Freelance Aristocrat: a decently educated, cultured individual who skips from metropole to metropole but rides the subway in every city he (or she) inhabits. These types are similar to the Monocle demographic, but stripped of their overpriced attachés, tailored shirts and contrived obsession with all things “design”. Magazines, marketers and brand engineers have sought to define and capitalize upon the traffic patterns of this overachieving global underclass, but those who fit the bill remain unaffected and unaffiliated.

Aran Darling, a Paris (via London, NYC & Vancouver)-based illustrator is about as close as one can get to achieving this vision of a free and easy sophisto-tramp lifestyle. He has a website, and it details his trans-continental adventures in a way that reads like a long lost sketchbook from a Grub Street poet. The following is a communiqué he sent me a few weeks back.

A. Darling:

wwww.arandarling.com celebrates its one year anniversary of showing full page drawings. First put online with the help of a friend as an experiment on new year’s eve, 2007,it originally showcased some small line-drawing cartoons and stories. Arandarling.com became a regularly updated full-page illustration website one year ago today, july 4, 2007.

Posting drawings and writing was a way for the site’s creator - yes, me, a darling - then living in new york city, to communicate with an absentee girlfriend, a fairly petite dancer with an e accent egu in her name, in chicago, illinois. In the autumn, the love affair with the dancer ended and the scope of the site’s intended viewership changed … becoming a vehicle for communication with a wider audience.

I started drawing with liquid ink, switched to smoother paper, sold a few originals, took some commercial commissions and moved to paris where people seem to have an innate sensibilty when it comes to understanding and scrutinizing drawings. The site now welcomes hundreds of visitors from over 30 different countries. The site’s creator however, still sneaks on the back of the bus to avoid paying whenever possible, lives off a sandwich a day and just yesterday ate a peach which he found on the floor of the number 6 metro while it was stopped at denfert rochereau on the left bank.

Spotted it (the peach) sitting there, unbitten and unblemished, and I literally had to get on my hands to knees, during rush hour on the hottest day of the year, to get under the seat to grab it. This woman in a business suit was frightened because she thought I was trying to sniff her crotch or attack her knees.

Free peach though.

The project’s goal (the website, not the peach), roughly, is to form sort of externalization for what’s going on within.

Of course that’s just a silly metaphor that i don’t actually believe.

It is, in its most basic form, a way to exchange ideas. Homo sapiens have never been solitary creatures, so we play. this website is a game. it is a game of words and word play and a game of ink squiggles. But make no mistake, it is a serious game. Especially these days when all of our surnames are @____.com, and our internet footprints, for better of worse, compose a great part of our identities. and our movable and traceable identities, furthermore.

So it is personal.

It is play and it is work and for me it has become everything in between. (end quote)

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Although it’s sold out at my favourite magazine spot, I’m pretty sure you can still pick up Adbusters #78 at select stores throughout whatever city you may be living in. If not, there is of course, always, les internets. I wrote a couple articles for the issue as well as an untitled piece of speculative short fiction. The story explores our intensifying relationship with the ‘net and the increasingly bizarre forms of social interaction that taking place all over the web.

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Way back in 2005, I was living in Tokyo working as a menu translator slash photographer’s assistant and I launched a film project that tragically never ended up seeing the light of day. The storyline followed a despondent romance between a depressed ramen waitress and an insomniac deliveryman, both of whom worked the late shift in a near-future megalopolis that was subject to ongoing street-level terrorist attacks. Jeff Priest, a highly talented animator turned urban studies academic, was kind enough to help me out with the project and produced a series of conceptual imagery for the press kit.

Check out Jeff’s defunct blog. I’m in the process of turning the screenplay into a short story so stay up on your local magazine shop’s selection of avant-garde fiction periodicals.

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Sayaka is a twenty-something female artist from Japan who depicts Japanese females in subtly fantastic erotic situations. Much like her contemporaries who practice the neo-nihonga deconstructional style , Sayaka juxtoposes traditional techniques to creat entirely original representations of modern Japanese aesthetics.

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I recently wrote an article for the current issue of Elemente Magazine entitled “Aerosol Interiors“, which details the exploits of Graham Oatman - graf writer turned interior/graphic designer extraordinaire. Since finishing the article, I’ve grown quite fond of the wily yank and we’ve collaborated on a few projects here and there. The most recent and tactile of these collabos is the ongoing redesign of my century-old kitchen, which is being transformed through the science of design and the magic of “art” from a mess of vomity salmon pink nonsense into a cool n’ breezy Iberian-style la cucina.

photos by myself and Jordan Todd.

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I was quite struck by DDB Berlin’s award-winning campaign for Funk Sunglasses “No one needs to know what you did last night” . The eyeball-narrative illustrations, which contain references to ecstasy, marijuana and cocaine, succinctly communicate the two following ideas:

A new utility: these glasses will cover up your unseemly bloodshots when you drag your coke hangover into work Monday morning.

Lifestyle: people who wear Funk sunglasses live wild, wild lives filled with sex, drugs, disco parties and crime.

I have a friend who owns a couple pairs of Funk and these ads are fairly representative of his lifestyle, so apparently DDB did their homework. What’s really interesting about the ads is they are indicative of how sunglasses have evolved from a device designed to protect our eyes from ultraviolet radiation into a fashionable extension of one’s cultural super-ego.

Back in the 80s the idea of wearing sunglasses at night was mere novelty, but now if you walk into a nite-club on any given weekend you’ll find countless individuals wearing shades and hanging in the cut. Can they see anything? not really. But the fact that you cannot see their eyes allows them to further disguise their motives in an environment where projecting a perception of elitism is the key to success.

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Japan and Iran both have excellent snacking cultures that exist on opposite sides of the snack spectrum. As the Japanese are naturally inclined towards mass production and hi-tech innovation, their snacks come in a variety of easily consumed forms that range from complex potato chip flavours (fried mayonnaise, raw egg, etc) to biscuity micro-snacks like Pocky and Pretz. The Persians on the other hand favour healthier and more natural snack forms like sangak w/ tahini humous, peeled walnuts and unripe plums.

But one similarity both cultures possess is a love of milky soft drinks. In Japan, they drink Calpis, which is what you would get if you mixed skim milk with 7-Up, only the citrus has been replaced with a distinctive chalky aftertaste that reminds me of that dusty ol’ bowl of hard candy grandma used to keep on her end table.

In the Islamic Republic of Iran, they go for Doogh: a sugarless mix of club soda and yogurt that makes for the perfect summertime cooldown. Yeah I know what you’re thinking - gross! - and it is. It’s quite possibly the most disgusting thing you’ll ever taste, but that’s irrelevant, because in the world of carbonated lactose-based beverages, it still ranks pretty high.

So if you’ve tired of the same old glass of plain milk and want to jazz it up a little, head on down to your local Persian market or Japanese convenience store and check out one of these exciting and calcium-filled ethnic drinks. In Vancouver, Doogh can be found at the European Delicatessen, and of course you can hit up Konbiniya for Calpis, Calbee chips, a half-decent selection of overpriced ramen and hundreds of other J-snacks.

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