Writing takes time. Blogging takes time. My time is taken by packing, unpacking and moving stuff around. Boxes with books, boxes with papers, boxes with stuff. (The paper trail of one’s life). My time is taken by getting used to new things – I started working at V2_ last week. I will be moving house over the next few weeks. Blogging is not on my mind these days.

And then I’m part of the Offline – Online Publishing event at De Balie on the 19th of January: http://www.debalie.nl/artikel.jsp?articleid=92553&podiumid=media. With Alessandro Ludovico, Simon Worthington and Georg Schollhammer of resp. Neural:http://www.neural.it, Mute: http://www.metamute.org/ and Documenta 12 Magazines.

I will be speaking about Ubiscribe: http://www.ubiscribe.net, the POD we made, and about different time-regimes of editing. (Maybe I’ll use a different term in a weeks time – have to check on the exact significance of ‘regime’ in English, but for now the term is stuck in my mind.)

Peet http://sneaker.nl/articles/2006/12/20/wil-je-ook-eens-een-keertje-minder/ tells me about this software: http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/product/writeroom – and hmm, although I’m quite often doing the apple-tab thing (swithing quickly between programs), I might like this.

Just text text text!

Alas, it’s only for 10.4 & I’m still using 10.3.9 – maybe this will make me upgrade (when I find the time — …)

I bought an ipod-nano — for all the train travelling I’ll have to do next year. I must say, it’s such a stylish & fashionable thing that I feel very tempted to cover it in ugly stickers.

I bought my brother the dvd We Jam Econo as present; the story of the American punk-band The Minutemen – d. boon, mike watt & george hurley – plus three complete live sets: http://www.theminutemen.com/. I just came back from his house where we watched 2 of the live sets – I admit I already watched the documentary yesterday (and afterwards ran off to an Oorbeek-rehearsal – where the idea was to spend time with F.). Well, what shall I say… It’s fucking awesome? It is. And I get into such a good mood from watching & listening to the Minutemen.

Discussing it with my brother – how we both like this band, and why. I know them through him. He says he doesn’t really remember how he got into it then, around 1985, 1986 – how friends of his who were into punk and the Dead Kennedy’s didn’t ‘get’ the Minutemen. That he probably would not have liked it himself had he not gotten into listening to jazz (Coltrane, Ayler, Cecil Taylor) through me.

The Minutemen are ‘real’ punk – in the sense that punk is about doing it yourself, making your own thing, creating something which is real and you, not copying anything – so also not copying other punk bands. Discovering. And not wanting to be like somebody else. And it always sounds that such is the way the music of the Minutemen was made: this is us and we play bass, drums and guitar – and each of us plays in their own style and it magically comes together. This is how you play together.

& I love their songs – they are so bare-bones and ‘simple’. You hear what the building blocks are and how they click. It is simple, but well, complex in the interlocking and succession of simple elements – mike watt’s baselines, geoff hurley’s crazy drumming (not at all how a punk drummer ‘should’ drum), boon’s piercing & funky guitarbits.

& it is such a joy to see them perform live on a dvd & see d. boon jumping on stage. (Needless to say, I have never seen them live – yes, later on I say mike watt a few times with george hurley and I guess Eliott Sharpe, and also with dos – but never the Minutemen).

In the States the Minutemen seem to be sort of legendary by now, it seems. I have the feeling they’re not so big in Europe. Allright even 2 other Oorbeek-members knew the Minutemen (Maarten because he knows them all, Serge because of the Raymond Pettibon-connection), but generally you see people staring at you with a face like “who’re you talking about? – the Minutemen?”

mike watt btw is here: http://www.hootpage.com/.

… I can join in the fun — it has arrived. IT has arrived. Against the Day. I’ve got it in my hands & can start reading….!

I’ve put a pdf of my presentation at the RFID-workshop online, for download. In my talk I dealt with the development of blogging-software as an example of the co-development of software and uses/users, using both Latour and Andrew Liu’s ‘Discourse Network 2000’ as an inspiration. Showing how a genre is constituted both by needs of users/writers and by software that is developed in response to those needs. Well, this goes through stages — for instance at one point it is blogging software that actually defines the genre. Next stage — where we are now — is when blogposts can & are used and re-used in different contexts, aggregation/syndication, when one is blogging without ever looking at the back-end of the blogsoftware, or even ‘blogging’ automatically. (Et cetera — hope you catch my drift). I’m trying to formulate what this means for the concept of ‘publishing’.

This is also what I will be discussing next week in my lecture in Groningen (15.00, Radesingel 6, Frank Mohr Institute).

Anyway, the pdf is for download here: http://www.ariealt.net/mediamatic_rfid/.
The first half is the actual presentation I did, what follows is a recap, and it ends with a collection of reserve ‘sheets’ that cover issues that I expected Julian Bleecker to talk about (but that I wanted to have handy, in case someone would ask me about it).

Last minute: Julian Bleecker will do a public lecture in the Mediamatic exhibiton space (now the “Night Garden”: http://www.mediamatic.net/artefact-12874-en.html), friday 17th november 18.00.

Julian Bleecker is visiting Mediamatic for the RFID-workshop (see below). “He is a Research Fellow at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication and an Assistant Professor in the Interactive Media Division, part of the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television. His work focuses on emerging technology design, research and development, implementation, concept innovation, particularly in the areas of pervasive media, mobile media, social networks and entertainment, and he is one of the main theoreticists on The Internet of Things.”

With lots of videos online: http://www.freewaves.org/?page=artists#. Nice. Apparently also with some art-videos that were censored by YouTube (Eva Drangsholt, Mike Faulkner).

14 – 16 november: another chance to follow the RFID-workshop at Mediamatic in Amsterdam: http://www.mediamatic.net/artefact-11944-en.html — it’s not booked-out yet & it’s a chance, as well, to hear the opinions of & about the projects of Timo Arnall and Julian Bleecker (http://research.techkwondo.com/); as well as Rob van Kranenburg (http://robvankranenburgs.wordpress.com/, and, yes, me.

Good reader online too: http://www.mediamatic.net/article-9691-en.html.

Btw at the public library in Amsterdam the RFID-system is installed and working & I must say, the first few times one borrows books now, it feels truly like magic. Scan your library card. Put books in two stacks on the lending table. Table ‘says’: “Are there indeed 8 books on the table?”. If the number is correct, push ‘Yes”. Books are lent to you. Takes less than 30, well, 20 seconds.

Jan van Eyck goes Second Life — led (& initiated) by Hinrich Sachs, on Friday 27th October, 5 euro entrance, 21.30 – 3.00. http://www.janvaneyck.nl/0_2_3_events_info/arc_06_galanightofthecannibals.html