NQPAOFU memory high 28
since 1998
nqpaofu#28 memory high : disclaimer : must link : myURLs : previous issue : next issue
notes quotes provocations and other fair use
conversational drift, informatic license
by jouke kleerebezem

the mark of launch-and-learn publishing: corrections are generally made within 36 hours.
grey (#DEDEDE-#777777) text paragraphs are subject to editorial scrutiny and should be considered temporary.



contact jk@ciw.net


15 May 2000
off-web
CONGRATS Michael and Auriea! netgoed!

updated moerstaal 15 mei, with long citations from the 'FTF2K' essay (NL)

20000515 link
Hermit+Whore best hit: the Medieval Feminist Index (www.haverford.edu/library/reference/mschaus/mfi/whatis.html)


attention management
OK so I do get in a foul mood when I don't manage my attention in any significant way.

mastering material, measure, momentum: to taste
Choose or produce your watercress, soft goat cheese, and bread. Mix honey vinegar and Balsamico, olive oil and walnut oil, pressed garlic, salt and pepper to taste. Dip cheese in milk and cover with breadcrumbs, and grill. Serve watercress and vinaigrette and cheese separately, for you and your guests to combine to taste. Serve bread and wine on the side. Use any leftover watercress to boil with pasta for diner.

and I occasionally do search the web
...to check some hunch I have. Meanwhile trying to keep my precious connect time as short as possible, I live off of my own ref without the checks. There's a million books on the shelf, greens and other colors in the field, waters in the river (high and yellow, this weekend...), music in the other box, (Prince re:lease 'Dreamin' about U', addictions are many, on Emancipation; Shelby Lynne; Fiona Apple), inks in the cartridges, moods in the guts, suns in the skies.

Poor disjointed web. The other day I found no Sign in it, of the Hermit and the Whore I was looking for. They sure exist off-line in some sort of dramatic relation. If not I'll have to create it, pull them out of a reality known to me, disclose them in disguise, as an innocent but curing story, not to offend their original inspiration who may even live next door to you. Art is meant to corrupt lived reality only by offering it re:lease, to offer meaning to the suffering, it is sacred code, meditation, incantation, celebration as much as warning, spell, curse. It is addictive, per se. Indeed a drug. Which fact sharply distincts art from design, which is lived reality—everyday more so every day, disappearing into it, merging with it, all informationalization lurking at the end of the line—not so is art, which is growing away from it every day, finding refuge in dead languages, where hermits and whores rejoice. So to speak.

RE: art as a 'sacred code' is as much source-for-the-sake-of-source (spin) as it is a condition for other realities to come about. But you knew.

clock work
I moved the mantel clock (by Lelouche, from Donzy, which is only 30kms from the moulin, where the other watermill is, the one that squeezes the walnuts to produce that excellent oil of oils) with its 6" bronze shepherdess on top, from the guest room to the library, so that I can hear its cristal clear chime every half hour (now that I hear it striking 10.30am I must say it sounds very much like the short triangle bytes in 'Dreamin' about U'...). Its ticking is another tremendous joy, only to be experienced in the library itself.

13 May 2000
the hermit and the whore
Webwide search for a story featuring the two personages who compete inside of me: I found none but some ref to Mary Magdalene. Makes me wonder what the web's about, if not about those who stay and those who go. OK, forget it. Most information is still hiding from the archive. Or indeed: unwritten.

12 May 2000
meanwhile, abundancy
a million thin varnish layers break the light
Richness. When you can see all of life's attractions and delusions as the result of an endless amount of micro-scopic effects, crises, slips of the tongue, winks and wits, semper temper and climates and humeurs and hors d'oeuvres. Our consensus realities are so gross. Our social manners so daft. Our preconceptions so inhibited. In other words: there is no freedom, only grace.

