conversational drift, informatic license, exquisite enclaves_by jouke kleerebezem
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14 January 2001
me and ma vica
(placeholder) again darn Fetch 3.03 freezes over and over on my JPEGs....
12 January 2001
add location
First extra-moulin upload, from room 208 at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht NL.
8 January 2001
W alert
Catching up on work. First holidays then viral invasion took me back at least a couple of weeks (of attention, that is). While there's so much good stuff waiting for me to kick it. BTW, remember my DISK ERROR C : 13 : 01 on the Mavica? Well she returned to Sony twice and word has it she's saved. Expect a lemoulindumerle.com upload, over the next months. And: someone hit NQPAOFU on the 'DISK ERROR C : 13 : 01' search string. Aah, blinkin' poetics.
add moon, add crows
Spotted, over East hills.
add miles, add ink
Taking off on board Thalys TGV tomorrow. Just burnt three fresh minidisks and filled the Duofold. Check the Fratres for updates over the next days.
7 January 2001
better
Booked my train. Tracked my broom. Bruised my name. I'm moving on.
6 January 2001
idie.net: vormgeving ontwerpen
Finished 'Modelling Design', to appear in De Witte Raaf, January 2001 issue. In Dutch. Expect an English summary.
add water
Rains have stopped with our little river at critical height. Forecasts for the next three days are dry-ish. We still round the beds, in and out and about. Since a long time read some Edge via Caterina. Downloaded Jaron Lanier's .5 Manifesto and its replies, for diagonal reading. A propos adding water.
add snow
Just got confirmed we'll be returning to Threes Moolhuysen's chalet in Villars CH in February. It's been too long! Wonder how R+r will like the mountain.
5 January 2001
overconfident, underanticipated
While in feverish overconfidence I invite Paul to India (like we never went to Costa Rica or NYC, but to Lithuania and SF, and have discussed India before), Alamut has it that BC is the best of all possible worlds—'socked in' as it is. Like here, where the Beuvron jumped up 3ft over the night.
WEIN
Now R has the virus since 8-ish ce matin. Par contre, G. seems spared the most convulsive spasms. I just lit the fire in her bedroom, opened the shutters and brought her tea. There's some interesting mail waiting and I should reply to Paul and Mitsu, whose recent posts I particularly liked.
4 January 2001
still under the weather
Relapsed yesterday and last night. Dreamt all the colors and animation of India and Indonesia and wondered why we hadn't moved back there. Lit the fire in the bedroom on one paper tissue. Read some more Bachelard to enhance my nested mood. On waking up it is covered and pouring. Our friends left for Paris later Amsterdam. I'm gonna bury myself under a thick pile of Eastern fabric in yellows, oranges and ochres.
up or down, east or west?
When I'm in horizontal position my head keeps popping up with a jumpy mind full of brilliant creative ideas and daring field trip proposals to far away countries with lots of good excuses to indulge in local color—when I'm in vertical position to take note of these mindful ideas in order not to forget them, or find some more colorful slides and a projector to remote-from-bed prepare my directions East, my body keeps slipping out from under the head which contains the restless mind. How much longer will I have to suffer this destabilization?
...and a next patient
I'm barely balanced when Gilberthe and I switch roles. She's in bed since 7:30pm. I do the household and R+r.
now playing, comfortingly, Kristi's present
Talvin Singh presents Anokha, Soundz of the Asian Underground (with Talvin Singh's Jaan, Doors 6 soundtrack, featuring Amar Hussain***, and increasingly tear jerking in re:re:play, A.R. Rahman's Mumbai Theme Tune. I have to get back to India. I only had a taste of it. Doors East 2 will be in Feb 2002.
interesting stuff for idie.net
Mau's Life Style: its one-liners ('Read>') certainly don't do the trick for me, let's go buy the book (his 43-points 'incomplete manifesto for growth' originally delivered for Doors 5, which gets no credit BTW, did strike a chord or 2, 3).
