As I mentioned before it is autumn in Germany and it tends to get rather cold. In order to protect themselves from that cold, Germans have developed warm jackets, hats, gloves and penis warmers. After all, if your hands and head are warm it is only fair to keep your cock'n balls cozy as well.
You all know that I am staying with my mom at the moment. In good old family tradition she knitted me my very own penis warmer.
I feel much better now.
Even if it get's as cold as in Siberia, I won't freeze my balls off.
Thank you Mom.
PS: "Penis Warmer for the Sophisticated Gentleman" is a registered trademark owned by the Manfred Maluche trust. My father used to give those away as corporate gifts to his clients like Henkel, Tartex and Haus Bergmann.
I am not shitting you.
And my Grandmother knitted all of them for him.
Now you know why I didn't become an accountant.
I have a friend who loves to take viagra
just because he like the feeling of getting horny
without the sex and stuff
So far I went 3 times to the Oktoberfest. Now the weather turned sour and it pulls a lot of fun out of the action. But I am sure that I will go a few more times just to be on the safe side.
Am I having fun yet.
I still have to re-charge my funny bone. Just wrote a story for a magazine and it sucked all funny out of me.
So far I have been on the Oktoberfest twice.
Once sober and once sligtly skewed.
I dont have to tell you which was more fun.
Keep coming back, many more pictures and stories to come.
September 26. 2007
Honest Pumkins
Another blast from the past
Labor is very expensive in Germany that's why somebody came up with ze idea to let other people do all the work.
Along every highway you'll find signs like ze one on the picture above.(click on the picture to enlarge).
Ze idea is that you go out in ze field to plug your own, strawberries, flowers or like in this case pumpkins, load them in your car and then voluntarily pay by throwing your money into ze box. I could understand ze concept if you would get ze stuff cheap. But a pumpkin is US $ 5 and you have to get it yourself from ze field?
They are really tempting my honesty.
Newspaper are sold ze same way here in Germany except you don't have to plug them from a field.
You zee, lot's of honest people around here. That's why I don't understand why Germans lock up their garbage. They really do.
Great art happens within restrictions or limitations, in times of crisis.
It forces you to be creative.
Last night I walked passt this sign again and I remembered my note from 4 years ago:
As you all knew, "Beduerfnisanstalt" means toilet, of course. Literally, "Beduerfnisanstaltbenutzungsordnung" means: "Desire Institution Usage Ordinance"
But you knew that as well. "
To be correct it should have been spelled in one word and I have already sent a written complaint, in triplicate, to the "Stadtwerke Muenchen Gmbh".
If you ever come to Germany, you will probably encounter a "Beduerfnisanstaltbenutzungsordnung"at some point. Therefore, in order to protect you from any possibly negative encounters with the law, I went through the pains to translate it for you. Please read it carefully. Germans have no humor whatsoever when comes to their "Beduerfnisanstaltbenutzungsordnung". I translated some parts literally, when I felt it might add to the overall amusement factor.
Beduerfnisanstaltbenutzungsordnung
1. In the interest of neatness and hygiene, desire institutions and their installations are to be kept tidily at all times.
2. Attendance is only permitted for the purpose of the execution of emergency relief. Exceeding and useless lingering will be prosecuted for trespassing.
3. Bulky items, especially baby carriages and bicycles as well as animals are not allowed to be brought into the desire institution. The prohibition is not applicable for sickness-vehicles and seeing-eye dogs.
The funniest part of all were the faces of an elderly couple who saw me taking the picture of a toilet door in the middle of the night. Unfortunately I have no documentation of that. But my sculpture: "You Guys Are Sick" does a pretty good job describing it.
September 22. 2007
Munich, Germany
After a really long flight I made it to Germany just in time fort he opening of the Oktoberfest. I will be going there in a few minutes. Unfortunately I have to work, trying to find Asians partying their asses off.
I still have to settle down and get my updates organized.
What do you do if you have a beautiful 16th century church, bloated with history and you want to attract tourists?
Exactly, you build two huge transformers right in front of it.
It's a devilish clever use of contrast to highlight the subtle design elements of this ancient monument.
As a seasoned designer, I wish I would have thought of that.
Binondo church, located smack in the middle of Manila's Chinatown has a dome similar to the one on St. Peters in Rome but slightly smaller.
Apparently the first and so far only Filipino Saint, Lorenzo Ruiz got his bliss right there working as an altar boy.
