The first chocolate Easter eggs are in the shops already, in competition with heart shaped Valentine boxes. It won’t be long till the Holidays are only distinguishable from one another by the shape the chocolate comes in. Last year, to battle the candification of our culture, I went to an “Artvesper” in the Nassau church,…
What color is Monday? Light yellow of course. What color is the number 4? A warm shade of yellow. 8 is dark brown, 5 sky blue. That is to say, my Monday is light yellow and my 5 is sky blue. In the way that letters have a sound and numbers a value, for me…
The funeral procession took the tourist tour. The driver of a car in such a procession can be very prepared, program the GPS and so on, but eventually he has to go with the flow; the only certainty being the final stop. Indeed, like in life. We bent under and over the highway, past a…
Breasts will sag, butts, and fat little bellies. But in the drawing “Hangend vlees en twee lijnen” (Hanging meat and two lines) by Otto Egberts the meat is, though hairless, not clearly any specific body part. It would have been easy to add a nipple, but luckily Egberts didn’t, as the work is not about…
As beautiful as a new refrigerator it won’t ever get again. Not in my house anyway. Could life itself be as clean, as simple, as clear as the first day you start using the new refrigerator. You wipe the migrating pot of gherkins with a wet cloth and place it reverently inside the door with…
We love to look at the face of someone we love. Even if we don’t really know this person. Maybe even more so, because then we search all aspects of their physical appearance until we’ve made up the character traits to go with it. The face is the face of our fantasy. Take Mick Jagger.…
Walking from Amsterdam east to west I thought about how taking your camera changes the whole walk. The first thing that causes you to take the camera out determines your point of focus for the rest of the journey. Is it something yellow, then yellow it is. Is it a bench with a length of…
The roaring came from an unexpected source. On the sidewalk (silent shopfree street, sunny and complacent) sat a little boy in diapers. His finger tracked the red chalk stripes on the pavement within the reach of his short arms, and he roared. He was very focused, and sometimes the roaring changed to a satisfied growling.…
The friend with whom I went to the exhibition was lovesick. He couldn’t stop reading her last message. In essence it said she didn’t want anything to do with him anymore, but he kept hoping that he could read interpret it differently if he kept re-reading it often enough. To make things worse she…