notes, quotes, provocations and other fair use 2004

nqpaofu.com by jouke kleerebezem issue 86 conversational drift informatic license exquisite enclaves 85 portal history 87

SLOW ON THE UPDATE Expect NQP to be slow on the updates these days. Most content is flowing elsewhere, into other sites, into other media, like wood, paper and ink. Exquisite enclaves are sprouting sprawling over different high res formats, with pressure possibly decreasing a bit after the deadlines of the more labour intensive production processes will have been met — like yesterday, today and tomorrow. Meaning I'll start issue 87 after this short drift into other workshops and little stores. Other upcoming events however promise to contain plenty NQPable reflections, like a reunion of 1970-71 friends, next 11-12 June on the North Sea coast and more particularly the Wassenaarseslag. And indeed next week's printing processes. banner, 500 x 75 cm, felt tip pen on nylon hand lettering by Gilberthe Akkermans I'm in Maastricht and one of the last minutes highlights in St. Germain des Bois before I left was the installation of a banner in the heart of Thurigny, announcing the village's URL and next festivity, the Feu de la St. Jean on the 26th of June. Don't delay a visit to our community to attend this mythical event. Nomen is omen. When I'll be living in Almere during two weeks 4-18 July to build the installation, my address is Realiteit 18 (Reality 18; 18, Réalité; Realität 18), in the house called ‘Zeiltoren’ (sail tower, tour à voile, Segel Turm).

DUMMY I receive the dummy of the printed publication in the post.

WHAT MAKES ME THINK (I DO)? The purpose of things is not primarily to make you think. It's a causative idea, popular with inexperienced designers and artists, I remember when it takes things hostage in thought. The more I think the more I think, Paul Valéry wrote, dividing his lifetime equally to think ‘making’ and to ‘make’ thinking — just by making and thinking — not as simple as it may be thought of, as any maker, to start with Valéry, would confirm. The more you make the more you make, as well, and making and thinking easily get in the way of each other. Thoughts do very well produce themselves. Once taken off, at the prompt of a thing only if you insist, see them fly. Can you distinguish between the thought and the thinking, between the bird and the flock? Between the drop and the ocean? Already here's a thought thing that doesn't work really well. On the other hand, thinking in order to be geared towards making, thinking finding a ‘solution’ in making, thought formatting, is a specific kind of thinking, which uses ideas to get into bodies. Many things however, can very well generate many other things and certainly more of the same or extensions of a prior thing. It's amazing how things procreate. The meme, that thought commodity du jour, is a helpless medialing, in comparison to how a thing powerfully creates other things, or whips itself into different states that we might mistake for new things which basically are the old thing that has grown up. Which again might happen to thoughts too. Especially thoughts of the idea nature. Old ideas can be brand new after some time that they needed to get to be that thing at that right moment. Coming to think of it, thoughts need time, just like things they need time after their conception and fabrication, to become what they are. They never become what they are without us paying attention to them. Pretty things, pretty thoughts. You think they tell us what they are, why they are? Think harder. Or make yourself some thing. At the end of the day the purpose of things is to get you to know things. The purpose of thought is to make you think. The world knows more things than thoughts. So how in the world did that happen?

HORROR VACUI In the evening I spill as much Rohrer & Klingner Leipzig Co. black Zeichentusche on Schoolmeester rag paper as my heavy head allows me. R&KLC are in Zella-Mehlis, in Thuringen, since 1892, having started in Leipzig, around the bend from where Berger Wagenbau used to be. I brush a couple of dark carriages and a dark Dutch though ornate wind mill, like the Schoolmeester. Verso I'll print a near-bleeding field in some hazy light blue color, with carved out type denouncing what the paper is and where it is from. Would that be information? Isn't the recto inky blotted side as much? In the afternoon I visit the Château de Lantilly. To see its carriages and check out the place. The more carriages I get to see, the more interested I become. Especially if they are in no state of maintenance, like the carrosses that I see here. Then there's several dozens of (pre-)school kids age 4-6 who run around the site, curious about the seigneurs that lived and killed from here, feeding the carp in the ditch, stealing each other's caps. The Production of Carriages. The Production of Paper. The Production of Houses. The Production of Charcoal. The Production of Knowledge. The Production of Experience. The desire to burn.