11 May 2000
whatever generosity
enough is enough, now what
Finished a 4600+ wrd essay for Items magazine, in Dutch, which goes by the above title. It tries to situate design as one of the key processes in an emerging 'critical' market, in which producer/consumer interact to produce goods, services and information. It goes rather beyond the original provocation by First Things First 2000. The more I thought about it the more I imagined alternatives to its rather tired critique. I read most of No Logo but still longed for a different approach, so I speculated on. Just like what always drove my interest in art, also for design I'd love to see more better smarter experiments and imagine them in the Internet realm. If there's a challenge to design today, it would be to design its own competence and responsibility, in a market/as a market, with no particular client to work for, but to enhance and represent and dramatize the bidding.

I hope to translate/transpose/re:write it in E, like with infoArcadia.

I like Judith's palimpsestish 'design' and 're-design' rooms (sort of like the men's and the ladies', yet different). I wonder if they are inter-connected and what is between them in a way of portal, or hall or other acclimatisation space. Re-design is a time machine. Actually it is a waste not to be able to rewind your bits when working in digital media.

sensations of generosity
The smell of incense when I open the cabinet to get a whiskey glass. Our Indian stock is in the drawer above the glasses. The fast grass and John's carefully sculpted paths through and around the trees and back. The disappearing cock. And where did the duck's eggs go? Two very attractive young boys. Budding and more budding.

When our publishing needs spread their utterances, how do we keep these connected.

9 May 2000
city is not the message
The city's not the message. Amsterdam is a message, with a million messages embedded, nested, threaded. New York ditto. Ahmedabad ditto. Moulin du Merle ditto. Experience is in the detail. The message is the message. The medium is the format. The Amsterdam format is the Leidsestraat at 2am, affording and growing and pampering its homo amusans the nuisance, the gnawing, slurping and burping death by commodity seeking population, educating it in all the wrong manners. The Amsterdam format affords the keeper of the botanical garden, 6 hours later, just before 8am, to silently spray a rainbow cloud of water, as the sun rises from behind the greenhouse.

4 May 2000
the dream is in the details
The young woman's right leg was considerably thicker than her left leg, and straight, almost tubular, from the knee down. She wore a customized shoe, to contrast with the elegant pump on the left foot. I bet the right leg was also a bit shorter. The leg is the first detail, which only struck me after I had entered the brothel. Before I had caught a glimpse from the outside, when she stood in the window. We went to her room and she explained how to proceed, that she would take most of the initiative since it was my first time with her, that if I would return I would have to take the initiative and tell her what I liked. She put her tongue in my mouth and gave me a very skilled kiss, not too long, not really short. When she guided me to a small bed and we laid down, I suddenly noticed a very intricate piece of Kinder Surprise on the bed's head end: the second detail. Much larger than they come in the egg, and plenty detail, small pieces, plenty. Some parts were obviously lacking or had come loose. When I considered to fix it, for her or with her, I got distracted and thought she shouldn't do so during working hours.

(NQPAOFU resumption: May 9)

3 May 2000
piece of blog
20000503 link
CITES list, to search NL extinction, for METO (www.wcmc.org.uk/CITES/eng/index.shtml)
Zonnemaire Buitengewoon (1999): be there 9-10 July 00, or don't party (www.zonnemaire.com)


not.art
This morning I thought up a piece for the Animal Farm beeldenroute (sculpture trail) in Zonnemaire this summer. Thinking up pieces is what I have been doing for a long time, mostly before 1993, until I first faced the Web. Before I started to think up pieces, I used to brush imagery on canvas or construct objects in various materials and media that occupy space, and either pile or glue or spread well. The objects took more or less space, generally more than unframed canvases, sometimes you could walk around them or float them in the air. Before the canvases it was primarily typography. All along there's photography and moving images, and some audio: just recording. Photography or audio I never thought up. It just followed us around.

