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28 June 2002
sound map
Receiving 'Magic Bus' by the Who, from 'Live at Leeds', over my still favorite Internet radio KPIG, from 10pm, Freedom California. I have no trouble to return to that old Blaupunkt (the second fig.6, 1937) my grandfather gave me, that I used to cling to for hours in bed when I was supposed to sleep. Radio Veronica, Radio Caroline: off-shore pirate radio. Just when I image search/find the Blaupunkt, KPIG serves me a country song that samples a creaky Dutch radio message announcing the allied forces having landed in Normandy. Eerie (hours later, at a second link check visit, it appears that the radio message is in the Blaupunkt displaying site, and it mixes in with KPIG...)
radio in postal times: postage stamp/envelope issue commemorating last Veronica broadcast in 1974
The sad news is that KPIG plays The Who to honor John Entwistle, their bass player, who passed away at age 57 from a heart attack in his Las Vegas hotel room last night.
25 June 2002
many births, many loves, many deaths
To further simplify narrative's infinite ('irremediable', as I claimed in 1990) abundance, one could pertain that all stories are love stories, anyway.
The disturbing (singularity challenging) multiplicity of births, loves, deaths; in singular (unique, linear moving and reasoning, time bound, time guided, succession seeking) containers, environments, selves. Time as linear, an ageing process basically, mortal time bits, beginnings-stories-ends, as opposed to or included in and constituting the circular time of returning sentiments, narratives, repeated processes of communication, articulation: immortal time, big time, eternal mistakes and retakes.
Image versus storyline. Visual narrative: access and exit points, narrative trajectories, impressions and sentiments, visual abundance versus storyline abundance. Find the differences. Stories told and untold as embodied in an object in time and place, a witness, unfolding narrative, constructed around the phenomenon.
24 June 2002
I am a woman in love
And I'll do anything
To get you into my world
And hold you within
storytelling
The art of narrative is exactly in how to start and how to end a story. Even if for the reader any (recorded or event-based) story will start as soon as s/he is introduced to it, in writing or otherwise, and like so ends when s/he closes the book, or leaves the theatre, her personal introductory or closing anecdote does not affect the story's content. Authors are as lucky as not to bother when or how any individual reader approaches their story. Stories are out there, and so are readers, we can sit back and relax for the two to meet eventually.
To a grown up audience, the routine rituals of reading, theatre or movie going, web browsing—past and contemporary modes of information gathering alike—are rather undramatical. Hence in general they are not articulated as story content: most stories are generous to the variety of moods in which they are approached by their recipients, or the variety of purposes which they serve in interpretation, quotation: fair use, fair 'nuff. The recipient will always find a beginning story at its start and exit a finished story at its end. Start and end are the decisive moments of a story's unwinding and concluding movements. All other entrances and exits can be considered trespassing.
Birth. Story. Death. Against infinity, against connectivity, against linearity: live the biography.
re: read, repeat
K., I., P.'s stories are at one hand extremely linear, following that progressive zip: pow logic of them bricks that fly like (or rather are welcomed as) Cupid's arrows, in a straight trajectory from I. to K., more often than not sending K. straight to cloud nine and I. straight to the kounty jail, over a left-to-right succession of drawings containing, on the other hand, jumpy changes in scenery that show no time's arrow or consistency of space at all. Shrub, rock, mountain, moon are the unbound set pieces, a landscape of desire that knows no beginning or end, and has no other goal other than to inspire an increase in volume of objects and interaction—or life and love happily ever after, eternity. Right stuff. Ever more of it.
unrelated? space travel
Find the house sprawled with toys and tools and furnitures fitting future and past, any room occupied any purpose obtained any time spent by all. The irremediable narrative in any trajectory, any cut, any frame, any selection, any time. The room is a container. It has this smell. It connects past and future. It's occupied in different ways, it allows different uses, invites different postures. You can stick you feet up in it, or keep them on the oak, or on the rug. You can remain silent in it, or shout, beat, grunt or cry.
One room. One or any amount of objects:
Blanket. Glass. Fixture. Miniature wheel. Sheep skin. Bottle. Ray gun. Chair. Frame. Stack. 10 doors. 1 hidden door. Rug. Trunk. Flask. 1 plaster and 1 wood object. Cassette. Disk. Record. Bowl. Tizio. Book. Television set. Table. Ash tray. Screen.
