Life is elusive,

and yet, this does not take away our curiosity, our longing to mean and understand, shape and change other's perceptions and hence exert power.
Therefore, it was very refreshing for me to meet artists that do all these through other means, in a more impulsive, explosive way than I choose to. The setting was a party we went with James, but also
zoete-broodjes
bezembinder
(more in dutch)



I spent my afternoon in the Dutch Resistance Museum (see the highlights). Such museums are naturally useful for the younger generations etc, but for me it explains quite a lot of details of why things are the way they are here. One major example (think about the institutional repercussions as well) is the signifier: the war. In Turkey, "the war" refers to the First World War, which includes the Independence War as well. In most of Europe, and surely in the Netherlands, "the war" is the Second World War. (To my surprise, in the US, it referred to either the civil war, or WWII, or the occupation of Iraq depending on one's origin or the context.)

Finally, talking of war, John Bellamy Foster's piece on climate change is worth having a look at (A New War on the Planet?).