Monte Carlo. © Cristian ·Kit· Paul. Click here or on the image to enlarge.

I don't have many heroes in my adult life. I find it hard to aspire to or identify with whatever guidance artists have to offer, save for some rather rare moments of blinding insight. And, unfortunately, I have close to zero affinity with sports people.

Except the one-of-a-kind friend I started a company with, Steve Jobs was the only relevant figure capable to directly inspire my work and deepen my vision, day in, day out.

And Steve is gone now.

There are two of his sayings I'm thinking about the most. The first one I find useful every single day—"real artists ship"—talking is irrelevant, only doing matters. As a coincidence, I learned about his passing last night, while working feverishly until the light of dawn.

The second one—"stay hungry, stay foolish"—I am trying to learn, yet I'm mostly failing—it's so fucking hard to stay young, keep your heart vulnerably alive and cling to that state of graceful emergency. I promise I'll try harder, Steve.

Started in 2003, this blog turns 8 years old today, going on 9.

If blog years are anything like dog years, Kit·blog is rather old. Lately it rarely speaks, actually, beside those cryptic picture headlines. Don't get mad about that. Silence gets golden with age, it seems.

It still has pretty good eyes though, wisely and lovingly inspecting that coarse film grain.

Sorry for the botched archives and comments—I am upgrading. Not having enough time for fixing broken things means it's going to take a few days.

Thank you.

Update 1: Basic functionalities restored. Comments working.

Update 2: A few glitches remain to be corrected but they are not very serious. Also, www is now completely deprecated. Almost all Facebook Likes in the main blog are mysteriously lost. God's will.

What a week! I lost 2 kilos and my voice, but now that I survived, I'll draw the line and give thanks where it is most certainly due.

For Brandient 101 Book: first and foremost I have to thank Aneta for picking me when back in 2002 the whole advertising elite was at her feet, Mihai for managing the project, the second to none Brandient team and my truly exceptional clients for making it all possible. Also, Peggy Production for bearing with our frequent changes and impossible demands.

For Brandient 101 Exhibition: I'll thank my unrelenting team—mainly Lacrima, Ciprian and Iancu—and Carturesti for kindly having us there. The private opening was more like a business summit and I was blown away to find out that some guests had to book a helicopter to reach Bucharest in time to attend it—big, big thank you.

For Brandient 101 Minutes seminar: thank you, all of you, for showing up and listening—now that the ice is broken we should do this more often;

For RoBLogFest award: Thank you Dragos Novac—do you remember the days Petroniu's RBA and IRBNLA were the alpha and omega of it all?—and RoBLogFest 2010 jury. Also, congrats to Iancu for his award—I would've voted for his blog. I'm truly sorry I could not attend the ceremony.

Update: Regarding №4—additional thanks to Smartgifts.ro for sponsoring the RoBlogfest section.

This is the 1000th blog post here at Kit·blog

To be more precise, the 1,000th at kitblog.com — and 1535th from its inception, counting the posts in the previous installment as well, but 1535, that's not a beautiful, round number so let's ignore that.

Although, between you and me, in the year 1535 the Galapagos Islands are discovered, Lima is founded in Peru and the first complete English-language Bible is printed — that's a pretty good year — so 1535 might not be not such a bad number after all.

Back from Galapagos. As you might have seen, I've changed focus: nowadays I post images more than words. Mostly black and white photographs shot on film, with one camera and one lens. It's about learning about photography and enjoying it, slow-food style. The silent way, as Miles said. Better than words, let me show you:

Office, Bucharest. Click here or on the image to enlarge.

See? A ray of light is sometimes more eloquent than a pile of words. Told you!

Speaking of words, they're too many already — fact is, this 1k entitles me to say it: thanks for reading this. Really. Thank you.

Regarding the previous post—something was rotten, and the baddies were coming from Mother Russia, admittedly. All the evidence pointed to a compromised 3rd party captcha mechanism, so I wiped it off.

I also moved the blog database to a fresh install of Movable Type 4.2.1—the basic functions are working, but there are some glitches left and a few features unimplemented yet. For instance, the blog roll is missing for now, the comment preview is borked and so on. Sorry about that.

Please bear with me a couple of days until I have a chance to iron out the remaining issues and also please let me know if you encounter anything suspicious. Thank you for your indulgence.

Update 1: Blogroll is slowly coming back. Comments mechanism still broken and not much time to get to the bottom of it. Thanks for patience.

Update 2: Comments working again. Upgrade done. Situation back to normal.

This anal-retentive bazar of a personal web site, entered yesterday its 6^th year of (virtual? virtual?—does anybody still use that word?) existence. I have no clue how come it didn't die since September 2003, although I'm lucid enough to question its purpose and value once in a while.

In time, I found there's no ultimate purpose nor absolute value. I feed in things that I like (be that notes, photos or links) and they may prove dear to some, interesting to others and rubbish to the rest of you.

