Spam poetry

Good day my friend!

How are you?

I hope all well!

What you interests? 

Than you are engaged, your interests.

My name - Elena.

For me main is heart of the person!

My age is 28 years.

Do not reject my offer.

I shall hope that my letter will not be rejected by you.

I hope you have correctly understood me.

I shall wait your answer.

Elena.

Iain Sinclair lecture

"Any kind of structure I make is like a walk. I don't know quite where this talk will resolve itself. It is like a journey, it detours, it comes back on itself. There are some key things, lizards are waiting over us. It all interconnects in interesting ways, or it falls apart."

Iain Sinclair at Stroom, Den Haag, Netherlands, 25/01/2011

I made a recording of the talk and you can find it here on archive.org.

A few points I wrote down from the talk:

• Does not use powerpoint. Artificial reality is already too much taking over. People believe that computer generated images of “grand projects” really exist. Writers have to create countermyths against this poisonous imagery. Graffiti artists put up counter-images against the Olympic blue fences.
• The Olympic toxic dispersal cell mishap. Poisonous soil mixed with Japanese knot-weed. Will create triffids.
• Holds expeditions to investigate topographies under sentence of death. Memory traces. Landscapes invaded by the machinery of global capitalism. Unnecessarily destroying the local while putting up signs like : “ improving the image of construction” and “we are creating a legacy”.
• A columnist goes into prisons and asks what the inmates are reading. They are all reading David Icke. The wold is controlled by lizards. Looking at Rupert Murdoch you might think he is one of the lizard people.
• William Burroughs might also be one of the lizards. He became so rarefied from his years of drug use. He went to a sweat lodge and the evil spirit of American capitalism left his body in the shape of a helmet. He made painting by shooting a canvases.

Iain Sinclair and Wilfried Houjebek at Stroom, Den Haag, Netherlands, 25/01/2011

Report of a visit to William Burroughs:

• Late afternoon, strong October shadows, goldfish flick across the surface of a pond. A cat watches from the windows of a red clapboard bungalow. The writer William Burroughs is at home, sitting near a table, a drink at his elbow. Lawrence Kansas, nowhere. The locations and accidents and that’s what he says: “Property prices are favorable”. He does some pistol practice and he takes his aches and pains to the sweat-lodge, otherwise he doesn't go out more than he has to. There are helpers for that. There is nothing to say that hasn't been said before. “ This is when they’ll come” Burroughs thought “one endless American afternoon”. Waiting for the sun to sink, waiting for the moon, his hand closing around the glass. An unidentified car making a right turn. He'll notice them, quiet enough for that. Hear what they say, the absence of a convenience store, hear the banalities they say. The rustling of a map coming out of its plastic holder. The electric window, the heavy click of a secret camera. He always knew it would arrive like something out of Hemingway. The killers. Hemingway is good on death. The men in the car would have a cover story that stood up, they would have proper documentation. They would be fixed up for an interview. An that's why these days Burroughs preferred to talk on a telephone. Do it that way, keep chance out of the equation. How it was at the beginning, two nondescript Caucasians. The one in a black coat and the other with a snake tattoo on his left arm “Your name?” Burroughs said. [...]

The lecture includes many other themes: London - council politics - Christopher Wren - change - Rodinsky's room - a dream hospital - conceptual architecture - Will Alsop's mega-city vision - his free bus tour across the whole country - how magically different small parts on England are - the demise of real libraries with real books - the damage done by the London Olympic projects - prohibition of photography - future ruins - mausoleum plan for Winston Churchill - predictive fiction of J.G. Ballard - archaeology in reverse - ghost bicycles.

Plants in a random corner

Last August I walked through the art-college quarter of Rotterdam and I walked onto this building site. The building was almost finished but the sidewalk was a work in progress. Some tough plants had gained a foothold in this inhospitable and fleeting refuge. I decided to do a Wilfried Houjebek and exercise my urban botany skillz.

It is easiest to do botany in situ - with the plant guide next to the plant. But it is November now so had to use the photographs. Still I found 10 species - all very comon pioneer/roadside plants. Isn't nature wonderful? All this vitality for free.

