Yesterday a cartoonist was arrested in the Netherlands. He drew discriminating cartoons according to the state and judging by what I have seen of his cartoons they’re probably right.

However: they also accuse him of incensing to hate and hate crimes. Now here the slope gets a little more slippy. Did he? By drawing cartoons? If I see a cartoon like that I cluck my tongue and shake my head but I don’t suddenly hateMuslims or black people. And a person who already has a propensity to crime of a discriminatory nature would not be more incensed by these cartoons.

What does scare me in this affair is that our prime minister apparently has not only been fawning at Bush’s heels begging for recognition but he has also been studying the practises of the CIA. How long before we in the Netherlands have acordoned off area somewhere in one of our ‘ polders‘ where the state can lock up it’s citizens with or without trial? Far fetched you say? Well not so far fetched as you may think. Five years ago, during the avian flu crisis (and o dear how many people have since died of avian flu… millions, well thousands… ehm, well, a couple of hundred world wide actually) fences were climbed and private properties invaded by sometimes up to twelve strong arm morons in the service of the government to kill anything with feathers on. National emergency? No, killing spree. Pure,unadulterated killing lust! The most shocking to me was that the legality of the entire action was then and is now vague at best. Never has the lid on that one been lifted and the Dutch government has covered it up nicely under a fluffy blanket of poultry feathers.

Just as in business where it is always very unwise to piss of a client it’s bad practice to piss of your citizens. You never how the spreading oil spill contaminates the waters you try to navigate. Firstly: our state department has not the best track record when it comes to thoroughly investigating cases and not making mistakes. As a matter of fact they have frequently been the wry laughing stock of our country’s people these last few years. Secondly: I wrote it before and I will write it again: our government is very quick in issuing tough laws against the poor and defenseless but when it comes to difficult issues involving a tougher opponent things get delayed and finally swept under the carpet.

This is the government that has been investigating a cartoonist for three years and finally arrested him. And it scares me. It scares me witless to know that I live in a country where a faulty state department has this much power. It scares me that the government spends three years on a cartoonist while other important issues don’t get resolved (health care, public transport, alternative energy to name but a few). And it scares me to live in a country that has a prime minister that wants to be associated with that war mongering idiot in Washington. Even going to America to visit him in June. You should stay as far away from that man as you can. But no, Jan Peter wants to say goodbye.

I loathe him, I loathe our government and I feel powerless to change it. I tried voting, as did many others but votes are counted and then added to the statistics. A lot of black suitsdisappear behind closed doors and weeks later a monster comes out that lacks any resemblance to the flawed but strangely beautiful creature our people had voted for. Our democracy and my faith in our leadership has failed utterly. It is sad to have to conclude this. Balkenende: thanks for ruining our country. Much obliged, dude!

Today another great and enjoyable songwriting session. What struck me today that when writing lines the order of the lines is often conducted by serendipity, or so it seems. We were just randomly adding lines to a rap or spoken part (depending on the clients interpretation) and suddenly it occurred to me that the order of the lines became important. Some were connected by a common theme that produced a nice flow. Not just in rhythm and rhyme but also in meaning. This makes a few lines of text suddenly more powerful.

Now that I have (again) been emerged in a few intense songwriting sessions I am listening to songs with different ears. Again, my iPod contains a treasure trove of ideas and tips and tricks. It is funny how different sessions in the studio gear my brain in different ways. When concentrating on the sound of a production I start listening to my iPod and listen carefully how he instruments are recorded and mixed and how the sounds blend into an overall sound. Now, after sculpting a song while paying hardly any attention to the sound I start listening to melody lines and how text is incorporated into that melody.

That’s what I love about this job. You never ever stop learning and you never ever have the one right way of doing things. There is always someone out there who has a better idea or has found another way of solving the difficulties of fitting text to music. There’s maybe one person who I would consider the ultimate songwriter and whom I believe unbeaten in this and that is Joni Mitchell. The way she manages to write almost prose like lyrics and still give the listener the false idea they are listening to verse-chorus-verse is amazing. Listen to Hejira for instance and be amazed at how well the lyrics fit the song. Or is it the other way around.

I have a lot of analyzing to do this weekend. A humble music producers job is never done.

I haven’t been very active on Twitter lately. I still love the principle of Twitter though. 140 characters to say it all. It forces you to be very creative with text. I can’t wait for a mobile device that will allow me to use Twitter on a more regular basis.

Today I found out that unbeknown to myself the regular activity I had on Twitter before helped me in another field: songwriting. A buddy-colleague of mine and I often work together on songwriting projects. Often these projects have to be completed in record time and quickly transforming an idea into text has become almost second nature for me.

