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dumb writ
....so you forgit. With the Palm, I lost my Keyring, some 30+ passwords... clever cod that I wrot and forgot. Oef. I just upgraded NQP to 25M of server space at 12.95 bucmo, but haven't found the pw to access my admin doc. Drt. Dumb cud. Dumb AAA power strike. Dumb palm in dumb mln safe ran out of drn juice.
to not forget
infinite possibility space: the Beneden Merwede at Sliedrecht
radius loci
rivers meeting: view from the Bellevue room #27 (restraining possibility space)
Returned from four riverside days in NL. I unexpectedly rediscovered much of the unworldly beauty of the 'Holland' part of the Netherlands: the province of Zuid-Holland, in its Hoeksewaard and Alblasserwaard polders, along the borders of its rivers. Of course this place is threatened from all of its horizons, where there's no more space to be expected. The next thing I discovered is that Holland is actually getting smaller and smaller, turning (itself) into a prison state. In a prison, rules differ from rules outside. When space is shrinking at all sides (and also from the inside all remaining space is filled) one can only so long remain true to rules which date from times when space was plenty. The more when you are squeezed together, the more you are liable to attend to new rules, contrary to when there's blue millions of escape miles waiting, stretching one's chances in all directions. New rules for new space cannot, against all odds, for ever feed the dream of freedom which every human cherishes. For the Netherlands, with its rapidly disappearing space, new dreams of new space for a different freedom should soon develop, or more Dutch should move out.
AZC in Hendrik-Ido-Ambacht (restraining possibility space)
(center for people seeking asylum in NL, where they stay during the period when their request is being reviewed)
I'm convinced that those Dutch who choose to stay in their self-made prison-of-many-treasures (prison art, prison street furniture, prison media, prison entertainment, prison logistics... let there be no doubt about my deep conviction that it truly is an amazing place, and its rule-making, prison-making process is awesome, and it's hard to escape its lure, hard to neglect this experiment—let there be no doubt that I still consider myself part of that same experiment), will adapt to new rules, which they conceive of themselves, the unwritten, and those that are agreed upon to be force of law. Rules that have to be obeyed, are rules that do live you, shape you. Rules which shape your rule making. We're always in such loops. It is the enlightenment which obscures. I realize that one is much more liable to adapt, than one is to oppose to those rules which one makes up, or is made up by. Actually living to the rules is the only way to make them up. There's no rationale to the rules I am imagining, those strict rules of life in prison, but order. Order which allows for 16M people to live on a small stretch of land along the North Sea shore, in the 21C.
I don't even want to speculate about what the new rules are or will have to be, I don't know, there's so many of them already at work, silently, the process of prison making can not be reversed. Besides, I see that I happily subject to other rules in a different nation. Rules that I (just like in the Netherlands) can disagree with and still subject to, accept them in order to order my life. But I need that space for escape. Space that used to be, in NL. Space I found, that review morning on the coast, space that I saw in the Hoeksewaard; or overlooking the three rivers from room 27 at the Bellevue, last week.
Herinnering aan Holland
Denkend aan Holland
zie ik brede rivieren
traag door oneindig
laagland gaan,
rijen ondenkbaar
ijle populieren
als hoge pluimen
aan den einder staan;
en in de geweldige
ruimte verzonken
de boerderijen
verspreid door het land,
boomgroepen, dorpen,
geknotte torens,
kerken en olmen
in een groots verband.
de lucht hangt er laag
en de zon wordt er langzaam
in grijze veelkleurige
dampen gesmoord,
en in alle gewesten
wordt de stem van het water
met zijn eeuwige rampen
gevreesd en gehoord.
H. Marsman
and by the same poet (courtesy: a discussion on these two works, by Verhagen and Stolk, Dutch readers should note the 'epistolaire kanttekeningen', where a contradiction between the Dutch and their environment, or landscape is noted, in the 1930s, between A. Roland Holst and Marsman. The first: "Was de Hollandsche mensch maar evenredig aan zijn landschap—in plaats van in zooveel opzichten omgekeerd evenredig")
Denkend aan Holland
Soms heb ik heimwee
naar dat land, en zijn zee.
maar als ik denk aan de menschen
wordt het verlangen gesmoord.
ik heb in hun zielen
geen spoor van weerklank gehoord
van de ontzaglijke ruimte
waarin zij leven;
noch dat zij zweemden
naar het accoord,
dat dag en nacht
langs hun kust wordt gehoord,
of naar de macht van hun beemden;
slechts hun ziel is met duister behangen
gelijk hun hemel.
gloed en verlangen,
hartstocht en onbevangen geloof
zijn in bedompte gebeden
langzaam maar zeker
gedoofd.