 Rode klaver - Red clover - Trifolium pratense

Geurloze kamille - Scentless Chamomile - Matricaria maritima

Koolzaad - Rapeseed - Brassica Napus

Heermoes - Field Horsetail - Equisetum Arvense 

Engels raaigras - Perennial Ryegrass - Lolium Perenne

Melganzenvoet - White Goosefoot - Chenopodium Album

Grote zandkool - Wild rocket - Diplotaxis tenuifolia

Canadese fijnstraal - Canadian Horseweed - Conyza canadensis

Gewone Veldbies - Field Wood-rush - Luzula Campestris

Varkensgras - Common Knotgrass - Polygonum aviculare

References:

• Weeds - Onkruiden - in Dutch
• Weeds - in English
• Weeds as soil indicators

Noise or message?

I admire the work of William Burroughs and how he describes his work processes:

There is a very definite aura that precedes the emergence of a clear image, a feeling of concentration at a certain point in the painting, then the images come into focus. Often there is a feeling of a three-dimensional vista with depth, cliffs and openings. (William S. Burroughs 1992)

But sometimes I'm puzzled by his work. Should we really value all of it? Does it all have some deeper meaning? Or is it just the famous name that transforms it into "high art"? Take for example the folders:

Burroughs began painting file folders “by accident:” The folders were always at hand, because of his writing profession and constant use of folders to organize his papers. In his painting studio, he began using file folders as pigment-mixing stations and palettes. 

Burroughs soon observed that the folders could be seen as art in themselves. He quotes Paul Klee saying that the way in which a picture is created may be more interesting than the picture itself. Then Burroughs went on, intentionally creating file-folder paintings. In these works, clusters of images rise out of the vigorously automatic, highly gestural brushstrokes. Faces emerge. Animals scream out. (Steven Lowe 1992)

Maybe a Turing test could make things clearer. How easy is it to separate the art from the non-art? The good from the bad?

The results of the [sociological] experiment suggest that in other worlds, with different path-dependent histories of cumulative advantage, our own world’s celebrities might now be languishing in obscurity.

Below are six panels. Two are art and four are non-art. One is Burroughs. Do you see a huge difference in meaning? In aesthetics? Which one would you hang on your wall? How much would you pay for each panel?

If all your friends told you that panel nr. 4 was great and that you should admire it ... would you be able to resist?

Imagine, for example, trying to convince a Harry Potter–obsessed friend that the book’s success was the results of a cumulative advantage process and that the book could have just as easily been a flop (as was predicted by the eight publishers who passed on it). That fan could easily counter that the success of Harry Potter had nothing to do with luck, but stemmed directly from its attributes, which although not what experts in children’s book publishing had anticipated, must have been ‘‘what people wanted’’.

If we replay our world-tape and enter a different path-dependent history then maybe we wouldn't know William Burroughs and we would admire different - now forgotten - artists. The more we try to predict success and the more we try to measure quality the less predictable our world becomes:

Overall, the results provided strong support for the argument that social influence at the individual level is simultaneously responsible for increased inequality and unpredictability in collective outcomes—in this case, the distribution of market share.

Although simple to state, this finding nevertheless exhibits a curious paradox: On the one hand, by revealing the existing popularity of songs to individuals, the market provides them with real, and often useful, information; but on the other hand, if they actually use this information, the market inevitably aggregates less useful information. This result, which is analogous to ‘‘information cascades’’ in economics, suggests, in turn, that social institutions that make us aware of the behavior of others — the New York Times bestseller list, the Billboard album charts, and lists of top-grossing movies — do provide a useful service to individuals, but only at the cost of increasing the overall inequality and unpredictability of the markets themselves.

References:

• ArT Random - William S. Burroughs - Paper Cloud | Thick Pages - First published in Japan 1992 by KYOTO SHOIN INTERNATIONAL CO., Ltd. - ISBN 4-7636-8603-8
• The Matthew Effect: How Advantage Begets Further Advantage, Daniel Rigney
• Web-Based Experiments for the Study of Collective Social Dynamics in Cultural Markets - Matthew J. Salganik, Duncan J. Watts - Department of Sociology and Office of Population Research, Princeton University, Yahoo! Research, May 2009

Two sets of autumn fruit

In October we took a few walks through the "green heart" of the Netherlands. Beautiful and threatened agricultural land between the cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht and The Hague. Exciting for the psychogeographer with its patchwork of meadows, hedgerows, old villages and modern suburbs. Ancient medieval territory where history can be touched. But in places it has been erased completely.

