nqpaofu.com conversational drift, informatic license, exquisite enclaves by jouke kleerebezem

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cleanup time

bleed the heat off your soul
carry the light from that hole
get it up roses
get it up with brand new poses
it's cleanup time again
(Lewis Furey, 1975, from 'Lewis Furey'. Accidental SIZE="+3" rendering)

Where was I? Float around the house to stay away from the heat. Last night's fast drive still somewhere in my senses. Take out memories of their objects. Urge writ. Contribute here and there. Lost for purpose I do clean up, actually. Purge. Looking for clues, not wanting any to happen. Consume, experience, produce are again out of pace, as if it is their natural process. Wonder how musicians feel (and: about that). Favorite banjo. It's hard to act random. Remember my self-adhesive prints which fitted perfectly (random?) anywhere (ransom?) in the house, but later refused to become random in the gallery (de Appel, Amsterdam). Guess also that infamous écriture was far from automatique. Elle consiste à «écrire tout ce qui nous passe par la tête». There's the experience/express discrepancy again. 'All that crosses our mind' is on the run for logic, and quick as a bite. Even Breton made sense.

Reasonably dead language.

winner

what's eating my time, 2:23am

I am doing a lot of hard work on the drechtlog.com site. With a concept so simple and clear, you can easily go wrong in the execution. Basically what it needs is a lot of contributions and support, which has to grow over time. Meaning it needs to attract attention, but not just any attention. In my soon to publish here notes, from days spent in room 27 of a well-known Dordrecht hotel, I read:

The more I reflect on the state that our everyday environment is in, the more idealistic I become towards its possibilities for improvement, the more critical I become vis-à-vis some citizen's abuse of it, the more elitist I become in my editorial ambitions. This brings close the risk of utopian ideal, call it 'utopian conservatism': any moralistic idea planning for different attitudes and interests to arise on a popular level and scale, from a slightly paternalistic stand. Yet, there is something innate folkloristic about a popular idea of ownership: I've seen so many true expressions of 'bourgeois' creativity, care and love for one's possessions—read: house, garden, leisure—it would deserve wide anthropological research.

Me, sentimental? I don't believe in democratic art, but I respect 'folk' attention :-)

So?

Many specific recreational interests (entertainment, shopping, sports, health, children's play, food and cuisine) migrate already today, to what comes close to isolated 'consumption camps': factory outlet centers, malls, casino's, holiday centers, natural parks, beauty farms, spa's, etc. The themepark seems to be the most successful experience format, the 'theme' being a killer slogan in mind numbing epistemology.

re: pandemonium

Nowadays one shouldn't ask whether any weblogs are churned out at a given place, but who do them. As proves a starting link which Judith sends me upon publishing my question on the Montreal area.

meanwhile in the spirit of list(ening)s

Alan W. Pollack's 'Notes on' Beatles songs, from which below WMGGW link came. The listener's voice, par excellence.

WMGGW

Quinze Août is a holiday in France. We joined the repas champêtre in neighbouring Cuncy les Varzy, where also R+r's pre-school was. Upon return, around 7, (lunch started noon-and-a-half) within no time a sweeping thunderstorm hits the Moulin and undoubtedly Cuncy, where people were preparing to go on until the fireworks later, around 11pm. You see these storms coming from a distance but only believe they're going to hit you when things start to fly around the garden and shutters bang. At 10pm I find myself at the computer, having a piece of bread with sambal enhanced peanut butter, sipping a JD with lots of ice. Back in the U.S.S.R. and Dear Prudence softly sound from the salon two rooms away. I can only hear Paul's bass and some of Ringo's beat. That White Album is some terrific collection. I'm thinking Work and Travel and more Work. Things start to wake up in NL. Then I would love to go see my uncle Cees Jouwersma in Strasbourg, since also my niece visited me here, but I guess it is not going to work this month. Tomorrow morning the car is tested for its French license. Already I was fined in NL for not having it tested according to Dutch rules. Other traffic trouble: I hope to find a nice price Paris-NYC-Montreal stop over ticket for October when I do the Concordia University Declarations design conference, on a paper entitled 'Daily Operations: the Weblog'. I wonder if there are any Montreal based blogs? I should invite them.




