Job Opening: Prophet

No fancy cartoons on my website of either Jesus or Mohammed. In my opinion you don’t have to act like a sheep in order to stand for freedom of expression – or freedom in religion. (And besides, I don’t even like the cartoons).

In order to avoid future conflicts as we are experiencing today, I would say it becomes time for a new Prophet! So here it is: a job opening! Besides the message(s) you have to bring from above and the miracles you will perform, you (as a Prophet) also have to understand the time we are living in and should be able to bridge the gap we have nowadays in our world – with keeping in mind that cultural values and legacies should be preserved as much as possible. With this job comes great responsibility but of course also very good secondary conditions, as holidays and flexible working hours.

So, feeling greater than Jesus and Mohammed, please feel free to perform miracles and be A PROPHET for us all!

Free music

Well, not completely free of course, but as Creative Commons states it: “flexible copyright licenses for creative works.” Meaning a lot of work from people like you and me (and more talented) that want to share their work with others. If the material you downloaded is just for personal use then it is mostly free (but please donate if you respect the artist). Are you going to use the material commercially, then expect to pay a small fee. A great initiative that is already embraced by quite some artists (I strongly encourage you to have a look for yourself on the website of Creative Commons).

Jamendo is another site that provides only music albums from mainly artists from France and Belgium. They do this by using the licenses of Creative commons. Every album you will find here can be downloaded via the edonkey p2p-network (also licensed via the CC license) or via a bittorrent link (both legal as long you will respect the CC license). All albums can be listened to by streaming audio and I may say: it has very good quality and is fun to do so. With help of the tags it becomes even easier and more fun to find the music albums of your preference(s).

To name a few artists I came up with after browsing for an hour:
An easy to listen to album in the genre vocal/folk is Guillo (France). If you are more into Electronic then you could give Bep (France) a try. Still on the electronic move but mixed with some classical influences and sometimes a bit experimental is Collectif Terra Incognita (France). And for the one that liked the soundtrack of Amelie Poulain (Yann Tiersen), then you should try the classical (piano) album of Ehma (Belgium). If you are looking for instrumental and poetic music, you should give Le Collectif Unifie de la Crecelle (France) a try. And if you are really into experimental jazzy music (lots of saxophone), you have to try TheLinks (Switzerland).

And last but not least, my personal favorite is MAIS 69 (France). A mix of funk, modern jazz, ska and some blues.

To conclude; quite refreshing and away from all the mainstream music from nowadays!

The money maker

The Dutch are gaining too much and too fast weight . Because of this, our government will spend 7.3 million euro for health and sport in the year 2006.

Amazing… That we are all getting lazier with the day and the commercial world is making it us easier (escalators where ever you go) while the government tries to make us move and spend millions of EUROs.

My theory: Make the elevators and escalators only available to disabled people, so other people have to move and take the stairs for example. In this way we all save money (government on advertising and subsidiaries, companies on elevators and escalators and last but not least, we will be spending less on sport contributions). And as topping on the icecream, you will even be more environmently friendly :)

Follow your instincts…

At the moment when I start writing this post, I realize it has been quite some time ago since I last updated the blog. Probably a good thing, because I might have had a lot of other things to do instead. But it could also mean I do not create time for things I like to do anymore…. Or perhaps I was totally left without inspiration and had nothing to write about and all I could do was to stare outside the window, as bored people do. Well… I will leave it up to your imagination why. But probably you could not care less what I did :)

All I actually wanted to say in this post: Have a great year and follow your instincts!

Neighbours

“This summer was great – I went to Thailand and did scuba diving and some relaxing on the beach. And next weekend I will go to New York to do some ‘winter’ shopping – I heard they have sale now there.”

Going abroad to the most remote corners of the world, but not been to the village next to your own village. This is the image that spreads nowadays. The first time when I was in the city New York and telling some friends from New York I just had visit the Statue of Liberty, they asked me how it was like. I could not believe they had never been there, while they had lived their whole life in the city. But it is true, having lived in Rotterdam, one of the main ports of the World, for eight years now, and yet I have not seen the chance to visit the harbor.

So, two years ago I decided to do some catching up with visiting countries closer to home and so visit more of Europes’ beauty. First to the Eastern part of Europe, last year Russia and this year Barcelona and the North-Eastern coast of Spain, better known as Costa Brava. You can have a look at some of the pictures @ The Dutch Grapes Gallery.


Figueres – home of the surreal Teatre-Musea Dali

Mr Blunt & dEUS

Two albums that have lately attracted my attention. Back to Bedlam from James Blunt and Pocket Revolution from dEUS.

James is a new song-writer who was a soldier in his ‘previous’ life. With this debut he follows many English song-alike male singer songwriters as Damien Rice and Daniel Powter, but still he creates a unique sound. A good album, but hopefully it won’t stop here with this debut and will he continue to explore to what else he is capable of.

After a kind of sabbatical of four years (in where they did their tour of their previous album “The Ideal Crash”) and six years since they brought out “The ideal crash”, the Belgian band dEUS comes with their fourth album. Nothing really new, but luckily it still sounds like dEUS. On the net you can read many reviews already (three days after the release), even though almost everyone is praising this new album, I still prefer their previous (The Ideal Crash) one. Hopefully the next album will not take another six years and will bring us something new and fresh.

“Haiku” what?

Keeping my blog for nearly two months now, and after having taken quite many pictures and writing some stories, I accidentally found out about a new way of photography. You basically fix of what you see in a few lines and a few words. It is called Haiku and can be seen as photography in words.

    The Discovery
    While being a little wasted and stumbling at night on the streets, a fellow wasted person and me almost stood still for nearly two minutes at some brick in the street, encrypted with some none-sense making sentences. Of course we remained in denial of our stupid ness and decided this was the effect of the alcohol. We continued our crawl towards the car and it only took us a few seconds to completely forget about the whole brick.

    The Benefactors
    Some days after, when this very same person and me met each other again, she showed me a text message on her phone, that seemed to be a copy of the brick. At this point (completely sober) the sentences still didn’t make sense to us at all. And still being in denial, we decided we should rewrite the sentences at this brick and do all the drunk people, walking down the same street and reading the same brick, a favor.

    The Revelation
    Finally home and ready to write some of the best and smooth sentences ever. But before I even started writing, a little research about the other text learned us that we had to do here with some sort of Japanese poetry. So, no smooth version of our brick stories….

A Haiku poem consist of respectively 5, 7 and 5 syllables in three lines. The lines have to be independent of each other, but enrich the understanding of the other. Also every Haiku has to have a seasonal theme. For example, cherry blossoms indicate spring, snow indicate winter, and mosquitoes indicate summer, but the season word isn’t always that obvious (source: Haiku for People and the Haiku Notebook).

The sun is shining?!

Last week I had the honor of taking pictures of the upcoming model Cailu. We had talked about it before, but one of the conditions was that the sun had to shine. Since this is something quite rare in Holland and totally unpredictable, the photo session would have to be quite spontaneous.

But last Thursday this day had come! Full blue sky and a nice cool breeze to keep us Dutch people from complaining about the high temperatures. You can see a selection of the shoot @ The Dutch Grapes Gallery.

Cailu