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Present Past Subjects Projects Misc
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ARTISTS WRITE
Introduction Artists don't write. Artists dream. And each dream is utopic, containing everything and nothing, providing fuel for the artist's hope and fear. For six years I have been publishing -- as an artist -- an online index of my daily attention. Since a large part of my attentive time over the past six years has been spent online it follows that my daily attention has been structured by the shape of the medium: the net for me being the ultimate dream space where each entry can be seen as a wish, a censored desire, a substitute, a place holder, an escape mechanism. Tick, tock. Last night I dreamt you tried to kill me. Recording my attention over the years I've found to my dismay that where one might hope for signs of progress there are none... that each successive entry is a re-entry -- a re-entry into a labyrinth were every point is but a single step away from every other point and where causes -- more often than not -- follow, rather than precede, effects. What follows below is thus not a true timeline (where time is always out of joint) but an ersatz timeline: six years of two days (July 14th and 15th) with one night in the middle, traversed back and forth (with some sections of text and the URLs left out due to publishing constraints). MONDAY, 14 JULY 2003
Two Short Sentences
Software This is the sort of non-linear word processor that I like:
Don't be put off by its name. A lot of people are using it for non-journal project writing. And it's free. (Hotel Internacional, San Salvador de Jujuy) After what we both agreed was a more or less uncomfortable bus trip (where the so called "sleeper seats" left us "resting" in that vampirish position between lying down and standing up, that half-state between waking and sleeping (according to Jalal Toufic vampires cannot bend or sit down -- in Murnau's Nosferatu the vampire rises, stiff as a board, out of his coffin on the ship)), we arrive at the the bus terminal San Salvador de Jujuy. In order to bend our legs, get our bearings and coffee, we take a short walk around the block and N. makes her first discovery -- this close to Bolivia (and as it later turns out this close to the bus terminal) the cafes offer two typical Bolivian hot corn drinks... api and tojori. She's excited at finding them again and I'm willing to try so we sit down at a table and order one of each. Both are incredibly delicious. After checking out a number of hotels, we ensconce ourselves in a room on the 9th floor of the Hotel Internacional on Plaza Belgrano. While N. has a short nap I check out the view from the window. Later we go out for a long walk, at first without a goal, then towards the ubiquitous cross crowning every South American town's highest point (in this case San Salvadore's highest hilltop). Along the way we make another discovery: a chalked sign outside a small store advertises coca y bica (coca leaves and bicarbonate of soda). While chewing coca leaves is strictly prohibited in Argentina we'd heard that coca leaves were available in the Andean provinces though we hadn't expected to see them sold so openly. We buy oranges and water. We climb stairs and walk through strange neighborhoods. We cross bridges, back-track, walk along the highway. At times we get lost. At times we enter areas where we don't feel entirely safe. It's Sunday. Some kids are flying kites. Others are talking through tin can telephones. By these and many other signs we realize we are no longer in Kansas. 23:30 I just got home and heard that my friend Helle Viirlaid passed away yesterday afternoon in Vancouver. She died of cancer. She was 50. Ewan called while I was out and left a message on the machine. He said that he and their two girls, Jessie and Kaya, "were with her throughout." He said that at least her pain was over and that in the end there'd been "a lot of it." I spoke with Helle Tuesday evening after I got back from dinner with Sue-an and Kees. I never realized her death was so close. I don't think Helle did either. Tuesday was the first time we talked with each other since I returned from Vancouver last January. Since then all contact with her has been through Ewan. Coward that I am, I found it much easier to talk with Ewan. On Tuesday Ewan happened to be out with one of the girls and Helle picked up the phone. It was an absolutely amazing conversation. On the phone Helle sounded so incredibly positive, so incredibly warm and caring, so, well, Helle sounding. Pure Helle Viirlaid. If you didn't know better you'd never think anything was wrong. She seemed more concerned about me than herself. Helle was always like that. Her warmth towards the people she loved knew no boundaries. Her warmth was so great that it was easy to feel overwhelmed by it, and occasionally, even slightly embarrassed by it. Tuesday evening there was no embarrassment and a hell of a lot of wonder. I'll never forget what she said or how she sounded. There wasn't a drop of self pity in her voice. Even when she mentioned the pain, you would never think she was dying. She had only one complaint: "I feel like I'm on a journey," she said, "and the worst part of it is that I can't leave Ewan and the girls somewhere along the way, somewhere fabulous, like Hawaii. I have to drag them along with me." I can't call Ewan now. I tried calling Norman and my sister-in-law but neither of them are home. I left a message with Norman. Jente's asleep. I'll call her in the morning. I sit here and think about how I felt yesterday (very restless all day) and what I was doing at 15:30 Pacific Standard time (watching Bergman's 'The Silence'). I'm eating a bowl of ice cream. The last thing Helle said to me, "I love you Paul." Goodbye Helle. I love you too.