And I think I kinda figured my job here: just keep bringing those things in.

Five years. And now the sixth. That's a fucking long journey actually, isn't it? Thank you for coming along.

Museum lobby, Berlin. View large on black.

Counting the squares that I step on—everybody does—don't ask me why.

Anyway.

The trick is to avoid the black ones and to keep away from the floor drain for as long as possible.

Although sooner or later you'll have no choice—because The Big Bastard won't allow you to step on the same square twice.

Date: last night. Place: uptown Bucharest, Aviators' Boulevard. Muscle: Volvo S60 (piloted by my friend). Distance: 400 meters, straight line. Record time: 40 minutes.

The rain was pouring so this time nobody abandoned cars on the boulevard, like in the good old summer days when people say —Fuck the Mayor! and walk away leaving their cars behind like empty plastic bottles at the picnic place. No, not this time.

The resemblance with the static shots from The Road to Hell video was eerie.

Flickr, Faces in Places, The Times

A funny picture of mine is in The Times today—Arts Online section—featured in Olav Bjortomt's Blog of the Week review of Faces in Places.

Thank you Jody/PickupStix from Faces in Places, thank you Jo Carlill from The Times.

Kit·blog enters fifth year today

Will the 5th be a good year? A bad one? Light, dark? Long, short? Thick, thin?

Past

For almost one year at the current address (kitblog.com), previously (since 2003) located on my .Mac account (homepage.mac.com/cpaul/iblog), this blog approaches 1000 posts—one freaking thousand?!?—and counts over 600 self-made photos. Thousands of comments (that—unfortunately—disappeared from the old location). Four years of blogging, some pretty good, one not so great and a platform change that felt more like starting over.

Thanks

Thanks for dropping by, folks.

While every visit makes me feel good, still, I'm doing my best to keep this blog a little pensive and away from being a middlebrow affair. Thank you for stopping by and reading it.

Thank you for subscribing to my feed. For me, this means that more than a couple of hundreds of you care about what I'll concoct next. Thanks.

Years don't mean much when a blog is dead. And with no comments, nor e-mails, it would be—I do appreciate each and every comment and e-mail (yes, even when I'm too busy to reply). Thank you for sparing the time to share a thought.

Thank you for linking here and for spreading the word—this turns a blog from personal entertainment into something else, something much bigger. The perfect example would be the anti-SDPR's design law protest, when blogs and massive linking turned into a formidable power and triggered mainstream media responses in the country and abroad. Also, I'm grateful for being listed in your blogrolls. Thank you.

Future

Que Sera, Sera / Whatever will be, will be / The future's not ours, to see / Que Sera, Sera / What will be, will be.

The slow ASCII

What do you write about when you're not in the mood for writing? And, as you probably noticed already, I'm not in the mood and I haven't been posting much text for a while now. Don't know exactly why, but it has to do with a couple of (huge and complicated) ongoing projects at Brandient — and fighting the urge of posting irrelevant junk (like this post) for compulsion's sake .

So I post photos — I hope you don't mind. If you do mind, well, please leave a note and I'll move the entire Photography topic out of the homepage, to a blog of its own, like Notes or Articles.

The Japanese

Speaking of photos, I spend my nights lately searching for pearls in the big pond of mud called Flickr¹, where I'm closely following around 80 photographers and a lot of thematic groups.

I'm really drawn toward Asian photographers using film cameras — their serenity, perfect compositions and bokeh (from the Japanese boke ぼけ, "blur") aesthetic philosophy. And I found quite a few of them. Let me give you a few hints and you'll see what I'm talking about:

• Tommy Toshihiro Oshima [DNA] — look for his Noctilux f 1.o shots, like the gorgeous low-light portraits rad! and resonance, but don't miss hypnosis, sleepwalker, guardian, dioramic sunday, the ninth gate or captive to open your appetite;
• Clarice Mami Koni [DNA] — she loves Russian cameras and medium format. I love her in_the_grass and 8 but you should browse through bicycle, breeze, siesta_#1, mountain_path and with_simon to get the idea;
• Sakazoh Yayoi Sakamoto [DNA] — My favorite is Kagurazaka #13, but you should take a look at works like POLAROID #13, POLAROID #24, POLAROID #27, SCALA #04 and SCALA #06;
• Papaiya [DNA] — stunning medium format low-key photography. A few personal quick faves: /, in mirror, Friday, no child, conditioner, L and 0808f;
• Golban [DNA] — take a look at Carousel, -, 木漏れ日, 7, * and working man.

That's it for now, five of them — more to come. I hope you'll kick back a minute and get into the proper mood to enjoy these beauties.

The masthead

Photography is great and an image is worth a thousand words — a thousand totally irrelevant words, sometimes. This is why I killed the photo masthead and switched from this:

to this:

It uses the same screen real estate, only wiser. Hopefully.

¹ No, this doesn't mean changing my mind about digital proletarianism — I still believe that only elite makes the Internet a great place — and the elite photographers is what I'm looking for on Flickr.

