take the bus from Maastricht, Rod sees me off at the bus stop just 100 meters east of the border. arrival in Hasselt, waiting for the free bus to the Grote Markt seems a waste of time, and indeed it is only a 5-minute walk to the hotel. (after being in Berlin, when consulting a map, the scalar sizes of cities is suspect). another bed, another random coagulation of humans - a workshop, seminar, conference, happening. begin to meet folks. chili dinner with early arrivers. negotiating some flexibility in the pre-formed structures. more notes on this later.

Rod and Magnús is visiting Rod because they want to rehearse two parts of a three-voice spoken-word performance in Berlin in September. I hadn't seen Magnuús since some performances he choreographed at the HafnarHusid in Reykjavík in 2000 or so. got filled in on the Maastricht, Iceland, and Jan van Eyck Akademie mafia histories. interesting! (audio also to come some day!)

the weather is splendid. outrageously nice for this time of year. not a cloud in the sky since leaving Berlin.

make it over from Amsterdam to Rod & Lizbet's place in Maastricht just on time at 19:00 for a fine fish dinner. another visit. Magnús is there already. nice to be back. audio forthcoming from the weekend -- what more to expect with a bunch of sound artists hanging out! I'll be helping Tom work on the VEC site which is a platform he constructed to showcase Rod's work. more on that later as well. always too many things to get done.

in transit. first trip in two months. to Amsterdam. it takes about 6 hours door-to-door from my place to Raul & Truis's place on Overtoom. May Day. turns out that May Day really isn't celebrated so seriously in Netherlands, so I'm told. unlike the heavy things that go on in Berlin. nice to catch up with them. I help Raul deal with fridge magnets for an exhibition in Bogota.

head down to have dinner with Udo and some of his neighbors last night, there is a heavy police preesence all along Petersburger Strasse, Mercedes van after Mercedes van line the street each with a contingent of traditional green, or the new dark blue, or the black-clad Polizei (colors in order of the increasing necessity to avoid confrontation with, I believe.) Straßensperre durch die Polizei. dinner is wonderful in his space, though I feel a little guilty that English is donned on my account. I learn more about May Day in Berlin, though, where there are usually confrontations with little historical relevance, mostly just fun between cops and kids rioting. also learned about a small town where on May day eve, boys in the town would bring birch trees to lean against the windows of the girls that they fancied.

Experiments, that they become always more necessary the more one is advanced in knowledge; for, at the commencement, it is better to make use only of what is spontaneously presented to our senses. -- Descartes

in response to this question posed by Annick Bureaud on the [new media curating] list (in a discussion about access to digital information:

The question might be : how much do you (really) pay to get access to a document, how much the people who have worked to provide the access to this document are paid, who (ultimately) pays for this service?

