black — the dominant colors in most Giant posters. Not to be outdone, before Fairey returns to his home base in San Diego the next morning, he and the posse double back to the abandoned building, finish the huge Andre head and retrieve the ladder. The bombing run has been a success. Though many of the scores of posters Fairey has put up will be removed in the coming week by city cleanup crews, he’ll be back next Saturday to bomb L.A. anew.

Such run-ins with authorities are part of the game for the South Carolina-born Fairey, whose nearly 11-year-old Giant campaign is a worldwide phenomenon.

It all started when, as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design in the late ’80s, Fairey — on a lark — designed a black-and-white sticker using the image of obey giant and started putting it up all over Providence.

The stickers and posters, which boasted, “obey giant Has a Posse,” drew the ire of authorities as well as the adulation of the skate punks and other anti-authoritarian youth. Fairey made more stickers, sending them to friends nationwide and asking them to post them. Suddenly the obey giant thing mushroomed into a movement far beyond what Fairey ever imagined.

“I realized that a lot of people didn’t know what it was about,” he explains later, during an interview at Black Market Design, the successful graphic arts firm he co-owns in San Diego. “But they liked it because they knew that the conservative people hated it. Initially, I wanted to elevate Andre out of the wrestling subculture to be on par with more mainstream cultural icons. That was the coup — to raise Andre out of a subculture he should be embedded in.”

“Even my very first print ad in 1992 was a picture of Elvis with ‘Big’ underneath and then a picture of Andre with the word ‘Giant.’ So it was saying that Andre is bigger than Elvis. I also did a shirt called ‘The Famous Dead People Shirt,’ which was a grid of nine people with Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Jim Morrison, Bob Marley, Sid Vicious and Andre the last one in the corner.”

Think of it as Phase 1 of the Giant campaign: the drive for icon-like status. In this phase, Fairey got people to like Andre by associating him, often humorously, with other adored pop-culture figures: Andre as Gene Simmons, Andre as Jimi Hendrix and so on. But it was a limited gag. So, around 1996 Fairey moved into Phase 2, borrowing heavily from communist propaganda, Russian constructivism and old-fashioned Madison Avenue hucksterism to blow Andre up into an Orwellian Big Brother figure — ironically appropriating the most powerful aspects of each of these schools for his own anti-authoritarian campaign.

Fairey streamlined Andre’s features and began to use the new Big Brother face in provocative ways. One image shows a police officer holding up a photo of “Big Brother Andre,” with the slogan “Always Remember to Obey Law Enforcement Officials, Giant.” Another shows a paranoid-looking man, who bears some resemblance to Orwell himself. Above his forehead is a series of Andre stencils in orange and black. To the right is the question “Am I under surveillance?” And below, in large block letters, is rendered “7′4″ 520LB GIANT OBEY,” the measurements being a reference to the deceased Andre’s proportions.

“The people who most hate the ‘fascist’ stuff are the people who are most fascist,” says Fairey. “It really pisses them off, and that makes the kids like it even more.”

Fairey points out that when Andre (now referred to almost exclusively as “the Giant” to avoid any legal contretemps with the WWF) orders viewers to “Obey,” he is in fact telling them to “Disobey.” It’s a message teenagers and young adults enjoy to such a degree that Fairey can barely keep up with demand for his posters, and he’s had to farm out T-shirts and additional Giant merchandise to selected companies.

But that rebellious message would mean little without Fairey’s street cred. From the beginning, Fairey adopted the tactics of graffiti artists and earned his stripes by “getting up” all over the nation. His willingness to put his ass on the line and be arrested hasn’t hurt either.

Fairey’s been busted in Philadelphia, Long Beach, Calif., and New York, where Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s anti-graff squads caught the artist with a ton of Giant stuff in ‘96. When Fairey, who’s diabetic but in wiry good health otherwise, got sick in the slammer waiting for his court date, the authorities hurried his case through. He got off with time served.

Denizens of the street were impressed, and remain so. Stephen Powers, renegade author of “The Art of Getting Over,” a book regarded as the graffiti bible, gives Fairey mad props. “I remember being on the fence about whether or not I liked his work,” Powers e-mails from New York. “When a Bronx youth pointed to a face he did and said, ‘Yo, I hear that nigga got one of those on the Great Wall of China!’ That, and his extensive arrest record tell me he’s really committed — or should be committed.”