(anyone cares to try for a N-E translation? Or knows of one?) (darn, I felt lucky: Google hicked this up, for Herinnering aan Holland: 'December: Teasel Symmetry and the Marriage of Inner and Outer Worlds')
Thinking about Holland,
I see broad rivers
moving slowly through
endless lowlands,
rows of unthinkably
thin poplars
standing as high plumes
one above the other;
and sunken within
wonderful space,
farm houses
scattered throughout the land,
clusters of trees, villages,
cropped towers,
churches and elms
in one great association.
the air hangs low
and the sun is slowly
muffled in a gray
mottled fog,
and in the many provinces
the voice of the water
with its eternal calamities
is feared and heard.
(courtesy: New Dutch Poetry in Translation, by Cliff Crego) (looks like an interesting site at first glance. Those bi-lingual readers, both native Dutch and native English, take a look into it, to see what the translations are like. E-only readers might enjoy some of the po-e-try?)
possibility space
Once you've looked into that great empty space up above on a moonless night, or you've spent time with your community, you know: them p-spaces are simply endless, they're rich, rich, rich. They're only to be restrained.
pearl
It's 0:58am and I just returned from the Thurigny mechoui, which I assisted from 2pm, yesterday. My hair needs a cut and I'm sorta pissed. Today was a day of great harmony. It ends with Roemer and Linde asleep in Joes and Marjolein's camper on the island, with M. J. is asleep in R+r's bed, Gil and Rolf are in our bed. I'm having Janis J. on the headphone: Pearl. 'Trust in me baby. Give me time, give me time.' Life ain't smart. It's just excellent. That cool sky above us, and we're pissed below. Il ne faut pas changer les habitudes.
drechtlog dotcom
Been there, linked that. This new, commissioned site will contain documents, which are linked offline, not within the site. An older idea, once experimented as a SWIKI in the Arnhem @ve festival, when it was open to all but ran too short. This time it is gonna run 4evva, and be edited. First by me, later by the commissioner (one would expect). If it appears successful. There is no commercial pressure (yet), it operates from the cultural enclave which is the Kunstdelta art context. Close to a '1 percentage for the arts' commission. Anyway.
The site collects descriptions of unique Drechtsteden ('Drecht cities', the Drecht being a river) objects, situations, events, which will be tagged (numbered) and given unique URLs. Simple. In the longer run we could probably do away with most of the address in the tagging. Now tags will read like drechtlog.com/#. (Did anyone notice the disappearance of 1) the mention of 'http://', then 2) out went 'www', following probably the '.com', in offline URLification? All top level domain names will be read from the context at some point.) I am introducing the 'dl.c' acronym in a campaign, so we'll see where the tagging ends. On location, for sure. So the offline linking will shape in 'easter egg hunt' kind of routes, official tourist routes (hiking or by slow transport), or by closed circuit (semi-public) distribution, when eg. some company sponsors ##51-60, to add to some object they give away to their relations, or otherwise reintroduce into circulation.
Then I would imagine that objects get distributed from (or migrate from) the Drechtsteden region. They can take with them their URLs and flag them anywhere on the globe. The Drechtsteden have been about logistics and distribution, throughout their long history (Dordrecht being the oldest Dutch city): a transport node, still being crossed by heavy water, rail and road traffic.
The simplicity of URL tagging unique objects offline, bringing their unique stories online (submission is open to anyone), is something I will also bring into the Time to Play discussion.
extended play
Coupling media presence ('living the biography') and 'chest-to-chest' interaction is a high priority in the play/education discussion. I personally see no danger of wide social alienation re: otaku-ish isolation as a result of increasing mediated communication. BUT, any such interaction will benefit beyond competition ('there's no technology that beats lunch') from real space, localized extensions, in whatever form, specific to the character of the communication, ranging from collaborative work to histoires d'amour. 'URL or mine?' is a decent proposal, any young wo/man to do to any young wo/man.
which reminds me...
of that first credo that I signed my emails with, from 1993: 'Life on the Face of the Web: it's only netURL'... them clever days.
play pandemonium production
After In Media Omnia (in Dutch), and before that: Vormgeving ontwerpen ('modelling design') I have been wanting to write about the next important issue for the personal publishing paradigm: the abundant availability of tools/toys and channels—not about emerging technology, but about the production and distribution it allows, or restrains us to. It is this story which I am developing for Time to Play. It's an education conference, and education has everything to do with it. How to educate one another in order to:
- build media literacy
- train expressive and interpretative skills
- enhance dislocated collaboration
- forge a documented life—live the biography
- make it work 24/7
and do so:
- in a multi-media landscape with multi-channel networked gear
- in a multi-cultural landscape with special interests only
- from a multi-personality self... or multi-self personalities
- under ever increasing commercial pressure
- in shape shifting private/public spheres
- lifelong: cradle to the grave
note to self: don't forget
the Videogame Construction Kit (Rolf's been begging for it...)
