From the Notebook Vol. 8

They say that having a litter is good for the character of the bitch. This was definitely not the case with my boss. It was only after she had a baby that the paranoid madness truly went off the scale. She became cold and selfish. And weird! When those paranormal ‘radiation trackers’ with their phoney Eastern European accents came by to rid the office of mystic presences, I shouldn’t have shrugged my shoulders, stand by idly and whistle the Ghostbusters theme...

Nice Postcard

Nice, 2 June 2012

Mon Chérie,

I amuse myself into smithereens over here. First a week in good old Aix-en-Provence (lots of tramping through nature mostly) and then off to the Côte d’fucking-Zur. There are uglier places than this, but how busy and luxurious it is everywhere! I just try to laugh at it and enjoy myself thoroughly. Far from Dutch finicking... Yesterday folding biking to Monaco, today to Cannes. I completely destroy myself: monstrous days. So that’s nice. Weather not too hot alas, but okay. The women overhere are very prudish, as can be seen on verso. So you can imagine I miss you very much. Amai! Stay as cool as you are and be having some of the old monster raving fun at your own vacation later. Lots of love, Martijn.

P.S. Death to Get Set Inc. & Long live Love! (Give S. my regards.)

From the Notebook Vol. 7

[…] One of those dreams was amazing. I was a man whom I observed in the second person (I could see myself act). I looked like Niles Crane. The exact procedures have escaped me by now, but I appeared to be a scientist whose career had completely dried up by a serious nervous breakdown. Then I find a ‘thing’ in the ground, a beautiful but strange metal apparatus, and I walk around with it, marvelling and examining the item.

Inside the silky, shiny, silvery exterior, that looked like being made from a tuba horn, were hidden, like in a Swiss army knife, all kinds of other mysterious instruments, some recognisable and mundane, others that hinted at some supernatural background or mysterious religious practices. When I begin to realise the scientific importance of the thing, I go frantic and start running like a madman over the university grounds looking for my desk – to investigate the object. I punch people that stand in my way in the mouth, make death threats, huff & puff (see Stan Laurel with his whip in Chumps at Oxford) and, in a loud booming voice, demand my desk back! This thing was going to be ground-breaking!

From the Notebook Vol. 6

On the camping. I overheard a conversation between the posh neighbours from across and the guy with the military moustache and his curly wife. They were talking about Monaco. First man said how utterly amazed he was how densely the city was built. He drove into Monaco and saw… wait for it!… he saw an underground roundabout, my oh my!

I didn’t gave it much thought, but now, ruminating those words, I remember I was there myself. I drove my bike through that long, dark, quite scary tunnel and over that underground roundabout into the city. But I couldn’t care less at the time. It didn’t look like anything out of the ordinary to me… as nothing ever did for many years, as I’m now realising. Telephones with which you can make photographs… so? Extrasolar planets… footballers making a million a week… a building 1, 2 or 5 kilometres high… people eating raw horse manure… snowfall on the Acropolis. Nothing.

Literally nothing can astonish me these days. Even if the Amazon would dry up, the IJsselmeer would turn red, people would learn the art of flight, the discovery of extra-terrestrial aliens, or a race of hairy, purple, three-nippled deep-sea people, parallel universes, a way of making gold from base metals, the Fountain of Life or a secret population of unicorns… a talking beetle… okay, maybe some things would strike and excite me. But not a lot!

From the Notebook Vol. 5

What’s unknown to Holland are the evenings of existence thickening. The windless, motionless evenings of warmth, silence and an inescapable Absence Threat. Yes, we do know them… but they are too rare to form a tradition, a School and, therefore, the magic gets denied and they’re called ‘a pleasant summer evening’.

Here I sit again. The swallows have been relieved of duty by the bats. A perfect solitude with anagram ghosts to comfort me. A. and S., my ‘Sisters Karamazov’. Quietly singing to myself… O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden. Now, let there be lines… and colour… and thought. Of a dog that keeps on wagging…

From The Notebook Vol. 4

Salad With Cuscus and Tuna

- An onion, finely cut
- Bit of garlic
- Capers
- Sambal chilli paste
- Ready cuscus from the supermarket
- Salt, cayenne pepper
- Fresh thyme picked from the mountain
- Can of tuna
- Cucumber
- Tomatoes (cherry ones, in quarters)
- Bit of salad dressing

Yumm!

