Demo of an interactive listening and drawing tool for kids of 3+ years old – developed during a Cinekid/Mediamatic workshop by Aletta Becker. She’s looking for someone to produce and design it: http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpgcbS8q-lk.
In the early eighties I was a ‘fan’ of the young English speaking pro-cyclists. With ‘fan’ I mean to say that I searched for their names in the results of Paris-Nice, the Criterium International and the Dauphine Libere. I’ve never seen them on the television, at least I do not remember seeing them. Their names: Paul Sherwen, Graham Jones, Robert Millar and Stephen Roche – a bit later also John Herety and Sean Yates and I could add Jonathan Boyer, but he’s American. (The poetry of names… I even remember the name of Alain de Roos, a South-African riding for Peugeot in, I think 1981).
I recently read [Brian, oops, no] Richard Moore’s biography of Robert Millar, entitled In Search of Robert Millar (as Millar disappeared, not liking publicity at all, cherishing his privacy), and while reading I realized that Millar is as much a cyclist of the late eighties and early nineties as he is of the early eighties. Yet for me he’s always associated with the years between 1981 and 1985, for me he stayed a Peugeot-rider. I’ve never been able to see him as a Panasonic-rider, a collegue of Eric Breukink, much less as a rider for TVM.
Reading his biography – a good one, by the way (the only blemish: that Moore calls Lucien van Impe a Dutchman…) – the same happened. My interest slackened once Millar’s career gets going after the Peugeot-era. He then quickly discovers he is not a leader, his career becomes a string of good performances in the Pyrenees in the Tour de France, followed by either a nice ‘classement’ or abandoning due to sickness. Of course, he stayed the same Robert Millar, a real climber, but well, maybe it just was the ugly TVM-shirt… (But the story about losing the Vuelta is a classic one).
Millar – and Moore really brings this out in a good way, without ever falling prey to easy gossip – is a true ‘character’. He chooses his own route, radically, always, without ever reckoning on the help (or anything) of others. He was very private. It is this aspect the makes the biography ‘gripping’. The book is not so much a record of Millar’s career, as it is the sketch of a character, a certain way to approach life – one that not many take.
Can you learn from it? Do you recognize yourself? Is it an example of how (not) to live one’s life? Does it show how one can live one’s life? Does it tell you what privacy is?
Why do you read biographies?
(And yeah, allright, I have to say something about it: after reading this biography the question of Robert Millar is now a woman – a question that again popped up in the last issue of the German magazine Tour, has become utterly uninteresting. I don’t care. Nobody should care about that).
Check out Peter Luining’s blog for Youtube-footage and pictures of Oorbeek’s performance at W139: http://www.ctrlaltdelete.org/oorbeek.html
Earlier this week Max Roach died. It might have catched your attention, as the blogs are full of obituaries, reminiscences, short essays and mp3-excerpts of/about, well, the most influential drummer of the 20th century. He’s always been my favorite, as everything he plays is ultra-clear, and he thinks compositionally.
I don’t feel that there’s a need for me to write an appreciation of Roach’s work from his be-bop drumming with Parker, via Monk, to his own groups with Brownie and Booker Little, to the stunning duo’s from the seventies that I’m only now discovering; just start browsing here and you’ll find the rest: http://destination-out.com/?p=135.
(Free improv trombonist Paul Rutherford passed away as well earlier this week, and also as it seems bassist Art Davis).
On Monday August 20th, W139 presents
OORBEEK: Life in a Lamp
doors open 20:30 | start 21:00 uur
Warmoesstraat 139, Amsterdam
Concept: Serge Onnen
Light: Tom Verheijen
Dance: Sandrina Lindgren
Sound: Oorbeek
(Thanks to Rapenburg Plaza)
http://www.oorbeek.net
http://www.w139.nl
There’s quite a bit of interest in “shelters” from the art scene, with exhibitions that cover that theme (like Shelter at Kasteel Nijenhuis in Heino). Well, let me then point you to the project Dream Depot that I naturally find very relevant, interesting and also well executed, as it is led by the Irish-born, Amsterdam-based artist Fiona Whelan. (Mostly referred to as F. on this blog).
In January she conducted a first part of this project in Kildare, with a group of youth. They (the youth themselves) developed, designed and built a mobile hang-out under the direction of Fiona Whelan (plus help from the Kildare Town Youth Project and a local carpenter). There’s nothing for these youth in Kildare, nowhere to go – so this is their solution and statement.
On the pictures you see them taking the hang-out through the streets of Kildare a few weeks ago.
More on Fiona Whelan and Dream Depot: http://www.xs4all.nl/~fwhelan/.
According to iTunes I am Felix Hess. I just burned an audio-CD with one 8 seconds track that I ‘composed’. I feed it into my computer and into iTunes and there it is: Air Pressure Fluctuations by Felix Hess, genre ‘unclassifiable’. In fact it’s 8 seconds of crackling at the end of a 7-inch vinyl of Gerard Souzay singing Schubert, doubled up twice (and recorded at both 33 and 45rpm).
