20000308 links
National Amateur Press Association (US) (www.amateurpress.org/) and its
Webring list (www.webring.org/cgi-bin/webring?ring=apawebring;list)
Gothik APA list for more APAs (members.tripod.com/~gothikapa/apalinks.htm)
ANFSCD: Egg Writing at Makestuff (www.makestuff.com/egg.html)

slow food: snail agency
Yesterday Paul told me someone had recently compared weblogging to the literally age old phenomenon of the Amateur Press Association. Amateur Press Association?... People, 'amateurs' (read: diletantes, dabblers, devotees; not 'users') write a page on a subject that fits their interest and that of other amateurs that they are connected to through the bundle: with who's pages they connect theirs. The bundle is sent to all amateurs. It's a collection of clippings, from selected minds. I'd start my onto-e-apa tomorrow, on the affordances of the Internet/www for cultural intelligence and expression. While a subscription-based APA with selected weblog authors contributing to it is a clear business opportunity, in an online and hard copy edition. Someone think about it.

mix and stir: egg writing
- Dissolve 1/2 ounce of alum into 1/2 pint of vinegar. Dip a fine tipped brush into the solution and write your message on the shell of an egg. Let dry completely; then boil for 15 minutes. Writing cannot be seen on the shell, but is on the inside of the egg. Do not eat this egg.

Love a site which provides recipes like this. (courtesy Calamondin) I remember making Bengal fire, smoke bombs and other fire works from a volume entitled 'Mengen en roeren' (mix and stir). Never got to condom making though, but the recipe alone was exciting enough for a 14-year old.

20000307 links in body

nothing you ever wanted to know about the Internet and yet nagged about all the time
Paul brings up strategies of appreciation on Alamut March 6. This is about the decay of natural beauty, but I had just been thinking about appreciation of the flowering of media beauty, after having been forced once again to inspire people to use the darn net and to do so with some attention and endurance in order to learn to appreciate it, instead of being prejudiced or bored or both. These days you can very well afford to be bored with the pastoral (if you choose so, do remember that those who love it will reap great benefits... the net will replace the city, so prepare, if not for yourself, for generations to come), being bored with the net is plain suicide. Remember when mourning the city (link courtesy Alamut, Freud on transience):

- Mourning comes to a spontaneous end. When it has renounced everything that has been lost, then it has consumed itself, and our libido is once more free to replace the lost objects by fresh ones equally or still more precious.

If appreciation doesn't come natural, when we oscillate between 'everything' and 'nothing', we have to cultivate our swings to follow a steadier course. 'Learning' to appreciate your swings into extreme uncertainties/certainties means that you have reached some detachment from 'everything and nothing', allowing you to orient and balance your directions.

Learning takes time. Swings are sensational. The spin comes before heads or tails.

20000306 links
Early manuals by artist Allan Murray (www.amurray.com/earlier/steam.html)
Rules of Squash, or the Art of the Manual () (upcoming)
When manuals go online () (upcoming)
Squash, Rules of the World Singles Game, World Squash Federation (www.us-squash.org/squash/x000610oRules/x0010oworldsquashsingles.html)

on the literature
Aha. What if a manual would be a-real-good-read? Literature. When you would solely buy that silly superfluous polluting mind framing piece of hardware, or software, or haberdashery for its wild storytelling manual, this primer of unthought-of possibilities? What if such manuals contained a serialized narrative, an epic series of violent relationships and dramatic personages, plenty secrets and life altering recipes? What if you would really learn from a manual? What if it would set you free? Like it did to Nell in the Diamond Age.

I couldn't care less about 'How Things Work', they never do the way they do anyway: I only learn from 'How We Use', because we never use the way we used to. There are no rules, but we have good speculation. We can put together a series of one of a kind off-beat manuals and produce it as a 'how we' book, an agenda, a site, an exhibition, a trade fair—or hook it up to some existing distribution. Think (a first, top of the head selection, in the order they come to mind): the 'Anarchist Cookbook'; 'How to start your own country'; 'AdHocism'; 'Computer Lib/Dream Machines'; 'Bachelor Machines'; 'The Gentle Art of Making Enemies'; 'Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth'; 'TAZ', the 'Whole Earth Catalogue'. Send more links.

