Oorbeek — the band in which I play the guitar — will be performing here: http://www.muziekgebouw.nl/voorstelling.asp?PageID=2&EventID=17411. That’s next week sunday.

Rumour: there’s a chance that Koichi Makigami will do a guest performance with us.

George “metaphors we live by” Lakoff has a new book, in which — judging from blurbs &c — he analyzes how the Bush-neocons are hijacking the word freedom. Dangerous, because: (quoting now): “Cognitive science has produced a number of dramatic and important results—results that bear centrally on contemporary politics, though in a way that is not immediately obvious. We think with our brains. The concepts we think with are physically instantiated in the synapses and neural circuitry of our brains. Thought is physical. And neural circuits, once established, do not change quickly or easily. Repetition of language has the power to change brains.” Now this might sound ‘too easy’, but it becomes more complex, and this is a book that has to reach out to a large public…

http://www.whosefreedom.com/browse-book/introduction-to-whose-freedom/.

Btw, over here Square vzw — artist organization — has put up a webpage with messages from Libanon — concerning the current Israel – Hezbollah war in Libanon: http://www.squarevzw.be/war/. FYI.

In the Guardian of last saturday I read an edited excerpt from Frances Wheen’s forthcoming book on Marx’ Das Kapital (in a series that is called ‘Books that Shook the World’). It’s also online: http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1814909,00.html.

“By the time he wrote Das Kapital, he was pushing out beyond conventional prose into radical literary collage – juxtaposing voices and quotations from mythology and literature, from factory inspectors’ reports and fairy tales, in the manner of Ezra Pound’s Cantos or Eliot’s The Waste Land.”

Not only did it inspire me to go out and try to buy the book immediately (but it’s not available yet…), it paints such a alluring picture of the book and the style it is written in, that I’m tempted to make Marx’ big book my summer reading…

But then, should I read it in German (all the editions look equally ugly), or pick up the Penguin Classics edition that probably most people are reading nowadays and that, I guess, Wheen cites from…

(Frances Wheen also wrote a very enjoyable biography of Marx.)

“I am my character”. Salon @ Mediamatic, monday July 10th: http://www.mediamatic.net/artefact-11828-en.html.

And the last Metropolis M is all about Fake Identities: http://www.metropolism.org/.

If you want superb comedy: watch and listen to Slavoj Zizek explaining film in A Perverts Guide to Cinema. I was never a fan of Zizek, but now I am. I burst out laughing loud a few times. Zizek says: “with sound we get … the complete edible universe”. (Edible = oedipal). And sure, cultures that do not have toilets do not need psychoanalysis, the whole theory does not apply to them! Zizek is a born comedian! At Youtube: http://youtube.com/watch?v=xegCeH_BavE&search=slavoj. Or is it that television by definition turns theory into parody?

Off to the SLSA-conference. Hope to do some live-blogging. Also Joseph McElroy will be speaking — I’ve never read a book of his, but his name pops up, always, when there’s a mention of both technology and postmodernist fiction…

http://noggs.typepad.com/the_reading_experience/2004/10/joseph_mcelroy.html
http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3040
http://www.josephmcelroy.com/

Benjamin Gaulon put up two new movies which show his Pong-game, played on the wall of an 19th century building in St. Brieuc, during the ArtRock festival there:

http://recyclism.com/deponggame/dePongArtRoc768K_Stream001.mov
http://recyclism.com/deponggame/dePongArtRoc768K_Stream002.mov

More on this work:
http://recyclism.com/deponggame.php

Close Encounters is thet title of the conference where I’ll be speaking for 20 minutes on wednesday 9.00-10.30, in a panel with Tobias van Veen and Trace Reddell. Tobias asked me to propose a paper in the panel that he and Trace Reddell were proposing & we got accepted: http://www.slsa.nl.

So more than 10 years after my 4-year stint as PhD student at the University of Amsterdam ended, “I’ll be back”. Richer qua experience, being more & widely well-read and with a string of published articles in my bag. But also: not having written anything for an academic magazine ever (hmm, or does writing a review for Krisis count?). Also I have never spoken at an academic conference. I am looking forward to 3 days of listening to papers. I hope I will be able to do some live blogging.

Btw, I will be speaking about blogs & mp3-blogs, memory, hoarding, mixing and the transformation of, well, the culture of enjoying music. (Still have to find the right words, les mots justes).

New issue of Will Stuart’s samizdat mag Tourette (Black Rainbow) will be presented next week, tuesday june 6th at De Appel in Amsterdam, from 19.00h on. Expect fotocopied quality text & image that will tickle & soothe the brain. (Or something like that). — It’s not for sale! (But voluntary donations are of course welcome).

I’d say this is another direction which publishing is taking. No distribution, non-commercial, cheap, but high quality content + excellent choice of material. And sort of operating on the brink of copyright-legislation. (Like old-fashioned xeroxed magazines?)

It’s not directly print-on-demand, on the other hand: I’d be interested to obtain a print-out of material that Will Stuart thinks is interesting… I’d give them a voluntary donation for selection + the effort of printing out. (The re-invention of publishing?) So in that sense it is similar to ‘print-on-demand’.

This is already from last week (21th May): the presentation of the Ubiscribe POD. Only now I’m beginning to realize what we’ve done…

PS, left to right: your blogger, Inga Zimprich, Jouke Kleerebezem, Sandra Fauconnier, Claudia Hardi.