quinze août, foot and cook

So I flip the record. I play Martha My Dear : I'm So Tired : Blackbird. I'm not here. The ice has gone from the glass. So has the JD. I pour another one. No ice. I flip the record and play While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Think I heard Trini Lopez' La Bamba this afternoon in some kinda cover at the repas. La Bamba made us dance in circles and steal a kiss. Kick out our shoes. I open the windows and shutters. The thunderstorm is long gone. It's much fresher. Dark though. The piano intro to WMGGW tears me apart, like it blends into Bungalow Bill applause. Then, at the end, I look at you all see the love there that's sleeping, While my guitar gently weeps, Look at you all, Still my guitar gently wee - heeee - heeeeps... And I'm aware I shouldn't think, I shouldn't know, today somewhere in Switzerland George Harrison is dying from cancer.

day bed


Sezwho Césure's settee (1879-2001)
(in use in the Moulin du Merle salon since 1999, to pamper old ladies and pamper other sick friends,
lodge snoring brokers and listen to George Harrison's While My Guitar Gently Weeps or other Beatles material)

F.I.G.H.T.

The political fight against the weight of today's standards and methods is enormous. But what we are trying to do is clear up the problems that these standards, and the present way of thinking, have created.

Yeah R.I.G.H.T...

the 'indexable carpet'
History of Internet and WWW: The Roads and Crossroads of Internet History, by Gregory R. Gromov (hypertext?)
The new Xanadu structure for the web (hypermedia?)

abbey road



'Do they look famous!', Rolf immediately exclaims upon seeing his first ever Beatles cover, or Beatles photo for that matter: the Abbey Road crossing. Just when I realized a few days ago (yesterday?) I didn't own any Beatles records (or ever listened carefully to their music), today at the Corbigny vide grenier at 7am in the morning chill I buy Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The White Album, Abbey Road and John/Yoko/Plastic Ono Band's 'Some Time in New York City', (the first three albums in re-edited early 1970s French pressings), the whole lot in a near-mint state, including the original artwork, at 100FF. A good deal. 'They look so chic and tough' ('sjiek en stoer'), Rolf explains his insight in the conditions of fame. I definitely agree. They look sjiek en stoer and some band they were. I'm surprised to hear their music after some 30+ years. R+r shake rattle and roll to it too. Hm. One could write the rest of one's life about them and have a lot to say about many things.

magic

...still, none of the Moulin magic has disappeared: its acoustics, smells, its strong blend of past, present and future has lost none of its tangibility, of its urgency or of its promise. It's been almost three years now that we signed the compromis de vente, we have a history, our memory is growing with this place, which' shutters we close every night, after having made a round of chickens and ducks, barn and garage, terrace, kitchen, carefully preparing it for the night, telling it to have a rest, after which we quietly move around in it, slowly withdrawing, via the library and the studio, often even staying up late to defy the night, watch the house surrender, write some more, check and balance, go to sleep.

key or clock

repertorium
excursio
en/clavis
hora/logos

Hibiscus A-Z 9 August 2001 flowering



Moulin du Merle, east entrance, left of door Hybiscus, three bushes, right-to-left white, blue, blue

(synchrony: play; diachrony: ritual)

Giorgio Agamben (in In Playland, 'Infancy and History; Essays on the Destruction of Experience', 1978):

(...) toys and ritual objects demand analogous behaviour: once the ritual and the game are over, these, being embarrassing residues, must be hidden and put away, for in a sense they constitute the tangible denial of what they have none the less helped to make possible (...)

play

At the Time to Play conference, I discussed Mitch Resnick's distinction (at Doors 5 'Play', 1998) between playing the piano (good) and playing the radio (not good), by introducing 'playing the phone' (best). Beyond an old habit to discern between 'passive' and 'active' play, or 'entertaining' and 'learning' experiences, I can imagine a hybrid (of course), which could be exemplified by the wireless phone, or next generation communicational instrument between tool and toy.