IVAN ILLICH ON FRIENDSHIP I can't be more impressed by his deep wit and elegant modesty, every time I come across his thought: Ivan Illich, as quoted in Remembering Ivan Illich in the Whole Earth Magazine, courtesy 1 June wood s lot: Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship. (...) I believe that if something like a political life is to remain for us in this world of technology, then it begins with friendship. Therefore my task is to cultivate disciplined, self-denying, careful, tasteful friendships. I have to read him more on what is his perception of ‘this world of technology’. That world is one of our worlds. We have to give our best attention to the perception and articulation of that one, and some of the other worlds, and to the nutritious or poisonous relationships between them — the worlds of individual people, of systems, beliefs, of economic and cultural practice.

OBJECT EXTENSION LESSONS wheel brand of ExE prop carriage I used to bundle the kind of results of the Internet described hereafter under: “Underhyping the Internet” and number them, but lost count a long time ago. From the ‘Different Strings for Different Swings’ department: Bergers Wagenbau, Frohburg Sachsen, 1849. Having opened his workshop early today senior Mr. Oskar Berger spreads the two week old Saturday 19 May's Neue Rheinische Zeitung that his youngest sister brought him from Köln under the 4 seat carriage which he is about to finish. One more layer of Lackfarbe and he can invite his client after the week-end to collect his Kutsche. A drop of deep blue lacker falls on the front page's red print, as if to mark the line, ‘Emanzipation der arbeitenden Klasse!’ which closes the paper's editorial. (...) 155 years later, Frohburg, 1 July 2004. Arndt Heermann hits the send button in the office of his garage. Soon after I collect his mail. Oskar Berger's Urenkel writes me in reply to a post I put in the city of Frohburg website's guest book, last 16 April, after the seller has told me about the Berger brand on one of the hubs of the carriage that I have just bought in the blind, from an Internet photo and the seller's meticulous description, to serve some part of the exhibition at De Paviljoens as a vehicle. Carrosse Carcasse... Char-à-Banc d'Essai. Contrabande Caresse. Bergers Wagenbau Frohburg... A family business? The Fa. Berger ended carriage construction only in 1948, as Arndt Heermann writes me. Since 20 years he has led the garage business it became after and he is a carriage enthusiast himself, participating in rallies. Recently the garage picked up some carriage construction again. If I would like to get in contact?

THE UNCOMMON CAUSE There's no such thing as a cause for art. Not even for a single art piece. We can distinguish at all times all kinds of urgencies and rituals that lead to art and art pieces, which are exciting and essential for our experience and analysis, and production and promotion, of art, artist and art work; but we can not read from those phenomena a cause for art, at any instant or in any sense. Like with the body, art speaks through art. All the rest is history. Too often: propaganda. Never to subscribe to a cause for art is no common practice. To fully appreciate just one single work of art in a lifetime is as rare a phenomenon. A couple then, the œuvre of a single artist, maybe a couple of artists. For the love of art is as other loves — a love of love, a love of life, a hungry one — it can't decide to be selective, if not at the intolerable cost of a loss of receptivity. To fall in love, as a mechanism of desire and enthusiasm, knows two contrary forces. One that wants singularity and exclusivity between subject and object, another that wants freedom of choice and love for and with everyone and everything, to be in love as the human condition. But you can't have your love and push it. The cause of an artist is to speak to people through his or her work. Every art work has many manifestations, only one of them is released by the artist with the original piece, event, line, note, word, pause. This arresting moment of release for the artist is a moment of love. After s/he can only be expectant to see the uncommon cause of love speak to other people, and those talking back to it. Yet, if I'd be challenged to list my one or two art works, books, artists or writers, music, I refer to those which return to me and with me, that have been sensational to me once, sometimes twice or more even never cease to evoke my emotions. They return in many forms though, not just in the repeated memory of the actual work that I love. They return if I am that lucky in my own work — without ever coming near of competing the original works, not out of modesty but because competition in art-without-a-cause is non grata, nobody competes for attention, 'to give is more blessed than to receive' and ‘beggars can't be choosers’ anyway — they return in the many observations and reflections of life, some have lived there forever it seems, like Dissipatio HG by Guido Morselli, Saut dans le vide, Yves Klein; Kosmos, Witold Gombrowicz; Monsieur Teste, Paul Valéry; the Mondrian drawing on the back of a cigarette box in the collection of the Haagse Gemeentemuseum; Bruno Munari; the Yves Klein gold monochrome that used to hang in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, next to where the large Matisse paper work was installed; Tadanori Yokoo's Tadanori Yokoo; Christopher Alexander's The Production of Houses; et cetera... but the list I find already gets so long that, as a list, in this form, here and now, it does not do any justice, nor to the works mentioned nor to my relationship with those works. They're too naked here, lining up for execution. The uncommon cause is the only cause that I subscribe to: individual learning, by doing, by reviewing, by redoing, by viewing. Not by listing, I would now add.