Both music and lyrics have to be written and in the case of this client (whom we have worked for before) the lyrics actually have to mean something. Enter the Twitter experience. Condensing thoughts into 140 character micro-blogposts has trained me well for songwriting where you have to say a lot in a couple of lines. Often your initial lines get changed around due to musical requirements and then you have to think quickly: say the same using different words that cause a different rhythm. Hard work for the brain but also very satisfying when it works.

So even though this blogpost is late and I haven’t been as active on Twitter lately as I’d like to be I have practiced my writing skills again and I am increasingly convinced that writing is where it’s at for me!

Today some links. Just to entertain you and kill your productivity. It’s summer here and productivity is for the winter time.

• The human mind works in mysterious ways.
• Pick your mood, music will fit.
• Ultra condensed movies. Some are very funny.
• Online music theory lessons, tutorials and utilities. Very handy and easy to learn.
• 1001 movies you have to see before you die. They say.
• If advertising was all like this, I would love advertising. Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis advertised.
• Historic timelines on overdrive. Great history tool.
• Herbs and spices guide.
• Oh dear, how frustratingly addicting. Took me a couple of times to get off the blocks…
• Cooking by numbers. Pick what’s in your fridge and or cupboard and get recipes based on that. Handy.
• Hot library smut. No not what you’re thinking. If you love books and libraries, this is going to be better than porn for you.
• The earth at night.
• Great, great animation. Some people’s imagination is inspiring to say the least!

I fantasise about emigration often. The way this country (NL) is developing and the lack of influence I as a citizen have on it make it a place I no longer feel happy or at home in. So escaping to more compatible climes is a thought that crops up more and more.

The political system in this country, although called democracy, has collapsed into a populist shouting match that shows all the uplifting hallmarks of a rigged Idols competition.

The pressure of overcrowding is making people in general and me in particular edgy and fuses are very short indeed.

Air quality is laughingly bad. Laughingly because only by viewing the speed of decline with the blackest sense of humour can I make sense of the way our roads grind to fume spewing gridlock every morning and evening. Roads filled with cars filled with mostly one person who while picking his or her nose edges closer to a job he or she hates with gusto.

Then there are the a-social elements. I am happy to report they are still a minority in this country. However I am very unhappy to report that the balance is shifting and anyway they make more noise than a herd of stampeding elephants, who by the way have more in the way of brainpower than the shouting and noise polluting herd of assholes that somehow got admitted to the club of homo sapiens by mistake. Some of these anti social miscreants that should be locked up and the key thrown away even make it on national television as the summum of entertainment. Yeah, right, encourage them why don’t you. Jeez!

But above all of the above: I need space. I need to sit in the back of my garden and not be force fed the delights of neighbours, cars, mopeds, stereos, belches, creaming children, building works, airplanes, fireworks, … I could go on but I think you get the idea.

So is it really that bad? Most would probably say it isn’t but to me it is. Interaction with other humans often puts a lot of stress on me. I seldom invite it voluntarily. I want to be alone with my thoughts without being rudely intruded upon. I guess I am the a-social one but at least I don’t make other people’s lives amisery being it. I’m fairly certain of that.

Would emigration solve the problem? Some say it will not but I stubbornly and somewhat secretly stay convinced it would. At worst it will make things a little better. Slowly a checklist for emigration is forming in my mind. It will probably never get used due to lack of funds and the fact that I am not alone in deciding this. At least thechecklist provides a means of escape. After all that’s what it is all about: escape.

In a couple of months the two year contract on my mobile runs out. To those not used to European contract practices I’ll explain what this means. In many countries in Europe you buy a contract with your phone company for say two years. With the contract, which stipulates a certain amount of call minutes, sms messages and optional other extras such as data plans, comes a phone. Either free or for a much reduced price. When the contract runs out the haggling starts again. New contract, new phone.

However, my current phone (Sony-Ericsson w810i) does everything I want and more. It has a reasonable camera for those emergency shots, it runs Java apps for those games I never play, it synchronises with my Mac for calendar and phonebook up to dateness, it has a mp3 player and radio that I hardly use because I’m an iPod bigot, it takes voice memo’s for those on the road blog ideas and amazingly it also makes phone calls and sends sms messages. The interface is very bearable and the form factor is very pleasant indeed. All in all I’m very happy with this phone and it is the best one I’ve had so far.

There’s only on thing missing that I would very much like it to have: WIFI, internet connectivity via a wireless access point. I’d like to use the phone as a quick internet reference guide and for twitter updates but there is no way in Hell that I am going to pay those extortionate rates for broadband internet access through UMTS or GPRS or what ever mobile broadband is in vogue. There is of course one phone that is at the top, nee lonely, lofty heights of my wanted list that provides WIFI: the iPhone. There are however two tiny problems with the iPhone. A: it is not officially sold in the Netherlands and B: the price.

