Made a visit to Museum Het Valkhof in Nijmegen, where archeology and modern art meet. Especially enjoyed the first exhibition of the Cool Collection series, by guest curators Flos Wildschut and Jessica Helbach.
🌱 Blue emperor dragonfly resting on withered white roses.
🎵 My week in music (week #32 2020)
Amidst the heatwave, while tidying up our study a bit (in preparation for the new busy working period coming up), I listened to some fitting classic reggae tunes by Sly Dunbar and Barry Brown.
🎥 Desi (2000) ★★★★
Beautiful documentary about Desi, a young girl in Amsterdam. Everyday after school she has to call around to find a place to sleep. Nevertheless a very uplifting and honest documentary (though with some suspected fictional elements) by Maria Ramos.
Currently reading: Space and place by Yi-fu Tuan 📚
So far, it’s a very inspiring read. The book starts by describing how a young child experiences the spatial world and how that impacts all later experiences in life.
💬 Excellent episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, about U.S. History (although it could be just as well about all of western history)
”The less you know about history, the easier that it is to imagine you would always be on the right side of it”
🎵 My week in music (week #31 2020)
Enjoyed listening to the reissue of African Rhythms 1970-1982 by Oneness of Juju and also very much liked hearing Touch by Eurythmics again.
📺 X Files: X-Cops (S7E12) ★★★★
I wonder if they used the original Cops crew for the actual shooting and editing of this episode? The last lines seem to reveal a bit:
“You didn’t get the proof that you wanted, Mulder”
“Well, hey, it all depends on how they edit it together”
🌱 Blooming Chinese meadow-rue in our garden.
🌱 First Indian Cress flower in our front garden.
Known for Das Elisabeth Linné-Phänomen. Its colour is so bright, it seems to emit flashes at dusk.
🌱 Freshly-harvested raspberries from our garden.
Microbes in the “deadest” part of Earth redefine boundaries of life
- Microbes may be finding a way to reproduce despite the circumstances.
and/or
- The tiny organisms are finding a yet-undetected source of energy.
and/or
- They are living for an incredibly long amount of time.
I’m rewatching one of my childhood favourites. I was expecting the worst, but I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of factual information (although not always accurate). Also a great guest appearance in episode 5 by Johnny Cash as abolitionist John Brown.
🎵 My week in music (week #30 2020).
Highlight of the week was ‘Hound Dog’ Taylor, a ‘true’ blues man:
“He was famous among guitar players for having six fingers on both hands (…) One night, while drunk, he cut off the extra digit on his right hand using a straight razor.”
Love this ‘stoic’ quote by Viktor Frankl:
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Viktor E. Frankl 💬
🌱 This year promises to be a record year for the raspberries in our garden.
📚 From A to B and Back Again - The Philosophy of Andy Warhol ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
🎵 My week in music (week #29 2020)
Listening to Jonny Greenwood’s excellent soundtrack for Norwegian Wood made me want to rewatch the film. But of course it would be better to finally read the book itself…
Perhaps?
“Perhaps one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership in generations.”
📚 Books to read (or to finally finish) this summer:
Andy Warhol - From A to B and back again - The philosophy of Andy Warhol
Yi-Fu Tuan - Space and Place - The Perspective of Experience
Anne Frank - Het Achterhuis
Ron Gorow - Hearing and Writing Music
Seneca - Dialogues
🚴♂️ Will be cycling across the Green Heart of Holland today, en route to our holiday destination on the coast.
📚💬 I keep on quoting Andy Warhol. In unexpected ways he can be like a kindred spirit of mine whilst being the exact opposite of me. As a country boy living in the city, this one stood out to me in this regard.
🎵My week in music (week #28 2020)
Listened to an older work by Sarah Davachi, anxiously awaiting her new album Cantus, Descant, scheduled for September. Also enjoyed listening to Soro by Salif Keita, while reading about his foundation, raising awareness of albinism worldwide.
The best description (by Ben Dolnick in the NYT) I’ve read so far of our collective experience of the Covid-19 pandemic.
”Since March, I (and, more important, the entire human race) have been living inside a set of massive parentheses. Our lives as we knew them before the coronavirus — the subjects of our days marching crisply along, the verbs of our every hour thoughtfully chosen — have been suspended. And until God or Merck blesses us with an end-parenthesis, we are stuck here. Is it Saturday? Would it matter?”
🎵My week in music (week #27 2020)
The Trip (2006), curated by Jarvis Cocker and Steve Mackey is one of those albums I keep coming back to every few months. A classic collection of pop, rock, soundtracks and what not.
