Here's to you Nicola e Bart

This moving tune has been haunting me for the last few days.
No idea where it came from, except that when your mind doodles around in search for melodic lines that matter, tunes that matter tend to pop up.
It may have something to do with the time of year, just before Easter.
When checking the facts just now, I read that they were sentenced to death on 9 April 1927...

So here's to these two men, whose suffering nearly caused a global revolution, 85 years ago.

"If it had not been for these things, I might have lived out my life talking at street corners to scorning men.  I might have died, unmarked, unknown, a failure.  Now we are not a failure.  This is our career and our triumph.  Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man's understanding of man as now we do by accident.  Our words - our lives - our pains -nothing!  The taking of our lives - lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fishpeddler - all! That last moment belongs to us - that agony is our triumph."
(Statement attributed to Bartolomeo Vanzetti, shortly before he and Sacco were executed on the electric chair, in May 1927)

Spanners

One of the most endearing remarks I came across recently was by a man characterizing his own face as looking like "a box of spanners".
It reminded me of this 'drawing' I made in 1993.
The first thing that struck me was its messiness. I remembered it as being rather neatly drawn, with every single detail copied from the actual spanners, including the actual shape and outlines of the spanners themselves. The latter is completely missing. I never drew the shapes.
The inexorable urge of memory to embellish had struck again. It's just a bunch of names and numbers and a few hints at how they were made and what material they were made of. There's absolutely nothing on the page that remotely looks like a spanner. It is difficult to explain why I felt I had to copy the spanner inscriptions. I remember that at the time I was suddenly struck by the beauty of some of those tools, how their design was the result of practical usage and standardization through the ages, and how they had to have a minimal quality to be usable at all. Also, I was in the middle of a restoration project of an old Italian motorbike, and I had been worrying about the quality of my spanners. The bike was old school high quality, and I couldn't possibly take a low or even medium quality spanner to that beautiful machine. Another thing that struck me is that there aren’t any British-made spanners here; they’re German, Swedish, French, and one is from India. Maybe it’s because the British continued using their Imperial (inch-based) standard for so long, that their tool-making never really invaded the continent.

Finally there is this enigmatic word “aition”. It is the Greek word for “cause”, a concept which is difficult to define, strangely enough. Cause is from Latin “casus” which basically just means ‘as it falls’, or ‘as it has fallen’, ie. as the case may be. But that sounds rather trivial, doesn’t it. The Greek aition, however, means ‘that to which something else is indebted’, and that seems to have a lot more weight in terms of how we once stood in the world. So when we dug up the earth, and caused it to yield copper or tin by heating, we were owed something. When we used a clump of bronze to create a helmet we were owed something. Sure, it was a matter of cause and effect, of instrumentality, but at the same time we were building up a debt, against the gods, against mother earth, and against each other. Whenever we created something that didn’t exist before we created a debt, and a duty of responsibility. When we took something out, we realized we had to put something back. The bringing forth of anything was intimately related to being responsible. I believe this ancient way of thinking has continued right up to this day in the minds of artisans, craftsmen and artists. Unfortunately, it has not continued to inform those involved in commercial mass production.
My spanners became the symbol for the medium between me and the makers of the machine, allowing me to physically interact with the machine, get to know it, see the beauty of the details and craftsmanship, gradually gaining familiarity with her soul, and that of her makers.

Butterfly

A little butterfly
fluttered by and
landed on the table.
Right in front of me.

Its brown speckled wings
moved, almost imperceptibly,
up and down, at about
100 beats per minute.

After a minute or so,
it flew up, only to land
on my right hand.

He sat still
for just a moment,
then twirled upwards,
in a spiral, and landed
on my left arm.

All the while I talked to him,
speaking softly,
and admiringly.

Then he flew off, describing
two widening spirals in the air,
avoiding several large spider webs.

It felt like we waved our goodbyes
like two old friends,
after an afternoon riding
on their motorbikes.