Note to art historians: the two major breaks in the body of work do not follow lines of materiality however, or spatial definitions, but modes of distribution (how very 20thC). Ever since the early typography years, reproduction is in the work, like in: multiple originals; not like in: reproductions after an original. Editions. Of 2 and up. 2 or up to 1-2K (identical) originals, or a 1-2K part distributed original, that is. (I remember visiting Heinz - Yellow Submarine - Edelmann in his Scheveningen home and studio, when I was a student. He intrigued me totally by telling he always trashed the original drawings (which I admired so much for their brilliant line and color and materiality), while he considered the prints that were made after them (books, posters) his original work. That taught me). A lot of silkscreen and off-set. In 1993 the edition problem got solved, ad infinitum, which leaves the piece problem.

bits and pieces
Having thought up the More Equal Than Others piece (though now that I've read the organizers'—who are highschool friends of mine, which I haven't seen for ages. I remember Jaap Verseput played the sax and owns the farm which hosts the music festival, I'll be curious to meet them again—wind warnings, I'm doubting the feasibility of my flock, well anyway), I thought of how little net art I have seen over the past years. I've seen a lot of good net, but not a lot of art, and even less good pieces. Pieces don't seem to upload, but they would download, if someone would care to put up their instructions, that is. I can imagine following these, even without the mediation of some kind of rapid prototyping kind of technology. More like following them, do this or do that, turn left, turn right and voilà, here's the piece. Or you're the piece. Very performative, very DIY, which is (1) an unacceptable limitation, for a lot of pieces, or (2) could be the work's quintessential quality, for very few pieces, a genre by itself.

Unless it is designed at/as the core of a piece, you don't want user interaction. Users give good net, but few pieces. In the real world, that is. To keep it real enough, we need good net to support good pieces.

2 May 2000
where have we been for the past 20 years


trick or treat, the bitter and the sweet
vintage
Listening to vintage vinyl Siouxsie+Banshees. Happy House. Can't believe this is 20 years ago. Where have I been? Where were you on May 2, 1980? And after? We had just returned from a 3 months cold spring (snow in March) stay in the Pyrenee foothills, in Rolf and Nienke Henderson's primitive cabin. Went there with our first car, a white Peugeot 204, with a sun roof. Drove down to Barcelona for Easter. Red Light, with its neurotic motordrive exposure sound. Remember that song when they were performing live at Vera student club in Groningen—that year? I was a regular concert goer and Vera had all the best acts, but the Sex Pistols was Huize Maas (this actually would be very much moerstaal content—or no content at all. Excuse my sentiments). That was the last concert when they served beer in glasses there. After the last encore the wall-to-wall broken glass carpet was 2" thick. Malcolm McLaren had hit organizer Robbie Kaufmann on the eye. Local scenes. Actually the S+B Sioux+Severin+McKay,+Morris line-up was very strong, listen to that awful Trophy intro. Whine baby. Playground Twist.


Feeling much better now.

new female voices
Later we welcomed Greet and Ann Levine who are American but have been living in NL for I don't know how many years and together (they are mother and daughter) run Roemer's former kindergarten excellent Oma Pap in Amsterdam. They brought Liz Phair, Emma Townsend (yep, Pete's daughter), Shelby Lynne and Fiona Apple. While we'll be attending John and Kristi's marriage next Saturday in A., they'll stay with R+r. (I'm K.'s best man and we talked dress and hair and table and assorted hen talk for over an hour on the phone tonight).

29-30 April 2000
was: ars longa vita brevis
20000429 links to follow

the proof of the pudding: self-help as autophagy
- Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
(Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871)

Paul's (altruistic) interest in an online EQ test, by his request triggered some interest in self-help and self-assessment in the old ontoménage. Since the proof of the pudding is in the eating, I clicked a record time test and came out with a fan hitting overall 118, behaviour 117, knowledge 118 score, and a re-assuring conclusion on my emotional personality (which I plan to use when G. and I have our next argument), plus the same booklist as Nina (on the 28th) (and no doubt all other selfists), since

- There is still room for improvement, though. The good news is that you can do something about it, even if you are a mature grown-up. And you can start right away!'

