Apr 19 2007
I thought it was about time to shut up for a while. There is too much work that really needs to be done, so I am leaving you with this wonderful Tufat mp3-player loaded with my all time favorites in music.
Click play button twice to start the player
Of course it will be hard for me to refrain myself from adding songs once in a while.
Apr 06 2007
A friend runs a site with xxx adult content. Of course he needs a payment processor and so he filled in the usually forms at ccBill; the most common payment processor for that kind of content. Little did he know that he was going to be reviewed with a thoroughness that borders on neurotic. Within 24 hours he received a long list of pictures and links that needed to be removed before his site could join the payment program.
According to Billy C. the girls on pages 256, 457, 832 and 902 looked kind of young and the page linking to a site - containing a link to yet another site - was linking to content Billy did not approve of. Etc. Etc. It was a fucking phone book of adjustments. I mean, I know what he is going through — as an adult Webmaster it is hard to check all of your own content. Believe me, all that fucking gets very, very boring if you have to look at it day in day out.
Earlier on I had some problems with ccBill myself because they wanted me to remove the painting Leda and the Swan at AMEA, because in their vision that was considered to be bestiality. I have a dirty mind, but I would have never thought of that Swan to.. Never mind, it is just too damn stupid.
In the mid-nineties we had hosting services and search engines who thought they were omnipotent and they would block whatever content they felt like blocking and now the payment processors and the cable companies seem to feel that they are the ones who should control the web.
It is my strong conviction that in *all* cases the Webmaster and the site owner should be held responsible for content. If third parties think certain content is illegal they should inform the local police or file a lawsuit. If they do not have a real case, they should simply be quiet and do what they are best at; leaning back and receiving kickbacks on transactions of people who happen to work for a living. That is how grownups deal with the same issues in printed media.
I have always mistrusted people who have such a keen eye for girls being over or under 18. To me all women under the age of 30 look like they are way too young to take part in an adult movie, but that’s just me, I guess.
Have you ever noticed how often child porn crusaders later turn out to be producers of child porn? Just as often as sport coaches and Catholic priests are child abusers. I know one thing; if I would suffer from that mental illness called pedophilia and needed a good excuse to look for child pornography on the web; I would certainly join the vice squad or the staff of ccBill. Every day of the week you have all the goodies you can lay your hands on without taking the risk to get caught.
This is the only reasonable explanation why ccBills reviews of sites are so unbelievably thorough. They must be pedophiles themselves. Mark my words; before this decade is over we will read about the staff of ccBill being arrested for the distribution of child porn.
Apr 05 2007
I was seeking shelter from the pooring rain at the bar of a restaurant about 60 km from my hometown Amsterdam. Sitting with me were a group of people one would rarely encounter in the center of Amsterdam; a farmer, some very old-fashioned desk clerks and a lady with red hair, who was obviously drunk.
The barkeeper dropped a bottle and cursed with such enthusiasm that the office clerks closed their eyes. The farmer mumbled something in a dialect I could not completely understand. I knew it was about The Lord Above and Sins In General.
Unlike me the lady obviously understood the farmer very well, because she replied almost instantly with a swollen tongue.
“Why should God be a man? I am convinced God is a woman.”
I was impatiently waiting for my drink. It was in the bottle the barkeeper just dropped. A discussion about God being male, female or neutered wouldn’t speed things up, so before any one could answer I moved towards the woman. All her wrinkles seemed to point downwards. In fact everything about her radiated dissatisfaction.
“I am sure God is a woman, my dear,” I said. The smile on my face was the kind of smile I normally reserve for my mother.
“See, what did I tell you?” she yelled at the rest of the visitors.
Luckily there was no response. The farmer looked outside and the clerks went on with their conversation about sports. My drink was going to take a long time, because the barkeeper had to descend into the cellar to find a new bottle, so I moved closer to the old woman.
“Do you want to know why I think God is a woman?” She just stared at her glass without expression, so I continued. “Because God evicted us from Paradise for the theft of one lousy apple and here we are today, thousands and thousands of years later.”
“Ah, not that again,” she said with her raspy voice. “Not that old story of blaming it all on Eve.”
“No,” I answered, “but if God would have been a man; he would have long forgiven us by now and you and I would not be sitting here in this dump waiting for the rain to clear.”
Without warning or hesitation she threw the contents of her drink in my face.
I did not mind. I was already soaking wet from all that rain and now the barkeeper spontaneously handed me the towel I had not dared to ask when I first came in.
Apr 01 2007
Once I had a friend who was a brilliant jazz musician. I have long lost track of him since he moved back to Philadelphia. As a composer, an instrumentalist and a singer he was as an absolute genius. This was not just my opinion, even those who hated jazz had to admit he was anything but mediocre. He had one tiny flaw; he could not sell his work. I remember accompanying him to a producer who had his office somewhere in Manhattan. After listening to the tape it was obvious the man adored the work. All went fine, despite the fact that my friend mistrusted any man in a suit. Well.. It went fine up to the point where the producer compared my friend’s musical talent to that of Stevie Wonder.
My friend was furious; I almost had to prevent him from attacking the poor man. All the way home he kept moaning. ‘This *always* happens to me! Whenever somebody is interested in my work they immediately start to compare me with either Michael Jackson or Stevie Wonder! Is it because I am black?’ It was 1981 and being compared to Michael Jackson was not such a bad thing. The producer was a black man, so the idea that my friend was being discriminated because of his skin color was not very likely either.
I guess he just could not take a compliment very well.
I would like to add to this anecdote that he married a Southern girl who had a well-balanced relationship with her parents and other family members — all people who were without exception members and strong supporters of the Ku Klux Klan. A psychiatrist would have diagnosed my friend as ‘destructive’ but I knew his behavior was based on instincts far more complex than that.
I could see why he did not like to be compared to Stevie Wonder because in the past he had occasionally earned the money for his musical education by pretending to be a blind man in a wheel chair, which was not a decent thing to do, but we have to keep in mind that he was brought up in one of the worst parts of that inferno he kindly referred to as ‘Philly’.
During his stay in the Netherlands he had many contract offers of record companies but the deals all turned sour. I guess there were more things than just being compared to other geniuses that stood in the way of his success.
Because of all these fights with managers, reps and producers, another friend decided to pay for the studio recordings of his work. I still have that tape. We played the tape in our favorite bar and a few of the regulars decided to put up some money to buy a camera and hire a video editor to make a modest but effective video clip.
In the end there were five of us and my friend generously offered to pay his own share which really was a quite a gesture since he was working as a street musician to pay for the rent of his seedy hotel room. Our intentions were sincere but after a few weeks we forgot about the video clip until his wife to be gave us a call to remind us of our commitment. Her voice sounded irritated and upset and she insisted that we would show up to hand deliver the money needed ‘to complete’ the video.
One day later all stood in that tiny hotel room and she was there, but our musician friend was missing. ‘Well, what about it?’ she said. Being Dutch we were not going to open our wallets before we knew what her contribution would be. ‘Well, the monitor is in..’ she said pointing at a small, rented TV-set that was tuned to a talk show.
We were too embarrassed with the situation to come up with good excuses; we just left.
Today I was reminded of that incident, when I had a look at my latest web project Amstelvisie that seems to be dead as dodo. Okay, I have my excuses, like a stay in the hospital and being ill for a few weeks, but it seems unlikely now that I will continue. I loved doing the interviews and there all still loads of unedited takes sitting on my hard drive, but I have to admit that I have lost most of my enthusiasm due to other projects that do pay the rent. On the other hand.. I may be slow but I am no quitter either.