So R. U. Sirius and I gave our big Amsterdam talk is tonight. I was worried this morning, but it went well. We killed, as stand-up comedians say. And SF lives. Many thanks to the Waag Society, Cyberspace Salvations, and XS4ALL for organizing it.

We had a good crowd, and R. U. was brilliant. I put my own talk online last night, it’s called Psipunk. I think Menso Heus of our co-sponsor XS4ALL might have video of our talks on YouTube in a few days.

I projected live realtime computer graphics from my Windows laptop, mainly psychedelic continuous-valued CAs from my CAPOW program.

Yesterday I went out to the offices of XS4ALL, they’re a big ISP in the Netherlands. I had lunch with some friendly programmers and in fact worked my talk in the course of an informal conversation with them.

My contacts there were two nice women, Mieke and Margareth.

After supper I hooked up with Sala again. He showed me a great Art Nouveau movie theater, Theater Tushcinski. A friendly usher let me look around.

And then Luc took me to meet a guy called Soma. He’s a pot breeder, and has perfected a seed called the Soma seed. He had dreadlocks nearly to the floor. Hanging around his place was like being back in California—maybe even more so.

One of Soma’s friends painted an Art Nouveau pot and mushroom frieze along his banister. He told me he saw a UFO before dawn on Easter morning. Sounded to me like it might have been Venus, the morning star. But I enjoyed discussing his vision with him, as I’m working on a novel scene where a guy who’s high on telepathic contact with Gaia sees the Peng UFO. It’s always good to get transreal first-hand input on these things!

Today in the morning I met up with Luc again. He’s a big talker, but that makes for good company when you’re alone in a strange town.

He drove me down to see the tulip fields. They’re near the seashore, as tulips like sandy soil. A lot of these fields are just for the bulbs, and the farmers pick off the tulips and just throw them in a heap.

There was an amazing, sweet smell coming off the fields. Tulips in stores don’t seem to have much of a smell, at least not in the U. S., but these were sweet as honeysuckle.

Luc was on his cellphone the whole time, doing a business deal which, over the course of the day, worked out well for him. I told that was because he was with Het Magische Varken. That’s me. The Magic Pig.

Happy in the tulips. Happy to have the talk over with. R. U. and I laid ‘em in the aisles. Tomorrow I’m planning to take the train to visit Heironymus Bosch’s house in a town called Den Bosch for short, and s’Hertogenbosch for long..

Today I had meant to take the train to a place near Leyden called Keukenhof where the big tulip fields are. But it’s hard to get back on the road after coming this far. So I rode my (Luc Sala’s) bike to what looked like a park on the map.

Turned out it was a zoo called Artis, the oldest zoo in the Netherlands. They did have one little patch of very nice tulips, and I pretended it was a giant field.

Near the tulips was a statue of a dinsosaur. He looked so ecstatic, so punk rock. I mean, he looked like Joey Ramone or Joe Strummer! Or a happy kid. Roar!

Future archeologists might imagine that in our time we “worshipped” dinosaurs as we love building idols of them. And in a way we do worship them, don’t we. The ROAR. Often people imagine that everyone is/was stupid and robotic in civilizations other than the one that they’re currently living in. Sure dinosaurs are among our gods. But we’re not all that serious about it. Why be serious? We’re all gonna die, just the same. Might as well have fun while it lasts. The average person always knows this. Joyous daily life is the highest possible religious observance. Let’s go to the zoo on Easter Monday!

I saw a nice elephant, they call them oliphant here, a man and his son were cheering him, “Dicke oude oliphant,” meaning “Fat old elephant,” but in a friendly way. It’s not insulting, really, to call an elephant old and fat.

Giraffes wearing Turing cellular automata patterns. Odd to be in a zoo without my granddaughter. And more grandchildren are on the way!

I had to change apartments in Amsterdam when I got back. I talked them into putting me up for eight nights, so they’re piecing my lodging together. The new place is a bit further out, but the street cars are good and I’ve got that bike. I love biking here. Real no-kidding separate bike-lanes. And the car-drivers aren’t, like, shocked to see you. And it’s all flat as a pancake.

