Pablove In South Korea

It's not everyday that Pablo has a friend in South Korea. Last week, our friend Justin Meldal-Johnsen was there to perform at the ETP Festival with his band Nine Inch Nails. During the daylight hours before the show, JMJ found a great place to honor Pablo's soul in Seoul. With Pablove stickers in hand—and on forehead—he snapped the above pics at the Bongeunsa Buddhist Temple. I've gotten heavily into featuring 'Pablove In...' photos on the blog. It's been a great way to show the support (and faces) of Pablo's friends who live or travel all round the world in the summer of his passing. It makes the world feel smaller. From another point of view, it shows the vastness and the reach of the Pablove community. I always think of each photo as a ray of light shooting into the heavens.

Justin's photos are a bit different: he's had no choice but to be away, to snap a photo in the coolest spot in his remote locale of the day, and email it to me with his best wishes. Justin has been on tour since before Pablo passed away and hasn't been home since. If you're the bassist in a rock band that's headlining summer festivals in Europe, there's no opportunity to, like, fly home for a couple days. Imagine the tickets sold, the massive road crew and all that. It's not as simple as it may seem to pop out for five days to fly halfway across the globe. So we've adapted.

Justin and I kept in close touch in the couple weeks following Pablo's death. Many phone conversations and emails back and forth between our house and JMJ's ever-moving location on the globe. It's kind of like communicating with a spy: every day a new hotel in a new city in Europe, Asia, the South Pacific. The day after Pablo's passing, JMJ posted a memorial tribute to him on the Nine Inch Nails blog. He honored Pablo and mourned his passing in his own way, from his laptop, from the road. This is the way it goes in the kooky world of rock and roll showbiz. In a way, Justin being away was helpful. One night, I couldn't sleep. I called JMJ at his hotel in, like, Stockholm or Oslo—Copenhagen!—and we talked til the sun came up in LA. If he were at home with his wife Corinne and daughter Zelly down the block from us, I wouldn't have been blowin up his phone at 2 a.m. I'm not that crazy. Even if I was, he wouldn't have talked to me for hours. He's definitely not that crazy.

All this talk about Pablove around the world has me thinking: at some point, we have to develop a map that pinpoints all the places in the world we've received photos from. Would be cool. Pablo would love that.