AS A MATTER OF CONCENTRATION Neue Rheinische Zeitung ‘Organ der Demokratie’, Köln Saturday 19 May 1849; Editor-in-chief: Karl Marx (the actual copy is printed in red ink) As soon as the guests have left I move back into the lite studio. I re-arrange it, keep the giant peonies, display the inspirational objects, matryoshka's, Petites Illustrations, books and raw material, widely open the E. and S. windows, redo the bed, evaporate some bamboo oil in the adjacent chambre de toilette, burn a Papier d'Arménie Triple to mix with sweet peony fragrance and set to work. It is every time surprizing to experience the sensational intricacy between the workings of the mind and the space that surrounds it. I imagine my thoughts still floating around the room. They stream up to me, in a hurry to settle, already while moving stuff in and smoothly descend back into my head when I start setting up gear. I just have to sit down and blank out. It's not the exact same thoughts but from its family of ideas. They attach to new directions to take, remind me of lessons learned and recent breaks in the continuity of my experience. They try to accommodate significant relationships. They release for me to release. The windows are open, the night is calm. I think there's some drizzle. I don't dream I'm Karl. I dream I'm Oskar.

BODY INTUITION Within 24 hours from my realization of how different bodies live their different subjects in different time periods or different species and how difficult body information is communicated, this insight is tested. I am forced to give attention to deer body. The three guests we lodge for Matthias and Christiane, who have their wedding anniversary party this Saturday, knock at our bedroom door at 2 am. We've just fallen asleep. Standing on our landing is a middle-aged Dutch couple and a younger French art professor, who have only met that evening and shared a car to get home. We don't know either of them . They occupy a room in our house, like other guests for the wedding do in other houses around the valley. Our guests in the back of their car bring a young deer which they found on the road. It has a splintered right front leg. Standing on three feet in the middle of the road it didn't move when their car approached. It's in shock. Someone before them must have hit it. We passed by an hour earlier on our way home from the party and did see no deer. Now it is in the back of their car on a piece of plastic, groaning. Marianne, the Dutch woman, thought it might go to some recovery place. Or we'd go see a vet with it. We know the routine when in the middle of the night you pick up a wounded or dead deer is to put it in the freezer. But this is our first. We even don't do as much as fish our waters. Remember the difficulty we had to kill a couple of cocks. Also these guests seem as shocked as the deer. And we're half asleep. So we help them put it in the geese shed ...which the birds don't use anyway these days since they're not nesting. They should however, because they lost their 10 or so gooselings earlier this spring partly by their own utter clumsiness — what are they thinking anyway? We leave a bowl of water with the deer and call a vet on emergency duty who tells us to get in touch with a game-warden the next morning. We actually were not allowed to take the animal home. As we know. Sunday morning it takes endless calls to get someone to locate the game-warden. R+r meanwhile want to keep the animal. R. just brought it water. It hadn't touched last night's but it looks fine to him, and sweet. They're sure it will be OK to live with us. I just hope they don't talk to our guests, who might support that idea. The mayor turns up with the game-keeper in the afternoon, just when we have a whole bunch of party-goers and their children on a ‘day after’ Moulin sight-seeing visit. Their German and English cars criss-cross clog the entrance to the house. The warden's jeep parks at the end of the line. After the obvious ritual lecture on how to go about hurt game, including the always between the line freezer destination option, now that we've chosen the official way we'll have to go through the motions. After inspection of the deer, establishment of the nature and seriousness of its injury, some digital photos, the necessary paperwork, it is killed with one shot, behind a closed door. The two teenage German girls remain closest to the shed. They don't like this. Neither does the rest of us. The mayor, warden and myself drink a quick glass of wine. More paperwork follows and we'll have to wait for it to be collected, probably only on Tuesday. The three of us pass by the shed before they leave. It's a young female lying on her left flank, on a small trace of blood. Her head the warden covered with straw. The mayor wonders whether she is pregnant. The warden squeezes a nipple. It produces some milk. It was feeding.

