The latest instalment of Flea Fly Flo Fun is upon us, and something tells me this is going to be a special one. Not only is it the last one of 2010, but this time I will take part by actually having my own stall!
I don’t know yet if I will be playing some music during the event, but I do know that I will be selling some very cool and unique Mexican products.
Frames, masks, blouses, wallets, decorations, and necklaces on sale all come from various parts of Mexico: Morelos, Oaxaca, Chiapas, Mexico City, and they are all hand-made.
Here are some photos of some of the products we will be offering:
Photos, descriptions and prices can be viewed here and here.
Hope to see you on Sunday!
*MUSICAL BONUS*
Here are some Mexican playlists I found on 8tracks. Some are cheesy, some are smooth, some are recent, some are old, but they’re all very Mexican!
Last week-end I went to visit my parents in Kuala Lumpur and I thought I’d finally check out the Amcorp Mall flea market in Petaling Jaya. I was a bit weary of so-called “flea markets” that end up being nothing more than a night market (pasar malam) held in the day-time.
I of course love Malaysian markets, how could one not enjoy such variety of music, food, household goods, toys, drinks, in one single place? But I don’t like crossing halfway through the city eager to go through crates of records and dusty vintage objects and coming back disappointed.
Thankfully, the Amcorp Mall flea market delivered, and I was pleasantly surprised to find vinyl stalls (rare 60s Malaysian and Singaporean rock. I finally got my hands on some Naomi & The Boys EPs!!), Asian 60s knick-knacks (posters, ads, promotional objects), Hindi pulp magazines, vintage porcelain, and too many other items to mention. The only problem with having so much good stuff to go through is that the sellers know exactly what they’re selling and to whom, which means that prices are pretty steep, and bargaining difficult.
I was able to get some nice old photos, but only 4 or 5 since they were 10 RM each and bulk bargaining didn’t seem to interest the sellers. Thankfully I also decided to walk around the mall and I found a shop on the 3rd floor that sells lots of old memorabilia, paintings, books, coke bottles, and photos. There were about a dozen shoe boxes filled with random stacks of old photos, all for 2 RM each. I selected some 35 photos (in a hurry, since my father and my sister were getting tired of seeing me go through photos), tried to bargain a price for them (nope, failed again), and bought them anyway.
Here are some of my favourite ones, selected mainly for people’s stylish clothes and poses.
So, I haven’t been able to write or upload anything for a while, I’ve been extremely busy with many different activities.
First of all, I got married last June! Laurence and I had a simple but nice ceremony in the 19th arrondissement of Paris. Our families came to Paris from their respective places of study/work (Israel and Malaysia on my side and Bordeaux/Mont-de-Marsan on Laurence’s side).
The civil ceremony was held at the Mairie du 19ème, where we lived for the past 4 years, and from there we went to the Pavillon Puebla restaurant with a very nice terrace inside the Buttes Chaumont parc. We had a hearty Mexican buffet (mole, tortillas, guacamole, alambre, frijoles refritos, salsa verde) with excellent red wine from Laurence’s family.
The preparation and execution of this humble yet important event took us about 2 months, which was the deadline we had before flying off to Singapore on August 4th. I’m actually writing this from our brand new apartment in Singapore, where Laurence found a teaching job for at least three years.
I’ll give more details in an upcoming post, but basically we got hitched, we did all of our paperwork in France and in Singapore, I dropped my job back in Paris, we sold most of our belongings in Paris, we flew off to Singapore, we found an apartment, we moved in, we went to Malaysia for a week, we came back to Singapore, we went to flea markets, garage sales and second hand stores to furnish our apartment, Laurence started work, we finally got Internet at home, and now I’m in between sending resumes to find a new job and taking pictures/buying records/decorating the apartment/listening to music.
Anyway, here are a few of my favorite wedding pictures. As I was the groom I wasn’t able to have cameras on me, so the pictures are credited to : my mother, her friends (Magda, Alain and Mireille), Nico, Maelle, Seb, Bubu, Andy, John, Audrey, Jean-Yves. All I did was collect them, select them, and rework them to give them a retro-vintage effect.
I’m also posting the recording (again, sorry for the bad quality, I have now found out the problem with my laptop’s sound recording device) of the after-party. Props to Olibusta, Time is Music, and Andy Vortex for playing it loud and hard all night long!
I haven’t had time to take my cameras out for a couple of months, what with being busy looking for a new job and Paris being so cold and grey. But I’ve finally settled my professionnal situation and the weather has been getting nicer and nicer.
I was recently invited to my ex-colleague’s wedding in the lovely 18th arrondissement of Paris (Montmartre, painters, the Sacré Coeur, Amélie Poulain and all that). After a fun photo shoot with the wedding photographer (who admired my Fisheye lens), we headed to a small and cozy restaurant where we proceeded to eat and drink in honour of the new official couple, Veerle (Belgium) and Josué (Guatemala).
That’s where I was able to get some nice, unusual wedding photos:
Some time ago I bought a Lomography SuperSampler 4 lens camera, which made really cool pictures. Unfortunately the crappy little string mechanism (a very flimsy chord that had to be pulled in order to advance the film) broke after one roll of photos, and then I made things worse by trying to fix it myself (I know, I know, shouldn’t have tried to open it, but I was pissed off…).
Anyway, after that bad experience I had decided to stop experimenting with novelty cameras, especially when they’re 40 to 50 bucks each. And then I heard about the Disdéri toy cameras, which were extremely cheap (from 10 to 15 bucks), but also very hard to find (they seem to be produced in Korea and commercialized around East Asia).
Thank god nowadays we have Ebay, and I quickly found a seller that had the 3 lens and 4 lens cameras. I wasn’t able to test them out immediately since it’s been getting grayer and rainier around Paris, but I did manage to find a sunny day to test the 3 lens camera in and around the 19th arrondissement (park and canal).
Below are some of my favorite shots from that first roll of film. Hopefully I’ll soon have more of those, including from the 4 lens camera. Enjoy!