Dwarf elephant

My ‘Indian name’

From the Notebook Vol. 3

[…]

No shortage of living today… capital L! Wandering about like a Lost One. Like a Born-again One. The sand of the beach, the brown burned bodies. Unwiggleable, lickable. The boorish coastline, filled with disfigured villas & animal flats. The Sun... and the Shadows. Bend over, pounding on the pedals, over ran-down asphalt and painted tar. On! On! Forward!

You know, this writing of mine is complete shite of course. Once upon a time, I could write like bewitched. Especially something like four years ago, on dirty grey notepad paper, disposable paper... in places like Arles and Lisbon. Words flew out of my pen like barbarous & colourful swarms freed from the aviary. And even though it proved later to be worth very little, or was often completely embarrassing tripe, by alcohol intake and corresponding sentimentality, still… I mean, still... I could write!

These days, when I want to write… I begin to think first. Classic mistake: he who ponders, blunders*…  Quite ugly wordplay this too, come to think of it. So I go Thinking… then Rethinking, whether or not it makes any sense. It rarely does of course, but that’s not something you should ask yourself. Just create like a motherfucker and ask yourself later if it can be knead, cut & kicked into something sensible! […]

The shadow falls on my paper/ and the steps/ her ankle/ and the hollow knee

-

The immaterial becomes dust of yellow and blue, stone and oil

-

As if one is scratching at the scabs of layers of callous and worms and strings are severely strung over combs of tuberculosis, of suckling and sway over deeply depraved reason. Wanting Priests... ghosts. Folk wanting stones with two tongues, preferably dead, better than alive. But my forms and my toes are rocking like drunken macaws. White macaws with preposterous yellow crests.

This is a way to live… overlandish.

To trot, rebellious, pure, a lichen tamer**, greenly in love and greyly liberated from the King who came over the Mountains. The animals who licked themselves after a short, wild sigh, yawning.

Like that.

*Orig. ‘wie denkt, verengd’= he who thinks, narrows.
**Orig. ‘meeuwentemmer’= seagull tamer, as opposed to ‘leeuwentemmer’ = lion tamer.

Alas, I no longer have the possibility to scan my drawings so you'll have to make do with primitive hand-held camera shots...

From The Notebook

For the so manieth time I returned in the late afternoon to the public garden behind Rue Van Loo. To sit  amongst the roses, sultry folk and thickening air. I knew something was wrong with the flaming cypresses. I counted them and I was right: ten… even!

Beautiful elder ladies, conversing from behind gallant sunglasses, little girls walking around with a lolly pop and a teddy bear, boys chasing lazy pigeons, and further beyond, some teenagers – first class scum of course – are sitting on a bench, frenching. Straight ahead a girl sunbathing and smoking... gracefully smoking. It should all be captured and fixed… I don't mean on paper, photo, or film… It should really be FIXED.

A father who, for a laugh, with a perfect choreography, kicks at one of the pigeons. On top of the house with the closed shutters, obscure ‘things’ are dangling from the washing line.

An elder couple takes place on the bench next to the frenching pair. And voilà, a very black negro with large headphones comes on, looking surly but walking with a swinging gait. He must be fixed too! Stay forever! And the swallows too. And the people carrying long breads.

Exit the frenchers. On comes a woman in white summer dress and some muscle parading gorilla with millimetred hair in a wife-beater. He looks too seriously. The little girls play panthers on the lawn and gesture wild horns and clawy attacks. Papa acts crazy. Mama polishes her sunglasses.

The Doves Go...

(From the Notebook)

La Bourse
La Bourse
La Bourse
La Source

Ya Hourte
Ya Hourte
Wa Hourte
Ma Hourte

La Bourste
La Borste
La Borste
L’Aborte
L’Aborte
L’Aborte

La Bourse
La Wurste
Da Wurste
L’Aborte
La Corse
La Corse
La Bourte

Fla Mouse
Fla Mourte
La Mourte
L’Amourte
La Morte

La Bourse
La Boorse
Ro Booste
Ma Booste
Ta Booste
Ma Source

O Porto
O Porto
Sau Dade
Sau Dade
Sau Dade
Sau Dade

La Source
La Source

Ma Source

The Dove

There was a dove. One day it came walking over the gravel of the campsite towards me. As I was eating a piece of baguette (‘stick bread’ as the Dutch aptly call it, in appreciation of the shape as well as the texture) I threw some crumbs to the bird. It ate well and looked completely at ease with me. After a while, it even took the bread right out of my hands without flinching. It looked dozy and poorly, but I had hopes for its recovery and christened the poor bugger Lazarus. I even sang to it. I sang: “Lazarus dansar i Rotterdam, hei, en så lustiger dans!”