Is that a full moon over that tree? What!? What do we call again that music that relieves the soul?
22 June 2002
Tragedy of Connectivity
K., I., P.
21 June 2002
#sunupsundown
05:49-21:47. This 16'58'' hour day. Played Home IX to chase away the night that went before it. Where have they taken their whining? "We will always see the country, we will always see the stars. We will open up our eyes. Take a look at where we are. I see the country, like you see the stars." Early morning I see and smell the rain while my skin registers a new temperature.
19 June 2002
somnambulance
Pampered life is not relished by its home-made jams alone. Though we're sticky with it, trying to harvest and preserve as much as possible the many colored gifts of springtime and summer, moods can change like the weather. The sad risk of a weblog like this, being the idealized construction it is, is that it tends to keep up the spirit at the price of rigour. I refer not only to the quality of its personal information, but certainly indeed to its professional, or rather its artistic claim aOFU of wild talent.
placeholder: 2002 cherries on towels
Artistry follows fancy. In a battle of the selves, desperation with whatever 'work' infects any 'personal' relationship. While in the latter you have many choices to make and struggles to live through, at least there's chances to be partially in charge, to lead the life and spend time in exchange, with friends, a partner, a family, in communication. Thus spoke the somnambulant sociopath divorcee. As far as the work goes, creative life is led individually, with no other struggle than with oneself, with one's difficulty of observation and comprehension of whatever goes on, the materialities and mechanics of concept and expression of that failing understanding, limited discipline or concentration and all the excuses for serious avoidance one needs, to be found in an 'art world', which is generally taken for a given, read from the art magazine'sedad pages, while not at all created with and as a consequence of the work it is supposed to support and further. Thus spoke the somnambulant dilettante artist. All somnambulant and no place to go.
In The Education of the Un-Artist, Part III (1974), Alan Kaprow distinguishes 'root types', of actions that blur art and life as suggests the title of his 1993 bundle of essays, 'taken from the everyday, from the nonart professions, and nature', page 130:
situational models (commonplace environments, occurrences and customs, often ready-made), operational models (how things and customs work and what they do), structural models (nature cycles, ecologies, and the form of things, places, and human affairs), self-referring or feed-back models (things or events that 'talk' about or reflect themselves), and learning models (allegories of philosophical inquiry, sensitivity-training rituals, and educational demonstrations).
Now that (a limited set of ideas or models of) art and its exposition have permeated the consumer everyday as a constituent part of the seamless fabric of brand media events, a certain blurring (as in Kaprows 1974s could have been foreseen) obtained mass penetration, while at the same time the museum cannot dream to pretend anymore to stand outside the banalities maelstrom.
splendid isolation
These days there's no isolated foothold to be found in art, none in design nor writing. Culture is about distribution and access. Isolation's virtue, to set apart a sign, in a discrete object, an image, a text, a chord, a strip of light sensitive material, in order to enhance a signal, in order to render voice outside Babel, outside Brand, outside Politics and Administration, yes, outside those channels too, outside Art preferably, is left for the tragedy of connectivity. The blur is in the application, when art solves problems, instead of raising questions.
17 June 2002
travelogue
Paul left NL for a couple of weeks before I could say dfergerfpwowcen, so from here I wish him big time whatever time in A. with N. Take care, man. Alamut watches over you.
11 June 2002
mollet del vallès parc revisited
graffiti water-colour sketch and construction
Thanks to Arcspace (who offer a good selection of contemporary architectural studio links) recent information on Miralles/Tagliabue Studio, EMBT's Mollet del Vallès parc, which I visited in 2001, can be linked. It did not seem even near completion at the time. EMBT built three parcs in Barcelone which I hope to revisit summer 2003, at the occasion of another seminar the Jan van Eyck will be involved in, while part of it will also bring a collaboration/workshop on Miralles to Maastricht.
