Magdalena O!

My parents made me “supervise” my seventeen year old brother in the suburbs last weekend. I made him and his two friends watch two hours of Millionaire Matchmaker, and they all fell in love with Patti. They also let me take some photos of them hanging out.

more on flickr.

I stumbled upon Angela’s blog, “Totally Not Depressed” from Sara A‘s lavish praises and today in my RSS feed I found her posting this D.H. Lawrence poem. I follow her blog because it’s kind of awkward, well written and full of carefree photographs I wish I could take at parties. I think she works for Vice and might have been a former model or still is. The fragmentation of knowledge of people and their lives through blog following fascinates me.

Anyways, the poem hits the spot and is another reason I should continue reading those Lawrence books protruding from my bookshelves. I went to BMV and bought a bunch of them after discovering Anais Nin analyzed his writing intently in D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study.

The Mess of Love  / D.H. Lawrence (1929)

We’ve made a great mess of love
Since we made an ideal of it.

The moment I swear to love a woman, a certain woman, all my life
That moment I begin to hate her.

The moment I even say to a woman: I love you! —
My love dies down considerably.

The moment love is an understood thing between us, we are sure of it,
It’s a cold egg, it isn’t love any more.

Love is like a flower, it must flower and fade;
If it doesn’t fade, it is not a flower,
It’s either an artificial rag blossom, or an immortelle, for the cemetery.

The moment the mind interferes with love, or the will fixes on it,
Or the personality assumes it as an attribute, or the ego takes possession of it,
It is not love any more, it’s just a mess.
And we’ve made a great mess of love, mind-perverted, will-perverted, ego-perverted love.

I called up my hair stylist and said, “chop chop” // So today after eight years I am a girl again // One of my friends Yuula also just cut her hair off !

Riding my bike never felt like this before.

an avatar J created for me in Pixen in 2005

Being on the computer since I came to Canada and exclusively on a Mac*, creates a specific type of sentiment for oldskool gaming. Every once in a while I stop by Macintosh Garden to see if anything has been added to the coolest accessible website featuring Mac OS abandonware & shareware games, such as the addicting Where in The World is Carmen Sandiego? Oh how proud I was with my 1992 Almanac when my parents got me the game. Leisure Suit Larry (!!!) going along the porn market VHS trend & the old Sim games which kept me up for hours when I was little… right. As if the same doesn’t happen now. Something about playing Sim games which makes you lose total track of the time, reality and whatever else is supposed to matter. I enjoy fast paced technology and the beauty of new games but there’s something about a game file that is less than 1MB. It’s been long enough, or rather computer games have evolved so fast that the nostalgia is already there. With that, I find pixel art and pixel King’s Quest style art/games/flash is becoming popular. The quintessential pixel bible 1 x 1: Pixel-Based Illustration & Design published in Spain is a must. Luckily I managed to score it on mega discount off Amazon. Anyone insterested in Pixel Art on a Mac platform pick up the free Pixen. Fun ! Hot ! What did kids do before computers? Geez. More often created for Windows but emulation software is also totally cool, or else how could I play the new King’s Quest games. Variable Media has a lot to say about emulation technology as means of preservation. Or you can be on full geek-out mode with the Machine Emulator that ‘Also check out The Generative Crash which combines computer games and Baudrillard (what’s there not to love about that combination?):

What is emulation? The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘emulate’ as ‘to imitate with the object of equalling or excelling; to vie with, rival’; indeed, the word comes from the latin aemulus, rival; it appears in Hamlet as an adjective meaning ‘ambitious’. It also, denotes a phenomenon within the world of software and computing: the ability of a program or device to imitate another program or device, to trick a pc into thinking it’s a mac or vice versa – or a BBC Micro, an Atari or a ZX Spectrum. This is to overcome not only incompatability but also obsolescence: emulation makes us able to run programs designed for machines long added to the junkyard of technological progress, to play old games and access old documents. It has a curatorial function.

Hiding, or only half-hiding, behind the term ‘emulation’ is another, ‘simulation’. To simulate, the OED informs us, is ‘to assume falsely the appearance or signs of; to counterfeit, imitate; (in biology) to mimic’. The philosopher Jean Baudrillard founds his whole oeuvre on the concept: simulation, he claims, is ‘a copy without an original’, ‘an imitation of something that is not real’. Arjen Mulder, in his excellent essay Trancemedia: From Simulation to Emulation, points out that even Baudrillard cannot entirely dispense with the notion of the real, however: it remains inextricably present within simulation, ‘albeit in negative form’.

The post is an updated version of something I wrote several years ago and since then I have not been able to run an OS 7/8/9 emulator on my 10.6 machine successfully. Have you? Do you play any oldskool games?

* barring a short stint when my dad got a PC through one of those training scam programs that chaned my life. King’s Quest was somehow included in the package. There I said it: A PC did something good for me.

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Reference

Hindle, B. (1981). Emulation and invention. New York, New York University Press.