“Who said, ‘The tree of liberty must be watered with rebellion’?” Powers asks. “Shep makes questioning the BS we’re handed on a daily basis standard procedure. That’s necessary to our growth as humans.”

Similarly, art commentator Carlo McCormick, a senior editor at Paper magazine in New York, is a fan of Giant art, demonstrating Fairey’s ability to win over the intelligentsia.

“He’s kind of advertising, but he’s advertising ‘nothing,’” says McCormick. “He puts it out in such a way that you need to fill in some sort of explanation. It’s telling you to buy and obey, but you don’t know what to buy or who to obey. It works on a very simple level of grabbing people and making them question what that sign is. Once you start to question what that sign is, maybe you start to question what they all are.”

“He’s really tapped into something. People, without even understanding phenomenology, get in on this elaborate joke of putting out this empty signifier.”

Not everyone finds Fairey’s work so engaging. Recently, he came to an agreement with authorities on his home turf of San Diego to cease his postering campaign there. Then there are adherents of the famous “broken windows” theory, which posits that crime is often the result of the breakdown in law and order as represented by such activities as vandalism, graffiti and the like. To them, Fairey is simply a lawbreaker who should be imprisoned and fined for his activities. For McCormick, the issue is not so cut and dried.

“Basically you have a lot of kids right now, at least I can speak for New York, who have seen the entire available visual surface of the city being turned into one big For Sale sign,” McCormick says. “People are feeling, I don’t know, violated. Our world is now cluttered with ads. There’s no escaping them as you walk down the street. Maybe graffiti is at a wane right now in pop culture, but it’s bigger than ever on the streets. There’re more kids out there feeling obliged to take back that space for personal use.”

Hence the appeal to teens and young adults who mimic Fairey’s graffiti-art tactics by putting up posters and stickers on their own. Sure, they may not be able to quote Heidegger, but it doesn’t take a degree in philosophy to understand that the whole Giant thing is fucking with the man.

Though Fairey gets up a lot on his own initiative, the help of the auxiliary members of the posse allows him to boast the distribution of over 1 million stickers worldwide along with more than 8,000 posters and thousands of spray-paint stencils.

(Fairey is quick to point out that he does not endorse vandalizing private homes or businesses, preferring abandoned property, construction site “snipe” walls or, his favorite, city-owned utility boxes. However, he has “liberated” billboards in the past on the grounds that everyone has a right to the visual space they occupy.)

Frequent road trips cross-country and abroad attest to the Giant campaign’s subversive appeal. Last November, he was a smash in London when the hip Chamber of Pop Culture there sponsored a Giant blitzkrieg. Fairey similarly was hailed as a conquering hero in Japan in May when he bombed Tokyo to promote shows at the funky P House and Alleged galleries, who feted Fairey & Co. like they were the frickin’ Beatles.

Where’s the saturation point — the plateau at which the colossal joke is over and the Giant campaign is no longer subversive? Fairey doesn’t have an answer to that. For the time being, while his design firm caters to large corporate clients such as Mountain Dew and NBC, Giant remains his pet art project octopus with a ravenous appetite, one to which Fairey dedicates all of his excess time and resources. Will there ever be a time when he’s no longer postering or bombing?>

“Only if I’m wanted on a national level,” he laughs, an eyebrow raised as if to say that all things are possible. “Until then, this is what I do for fun.”

Alex "BUGA" Bugaloo

This is a very dear friend of mine and he is a super talented pop artist.
Keep an eye out and remember the name BUGA.

Weekend line up

Because weekends start on Thursdays for me here is my line up

tonight: aerobar / rokbar
friday: absinthe tasting at my place then aerobar/mynt
saturday: joo flores at nikki beach day party then dinnerwith mom for her bday
sunday: model brunch at nikki beach then amazing sunday beach party

lets party - claude monet

lucid absinthe

This has got to be my favorite drink right now, i recomend everyone tries it.





