• I was also thinking about The Arcades Project when we were in Paris. Benjamin writes, "All collective architecture of the nineteenth century constitutes the house of the dreaming collective." I wandered down the few that I found, disappointed at the unAtgetlike dreamlessness of the window displays -- no corsets, no gloves, no mannequins -- but instead full of t-shirts and Eiffel Tower snow domes.
• The two books that I brought on this trip, Absalom, Absalom and Angels by Denis Johnson, are very Life and Death. I never thought of this category of books before, until I read an interview with Cormac McCarthy in which he says he doesn't like books that aren't about life and death, and I realized that, for the most part, I don't either. I'm still working on my definition of this, but so far it can mean anything from The Stranger to Lolita to Madame Bovary.
• Everything seems to be closed in Bordeaux, except this internet cafe.

Gail and Dean dropped us off at the train station, and it turned out the 11am TGV was sold out so we had to wait for the 2:30 train. I read Absalom Absalom by Wm. Faulkner for four hours, hub-bub rumbling around me distractingly.

On the train between Montpellier and Bordeaux, I noticed that there were a lot of what looked like tree farms. Plots of trees planted 10 feet apart. I was wondering if they were for gardens? or pulp? or lumber? There were some that had clearly gotten too big to transplant, so I thought maybe it was just reforestation. Does anyone know what this is?
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You've already heard about all the uproar in France over LePen of the Front National coming in second during the first round of the presidential elections, ousting prime minister Jospin. We managed to be doing our laundry on the Boulevard du Temple around 5pm where the protest march started up, Trotskyites and Greens and Young Socialists shouting NOUS SOMMES TOUS LES ENFANTS D'IMMIGRES! (we are all the children of immigrants) and wearing stickers that said "J'ai honte!" -- I am ashamed. All kinds of people appeared to be represented. There were many young university students, as you might expect, wearing dungarees and dreads, but also the occasional senior commie and fashion plate. One dude had apparently been shopping for a suitcase when the protest started and decided to join in -- his enormous suitcase had all its tags still on it, and was emblazoned with protest stickers. He was dragging it along in his wake. People who'd apparently been out walking their dogs joined in -- Chiens contre le fascisme.

Later we managed to be having dinner near the Bastille, where the protest had ended up. The police were in full riot gear -- helmets and shields and big boots. They seemed to be indifferent to the protest, and unmoved by the occasional bottle flung in their general direction. But it was all very exciting for us. As Gail pointed out, in the US and Canada, they plan these things months in advance, and have pathetic turnouts. This manifestation appeared to be more or less spontaneous, and impressively well attended. Le Pen Dehors! I say.
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Peter Mayle, suck my pants. I, too, have joined the chorus of Peter Mayle, suck my pants here in Pompignan, where Gail and Dean are spoiling us with wine and 20-yr-old cognac and copious delectabilities. Stewart is presently napping in the famous hammock, and the famous dog is gnawing on a bone at my feet. This morning we went to Quissac, rechristened 'Hackysack' by Mr. Allen, to visit the market and indulge our taste for the quaint. Quaintitude and charmfulness are in great supply here, you just can't exhaust it.
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Still in Paris. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Vin Rouge!
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Travel has a way of putting time out of joint. I'm not sure what day it is anymore, how many days its been since I left home, how many days it will be before I get home, what time it is at home vs. what time it is here. Time has a way of receding in importance, becoming a sheeny silver thing on the horizon, with some interesting attributes, but not worth pursuing until later. I am attending the Numer conference in Paris right now, and spending the days sunk in darkness in the bowels of the Pompidou Center watching slides slide by like so many windows on a southbound train. As always, the best part about these things is running into people that you know from other places and other times or just through the internet and finally meeting F2F. Like Francois from South Africa who recognized me from my picture on caterina.net and Michael Naimark and Golan Levin both of whom once lived in San Francisco, and Kris Malden who I met the last time I was in Paris and who I'm hoping to see tonight.

Yesterday I emerged from the shadow-cave and went wandering around the Marais, looking for Muji, which is a kind of Japanese office supply paradise -- Post-it Notes in earth tones and clear plastic staplers and pressed cardboard portfolios. It was all the rage last year and the stuff is still beautiful, but alot of their design styles had been appropriated by designers everywhere and so their stuff wasn't as remarkable as it was in December 2000. It is a terrible thing that I am so easily jaded, or that the rush of styles is so relentless that one has to dismiss former styles to make room for the new. Or something. I was slightly depressed about consumer culture when I ran into Martha who lives two blocks away from me in Vancouver, and we went and bought a bottle of Merlot at this combination bookstore/wineshop and took it to her apt. on Rue des Rosiers and drank it with Ivan, her friend from Belgrade.

I am missing Dos Pesos. I see the little toutous on the street -- they are very coddled here in France -- and have puppy missing pangs. Missing people, and pets, and places is what regularizes time. 10 daysI think, until I see Dos Pesos again and shlooomp time is concatenated into minutes, hours, days again.
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• The other night at dinner John was talking about the new way of doing business for sustainability, comprising three basic aspects: 1. making money 2. doing good and 3. learning. I may have misheard this, but then yesterday I read Brenda Laurel's Utopian Entrepreneur which bore this out.
• An idea that has been interesting me lately is related to this, and mentioned by Laurel in her book: that private gain is not antithetical to public good, that these are not opposites, as is often said. That businesses can exist for other reasons than making money.More on this later, my time is about to run out on this machine -- I'm at EasyEverything again.

