I love art. Growing older I realize that life is just not complete without it. I don’t consider myself an expert – my partner as an art historian is – but I have learned to understand the essence of it. We have done all “the classics” in the more than 20 years we have travelled together, but now we started concentrating on the (emerging) artists of the 21st century, buying (more) books and visiting musea and galleries who stretch our knowledge. And also, putting some savings aside, to buy the occasional work.

Filip had picked up this book at our favorite bookshop Passa Porta. It is delivered with two white gloves, as to not leave any dirty finger prints on the mainly, black pages.

Copyright. Blue Turban, 2016, cover of the book, published 2017 by Stockmans.

This work really stunned me. It is 21st century, for sure, but rooted in the Early Netherlandish portraits. Woaw !

copyright Danielle van Zadelhoff, Madonna with Child, 2015.

copyright Danielle van Zadelhoff, Mystery, 2014.

Categorieën:art, Uncategorized

getagged:art, danielle van zadelhoff, photography

mcluhan revisted

everyone and everything is a story

Geplaatst op december 25, 2017

I have read “Understanding Media : the extensions of man”, Marshall McLuhan’s masterpiece a long time ago.

The medium, or process, of our time – electric technology – is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted. Everything is changing – you, your family, your neighborhood, your education, your job, your government, your relation to “the others”. And they’re changing dramatically.

“Understanding Media”, Marshall McLuhan, originally published 1964. Reedited 2003, Gingko Press, critical edition by W. Terrence Gordon.

But only recently, at Tate Modern’s bookshop, I came across “The Medium is the Massage”, by both Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, co-ordinated by Jerome Angel. It is the sort of book that is very popular today and which you find at the counter near the cash desk of your favorite bookstore. But this blend of text, image and photography was quite unique for the ’60.

I gave it a five star on Goodreads and made it one of my preferred books as it is very, very topical today. Just change ‘electric’ by ‘digital’ and your are in the middle of today’s media crisis.

Republished by Penguin Modern Classics, 2017.

your neighborhood

Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of “time” and “space” and pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men. It has reconstituted dialogue on a global scale. Its message is Total Change, ending psychic, social, economic, and political parochialism. The old civic, state and national groupings have become unworkable. Nothing can be further from the spirit of the new technology than “a place for everything and everything in its place”. You can’t GO home again.

Categorieën:books, media, media & democracy

getagged:2017, jerome angel, marshall mcluhan, quentin fiore, the medium is the massage, understanding media

death cleaning

everyone and everything is a story

Geplaatst op december 17, 2017

When I picked up this book at my favorite bookstore, I thought this was written by an undertaker, describing how she prepares corpses before they are coffined. However “The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning” by Margareta Magnusson is not at all about dead people. It is about people cleaning their houses at an elder age. Or – tout court – by anybody who wants to sort out her stuff.

“The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning”, Margareta Magnusson, Canongate, 2017

Margareta Magnusson being “between eighty and a hundred” is a graphic artist from Sweden who lived all over the world. In this memoir she is cleaning her apartment, sorting out what stuff she still wants to keep, what she wants to give away and what she wants to sell. Plenty of memories accompany this action. And she is experienced : she did it before when she moved from a house to a flat after her husband died. And occasionally she helped others sorting it out. “Death cleaning”, they call it in Sweden (*).

Margareta Magnusson

The places where I reside (Geneva, Brussels and many hotels) have plenty of room to store whatever I would want to keep. But over the last few years without realizing it I seem to have been death cleaning myself, keeping only what is really dear to me.

When I met my partner, now twenty years ago, we lived separately. He in Ghent and I in Brussels. When after a year he moved in with me and later when we bought a house together now fifteen years ago, we merged our belongings. I had bought my furniture at Morres Wonen in Hulst. Filip had invested in a antiques. Until recently our home was this mix of the two. But today after some recent renovations, we now live in a house with furniture that ultimately we bought together, selling or giving away the original furniture.

For sure, there are also the personal belongings like books, papers, notes, clips, photos, … put the digital disruption made me move most of it to the cloud. I did away with hundred of mostly management books, and now keep only what is fiction and art.

I guess that from now on death cleaning is a permanent business.