A propos manuals, meet the king (not the jester): artist Allan Murray does them, better than any other artist and better than any other industry. You should check on his work in progress on the rules of squash (link upcoming).

20000304-05 no links

spring soundscape
The sound of tiny streams and bird song mark a late winter, early spring transition. Today Sunday a thin sheet of ice sealed the streams for some morning hours. When you turn off the car at Le Plessis, on the bridge, and lower the windows to take a deep breath, you hear only the water and the birds. Earlier I drove to Varzy for the boulanger/patissier (today is Gil's birthday) and dropped Francine on an early train to Paris. Which reminds me we should review the moulins visiting conditions before the summer season starts. Now the best people come for the shortest stays.

less harmonious vibes
Sometimes when I abort (especially short, one line) passages from NQPAOFU, I feel like the retouch artist falsifying history. But why would an editing process after the fact be worse, or more untrue, than restraint before publishing? I only delete/falsify history that I've just written. The writing and the editing moment coincide. It is part of one creation, even when the format allows some of the writing to be published some hours, before taking it down. At what moment you want which information to be up? is the question. In a live medium the process just never stops. Untrue, because at some point you're fed up with what ever tweaking and rewriting and you just leave it alone, knowing it will stay like it is for ever after, gathering dust, until by some decision someone else pulls the plug on your work. Since digital information doesn't gather dust, I wonder what the reasons will be for someone to pull the plug and delete NQPAOFU from the server, melt the back-ups. I guess unmerchantability. When its storage space can be utilized at greater benefit for other information.

When will we reach a point at which whatever information is saleable? When information can be used as raw material for another product (like statistics, or history, or lab research).

getting to know eros
I left the room after after dinner, when Gil and one of her best and certainly her oldest friend Anne Lammers were discussing life at a certain age and period, love and business, kids. I enjoy very much to hear two good friends, women, discuss these issues, two girls that I love, if only for being such good friends. I could sit there and listen forever to their talk. This I do not see with men. So instead I sneak off to the 90CW room with some sweets (Canistrelli: Corsican cookies on a vin blanc et grains d'anis basis) and coffee, and sit at NQPAOFU to share this with you.

The best moments in life are when your interest in a person wakes up. That first blissful period of uncertainty of form or content, but tremendous energy. Eros.

When all of a sudden you experience this vital interest... an interest in search for a form, to be sustained. A form which keeps you alive and alert and awake (no I did not fall in love, but some loves were brought to a different level, put in perspective). Then the very form disappoints and disengages you at some point. Which does not only go for relationships to people but to objects, systems, rules, work, career—all too familiar patterns.

20000303 links to follow

in and out
In the 90CW room I find I have two views at 0° and 90°CCW (aka left) angles. If I turn my head slightly to my left my angle of vision gives me green garden stereo. Another change is that all the heavy memory stuff (hardware, books, media) are now on my right (and towering), direction rest of the house, mill, river, deep—while on my left there's no obstacles towards the garden, the outside—the SE, for early morning light and reflections. The whole set up reminds me a bit of Paul's design for the Temporary Autonomous Zoo installation, edition 1995(?), at Charles Wessels' café/chapel in Utrecht: the MUD/ant farm installation, which you could browse from a hammock, and see projected on the wall. Or of the little cubicle sort of display I designed for my Kryptotheka installation in 1993 in the Archipel space, with the MacPlus, a music box with some local rock station, a bottle of mineral water, a wrapped cookie, a mandarin, and some nestable MDF cubic seats and pedestals. Though visitors submitted to the guestbook, they left the food untouched, while it was there for their refreshment.

My sight and thought are allowed to travel freely in and out even more in the present set up. Another bachelor machine? Maybe. We need them so much for our exercises. It is the only reliable technology after all. True engines.

