The weary wayfarer is back in his California heaven. Immortal in cyberspace. Rather than making new posts, this week I keep revising this particular post.

Hooray! Today (Wednesday, April 18, 2997) Menso Heus of the Dutch ISP XS4ALL managed to post a nice version of my twenty minute Amsterdam Psipunk lecture onto Google video. Click the little arrow to play it or, to see a larger version, click this link: Google Psipunk Video. I have the full written text of the Psipunk talk online as well. The sound quality is very good, although the synch to video is just a bit off.

Thanks to XS4ALL, the Cyberspace Salvations group, and the Waag Society for organizing the talk. By the way I’ll be giving a similar talk at Dorkbot in San Francisco on Wednesday, May 2–in about two weeks.

Culture hero R. U. Sirius was on the stage with me that night; we should have video of his talk and our shared Q&A up soon.

My new Dutch impresario friend Luc Sala posted a ten-minute video of the first half of my talk on Youtube as well. The sound quality isn’t as good, but the synch and image a little better. Good work, Luc! Guerilla journalism. Luc has made a zillion interview and talk videos, you can find them tagged by mindlift on Youtube.

There’s also a high-quality, but somewhat hard to access (because of 500 Meg size) version of the video at the Waag site .

My Rochester interview about Mathematicians in Love with Bob Smith will air as broadcast and online from AM 1370 in Rochester, Tuesday, May 1, 2007, Noon-1 EDT. It’s supposed to be available soon from WXXI as an MP3 file as well.

More Rochester documentation: My lecture at RIT on “Gnarly Computation,” is up as a Flash video. The freshest part—that is, the part I never said before—is last five minutes when I’m giving my history of how I got involved with cyberpunk—scroll ahead to around minute 65 of the 70 minute talk. If you figure out a way to clip out this bit, Youtube it and send me the link.

And the very enjoyable four-person colloquium on my work is up as in video form as well.

My very last night in Amsterdam was fun. I had dinner outside a trattoria on cobblestones by a pair of intersecting canals with Ken Goffman [a.ka. R. U. Sirius]. Just the two of us, no Q & A, no psychodrama, it was relaxing. All the water and cobblestones and the crenellated stair-step gables. So perfectly European, like a theme park almost, but with some actual dirt and with relaxed locals puttering by in little boats drinking wine and beer. We had dessert before dinner: pancakes in the cool pleasant courtyard of the Amsterdam Historical Museum, another of Amsterdam’s intensely perfected urban spaces. I think the government has a lot of money to really buff things up.. After dinner we walked along the canals, ending up at De Melkweg (the Milky Way), a night club I’ve always wanted to check out.

Last time I was in Amsterdam, in 1994, I bought pot at the “R. Crumb Coffeeshop,” and their business card bore, on one side, Crumb’s classic “Stoned Agin” drawing of a man with a melting face, and on the other side, a little map of how to get back and forth between the Melkweg and the R. Crumb Coffeeshop. And parts of the great live Rolling Stones album Stripped was recorded at the Melkweg, as was Michel Gondry’s “Like a Rolling Stone” video for it. So I think of the Melkweg as being a very cool place.

R. U. and I came upon the Melkweg in the dusk; and it’s not such a big building at all. It holds a cinema, a theater space and small rock club, nothing like the cavernous Fillmore hall I’d expected. Maybe they use the big theater for big rock shows, but last night they had ballet in there. We went into the small room and saw a couple of ska bands; it was Ska Night, a mini-festival called Dutchska. We stayed about an hour. In a way, ska is perfect for Europeans. It gives them an excuse to sing “Ya, ya, ya,” to a band featuring an accordion—which is what they like to do in the first place. The band Mala Vita had guitars, and they rocked, one song’s chorus was good: “Nobody knows, nobody knows.” R. U. and I could relate to that, we were shouting along. Dancing to the music felt good. My hips and back get sore after a few days of walking around cities, also I was sore from the stress surrounding our show. When I dance, I let my backbone slip and work it on out. Yubba.

Between bands, Ken and I sat on the ground outside. We weren’t getting high, and neither were most of the kids there for the concert, which seemed incongruous. In the U. S., pot is illegal, and everyone is smoking it at concerts. In Holland it’s effectively legal, and they don’t bother to smoke it. Ken and I don’t need it anymore, we’re mutants for good.