Caterina.net

I received the latest issue of Cabinet in the mail yesterday, and in it was an article about artist Elizabeth deMaray's Hand Up Project.

The article has many interesting facts about hermit crabs, such as the fact that 30% of hermit crabs have been found to be inhabiting shells that are too small for them, because of the shell shortage. Hermit crabs will never leave their shells except to change into a new one because it leaves them unsheltered from predators. When they find a new shell, they determine if it is suitable for their needs by a process called fondling. They will claw the shell's surface and roll the shell over and over to determine its internal volume-to-weight ratio. Hermit crabs also take over shells that other crabs have evacuated. Sometimes two or more crabs will happen upon a shell simultaneously, which they find by smell.

I started Caterina.net in 1999 when I was home sick. And during the past two weeks when I was home sick for an extended period, I started another weblog. This one is about business, technology, marketing, PR and a bunch of other things I have been working on since we launched Flickr. These posts didn't seem to belong here on Caterina.net, so I put them up at a new site called Bizwerk.

After a long respite, the comment spammers have found my site again, and so I will, for the most part, stop having comments on this site. I may have to take my archives offline too. It is sad, because I love the dialogues that happen here, but I can't spend any more time managing the comment spam.

We watched three movies this week.

• Man Bites Dog (Belgium, 1992. In French.). I thought I had seen this. If I had, I blacked out the memory. Documentary film crew follows a serial killer around as he "does his work". An astonishing indictment of the filmmakers' and the audience's complicity in filmic acts of violence.
• Rivers and Tides (Germany, 2002. In English) A documentary about the work of Andy Goldsworthy, a land artist who creates ephemeral work with the stuff of nature, organizing leaves in a gradient of their changing hues, for example, or forming sinuous shapes out of icicles, or stacking rocks to form seed-shaped towers that will eventually fall when the tide comes in. A quiet and contemplative film, as befits its subject.
• Capturing the Friedmans (U.S. 2003) Another documentary about a father and son in Long Island who are accused and convicted of child molestation. Did they really do it? You decide. The most amazing part of this picture is that the family had a tremendous archive of film and video taken before and after the arrest. One of the most astounding portraits of a family ever made, in the same realm as The Loud Family and Grey Gardens. Extremely powerful.

But there's more. Next up: The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant. It's summer blockbuster time, in other words, a good time to stay out of the theatres and catch up on classics that have been reissued on DVD.

I stayed up late watching The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant Fassbinder's 1973 film of a play he had written years earlier, then stayed up even later watching it again with the Audio Commentary. The film consists of five scenes, and we never leave the bedroom, which doubles as a design studio.

Margit Carstensen was superb as the title character, Petra Von Kant, a rich, histrionic fashion designer who has just divorced her second husband. She is fantastically anorexic, dresses as if she were going to the opera, and switches into different wigs in each scene of the film. She bullies the silent Marlene, played by Irm Hermann, her secretary and assistant, who appears to be designing all the clothes. Her friend Sidonie, a Baroness, comes to visit, mostly to gloat over Petra's unhappiness following her divorce. And she brings in Karin, played by Hanna Schygulla, a young married woman from the lower classes. Karin married and moved to Australia after her father murdered her mother and then killed himself. She's back in Germany looking to start anew. Petra falls in love with her, and promised to make Karin into a fashion model.

The movie is played out against an enormous photo-mural of Nicolas Poussin's Midas and Bacchus with a naked Bacchus standing in the center. Scenes are framed through the many crossbeams, bannisters and slatted blinds around the room, and several naked mannequins stand like silent, impassive observers, not unlike the mysterious Marlene.

Fassbinder was, by all accounts, a frightening, sadistic and out of control man. He slept with everyone, men and women, did massive amounts of drugs, prowled leather bars, pimped Ugo Kier, threw screaming fits in public, beat women until they ended up hospitalized, brutalized the actors in his films and finally died freebasing cocaine. But he made incredible movies.

Somebody posted this list of the Clean Sweep program on my new business blog, and I've printed it out and put it on my fridge. It is a list of 100 things that you can clean up and finish in order to, well, make yourself perfect and wonderful. Since I became a fish-eating vegetarian about a month ago, and have written 500 words or more every day since about a week ago, I'm scheduled to attain Buddha Nature in approximately 31 days! Watch me as I quit caffeine and sugar and start riding my bicycle to work, with Dos Pesos in the pupoose. Watch me as I rethink my No Pain, No Pain exercise policy. Watch me think benevolent thoughts about people who piss me off   fuck up right royally   are slobbering idiotic mouth-breathers provide me with worthy challenges. Watch me file my 2002 taxes. And if you feel I owe you an apology, by all means let me know, ASAP!