The greatest account in Romanian advertising

If CONNEX was still alive, it would have turned 10 years old earlier a few days ago, in april. Looking back now, I’m sure that CONNEX was the greatest account in Romanian advertising, bar none. It attracted the best people and the best agencies into a Bermuda Triangle of überpower ecstasy and free-falling nightmare, somewhere in between a tango dance floor of swift seduction and a fight club basement of bone breaking clashes.

When I say it was the greatest I say the most challenging and spectacular, the most influent and visible. Many were brought into the spotlight by this crusadeous account (people as well as agencies) and quite a few were wiped out — some tasted both. This is why the stories about it come in only two colors: exalted reality-distorted white and still-in-denial traumatic black.

As seen from outside, in its final period the account seemed to collapse eroded by confusion and drifted blindly — like a ghost-ship — until it finally disappeared.

I’m a lucky bastard: I was blessed with the privilege to be one of those who could afford getting addicted to this life-changing (for me, at least) drug twice: once briefly at the very beginning (1997) while working for BBDO, and then again during 2001–2002 period, while working for D’Arcy DMB&B.

Continue reading "Ten years of Connex" »

I never thought about horses nor equestrianism, not for more than 3 minutes, anyway — even if one of the recent posts is about sidewalk riding in Moscow — until a dear friend managed to convince me not only to get out of the city this weekend (not an easy job, people really knowing me are probably shocked already) but go see some horses.

Mr. Cezar Manolescu, an artist of gentle horse training.

I got a friend.

I started by curiosity and ended up loving every minute of it. Better late than never, they say.

"You throw balls at me? I throw balls at you!"

People throw tags at me and — I know! — I'm too slow to play game. There's a book I would like writing about (that's another, old, old tag), but for now I'll try and put together a list of five things.

3 glorious things you might have not known about me

1. At 18 I was a programmer, writing (among other things) communication protocols for Z80/8080 processors. Telepat, my first application written in C, was an inter-platform (8080 CP/M machines to Z80 ZX Spectrum home computers) communication software. A man needed to program his I/O ports at the lowest level, using assembly, in those times. In spite of the fact that I was drawing on every flat surface in my ecosystem, I had absolutely no plans to pursue a career in design: I could only picture myself as a programmer. In America.

2. I am more and more of a vegetarian. I gave up red meat and I eat a lot of fish instead. I still eat chicken, but slowly-slowly I'll get rid of that, too. And — God! — I was a mean, mean carnivore only a couple of years ago. People change. This things happen as a couple of friends dear to me are de-vegetarianizing in order to pursue the decadent delights of mici and sarmale (heavy, meat-rich Romanian food specialties).

3. I never smoked. My parents were smoking so I regarded it as something terribly uncool as a kid. Funny dynamics these things have — how the intergenerational conflict can sometimes work for the better. Rather rarely, but still...

Continue reading "Five" »

Hello world

This is Kit·blog's second coming, now in a new location, on a new platform and a different look (first/old incarnation here).

Please read the colophon for backstage details.

Known issues in version 2.3.12:

• Tested only in Safari, Camino, Firefox, Mozilla, Omniweb, Opera and Shiira on Macintosh, and even in those there are still issues;
• Not tested in MSIE (I know, about half my readers use that junk), and I suppose there are tons of horrible quirks there;
• CSS techniques based on :last-child and :only-child do not render in all browsers (no surprise);
• A few layout errors in Opera;
• Search does not work site-wide and has encoding issues (done, I think);
• RSS does not validate;
• RSS appends a weird "]]>" at the end of some posts;
• Comments are down until I make the obfuscator work (done);
• Notes blog has no layout/templates yet;
• Blogroll doesn't display "last updated" information — have no clue what's wrong;
• Some broken links in the footer, will be taken care of.

Dear reader, this is not yet a public version so please do not write about nor link to it just yet (this web site can go down pretty often for revisions and I do not want to offer to my readers a sub-par experience). Posting (sporadic as it is) will continue on the old blog until this one is ready for prime time.

If notice any annoying bug or have idea how such a bug could be straighten out I would appreciate if you'd leave a comment or shoot an e-mail.

This blog enters the fourth year

At first I was puzzled: why would a reader (from Germany, it seems) write “Happy anniversary Kit” in an email addressed to me a few days ago? What was that I celebrate these days? Damn, this is what happens for not marking dates in that calendar application. I was lost. I read it twice, and then some more, unable to see past the point that separated the words, twisting the message: my reader was saying “Happy anniversary Kit.blog!” How could I possibly forgot? Thank you! This blog was about to celebrate its birthday.

It does today.

After three years of blogging I have to confess in front of you all: I'm not an easy writer. I do not write easily, that is. Not in English, anyway. And then I'm chronically dissatisfied with my writing skills.

I tell you, sometimes this blog is like a dog that doesn't want to be walked.

But I am stubborn, too.