Travelling through Suffolk

The landscape transforms itself in front of you, from a near Dutch flatness and a Mondrian 2-dimensionality to long flowing sensual waves that you caress via the road you're driving on. Those roads are ancient, pre-roman. Expressions of needing to get from here to there, of movement and transformation.
You're communicating with the land, via that path, once begun by a few goats, perhaps. Or people, who didn't want to be where they were now. That's my definition of traffic: not wanting to be where you are now.
I am reminded of Mondrian's dunes, and that one drawing of a nude (Agaath Zathreus?), which was discovered only a few years ago. There's a tantalizing similarity between his dunes and the nude, frozen movement, yet forever dynamic the moment you behold them, expressions of love, pure desire, lust.
In the distance I hear echoes of Barbara Hepworth's words about her first experience of the Yorkshire landscape by car, which inspired her work as a sculptor:

"All my early memories are of forms and shapes and textures. Moving through and over the West Riding landscape with my father in his car, the hills were sculptures; the roads defined the form. Above all, there was the sensation of moving physically over the contours of fulnesses and concavities, through hollows and over peaks - feeling, touching, seeing, through mind and hand and eye. This sensation has never left me. I, the sculptor, am the landscape. I am the form and I am the hollow, the thrust and the contour."
(From: Extracts from Barbara Hepworth, A Pictorial Autobiography, Bath, 1971)

These words were written on the wall in the Hepworth Museum in St. Ives, and they gave me goose bumps when I first read them, many years ago.

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Official Google Blog: Ten years and counting

Official Google Blog: Ten years and counting

Happy Birthday !

I switched to Google search about nine and half years ago.
The first thing I searched was a wholesaler in kitchen tiles.
I only had the name, and knew the company was located somewhere in my neighbourhood,
a rural bit of Holland in the Leiden/ The Hague area.
I entered the name I'd heard, and the word tiles (in Dutch).
Within a fraction of a second the company's website was on my screen, listed as the third hit.
I checked the other search engines I was using at the time, and none of them included the name I was looking for.
So that was the magic moment that I got hooked on Google.

As long as you stick to your slogan "Don't be Evil", and keep taking it very seriously indeed, I will stay for another while.
as of course Google will too.

Good luck!

Christmas shopping in Amsterdam

A man enters the Hajenius tobacconist, on the Rokin, between the Dam and Mint Square.

To his surprise he finds two young (30ish) ladies of astonishing beauty behind the counter. Both dressed very well, one very elegant, in black dress with a high neck line, the other very colourful, with low-cut blouse, showing a lot of cleavage, and about 50% of her extraordinary alabaster bosom. Her face made up, looking kind of posh-sluttish, with lips painted bright red. Amazing instance of oxymoronic experience, with a hilarious effect. After all, Hajenius is the oldest cigar maker and dealer in the Netherlands; the shop itself about 200 years old, unchanged, and usually its attendants are middle-aged gentlemen dressed in tasteful suits and ties.

The man immediately went into slow-down action mode. He was being served by the elegant girl in black dress, but couldn’t keep his eyes off the other one. This suitably coincided with the fact that the wall behind the counter displayed packets that looked like they contained cigarettes way over to the right, which forced him to look to the right, to peruse that part of the wall, but which allowed him really to have his eye balls fixated on the bosom display.

After all, what he was after were not cigars, but real tobacco cigarettes, which he hoped were obtainable at this centre of tobacco excellence. So he asked the girl in the black dress if they sold these, in rather long-winded fashion. But no, they did not sell cigarettes, only cigars. But what about those small boxes that looked like they might contain cigarettes? but no, they were tiny cigars. So, oh, alright, I think I will try one of those then. Which would you recommend?

In the meantime, the alabaster bosom is getting out several king size cigars for another, young male, customer, who’s noticeably suffering from similar symptoms, ie. taking a long time to formulate what he wants. As it happens, it is a large format cigar as a present for his dad or some such purpose. She gets a few out and puts them on the counter, and the young man hesitantly asks how you actually ‘use’ them, as she starts carefully taking them out of their tubes, bending deep over the counter, outing her bosoms even more.

At that point the man chuckles loudly, and starts getting Monty Pythonesque visions. His chuckle sets off all four of them chuckling, and he wonders what the girls are actually thinking. Like, we were put here with the sole purpose of selling something to every person setting foot in the shop, 99% of customers being male, and irresistably attracted to our counter where we, gorgeous girls, do the selling?

After completing his purchase, in the slowest possible fashion, the man wanders over to a display with traditional Ronson lighters, asking about the cost of those nowadays, and how he used to have one, but lost it etc. etc. thus allowing him a little longer shop time. Then, when it becomes clear he’s not about to buy one, his time is up, and he concludes he’s made the best of a special moment, and leaves the shop, his mood somewhat improved.