So the test did not figure out whether I am a mature grown-up or not, or it has a sense of humor? A propos humor, in below article, I found some on it. I've always considered sense of humor the Mother of all Senses. Generally I do not like jokes, but I love the absurd in any other format. To share a taste for the absurd, for irony, to share the impulse of laughter, in whatever form it is encountered (and there's infinite variety), is to share a release, and a basis for sharing of knowledge and insight and love, indeed. Humor then, and science. This morning the biochemist enters the lab to... I don't mean jokes, even when they serve scientific research, apparently:

- Materials: we created a 30-item questionnaire made up of jokes we felt were of varying comedic value. Jokes were taken from Woody Allen (1975) , Al Frankin (1992) , and a book of "really silly" pet jokes by Jeff Rovin (1996). To assess joke quality, we contacted several professional comedians via electronic mail and asked them to rate each joke on a scale ranging from 1 ( not at all funny ) to 11 ( very funny ). Eight comedians responded to our request (Bob Crawford, Costaki Economopoulos, Paul Frisbie, Kathleen Madigan, Ann Rose, Allan Sitterson, David Spark, and Dan St. Paul). Although the ratings provided by the eight comedians were moderately reliable ( a = .72), an analysis of interrater correlations found that one (and only one) comedian's ratings failed to correlate positively with the others (mean r = - .09). We thus excluded this comedian's ratings in our calculation of the humor value of each joke, yielding a final a of .76.

Expert ratings revealed that jokes ranged from the not so funny (e.g., "Question: What is big as a man, but weighs nothing? Answer: His shadow." Mean expert rating = 1.3) to the very funny (e.g., "If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is 'God is crying.' And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is 'probably because of something you did.'" Mean expert rating = 9.6).

Procedure: participants rated each joke on the same 11-point scale used by the comedians. Afterward, participants compared their "ability to recognize what's funny" with that of the average Cornell student by providing a percentile ranking. In this and in all subsequent studies, we explained that percentile rankings could range from 0 ( I'm at the very bottom ) to 50 (I'm exactly average ) to 99 (I'm at the very top).


Very funny indeed. This humor comes to you, courtesy Hotsy Totsy Club, who linked to the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments ...Don't You All Know Them—Or Him, But Less So, Her? Wouldn't 'incompetence' translate differently in a female than in a male? Is nothing sacred anymore? To quote the article's disclaimer:

- Gender failed to qualify any results in this or any of the studies reported in this article, and thus receives no further mention.

Haha!, well, there's nothing like a good dose of objective science to do away with prejudice...

So Hotsy Totsy Club is right:

- labels like "emotional intelligence" or "mental health" tempt us to bundle together traits that are, if not actually contradictory, at least not mutually reinforcing.

My good and my bad habits are however 'mutually reinforcing', alas—like my male and my female agents, and the myriad other selfish contradictions that I host. To 'become who I am' I need more than an 118 EQ. See you at the next interrater correlations meeting.

28 April 2000
running fast


Théodore Géricault, 'Satyre et nymphe', musée du Louvre, in Posséder et détruire; Stratégies sexuelles dans l'art d'Occident
20000428 links
Le Louvre (www.louvre.fr)


one full day, yesterday, today
It's still 27 April, but blogwise this day is filled. So we open another. Yesterday was spoiled by the Advanced design bravura. Today should be real. This afternoon I am invited at the bank Crédit Agricole Varzy office, where we have three accounts. I do not know about their privacy policy but I can only imagine they will propose some investments, that is, if they snooped our credit. I would not regard that a possibility, at a local outlet (I don't think it is officially possible in NL), but somehow I guess their proposal will be to use our reserve to grow it a bit. We did not invest the profit on the Amsterdam property sale. We live off of it. We grow it in the garden and in peace of mind. We grow it in our family relations. We grow it in R+r, in local reputation and friendships, we grow it in the estate. We're big spenders in growth: that's what I'll tell'm at the bank later, and request some venture capital for the Moulin du Merle. (...) Indeed it was proposed to me to set aside some money, at a very moderate interest, but slightly better than the current 0.0%, without strings attached. The funny thing is that indeed the local manager has all my financial history at hand. I suppose that as long as he is by his right mind, I'm fine. Suddenly I remember when I got my bank card, without showing my passport, because they knew me. Bonjour monsieur, vous allez bien? How would you like your money today?

