Just a few pics from Sebastian's fake Bar Mitzvah as well as the bike light assembly line. If you don't know what this is about, read here.

As promised some shots of the work in progress as well as results from the other groups. The last one was done with photocopies and paint thinner – hence the grungy look.

That's probably the best way to describe last night. Holy fuck, it was good! But one thing after the other:

It started out by me calling Pete and Hendrik, two of the guys from the hostel which I hadn't seen in ages. In Hendrik's case it's been over two months to be precise. We've been trying to meet for quite some time now, but it never worked out. But yesterday it actually did! Hendrik agreed to come over to my place for some beers and later move on to Vega, where we'd meet Pete. And so it happened. Hendrik came over with a sixpack of juleøl and we had a nice talk, while Felix and I had a glass of red wine. We still had headaches from the night before but the wine got rid of them. Magic! Or just the killing of the few brain cells still working right. I don't know. At about 11 we made a move to the club as we wanted to get in for free (until 1) and we had to walk quite a bit. At 12 we were inside, chilling in the lounge and having our first ice cold Tuborg – later we switched to Corona. Yes, it's both beer. And I drank it. Again.

And then it happened. Suddenly, while the place was getting more and more crowded, all kinds of people started popping up out of nowhere. First Johannes and Schwan, then Leopold, Elena and Andrea, then Dot and Jeppe. Later Paulie, which I hadn't seen for over a month, showed up as well. Even Johanne's friend from the trip to the Josh Cochran exhibition was there! And Hendrik! And Felix! And then at 1:30 Pete! And Lasse! Holy crap, one big ass family. And as I found out, it was Lasse's birthday that day. I swear, had the boys from Darmstadt and the people from Erlangen been there, it would have been THE perfect, not-able-to-top night.

What made it so good, besides having so many friends there and dancing with them, was the music we were dancing to. If I forgot to mention, it was friggin' DJ Feadz AND friggin' Trentemøller in a double feature! Plus support by Fredski! Feadz was just killing it. At 2:30 you couldn't drop a penny on the dancefloor. It was so packed, people started piling up on the stage next to and behind the DJs. The final 10 minutes of his set were maybe the wildest I have ever had on an electro night. There was a goddamn pogo – to electro!!!

While Hendrik and Felix kept on chilling in the lounge and enjoying a nice talk (it's not really their kind of music), I was pouring sweat with the others til 4 o'clock. We left so relatively early because to be honest, Trentemøller had some trouble keeping the crowd going and the party lost quite a bit of it's momentum. Had it been just him that night I think it would have been fine. But his sophisticated minimal just didn't work on a crowd that was still high on bone crushing new rave.

Still, a night to be remembered. Also and especially because all the good friends I was able to share it with. Sorry, no pictures this time. I don't think my camera would have survived it. But I'll see, maybe I can get some cellphone shots from the other guys.

And here it is. Linn did the capitals, while I stuck to the lower case letters. The right pic is the poster we had to print in 70x100cm and the left one is Christmas card we had to design with 'our' font.

Last week's been somewhat busy. Here's what kept me from writing:

The type workshop kept me quite busy. We got a new assignment on Monday: cut up one of the letters of 'your' font into nine pieces and create a new typeface with them. For this I was teamed up with Linn, a swedish girl specialized in illustration. After taking two days of deciding on the letter and the way to cut it up we thought it was better to split for creating the font itself. I think you'll figure why from the results (above). Tomorrow I'll try and post some of the other group's finals. Working so hard on this thing kept me from continuing my big illustration project, which I was supposed to finish next Tuesday. Luckily I was able to talk to my teacher and am now able to send via e-mail. Phew! But that's DKDS.

As part of the workshop we also got to listen to a lecture by Bo Linnemann, one of the leading danish typographers and founder of Kontrapunkt. He and his staff have actually worked for quite a few big companies (Carlsberg, Microsoft, Danske Bank etc.) and created their share of type faces. Most famous probably being Kontrapunkt Font, which you can download for free here. Although I don't like all of his stuff, it is quite impressive how productive this guy is. On this occasion I was also able to watch the Helvetica movie again, which one of our teachers had organized. A thing I forgot to mention about it last time: it has a very nice soundtrack, which almost by itself makes the film worth seeing.