Space Station Originally uploaded by lantern.

This is cool. Lantern uploaded it to Flickr today. A nifty looking space station that you can make yourself. Even better, I found this site that gives a little bit of the history behind it and has the instructions of how to make it. It being 1978, Star Wars mania was in full swing, and this project appeared as a 4 page photographic spread in Woman's Day Magazine, November 20, 1978. You had to clip a coupon and write away for the instruction manual. I remember those terrariums (the half-orb plastic thing) -- they disappeared in the mid-eighties, never to be see again. The coolest part of this space station has to be, as the guy who posted the instructions observes, the monorail, that "symbol of 1970s futurism". Wouldn't this be great with an electric train powered monorail?

Most of the stuff seems to be the kind of thing you can pick up at Home Depot and a place that sells acrylic and other plastics. And there is one item that you need to get from an aquarium store.

There is some amazing stuff on Flickr, such as Motorcycle Crash in front of Eric's House that happened this morning (the guy lived, actually, Eric held his hand until the ambulance arrived). And yesterday I was idly looking out the window of my studio and recorded a drug deal going down. It's not that hard to do, happens about every 10-15 minutes. :) And superhero by night recorded a car on fire near his house.

But talk about local news live from the scene. It's really focused local live news, like having private news channels on the people you care about.

If you're reading Caterina.net using a feed reader, I've switched over to Feedburner, and you can subscribe to my feed here. So far, Feedburner seems to be super useful.

Ray Johnson's Work Originally uploaded by caterina.

We went over to Peter's last night for some pizza and wine and he took out his collection of Ray Johnson's work. He has about a dozen collages that are exquisite and beautiful and had a long correspondence with Johnson just before his death. Ray Johnson, if you're not familiar with him, was the originator of Mail Art, and tangential to the Fluxus movement. He was a diffident man, and died of what seems to have been suicide in 1995. After his death he received a great deal of critical attention, and public attention (ArtForum, ABC News, and so on). The pictures are beautiful -- I only had my cameraphone on me at the time -- and Peter is selling the work, if anyone is interested. His site is here and he can be reached at peter [at] schuyff [dot] com.

I am so happy. I am taking a vacation for the first time in two years. We took five days off for Christmas last year and the year before, but that's all. I am going to be in Amsterdam for an entire month. I chose Amsterdam because I have several wonderful friends there, it was fairly easy for me to find a place (thanks Rogerio!), you can bicycle everywhere and there are a lot of cafes in which to write and draw. I'm going to be working on a series of drawings I started, and continued the great progress I've been making on my book lately. And I'm going to be working about 3-4 hours a day on stuff for Flickr. I'm leaving on Tuesday. Stewart is coming some time in the middle and most likely we're going to visit a friend in France near Lyon.

If any of you out there are from Amsterdam, email me and we can go to some art openings, or have a coffee.

(via xvarenah)

Have you tried Vivisimo yet? It is a search engine that includes Clustering -- i.e. if you run a search for Italy you can then look at relevant clusters of Hotels, Wine, Government, Politics, etc. It's great. I'm switching over from Google.

They really need a new name though.

I've arrived, my flight was fine, the apartment is great, I've taken a bath, will finish my novel, and will have a little nap before I'm here for real.

In A Heart So White, one of the characters, Berta, the protagonist’s friend, belongs to a video dating service where the members send one another videos of themselves prior to arranging a meeting with each other:

A Heart So White, is like Marias’ other novels…perverse, sophisticated, foreboding, strange and brilliant.

Eye/Machine by Harun Farocki Originally uploaded by caterina.

I went to Post CS to the World Wide Video Festival (also home of Mediamatic, which I had a subscription to back when they had a print version). I finally got to see a Pierre Huyghe piece, he of the Big International Reputation, but I was most interested in seeing the Harun Farocki piece that was there, having read the detailed description of another work of his in The Threshold of the Visible World which centered around war and the cultural gaze.