slow motion
Heating water. Cooling water.

french discourse
Every morning during shower and shave I listen to France Culture radio. Today before 8am I witnessed a discussion in which Sartre and Pokemon and former Minister of Culture Jack Lang were mentioned, probably sharing some existential needs, being immediately followed by a discussion on the Louvre exhibition 'Posséder et détruire; Stratégies sexuelles dans l'art d'Occident' (Possess and Destroy; Sexual Strategies in Western Art, E introduction, linked out of frames). French intellectualism rocks. In essence it is so very local, certainly before breakfast, when outside in the distance is hilly colza (its deep sweet smell reaches us in the evening) covered yellow and dark green Burgundy, grey skies, wet.

learn to change
Paul reminded me of an early NQPAOFU statement, which said that somehow I moved to France, without ever having been taught 'to move to France'— basically à fond perdu, like I would say today, 28 April 2000. How did I learn to move here? I searched for the entry. Truth is (NQPAOFU 11)

- We were never taught to move to France. Which would come before knowing how to move to France. We never learned to do 'move to France'. What we learned over time is the relative effect of change, we learned that change can do you good but that you should never expect all of it. We learned that we (G+J+R+r) can take risks: so we did before.

Learning is 'circumstantial reasoning', interpretation of prior experience, reading clues, pattern recognition, applying experience to present situations -- as well as individually: to know how skilled you are, how equipped, what kind of risks you can take, or want to take, how much information you can handle; how much you are willing to learn, to add to your experience, how much you want to 'do/learn'.

Now we know to move to France. Not only do we know now how to move to France (you calculate the costs, invite movers, box your stuff and schlep, etc.), most importantly, we now know 'to do' move to France. Which is the all important thing to learn.


It was 'instructive' to read back some of my early notes (they need some spell checking). Simply engaging was listening back some of my 1984(!) and after audio notes, late night. I always carried an Olympus memo recorder to keep track of gab, still do on long car trips, but today I dub all the time and only occasionally save some. Very personal audio indeed.

27 April 2000
when enough was enough
20000427 links
Advance for Design, at the AIGA (advance.aiga.org)


First waded back in time some hours, then hit on the below described 'Movement', and spent too much time dissing it. Even when there's critique in the making, being exposed to design ambition overbidding its hand, I show allergic reaction.

re: FTF2K
While working on the FTF2K review for Items (don't follow these links if you remember what I'm talking about), I came across an initiative under the wings of the AIGA, called Advance for Design—'experience design' to begin with:

- Experience design is the way in which meaning is communicated in the network society, where no point of contact has a simple beginning and end, and all points of contact must have meaning embedded within them.

'Embedding meaning' in (the transactions?, or in the connecting) points with no ('no simple'...) beginning or end (a simple mathematical impossibility, according to my teachers), as a design challenge? Sure, why not, we're about this all the time: design simply fixes points that lack beginning or end, by attributing them ('look at this point's magnificent beginning and jeez, what a tremendous dramatic end'), yet it makes Advance initiators wonder:

- ...not only where, or how design happens, but WHEN design happens

...with the in new media brouhaha inevitable alarmist twist, and lousy metaphor:

As a group of professionals and practitioners, we are at a crossroad. Evolve or become roadkill.

Serious confusion deserves a serious reply. Part of it would sound: design happens, whenever cultural expression (try 'daily communications' for size) is mediated through a designed interface. We should not go as far as to define all human interaction designed expression, but surely with media enhanced communication, design decisions have been taken for participants/users, and are often (more or less consciously) taken (should be taken) by participants, when using these media, whether it is a simple email software, or a web publication, or subscribing to some sort of service. The user designs the experience more than anyone else, especially in customized catering. What will the industry supply in competition, according to the Advanced?

- The experience designer must combine the rigors of engineering with the inspiration of high art. He or she must become adept at the traditional skills of design, and engage in dialogue with the virtuosos in the world of social science, economics, architecture, theatre and the narrative arts.

So does (s)he listen to our not so everyday everyday? Who does (s)he think (s)he is anyway?