It’s been a few weeks and I’ve let my reaction to Bangface Weekender settle — J & I arrived in London Thursday morning and headed straight to Brighton to stay with Matt, Simon, Jeri and Jonnie (all who I feel in love with immediately), despite the volcanic ash fiasco. Air Canada fucked up and sold our seats so we ended up in executive first and on the subsequent plane with the lovely Teva and David, who were the only other crew coming to Bangface from Canada (as far as I know). Air Canada also lost our luggage for many days, and we didn’t get it until right before J’s set on Saturday night. The coordinator woman-at-large of Bangface, Fran, was also lovely and obliging, especially when it came to making sure we got our luggage when it finally arrived at Pontins. Everyone was so helpful in accommodating us with clothes, costumes, and other essentials, to a point where I thought I was in some fantasy land. I’m beginning to have a really skewed vision of Europe because every time I go my whole self is opened to kindess and sincerity (mostly! of course there was some internal conflict in another house we stayed in that managed to throw us in the middle of it, but we got out before any damage was done to us / unfulfilled egos are fragile).

the backyard of our chalet

From Brighton to Camber Sands, we took the Big Lemon bus, which runs on locally-sourced cooking oil. As soon as we were through the gates, happiness exploded. Bangface necessities excitement, and not just a weekend to get fucked up but an urgent desire to hear good music. And whilst most of us get totally mangled, even that pans out with respect I never encounter in Canada. You also have a kitschy yet cozy chalet to stay in with beds and a kitchen, which I decorated with a fruit platter and other assortments to make it seem quite wholesome.

The clincher at Bangface 2008 was that I was exposed to so much new music, “I got to lose myself in artists I have loved for years but never saw live, artists I knew of but had no idea they were that phenomenal, all in a small seaside town in England.” In 2010 the same happened, unexpectedly, because I knew most of the artists playing, or was not really interested. What really blew me away and what I should have prepared for was the world premiere of Urban Tribe live: KENNY DIXON JR + DJ STINGRAY+ ANTHONY ‘SHAKE’ SHAKIR all up there so serious on stage, as if this is it, this is the world ending. WTF WTF WTF, is all I kept repeating and still do.

Everyone performing at Bangface is so hungry. And we are all so hungry too, knowing how to feed ourselves and the others. Everyone puts in so much energy to be present, to give to the vibe (a guy made foam 303′s to give away). This designer girl even lent me her subtle yet Bangfaced themed green costume jumper to wear and lent J a one piece to match me for our performance! The four other performances I was really anticipating: Loops Haunt, A Guy Called Gerald, Plaid and Luke Vibert exceeded my fucking brains out.  My only complaint is that the curation was not as solid this year in terms of coordinating artists. The timing was disheveled (and many agreed). Squire of Gothos following Jimmy Edgar on the Saturday night? Gah! Plaid’s futurist performance that had me convinced I was flying through space on a wing of an airplane prior to Killa Kela’s clown circus before the totally un-rave and straight-laced Orb? Orb was a mistake altogether in my opinion, dudes standing up on stage barely moving is NOT rave. I remember leaving part way through their set, being ridiculous repeating how colonial their tunes were in their use of ‘ethnic crooning vocals’ to create ambiance. If anything Luke Vibert for a tertiary performance to end it all off!

If you know me, you know I have an unabashed hard-on for vocoders, so Jimmy Edgar‘s live set should have gone on for hours. I discovered Loops Haunt in Brighton on our three day bender last year on Red’s laptop and there he was and just like that it happened. There’s always so much happening at Bangface. Seeing Scott preform live was like, yes, yes, this is how it should be. Like the Urban Tribe set, it was just so realized, even though he said it was some of him just trying out new things. I could insert some music journalist words here to describe his sounds, but not now, just listen.

A Guy Called Gerald did a live show using Reason (!), pulling out drum n bass that reminded me why drum n bass will always be my #1 love forever and ever. From beginning to end – heart thumps and footwork madness. If you know anywhere I can find videos, clips and/or MP3′s of this newest incarnation of his live performance, please send them to me! Equinox, who I’m a giant fanboy of, cos no one does amen choppage like him, except maybe his mentor Bizzy B, played a bit of a one-note set, but to his defense, he was first on and the technical shit was all still being worked on. Luke Vibert followed and pulled out the most intricate acid set I’ve seen from him (that includes jungle and all that goodness too! of course!), footwork footwork footwork! Walked in on him during his second set on Saturday, playing an oldskool garage track I had on a mixtape from 2001 in the Queen Vic room, in which he proceded to play all genres in only the way Luke Vibert knows how. Who the fuck loves to play music as much as this guy and has been around, and done all the genres so so well?