Helle and Jessie. Plunderbund I think that webloggers should conspire together to publish more poetry. Bring poetry more into the public eye. The genre's 'scrapbook format' certainly affords this, poetry can be used as illustration, annotation, commentary or even the subject or context for a whole day's affectations. Personally, I get a lot from the poems I read on other people's sites (I always like what Nina publishes for example). Ray's publishing house, The Hotsy Totsy Club, had me absolutely in stitches (ROTFLOL) the other day when it published a poem by Archy the cockroach called 'The Suicide Club.' (Okay, okay, it's funny, but it wasn't exactly Archy's words that had me laughing so hard -- it was describing Archy as "the thinking man's Charles Bukowski" that had the tears streaming down my face. Thanks a million Ray!) It's been hot the last couple of days. So most of the decent bottled water has disappeared from the shelves of the supermarket downstairs. Every summer this happens and each time I think about the precariousness of living in the Netherlands, so many people, so little land, so much dependency on a smoothly running infrastructure... Today's Secret Quote... ...is from the poet W. S. Merwin:
Nuke the Whales Embedded in the middle of Cosma Shalizi's 'Home Page' is the following delightful disclaimer:
Cynical? I don't think so. This is a PERFECT example of heresy. Need more? Check out Thomas Moore's (Hoover Institute) paper: 'Why Global Warming Would be Good for You'. I do wonder however why Mr. Shalizi linked Bruce Sterling's Viridian project to the above statement... Do you have any idea? Btw: Searching for an image of a 'Nuke the Whales' bumper sticker I found quite a few examples of politically incorrect stickers (but no images, unfortunately). Another from the same genre:
What Makes Today's Heresy So Appealing? Heresy is determined solely by interpretation (hermeneutics). A year ago (Saturday, 18 July 1998) I mused on Alamut:
Been working the last two days on an introduction to the Amsterdam 2.0 Constitution. I'm finding it very difficult (and slow) going. Got to have it finished by tomorrow. Btw: the constitution has been updated to version 1.2, giving the cities the right to refuse citizenship to anyone and ammending the Bill of Rights to allow "voluntary slavery." Am I a happy slave? Finally finished my Introduction to the Constitution of Amsterdam 2.0 this morning and took it personally to the graphic designer (in Amsterdam, of course) Thomas Buxó, who will be making a dummy of the book. With the dummy the team hopes to raise interest and money to publish the real thing. Quick Answer Christine Booker provided an answer to yesterday's question by sending me the following link:
Thank you. Viridian Note 70 maintains that everytime you move 10 megabytes of data in or off your computer you burn 5 pounds of coal! Well... TANSTAAFL (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch) I've got a sore throat. Listening (cautiously) to Tortoise's TNT. Reading Susan Blackmore's Dying to Live: The Near Death Experience. Most writers on NDE's interpret the phenomena as "proof of an afterlife" (and this hope has created a jolly fine reading and writing market -- Amazon, for example, lists 185 books in their category 'Near-death experiences'...). Blackmore is one of the few NDE researchers who critiques the populist "good news" interpretation. Plunderbund, "Group or alliance of financial or political interests that exploits the public." (from Howard Rheingold's wonderful dictionary of untranslatable words They Have A Word For It. Rheingold -- or his source, David Grambs -- ascribes the word to the Dutch, and although that seems plausible enough given the trade history of the clever Dutch, it is nowhere to be found in De Grote Van Dale, the definitive lexicon of the Dutch language. Could the term be German? Google lists 27 instances of plunderbund, but none are Dutch or German pages.) Plunderbunding is a naturally occurring