Current generation communicational devices have been introduced as tools, in the tool history of innovation, starting with Edison and linear ever after. Even when one line point-to-point went infinite-in-all-directions network, this model prevailed. These tools were regarded examples of solid diachrony. Hence our relationship to them (as a tool) is supposedly ritual. We pace our lives with them, they build our calendars. Every tool definitely is a clock of sorts.

a killer toy

A toy, while complex in its timely manners, 'kills' linear time, as synchrony emerges. Mobile personal telephony (the device is attached to a person, not to a site, it follows the person around), is the ultimate toy, since it exists in synchronous time only, by its very connectivity. Even when switched 'off' (a dead object), it is potentially connected beyond local time, to reach through diachrony. No wonder to find people invited to play with this thing that was handed down to them to 'work' with. The mobile telephone, as time unlocking device, becomes key to an information revolution.

(switched off: a tool, switched on: a toy?)

Whenever I imagined the Internet, the global information network, to secretly carry one culturally disrupting quality, which cannot be tamed, or commodified, if not at the cost of war or another diachronic fix, it must be that very time killing possibility.

landscape


national landscape (taken from Aulanko tower; find the marina)

In Hämeenlinna I was helplessly attracted to that vast 'empty' space between Aulanko and the North. I would hope to remove myself further and further away from where we are.

childhood

I got quite restless when hearing some opinions on childhood, child depression, child/adult relationships, the upbringing industry etc., at the Time to Play conference in Hämeenlinna the past days. So expect some online sources to either support or nuance what I experienced as pessimism, but could be well informed. For my own purpose and for anybody else interested in child well-being in the early 21C, a first link.

(Conference of European Ministers responsible for Family Affairs, XXVI Session):
Social Cohesion and Quality of Life in Finland

Also in H., a man with a heart and a drive: (Toys, Culture and Society; an anthropological approach with reference to North Africa and the Sahara, by) Jean-Pierre Rossie (tonight drifting in Helsinki, from tomorrow by bus to Gent). Later.

more links

The child, the adult's object of desire
Interview with sociologist Christine Castelain-Meunier

replay



touch screen: the documented life is performance driven

Paul is out to Beirut to meet Jalal Toufic, August 2 (my birthday) I'll take off in the opposite direction, to Helsinki and on by bus to Hämeenlinna. We both return next Sunday, again flyingin opposite directions, maybe crossing somewhere between Amsterdam and Paris. From Paris I will pick up Joke who is gonna stay with us next week. Yay! Hope to link to her site soon.


service announcement
FI map with Hämeenlinna (I'm always surprised to find links on a map to physical reality: 'link is in Belgium' kind of style. When checking latter link, please note that the Parus World link in NQPaOFU 23 is currently rotten. The link in Belgium isn't though. Good for Blogium. I tried to fix the first one, but also search engines turn it up at the same URL, so...)

original service announcement
Broken NQPaOFU links will be fixed. Email will be answered.

you are the attention you invoke

(July 2001 top 20 of 96 web wide search term returns with NQPaOFU)

site:www.nqpaofu.com c:13:01 sony
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sony c:13:01
flameless ninja smoke
quotes cultuur
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pbl woning
iron drawing table
mushy brain
kiesler correalism
psyence fiction greil marcus
ariana nubbin
fj%e4llr%e4ven manhattan
21c magazine soft architecture
modernism criticism
mavica error c:13:01
silent i
mymobility

nqpaofu.com 2001 jouke kleerebezem Notes Quotes Provocations and Other Fair Use