I’ve been having a slight problem using up my time. So hard to just relax and soak in the beauty. The eternal “What next?” nipping at my heels.

Starting tomorrow I have a series of duties and meetings, which I look forward to. Ad for our reading in the window of the American Book Center. Amazing store. I was looking at a book about an artist called Roman Signer who blows things up and makes art with fireworks. My son Rudy would like his work.

R. U. Sirius will be here tomorrow—see him looming up behind the tulips? I can’t wait to show him the Smartshop on Staalstraat; they sell a brand of shroom called Psylocibe Mckennia. Our psychonaut brother, passed on to statelier mansions.

Oh, I found a good model for the alien Peng in the zoo. South America’s Great Rhea! Big, mild eyes with long lashes. Their expression a bit bland, and world-weary, but if you hold something close they’re very quick to peck and gobble.

Dark skunk stripe in their feathers down the middle. Bald-man tufts of feathers above the flat ear typani in the sides of their heads. Very large nostrils in the beak. Whiskers around the beak. They’re constantly twitching their wings so that the halves of the body seem to twitch together at the top—no doubt they have alien lice.

In the evening I got some company which was great. Dorien Zandbergen, on the right is the woman who is organizing the talk series that I’m here for. She’s a graduate student writing a thesis having to do with the sociology of eschatological and messianic notions among Silicon Valley computer types. I have no idea why I was invited to speak. 🙂 On the left are Dorien’s friends Marÿke (yes, that’s a letter Y with an umlaut) and David.

We had dinner in classic Dutch “brown café” with nice paneling salvaged from all those defunct churches. Killer meal. Dutch treat!

Easter Sunday. It was noon by the time I hit the street, too late for church, and, as far as I can see, none of the big churches around here are still having services. Religion not too big with the rational Dutch. I’d thought everything would be closed up tight, like in old Europe, but the cafes and bigger stores are open. I saw an entertaining unicyclist-juggler. He was great; cajoling and insulting the audience, even screaming “Cheap bastards!” at some people who left without giving him a Euro.

I’m looking for more ideas about how the Peng send the woogies down here. I was thinking graffiti is like van Gogh brush strokes is like…calligraphic script. Obviously the Peng should be using something like calligraphy instead of boring Fourier series.

One church I tried to go into, the Nieukerk, had a big show of Islamic art. This is by the nineteenth century calligrapher Abdulfettah Efendi, and it says, “Sultan Abduülaziz, son of Sultan Mahmud, victorious forever.” I love how all that information is in that mark, it’s what they call a tugra, it’s like your seal. Too bad the content is semantically dull, though. Same as the Egyptan heiroglyphic inscriptions, that are usually just praising a pharoah. And graffiti are normally just someone’s name. Would be nicer if these things were more like poems. I got some email from a fan, Guy Rombouts, in Antwerp yesterday, as “chance” would have it—he has an ”Azart” website devoted to converting roman-letter words into heiroglyphs.

It all fits. Or am I just experiencing what clinicians call ideas of reference? Well, no, it’s not clinical, I do know I’m playing around. It’s art. And during my long wee hours awake, I keep rewriting the outline for Hylozoic. Crazy like a fox.

Here’s some really fine religious calligraphy by Katip el-Antalyevi, dating from about 1550. They way he’s drawn clouds around the letters is really cool, it remind me of this amazing art-book The Humument

I walked along the canals. I missed my family terribly today. I kept thinking of how last time I saw Amsterdam was with Sylvia and Isabel. We always have a family dinner on Easter, it’s such a nice holiday.

A number of people live on tethered boats on the peaceful residential-neighborhood canals. Seems mellow. This guy is touching up the paint on his boat, I thought of the Dutch abstract expressionist De Kooning.