20000302 links
seenoblogs, blogabroad, aka xenoblogs, by joeclarktorontowriter (www.electricseed.com/joeclark/xenoblogs.html)
A Picture of Weblogs, for Sarah-Rose (www2.ucsc.edu/~rsdio/weblog/wlm.html)

Listening to Jeff Tweedy's gently weeping guitar and whining voice in Via Chicago, track 9 on Wilco's Summerteeth, 5'33"

webblog visits
Joe Clark has an overview of non-US weblogs. It's global, remember! 'Xenoblogs' wouldn't be my name for it, too claustrophobic... seenoblogs, as a critical quip on myopic US-centrism?... nah, blogabroad, no no, too peripheralishtick, though lotsa male geeks would straight bet on it—I'll give it another thought. The Eurochique way would be to not make the difference. A propos weblog meta mapping, here's one that shows your line of linkage (slow load but nice arrangement).

studio visit
Last night I washed my studio wall a very light blue (robin's eggshell indeed). Today I will even wash it a touch whiter (the masking tape is still on). Meanwhile, outside, it's time to plant. France is prepared for the rentrée du jardin, it is all over the LeClerc and Auchan and BricoMarché and Weldom... I bought red currant, white currant, black currant, gooseberry, raspberry and wystaria ('blauwe regen', another of the lighter blues). In Amsterdam our wystaria was 14 years of age and 40ft high, and abundant, flowering twice a year. Passers-by used to photograph each other in front of it. The wystaria's first bloom is early and one of spring's announcements.

The weather has been too wet to plough that sticky clay to expand our vegetable garden. This morning the valley is damping when the sun appears and reflects in the multitude of small streams that fed the Beuvron to a fill (again). Manic ingredients. Later we'll have more rain. Nevertheless since a few days some birds we haven't seen all winter all of a sudden returned, in leaderless flocks. We know this of course, but never saw it happen—as I've mentioned before. Here everything happens right in front of us.

90cw
After the wall was finished I turned the entire room 90° CW. Now I'm facing South, but the shutters are closed and it is night. On my left is the door to the small balcony, where morning sun is first. The room's a mess. Half of the computers and peripherals are piled up in a corner. Cords are arranged, but I know they'll be tangled up tomorrow. The books are off the shelves, on the floor, and in boxes in the petit salon next door. My new shelves are towering 10ft up, empty. The books will go in again. Vertigo. I want to have it finished before Francine arrives from Marseille. Yay! At last she found the way. We'll talk shop and vie. Sunday she has to be in Paris to see how her sister comes out of chemo. Damn.

20000301 links the best, the usual, and few new
Is your weblog Built to Flip? (www.fastcompany.com/online/32/builttoflip.html)
Sciences as Communicational Communities by Joseph Ransdell (www.door.net/Arisbe/menu/LIBRARY/aboutcsp/ransdell/physics.htm)

wtf encore
Derek Powazek sent me email to inform me of the removal of my line in his inquiry ('just because some of the best sites on the web are weblogs, this does not mean we found the killer utterance', or something like that—not much of a definition, true), and suggested to submit the blurb I posted here instead. OK. Somehow I trust it here better, unfinished as it is. But wtf. You have to get out of that weblog ever once in a while. Especially since I will not be going to SXSW, where Derek will be moderating the weblog panel.

You should take a look at those 'definitions' that are piling up at wtf: it is just amazing, the ambiguity that some of the posters show in trying to get to grips with a reflection on their own daily slavery, the weblog label, and all the fuss around the format. Jeez. Just answer the guy's legitimate Q, or go hide in your utterance.

connect the thoughts
- No present actual thought (which is [in itself] a mere feeling) has any meaning, any intellectual value; for this lies not in what is actually thought, but in what this thought may be connected with in representation by subsequent thoughts, so that the meaning of a thought is altogether something virtual.
Accordingly, just as we say that a body is in motion, and not that motion is in a body, we ought to say that we are in thought, and not that thoughts are in us.
(from Charles Peirce, Writings 2: 241, 227, 227n)

against consensus
Democratic sentiments and confused egalitarianism can do to art and design, what they can do to the sciences , see Joseph Ransdell's 'Sciences as Communicational Communities'. Or: we need out of this world labs, studios, estates, sites... and ways to link them to the everyday without consensus dependence either way.

