This weekend was very laid back, which comes as quite an advantage as I wanna focus on my illustration a bit more. On Friday I worked til 12, had a chat with the girls (see below) and ended the night with a nice 'reunion' with Pete and Lasse, who I hadn't seen in ages, at Lasse's house warming. Saturday turned out to be quite relaxed as well although I had to get up at 8 in the morning to attend Jonas', Simon's little brother, Bar Mitzvah. Quite an interesting experience to take part in this three hour event at the synagogue...

In the evning I first met up with Johannes and a friend of his at the vernissage of a small exhibition of the very talented L.A. based illustrator Josh Cochran at Rumkammerat – quite a small place but therefore very familial. We were handed a beer two minutes after our arrival and, as there wasn't many people around, were able to chat with Josh and his wife for quite a while. Very nice and enjoyable folks, who are visiting Denmark for a couple of days in line with the opening. Josh is also gonna hold a lecture at DKDS (my school) upcoming Thursday. By the way, that guy is only 28! And for all those long term design students out there: he also studied for seven years...

After the gallery the three of us went on to the Cinemateket to see the Helvetica movie as part of CPH:DOX. The building is part of the Danish Film Institute and houses a cinema, restaurant, bar, film & book store as well as exhibitions – and it's got some nice neon animation thingy on its exterior wall. The movie was very good by the way, better than I had expected. I can only recommend it to anyone who's at least a bit interested in typography. We finished the night by having a drink at Loppen and meeting up with Guilom, Dora, Chloé, Gabo and his sister in Christiania for a short 'sight seeing tour'.

Just a short one today. Tonight Dot and I went to Ideal Bar to see the world premiere of the movie Break Hit, a french documentary about breakdancing. It ran as as part of the CPH:DOX, a documentary film festival here in Copenhagen. The festival lasts for ten days and it's mostly movies but also includes events like parties, concerts and other live performances. The movie was quite good (with all the french stars like Salah, Lilou etc.), the location was nice and they even threw in what the host announced as 'Copenhagens Best B'Boy Crew'. Well... uhm, yes, they were b'boys and uhm.... ah, what the heck, it was for free and it was still far more than what I could ever do, so I'm not gonna complain... :)

Shootin' some hoops with an aussie guy, who saw me playing from the hostel across the bay and spontaneously dropped by. I got my ass whooped big time.

Why don't all of our politicians look like models? And why aren't we as creative in making them look ridiculous? P.S. I think I'm in love with Mrs. Auken.

This Sunday Simon, Julie, Astrid and I went on a day trip to Sweden to see the work of David Shrigley at the Malmö Konsthall. Some of you might know him from the 'Good Song' video he did for Blur. While you're at it, have a look at the hilariously strange Who I Am And What I Want.

But anyways, a very very refreshing exhibition. That guy just doesn't seem to give a shit at all and does whatever the hell he wants to, without even trying to explain it a single bit. Sometimes ironic, sometimes harsh and sometimes just plain nuts. For me one of the few bright spots in contemporary art right now. Still, I don't wanna know what's going on in that guys head...

...and Andreas and Martin and Jonas and Jonas' friend and Sebastian and Emil and Astrid and Rebecca and Simon and Noah and Julie.
Thanks to Simon's parents for the spontaneous shawarma dinner!

That's exactly what this week has been so far. We are currently having our introduction week into the second half of the semester, which means a new project (editorial design/illustration). People here, unlike in Germany, seem to put a lot of thought into the question how the students can be introduced most efficiently and effectively. So instead of handing out some lame paper with a couple of books to read and a short round-up of the course theme, we get lectures, speeches, field trips and workshops.

It started out on Tuesday with two lectures. One by Ole Munk, co-founder of Ribergaard & Munk, and one by Kenneth Schulz, Creative Director of the danish lifestyle magazine Euroman. Ole Munk talked for almost two hours about newspaper design/layout design and it never got boring. Tiering maybe, as 9 o'clock is just way too early for such a speech. But that guy really knows his stuff. Although I don't really like any of his other works, his newspaper re-designs are very nice.
And Kenneth Schulz, starting out with a portfolio presentation showing a lot of David Carson inspired work, talked to us about the truth of art directing, which is in fact a whole lot of organizing and planning and not even that much of being creative. Oh and he also told us a bit about the typical ad agency/publisher/magazine lifestyle. The stereotypes of all people in charge losing their grip on real life and instead doing coke and the 18-year-old interns? They're all true.

On Wednesday the whole course went to visit Politiken, Denmark's biggest daily newspaper. After getting a tour of the really vast, not to say huge offices of their building, we listened about an hour to one of the guys from the graphics department talk about 'something' – unfortunately for all exchangies it was in danish. The essence, so we were told, is that they get a lot of inspiration from Miro.

After having lunch at the very nice and cheap (4€ !) cantine, I went back to school to take my danish lessons and then on to meet up with Yoshi, Schwan, two more exchangies and three danish students to go to Lousiana, a very nice museum a bit outside of Copenhagen, where I had already been once before to see the Richard Avedon exhibition. This time the main reasons to go were Lucien Freud and Tal R. To my disappointment the latter is way overrated and in my eyes just naive child's play put on 4x4m canvases. Anyways, Freud made up for it, plus there was another exhibition called 'Frontiers of Architecture' which was also quite interesting but I just happened to discover a bit too late. Back in Copenhagen we went to get dinner at a very cozy bar called 'Café Klimt' and I finished off my very pleasant and long conversation with August, one of the Danes, about modern art, fashion, music and movies. Funny, we just seemed to have the same taste in almost everything.

One Song for Copenhagen = 6 different singers, 6 different band(s) formations, 6 different songs = one hour of good music and happy people.

From my window.

Eating out with Felipe at an Indian restaurant last Monday. Very nice and talkative guy with a great knowledge of design by the way. Watch out for his new 600 page book about South American design to be released in February by Taschen.