The piece that he had showing at Post CS was called Auge/Maschine I-III which consisted of three double screens shown simultaneously along a wall. The images had been culled from the technology of war, specifically the images generated by the machine "eye". Some of the images were from the Gulf War in 1991, but the images show the arenas of war as seen through the eyes of machines, and the complicity of the human eye in their viewing. The images, originally intended for viewing by war technicians, were broadcast on the international news daily while the war was happening. It was a fascinating and deeply troubling piece. Whose eye is the machine's eye?

• I have been listening to Glenn Branca's Symphony Number 6 (thanks Forrest!), subtitled Devil Choirs at the Gates of Heaven. It is fantastically infernal.
• I have to give the clerk at the Athenaeum Bookstore credit for not flinching at all as I bought Italian Vogue, Business Week, ArtForum and Revolver all at once. Revolver is AMAZING! A band called Slipknot is on the cover, and they look deranged. Italian Vogue is amazing too, but in a way that's probably already familiar to you. I bought these for the drawings I'm working on.
• Flaneurism=happiness.

We were discussing a well known online sociopath when I came across this description of sociopathy.

I know a half-dozen people who are like this.

• Water boils very fast here, being as we are below sea level.
• I left my cameraphone at the restaurant 11 atop Post CS, where I had gone to meet Teike. I didn't notice it was gone until 5 hours later, and I ran back. Fortunately someone had turned it in, but not without taking a couple pictures first. Too bad they weren't of something more interesting. Which gives me an idea for a story, or an episode within a story. A few years ago I borrowed the company digital camera -- this was when digital cameras were very expensive and more rare -- which the creative director had taken home with her over the weekend, and taken a group of erotic photos of herself with her boyfriend with great blackmail potential. These were still on the camera. I was kind enough to erase them without showing them to anybody. I know a few people who would have loved to get their hands on them. She had enemies.
• Someone has gone around sticking little French Flags (the paper kind, on toothpicks) into every dog turd in this neighborhood. It is gross and amusing at the same time. Merde!
• Since I'm cooking for just myself, and not me and the mushroomhater, I can eat as many mushrooms as I want. Fungijoy.

Once again, headlines from around the world tell different stories:

New York Times: White House Says Prisoner Policy Set Humane Tone
The Guardian: Afghan detainees routinely tortured and humiliated by US troops

Kafka Cooks Dinner by Lydia Davis

• There will be a dearth of new photos since I don't have a cable for my cameraphone, or the little bluetooth attachment for my phone and my free data distro service has expired.
• Last night I went to meet up with Peter and Jeff and Bryan at de Balie, where they are having an Adaptive Path seminar (and where they have this horrific wallpaper in the upstairs balcony of a closeup a man's body hair). I also met Marrije, GNE player and fellow booklover, who was taking the seminar, and who gave me a lovely little crocheted bone for Dos Pesos. I wish I could take a picture, it is darling. After the cocktails, we headed over to de Koe, "the cow" where I we had dinner with some Dutchies and BBC folks.
• I have been rereading Mason & Dixon while I am here, one of my favorites.
• I watched Thirteen, and Rogerio has lent me Happiness.
• The other night at the Cafe de Waag Rogerio drank a beer while I had a glass of wine, and he said that one of the wonderful things about his new policy of buying fewer books is that he is slowly reading all the books he already owns. We talked also about Walter Pichler's Prototypen, Constant Nieuwenhuys' Utopian architecture, the island of Yap, where everyone's mouth is red from chewing betelnut, the difficulty of running our own businesses and the sirenlike call of the Regular Job.

Walking around at night in Amsterdam you appreciate the enormous windows on the front of every building. You can see inside most of them, and see Dutch people eating their dinner, or reading a book on the sofa. Someone told me that the reason they have no curtains on their windows is religious and/or cultural: they are not doing anything that they are ashamed to have the whole world see. I wonder too, if this Dutch tendency is why the prostitutes in the red light district also stand in windows.

I went to a great party last night (Thanks Liz!) where I watched the end of the Netherlands-Sweden soccer game. It was a great match, if you didn't see it, it went into overtime and was won by the Netherlands in penalty goals. I sound here as if I know something about sports. I don't.

The first time I used the toaster here, the toast flew all the way across the kitchen and landed in the flower arrangement. The second time, it landed on -- and ruined -- a watercolor I was working on. Today, it sprung at me and hit me in the eye. I tire of its slapstick assaults, and may have to switch to cereal.