CURRENT MISSION

Screenprints

ABOUT ME

I love to cook.
I love to ride my bicycle.
I love to dance.
I love to draw pictures and make screenprints of them.
I listen to the radio but I don't have a tv.
I love languages and I pick them up quickly.
I love to pretend to be a doom-robot with my friend Pete's little three year old boy ("see his colossal steel claws open and shut with sickening inevitablity!"). Then sometimes we do camel-chase. Sometimes crocodile-police. I don't know. He makes it up. Sometimes I do.

The fact of being alive is absurd, miraculous and marvelous, and I often recognise this. Don't you find it incredible for example, that you can read these little characters and have some notion of what I'm trying to say? Isn't that bonkers?

Sometimes I get a little too caught up in paltry matters though, and then I forget about the unlikely, impossible-but-real everyday miraculousness of life.

Me then: the usual bag of contradictions that makes a human.

I'm very friendly, though I do take a little while to see where I fit in with people, sense how they are. I'm very quiet with some of my friends and very silly and loud with others, depends what they're like, depends how we fit together, depends what mood we're each in.

Conversationally, there's very little I won't try and engage with, though I do struggle to find anything of interest to say about televised sports or soap operas.

I practice yoga and simple meditation often. It makes me feel good and calm and happy.

I'm nice, I won't hurt you, the last person I hit was Dean Hughes during a tantrum in 1984. I'm so sorry Dean, I still feel dreadful about that.

PHILOSOPHY

Oh heck, I don't know. Smile first, ask questions later.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

CS.org-wise, absolutamente nada, though I have couch-surfed all over the place, long before I'd ever even heard of this site. I once had the great honour of hosting one Eduardo Chikusa from Sao Paolo. I had only a rented room to share, but it was such a treat to be in the company of this remarkable, intelligent, warm-hearted individual.

Interests

I like:
David Attenborough, other people too, screenprinting, drawing, linocuts, fountain pens, Martinho da Vila, Paulinho da Viola, sambao verdadeiro, Mose Allison, John Steinbeck, Jaws, TC Boyle, Talladega Nights, meditation, Mark Eidsel, Saul Bellow, Dizzee Rascal, Cervantes, Nabokov, blues piano, David Hockney, arthouse cinema, daft cinema, action cinema, international cinema, The Master and Margarita, talking to old people, Berlin, California, France, Brazil, rice and beans, Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka, and that reminds me Roald Dahl, Tom Waits (especially The Heart of Saturday Night) Professor Longhair, Bossa Nova, Caetano Veloso, Tom Ze, Jay Dilla, Boards of Canada, Percee P, David Bowie, Haiku D'etat, Sonny Rollins, J.J. Cale, Bill Evans, Spank Rock, Lao Zi, Duke Ellington, Jim Hall, Proposition Joe, very old crackly hollering ranting gospel records (Especially the Reverend Utah Smith) trying to play the piano, the films of Hal Hartley, Jean de Florette, Tommy Cooper, Einstein, Richard Feynman, Woody Allen's older stuff, Coen Brothers, The National, dancing to old fashioned funk music, yoga, vegetables, chicken, chorizo, honey and lemon on toast, porridge, my tiny little blue bike, Andrew Marr on the wireless, the Portuguese of Brazil, Chinese writing, picnics, wooden boats, woods, the idea of having a little house on a little Swedish island, fish, a pint of bitter, a bottle of red wine, red poppies, dark chocolate.

• fish
• writing
• dancing
• cooking
• chocolate
• wine
• red wine
• yoga
• meditation
• movies
• tv
• drawing
• music
• piano
• blues
• cycling
• fishing
• sports
• teaching
• emergency services
• languages

Music, Movies, and Books

see above, also:
Books:
Austerlitz, Cannery Row, The Heart of a Dog, Alias Grace, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, This Thing of Darkness, A Place of Greater Safety, Dao De Jing, Humboldt's Gift, Everything is Illuminated, The Constant Gardener, Restoration, Music and Silence, Zen and the Brain, Under the Frog

Films:
Bob Le Flambeur, Out of the Past, The Counterfeiters, Evil Dead 2, Docteur Petiot, Chinatown, Chinatown again for good measure, Repo Man, The Lives of Others, Kung-Fu Panda, Dead Man's Shoes, Badlands, Bubba Ho Tep, Cutter's Way, Get Carter, All The President's Men, Bad Santa, Frost V Nixon, The Return (Vozvrashcheniye) Kung-Fu Hustle, District 9, Elling, O Horten, Let the Right One In, Festen, Mean Streets, The Golden Door, There Will Be Blood, ALL of W.C. Fields's...

Music:
oh gosh tons. Aren't you bored yet? see above.

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

My goodness, I've just set up my own screenprinting studio, FINALLY, I can't believe it! Built that sucker with my own bare hands!

Teach, Learn, Share

I could teach you how to screenprint.
I could teach you a couple of bossa nova songs.

Countries I’ve Visited

Belgium, Chile, Ecuador, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Peru, Portugal, Turkey, United States

Countries I’ve Lived In

Brazil, France, Spain, United Kingdom

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