BODY INTELLIGENCE figures 107 and 108 from: K. v. Bardeleben und H. Haeckel, Atlas der topographischen Anatomie des Menschen, Verlag von Gustav Fischer, Jena 1908 emancipation 1 : to free from restraint, control, or the power of another; especially : to free from bondage 2 : to release from paternal care and responsibility and make sui juris 3 : to free from any controlling influence (as traditional mores or beliefs) Didn't you ever wonder how 18th or 19th century folks climbed the stairs, how they moved around this place, opened doors, got into their beds, in their garb, in their 18th and 19th century bodies? Those bodies were differently informed from contemporary bodies. I just can't imagine how they felt like moving about in. My parents I remember, like my grandparents, I imagine them in their movements, in their surroundings, their rooms, gardens, I remember their dress, but if I look at my parents' parents photographs, from around the 1930s, beach scenes, hiking scenes, living room scenes, I know that their bodies lived them differently from how my body lives me today. I don't know my parents' parents bodies. Who will tell me about them? What would they tell me. Body information doesn't travel well in other media than the body. All I can be told about is body care, body ritual, body make up. Body history — not body being, body ache, body lust. Anyway I don't know how the body would emancipate. No medication nor moral will do this. Free it from the garb and the architecture it is forced upon. Free it from our care. The garb and the architecture and the care is different today from 200 years ago. But the body can't escape itself. It'll never be free. It's what makes us temporal, fragile and servile. It wears. We wear with it. It renders us helpless. The body is the balance. It humbles us. Like when you have been really ill, you're so grateful when you're cured. That gratitude changes your life's perspective, until it wears. Waiting for another ache, another warning or worse. Another information from the body. If already I can't imagine what my forefathers' bodies were like, I have no clue about a goose's, a horse's, animal muscles, animal skin, animal aches, animal encounters with the material world. We have no idea. Give attention to the body.

LOCAL COLOUR I lean out the lite studio E. window. It's quiet now, and grey today. With a repeated disturbing loud buzz that we could not locate, somewhere outside, the electricity has gone down and up and down again and up again. After a last loud hum it stays down. A blue EDF/GDF 24/24 7/7 (sure...) van surprisingly soon turns off the road and heads up the hill to Les Quesles, Christian Seutin's farm. A couple of minutes later it speeds down again and turns left in front of us. Should we have signalled it? If the electricity is down, everything is down. We can't pump up any water from the source, the phone doesn't work. Our long distance communication possibilities are down to their bare essentials: go catch someone's attention, get in sight of him and wave your arms for help, or something. We decide to take it easy and wait and see. The van soon returns, heads up again. The farm must have blown a fuse. After they haven't returned for almost an hour I drive up, taking my phone cards to call from the booth in the village. Yes we have no mobile network at this site. The van is half way up the sand road to the farm. No worker in sight. Suddenly a chain saw starts. The sound comes out of the green on the slope down. I see cables hanging from a pole. Sylvie Seutin is up the road around the bend. She spotted large sparks this morning early and thought her pump house was on fire. But a low branch had hit the cables, which touched and produced those sparks, and the buzz. They had called EDF, which explains their in my perception early arrival. Not — they had taken their usual delay. At exactly 1pm, over lunch, the light switches back on. We can plug back in. But my energy is gone. It's still grey. I'll take a day off.