10 June 2002
dolmens for size
Just the link to warm you up: Dolmens.
histroy the future
Because I like these undecided time travels in a period when history can only wham-bam-at-random project its directions to deliver the scattershot, backwards and forwards for ever in our time, a suspended now, pacing up and down the present, with no incentive to monumentalize anymore, but to establish what Virilio labels the 'Museum of the Accident', which he situates in the histructive hysteria of nostalgic environments and performance, as 'landscapes of events', where any progress enacts disaster and art follows in its whatever representations, incarnations, incantations. Here I do not share V.'s pessimism. We do live in many times, at the same time, not to decide whether we fall forward or are pushed backwards.
'The' future is a thing of 'the' past. Live today, live tomorrow.
7 June 2002
copyright ex nihilo, economic life extension, or the future invests in the present
Copyright as an incentive for an original (intellectual) work is a hindrance to the development of original work that might be built upon it. Actually © departs from a definition of originality, which considers it an exclusive and ex nihilo quality or inspiration, a disconnected individual act, not crediting any education or Bildung leading up to it. One could live with this imperfection, I suppose, if one could live with the limitless neglect of how we relate to one another, in a lack of gratitude and respect, a lack of tribute and a lack of solidarity (...). Copyright celebrates that lack and the blunt desire for economic value which should be attributed to every human expression or action. Money makes the world go ©.
Intellectual work and its fruits aren't that pinpoint precise in their courtesy and education is both a right, and paid for. An intellectual work does not contain a traceable track record of what went before, a fantasy cannot be mapped or laid out in the changing landscape of an author's intellectual development. T. S. Eliot? How to conceive of retro-copyright, for the past to benefit from the present, it has a price to pay?
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of ęsthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.
Previous generations, through their caretakers or estate, pay for later added value to the original creations they support, because these extend the also economic life of the previous work.
Plagiarism? 'Theft'? 'Sharing'? Invention. Original design. Repetition (e.g. Japanese temple).
7-9 June I'm happy to live in the same underlayment lined box, this time in full summer dress, in Marjolein and Joes' backyard, where the ménagerie meanwhile includes one adult female and two kid brother goats, while the usual chickens host two rabbits in their run.
6 June 2002
hello and goodbye
Andrea arrives around noon. She will stay in Parigny, in Hans and Rini's house, for the next 5 weeks. After lunch at the Moulin I install her, making the round of the house, of water, electricity, gas for the stove, gas for the shower, locks and stocks. When I drive into Parigny a Hoopoe flies up from the roadside. Tonight or tomorrow morning early I'm off to NL, to Amsterdam to start with, for a Lessig talk. I decide to leave early Friday and actually leave at 6am.
5 June 2002
fair winds
There's before and after the fair winds that downed two 25+ year old Beuvron bordering poplars on the island, behind the chicken run. 'Before' because early this morning I wet my feet again on yesterday's lawn mower sculpted field, camera in hand, and 'after' because, well, the sight is spectacular enough and nothing much of my clean lawn remains for the next weeks. The poplars are beautiful though, long and straight, I will use their wood to good avail.
'vent, déraison de la nature' (Picabia)
4 June 2002
H.G.
Dissipatio H.G. lonely crowns my non-existent list of best fiction: Guido Morselli's last work, before he committed suicide (in the same year, 1973, as, among others: william inge, pablito picasso, paul williams, salvador allende (self-defense, possibly murder), clayton perkins (carl's brother), for 'lack of recognition', as the official version of his death goes. To my knowledge H.G. has not been translated into English. I read the Dutch translation by Els van der Pluym.
Challenged by Spanish philosopher de Unamuno ('an idea does not pass from one language to another without change'), who took to learning Danish in order to read Kierkegaard in his own tongue, at some point I decided to improve my basic conversational Italian to the level that would enable me to read Morselli. When I bought his Diario and Fede e critica ('belief and critique') I added Italian grammar and the Van Dale Italian/Dutch dictionary. At the same time I wondered whether I should commission a translator to post-by-post serve me parts of his diary.