3 January 2001
meanwhile
Feeling slightly better. Actually I like my body to give up temporarily. It is perfectly right to do so.
(this year's viral invaders first took Kristi, who missed New Year's party, then me, last night jumped to Kate. The house is like a field hospital, we're moving beds around in order to let the sick be quietly sick and the healthy be quietly healthy. I'm glad to have my room with a fire)
2 January 2001
sick from 1:30am
Sick and tired, all day in bed, developing a flue, when not asleep looking at the bright blue glass ceiling lamp, flooded with sunlight. Listening to the sounds in the house. Reviewing this life, which all of a sudden seems so long, so filled. Later some reading in Poetics of Space. The house makes a lot of sense when you're ill.
1 January 2001
zero proof
today's playlist
- Patrik Fitzgerald, Grubby Stories (lp, 1979)
Come and get your punk in Woolworth's
Bondage trousers - twelve pounds
Mohair jumpers sold next to cardigans
It always comes around
They make it safe
- Dalek i, Compass Kum'pas (lp, 19?)
- Cocteau Twins, Blue Bell Knoll (lp, 1988)
- Miles Davis, Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (cd, 1950-2000)
- Donovan, What's bin did and what's bin hid (lp, 1965)
- Roxy Music, Avalon (lp, 1982)
- Chér, Sonny Side of Chér (lp, 19?)
- Zappa/Beefheart/Mothers, Bongo Fury (lp, 1975)
- Victoria Williams, Water to Drink (cd, 2000)
- Shelby Lynne, I am Shelby Lynne (cassette, 1999)
today's guest list
- Kristi
John
Kate, John's daughter
- Patricia
Giles
- Patrick
Florence
- Madame Rodriguez
Cathérine, her daughter
Laura, her grandchild, Cathérine's daughter
Alexandre (?), another grandchild
- Annemiek
Joost
Jet, their daughter
zero use
Last night and this morning at Patrick and Florence's, in the Grange Treillard hamlet, along our conversation I was reminded of Heinz Edelmann (of Yellow Submarine fame), whom I visited in Scheveningen, when I was an art school graphic design student, when he told me that he always trashed his drawings and paintings after having been lithographed, since he considered the books or posters that reproduced them to be the original artworks.
I was reminded of the Grateful Dead's permissiveness with taping their concerts,
I was reminded of this one book on 'world acoustics' (site specificity) which I never found, which' title I forgot, after Justin Benett had told me about it in the Hague at the Silicon Rally dinner,
I was reminded of my childhood's search for unexploded fireworks, the early morning of the first of January, when the weather was hopefully dry.
I was reminded during my conversation, with Patrick, musician and composer; Philippe, farmer; Richard, 'camerade' oyster opener and independent inventor in electrical miniaturization for the space industry (so his sister Florence told me today).
zero explanation
Most people pay most of their attention to (and subsequently have their actions guided by their limited conceptions of) why the world functions the way it does, instead of adding new experience to that world, without explanations given or sought, other than embodied in the added experience. Outside the infinite ways of explaining/interpreting of what is going on in our world, and why, it appears to me that 'zero use, zero explanation' is a unique value, which certainly added all of my personal understanding of the endless complexities of what we are doing.
Zero use, zero explanation's only ground is in art. Whatever might be the relevance of such foothold at times—like when we are living a market reality in which most couldn't care less for zero options—its unique qualities are of course independent of our appraisal and will always work for those for who they will work. Zero proof.
31 December 1900-1 January 1901
and a Happy New Year
John, Kristi and Kate and all of us are invited by Patrick and Florence, to Grange Treillard tonight (hi Caterina!), so we will take our oysters and oliebollen et al up the hill, to share with Philippe and Delphine and children of Le Mazot and all at La Grange and who else. Fréderic will sound the Thurigny church bell all around. Anyone I would email tonight to wish a HappyM3 and 1901: herewith. And later.