ENHANCED ATOMIZABILITY FOR NQP Mine this site more. 6+ years of cherished hesitation to go public hide inside it.

CONVERSATIONAL DRIFT — Would you please tell me that story again? — Which one again? — That one with the parrot... — Ah... ok... the parrot that goes to the market? — Uh-Huh! — The parrot goes to the market, to buy a new set of wings. The feather merchant only has a couple of pairs of chicken wing left. The parrot can't try them on, so he buys them in good faith and returns home. He fits them on and they do fit, he can flap them, put his beak under them. But he doesn't like the color so he takes them off again. He visits the pigment merchant to get some color for his chicken wings. Blue and orange pigment, some oil to dissolve them.

HIP HIP A HREF! Long live the network! Celebrate how things relate! Celebrate how they inform one another! Celebrate the link! Hip, Hip, Hurrah... Hip, Hip, A Href! A informs non-A, HREF informs non-HREF. Non-A and non-HREF become a bit like A and HREF as a result. Meanwhile non-A and non-HREF inform A and HREF... which in turn B COME somewhat like A and HREF... All HREF and nowhere to link is not an option. B HREF or B2! We inform to exchange HREF, it's A HOPE. We inform to celebrate our friends and dis our adversaries. B HREF versus X RATE. B HREF for A LOVE. A Liaison Of Veritable Exquisiteness. Venereal Escape? May HREF hearts pound, A loving life LONG! Bon bhref! What A DRAG is.

SAVING GRACE Touring the breathtaking countryside around the Moulin for photo ops, just down the road between Grenois and Asnan and Beuvron you find amazing abundance. The three main ingredients of animation, in these hills and valleys like anywhere else in the picturesque, are color, light and movement. All forms roll these issues into an experience of insatiable visuality. We pass in the morning on the way to Germenay for its vide grenier. I did not bring my camera, so return. In Germenay I purchase 7 copies of La Petite Illustration, theatre play manuscripts from 1930 (‘Revue hebdomadaire publiant les pièces nouvelles jouées dans les théâtres de Paris, des romans inédits, des poèmes, des critiques littéraires et dramatiques, des variétés cinématographiques et des études touristiques’), 1932 (‘Revue hebdomadaire publiant des pièces de théâtre et des romans inédits’) and 1933 (‘Revue hebdomadaire publiant des pièces de théâtre et des romans inédits et adressée aux seuls souscripteurs de l'abonnement No 1 à “L'Illustration”’). From Au Soleil de l'Instinct by Paul Raynal, 1932; LPI No 573 — Théâtre No 298; représentés pour la première fois, le 1 mars 1932, au Théâtre de l'œuvre:    Brigitte. — L'amour n'est pas la récompense des vertus domestiques.    Alban, amusé. — J'en conviens.    Brigitte. — Il y a bien plus. Il n'y a que ceci. Le reste!... Mais ceci! Elle hésite. Dois-je?    Alban. — Certainement.    Brigitte. — J'hésite.    Alban. — Pourquoi?    Brigitte. — Je suis humiliée pour nous deux.    Alban. — Personne n'entend. Brigitte. — Et nous deux?    Alban. — Tout de suite nous oublierons.    Brigitte. — Oublierons-nous ceci? Je rentrais. On referme la porte. J'entends soudain que vous m'aimez, que vous m'aimez, que vous m'aimez, et je fléchis sous mon délice... Il ne fallait ajouter rien! Qu'avez-vous ajouté? Tout les mots qui disqualifient. (...) I actually collect them for the reproduction of the theatre poster of the pieces' performances on the covers. These miniature posters I want, announcing La Moisson Verte; Peau d'Espagne; La Belle Marrinière; La Banque Nemo; Le Vol Nuptial; Baisers Perdus; Au Soleil de l'Instinct.

