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# Music you cannot hear 02'05'30 12:33 link

lowercase music
"One recent album was so quiet, listeners wondered whether it actually contained any sound at all."
It reminds me of the videotapes showing an aquarium, or open fire. Haven't seen those on DVD yet but I'm sure they're out there. Funniest was seeing someone who actually built a mock open fireplace around a set...
Anyway, sure nice to listen to.

# a library, a prison 02'05'29 10:45

# Who is Bernard Tapie? 02'05'29 01:27 link

Going through a manic, sleepless patch has advantages - such as being pleasantly surprised by a late-night movie on BBC2: Who is Bernard Tapie by Marina Zenovich. A story of compulsion, obsessive interest - close to being in love, but not quite. Being enthralled.
Tapie is a character. But it's not just a movie about him, or her; for me, it shed light on my (stress: mine) european prejudices. She's an american, and answers to both the negative and the positive stereotypes: over the three years the movie takes, and countless visits to France, she hardly improves her very poor french. If you want to communicate, it's the least you can do, right? Also, from the film I get the impression that she knew hardly anything about France at all.
Which brings me to the other side: coming from that position, she then goes on to make a film that at least touches on the ghost of the Mitterand era, and on the ghost of Tapie.
And her naive enthousiasm (and openness, bordering on exhibitionism) embodies the very naive spirit that us europeans find so appealing ('us' europeans, I'm generalizing terribly here I know. Pinch of salt, everyone).
From the accompanying interview:
Seguela said, "He thinks you're in love with him." I looked at Jacques and said, "I am not in love with him, I am in love with his spirit!"
Having seen the movie just now, I think there is no difference.
On a related note, that's also the difference between loving and being in-love. A topic close to the bone, with what happened the past ten days.

Fifty-five minutes well spent, that's for sure. I'll go to bed now, to lie awake for a while. And hopefully, sleep soon - I am so goddamn tired, my head aches.

# Kill your Television 02'05'28 11:02 link

# It was't to last 02'05'28 11:00 link

The internet's mood is back to tired again. Sigh.

# The internet's happy! 02'05'27 12:01 link

I've had the imood face on the main page for ages, and the internet mood has been tired for at least half a year. No more!

# SOS privacy petition 02'05'27 12:00 link

Only 24 hours to go:

# A hard day's night 02'05'24 01:29

After work, a straight 4 1/2 hours in the darkroom! New scans! And I'm actually rather excited about them! My fingers still smell of developer fluid. And I should go to bed, I feel a bit manic after all this. Haven't eaten properly even. So worth it.
Let's start with my friend Sadhu:

She's lovely, don't you think?
More photos later (yeah, they're in the gallery already).
(There's a chance that this looks horrible on a windoze machine, with gamma set to that real ugly 2.2. Sorry folks, all's set for 1.8.)

# life in links 02'05'22 22:17

I'm really enthousiastic about From the Four Directions.
I was also struck by what happened to my old history teacher, a really inspiring guy. Brain damage after removal of a brain tumor was only the beginning: Zoektocht (in Dutch). I'll send a little prayer tonight.
Been searching for a voice of reason on Fisk from the other side, found it in a defense of Robert Fisk from the right wing Texas Mercury
The third Midsummernight's burn cd arrived, from Punkey. Can't quite listen to it right now, but sure nice to get it (especialy since some participants received none!)
And I hope I can start my holidays with an 8 day Voicing Institute Intensive workshop in Greece.

(harvest of a day ill in bed)

# M for Misery? GVB for Godverdomme! And an election to boot. 02'05'17 02:45 link

Mighty Girl (no permalink, scroll down to 5.9.02) saw this happen on the F-line:
here are two trains on the same track. A tourist approaches the one in the rear and asks the driver, "Which train leaves first?" He blinks at her, then at the train in front of him. "This one," he replies. She climbs aboard.