sotto voce: The cost you pay is directly correlated to the depth of your embeddedness, your degree of participation in the techno-social system. For example, to simply 'own' a laptop, I calculated over the past 15 years I spend around USD 120 / month. This does not include cost of upgrades and peripherals, telecom, electrical, or other costs. This is only having the machine sitting on my lap. Of course, to participate in the techno-social system that 'allows' me to make a posting to this list, or to receive incoming postings, requires much more than that single expense. There are ways of minimizing or reducing the relative level of participation, but in a developed country, there are absolute minimums which, if I slide under, I remove myself from any ability to participate. Things like a fixed address, a bank account, a national ID number, a passport -- each of which demands a certain set of other fixity/stability in regard to the system (which demands this to support its continued viability). I 'pay' for the privilege primarily by spending some of my life-time in the service of propping up that techno-social system. Spending life-time in participating in system-sanctioned interaction with others who are also seeking legitimacy within the system. When I spend that life-time, it's gone, I don't get it back. I convert some of that resource, life-time, life-energy into an abstracted currency which allows me the 'freedom' to convert my life-energy into other sanctioned expressions of the techno-social system for my perusal and consumption. Through participating I lend my life-energy as a signature of legitimacy of the entire techno-social system that I am helping to prop up as a participant. What a system 'sanctions' is not always clear, but in the long-term, it is anything that promotes my participation in the system in such a way that the system profits in using my submitted energies in expressions that it deems necessary to its survival (not mine!)... The ultimate payee in any social system are the individuals who participate in the system, at whatever level -- through the spending of life-time (think, for example, 'paying attention') into that system. There are relative 'winners' and 'losers' depending on how you judge the relative punishments and rewards meted out by the system as it seeks your optimal participation. I think that refusing participation at the degree of whether or not to publish based on an ideological detail within the system is a very small incremental shift in paying slightly attention to the 'dominant' system and slightly more to a subset of that dominant system. I use the word subset because the dominant system includes the entire globalized techno-social infrastructure of telecommunications and digital devices upon which in both cases we are totally dependent. In order to participate in this forum here (as one possible niche, taz, where we can play for a time, before going back to paying attention to the dominant system ...) or to write about these subjects or to circulate at all, we are dependent. I can understand the refusal as a statement against the hegemonic power of that system, and BRAVO for that. But what about a refusal to use tele-communications and instead only transmit orally the ideas to one person at a time. (Yeah, why not -- what is it about numbers and spatial reach that so seduces us to believe in our own 'influence' on others..?) Imagine that, if everyone on every mailing list in the world would instead take the same amount of time they spend in eye-lid-locked paralysed point-of-view gazing at the screen and instead engaged with those humans which were immediately around them... some musings...

finding the wall. on a stroll with Jim and MH for a splendid afternoon, cloudless sky, 20C in the shade. not bad, well, to be honest, pretty damn nice weather after all the cold crap in the preceding weeks. find the wall, The Wall, wandering through Friedhof der Sophiengemeinde, and there it is, a preserved section, along with a pile of grave markers, and a row of stacked pieces of The Wall, crumbling away slowly, rebar showing. head home after dinner. tired in the relative heat.

Dialogic relations have a specific nature: they can be reduced neither to the purely logical (even if dialectical) nor to the purely linguistic (compositional - syntactic). They are possible only between complete utterances of various speaking subjects ... Where there is no word and no language, there can be no dialogic relations; they cannot exist among objects or logical quantities (concepts, judgments, and so forth). Dialogic relations presuppose a language, but they do not reside within the system of language. They are impossible among elements of a language. -- Mikhail Bakhtin

yes, spring does arrive. the chestnut tree outside the back windows rather suddenly bursts into a leafy presence that only the chestnut can express. added advantage is that it blocks the view into and out of the windows, replacing too-near humanity with ... green.

We do not need to invent sustainable human communities. We can learn from societies that have lived sustainably for centuries. We can also model communities after nature's ecosystems, which are sustainable communities of plants, animals, and microorganisms. Since the outstanding characteristic of the biosphere is its inherent ability to sustain life, a sustainable human community must be designed in such a manner that its technologies and social institutions honor, support, and cooperate with nature's inherent ability to sustain life. -- Fritjof Capra

when describing what I observe in the world, I can choose which pre-existing configurations (of an existing language) to use. this will determine the audience. pictures on a wall. objects in a room. speeches, houses, meals. presence. and absence.

movement, nomadism. the restless need for an alternate point-of-view. could this have erupted in that caged feeling of family? being the hamster in the cage and being poked with sticks through the bars. looking for a safe corner somewhere in the bar-delimited space. but never finding it. never safe from those tortuous energies raging around the enclosed space of relation. no escape. with the ultimate result being to curl up in a ball, fetal, and accept the brutality that life brought along. insecurity, fear, and above all, a deep lack of trust in those Others.

now, to trust? how to trust when the early lessons were all about how never to trust. sad eff-ing state of affairs. broken trust. that was the chief operating principle in the meta-structure of family. a self-fulfilling distortion of human relation. breaking the cycle by re-discovering what it is to trust. recalling the trust expressed by friends through their open welcomes and open doors.