LATE-NIGHT POOL

Tuesday, January 30, 2001

12:54 Brasil
Ver os filmes brasileiros acabou sendo a melhor coisa dessa minha vinda ao Festival de Rotterdam. Principalmente Domésticas, o filme, de Fernando Meirelles e Nando Olival (em estréia mundial). O texto é excelente e as personagens e situacoes incrivelmente familiares. Sem falar na variedade de apartamentos paulistanos que tive a chance de revisitar, incluindo um predio do Artaxo Jurado em Higienopolis (o elemento vasado entregou) e uma vista aerea do edificio pauliceia, minha ultima residencia em Sao Paulo.

Eu cresci sempre com empregadas domésticas por perto; eu gostava muito de ser amigo delas e, agora mais que nunca, eu percebo o papel que isso teve na minha formacao e o tanto que essa convivencia me ensinou sobre a natureza das pessoas.

Portanto eu quero mandar, daqui dessa Holanda que apareceu inesperada na minha vida, beijos e muito obrigado para a Perci, em primeiro lugar, e tambem pra Dete, a Olga e a Irene, a Nalva, a Penha, a Maria Jose' (da Dona Mausi), e a Corina que nao ficou nem uma semana mas que tinha o rosto coberto de pintinhas e que adorava dancar (a noite toda).
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Monday, January 29, 2001

18:15 Loose, assorted, unrelated
-Missing São Paulo more and more.
-Devouring Philip K. Dick's UBIK: another hit recommendation by Paul.
-Still very tired.
-Thinking of the days I used to paint (yes, I used to paint).
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Sunday, January 28, 2001

21:37 From Rotterdam
A late-night posting from the Calipso cinema, at the moment offering a very fast and free connection, with projection screens as monitors.
Yes! so far my plan to have a few days away from it all has worked out pretty ok. Lots of movies and a variety of beds the last few nights. Most of my nights in Rotterdam will be spent in the quite good local Youth Hostel, with two very nice and quite extreme exceptions: one night at the Westin (thanks to a bunch of airmiles Richard and I decided to cash) and another at the Hotel New York. The three places end up being a very, very fine combination.
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Tuesday, January 23, 2001

00:45 Oh-la-la
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Saturday, January 20, 2001

10:44 Process - Product
Today: I will be doing the final edit of the title sequence I am designing for the Dutch Buddhist Broadcast Foundation. My job is to define their on-air identity. The intro sequence is looking very good.

Yesterday: Tanja den Broeder presented in Utrecht the first impressions of the Design Agenda during the BNO new year's reception. The Design Agenda is a site that offers an overview of all design-related events in The Netherlands, added with relevant articles from main design publications and a very rich and complex annotation/disussion environment (and here's where the agenda of each designer really plays a role). My job is to design the site and make it 'skinnable' for all other designers.

Next week: beginning of the International Film Festival Rotterdam and the opening of the Exploding Cinema site CINEMA ONLINE: an online exhibition that is part of the festival programme. The idea was to design a 'cinema environment' where vistors can the view the featured work.
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10:25 Lat night I went to Unbreakable. I wasn't expecting such a subtle, restful movie. The camera work is breathtaking and a does a very delicate translation of the graphic novel style. If you like Watchmen, this movie is for you (and vice-versa).
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Friday, January 19, 2001

15:14 Amsterdam is freezing again - ice has been building up on the surface of the canals and there's some snow on the sidewalks since a few days. It always amazes me how cities survive such variations in temperature. Back in my home town, São Paulo, temperatures range from 10C to 35C in extreme winters and summers - though we mostly stay within 15C to 25C. That was all I knew about weather until I was 26 years old and left Brazil for the first time (!).

And now a report from our Vancouver correspondent.
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Thursday, January 18, 2001

03:08 Just now I received an e-mail from Mr. Robert Baskerville with a small correction to the lyrics of Clouds across the moon I posted (copy-pasted) last August.
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Monday, January 15, 2001

16:57 Things
I am in love with my desk these days. That's really good because I spend an immense amount of my time sitting at it getting stuff done. You know that already. What you probably don't know is that I have a plastic stingray always laying somewhere between the keyboard and my two monitors. Like the real ones, it camouflages himself by having the same color as the surface of the table.
The plastic is shiny and flexible, almost like rubber.
Best part of the stingray to play with while on the phone: the tail.
Detail: next to being really cool animals, there is a language feature - the Dutch word for stingray is rog.