More serious: among the professionals subscribing to such design recasts are a lot of not so absolute beginners, to name some: Lauralee Alben, Principal, AlbenFaris; Gillian Crampton Smith, Professor, Royal College of Art; Peter Girardi, President, Funny Garbage; Carl Goodman, Curator of Digital Media, American Museum of Moving Images; Terry Irwin, Partner, MetaDesign; John Maeda, Assistant Professor of Design and Computation, MIT Media Laboratory: Clement Mok, Chairman, Sapient; Thomas Mueller, Razorfish; Patty Pallisco, Corporate Design Strategist, IBM Corporation; Nathan Shedroff, Chief Creative Officer, vivid studios; Gong Szeto, Chief Creative Officer, Rare Medium, Inc.; John Thackara, Director, Doors of Perception; Andrew Zolli, Vice President, Interactive Media, Siegel & Gale, Inc.—I see some friends too, didn't know about their secret lives ;-). Bien étonné de les trouver ici...

more question marks, more relevance
Today's Alamut entry contains 13 question marks on a total of 133 lines. And all these ?s open to a space of un-answering, preparing for experience, rather than 'conditioned existence', or the stuff Advanced 'experience design' will be made of.

26 April 2000
dialogue intérieure

correspondence as communication and concurrence

(ill.: William Heath Robinson, 1872-1944, 'Training restaurant car attendant to carry on during uncertain motion of train')
interior resign
I did not mean it to be all that interior, not following up on my hunches here. But like I just (27 April morning) wrote to Paul, about dialogus interruptus:

- yesterday I spent most of the day installing 6 ancient but usable glass windows in the vegetable garden, supporting them on available stone material from an old landing on one side and a low wall on the other, so as to form a greenhouse for strawberries and the likes. And weeded.

It's true. And when I read on Judith's boredom yesterday late night, I had one foot in the bed already, and not enough juice left to reply to it, while very much corresponding to it. Bore. Blasé. BeenThereDoneThat. It's all fact. It happens. It does not mean a whole lot, but it is for real enough. The next moment some daft inspiration kicks you in the but. And there you go again, exploring the 'wasteland of the free'.

25 April 2000
slowly opening the shutters

different widths yellow_bar.gif, grey_bar.gif, black_bar.gif, light-yellow_bar.gif, MLdred_bar.gif; repeat
not your everyday everyday
<woman, man, love, life, death> all the rest is ritual, or work, and both, a struggle for expression, form, language, performance, nature. Who tries to convince you of the existence of higher complications in this scheme didn't get it and probably has a political agenda: file under ritual/confused/politics.

Change and re-invention are slow. It will take me a couple more years to build a new life here. 'To think of new ways to say the same old things'. Doing very old things to think new thoughts.

If we should remember one thing for the coming age, it is to take our time.

Still listening to Spiritualized, tracks 3 and 4.

iconic irony
Then, there's irony: the root of all relief. Paradox, another one. High incompetence, deep purposelessness. I remember I had the taste for such over long periods of time. Kind of lost it in the 1990s, when I got too involved with agendas of sorts—actually, like the rest of us, like the damn peers. So who's leading the escape now? Or what is, not: into what? (I'm gonna air my brain outside).

For those of you who lack the possibility of an outside, note another come-back blog, the return of antidote, Demian, Inverti Ecclesium Salas, Inverti Monsoon Rangoon, Meow: Bovine Diverses.

remember


unless I read space in images, in objects, in people, I clutter
moods
Later today, in the evening, I listen to Iris DeMent. 'Wasteland of the Free', on 'the way i should'. I've spent my time this afternoon again opening all the barn's doors and hatches, airing it, thinking about how to turn it into a studio space/apartment, and where to put the glass in its roof, weeding the vegetable garden, watering the recently planted berries and fruit trees, later walking around the house, looking over the river and into the valley, looking at the light, thinking about my friends and their lives. Francine I wrote a longer email, explaining what it is that fatally attracts me in this medium—but I owe some of you. And of course I want to do other work, or projects, besides the weblogs. Do I, really?