(courtesy ludology, who also link to Game Studies)
the Hypertext Kitchen
the ID blog
cross-link detection
the ockham's razor
the consumptive.org
the lived thought
langage
- Krazy: pourquoi est-il "lenguage", Ignatz?
- Ignatz: "langage" est, cela que nous pouvons comprendre un un autre
- est-ce que c'est ainsi?
- oui, c'est ainsi
- pouvez vous unda-stend un finn ou un leplender ou un oshkosher; huh?
- numéro
- peuvent-ils un finn, ou un leplender, ou un oshkosher, unda-stend vous?
- numéro
- alors, je dirais, le lenguage est, que nous pouvons SIG-unda-stend chaque udda.
(Google translation)
children's games
From the Artist who presented us a much posterized Babel.
As a preparation to my performance in Hämeenlinna next August 3, I am looking into Pieter Bruegel (the Elder), who is showcased also at artists AtoZ (under B). From my introduction, which was just mailed to the organisation, still a bit tame, but I'm warming up to it:
'Under the pavement: the beach', that infamous May 1968 slogan ('sous le pavé: la plage'), points us exactly where we should imagine a space for playful interaction. One should venture behind consensus reality, under thick layers of debilitating entertainment, off the beaten tracks of mischievous commercialism, beyond the media logo's and outside the themeparks which these support (by what today euphemistically is called 'experience design')... to find creative people, expressing themselves, having a good time, building communities, communicating, playing. The 'beach' is that prototypical non-utilitarian space, a sand or pebble plane, a water front and endless view over the tidal sea, where one brings one's own tools and games, to have a good time, and to play with what is available on site: sand, stones, water, and whatever washes up. The 'beach' in this story stands for that open possibility space, a space free of (more often reclaimed from) entertainment.
Play certainly reclaims space and place, for vital activities which inform us, make us learn. It's almost a definition of play, that it does free that space and connects us to it, and connects the players to each other. In most of our everyday play however, rather we play CD's in our computers, than music on our piano's. The only place thus reclaimed, is our seat in front of the screen. What is referred to in this paper however, is not some passive play, (whether labelled an 'experience' or not), but a productive play in performance, social activity and collaborative learning.
Any 'freed' space is palimpsest space, space with a memory: never totally wiped out, never completely blank, it is endlessly informed, erased, informed, erased. There is no clean beach under the pavement—never was. Today you'll find primarily the pipes and cables that form the multiple networks which support our lives. Every new layer partly covering, partly exposing, partly even articulating, that which it is supposed to overwrite and send back to the primitive past, never to return. Consequently, this story starts not under the pavement of Paris in the late 1960's, during some student revolt, but 300 kilometres north and 4 centuries before, in Brussels in the 1560's, when Pieter Breugel the Elder painted his 'Children's Games'.
In a time when pavement was hardly applied, people lived on a 'beach' and children played on that beach. Of course, that 'beach' was just a muddy yard, an open sewer, a landfill—and, as much as in our times, it was ruled by the interests of commercial production and traffic. Yet it was also empty of the all invasive entertainment industry which only arose with media culture, after WWII.
Departing from a 450-year old scenery, this catalogue of improvised play which the painting is, while showing where sites of play could be situated today, my story will unfold. It will pay attention to how we learn to play, and how we learn to use our new tools and bring our new toys to contemporary 'beaches'. It hopes to emphasize, that rather than in a time of 'designed' experience, we can live in a time of mediated multiple performance: a true pavement scattering time.
Its tameness is in the fact that it seems to be too simplistic about 'passive' and 'active' play, situating these in entertainment and cultural production respectively. Without being too relativist, I should aim to be precise. Having in the back of my mind the productional mode of the weblog/personal publishing, I should scale the use of cheap, available digital tools for multi-media publishing in the right mix. There's two more weeks to go. I'm looking forward to be back in Finland, after (drt) 30 years.
propriété asalternative statealternate reality
R's 8 Bday on the 17seven2001. Woke up at six with that special feeling: It's My Birthday. But mine is only in 16 days. So I picked flowers and set the table, then off to the boulanger in Varzy for éclairs, croissants and bread. Six Spanish oranges at the early supermarket. Later Joes, Marjolein and Linde (who is 4 days older than Rolf, and shared a potato basket bed with him on several occasions, sevenandoverhalfa year ago) joined us. They let us in on the best camping site in Bretagne, on the Brehec bay, for one of our future holidays—and shared oysters.
congregatio de propagande fide
Thoughts at sixam, wandering my field around my house along my part of the Beuvron looking for my flowers to pick after having opened my chicken run having my private thoughts (re: review mornings): 1) vrijstaat = free state? = propriété = autarky? 2) (for Declarations) propaganda = most of our slogan-(busting)s. Will present the weblog ('personal publishing') as definitely anti-propagandic, vis-à-vis eegee Adbusters et al. No Blogo!