No need to tell us what happens next: nothing. Tourist gets aboard and noone mentions anything. The joke's more important than helping out an, admittingly dumb, person. Really dumb, ok...
Sounds exactly like an Amsterdam tram driver...
In yesterday's referendum, the people voted against privatising the GVB, our municipal transport company we love to hate. And we can't have it better its ways now, can we? As an afterthought, insult to injury, the same people also got the country the strangest parliament ever.
Not that I was so certain. I voted at ten to nine in the evening, couldn't decide all day, and even in the booth I stood there, the red pencil raised in my right hand, doubting. I couldn't decide on a party, decided to vote on a person instead, and that made things easier. Roel van Duijn, I hope you've got enough direct votes to bump you up six places. We sure could use you. Rather than that phony Rosenmuller, bah.
Strange times.
Hope I'll make it to see the Muni in action sometime... cue Vera Lynn

# new scans! 02'05'12 19:59

Scanned this one, and five more... click on the darn picture!

# adventure minus risk equals disneyland 02'05'12 15:00 link

I love AccordionGuy, and not just cause Joey reminds me of my bagpip-playing-coder friend Paul...
Now he's writing about fear - and the road less travelled. I like the solemnity in those two words - which I know from the book, but Robert Frost also used them:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

And I open up the book next to my bed (Don Miguel Ruiz' the mastery of love) and I read about the power of the fear.

And I think of Morrissey's "shyness is nice, and shyness can stop you / from doing all the things in life you'd like to".
[And I'm indoors, though it's grey and col outside and I haven't written any frightening verses to a bucktoothed girl in Luxemburg today.]

And I am afraid of what might happen if I break the spells that smother my energy.

Or rather, I'm afraid of what will happen.

There's a pile of notes on the livingroom floor - my favourite sketchpad, the livingroom floor. My favourite couch, the livingroom floor. Where I read the paper, the livingroom floor. Where I sit slouching down, the livingroom floor. A tear makes a slow run, the livingroom floor. On the salmon pink carpet of the livingroom floor.

The last few weeks I've been slowly getting accustomed to my life not going very well. Even though it all seems so well on the outside. Even last week, when D. asked me if there was more going on, I said there wasn't, and I knew I was lying. He knew it, too, and chose to let it be - it wasn't the right moment. Wise guy, D. I sat down and started writing instead, and wrote until five in the morning, and wrote and edited until I wasn't lying anymore, and I looked the truth in the face.
[to be continued]

# Burn 02'05'11 19:27 link

Meanwhile, life goes on, sort of. You don't want to know the mass hysteria in this country and god help us if we'll really get a government based on condoleance-votes. There's a devil's dilemma, on the scale of the french second election round (for leftpondians: Gore vs. Nader probably comes closest) - do I vote for Melkert whom I think is a typical exponent of the problem with traditional dutch politics, but at least it's a vote strengthening the most reasonable of the big parties, hoping it'll come out marginallly bigger than the christian democrats, the conservatives, or that bunch of weirdo's without leader? Or am I going to vote for someone whose ideas and integrity I trust way more but who's not very likely to be a part of government after this election?
[BTW, I'm, not thinking of GroenLinks, they're too screwed up in political correctness, they should've bloody put Roel van Duijn higher on their list. So, I'm leaning to the SP. And poor old D66, good intentions alone can do more harm than good, I'm sorry to say]

Mark Steele's column in the Indy has me LOL at times, though I think he's missing the main point. His article on the french is also very funny.

Back to our regular program. The second Midsummernight's Burn cd arrived, thanks Taco! Interestingly, it has Stroke of Genius on it. Wasn't the only vinyl release a single run of 300 singles? Which begs the question - are mp3's allowed on a CD-mix? I could argue then, why not exchange playlists. Of course, given that the Freelance Hellraiser rules, and I really love this song, let's leave it a theoretical question 'l?. Hey, it's nice this song's no longer bound to my iBook :-)
Another pleasant surprise is track 9 - a hook I've heard many times but somehow never got round to finding out what it was, exactly. And number 4: 'kosher kebab jazz film', well, a little bit mainstream. Compared to John Zorn that is. Nice. Once upon a time, I was a crappy bass player in a rather ok klezmer band, which landed me with a lasting fondness for the music.

# Fortuyn 02'05'07 23:09

At the very root of all the news lies this: a man died yesterday. A man was shot. A brutal act of violence by a totally deranged person.

Many thoughts drifting around about what caused this, what its impact might be, but let's not forget that core.

Similarities are sought and found - the murder of Kennedy is recalled, the WTC.

It is a strange mood, on the tv and radio, in the papers; on the street, at the coffee machine.

For me it's more like the murder of John Lennon. Not a political killing, but an individual act. First reports on the guy who did it point that way, too.