I had missed many performers (Joker, Bizzy B, Ratpack, Cooh, Murderbot, u ziq and some others) on the Saturday night preparing for my VJ set for J’s LIVE PA, which was so exciting to finally see as a whole. The Queen Vic had sweat pouring from the ceiling. Everyone was bouncing. Matt told us later he threw out his back from all the amen time stretching. Europe desires J so much, in this beautiful vulnerable way Canada never will. As for the VJ’ing, I was assured the projector and screen was set up properly and even though I went and asked three times, I should have actually tested it myself, because it was all out of focus and totally skewed. I had to play a very limited clips that could work in such circumstances. Lesson learned. After that, everything went 100% rave.

We had the most well-suited team in our chalet // Jimmy, Scott, J and I // we spent much of the Weekender together drinking Nescafe Extra Gold Instant Coffee.

At one point I took over Scott’s MacbookPro to judge him on his music taste and found a missing part of myself, a piece that I fell into but am now emotionally unable to make peace with. It came on and instantly I fell and fell and fell for three minutes and 22 seconds into the deepest well Murakami wrote about. “Rewind on that one.” I yelled from outside our chalet where I danced until I rushed back in to play it again. “Good call,” they all said. At that moment, I felt so much love. Fuck. Later the next night, everything was really intense and sharp (my heart is racing now!) I had to listen to it again. The stereo wasn’t hooked up properly and J + Scott managed to hook it up in no less than 30 minutes with full effort. “So I’m in a room with two music geniuses yet y’all cannot get a stereo hooked up to a laptop?!” And then it worked and then I found the deep well again. There was movement inside all of me, movement I hadn’t felt in a really long time. I was being opened and aired out (and yes, causing me to let it all out on the Monday early morning). I guess yeah, the song changed my life. Actually. It was the first song Warwick recorded in 1964 and the lyrics, as it usually is with these things, couldn’t have come at a better time.

DIONNE WARWICK – DON’T MAKE ME OVER MP3

Many people stopped by our chalet. Here is Jason being all serious with Dinn, pointing to his Reaktor Patch. Chrissy Murderbot also managed to keep close and cause a shit load of ruckus when HE BROUGHT HIS MOM AND PROCEEDED TO LOSE HER AT BANGFACE!! You know we’re totally making a teeshirt, “I lost my mum at Bangface.” At some point on Sunday night, so you can imagine my state at that point, Chris challenged me to a game of table hockey , but did I ever school him in how to be a winner. Despite never having played before, my Canadianness eclipsed his tenacious Americanness.

The Countryside Alliance Crew practices for their performance, including their closing anthem Super Sheep Shearer, a very very special rendition of Super Sharp Shooter.

Wassim, of Centrifuge Agency, one of my new heros, has already retired from academia as a post-doc at 29, fed us balloons and took us to the beach.

Camber Sands is a typical gaudy seaside town in England where most houses have crocheted curtains, fitting the festival of RAVE so well.

You cannot see the giant sandstorm that scratched our eyes out in this serene photograph though.

A bit more photos here.

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coda: Just like in 2008, I cried so much when it was all over. It was so perfect, so musical, so giving, and I was able to be more outgoing and not just hide on the dancefloor or in my room. J said he noticed such a difference in me, an openness that seldom comes out. Usually, in new situations I retreat and my actions are perceived as bitchiness but they’re just social anxiety, fear of loss and misanthropy really. The inspiration this time was different, it was concrete, it was like, hello Magda, you are doing shit so don’t stop, don’t be so insecure, and just do it, you know you have to. Until 2011. Bangface is the best thing that could ever happen to life. Everyone I talk to agree. Did you go?

While I was in Brighton at the end of April I sent off a three page application to the Digital Methods Program Summer School at the University of Amsterdam. Earlier this week I washed my hair and put on my freshly dry cleaned blue Maje dress shirt for a Skype interview with the program after I got shortlisted! The peeps emailed me back less than an hour later saying I GOT IT. I am totally making the biggest deal out of this. I’ll be leaving at the end of June to study and work alongside researchers and designers for two months until end of August. I have a break in July in between and I might go WWOOF again. I was wanting to go to Europe this summer, for various exciting projects but knew I could not justify the expense without a concrete need and then it happened! I’ve been going to Europe a lot because I want to move there, but like with everything I dance around on the edges of committing and think and think about it until I believe it to be actually happening even though it totally hasn’t. When you think about something so much, you get exhausted before you even begin. I hope that this program will give me what I need and push me to apply for a PhD for September 2011. University of Bergen and University of Edinburgh are top contenders. They both have really well funded and serious digital culture PhD’s.

Although I wasn’t fond of Amsterdam when I first visited, I’m excited to re-live it. I was 19 and missing my boyfriend at the time way too much. I’m mostly excited because I know people in many big European cities, I know no one in Amsterdam. This makes it way more difficult to find a place and have help adjusting but that’s what I want. To just be alone.

Have you ever lived somewhere for a short time?

Now comes the great apartment hunt. If possible I want to live in a box, but live alone.

I am so excited here.

An old friend posted this on his blog a long long time ago, and in sentimentality I’m re-posting it.

Chantal Goya is always saying what you want her to say. Kiss her! Right now! Shiiiiit.