PS zero progress: So why do we have war? I'm not taking any answer for an answer.
elsewhere
Temporary Autonomous Zoo: platform, garden furniture, various objects and baby bear, at birchlane
zero progress, next level
Just fiddling. To compensate for a lack of fulfilment, for man, trouble seeker. I hear myself saying to R+r 'we have war because we have soldiers'. Typical my parents' point of view, from last century's 50s and 60s. Stories from the cold war, a war so called because of cold soldiers, their cold machines, their cold generals. Cold politics. 'Are we not men?' Man for the sake of men. Can one tell one is on the verge of mood swing? Can one be truly happy and depressed at the same time? 'Are we not men?' Can we repeat a question without losing it out of sight?
(retro)
R+r enjoy the Retro game i downloaded from happypuppy. I remember the only military toy i ever possessed was a Dinky Toy 4-wheel tank or armoured vehicle, some friend of my parents slipped to me, when they didn't pay attention (... probably the same guy who offered me my first cigarette at the age of 12: Joos Korporaal, at my father's graduation party—dad studied sociology of education during our childhood; so i remember the back of the Gispen chair in his study in detail, that one designed by the son of Gerrit Rietveld, Wim, with two large rubber knobs, très Eames, which probably boosted my design interest, or was it the repeated visits to my parents' communist friends at the time in Wassenaar NL: Piet Zwart and Paul Schuitema)... We were pacifist socialist. Today R+r kill alien vessels the plenty. r joins me at dinner table, says he's 'a ship with a fart gun' and happy to shoot me. This afternoon we overpowered the Retro soundtrack with vintage post-JA Kantner and Slick: Sunfigther. Power kitsch, just like Retro. We celebrated zero progress. Next level please, before i have to go to sleep.
summer 2000, photo by Andrea Blum (or Wendy?),
attachment found 13 July 2001, while searching for BK191 contract
(picture shows JK in whites, chasing cow from island)
(there's no young blond girl in photo) (in blue skirt)
(nor boy, coming to think of it) (waving hands)
(actually there's more absent than present here here)
(missing it: but I swear I remember cow, like: bovine presence)
(whatever else lacking?)
'only three minutes'
For the first time playing the bonus CD video that came with Nick Cave's No more shall we part. On the computer, leaning towards the screen, watching the small field in the middle of the cover painting backdrop, one foot away. Amazing sight: a voice leaves the body. On this screen, nothing like tv, the voice is on the headphone, the Bad Seeds monitor their performance over their headphones, I see what I hear, and some foot that I don't hear, tapping the Westside studio floor. After a Bargeld feedback burlesque, they perform an alternative take of God is in the house. I remember Cave from a VPRO documentary a couple of years ago. That was tv, taped and reviewed after. More tv. That voice leaving that body on this screen, with my body leaning over to it, like looking at 'a' Cave on 'a' screen, like in this home video quality camera handling but immaculate sound, is like nothing I remember, greater intimacy.
On the rather needless site nickcave.net (ah, competitions!) nothing of the kind. Why does a great artist allow a sucking site. Oh well. Somebody propose a better one to him.
Then after God is in the house a coughing boy, Rolf's age, blue shirt and tie, joins Cave at the music stand. He coughs and is bored. They run a track and before Cave can even think of filling in the vocals, here's the cough again. Boy leaves up the stairs, hear those feet, to the control room. Talks over the intercom:
- Dad?
- Yeah?
- err... are you gonna do it again?
- Yeah. You wanna do something?
- Nah... I'm just so bored, obviously.
- It's only three minutes darling.
Here's to the artist father figure. I can hear my boy.
The tears are welling in my eyes again
I need twenty big buckets to catch them in
Twenty pretty girls to carry them down
And twenty deep holes to bury them in
(Nick Cave, refrain Hallelujah)
(from a state of practice)
reverse writing
back-up: review morning yellow pocket
in other words, in other notes, in another world
(Available only when one is in a certain state of retreat.)