Joseph Ransdell:

- (...) scientific publication proper, like professional academic publication in general, is (1) communication that occurs within a special public (2) which consists of all persons--living, dead, and as yet unborn--with a common interest in a certain subject-matter, (3) the common interest being to come to a better understanding of that subject-matter (more profound, more comprehensive, and better grounded) than exists at any given moment, and (4) who understand that what binds them together in a communicational community is not their personal affinities and likenesses but their common concern that that subject-matter should be increasingly well understood by all who are similarly concerned.

personal journalism
Good weblogs are hard to find. With all the questioning going on, with upcoming gathering of the tribes in Austin, with an increasing number of personal sites doing the blog, or some kind of serial linking, with all the noise going on, trying to make sense of my beloved sites, including my own, I realized I'm not really half there, and on the other hand with the good sites it is business as usual, in a new aggregate, with important new features. Hard to find quality in a noisy market.

wishful thinking aloud
Yesterday, when trying to write about weblogs I ended up writing about the ones I love including my own, trying to figure out what it is that they do (good) and how they might improve and certainly will—just because their authors are so damn smart and sensitive and knowledgeable. Because they know what they are talking about and why, and they do not slip into serial linking, ever.

So I was in 'wishful thinking aloud' mode and instead of convincing myself and someone with the money to send me, I decided not to go to SXSW next week. I'll miss some great people and talk, I know, but there'll be other occasions to rub, Doors of Perception 6, the Lightness Doors, being one: 10-12 November in Amsterdam NL. The first independent Doors. Be there too.

20000229 links
'What the Hell is a Weblog?' Who Wants to Know? (www.powazek.com/wtf/)

Listening to Traffic's Steve Winwood: 'Please don't be sad, if it was a straight mind you had, we wouldn't have known you all these years' (Dear Mr. Fantasy)

the weblog
Fostering a genre in second generation personal publishing ('post home page web'), the weblog author performs a 'gentle art of agency'. Guiding readers to previewed sites, (s)he builds a relation to a loyal shared interests group of returning and at best responsive visitors, with individual preferences. The voice of a weblog is what hooks its readers.

'Voice' consists of style and context, the choice (and amount) of links (by field of interest, design, technology, other content criteria); their mark-up, in a short, descriptive and/or critical blurb; the combination of the evidence: a good mix, bits in fine editorial juxtaposition; the look-and-feel of the site; the update pattern and other medium specific qualities. Medium specificity also means that weblog authors spend a lot of time online, if only to update their material. But also to keep in pace with the net and its technological and cultural development.

W2W (weblog to weblog) linking and recycling bits between weblogs adds volume and value to the information on offer, in recontextualization.

designing performance
We have come to regard design as of equal value to editing in the process of information refinement. Editing is design, any design edits the content, and adds content.

so wtf are weblogs?
What do I know? I only read 3 or 4 of them on a regular basis. And they do not proud themselves to be weblogs either. QED.

20000228 links
New Orleans Cemetry and Voodoo Pages (www.geocities.com/BourbonStreet/6157/)
The Afrocentric Experience on voodoo (www.swagga.com/voodoo.htm)
Voodoo Dolls (www.folkart.com/~latitude/voodooshop/dolls.htm)

more threads to gamble from
Darn Sims kept me out of sleep this morning at 4:30am. Only after 6 I dozed off again. In the meantime several threads dangled in my skull .

1. So Sims don't do 'child abuse' or 'domestic violence'. Wright cs. had to draw a line. You can have your group walk around naked all the time, in Andy McDowell's skin if you like and would find somewhere to download it, you can have them pee the floor until flies are attracted to them, and you can starve them to death—but you can't have them taking it out on the domestic relationships real bad. Sex and violence have their non plus ultra. This evokes (again) discussions of how we relate to 'symbolic orders', model realities, art, literature, media... Abuse of power is the main theme here, and a versatile tool. The more immersive and smart the media are, the closer they get to being a responsive reality, in behavior and gameplay, the harder as a symbolic reality they are to be distanced from the everyday. Players are played on a map which is the territory.

2. 'Signifier' and 'signified' have a seriously corrupted relationship since mass media circulation and penetration, high density symbolic traffic, endless signifier and signified reproduction and mutual contamination. Enters interactivity in a networked environment.