Introducing lucid, Absinthe Supérieure. lucid represents a breakthrough product for the U.S. market, as it is the first true, Grande Wormwood-based Absinthe of its type since before prohibition. Unlike imitators in the U.S. and many of the so-called "Absinthe" products that litter the international markets, lucid is crafted directly from select whole herbs, including Grande Wormwood, and never from cheaper assemblages, macerations, extracts or oils.


Absinthe, first commercialized in the early 1800's, emerged as a powerful icon of freedom during the Belle Époque period, and it was during this time that the highly perfumed spirit reached unparalleled popularity and cult status among the worlds of art, literature, and fashion. Once proclaimed to fuel the fires of creativity, and subsequently demonized, Absinthe has recently reemerged on the world stage as a high quality, fine alcoholic libation recalling those earlier artistic times.

lucid is formulated by world renowned absinthe expert T.A. Breaux, and is distilled in strict accordance to traditional French methods. lucid is crafted in the historic Combier distillery, founded in 1834 and designed by Gustave Eiffel in the fabled Loire Valley of France. Each bottle of lucid is carefully prepared by skilled craftsmen, using ancient copper absinthe alembics. Unlike most contemporary imitators, lucid is distilled entirely from spirits and European herbs, and uses no artificial additives, oils, or dyes. lucid recalls the rich tradition of Absinthe, and is crafted using a full measure of Grande Wormwood (Artemisia absinthium), Green Anise, Sweet Fennel, and other fine European herbs traditionally used in making fine Belle Époque absinthe.

Kid Robot & Paul Pope do Playboy

Legendary comic artist, Paul Pope, introduces his newest creation.

Inspired by Playboy's November 1978 cover, this 7.5-inch fantasy's thigh-high boots and sun-bleached locks are a throwback to the mansion's heyday.

Saturday Recap

artwalk was amazing. went to the o.h.w.o.w. gallery and also to art fusion. Finished the night at Brosia with great friends food and sangria.

Pic of the day

This is a veiw from my balcony. When i woke up and saw this i realized how lucky i am to live in this city. i took the pic with my iphone so pardon the quality

Raveney -vs- Guerra photoshoot

No Freedom

This is a piece my friend asked me to create for him. The model is his actual girlfriend, mabey thats why freedom is not allowed. haha oh well i love the peice

WEEKEND FOOTWORK

This is how i feel right now

Michael Gray from Denmark said it right when he made this song

JoJo Flores flyer for his new reidency in Miami

JoJo Flores becomes Nikki Beach Resident DJ!

Thats right, i cant wait, we are in for a treat.it is about time miami gets something interesting when it comes to music and djs

here is a video of when he played last in miami


here is a bit about him
Music Dedication Passion

Jojoflores has come a long way from his original Montreal residencies in the 80’s. Now reaching globally, he is current, dedicated, and consistently collaborating with international DJ’s, producers, club owners, high-brow and corporate affairs. He represents and purveys soulful dance music in every way possible: CEO of Gotsoul, founder of 9 year Therapy Soirée, and his CD compilations. This winning combination has managed to break musical barriers that otherwise would never have come down without his trademark packaging of music & events.

Jojoflores’ hard work and dedication has won him an established reputation in the music industry and has awarded him multiple residencies at famed clubs world wide, including New York’s Cielo, as well as others in San Francisco (Pink), Chicago, Toronto, Miami, Los Angeles (Deep), Hawaii (Lotus), Cape Town, Dubai & Athens. He was voted "Best International DJ" 4 years running by NYC's Underground Archives.

His musical influences range from: Chaka Khan, Prince, Stevie Wonder, A Tribe Called Quest, to the Beatles. Jojoflores, like Afrika Bambaataa is searching for “The Perfect Beat”, and his close connection with the pioneers -as well as the new jack producers- of soulful dance music brings him closer to this goal. He wants “to put the message out there, being optimistic in a chaotic world where positive times are hard to come by." Jojoflores does this--he brings optimism without fail every time he performs.

Wallpaper for download

click on it and then save it

Love My Saturdays

Photos for my friends paola & bibiana. we all went out saturday night came back to my place and decided to have a photoshoot. Here are 1 of the magical pieces that came out of our session at 4am

My Collection for Basel 08

click on image to save as wallpaper

enjoy the wallpaper