People do terrible things. They do. This earth is never going to be a paradise, the dream that we can do something to make everything alright is just that: a dream. A dream like a drug, an addictive escape. Forget it people, it is a harsh world. But don't even dare to quote that last sentence from me without adding this one: it is the very essence of our life on this earth that we feel all that, stay aware of it, try to do our best on our own little patch, instead of becoming a cynic, or turning away..

~ ~ ~

Last week, I was talking to a friend I've known since my school days, and we somehow got on the subject of all the people we knew personally who had done some total weird things. And it was quite a list.
I finished Ultima IV on my apple // with a map I got given by a guy who later became the suspect in the so-called 'ballpointmurder' case ('de balpenmoord' - which I'm not going to elaborate on now).

Also for a while, I was quite close to a guy who had been the boyfriend of the Heijn kidnapper's daughter (and he'd been lifted out of bed at four in the morning and got some rather brutal treatment until they were convinced that that bloke had really done it all by himself). Actually, my local supermarket is the place where that guy got busted after he started spending some of the ransom money on groceries there.

And there was this guy, also at school. Who boasted about cutting down street lanterns with his homemade thermic lance. He went on to threaten the Austrian government that he'd contaminate one of the country's main reservoirs. He laid it out very detailed in the ransom letter: he'd use this and this poison that he could make using these materials and such and such process, and he'd picked exactly the reservoir that Vienna would have the hardest time doing without. He was incredibly smart.
Fortunately, he was less smart in acting out his evil genius scheme: the 30 million guilders were deposited on his instructions in a roadside garbace can, and the policemen hiding nearby were amazed to see him coming to collect it on his bike.

So let us not forget. There are many, many people out there, but we are ourselves, too. See this breathtaking article Tales of the Tyrant from The Atlantic - in which Mark Bowden tries to explore what happens inside a dictatorship - and inside the dictator.
What would I do if I were living there? Hero or lie low? Very few people turn out heroes. Or even, if I would get the chance to step into that position, what would I do then? Truly obligatory reading. Very well written, too, journalism with literary quality.

~ ~ ~

I was about to write about this rotten spoilt Dutch society that at the very least is in dire need for a good economic recession - people have become so accustomed to their material wealth that they just expect no less, and see it as their right. Also, this is apparently the most insured country in the world, where people whine at the whim of a hard time coming. I mean, the beach pavillions applied for emergency money after two bad summers! And those bloody people who built their house between the Maas and the winter dike.

Whining about nobody doing anything. But doing nothing themselves.

So anyway, then I read Caroline's entry which is so spot on that you should just read hers. An excerpt:

"He was an opportunist with a lust for fame and power. He recognised that the Netherlands' fabled 'tolerance' was just that... a fable. Fortuyn sussed what the masses in this country really want. (Spoilt, self indulgent, selfish masses, who haven't known war or poverty in half a century and still don't wish to share their welfare state with other, less fortunate human beings.)"

So just my two cents to that. Pim Fortuyn was not a brownshirt right-winger, though some media, especially abroad, portrayed him as such. I am pretty convinced think he suffered from at least extreme selfishness, a narcistic tendendy, and possibly was manic-depressive. He had shown at times a total inability to put himself in someone elses feet (see this article, from 30 march) Pim nu ook voer voor psychologen)

He was about to burn bright but probably short. We'll never know now.

He put the finger on some sore spots that had been swept under the carpet in this society. He spoke out. That will be sorely missed.

~ ~ ~

Let me repeat it once more. A man died yesterday. A man was shot. A brutal act of violence by a totally deranged person.

This world is not a pretty place, and will never be, and despite that, it is up to us to make it better, how tiny the effects of our efforts. To keep our eyes open when we don't like what we see rather than turning away.

[update, some links: The Economist, Washington Times, The Guardian, BBC]

Now it's time for strawberries and vanilla ice cream. Good night.

# ... 02'05'06 23:09

Incredible. Unbelievable. Jesus.