3. When can we see the day that a symbolic reality sues you for abuse of power? When can I sue my Sims for misbehaviour? sueyoursim.com is still available.

4. The Organism of the Spectacle has proved its health by successful reproduction in the media. Its relation to the other reality, the unauthored one, formerly known as 'real' life, increasingly could be described as hosting it—rather than parasitizing on it.

as for the good news
Doors 5 'Play', the CD-rom was just awarded Silver at the I-D Magazine 2000 design contest. Yay! Another medal for our postgrads!

studio visit
More therapeutical gardening today, in watery sun and a light drizzle: major trimming, dredging the second fresh water source, unrooting blackberry bushes and grasses, so we can expand the vegetable garden with another 600sqft or about.

20000226-27 links
Milk Carton Bird Feeder (www.dfw.state.or.us/ODFWhtml/Education/BirdFeeder.html) (courtesy Bifurcated Rivets) (catless.ncl.ac.uk/Lindsay/weblog/latest.html)
World according to Will ('Sims' Wright) in Salon (salon.com/tech/feature/2000/02/17/wright/index.html)
More Matryoshkas (www.importspecialist.com/artists.html)

future license burning a hole in water
Beyond my box the sun burns a hole in the early mist and on the grass and branches and leaves and needles myriad shiny sharp drops appear. What was this supposed to be all about again? The waiting issue of power to the people has to wait some more. My soul turns to vital aesthetics and power to the people is all but (a subset). The despair of political life.

burning a hole in sky
This has become a splendid day! Spent hours in the sun collecting leaves and wood and piling up a stake on the island. Before I started the tractor, after some months it responded immediately. With its roar a new season came awake. R+r and myself made many cheerful rounds. Next week-end we'll burn a hole in the sky, to make spring official.

burning a hole in life
Woke up at sixam to surf me own sites. I'm facing major maintenance. Besides moving the NQPAOFU#1-23 archive to its proper domain, indexing it (adding anchors, fixing links), I have to work on the Memory High sand box, to reinstall some of the ease of use previous NQP's had. Then there's always improvements to be made. I wouldn't proud myself on having the 'Same design since May, 1998', like our ePmanPM (who, oh irony-in-the-face-of-truth, just today changed his epitheton to 'Increasingly irrelevant' ;-). Dun he no we're only in it for re:form? He could have guessed from The Sims, which he links to, Feb18. When I saw the first demo no-less-than performed by Wright in November 1998 at Doors 5, I was immediately infected. Then, time went by and I lost sight of the Sims, until 23 July 1999. This month they ship. Wright understates in a recent Salon interview:

- having a game about your life can be a powerful concept.

...and about some of the remarkable features and what they (might) inspire:

- There's a funny kind of double standard, with people focusing in on certain aspects of the game like same-sex relationships or violence. In about 60 percent of the games out there, the point of the game is to kill. You kill other people and you very rarely hear moral discussion about that. I think it's kind of funny.

- In some sense, when you're playing the game you're trying to reverse-engineer the simulation in your head. In general, we've kind of designed our games to allow people to be destructive. We just make it very easy for them to get it out of their system. And they realize that the challenge in these games is the constructive side, not necessarily the destructive side.

- The coolest thing about this game is that ... you'll be able to write a really elaborate little story just by playing the game -- and then upload it to our Web site where other people can read it. If they like the family a lot, they can even download the family.

- We're doing a lot of "Trojan horsing." So we're going to have objects to download that look totally innocent, like a nice new lamp. But in fact the lamp might include some dynamic totally tangential to the lamp that people don't realize. It's only when they put the lamp in that they realize this new social element has appeared in the game.