Guido Morselli (Bologna, 1912 - Varese, 1973)
That latter idea I might pick up. I'll bring his titles up to Amsterdam this week-end, when I collect the rent from my Italian tenant, through my Dutch Italian interpreter/translator liaison, who is a co-founder of that always tempting local and national center of Italian literature, the Netherlands' only Italian bookstore Libreria Bonardi, my neighbours during the last 12 years of the Amsterdam period. Of course all Morselli titles were bought there, and the grammar and dictionary... in addition I ordered recent Guido Morselli: immagini di una vita with them.
re: creative commons
When I recently 'discovered' Lessig, whose lecture I'm attending in Amsterdam next Friday, I posted a short inspirational text, Fiat Lux, that I had written in May 1995. A couple of months later that year I challenged the idea of intellectual property in the 'The Next Vision; A Digital Odyssey' panel discussion, at Hunter College, New York (hi Raimundas, I'll re: mltp subject shortly!), in Vital Information, which reads like I invented creative commons avant la lettre.
who's asking?
Now the weblog building community is challenged to beat sorta mainstream, at least that's what mainstream kinda thinks, and probably link-intensive weblogging would better try that golden blogonomical road. Link-extensive weblogging however I prefer to consider a lurky literary genre, interactive faction, full of fede e critica indeed, preferably and then well dosed diario added, in a tradition of personal publishing, venturing into domains of launch-and-learn communication where search engines and reply buttons dare not go, and still no one really knows exactly who is asking, when they search you for
ian hamilton finlay the horizon of holland; le plus grand cabaret du monde past shows; find a fucking job.com; animated gifs jpegs walt disney; serial maxis marble drop; the outside shot (book)spark notes(guides); benjamin het kunstwerk in het tijdperk van zijn technisc; vinegar kill blackberry bushes?; sony c:13:01; quotes on the art of laundry; toast titanium 5 warez; simcity world edition serial number; historian quotes on jan van eyck; custard or gia; quotes about from artis; daiichi process pte ltd; p2p asian underground; zuzana licko pics; informationalization stand davis; bravura informational technologies...
3 June 2002
spirit
Spirit is not in a single immediate act or experience. Without it being a some=thing or a some=how let alone a some=one it comes to visit us but very rarely, some=times. Before dawn I hear G+R's breathing next to me. From behind the shutters, where I would hope to see at least a first sign of light, sounds a blocked rumble of the almost dry river, blending with dimmed frog croak. When I hear the sustained sound of a motor passing by on a long line running north to south along the valley I am relieved that at this early hour at least someone else is on his way to disturbance, like if everything else might as well be working again.
In gown I go outside and wet my feet. Plenty bats circle the house, or at least so do I imagine. I can not see around it, nor can I identify individual bats. They go back and forth to the roof's edge, tens of them on a last trip before sleep. In the trees behind my back birds begin checking their channels. The sky seems overcast. Nothing came of last night's thunderstorm.
In the kitchen the kettle boils. On a first tea I open the small studio's shutters, only after lighting the computer. I check a new NQP issue. Redo the header tag several times to get the dissolve right, fade back into light grey yesterday's notes, not because they are less important, but indeed less relevant to my actual mood and intention, or rather search for whatever clearness, clearness of spirit. I did not wake up at 4 early something for no nothing but worries about practical matters, money, lifestyle, waste, worries. At least I wake up to imagine myself writing this and to memorize the first lines until I am able to take them down, not knowing how to continue them.
If only time would come to a standstill at this hour, somewhere between 5 and 6 one overcast June morning when bats return to hide in the roof while birds wake up to show up in the trees. Before you know it's 7:06 or 7:07 and other happy sounds tune in. 'It's just a joke, man!', David Thomas, the bus that will pick up Charlotte from Le Mazot passes by. 'Suffer! It's a joke! Oh it's a joke!', David Thomas. It's a joke, man. A first dark rumble announces that thunderstorm possibly moving in.
2 June 2002
meanwhile
We're being prepared for a long hot blue shaded summer, and looking forward. The temperature's right, summer festivities are announced the plenty, guests make their reservations. Meanwhile the little Moulin circle is expanding and some links are tightened with every get together.
Last night we wined and dined with Honorine and Derk in Monceau le Comte, this morning was spent well into the afternoon with Florence of Le Grange Treillard. I hope to introduce these people and some others a bit more detailed over the next couple of months.
goodnight to Derk
nqpaofu.com 2002 jouke kleerebezem Notes Quotes Provocations and Other Fair Use *1998