And: Last Thursday Felix arrived! Hooray, first visitor from back home! After already having gone to Stockholm and Berlin beforehand, I'm his third and last stop on his visiting-friends-across-europe-for-christmas trip. Since his arrival we've been quite busy:

• Thursday, 9 p.m.: Picking Felix up from the airport.
• Thursday, 11 p.m.: Going to Simon's place to celebrate Sebastian's fake Bar Mitzvah, which was actually just an excuse to get drunk and spend a nice evening with friends, and which meant that in order for Felix and me to catch up to everybody else's alcohol level we had to down several tequila, vodka, absinthe and muskat shots (in that order) in the first half hour. But hey, it worked :) It also led me to finding out that Felix, just like me, is a notorious party smoker...
• Friday, 8 a.m.: After having slept 4 hours and having a massive hang over I had to drag myself to school to print and present my workshop results. Luckily my body seemed to have somehow functioned on autopilot, as I don't remember half of that morning except for feeling miserable and very zombie-ish.
• Friday, 1 p.m.: Getting back home, sleeping for three hours during which Felix discovered Copenhagen for himself.
• Friday, 7 p.m.: Making dinner and calling up some friends to go to Vega for what would turn out to be an amazing night out, but I'll let you read about that in the next post.
• Saturday, 2 p.m.: Having had a good night's sleep, we got up to the sound of many people's voices and the clicking of plastic parts. And suddenly we found ourselves in an assembly line putting bike lights together... Let me explain: Simon and two fellow students had to come up with a good business idea for a university project. The idea was so good, that in fact it is now being realized. To encourage people in Copenhagen to use more bike lights (which is actually a law) in order to prevent accidents at night, they suggested to the city police to give out light's as 'Christmas Gifts' when catching people not using them and fining them 500DKK. These people still have to pay the fine, but at least they get some lights for it. The city is sponsoring the whole thing BUT Simon and his friends had to deliver the lights ready made: equipped with batteries and wrapped as a gift. So now, they had to cut open 2000 packs of bike lights, put batteries into and a ribbon around them. Too much work for three guys alone. So this morning, Sus, Julie, Rebecca, Astrid, Noah, Jonas and a few others came around to help. And at 2 p.m. they had two more guys doing the dirty work :)
• Saturday, 4 p.m.: Going on a quick sight seeing trip to Christiania, and eating some of the best food I know: Strawberry Cakes from Lagkaghuset. I could eat these things all day – if I had the money.
• Sunday, 3 a.m.: After some chilling, a good dinner, playing some Playstation and watching a very confusing movie by the name of A History Of Violence (I think we just didn't get it), Felix has gone to bed and I'm writing this post.

Sorry for this massive amount of text but there was obviously some catching up to do (Falko, I hope you're happy now ;)). Pictures to all this stuff will follow the next couple of days.

Julefrokost! This traditional Danish event – translated it means Christmas Lunch – which is a very common thing during the Christmas season and on which a group of friends meet at someone's place, have dinner together and get drunk afterwards, took place at my crib (yo!) last night. All in all 16 people and lots of good food, wine and Juleøl – great sushi and green tea ice cream by Yoshi, traditional german red cabbage by Johannes, three different pies from Guilom and Dora, meatballs by Jeppe, tiramisu from the swiss girls, potato gratin by Schwan, tuna sandwiches by Chloé, lomo from Manu, cookies, more cakes, lasagna...the list is endless.

After having stuffed ourselves we had a little post-birthday celebration for Chloés 22nd and continued the night drinking, talking, playing table soccer and darts and putting cool stick-on earring all over our faces. Memorable events included Dora breaking her chair in the middle of the dinner, Yoshi's indignant facial expression upon seeing some of his sushi being handled with forks, Guilom, Manu and me trying to find out how many different kinds of hard liquor shots you can have in one go without throwing up, the naked couple across the backyard which just wouldn't get it on, the dick, superman, and of course Manu's revealing of his feminine side (maricón!).

Altogether a very enjoyable and 'hyggelig' night. Thank you to everyone involved! And a special thanks to Dora, Dot, Johannes, Andrea and Barbara for doing all those dishes – just realized today how long it would have taken me to clean that mess up.

Last Wednesday we started a typography workshop with Elias Werner, a young guy working as a type designer for Kontrapunkt. Actually Bo Linnemann was supposed to do it but for some reason dropped out. First task: blindly pick a font from a stack of paper, find out which one it is, write a quick summary on it and design a black&white poster in 70x100cm using all the letters of that font. Time: 3 days. Here my experiments with 'Wittenberg Fraktur Bold' (coincidence I swear), the broken 'h' is the one that I printed in the end.
By the way, this is also marky my 100th-Blog-Entry-Anniversary! Yeaay!

Run!