22-24 April 2000, Easter
something old, something new: some experience
Listening to Spiritualized, 'Cop shoot cop', from 'Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space', track 12 starring Dr. John's light touch on the grand piano, connecting one guitar chaos to the next, for 17'13", 'hey man there's a whole in my head where information goes'...

hypnolepsis

struck Sunday before noon. When I woke up 4 hours later I went up to the attic to look at some old drawings. They are clean, aesthetic pencil line drawings on a washed monochromish watercolour background, small (A4-); architectural (maybe even typographical, though these works don't contain any text) in reference: maps and some projection/map hybrids. I vividly recall the decisions I took (where does this line go?: the final drawing function, every draughtsman's delight, or horror) as much as the surprises when the watercolour washings had dried up and had mapped their pigment concentrations on odd spots over the paper. This combination and juxtaposition of tracing chance and decision mark the work, which dates from 1986-7. All work is framed in an unlacquered slim, light wooden frame, and in passe-partout which exposes the entire sheet of paper, so to articulate the 'architectural' limits of the material. A drawing as an object. Some pencil marks are deep, like engraved. I also drew on wood panels, in conversation with natural lines, knots, at times also carving, more like peeling them. Some drawings show cut-outs and paste-on. I remember that my object defining sensitivity was very alert at the time, having come from painting and moving into installations, carefully stepping into the third dimension, leaving the picture space wall.

Generally the titles appeal less to me today than they did when they were given. Hey, I write much better now than 15 years ago. Obviously they then meant a lot, now they seem too illustrative to me, even when they attempt to move the work from the draughtsmanship level into another realm, a more literary field. I wouldn't hesitate to give them a different title today. Some have been exhibited in the 'Drawings' show curated by critic Cees van der Geer and organised by the Boymans van Beuningen Museum Rotterdam, in 1987.

follow that line
Far from écriture automatique, my fascination with drawing (and sometimes with painting) has been of the 'follow that line' sort of immature kind, ever since my early childhood's first encounter with a Mondriaan on the back side of a Peter Stuyvesant box, at the Haags Gemeentemuseum—like my writing has a 'follow that word' basis (not follow that thought!). I guess this way of working is in essence poetical, rather than conceptual. I surely would hope so. And it works for writing like it does (did) for drawing. But I should look into the detailed differences.

Another observation: the extinct seagull Paul and I saw in a shoe box at the missionary museum in Zuid-Limburg (where they also displayed a reconstructed ape from separate parts which had been sent home from Indonesian outposts, in big jars. This particular reconstruction's arms were way too long). Then there were two blood stained missionaries' frocks. Why would I exhibit the seagull next to the Peter Stuyvesant box, would I be invited to autocurate something like a 'this is your life' exhibition, from the scraps of experience?

Dead Language. Splendid Isolation. Follow that signature.

I thought of
New ways
To say
The same old things
I thought
I'd jump up
And twirl my arms
Like a windmill;
I thought
I'd jump up
And spin around
Like a lighthouse.

(David Thomas & The Pedestrians, 'The Sound of the Sand', track 2, 'Yiki Tiki', 1981)

Still listening to Spiritualized, track 8, 'The individual'



















note to self

nqpaofu memory high

is the sequel to NQPAOFU (1998-1999 archive), the weblog.
At some point nqpaofu.com will host the entire publication to date.
The current site serves since 15 January 2000. Welcome.


must link (http://...)

paul
alamut (www.alamut.com)

angels
calamondin (www.calamondin.com)
lemonyellow (www.lemonyellow.com)
puce (www.puce.com)

contrast
bovine inversus (www.bovineinversus.com)
synthetic zero (www.syntheticzero.com)

industry
tbtf (tbtf.com/blog)

search
direct search (gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~gprice/direct.htm)


myURLs

inf0Arcadia NL (www.idie.net/inf0Arcadia)
inf0Arcadia E (www.idie.net/inf0Arcadia/infoarcadia-index-E.html)
Le Moulin du Merle (lemoulindumerle.com)
I DIE for change (idie.net)