Rudy and R. U. in Amsterdam. Tulips.
Wednesday, April 11th, 2007
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..