But iTunes thinks its air pressure fluctuations.
Beautiful.
Should I apologize for only logging my rides and nothing else? I am busy with a lot of other things too, finally regaining ‘the right spirit’ to write, now that home feels like home, and focussed on making the deadlines after missing two important ones in the past months. (Something I feel rather bad about).
Reading a lot too. (I read through all the Maximus Poems, still pondering what I really think about that ‘epic’, and knowing that I will come back to it, since I do not really know what to think of it…).
And following the Tour de France. The Tour that shows how disastrous the situation is, ‘thanks’ to the war between the UCI and the ASO a.o. I don’t feel compelled to give my opinion, since everything is said, something eloquently by the cycling journalists. There is nothing to add. It’s war, all involved parties are hypocrites, the stakes are too high, the cyclists are too divided amongst themselves (and that is not only a matter of ‘old cycling culture’ against ‘new cycling culture’ – if it were only that, why doesn’t the new hero of Belgian cycling Tom Boonen take a leading role, to organize the riders?). The UCI might be too weak, but the ASO plays a dirty role too.
(They also have a problem with the lacking of a French ‘star’, for a long time now. How to sell the Tour in France when the French do not play leading roles?)
Just imagine: next year we will have three professional leagues, three circuits of races: 1. that of the UCI, consisting of the non-ASO-races, a truly international league; 2. that of the ASO with most of the European classic races with a long history, a mostly West-European league; 3. a new wild hyper-commercial league, backed by money from Astana and Tinkoff, plus some new sponsors and commercial television station, with as riders Vinokourov, suspended riders, and those who cannot withstand the call of money; races in Central Asia, Russia, Eastern Europe and closed circuits in Western Europe and the USA.
The wild league is of course open to any team, but the ASO and the UCI will forbid riders who compete in that circuit entrance to ASO and UCI-races. The Giro and the Vuelta wil probably join the ASO, but well, maybe they won’t?
Then the war will be really on. What races will the NOS and Sporza bring to us?
As disgusted as I am with this situation, I still love cycling (and pro-cycling) as much as ever. But I do not believe in a pure sport. I never have. (Benjo Maso’s analysis in I think a NRC-interview of a few days ago was of course very apt: the fictitious believe in a pure sport). “Cheating”, bending the rules, will always be part of cycling – certainly when it’s professional sport. There are those who play it fair – and I am always a fan of those riders. There are those who are sly in terms of tactics and I admire them (the ‘intelligent’ riders). And there are those who keep pushing the boundaries, who play on the edge, the ones of whom you suspect that their ‘medical preparation’ is “a bit too experimental”. (Like Riis’s in the past). I sometimes admire them, but it is an admiration, or maybe fascination is a better word, that comes with a certain abhorrence too.
By the way: it is said that Lucien van Impe is the only Tour-winner of the past 50 years not to have been involved in any doping issue ever. And Hinault I wonder? That analysis states that Hinault was the leader of a strike protesting doping controls. So he was involved in a doping story. If I remember well, that protest was not so much a protest against doping controls as such, but against the way they were conducted at that time. I am not stating that I am sure Hinault never used doping in his life (how could I know such a thing?), but it characterises the current state of cycling that even speaking up for one’s social and political rights makes one suspect.
&c.
What I wanted to do, is write a little ‘plug’ for an excellent book on cycling: Roule Brittania by one of the best (if not the best) cycling journalists of the moment: William Fotheringham (also author of Put me back on my bike, a biography of Tom Simpson). I am reading it at the moment – getting up to date on British cycling, enjoying the always present undercurrent of the cultural difference between continental and English cycling, a difference that continues until today, that colours the stories of Brian Robinson, Alan Ramsbottom, Tom Simpson, Barry Hoban and all those that follow. (I’m halfway, and will still get to read about Paul Sherwen, Graham Jones, Robert Millar, Sean Yates, Chris Boardman and David Millar).
(Of course I would have liked to read about Phil Edwards too – right hand of Francesco Moser in the seventies, in teams like Sanson – but this is a book on English riders in the Tour, so no Edwards here.)
Finished reading Albert B. Lord’s The Singer of Tales: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/LORSIY.html. There was nothing new for me in this book – I’d got it all studying Literary Theory and having Frans de Valk as a teacher – but it was a joy to read the full 220 pages. And I’d say it’s compulsory reading for anybody studying performance/poetry and/or rap and poetry.
Related: The Milman Parry Collection, http://www.chs.harvard.edu/mpc/index.html.
A not very precise entry for Lord at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Lord.
“According to Fielding the whole world of letters was becoming a ‘democracy, or rather a downright anarchy’; and there was no one to enforce the old laws, since, as he wrote in the Covent Garden Journal (1752, no. 23,1), even the ‘offices of criticism’ had been taken over by ‘a large body of irregulars’ who had been admitted ‘into the realm of criticism without knowing one word of the ancient laws’.”
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, The Hogarth Press, London, 1987 (1957) p. 58.