Does anyone want to take my frustration off my hands? Brand new, hardly ever used. Getting rid of it due to health reasons.
RFID
RFID (radio frequency identification, or remote field identification) scares the shit out of me. Several years ago, Gilette, under threat from privacy advocates everywhere, stopped shipping products with an RFID chip implanted in the packaging. I don’t know if they are using the chips now for anything other than a logistical tracking system, but their initial idea was to implant the chips in order to counter shoplifting; apparently razorblades are a hot commodity on the black market and regularly get stolen from supermarkets. If you bounce this idea around your group of friends during an evening of cocktails you can come up with some frightening ideas regarding the possible implementation of this technology. RFID chips in shoes that can track your movement. RFID chips in money that removes the anonimity of a cash-purchase. You retrieve money from an ATM and it registers which bills it hands out to you. You walk over to your local sandwich shop and buy a sandwich and there the money is once again registered against a particular product. You can then track every cash-purchase done with money tagged with an RFID chip. Or better yet, there’s a family in the U.S. that has voluntarily had RFID chips implanted under their skin, as an experiment. Sure, sure, there are a hundred ways in which you can use this technology for a good purpose, but there are so many ways in which it can be used for nefarious purposes that I get upset just thinking about the ethical consequences of RFID chips.
Apartment
My apartment feels very full right now, because of all the packing going on. Tomorrow, when Mouls departs for India, it’s going to feel very empty, in a good and a bad way.
Angels in America
.: Angels in America
About two years ago, Eva and I watched the Angels in America mini-series. It’s a rather epic play about homosexuality and the emergence of AIDS in New York City in the early 80s. Below a very good scene in which Roy Cohn, a viciously powerful lawyer and one of the lead parts in the play, is told that he has AIDS.
On saturday, after a long wait, Eva took me to see the play performed by Toneelgroep Amsterdam in the Stadsschouwburg. It was my belated birthday gift and it was a bit of a wait, but it was worth it. It’s hard to describe the five hour marathon play, but it was all about love, life, illness and death. As it so happens I’ve got a lot of issues on all those fronts right now. It also didn’t help that the score to the play was mid-80s David Bowie music, something I associate very closely with my mother. I am not ashamed to admit that the sadness became overwhelming at times. Luckily, there’s a lot of humour in the play, just the kind of cantankerous and black-galled humour that has kept my family and I strong throughout all of the last 15 months.
We had a small thirty minute break in which we had Burger King! Man, I haven’t been to Burger King, or similar fast-food chains, in probably over a year. It was good, and bad at the same time. I had a chicken-burger with cheese, which was so fucking good. Dennis and Winston probably remember that burger as fondly as I do, and it was true to form, a fantastic sandwhich! I’m looking forward to letting another year go by before I have another one. :)
.: John Everett Millais
I finally manage to go and see the John Everett Millais exhibition at the Van Gogh museum. I had tried, in vain, to go twice before, but always something came up and waylaid me. I had seen some of his stuff in the Tate Britain several years ago, and I was really taken by his Ophelia which has been plastered all over the city for the last two months and I was looking forward to it. I was a little disappointed, however. I had heard the works described as “very realistic, but also very, very sensual.” While I agree heartely that the bulk of his work is very realistic, which I like very much (I’m not much of a surrealist), but only a small portion did I consider sensual. Ophelia is, Mariana and the pencil study for Mariana are very sensual, too, and so are a handful of other works, but his later work, especially the portraits, he completely abandons the story-element in his paintings and focusses more on these passive expressions. I don’t know, I wasn’t very impressed or stirred by it.
Neuromancer
I was so happy to hear that Neuromancer was going to be translated to the silver screen, and with a 70 million dollar budget. Then I saw that the guy who directed Torque was going to direct it, and that Hayden Christensen was going to play Case, the lead character. Now I hate the idea.