(*) Döstädning, or the art of death cleaning, is a Swedish phenomenon by which the elderly and their families set their affairs in order. Whether it’s sorting the family heirlooms from the junk, downsizing to a smaller place, or setting up a system to help you stop misplacing your keys, death cleaning gives us the chance to make the later years of our lives as comfortable and stress-free as possible. Whatever you age, Swedish death cleaning can be used to help you declutter your life, and take stock of what’s important.

Categorieën:books, me, myself and I

getagged:death cleaning, margareta magnusson, the gentle art of swedish death cleaning

dying, a memoir

everyone and everything is a story

Geplaatst op september 16, 2017

No, I haven’t become religious; that is, I haven’t experienced a late conversion to a particular faith. If that means I’m going straight to hell when I die then so be it. One of my problems with religion has always been the idea that the righteous are saved and the rest are condemned. Isn’t that the ultimate logic of religion’s ‘us’ and ‘them’ paradigm ?

Now my summer of reading memoirs has almost come to an end, I finished the last page of “Dying, a memoir” by Cory Taylor. And I realize that the circle is round. In “Between them” I started reading about the kid Richard Ford who was almost not born because his parents lived happily in the bubble the two of them were. Dani Shapiro showed me a picture of her 20 year marriage in “The Hourglass” and now Cory Taylor describes how it all ends. Being the child you always stay to be, being a spouse, being a mother, being Cory.

I’d like to be remembered by what I’ve written. As somebody warned me, if you don’t tell your own story, someone else will.

The book is not, what you might expect, the story of the cancer killing her. The cancer plays a role, but a minor one. It is about Taylor assessing her life, her relation with her parents, her brother and her two sisters, her husband and her two sons. You might expect for someone dying to be conciliatory, but that is not the case here. She loves her mother and hates her father. She connects well with her sisters but is hard on her brother.

Saying the things such as they are, is good but wouldn’t it be much better to do so whilst you still have the chance to build. Being able to say whatever you want with friends and family is the value I appreciate most in relations. It ultimately makes everybody stronger and makes you move on together.

“Dying, a memoir”, Cory Taylor, The Text Publishing Company, Melbourne, 2016

Categorieën:books

getagged:cory taylor, dani shapiro, dying a memoir, memoir, richard ford

the incest diary

everyone and everything is a story

Geplaatst op augustus 5, 2017

I had to tick off two more books for my summer read : “Dying. A Memoir” by Cory Taylor and the story I just read “The Incest Diary” by Anonymous.

A mouse who lives in a warm nest where it is fed will venture out and then, when frightened, rapidly return to its home. A mouse who has an uncomfortable nest – where it experiences pain and lack of food – when out of its nest in a place with warmth and food, and then suddenly frightened, will also return home, just like the other mouse. Experiments with other animals proved the same – when an animal is scared, it goes home, no matter how terrifying home is.

It is strange to read a book by “anonymous” with a cover so sober. But it kept me focused today. I had some shopping in town, like picking up this book at my favorite bookshop Passa Porta, but I had finished it, before I got home a few hours later.

Nothing can explain away incest but it is strange to read this story where the daughter enjoys serving her father and where the father is the victim of his wife being depressed. Sometimes things are just f*cked up, and with incest it is probably often the case.

I had some doubts whether this book was a testimony or just well written fiction. But this book can’t just be fiction if what is told here is so close to reality.

This book is a must read and I thought of buying some copies to hand out to friends. But then it scared me … what if … my reader is a victim herself or himself ?

Just read it.

“The Incest Diary”, by Anonymous, Farrar Straus and Giroux, New York, 2017

Categorieën:books

getagged:the incest diary

memoirs

everyone and everything is a story

Geplaatst op juli 19, 2017

I realize that sometimes – although not really planned – I read per author (all of Armistead Maupin) or per theme (all about art deco). As a teenager I read plenty of books on parapsychology. Checked some bookshops recently and anything on the topic seems hard to find now. Not surprisingly I did away with my collection some time ago.

Reviewing the two books I have read so far during my holidays, I seem to have fallen for memoirs. They are real life stories.