Apples in left column were found in the wild
(garden in Harmelen, fortress in Utrecht).
Apples and pears in right column were bought from roadside box
(farm in Westbroek, orchard in Montfoort).

During our walks I foraged apples and pears. Sometimes I found them in the grass along the road and sometimes I bought them from a roadside box. What a joy to get wild and free fruit straight from nature! It feels much better than the imprisoned fruit from the supermarket.

Apples and pears were bought at the supermarket.

Hidden messages

I was totally blown away by the book Looking for Jake and other stories by China Mieville. Sometimes an author formulates the ideas in your mind - but more clearly and convincingly. That makes me jealous but it also makes me very happy that someone exported "my" idea to public space - and in such a great manner.

Last week I was reminded of this book when I reached the end of my toilet paper and discovered a code.

71604592781

My first impulse was to unroll all my rolls of toilet paper to see if they all had a code - and if they were numbered consecutively. But I know the rest of the household would not approve.

In China Mieville's story Go Between the main character receives containers that are hidden in random household objects that  he buys while shopping. The objects contain an instruction how to pass the object on to someone else. The recipient does not know for whom he works and what messages (or anything else) the objects contain. The one day he receives the message that he has fulfilled his task and that he is dismissed. He never discovers anything more.

Something was in the bread. Morley was cutting, and on the fourth strike of the knife, the metal braked. Behind him his friends talked over their food. Morley prised the dough apart and touched something smooth. He had marked it with a scratch. Morley could see the thing's colour, a drab charcoal. He frowned. It had been a long time since this had happened.

"What's up?" someone said to him, and when he turned his face was relaxed.
"It’s gone mouldy."

He put the bread in the rubbish, where he could reach it again. When the others were gone Morley took the bread out and pulled it apart. From its crumbs he drew a tube, a grey baton that fit thickly in his hand. The line of a seal was just visible at one end. Morley did not open it. He turned it over. There were instructions on it, in small type, embossed as if punched out from within.

CONCEAL BY RUBBISH BIN AT EASTERNMOST EXIT ST. JAMES PARK, it said.
ASAP. YWBC.

The idea of an omnipresent and omnipotent - but invisible - organisation is a very powerful meme. The Rosecrucians, Opus Dei, the New World Order all have taken the roles of those mysterious "THEY" that turn the wheels of the world.

In practice it would be very expensive, error-prone and dangerous to use a "go between" like that. Much better methods have been developed in traditional spycraft like the "dead letter box" and the "brush pass". It's precisely the use of an "impossible" method that makes this story so haunting and the invisible organisation so mysterious and threatening.

But the toilet roll demonstrates that we are really enveloped by an invisible and all-pervasive organisation. It's called logistics. And its power and glory are described in Alain de Botton's The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. This is something for a future blog post.

References:
Looking for Jake - China Miéville
Alain de Botton - The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
Dead letter box
Spy tradecraft

Dark cityscapes

I'm searching for a book in the Rotterdam library. I have forgotten the artist and the title of the book.
I fear they have sold it, but still I keep looking.
From time to time I browse the whole art-section of the library. I still have not found the book I'm looking for.

But often this futile search yields other treasures. For example this Dutch artist - Axel van der Kraan - that I didn't know about. Beautiful woodcuts of industrial cities. Like the "carceri d'ínvenzione" but more modern -  more industrial.


They remind me of the "road to hell" that leads from Charleroi city center towards the old steel factories. This area has always fascinated me.

Charleroi is known as one of the ugliest cities in the world. It is famous in urban exploration circles.

I have visited it often. Now a local artist is doing "urban safari" tours.

Link to German video here. And in French here.
My own visit here: Charleroi city hall and metro.

References:
Axel van der Kraan - Black | Catalogue for: Axel van der Kraan: Zwart 27 april - 15 june 2003 - Museum Jan Cunen - Oss