Bad night’s sleep again, not sure where that is coming from. Feng shui of hotel rooms. Don’t like hotels. Open window too noisy to sleep; closed, nose imitates room and stuffs. Maybe caffeine. Some small cups of coffee during meetings, not just to be polite, but it smells so good. So, wake up before alarm, force the obligatory liter of water down, gradually clear head. body drags along behind. pack, and hobble down to breakfast and wifi access to at least consume croissants and Eudora. And some Firefox. Though belly is fat and getting fatter. Can’t wait for a swim, cycle, something aerobic. But Dirk has made a tight schedule of luxurious 2-3 hour meetings with such an interesting variety of people. And so, this morning, he comes to breakfast a bit after Thomas Laureyssens comes tentatively to my table.
Excellent generation of ideas, intuitive connections, and pathways, dynamically evolving possibility. Thomas is working on a social networking project which aims to create a functional gateway for Belgian new media initiatives.
Brussels as the background. some good food, some short visions, hardly any time to catch the tourist scene, and no photographs made. Nothing missed on that account. Previous visits, the most recent was in 2000 for the closing cafe9.net meeting which ended up in the scandalous shouting match among participants at a Chinese restaurant. So much for European solidarity.
Dirk and Thomas head off after Angelo Vermeulen arrives for a short meeting before I have to catch the train to Maastricht.
Angelo illustrates my dialogue-based worldview with several direct anecdotes which counterpoint his prodigious and stimulating formal creative output. And reminds me a bit painfully the lack of a PhD is a deterrent to social viability. That or a book. So that story haunts again in the background. Text trumps lived praxis, title trumps actual presence. sheesh.
We have lunch at the Brasserie Falstaff with a nice interior where “you can admire the transition from Art Nouveau to Art Deco,” and the staff looking like they should be in a Paris bistro. And the pay toilets governed by a wrinkled old lady. Just the way it used to be. Mais oui! Typically touristic, with a complete backwards look to the future. Tourists would never distinguish that this is not real. Maybe tourists are so conditioned by looking at the world via tele-vision, that when confronted by the real thing, they cannot tell when it is a simulation of something else authentic. Like Disneyland. Seems like a great place to actualize physical presence in the ‘world’ when compared to prime-time teevee. uff!
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Over to Maastricht, train to bus to Rod and Lizbet’s place. Nine years since last time. Catching up on years of remote art, music, books, Iceland gossip. Talk about getting more of Rod’s work online aside from the wiki page that a friend has done—he’s a networker, and a singular one of that breed, a networker’s networker. No time to worry about publicity, the market, promotion. The work and the network are all that counts, matters, all that provides life reason. His output into that network is prodigious, profound, and humane. His archive is priceless, marvelous!
