Annual Freak Bros. Visit

Without air conditioning, club meetings can be held
just as well outside.

News from the 'Café Metropole Club'

Paris:- Saturday, 29. May 1999:- There are several ways to look for an apartment to rent in Paris. One of them is to go to a target area and look around for signs of vacancies.

Even with all the estate agents around, there may be few vacancy signs because most apartments are 'for sale' rather than rent. Another way to find an apartment is to ask people who live in the neighborhood, or 'quartier.'

I know few people so there are few neighborhoods where I can look. Gilbert Shelton lives in the 11th arrondissement, just off the Boulevard Voltaire. This is east of Bastille and a bit away from the 'high-life' of it, as well as a bit away the increasing 'high-life' around Menilmontant.

After cruising the estate agents around the Place Leon Blum and down the Boulevard Voltaire, I dropped into Gilbert's atelier last Wednesday. What had been a sleepy but somewhat eccentric storefront, turned out to be still sleepy outside but rocking with activity inside.

A fellow named Hicham Jurdi was there to announce the first public showing of his TV-film about the animation-cartoonist 'Ugo,' which somehow also features Gilbert and his partner, Pik. If you are in Paris on Monday, 31. May, the world premiere is at 19:30, at the Institut du Monde Arabe, 1. Rue des Fossés Saint-Bernard, Paris 5.

The main activity 'rocking inside' the Freak Brothers' Paris home involved eating sandwiches and testing a variant of pink Orangina. For reasons not quite clear - except possibly that Gilbert wants to increase the atelier's collection of beer brands - one of the studio's activities is the creation of beer labels, mostly for Belgian brewers, who want 'Freak' labels for odd brews.

Pik showed me a unusual 360-degree label for an upmarket Bordeaux wine; which indicated that the business must be getting as goofy down there as in the brewing scene up north.

While this was going on, musician Gary Carp came in and this reminded Gilbert of his EMI distributed music CD, entitled 'Honky, Soul, Race Music, Hard Bop & Anachronic Jazz' - a selection of 20 titles chosen at random by Fat Freddy's cat. EMI seems to be a UK outfit, so the CD's ISBN number is 1-65848-567-3, in case you want to hear some old stuff.

Gary Carp cruises the 'quartier' a lot and was giving me a tip about an agent who has a 'lock' on three streets, while Gilbert remembered the 'Freak Brothers' official poster for last year's World Cup - "Better a year, or more, late than never" - so here it is if you haven't seen it before.

Out of the whole visit I got one estate agent's number, and no other hot tips on available flats. On top of it, there was something really odd about the pink Orangina. I think I better think it over carefully, before deciding to live in this 'quartier.' There might be a bit too much 'high-life' in it.