Have you ever been in this really embarrassing situation, when a flush of blood rushes to your head while the bottom of your stomach caresses the inside of your ass cheeks? Like for example, when you suddenly realized that you have been masturbating to the pictures of a transvestite for the last ten minutes instead of what you thought was a gorgeous young girl slowly stripping.
As part of my ongoing effort to post all the beautiful things I couldn't post before because I had to wait until they were published or I was just too busy to put on my blog, here is an event I shot last November.
It was one of those jobs that make you work real hard for your money. A bunch of beautiful young models flirting with my camera and trying to distract me by pouring Mo? & Chandon down my throat.
To excel in anything you have to have the ability to quickly zoom into the smallest details and zoom out again to see the whole picture without loosing touch with either.
The best can do both at the same time.
One of my close friends, Phil Whelan, who is a DJ at RTHK 3 is also a musical director and concert clarinet player. He invited me last November to cover a production of My Fair Lady by the Hong Kong Singers
Great show and lots of fun.
I never thought I would enjoy that kind of stuff.
One of my most recent shoots was a bunch of young guys running around China town in Manila.
They are practitioners of a sport called Parkour.
It's a French thing, check it out in Wikipedia.
We had a lot of fun running with those guys spooking unsuspecting Chinese traders and pedestrians.
Pictures and story by James Gabrillo were published in the Phillipine Daily Inquirer, Saturday Super! section.
Sometimes when I play solitaire on my computer
I get this eerie feeling I have seen it all before.
Like a deja vu or something.
One of the main means of transportation in the Philippines are jeepneys and mean they are.
No, I am just kidding. They are not really mean.
It's the drivers that are.
Again, I am kidding.
Those guys have my highest respect. They slave themselves through the day choking on diesel fumes, warding of robbers, collecting money while driving, all so that they can sustain their family and the other two families they keep on the side.
In principal, jeepneys aren't a bad idea. It is a very efficient form of transportation. Or better…they could be. The bad idea is that Filipinos wouldn't walk ten meters if there would be a free keg of ice cold beer at the other end. Therefore, jeepneys stop about every ten meters to let somebody off or on. They do that preferable in the middle of the road or sometimes on three lanes next to each other on a one lane road.
Jeepneys are basically pimped US Army jeeps.
After world war II, Korea and finally Vietnam jeeps were in abundance and cheap (pardon the pun).
Too expensive to ship them back, they were dumped by the US forces in and around their bases in the Philippines.
Filipinos, needing urgently something to get them from one end of the street to the other without having to actually move, quickly realized that with their expertise in improvisation those cheap, plentiful jeeps could be pimped into serious transportation devices.
I took those pictures a year ago as part of a shoot I did for the Lufthansa Magazine.
4 days I walked around Manila trying to find pretty jeepneys. There are millions of ugly ones but very few which would be the pride of their owner or driver.
I did finally find this depot and got a few good shots.
A week later, I saw great looking jeepney's all over the city.
I would like to suggest that the department of tourism spends a whole bunch of money on helping jeepney operators to pimp their rides real bad. It is one of the very few topical visual characteristics in Manila and it should be made as pretty as possible.
As we say - If you can't get rid of it - pimp it.
September 12. 2007
Joe Zawinul
I just read that Joe Zawinul died the other day.
Bummer.
When I first hear "Birdland" of weather report I couldn't believe what I heard.
I ran out and bought anything on weather report I could find.
September 12. 2007
A new Nigerian Scheme
I just received an email from somebody I only once had a short email exchange with.
It turned out to be a Nigerian scheme to rip some money from you.
I guess that can happen if you check your email in an internet cafe.
Either because you forgot to log out or through key logging software, somebody get's access to your email account and sells the info on to some Nigerian Spammer.