I finally got my Easter church fix by going to a concert in the Oudekerk—which also doesn’t have services anymore. Organ, viola, violin, and a mezzo-soprano singing some songs by Handel. “Seht was ihr hier im Luften dür reiche Schätze habt.” See you have here in the air for rich treasures. Again I think of the woogies. Of the gnarly computation in the currents of the air. The music is in the air, isn’t it? The Tibetan Buddhists say the universe began as an Om. De Broglie matter waves from the captive atoms, converging like an orchestra to produce, gaaak, a Peng! The Gospel of John, “In the beginning was the word.”

The crowd was mostly Dutch, I think.

This is a nice picture, even if it’s a bit blurred. The pocket digital cameras are in some sense bringing us back to the early days of photography when it was more about the content than the image clarity. It’s good to have the camera along to keep me company. And the blog.

Believe it or not, the Detroit airport is beautiful.

I’m writing this at three a.m. in Amsterdam. Jet lag. I didn’t sleep at all last night, on the plane trip. That’s okay. I’ve read that if you have depression, going a night without sleep is a good way to jolt yourself out of it. I wasn’t even depressed to begin with, so I feel extra good. I slept yesterday afternoon for four hours, then I slept another three hours, and now I’m up again. It’s fine. It’s almost as wild and crazy as shrooming to be up and active at totally odd times. Fortunately I don’t have any particular duties for the next few days, so I don’t have to be anxious about “storing up sleep.” I’ll just sleep when I’m tired, whenever that is.

Bruegel view out my window. Dutch Market and the Waag building. I’m here to give a talk for the Waag Society; Waag is Dutch for “weigh,” and the Waag building used to be a customs house, it’s a massively turreted stone pile in a market square, the oldest secular building in Amsterdam. The Waag Society is a non-profit foundation that sponsors research and cultural events involving the electronic arts, health care, and cyberculture—I can’t think of a similar group in the U.S.

My trip is primarily sponsored by the internet provider XS4ALL , the first public Internet provider in the Netherlands, and by ABC, the American Book Center in Amsterdam. At the Waag, I’ll reminisce with R.U.Sirius about the 1980s cyber scene in San Francisco, I’ll talk about writing at XS4ALL, and do a reading with R. U. at ABC. I hope R. U. shows; last week he was still in the midst of a big hassle about getting his passport, he’s actually writing a story about this for the upcoming issue #3 of my webzine Flurb.

Having been sober for some years now, I’ve learned to walk past bars and liquor stores without a second thought. But, jeez, in Amsterdam, people are sitting in open-air “coffeeshop” cafes rolling joints and smoking pipes of pot, and I’m seeing “smart shops” windows displaying not only weed, but fresh-pack grocery-store-style boxes of shrooms: of Thai, Mexican, and Colombian breeds of the sacred mushroom. I’ll guess I’ll get used to it.

People here tell me that the authorities are thinking of somehow limiting the sale of shrooms, for last week a visiting young French woman freaked out on some shrooms she’d bought here and jumped to her death from a building. That’s such a classic psychedelic risk. Not stepping off a steep precipice is such a fundamental instinct. Even babies shy away from drop-offs. I’m imagining seeing the air so crowded with glowing three-dimensional Belousov-Zhabotinsky scrolls that it looks almost solid. The air like a gelatinous medium you can tread water in. Narrow-eyed angels hover just outside the window, beckoning, not nearly so friendly as they appear.

There’s more bicycles here than any city I’ve ever seen, I’m hoping to rent one for a few days, though people tell me you have to be on your toes lest you plow into a bombed backpacker or get run down by a tram.

All the skinny houses have gables with hooks that they use to lower stuff when they’re moving in and out. The stairs are way too narrow to fit furniture.

The Lowlanders have a distinct national look; I haven’t seen so many natural blondes in years. I liked this red baby wrapped up like a larva. Many of them have very vivid features, familiar to me from the armies of faces I’ve studied in Bruegel and Bosch paintings over the years. I love that they resemble those paintings from five hundred years ago. The one big thing I’ve learned from studying the history of art is that people haven’t changed all that much. Even in the year million, people won’t be the bland and humorless logicians that populate the worlds of bad SF.