Every day, the bird would come crawling out of the bushes or from underneath my car. It grew weaker though, ate less, dozed off all of the time and wanted most of all to sleep in peace. It became more and more depending on me, for food and water, but mostly for protection. When I fed it, some of the other doves would come and, given the chance, would peck Lazarus ferociously in its neck. I threw little stones at them to chase them away. (I knew it was ridiculous and contra-evolutionary and would bring me closer to hugging abused horses in the streets while breaking down in tears… but the bird had chosen me, so what could I do?)

During the day, it sought shelter and when I came to my tent it stepped towards me for bread and peace and sat underneath my chair while I made watercolours. But she (I renamed her Suzanne when her chances looked waning) grew weaker & weaker. Then she stopped eating at all and just sat there sleeping, sometimes opening an eye to see what I was doing, or when other doves would scream at her. Next day she didn’t show up and I never saw her again. No more dansar i Rotterdam.

Lost in Myself

Did you see that gust of wind?

I thought I had brought a thousand stories with me. And perhaps I did, but not of the narratable kind. Instead I have a thousand stories in my head that are incapable of being shared. To try and describe my experiences is fundamentally useless when the story doesn’t have its own intrinsic value. Pure anecdotes are not for me. Good stories do not, ever, represent true life, just as no good painting represents an existing visual entity, be it a landscape, a vase of sunflowers or one’s creepy dentist and his wife holding up a hayfork in front of an old barn.

A large proportion of the stories I brought suffer from the ‘you should have been there’ syndrome, which makes my experiences no less valuable, but useless for writing about them.

Other stories held more public potential, I thought, but at coming home, tired and de-enchanted, back under the sterile sun of the north, while reading my notebook, I see I had overestimated the quality of those notes grossly. Walking through a park in Nice, being surprised by a statue of the unlikeliest of people at that place… Louis Armstrong. I thought I had struck narrative gold with that. But I didn’t of course. It’s what’s known in the trait as a ‘Useless Fact’. It comes from nowhere and has no place in the story whatsoever. Another example. I was walking through Le Cannet, a suburb of Cannes. I had visited the Pierre Bonnard Museum and wanted to see the rest of the village. It was during siesta time and the roads were completely disserted. Silence was absolute but for my footsteps. Then I saw a completely black cat with one white foot. Muttering to myself, I walked on. Around the corner I saw (in these surreally, disserted streets with the voodoo cat still fresh in my memory!) a bona fide Charlie Chaplin impersonator, costume & everything, who, no doubt, went home after a gig at the Cannes film festival. You can’t tell that! Not only is it a useless fact, destroying the story of the sleepy, old-timey French city, but purely of the ‘you had to be there’ kind.

Further browsing my notes I see that a whole lot of them are only somewhat palatable in Dutch and will suffer greatly from translation. And the rest is mostly rough, semi or completely crazy, unfinished gibberish, incantations, curses, hymns & abstract imagery, written in almost complete darkness while the wine was flowing and the bats were flying around all over the place... Well, perhaps I can work with that last stuff after all.

France Ho!

A few days ago I came back from my voluntary exile in Southern Europe. For many weeks I’ve been hiding myself in a land far far away, in sunny, exotic and inspirational places. I completely closed myself off from “civilisation”. No radio, telephone, internet, newspapers or talking to anybody for a month. I was free from society and its Trojan Horse of mindless babble. This got me involved with ‘natural’ topics, like the colour of shadows, the rationality of a street or the apatite of mosquitoes (what did those animals eat before Man? I’m sure they can’t penetrate the pelt of a beaver or cow). I have travelled seven highways, climbed seven mountains and I read seven books. I made many drawings (178), photographs (740 digital + 4 rolls oldfashioned film photos) and wrote one letter.

So here I sit, repatriated, blond from the sun and filled to the brim with stories to tell and images to expose… and something is stopping me. Perhaps all the stories are blocking each other like a bunch of old tampons in a narrow plumbing system, or, to be a little more graceful: like mighty wildebeasts all trying to get to the other side of the river at the same spot. I can see no great composition emerging from all this material, so I guess there’s no other way than just begin by telling some basic facts for now and wait for the wildebeasts to be unleashed. Pure realism is really not my thing, but in this case a necessary wall onto which the paintings can later be hammered.