It came from Barcelona

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Monday, January 08, 2001

22:06 Interruption
While biking this afternoon I realized that I barely experienced the beginning of a new year. No resolution list, inbox cleaning or anything (an empty inbox is a good inbox). That's because I was - am - once again having a very packed work schedule.

Is that good or bad?

My brother-in-law Luis (who doesn't like the holidays season anymore) told me the other day on the phone that the only good thing about New Years' Eve is that it brings a sense of transition: "because if it went on continuously it would be unbearable". Hmm. That reminded me of the fact that in Brazil one barely notices the change of seasons - which is one of the things I love the most about being in Europe. It also made me realize that I learned to survive the packed work phases of my freelancer life by having several small breaks along the year. In that sense 2000 was really amazing with lots of small and medium trips to places I had never been before.

Coming soon: the International Film Festival Rotterdam, which I hope will be my next (really deserved) small break. If I manage to keep my schedule free as planned I'll be in Rotterdam for over a week to recover from the current work marathon. I am also designing one of the IFFR web sites and that's why I will have a passe-partout for the whole festival :-)
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20:47 CD-BD
Got this week a great CD from Fred: Paul Schütze's 'Third Site'. The music is inspired by a thermal pool in a Swiss alpine village. From the images on the CD booklet I gather that it must be the place mentioned by architect Sibo de Man on an e-mail message I got a few months ago, when common friend Teike Asselbergs realized our shared interest in swimming pools and got us in contact.

The spa was designed by the architect Peter Zumthor and won the Carlsberg Architecture Awards in 1998.

To do: Call Sibo. Go to Switzerland.

Thermal Baths Spa in Vals, Switzerland. Photo: Henrik Lund

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20:11 Tomorrow is the first teaching day this year - I am curious as to what the students made of the assignment I proposed just before the end of last year. The topic is repetition / paterns / loops. There's very few class days before the end of the semester so they will be work on a series of studies instead of one finished design.
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20:01 I'm exhausted. Satisfied but really exhausted.
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Sunday, January 07, 2001

15:14 Fusion anomaly; boundaryless and causeless chaotic attractor
Got this morning two e-mail messages from Fred Inklaar with links to definitions of the word Eschaton, a term we both came across a year of two ago while reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. In the book the unusually brainy students of one Enfield Tennis Academy play every couple of years a game they call Escathon. The thing is described as a sort of hybrid between chess, tennis and the good old RISK. A large tennis court is divided into areas corresponding to the world's political regions. Each area contains a player with precisely calculated nuclear ammunition (tennis balls). The gamemaster runs the whole time around the court computing the impact of each move.

It's a small passage in a very very thick novel. The book revolves around the search for the lost master of a film ("the Infinite Jest") allegedly so entertaining that viewers cannot survive the experience of watching it. Engaged in the chase for the cartridge are the tennis students, the members of a drug-rehab clinic and a Quebequois wheel-chaired terrorist group.

Whatabook.
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12:59 and all links are good.
Cozy reunion last night: Anneke, Annelys and I had a long beer-and-talk session at Café Orlan (Staalstraat x Kloveniersburgwaal). Conversation went from naiveté to relationships to the death of parents and friends to reincarnation (into) mushrooms. Also Rome, the catholic church, retirement and our designer hourly rates.

Le jardin Io Io Ito Ito (Compagnie Montalvo/Hervieu)

We met earlier in the evening for a performance at the Amsterdam Muziektheater. The show was light and good - full with antropo-zoomorphic video characters in delicate duets with the dancers on stage.
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Friday, January 05, 2001

11:17 I was born in São Paulo, Brazil, on January 5th, 1966

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Tuesday, January 02, 2001

09:29 Hello and welcome back.
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