Oh, and I forgot to say, I curated a Mirror Project Gallery this month, Pinkadinkadoo!
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I am here at EasyEverything in Amsterdam, we just arrived last night and are staying at John Thackara's place here (he's a super and brilliant fellow, buy his books).

If you've never been to EasyEverything, it is awarehouse-sized internet cafe. Superfreak is playing on the stereo system here -- Rick James seems to be inexplicably popular here, the Jerry Lewis of Dutch music. I've heard him playing on the radio, in the cabs, even at breakfast translated into muzak. Yesterday in Maastricht there was a Queen muzak medley, and Stewart started singing along over the violinsto Bohemian Rhapsody: Mama just killed a man, put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he's dead. ...um? The international wholesale appropriation of pop music leads to bizarre singalong moments. Like when I was in a cantina in some backwater Mexican burg where half a dozen men in their 60s were playing dominoes while singing I don't want anybody else, when I think about you, I touch myself. The importation of popular culture leads brings strange recontextualizations. I mean, we all know where Superfreak by Rick James fits into our American cultural map, but you'd never play it alongside The Lion Sleeps Tonight which is playing now, unless you were going for a really jolting, snide or ironic postmodern intance. (And now the first few bars of Maggie by Rod Stewart have started up -- have you heard this song, ever, in the past 10 years except on easy listening radio stations?)

The Design Recast conference run by Jouke Kleerebezem in Maastricht was a hoot. I finally met Paul Perry and Rogerio Lira in person, along with Gabriella Marks and Janet Abrams and Malcolm McCullough and Rick Gold and De Geuzen and a bunch of other designers and artists. I took copious notes which I'll condense and think about. Maastricht was a charming town, I loved it. Kute! Dutch architectural design is all it's cracked up to be. We went by all those new apartments on the river (canal?) on the train on the way into Amsterdam. We're planning on visiting them in person.

Right now the guy across from me is advertently or inadvertently playing footsie with me...I can't see him at all but he has some very nice business shoes, recently shined. It's raining here, and Woo! now they're playing some Michael Jackson from the days when he still had melanin and a nose, The Way You Make Me Feel...I'm not sure how I make Michael Jackson feel, but he makes me feel right at home.
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So much to do!
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My parents are here visiting. We were in Victoria this weekend. We are back. I am working very hard. Tomorrow we leave for Europe.

I just found out that I get an automatic two month extension on my taxes because I live outside the U.S. Yay!
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Build Cathedral. Here I am working on a job. Having not worked on a job in months, I forgot how drab and plodding it is. I forgot that the reason you get "paid" to do "jobs" is because it's not something you'd leap up out of bed in the morning raring to do, without the carrot of filthy lucre leading you on. This is not "real work".

"Real work" for me is something you just do as a consequence of being who you are and doing what you do, towards something you believe in -- with money as mere byproduct. I think I'm having a problem of focus. I'm writing page after page of HTML. Not "building the world's most sustainable community" -- which is what the web site I'm building is all about. I have to reenvision this work as that. Someone told me this anecdote recently: You ask two workers laying bricks what they're doing -- they're both doing the same thing -- and one guy says "I'm laying bricks" while the other guy says "I'm building a cathedral". This involves pushing your thinking out to the biggest context in which your actions take place.

Tonight's mantra: Build cathedral, build cathedral, build cathedral.
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The strangely muffled vivid world of Caterina Fake. When I wear earplugs, everything that happens inside my body suddenly becomes amplified. Without all the external distractions, I can hear each breath as it goes in and out, the beat of my heart, and even (I may be imagining this) the blood coursing through my veins. My thoughts are more vivid, forefronted. And if I close my eyes, they are even more so. This is a fantastic discovery.

Now I understand why Jonathan Franzen sometimes worked in this apparently strange and masochistic manner:

It's like turning on the projector in the theatre of your brain. If I could only learn how to write while floating in an isolation tank! (Stewart claims he can read in the shower, but I don't believe him.)
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What the fork! Since when has swindling the customer become the norm for manufacturers of consumer products? They now put 1 oz. of deodorant in containers which used to contain 3 ounces. The toothbrush bristles on overengineered toothbrushes are flattened like an Iowa hayfield mere weeks after purchase. And today I discovered that you can't get away with only purchasing the $19.95 black ink cartridge for your Epson 777 printer, even if you only want to print black and white copies. No no no! You *also* have to purchase the $39.95 color ink cartridge! I am beside myself! What the fork!
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When the writing is going well, like tonight, I feel as if I am generating electricity or something.
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Jim wrote to say the Warhol quote below reminds him of something Stalin said once: "Where there is a problem, there is always a person. When the person disappears, the problem disappears."
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An amusing article about the "holy grail" of various scientific fields. (Sorry, I forgot where this link came from.)
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Marching bands are creepy and surreal. Especially when they march by mid-morning on a Monday along the sea wall, with the trombonist high-stepping it out front, in a red coat and plumed hat, playing some highly avant-garde folderol that sounds vaguely hiphop. One would think one were having bad dreams, but no, there they march.
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