I ended up sleeping till one in the afternoon, when I was awakened by Amsterdam impresario and man-about-town Luc Sala. He was connected to the old Mondo scene, and, hearing I was in town, he found me and brought me a cell phone and a bicycle to use. What a guy! He invited me to drive to a “fire dance” in Breda with him, where he and seventy friends were going to dance around a bonfire until the sun came up, savoring the clarity that extreme exhaustion brings. But I wanted to explore Amsterdam, now that I’m here. Luc gave me a beginners guide to shroom-tripping that he published. Just rub it in, all right?

I biked through town to the Van Gogh museum.

It was insanely crowded, but I wormed close to look at my favorite wall there, with the pictures he painted in 1890 right before he killed himself. There’s a popular story that the “Wheatfield” was his very last picture, but that’s not known to be true. Could the despondent and nearly-suicided van Gogh have imagined crowds like this wanting to see his work? Or maybe he did imagine it and it put him over the edge!

Another last picture is the “Tree Roots,” or “Boomwortels,” — what a great language Dutch is. My favorite of the “last” pictures is “Landscape with the Chateau of Auvers at Sunset” Here’s a link to a rather bad reproduction of it, on a really very good site that has all the pictures.

Another last one I like is “Wheat Field Under Clouded Sky.” In these pictures, he’s using so very few strokes to limn nature’s most complex forms: trees and clouds. I snuck the bad photo above, here’s a link to the better official version.

I was thinking that when the aliens start draining away Earth’s gnarl by siphoning off a lot of nature’s quantum computation, it might be cool if the world started looking like a van Gogh painting.

I mean, suppose the aliens have a little class, and they’re not just gonna turn us into modern design or into Hanna-Barbera Flintstones cartoons. Yes, a van Gogh tree is plenty gnarly, but still it’s a lot less gnarly than an actual tree.

I wrote in my journals about visiting this museum in July 25, 1994, with Sylvia and our daughter Isabel and, hmm, I can actually find the entry! And it turns out that I once before thought of using SF to turn the world into a van Gogh painting. I have a limited number of obsessions.
Here’s the 1994 notes about the van Gogh museum.

[Tulips, 50 of ‘em for 7 and a half Euros!]

“My favorite four pictures were from June/July 1890, right before he shot himself. If you could paint like that, how could you want to die? Maybe it was like unbearable to be that good? It’s tough being a great artist, yes it is. The Vincent I got into the most of the fave four was one of a mansion or castle at twilight. What he does with the brush work is to completely shape the strokes to the subject of that part of the picture. In the grass the strokes are quick parallel vertical lines. On the sunset horizon there is a stack of parallel orange strokes, a pile of light. And, ah, in the big trees the strokes are PERPLEXING POULTRY, they are like an M.C. Escher tessellation yes they are, with leaf, branch, sky, sun colors tiled in, light and dark leaves, man I have got to use this in FREEWARE, this is what the Perplexing Poultry Philtre is for, man, to make the world look like the mature work of Vincent Van Gogh.”

[I saw a big show of work by Max Beckmann in Amsterdam today too. Here’s his transreal take on an optician’s shop actually called Genius. He added the Jacob’s ladder and the menacing birds.] Back to the 1994 notes…

“As well as thinking of Vincent’s brushwork in terms of the Poultry, also, since my playful daughter Isabel was there with us to joke with, I thought of it in terms of a hyena tearing a piece of meat in half by whipping its head around in crazy-eights. This being a rap that Isabel and I got into watching a nature show once — how a hyena that’s bitten onto something big (possibly even an entire ruminant), will lash its head around in a kind of figure-eight pattern to tear loose a bite of flesh. And Isabel and I got into doing that to each other’s shoulders, or threatening to, and getting into the very wild and hyper motion of your head that goes with it. So looking at Vincent’s last pictures, I found my head moving around in those loops, imagining how it would be to tear into that kind of painting — if you could do it.”

I got a picture of myself in Max Beckmann’s personal mirror that he actually painted with his face a couple of times. Hi Max! It’s great being an exile on Hoogstraat.