So for now I am very philosophical about the end of my contract. I tell myself I will be much better off negotiating a reduced monthly fee so I get a monthly return on investment which I can put to say an iPod touch or something like that. After all I don’t really need a new phone. It is better for the environment if I make my current one last longer. I don’t make that much use of my mobile (which I doubt is true by the way, but after all it’s a philosophy) and when mobile phones were introduced I scoffed at the idea of owning one so who am I to want a new one every two years.

So will there be a new phone in the mail when my contract is renewed? Knowing myself… most probably yes. *sigh* I have developed a gadget dependency.

Yesterday evening we had a nice, simple al fresco dinner and the summer evening slowly trickled on. As the level in the bottle lowered the talk got more profound (or seemd to do so) and we started talking about photography. I am only a very recent and very amateur newby at the flat surfice composition gae and it shows in my photographs. Some of them show all the detail of the object but that’s hardly difficult with todays modern camera. What makes a beautiful photo is the composition of the image. And I readily agree that in that respect I’m a novice. But an enthusiatic novice and a ‘very willing to learn’ novice. So after last nights talk I went anout shooting some stuff this morning. I don’t expect to become a world class photographer after just one nights discussion but I hope these pictures show a change of thought that went on in making them. It may be a small change and I probably need to get a lot bolder in my approach but give it time… So here are some shots. You can click on the image to show them ful size on flickr. From there you can also just browse my flickr stream. Comments either here on the blog or on flickr are more than welcome. I want to learn!

Why? Because it’s summer and I should be outside intead of inside typing a blog post. I have never let my readers/viewers down before and every day I have tried to post something of interest but this time I just feel too summery to do so. So You’ll have to do with this picture and let it inspire you to go out and shake your feathers a bit. Leave the world as it is and go enjoy the weekend. Forget work, obligations and other pressures for a moment, open a bottle of something cool and mind numbing and enjoy the day. That’s an order!

And the wolf is there every time. I am referring to Jeffrey Sachs‘ new book, “Common wealth: economics for a crowded plane.” I have not read this book yet so the details of its contents I do not have. However I listened to an interview with Jeffrey Sachs about the book on the BBC program “Start the week“. From this interview I got the message of the book, which is largely the same as the Reith lectures Jeffrey Sachs gave last year: why is it so difficult to get influential people up in arms to help some poor people by for instance providing malaria nets or cheap medication while at the same time its very easy to spend two billion dollars a day on the military. After all, the cost of helping some of the poorest people in this world would only be a fraction of the cost of running the defence department. And it is not only the world leaders that are hard to convince. In the program Jeffrey Sachs gave an example of how he had, with private funds he had raised, helped some very remote villages to get better water supply and some schools. Yet when he went to one of the UK’s largest aid organisations to ask them to help with the follow up of this project he got a “Sorry, can’t do.” The organisation started to give all sorts of reasons why they thought Jeffrey Sachs’ plans bad ideas. Instead of positive thinking towards a solution, negative thinking towards saying “no.”

Now Jeffrey Sachs is one of the smartest people on the planet I believe. Yet the things that he proposes are in fact very simple. I think it comes down to this: the world is in dire straits. Fossil fuel energy is running out, poverty is crippling development of many countries and war is crippling many more. Yet mankind has a great potential for solving these issues. All we have to do is to set our petty differences aside and start sharing the wealth that is there and start work on finding the solutions. Simple, right? Wrong. At least I think so.

The key is in the word “Petty”. Religion, race, family bonds, we humans have the tendency to want to feel attached to a group. That group protects its interests against the interest of another group. And the hallmarks of that group become very important to the individuals in that group. For instance: why is peace in the Middle East so difficult to establish? After all no one really wants war. The reason is simple. Whether you look at a school yard during break or you look at the Middle East, there is no difference. As a Christian, Jew or Muslim you undoubtedly are able to give me many reasons why you feel you have more right to your piece of land than the other. But those reasons are all based on either what happened centuries ago or on the fact that you can’t stand someone else practicing a different religion or just because you don’t like his face. In the end it’s no different from the petty excuses you gave your teacher when you were caught beating up some poor sap that didn’t run fast enough. Get passed the false sense of importance you attach to your differences and your more than halfway there. But, boy is that hard…

The planet we live on is going to spin on. Life on this planet will also go on. Mother Nature will guard her future. But if we as a species don’t forget our differences and focus on our commonality we won’t be part of that future. We will, at best, become a marginal species barely able to survive. So ask yourself: is that piece of land, the religious beliefs of the other or the colour of your neighbour really worth sacrificing not just your enemy’s but your own future for? If you answer yes to that question we’re truly doomed. If you answer no we may have a chance. I just hope that some powerful persons on the planet will one day listen to people like Jeffrey Sachs and don’t just take him for the little boy crying “wolf!” all the time. Because I do believe every time he does, the wolf is really there.

The garden is getting its summer look.
(click images for larger view)