31 December 2000
approximations
Speculation rules NQPAOFU writing. Find no evidence here, but of attention patterns.
29 December 2000meanwhile
We're back from NL and XM. When I tried to post 23 December, car on the driveway with a family in it, my FTP server didn't allow me access three times in a row. I left without posting...
23 December 2000
informationalization
In the very broadest sense we are moving from ages of materialization to ages of informationalization. When before all values strove for (were directed at) materialization, in the future they will strive for (we will direct them at) informationalization.
It's hard to imagine just how very broad the 'very broadest sense' actually is, or could be. We are only just trying to discover how information can be gathered, read and processed and distributed, from the material world and out of our relationship to that world and its histories and out of our own histories and relationships. Can we even see how deeply ages past have been all materialization?
Some see a danger of disenchantment in the lonesome figure behind the 'personal' computer, or at whatever interface in the network. Yet it will be fully engaged in communication pretty much all of the time, at equal rates producing and consuming information. The real danger of loneliness rather lies in the growing impossibility to be alone with something mute, dumb, uninformed—if something like it would still exist. It doesn't even need to be a something: it can be someone, or some atmosphere, or some whatever.
We will be so uncomfortable, so lonely, so left alone, so desperate and miserable if all of a sudden the systems shut down and we find ourselves alone again, vis-à-vis a material world, vis-à-vis that silent whatever, if it doesn't inform or allows to be informed.
I don't have to try hard to feel that loneliness already.
22 December 2000
loooongshortnotes
If I mean it 'to be continued', alors, I continue. Back and forth in time, slipping and sliding just before the year ends and, well you know what it needs to know at these occasions. Trust before anything else.
- forth 1: tomorrow is the school play and holiday after. We'll leave for NL for a couple of days. Cathérine Rodriguez and Joost Jonker will keep an eye and feed our ménage.
- back 1: yesterday when disentangling the 120ft. garden hose just before it was about to freeze in the grass (it was already cold plastic stiffish, you know, when it is hard to undo the twists) I was again thankful for Caterina, for disentangling the christmas lights and decorating our petit sapin with R+r. Disentangling: no links to go by, just a lot of stubborn knots. Brr.
- back 2: also yesterday, Rolf brought home from school the best report any parent could wish for. I'm so doggone ("perhaps from Scotch dagone, 'gone to the dogs,' or maybe an alteration of Goddamn, 1851; doggoned, 1857. -- from Stuart Berg Flexner, I Hear America Talking, publ. Simon Schuster 1976") proud! I know how hard he works it, the perfectionist he is. He told me he wants to be the best. His Dutch is developing ze accent, to start with his R's.
- back 3: the Thurigny Xmas was good fun and a lot more people than last year. More about it in Parenting Ahead after Xmas. Our new Sri Lankan priest required a volunteer to sound the bell of the StGdB church at midnight, 31 December. I raised my hand, so I'll probably be dangling from a rope in a cold dark tower for the first 12 minutes of C21. I'll rock that bell so hard it'll sound all the way to Amsterdam, Vancouver, Frisco and back through Belfort. Send love to all.
- back 4: Caterina brought assorted MWBilia: Judith used C. as her postillon to hand me the Vanity Fair article (with some new to me facts on her affair with Michael Strange and later liberating love for James 'Pebble' Rockefeller, and two color photos which confirm her beauty) and a sweet note on bizarre stationary from the land of the rising sun—C. herself had emptied her nephew's bookshelves to come up with a copy of The Runaway Bunny. "If you become a sailboat and sail away from me," said his mother, "I will become the wind and blow you where I want you to go." Incredibly fresh artwork by Clement Hurd, for 1942!
- forth 2: I'll be travelling a lot to NL next year, for the D-pack and the HsB. I'm positively challenged.