Here it is:
How are you doing today? I am sorry i didn't inform you about my traveling to Africa for a program called "Empowering Youth to Fight Racism, HIV/AIDS, Poverty and Lack of Education, the program is taking place in three major countries in Africa which is Ghana, South Africa and Nigeria. It as been a very sad and bad moment for me, the present condition that i found myself is very hard for me to explain. I am really stranded in Nigeria because I forgot my little bag in the Taxi where my money, passport, documents and other valuable things were kept on my way to the Hotel am staying, I am facing a hard time here because i have no money on me. I am now owning a hotel bill of $ 1550 and they wanted me to pay the bill soon else they will have to seize my bag and hand me over to the Hotel Management., I need this help from you urgently to help me back home, I need you to help me with the hotel bill and i will also need $1600 to feed and help myself back home so please can you help me with a sum of $3500 to sort out my problems here? I need this help so much and on time because i am in a terrible and tight situation here, I don't even have money to feed myself for a day which means i had been starving so please understand how urgent i needed your help. I am sending you this e-mail from the city Library and I only have 30 min, I will appreciate what so ever you can afford to send me for now and I promise to pay back your money as soon as i return home so please let me know on time so that i can forward you the details you need to transfer the money through Money Gram or Western Union.
I know a guy who perfected the art of self love to the point
where he is being credited to single handedly put the word "master" in front of bation.
Series: Portraits of Filipino Shakers
Imelda R. Marcos
Click on the pictures to see more.
I shot Imelda Marcos for the German Magazine Parkavenue.
The writer and I spent the whole day with her.
She gave us pre-prepared lectures about her life and her plans.
During lunch she loosened up a little and we had some fun together.
She is a very sophisticated and charming host.
September 10. 2007
Stories
Nothing like a good tear jerker in the morning to get you going.
I love listening to all kinds of Stories .
September 9. 2007
"The Shock Doctrin"
I certainly don't want to turn my blog into a political one.
There is too much I don't seem to understand, so I don't want to talk about it.
But I just saw this short film on Youtube and it did it's intended purpose on me.
Nothing new but put together very well.
That's exactly one of those things I thought I kinda understood but then got a little insecure because apparently so few other people seem to understand it.
"The Shock Doctrine"
By Alfonso Cuar?, director of "Children of Men", and Naomi Klein, author of "No Logo".
In one of my watering holes they show big-screen rugby and other instances of grown man chasing each other and then inappropriately grabbing other guys in colorful costumes.
Most of the time the show starts roughly about the time my buddies and I would leave anyway. Since we were the first in the pub we also had the most desired real estate to watch the screen, It turned out to be a reliable source of free beer selling of our table to the highest bidder.
It's now official.
The Boracay Chamber of Commerce and Industry have spoken.
From now on you please be so kind to refer to Boracay as Boracay.
Bora is no good.
It is insulting to the local sensitivities.
And of course it is also way to easy for the unsuspecting tourists to confuse it with Bora Bora.
I guess they are aiming at extremely unsuspecting tourists.
Curiously Bora Bora was originally called Bollabolla which, if it would be in the Philippines and not French Polynesia, would mean:
"Full of shit"
For some reason I have to claim my blog with technorati.
I have no idea why I am doing this but apparently it's a good thing to do.
I don't even know what it does.
Probably I fell for some cheap hacking trick and now somebody will steal my identity and make me the ridicule of society.
Well good luck.
During a conversation with a friend, the term "normal" pop up in reference to my approach to life.
"Let's face it Andy. You might have a lot of interesting character traits, but being normal is certainly not one of them."
Macumba is an authentic African Bar in Soho, Hong Kong.
This series of pictures is a little dated but also timeless.
Taken during a special event at the bar.
Many magazines or newspapers, or at least the ones which have been around for a while, have a little column called: "In this paper 50 years ago", "In the news 100 years ago" or something like that.
I decided to come up with my own version of it.
"Things I did this day 21 years and 12 days ago".
Part 1: I am so outta here.
I put on my Bavarian traditional dress, complete with lederhosen, suspenders, hat and stockings, held my thumb out on a Autobahn ramp and hitchhiked out of Germany
Well, not totally out quite yet. I was on my way to East Berlin to catch a train. Technically I went out of Germany (through East Germany) and then back again into West Berlin.
My dad brought me to the ramp and stayed with me until I got my ride. You might think that a guy in Lederhosen hitchhiking with his father watching over him wouldn't attract many takers but it wasn't long before the first car stopped. The driver asked me where I am heading. "Beijing" I answered. That was the line my father was waiting for. He got a kick out of that. That's why he came along. That, and also he somehow sensed that I probably won't come back anymore. He had seen the world and he knew his son. It wasn't too difficult to figure out what will happen if you combine the two. I didn't know. Even if I would have known I was way to excited to feel any sorrow.
My Dad gave me a hug, the hug which has been described in a thousand stories of sons leaving their nest in search of adventure. It was a good hug.
