Hidde van Schie recently asked me to participate in a somehow religious project about the hugeness of it all reflected in the adventures of improv. Me and two actual drummers played a drum solo each and (in my case: Vinniefoewakka) recorded these in order to appear on an all-drums-and-nothing-but-drums-because-drum’s-all-that-counts album ‘curated’ by Hidde van Schie himself. The actual drummers are Arend Niks and Robin Schaeverbeke and I’m me. Turned out to be (apart from being good ‘conceptual’ work) quite a nice forty somewhat minutes of a listen. The excellent drawings in the booklet and on the cd itself are done by Koen Taselaar.
It came out last saturday and is available only at Swetika Religion Arts store (South Side, Rotterdam) for a lousy five euros.
After reading the cynical article Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization in Adbusters, and the somehow great reaction on this article on this blog, I’ve a lot of thoughts about it, and a lot to say. But I think you can be your own judge after reading those articles (if you want). Those thoughts (about our MySpace, Hyves and Facebook generation) somehow cross my mind a lot this year. Some of my latest work is flirting with that.
But in the end every youth has their older youth. So therefore I’ve two book tips. The book NO WAVE by Thurston Moore and Byron Coley is a collision of art and punk rock in the New York underground of 1976-1980 and RoXY en de houserevolutie by Job de Wit which is a Dutch (which I read in one night) book about the upcoming of House music and her most famous club of that period.
Tomorrow at the VIA gallery in Paris there is an opening – of the 40th anniversary of the first ever Prisunic catalog – exhibition of Prisunic furniture and catalogs.
In the late 1960s in France, Prisunic was an ultra-modern furniture and plastic pop-art home objects store.
The Lijnbaan – by architects van den Broek en Bakema – is the main shopping street of Rotterdam. The Lijnbaan is named after a ropewalk which was there between 1667 and 1845.
It has been opened in 1953, as the main street in the new shopping district, after the old shopping district got completely destroyed during the bombings of 1940. The Lijnbaan Shopping Centre became the prototype for similar centres in Europe and America that allowed only pedestrian traffic.
Since I was a little boy I always wanted to live in The Lijnbaan-flats. And now I am actually living inside one. How exciting! I feel a bit like Le Corbusier everyday.
photo: with my new iPhone 3G (bought on The Lijnbaan), laughter…
The other day I saw Ghost In The Shell (Mamoru Oshi, 1995, originally titled ‘Kôkaku kidôtai’) again. I guess the last (and first) time I saw it was 1998 or so and I remembered it had made a big impact then when I was in my early twenties. I couldn’t have guessed it would be as breathtaking then as it still is now. It’s a fantastic film on the dangers –or consequences if you prefer– of humanity creating intelligent computers. Wearable technologies, robotic limbs, the internet and the fact that we grew up on films about this subject (2001 A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner) provided us with a mindset able to further explore the meaning of the soul of men compared to the soul of objects.
I don’t know why I’m always fascinated and deeply moved by films on this subject. ‘A.I.’, ‘electroma’ and ‘The Matrix I-III’ are obviously films that made me cry like a baby. It must have something to do with a certain numbness robots display that I can easily relate to. Humans seem to almost take pride in showing their every emotion when shit hits the fan. Their will to display their involvement with other people’s misfortune is mostly enormous and encouragable. If it comes to stuff like that, I tend to act a little droidy myself. For instance I never take my problems elsewhere but I do advise others on theirs in a soulless, reasonable manner and on a clockwork basis. In a way I have become a replicant myself. Society prefers calling it ‘nihilist’, but doesn’t that mean ‘robotic’ in itself. Also, I don’t consider myself soulless, so even in that respect I’m just like all the soulless droids in all the films I just brought up. Maybe men truly is soulless and their longing for a certain soulfullness drives them to do radical things, or make radical choices and their longing or hoping to posess a soul actually provides them with one just as their longing for a God who’s not just their inspiration but also their actual creator provides them with one of those.
But I do believe in love to be the driving force behind- and the meaning of life, so in that repect I was created by –at least the act of– love and now am inspired by it, hense my God IS love. It’s just not the kind of love that makes me feel sorry for sadness, it’s more of a love that embraces the idea of a world in which happiness is something to be celebrated, like ‘weekends’… and sadness is just the mud we all wade through uninspired, simply because we must. Because we’re programmed to do so.
If you haven’t seen it yet, go out and order it on DVD: the animation’s stunning, the score (by Kenji Kawai) is stunning and the characters are cool ’n sexy like Bogart and Bacall, but the story (of a hacker called ‘the puppet master’ being tracked down by the cyborg cop who’s actually the puppet master’s digital soul mate) is simply awesome.