- chapeau: it's guests like Caterina who make the Moulin work for me, and they're scarce. From the day we moved in I hoped our foothold to work as a place for G+R+r+me, and friends. If someone you just know from a weblog, who comes as a dear friend of someone else you only once met and know from her weblog, to stay with you, everybody better know what they are doing. From the moment she turned up on the train leaving Paris it felt perfectly easy. Remarkable to welcome someone new to your environment, who has the qualities to blend and stand out at the same time. The rest is history and described here and there. At the Xmas get-together again it struck me how hospitable our community is. It is. We kiss four times. Quat' fois.
21 December 2000
sortofshort
(note from the returning headlines desk)notes for a short day
What have we?
- As much as I like to freak my neigh ones on June 21, alarming them that The Days are Shortening!, December 21 is my greatest joy, which I love to share. It's Not The Glow From Your Screen, Stupid! The Light's Returning!
- After the G-pack, watch the D-pack: the Jan van Eyck design department, coming soon to screens near you.
- Why do we read weblogs in packs and how are the packs constituted. Myself I closely watch (and contribute to) that g-rific G-pack, plus some that drew my attention later, for different reasons (meeting the people behind or getting interesting mail from them), like latenightpool.com or caterina.net, birchlane.org. Then there's the ones that I like but visit on whim, like puce, or lemonyellow, both original 'angels' the first turned sort of mega, still with a distinct voice, but muffled by design, the latter too infrequent alas, to play a prominent role in my daily diet (though in uplift recently, which also leads to jewels like the folding chair link). Then there's unconnected dots that are hit, ran from, and sometimes quickly returned to. I hardly ever check most of the early blogs on blogs-et-al anymore (cam, linkwatcher, though the first sends me to O'Reilly's P2P, whambamthankyoucam) or anything too tech/design centered. I know there's definitely some out there that deserve my attention but I'm unfamiliar with. Wake me up to those gems!
Note: the 'package reading' best works when there is frequent cross-linking, in other words when the package is no coincidental pick of wild flowers, but those colorful petals show some mutual interest.
write me a cross-linking detection robot?
Wouldn't it be helpful if these 1000s of newcomers were monitored and grouped on the basis of some consistent mutual interest. Like when indeed there's more than average crosslinking going on between them? Who could write us a robot that snoops and groups'm? Or is there such existing in the Manilla environment, or at Blogger?
- That wasn't a short note. The more I imagine a crosslinking detection robot, the more I like the idea of it. I have no idea how hard it would be to write and implement. It would work on other sites than weblogs: we need a sound tool to group related content. Rather than grouping keywords, all meta stuff, consistent crosslinking discloses editorial attention; a key to content. I must be overlooking existing possibilities! If not I will have to discuss this in my HsB project, where we are splitting up the corporate ID of the school ultimately ideally into 12k individual students' IDs, then reconfiguring those with a tool? Rogério?
(to be continued)
meanwhile
Cold fell over a Moulin dressed in pale white haze that freezes in the shadows and drips from trees in sun spots.
then
Finished the weblog bit for Metropolis M, now entitled Hardop linken ('linking aloud'), which will be uploaded soon (before the print is out) as moerstaal/hardoplinken. And just, just finished a partly rewritten Vormgeving ontwerpen ('modelling design') for De Witte Raaf, where Rilke is called to the rescue (bees of the invisible). It improved a lot and now has a proper ending, containing an order for design. Yep, it's all in Dutch (and some German for the Flusser and Rilke quotes) and unless someone will pay me the translation that's the way it will be and Dutch design will take another advantageous lead...
20 December 2000
Clamecy
Today we return C.'s rental car, order assorted seafood to pick up before we drive up to NL for Xmas and wave goodbye at the SNCF train station. I haven't had a single moment to write on Maastricht, or the other NL project, or all the new people I get to know and to work with. Then there's two personal tragedies happening in my immediate environment, that also affect me, make me 'review this life'.