"Hitchhiking in Lederhosen to China?" the driver wondered.
"Yep," I answered, "but for now I'd settle for Berlin if you are going in that direction."
He agreed to bring me a few hundred kilometers north from where I quickly caught a second ride all the way to Berlin.
Since early that morning until late at night in Berlin where I had a few beers with guy who gave me the lift, I was high like I was on cocaine. Since I was a small kid I knew I would travel the world. My dad did it in the early 70s and he brought back thousands of photos, miles of super 8 film and boxes of exotic goodies. I remember seeing slides of the Taj Mahal, the Klongs in Bangkok and Jesus on top of a sugar cone shaped mountain in Brazil. Since I was only six years old, Hong Kong was my main point of interest. My father brought back hundreds of different plastic toys. Hong Kong was just emerging as the toy manufacturer of the world. It sounded like heaven to my six year old ears.
(I just stumbled over some fuzzy math. Although each of my ears was six years old at that time, both of them together were also only six years old. Hhhmmm...)
The main reason I was so excited and elated was that after years of school, college and military service, nobody is going to tell me what to do for the next few years. I can go anywhere I want and as long as I like. This absolute lack of any responsibility, total freedom to me is one of the greatest feelings in the world. Twenty years later, I would have another one of those moments of ecstasy, the day I decided to become an artist again.
Next post in: Things I did this day 21 years and 12 days ago,
Part 2: Berlin - Moscow, spooking little Russian girls.
September 6. 2007
Walking on ice
Rather than trying to walk on solid ground,
learn how to walk on slippery ice.
There is much more slippery ice out there than solid ground.
It's also much more fun to walk on slippery ice.
Most people don't walk at all.
Some are carefully probing their way.
Few boldly stomp down a paved road
and very few can walk on ice.
The best are those who can not only walk on ice
but are slipping and sliding all over the place
and having too much fun falling on their asses.
September 4. 2007
Quark Henares
I recently shot Quark Henares for Chalk Magazine.
Quark is a young up-coming highly rewarded director.
He is also the son of a good friend of mine, Atom Henares.
Those are their real names.
I do have to point out though that for the sake of accuracy that Quark should have been called Electron or Positron.
Quark's son should then be called Quark.
Being a photographer has it's ups and downs.
Sometimes you get great jobs and sometimes, well it's called "bread an butter".
A few days ago I had one of those really hard jobs.
A friend of mine is getting married and she asked me if I could cover her hen night.
Since she is a close friend I reluctantly agreed.
Who wants to shoot 15 young, pretty girls dressed in sexy school uniforms partying from eight pm until early the next morning.
Well, somebody had to do it and at least I got free drinks so it wasn't that boring.
September 3. 2007
Hong Kong
Sometimes you gotta do these kinds of shots.
You can always make a few bucks from stock shots.
And actually watching the sun go down from top of the Ocean Terminal with a cold beer in your hand isn't all that bad.
It certainly beats working.
Just to clarify, this particular picture is not from top of the Ocean Terminal.
It is much more conveniently located on ground level near a reliable source of cold beer.
I was thinking about writing my autobiography.
"What the hell was I thinking"
Would be the no contest title.
Then again what do I need an autobiography for if I have a weblog?
I shot that last October but it only got published recently in Manifesto Magazine.
Kublai's Rock was a notorious watering hole and party place in Manila in the eighties.
One of the few places with great music back then.
Almost twenty years later Kublai's Rock opened it's gates again. Some shots of the opening party.
September 2. 2007
The most important thing in Philippine advertising
On the agency of the year awards in Manila, Philippines my buddy Edu Manzano, a celebrity, politician, and anti piracy advocate MCed the show. Just when I was about to take his picture he started his speech: (I quote from memory)
"What is the most important thing in Philippine Advertising?" (at this point everybody was of course expecting that he moves to the importance of agencies giving awards to each other and of all of those that this one is the most important one.)"The most important thing in Philippine advertising is to avoid Andy Maluche trying to shoot your tonsils."
The speech was written by another buddy of mine, Lilit Reyes, who, when he has time will hopefully send me the actual quote.
September 2. 2007
Just an interesting picture
As shot on the agency of the year awards in Manila, Philippines.
September 1. 2007
Family man who is feeling guilty about having so much fun
Click on the picture and see a step by step presentation of the creation of the "Family man who is feeling guilty about having so much fun" Polyptych
..and no, it's not something dirty.