STUDIO LITE Sleep in the lite studio. This is the house's best room. Situated on the first floor, its French windows/doors open to the East and South, which makes the light a colorful pleasure from sun up over the E. hill opposite the house's entrance, to sun down, when you can see her disappear behind the hills on your right, if you lean out the S. window. The Beuvron valley runs North-South at this point. The Moulin du Merle former water mill blocks the valley, with its front facing S., the river running past the W. side of the house, the old part where the remains of the original mill are. In the lite studio you barely even hear the river.

TO BE CONTINUED Narcoleptic attack knocks around 10pm. I drag myself to the lite studio to sip one J&B, a nightcap. Sit back, toggle. Hope to fall asleep on the keyboard. Study the site map I create for the print publication (I try to avoid calling it a book, after all it's a guide, for the site, for the sites). J&B fixes me up. Have another one. 01Beatles' I'm So Tired, Penny Lane, Yesterday on the headphones, I Limewired for R+r, upon request. And Shakira. Onwards to Spiritualized. Lord Can You Hear Me. Or Will Oldham's Palace Brothers' Riding. 01Click. Click. Click. Sleep. Come together, not Beatles. 00:13, still awake. Early next morning. Any resemblance to actual dates and their events is unintentional and purely coincidental. Attention, follow that dog! Day and night on a string. Story to story passages. Old time friends still walk and talk me. The fantasy is theirs.

RECLUSE Upon return at the Moulin, after Gil's guests during my absence, her brother Erik and Marianne, have continued their trip, I reinstall the lite studio in the guest room. I set it up as 3) nest, 1) sample room and 2) writing hub. I remind you that it has no Internet connection. Material I recently acquired is now on display on the bed, including large size rubber bands — to attach the contraband to the carriage, I think —, pinkish light brown rag paper from De Schoolmeester, made out of the brown sails that help the mill turn its wings in the winter when there's feeble winds, other paper samples for the book and charcoal sticks, ranging from very thin twigs to a solid though lightweight block. I CCW move (ol' magic!) some of the furniture in the room. Now I face the jaded flower wallpaper, my back and left turned to the windows. Since they are open spring sounds such as of tractors and bird or cricket song are let in. Facing it I will stick something encouraging up on that wall. The Muy Fragil Cuadros Apoyar Parados sticker (yes, it's type is red). A piece of that rag paper with three pins stuck into it, that mark something yet hidden, some past rag. Add more books and other printed matter. At JvE I discussed the construction of the little stores with Ron Bernstein. I recommended Dave Hickey's Air Guitar to him. Little shops are containers and memory sites. The installation will embed three of them: ‘Bazar de Varzy’, ‘Soirée Poétique’ and ‘Off-Google’. They certainly will not be aware (with one or two exceptions), but a couple of people are on my mind constantly — while preparing this work, their voice I hear incessantly day and night, when they might wake me up or hush me to sleep. Rather than fatiguing, it is energizing. I am ever so grateful for their presence. It's a bunch of people that lack an apparent theme or organisation to most, and often to myself remain an unlikely combination of folks I know personally, others I have never met but know of, some being dead, most of them contemporaries. I did realize before how important is the fact of having such and such as a contemporary. Just the awareness of sharing a time slot with whoever performs around you in real time lifetime can fill me with happiness. The big stories are of all times — your contemporaries are not. They are the only thing that makes your time slot unique. Rather than forming my virtual, ‘ideal’ audience, I recognize their voices as coming from ideal partners. They make concentrated creative work less of an autistic activity. LiteSwitch X: Quark, PageSpinner, Camino, GraphicConverter, MacJournal, DEVONthink toggling. And 01Tunes.

ELASTIK COMPLEXITY Elastikity is in how and what I prepare.

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