process. We all plunderbund (when and where we can) and each of us is the product of past plunderbunding. What's wrong in organizing and grouping ourselves together in order to control and/or alter others or the environment for our own benefit? Genes do it (genes to gene complexes), cells do it (single to multicellularity), organisms do it (all manner of symbiotic relationships). Even words (rhythm to be memorable, rhetoric to seize the imagination) and ideas (memes to meme complexes) do it. Life would not be life without the plunderbund. Dirty Little Secrets The bigger they are the harder they fall. As a big fan of the Smalltalk programming language I find the epithet, "Smalltalk -- Java's Dirty Little Secret" not only true, but exceedingly well put (a well put put-down?). Having professional secrets is one thing. Java's coming on as earth-shakingly original and innovative (when it's not) seems to be just asking for trouble... Navigating the world as an artist I feel almost obliged to keep my share of professional secrets, hidden sources and private muses, while simultaneously avoiding (potential) 'dirty little secrets' like the plague. Especially in a field where issues of 'originality' are involved. So here, to protect myself, I give you a professional secret which is in danger of becoming dirty. Here, hidden behind the mild mannered facade of this site in Belgium: the Union of International Associations. A sample to get you started amongst the UIA's 11,000 pages:
How acutely the words "I love you" ring in the face of transitoriness, in the aftermath of disappearance. When the mountain is about to leave how extraordinarily poignant the shout becomes! And when the mountain is gone and the echo hangs in the air for a moment... what on earth could be more profound than this? (How much more meaningful compared to when we say "I love you" simply to affirm our (undying) resolution. Our constancy.) (Hotel Internacional, San Salvador de Jujuy) After a nondescript breakfast at the hotel we walk to the main market thinking we'll probably find more api there but are politely informed that it is only available around the bus terminal. We go back to the terminal, drink a couple of glasses (mmm...), buy a bag of coca leaves from a street vendor, a package of bicarbonate of soda at a kiosko, and then, after arguing a little bit about which bus to catch, catch a bus to the hotsprings. The bus fills. A kid (a boy) stands too close to me for comfort. Termas de Reyes is about an hour from San Salvador. Upon arriving we check out the various pools (hotel, municipal, private house), then N. proposes we go for a short walk before we soak. We follow the creek bed which passes along the left side the hotel, climbing higher and higher up the progressively narrower gully, eventually scrambling up a long and steep and extremely loose gravel slope to take our bearings. Once up we realize that it is not only difficult but dangerous to go back down the way we came. So we decide to find another way down. This too turns out not to be as easy as we hope (the hidden labyrinth: we can see where we want to go but how do we get there?).
After some stress (the fear: no one knows where we are and it will be cold and dark soon) we finally find our way down by -- believe it or not -- spotting and following a flock of grazing sheep, and, very dusty and tired, treat ourselves to a private bath in one of the pools at the Hotel Termas de Reyes before returning by bus to San Salvador de Jujuy. Palindromes Jalal Toufic writes in (Vampires):
Interesting. But what about the palindrome that occurs where there is no time (as in Barbour's theory) and existence is composed of separate frozen instants (nows)? In the middle of each of these moments one can legitimately wonder whether one is traveling forward or backward: every moment is perceived as a near death experience, a crisis. Every moment becomes a palindromic turning point.
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