Think I'm slowly getting this around to my initial 'power to the people' hunch—just renamed. So, yesterday I was thinking about agency and here we have the perfect vehicle. Downloadable families or 'ontogroups', what it'll be? I would start to reverse-engineer/re:invent myself many times in the game. Design a handful of Jouke Kleerebezems who do some of my lives. Some have specific tasks, like updating NQPAOFU, or replying my mail, or raising R+r. Others hang around to irritate these prime doers. Then I need some JK's to do some art and write (maybe this could be in one Sim hand, hyper realistic...). One to write my will. One to be gay. One to be a cook. One to buy books. One to do all the meta reflection on why and when these characters collaborate or sabotage. One for simJK p.r. Not a family for a happy download?

burning a hole in self
See through self. Pop up self. Take down self. Make up self. Mock up self. Here's looking at self.

burning a hole in retina
Meanwhile, beyond the box, in the garden, the last rays of today's sun reflect off a bone white 4ft high cardboard model home, IKEA, 1997. Door and windows are wide open. What moves inside? Have to return it to the Moulin, before evening mist comes in.

20000225 links
I DIE for change (idie.net)

pay me to be me/pay me to be myself : attention
Taking Alamut's 'learning by linking' two steps further, big into real life, I can imagine a situation in which I pay someone to read this book for me and tell me what it is about, or, when speculation rules, I am paid by someone to make him/her to be me, or vice versa I pay someone to become her/him... It's all within the range of information agency and cultural codes, no gene fixing involved, not even proper sex.

leave a trail, shake it off
My trails are (the marks of) my interests, my limited attention, the combinations that emerge on my bookshelves, in my travelling pattern, my sex life, in the art I see, the music I listen to, in the food I eat. If those are my trails, who can I set on'm to hunt'm for more meat? That's agency to me. Go for Me, agent! Follow that Ego! If I don't have the means to have an agent go for me, why not find someone to pay me to make him/her be(come) me? A: I finally get to see me, through my own eyes, and paid for; B: my commissioner will turn me, allowing me (freeing me) to be another me—less expensive, more easily contented, tender and loving, altruistic, generally good, animal lover, great communicator, whatever, I name it. Until someone pays me to buy my new me. And on we go. Agency.

I DIE for color
When the discussion on the infodesigncafe-list once again hovered over the topic of ID websites and the lack of any good ones, I was reminded of idie.net, so I updated it a bit, with the highly recommendable 41 point read Manifesto for Growth, by Bruce Mau ('22: repeat yourself; 23: make your own tools; 24: stand on someone's shoulders'), and an eLance link. In the same spirit I emptied and removed my bookshelves and steamed off the highly fashionable bamboo wallpaper in the bureau, hoping to disclose the pornographic fantasies of one of the former owners of the Moulin. No. Now what color that wall's gonna be?, I'm hesitating between cyclamen pink or blackboard green, or #A3067F, vs. #045729... alternative win/win: the two in alternating horizontal stripes... but those colors I have fancied since way before they became equally fashionable as the bamboo print that I just removed—I should get some proper trend telling going here. Wait, wait... I do feel a color coming... I can almost see it now, it's... it is... no... no... I can see it but I don't know what to name it. It's... wait... #AAARGH!

20000224 no more links

re: inf0Arcadia
'After the flood' Paul has all the right InfoArcadia questions at Alamut.

Otherwise this day was off, and I spoiled it for others.

20000223 link
Té Bheag unchilfiltered Gaelic malt (www.scotchwhisky.com/english/about/malts/unchill.htm)

what goes N must come S, asap
Am I glad to be back! If only for the scents, when you get out of the car... It had just turned night when we arrived, it smelled like spring. After Ahmedabad I immediately had to leave again for NL, for the inf0Arcadia symposium in the Hague, where I was primarily very happy to decompress with Paul. Then we had some family visits, and shopping. Food and flowers. I bought 2 regular size and two miniature cyclamens. I often buy in 2s: use one, freeze one? Two bottles of Té Bheag. (Also, we used to buy chairs in pairs.) Then at Dfl. 8,95 a piece, I bought 3 orange extension cords of 20m each. Connect me if I'm wrong.

Don't we like it when a search ("Té Bheag" at Northern Light) returns not a whole lot of hits, but one or more at our own site? NQPAOFU#2, 2-3 May 1998:

- I left Gilberthe and the kids with her parents to chill out in their garden a few days. I unloaded the car, picked random vinyl from the shelf (King Crimson, In the Wake of Poseidon, 1970), generously watered my passion flower and poured myself a Té Bheag. Collected E and V mail. Ready to pay attention. Snail mail can wait another day or two.

xterminator chili
Ghosts from the past, ghosts from the future: if only they would be visiting..., like professors.