19 December 2000
Toucy
Same amazing space as yesterday, same shine, different directions. With Caterina we visited two prospective houses in and nearby Toucy. Since I'm writing this 12/20 and an hour after we dropped her on the train back to Paris I can say it was wonderful to have her. What do you know? The amazing WOB world of blog (another meme anyone?) did it again... Thanks to the linking aloud discipline people around the globe unite! Let's quickly finish the Metropolis M Blogacy.
18 December 2000
Valence
The fast train TGV got me down to Valence today, to visit Valérie Cudel at the art3 space, and discuss possible future collaborations. It's amazing how beautiful France is when it speeds by at 300kms/hour in autumn haze and pale sunlight. It's an impressive space.
17 December 2000Cravant
Restaurant Crèperie La Griotte in Cravant, middle of nowhere France, somewhere between Auxerre and Clamecy for sure, Saturday night December 16 2000, 9pm. Caterina and myself are sipping a red wine and Jack Daniels at the bar, waiting for a taxi to arrive from Clamecy to get us to the Moulin. No, I didn't know Saturday nights the train just reaches Cravant, some 40kms from Clamecy, honest to god. Good thing the train's ticket master let us use his cellular phone to phone home. Every local who enters the place (where we'll return for food one day, because it seems like one of these track side attractions with a history you want to get to know better) we suspect to be another cab driver, which gets us a lot of attention from guys that might have cars but certainly have no meters. So we wait for Mr. Barbier to arrive. Whose meter will indicate a very round figure at our gate. At home the boys are asleep but Gil has a fire and food before we crash. Tomorrow is Valence for me (another long one day trip, straight South) and brokers for Caterina. Later, there's lots more.
10-11 December 2000
arslongabloglonger.com
This week-end I'm really writing. Going through all of the issues again and over. Next week will see several tests: the Hogeschool Breda's webfest and my first performance at the Jan van Eyck, an introduction and later that Friday at the Clash which is organized by my colleague there, Melle Hammer. The Clash is juxtaposing strategies of design on different topics, and involves all current researchers at the design department and guests. Next week's Clash will be about 'visual identity', using the new Centre Beaubourg's corporate ID as a case. Looking forward to it. Integral/Ruedi Baur did it and they have no web in sight (NPI), so there's no link. Evidently. No site for Ruedi Baur?
Sometimes you just can't believe them search engines. When I was looking for 'commissioning researcher' (my pref title for the position at the Jan van Eyck), it returned 7 hits at northernlight.com, which is already a lot compared to Google and such (lotsazeros), and had one good description of an existing position, in health policy research, not in Lithuania...
NQPAOFU portal
Added Nunc Qualibet Parte Alloquium Orant Fratres Urbanitatis
Since I'll be travelling again I uploaded a permanent 'guess book', for myself on the road and for you, my fratres urbanitatis to submit to. This time it is probably here to stay since not involved with any particular trip. I'll use it too. And I love the dead language twist.
9 December 2000
should you not receive it
It's a Long, Long Way
Paddy wrote a letter to his Irish Molly O',
Saying, "Should you not receive it, write and let me know!
"If I make mistakes in "spelling," Molly dear," said he,
"Remember it's the pen that's bad, don't lay the blame on me"
(...)
Molly wrote a neat reply to Irish Paddy O',
Saying, "Mike Maloney wants to marry me, and so
Leave the Strand and Piccadilly, or you'll be to blame,
For love has fairly drove me silly—hoping you're the same!"
meanwhile
I thought I was writing Bios Ex Machina, aka arslongabloglonger.com (still available). So far I've written 800 wrds (max for Bios) and there's no mention of the web yet. Guess I'm writing Vormgeving ontwerpen... instead? It's all about the material world and stuff and why artists came to hate the stock exchange (symbol soup). Deadlines are 15 December for both pieces.
nqpaofu.com 2000 jouke kleerebezem