Dramatis personæ: just I, your much-beloved, handsome, clever, visionary, hunky, good-to-his-mother, lonesome cowboy & decadent bastard of a narrator. Place of action: after a start in my hometown Hoorn, we almost instantly translocate ourselves to the South of France. It was 6pm on a typical Friday when I waved goodbye to my house (it never waves back) and boarded the blue 1998 Peugeot 106, licence plate number SR-RX-40; leaking a little oil, the passenger door closes badly, the cassette player is broken and the axes produce a distinct rattling noise when cornering, but otherwise it’s in pretty good nick. (Let one be precise.) In the (nameless) car I had my little fold-in bicycle (named Bliss), my beautiful tent (later to be christened Le Château Rêve, and later still Circus Tinus), ten books, drawing material and a lot of doubts (known as Demons & Dreams). The only thing I had forgotten was a corkscrew.

These facts are as boring as fat free yogurt… Hurry! Hurry! It was the third time I saw my beloved Aix-en-Provence, Paul Cézanne’s stomping ground and heart of the Provence region. I aimlessly walked around in the city, the museums and in the unsurpassable nature. I climbed the mountain, Mount Sainte-Victoire, in the rain, I went through the valleys in blazing sun. I cooked, I camped, I read, I ate, I drew, I drank, I dreamed. I was loving nature, I had fits of laughter, I sat with the bums, I mingled with the chic, I thought about the troubles at my work and my lost friends, I had nightmares.

One day, it was time to leave Aix. I decided I needed to go see Nice on the coast again and be in its delightful and ridiculous surroundings. Yes, this was a goal! I zoomed to Nice driving 100 miles an hour and playing 'Radio Côte d’Azur'. When it came on my tuner, I fell into a godallmighty great rock song with an epic guitar solo that went on for at least ten minutes, and I was shouting and slapping my knees and steering wheel and rocking my head. Well, you all know how it is with rock 'n' roll. I tell you… then & there, it was The Greatest Song Ever! Too bad I never heard who it was by. When I reached my destination, “Holidays in the Sun” by the Sex Pistols were on. I was transformed. I was manic, free and happy and stayed so for nine days. Nice is one of the last strongholds for ‘real life’ on that bizarre strip of coast of luxury living, with Monaco in the East and Antibes and Cannes in the West. Nice still has ‘folk’ in it. It is superb. It is alive.

I drove my bicycle a lot, wondered around the cities and museums, swam the refreshing water, made underwater pictures at Antibes and got seriously involved with obsessions and vacation madness (I don’t know how much of this can be disclosed – some things are too private to be vulgarized with realism). Obsessions and madness are good things to have. I pity the indifferent, the bloodless and the sane.

I moved again. To Cassis, a friendly, touristy fishing village near Marseille. I wanted to see for myself why so few people went to this second biggest city of France. When you hear about Marseille, it’s always about organised crime, heroin traffic, highway robbery, right wing extremists and race riots. So… let’s go and check it out, I thought. I can report: Marseille is a fine city. I was neither mugged nor buggered… And this too is a real live city, with original inhabitants, a culture and a pulse. The other attraction of Cassis was the natural area called Les Calanques. That was completely unbelievable and made it into my personal Top Three of Most Beautiful Sights Ever Seen, in no particular order, accompanied by The Autana tepui in Venezuela and the island of Værøy in the Norwegian archipelago the Lofoten. Les Calanques is a series of electric blue sea inlets deep in the stunning, harsh Provencal landscape. It was a magnificent thing to see from above and absolutely sublime to swim in with goggles, for the sea was as clear as a baby’s bottom. It had 15-20 metres of vision. And the laughter and simple, sunny, innocent enjoyment of the many (all French) people ricocheted between the rocks and Love filled the ravine that afternoon. Perhaps one day I will tell the story of the two young women with whom I climbed down to the beach who started to sing a long and beautiful old song about the ill-fated love of a goat herder for a fickel young damsel… or so I imagine, my French is not that good. But this was a moment of sheer Magic and Enchantment and, therefore, it has no place in this account of facts and realism.

I finished this trip with a few days in the Burgundy town called Tournus. “I started out on Burgundy, but soon I hit the harder stuff” the Bard sang. And he was right of course, as he always is, even when he is talking undiluted nonsense. The harder stuff is the coming home. And hard it is. Please forgive me my realism.