20000217 links
the Tisza river, before the cyanide flood (www.szabolcs.net/tourinform/eng/tisza2.htm)
J.-K. Huysmans (kirjasto.sci.fi/huysm.htm)
the Bièvre, tale of a river (bmlisieux.com/archives/bievre.htm)
Bibliothèque Electronique de Lisieux

end of nature
In countless small ceremonies, farmers and fishermen, inhabitants of Tiszafüred and Poroszló and other villages along the Tisza in Hungary, have paid due respect to their river (Hungary's second largest, feeding Europe's largest bird migration route), and declared it dead, after the release of 100k cubic meters of cyanide from a Rumanian gold mine, last week.

streams on
Three rivers I recently came across: Sabarmati, Beuvron, Tisza. The first and largest one cuts right through Ahmedabad, it is dry for some pools, nevertheless embedding 14 different occupations (sand collection and trade, laundries, dye works), some with their proper settlements, and a multitude of life forms and cultural expressions are hosted, like the Sunday Market. The Beuvron is my daily stream, which' behaviour I closely watch and which I am hoping to understand and read better over the years to come. As far as I can tell, she's quite healthy, quick. From the Moulin there's 30kms upstream to the source, down there's 10kms to the Yonne, where she gives up her autonomy. Then there's Tisza.

86 years ago J.-K. Huysmans wrote The Bièvre, tale of an innocent stream entering Paris only to be taken advantage of:

- La Bièvre représente aujourd'hui le plus parfait symbole de la misère féminine exploitée par une grande ville.

The entire text is at the Bibliothèque Electronique de Lisieux.

Took down Ahmedabad Letters.

20000216 link
Selection of Bruno Munari's Books (www.tzm.it/sba/Mostre/Munari/X3Libri.htm)

letting go
If one lesson's learned in Ahmedabad, it is that it's time to (again) shift gears in my work. Moulin honeymoon is over. It's time to exploit the new conditions. Act upon their distinctive qualities, otherwise changes have been made in vain (reading this back it sounds too firm, almost like an order: too black and white, either/orish, my only reaction can be: so what...). Orders to self don't work. I am already way too productive, worldly, connected, at it. Release. Let go. Give up the fruit.

Question to self: so what'll it be to let go, and what would it release? Among my mail was a copy of Aldo Tanchis' 'Bruno Munari, Design as Art' (MIT Press 1987), from Wickham Books South, via Advanced Book Exchange. It is all about

- the curiosity of knowing, the pleasure of understanding, the desire to communicate

facing inundation
Weather completely darkened over the past half hour, and restless winds move the grounds. Since last night the Beuvron shows a very quick increase, while forecasts say there will be more rain and sleet and thunderstorm all over France for the next 48 hours, after a brilliant sunny morning here. Things could spoil out trip to NL for next Friday.

20000215 link
Tribal Co-operative Marketing Development, Trifed (www.trifed.net)

touch base
Home and cold, incessantly sneezing from inside my brownish woollen tribal shawl from Trifed, I hope to deliver a start to the 25th issue of NQPAOFU.

Ahmedabad Letters will be taken down soon and slowly recast to a more or less coherent story, with lots of India Intel. Soar throat and hunger attacks. Not my average jet lag, which I hardly suffer. Culture shock rather, in the quiet confines of the Moulin. 'After India' I seriously hope to be a repeated thought for me. I need impact.

R+r sure seem to have grown, psychologically. 10 days is like an eternity at that age. Spent the whole day in their presence, showed the video, and made drawings and clipped magazines. Surprisingly my ninja turtle looks like a ninja turtle, even to me. R does very good color schemes (and in Photoshop), r draws/writes (blue felt pen on a newspaper page, oblong, full width; left to right first three are head/balloon, last one is balloon/head. Between balloon three and four, he added a blue outline 'sign' that reads 'PAIN', fr: bread, in silver stencil letters) tiny cartoon heads with one page balloons that say:

- ORORORORO
- OOOOOOOOOOO
- RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
- OROROR