# is that all there is ... ? 02'05'03 00:01

Saw the movie Star Wars tonight, for the first time. Really, I'd never seen it yet. I didn't think I had high expectations, but I was curious what all the fuss was about. With all the brouhaha about it being an epic tale of good and evil for our time. Well. Well, well, well. Was this what it is all about? What apparently millions of people are wild about? Who's fooling who? What crap, OMG. Cheap jokes, a plot, too lengthy at times, yet jumping lightly over some grand holes.
What a load of shallow crap. Entertaining at times, indeed, but a modern-day Odyssey? There are so many much more interesting stories told in various mediums, even if you restrict it to space opera.
Now what makes me sit down and write in my blog at exactly one minute past midnight, again?

# I want my thunder! 02'05'02 16:03

Damn, another mefi thread that I would love to plunge in (Matt announced that signing up as a new member will be possible again, soon, but what time is soon?).
Anyway: Wish I could buy some Thums up! around here - an Indian variation of Coca Cola. With spices, njam. more, more and more...
(of course, I love a good mango lassi, but I can make those myself)

# My Midsummernight's CD 02'05'02 00:01

Music to swing with in my hammock, cook to, listen to hanging out with friends before going out, dance to, and then, ah well, thus the evening ends. :-)

1 Fernando Lameirinhas - Aqui E Tudo (Controlado) 04:42
.... love this guy. He's so great. He can't help smiling when he plays - if you can catch him live sometime, see him. Great voice, great songs, great heart. Shame his website is (temporarily?) down, it seems.
2 Zebda - Tomber La Chemise 04:25
.... if this doesn't bring the sun out, what does?
3 Chet Baker - Look for the Silver Lining 02:38
See track 12.
4 Chinmaya Dunster - Kaunsi Kannada (Warm Side Of The Mountain) 05:28
.... the weird stuff begins. One of my all time favourite CD's. I love Chinmaya's sarod playing.
5 Keith Jarret - Summer Night 06:36
I actually managed one track with summer in the title.
6 Jennifer Terran - Sticky Sweet 8 To 5 Lady 03:29
File under being yourself. I saw her in the tiniest of venues, playing for twentyfive people and she pulled it off. Great bass playing, also.
7 Ramses Shaffy - Zing, vecht, huil, bid, lach, werk en bewonder 03:51
.... yes, this is Dutch. What the hell, we've had Portugese and French by now, which I'm sure most of you can't speak, either. I want this song to be played at my funeral! Sing along!
8 Bill Pritchard - Number Five 04:01
Originally track #5 of course
9 Boelie - Boogie Woogie 03:17
.... file under weird and wonderful. Local guy, actually looking for a recorddeal.
10 Big Bud - Mombassa 07:54
Someone played this in a store, and I kept hanging around til it finished, and asked the guy behind the counter what it was. The album was a bit of a letdown really, but this song (and the two tracks its sandwiched between) is fantastic.
11 Banderas - This Is Your Life 04:32
Melancholic britpop. I'd seen this song once or twice on nighttime MTV in 1991 or so, but never heard it again. Then I found this in a secondhand shop and I knew why the tune'd been in the back of my head for all that time. Given that the average one-hit wonder artists doesn't end up very happy it's maybe all the better that this song failed to do anything in the charts (AFAIK) but as a song, it deserves recognition. </rand>
12 Jacques Brel - Mathilde 02:34
Brel. Shivers down my spine.
13 They Might Be Giants - Whistling In The Dark 03:24
What the? Oh, Them. File under weird and makes you laugh.
14 Fernando Lameirinhas - Aqui, Ali, Alem 03:27
Couldn't resist another one...
15 Dawn Penn - You Don't Love Me (No, No, No) 04:34
Grand lady.
16 Liz Phair - What makes you happy 03:36
Liz doesn't write songs - she writes short stories!
17 The Lemonheads - The Outdoor Type 02:35
Evan Dando can churn out a decent song himself, but above all he can pick his covers ever so well.
18 Mike Smith and his Cadillac Cowboys - Six Pack To Go 02:53
love this classic, and there may be better versions, but not where I know one of the cowboys in person! Anyway, we're almost of the end of the evening and as tracks 15 and on might've told you, not all went well. Hey, mister bartender...
19 REM - Nightswimming 04:15
So let's wrap it up in style. Into the warm night, watching the sun go up.

Hope you like it, guys - the cd's are in the post.
BTW, turned out that Fraser actually didn't dislike my blog. I'm surprised! Given that he must've seen this page just about when it was full of emotional outbursts on politics. Nice.