The montage: the sequence of images one finds along the way, while reading bits from here and there, while shuffling one's papers and notes, while thinking while making a snack, while looking out the window, while watching video, while dreaming, while clicking in a web browser. (Restless montage.)
The montage: the serendipity of this order and the order in which our instincts drive said serendipity. Even more obvious when we pay attention to *the pattern of our attention*, to the pattern of our focus, to the pattern of our style and/or choice of medium (space), the pattern found in the subjective/objective duration (time) of each successive experience.
(Alamut 10 July 2001)
(ancre, encre, écrire, écraser)
enkore
- Krazy: why is 'lenguage', Ignatz?
- Ignatz: "language" is, that we may understand one another
- is that so?
- yes, that's so.
- can you unda-stend a finn or a leplender or a oshkosher; huh?
- no.
- can a finn, or a leplender, or a oshkosher, unda-stend you?
- no.
- then, I would say, lenguage is, that we may mis-unda-stend each udda.
(hot ci, hot là)
(Katoo-san wa Furansu-go o hanashimasu)
just notes
Downscaling NQP is no easy thing to do. June issue 43 (media in, media out) was meant to decide whether to take 'it' somewhere private. It didn't work. I didn't do it. That's when i decided to lay low for the coming period. Within an hour after posting this, I found myself preparing #44, 'just for my personal use'...uhuh, sure. Just to take some things down so that i wouldn't forget. What else have i been doing over the past three+ years? It says notes. That's what it is and that's what they are. They're online for easy access. Back-up. I shouldn't forget.
back-up: review morning roots one-to-one
'zero progress'
Says a note which i took on that fine-and-hazy-while-at-the-same-time-warm-and-clear 'review morning', last week, early handwriting, outside the caravan in Bakkum, looking at the sky, looking at the ground, seeing those silhouettes. The forensic look. Into the past, into the future. Into the present, and around it. Feeling remarkably connected and together. Jotting and snapping. Taking notes. As Dirk once noted: that he was 'feeling the old Dirk again', i felt some old Jouke's presence then and there. A pretty old young one he was: some twenty-five years younger than i am today. I remembered that victorious look around, scanning. Possessive. I recognized the objects surrounding me in that certain state, which only that certain regard brings into focus. I think i foremost recognized the power of that regard.
What then should NQP say? If i hesitate, it hesitates. If i stumble, it stumbles. If i chicken out, it chickens out. I share my hesitation, but i don't disappear somewhere 'private'. That's not how it works. Mixing up languages is fair use after all. Fair use is what it says, so that's what it does. My hesitation could as well be part of the fact that i equally use Dutch, French and English, in my current rencontres. Some fair hesitation that furthers.
(says or is or does)
This afternoon we cut a lot of grass (I had to fix the tractor three times, tool maintenance makes up for 75% of the work at the Moulin), cut off two Acacia branches that splintered during last week's thunderstorm, first using hand saws, later Thiery's electrical Stihl. G. is not here. She stayed with her mother, brother and sister in law, to stand by her mother, now that her father is in the hospital after several light strokes, the first (actually probably the second) happening when we visited the Zevenaar summer fair with R+r, to start off our NL week. Last Sunday a week ago.
His condition is slowly improving. If everything goes well, it'll take him months to recover. Hospital, rehabilitation, home nursing. G.'s mother is 91, he is 85. Neither of them has ever been hospitalized, they live and wish to die in the big family home, doing their household and home cooking and having an active social life, including in their circles many people that count tens of years less in age. They host the family, which at holidays could number up to 14, 15 people. We all faced an unexpected learning situation that night.
R+r showed completely different reactions to the dramatic scene of their grandfather hitting the ground, soon being surrounded by fair goers, medical people, and police, throwing up all the time, not able to walk or even stand. R was hypnotized, taking some distance but remaining focused, not to be approached by any one of us, taking in all of it by himself. r sat on some unknown, nervously chain smoking woman's lap, on the sidewalk, absentmindedly playing with the plastic coin which would allow for another ride in the bumper cars. R didn't want anything to do with the fair anymore. After the ambulance had taken father home, he stayed up all night, sitting at the table attentively, looking at the broken man. r was upstairs in their bedroom. Hours later we found him asleep, half standing up, feet on the ground, bent over the bed, laying on top of two toy cars. The next morning he wanted to go back to the fair to spend the remaining coin which he found in his pocket.
A few days later, after bathing at Bakkum for the three of us, when we visited the hospital, their grandfather took both their hands and r kissed his unstoppable. R followed his example.
nqpaofu.com 2001 jouke kleerebezem NQPaOFU