mirror, mirror ... (isabelle)

august 21, 2002.

I recently had the pleasure of selecting the ten images for one of the weekly galleries over at Heather Champ's pretty Mirror Project. My selection is called 'Reflective Geometry'.

Here's another intriguing 'mirror' picture: a girl sits at a table, reading, and her image is reflected in the glass of the open window.

It is one of a bunch of old black-and-white negatives that I found a while ago in a metal box, among a pile of other stuff apparently thrown away during the 'cleaning out' of an appartment, not far from where I live.
I'm afraid I do not know who is that girl, but I decided to call her Isabelle, which is the name of one of the main characters appearing in the pages of a typed manuscript - written in French - that I stumbled upon around the same time, spread out, under parked cars and all over the pavement just a few blocks away - again! - from my house.
I managed to get hold of twelve double sided sheets of what must have been a (draft of a) novel of some 240 odd pages. (One of the sheets, the contents of which seems like the beginning of an ending, is numbered 231 recto, 232 verso.)
I translated some of it into Dutch: 'Isabelle (op straat gevonden)' appeared in this summer's edition of the Dutch webzine Writers Block.

Scans of two of the original French pages can be viewed here.

tags: mirror project, found

# .2.

in the beginning

august 19, 2002.

"... Sound Chronicles and Killable Flies are proudly brought to you by HarSMedia™ .... "

Btw, it is still possible to download the free screensaver versions of the Flies! Have a look at the bottom of the may/june 2002 edition of the HM-guide ...

For more about 'Commuters', have a look at the Amphibious Records Archives ...

Pierre Schaeffer passed away seven years ago today.

[ note added jan. 25, 2004: The above is the very first 'soundblog'-entry. It was written to test 'IX' (Interactive 'X' - well, of course it was the time where all versions X'ed), the free blogging tool & space provided by 1Sound.com, an 'OMD' (Online Music Distributor) that started recruiting 'free artists' sometime spring/summer 2002. '1Sound.com' was a joint project of Rod Underhill, member of the original mp3.com founder group, and Michael Danke, who aimed at setting up an OMD-site that would incorporate both a form of 'quality control' (by having a 'team of musicologists' rate the uploaded tracks) and a site concept meant to attract a significant 'non musician' audience - somewhat mysteriously referred to as the 'theme park' concept - of which the 'blogging tool' was an early and important part). I had been interested in and been aware of the 'blogging phenomenon' for quite some time, but had not yet felt the inclination to set up a general blog myself. I've been a long time journal keeper, but prefer to keep my journal private. Putting it online would surely have had an important impact on my journal writing. It would have changed, through being aware of an anonymous audience 'out there', and I simply did not want to allow for that change. Neither was I prepared to consider a journal with 'private' and public' sections. This is mainly a matter of "too much momentum already", though, a not wanting to give up long established habits, and far from a fundamental objection to the online journal format. On the contrary. I do think, that were I to start a journal (or merely young enough to 'begin all over again' :), I would not hesitate and opt for a blog format. For a couple months, end 1999, I even kept, as an experiment, a 'fictional online diary' (Jan Harsman's London Diary).

But IX as part of 1Sound, an online music site, suggested the idea to use a blog as a journal accompanying the Sound Chronicles, and related sound works: not a 'general', but a 'thematic' blog. I soon got the hang of it, and little by little the SoundBlog effectively took on a life of its own.

After a rather promising start, however, the development at the 1Sound.com site itself came to a grinding halt. Just after 2003's summer I got fed up with the continuing server problems, that made the SoundBlog pretty difficult - and at many times impossible - to access as well as to update, and I decided to start to transfer the blog to my own domain. Which moreover enabled me to take complete control of its presentation, as well as of the archiving and other options. At the time of writing the only interesting blog-option lacking is that of leaving commentaries on entries. (This is possible by means of my Wiki, but I suppose that's not a very userfriendly way of commenting ... It'll be easy enough though to construct something useful php/MySQL driven. I'll have to work on that. [ added june 7, 2005: The Wiki currently is no longer active; the more recent SoundBlog entries are 'commentable', though ; added september, 2006: well ... they were 'commentable', until some months ago spambots started inserting steadily increasing numbers of spam comments, and I removed the comments sections again, until I find the time to install a more 'spam proof' version . ])
This turned out to be a good and timely move, as not much later, and sadly enough just around the time that 1Sound could have, in a natural way, filled up part of the void opened up by mp3.com's closure, 1Sound.com went off line completely. Due to an act of 'sabotage', or so it seems.
See Rick Munarizz's 'The Rise and Fall of 1Sound.com' for an insightful insider's story on what happened to this one time promising 'start-up'. ]

tags: flies, sound chronicles, commuters, amphibious, Pierre Schaeffer, 1Sound.com, OMD, London diary

# .1.