In “Hourglass. Time, memory, marriage” the celebrated writer Dani Shapiro looks back on the eighteen years she spent with her husband. An adventurous war correspondent, who became the caring father of her now sixteen year old boy. Memoirs make you think of your own life. This autumn I will be twenty years the partner of my partner. The best friend of my best friend. Nothing better could happen in my life. We are an (almost) open book to each other – entitled to some secrets – but I wonder if I would ever want our “open book” to be published. I write a lot myself and publish them on blogs like these or deliver them in speeches, but I write in journals as well (with titles like “personal”, “seven x zen” or just “photo”) by means of therapy and want them to be closed. Sealed in my soul. Writing is creating order in my chaos, but in the reflection also creating chaos in my orderly world.

Perhaps writing-off-things was also the reason why Richard Ford produced “Between Them. Remembering my Parents”. How boring our lives may sometimes feel, our stories are rich. That was the core message of the book “Everything is a Story” I wrote some years ago. I think we all should write the story of our parents, because ultimately their story is ours. Capture whatever we have observed during our life with them or whatever they wanted to disclose. Read in between the lines. Read in between the two of them. Ford wrote about his mother just after she died in the eighties. Now he also wrote about his father and bundled the two in this book.

Writing is a process. Much of my writings happen in my head before I put it them on paper (or on screen). This blogpost was no different. And this morning when I picked up The New York Times (my iPad edition), this book cover captured my eyes :

Another memoir it seems. A title, no author.

Here is what Dwight Garner says in the newspaper about the book : “In war stories, as in memoirs of abuse and genocide, a recitation of facts will suffice. In this book an anonymous writer tells the story of being raped by her father, starting when she was three. This prolonged sexual abuse continued throughout her childhood until she began, in a dire form of Stockholm syndrome to crave it”.

It is the memoir I have to read next. Just to realize that not every story is a happy one. That not all parents care for their most precious gifts.

Categorieën:books, me, myself and I, stories

getagged:between them, dani shapiro, richard ford, the hourglass, the incest diary

florbela espanca

everyone and everything is a story

Geplaatst op juli 8, 2017

I have been in Lisbon before, but early June I travelled there with the Executive Supervisor of the Eurovision Song Contest to kick of the 2018 edition of the show. These sort of meetings are landing around 8 AM and taking of around 7 PM. Enough time to have a meeting at the broadcaster’s headquarters and to have a glimpse of the city.

Although as EBU Media Director I am “Switzerland” and thus neutral, I was happy that Salvador Sobral won in Kyiv. He, his sister and the song had a unique authenticity. Upon landing in Lisbon I immediately found that same authentic authenticity. Plenty of small book and music shops promoting local culture. This is exactly what the core DNA of the Eurovision Song Contest is all about.

I bought myself a compilation of “Lisbon Poets” and have savored them over the last few weeks. Fernando Pessoa is great and comes in many dimensions – or personalities – but I was stunned by what Florbela Espanca produced in her short lifespan (1894-1930). She committed suicide at a young age and was not the only Portugese poet to do so.

To give you just a first impression :

To love !

I want to love – love madly !

Love just to love – here … there … and beyond …

Him over there, and him right there, and everybody …

Love ! Love ! And not love anyone !

Remember ? Forget ? Doesn’t matter ! …

Become attached, or grow distant ? Is it wrong ? Is it right ?

Anybody who says you can love someone

for your entire life is flat lying !

In every life there is a springtime :

it must be sung of once it blooms,

for if God gave us voices, why then we must sing !

And if one day I’ll be dust, ash, and nothingness,

them may my nighttime be a dawn,

may I learn to be lost … so that I can find myself …

Categorieën:books, inspiration, Uncategorized

Jean Philip De Tender

everything is a story

danielle van zadelhoff

everyone and everything is a story

Geplaatst op december 29, 2017

mcluhan revisted

everyone and everything is a story

Geplaatst op december 25, 2017

death cleaning

everyone and everything is a story

Geplaatst op december 17, 2017

dying, a memoir

everyone and everything is a story

Geplaatst op september 16, 2017

the incest diary

everyone and everything is a story

Geplaatst op augustus 5, 2017

memoirs

everyone and everything is a story

Geplaatst op juli 19, 2017

florbela espanca

everyone and everything is a story

Geplaatst op juli 8, 2017