Date: 7/7/98

Hopefully, some of you will be glad to know that I am still alive.

I did not run with the bulls.

No, it was not an attack of common sense, it was miscommunication and such. It turns out that you have to be in a certain plaza half an hour before hand, and the hundreds of us first time runners spread out along the course were screwed. The police cleared the course in preparation for running, and kicked us all off. Mats managed to get back on by jumping over a barricade with the cops chasing him, but I didn't. So I didn't run.

Subject: Brief Udpate

Date: 7/10/98

I ain't got much battery life and I ain't found power in the train station, so here's a quick update...

Shortly after my last message, I decided that pamplona was boring, and headed for paris en route to the Love Parade in Berlin, which is (I believe) the worlds largest rave (certainly the first one to hit 1 million people). I stopped in Paris for a couple days while Mats and some of his friends took a night train to berlin right after getting to paris. I am going to be taking a train to berlin in an hour, and meeting mats for the festivities. After that, prague, vienna, budapest, and the pink palace.

I will give you more details when I get a chance, hopefully tomorrow or sunday.

Subject: Finally, an update Date: 7/11/98

Its been a while since I had time and space and energy and stuff to talk about, so here goes the mass email...

On Tuesday, not long after I sent out my "I am alive" message, Mats and I said fuckit, we are done with pamplona. It was nice to see, but we were tired of it, it was nasty and dirty and debauched in ways that I don't enjoy. I much prefer drunkenness on the beach and in front of the screen and with my friends than drunkeness on dirty streets with thousands of spaniards, and mostly macho male english-speaking backpackers. So we zapped outta town to San Sebastian, a gorgeous resort town on the coast.

There Mats ran into some friends of his, Canadians that he had traveled with earlier. Two of them wanted to go to the Love Parade, so we joined forces. We took a night train to Paris, arriving Wed. morning. There they wanted to take a night train to Berlin, cuz these two friends of his don't sleep much, and don't like to pay for rooms when they can avoid it. I hadn't gotten much sleep on the train or in Pamplona, so I decided to stay in Paris for a couple days and meet them Saturday morning for the party in Berlin.

So they took off, and I got a single room on a street that had lots of sex shows. The hotel was nice, despite its surroundings, and I stayed there for two nights, enjoying Paris.

Wednesday I didn't do much besides sleep, but Thursday I went to the Musee d' Orsay, deciding to let the mammoth Louvre and its long lines wait for another day. When it comes to art, I have very strong opinions - I find photorealism boring (I own a camera), and I find sameness boring. Most of the stuff in the Orsay was crap, as far as I was concerned. Fortunately I can tell fairly quickly whether I am going to find a piece of art uninteresting - my filter is "Is this different than any of the thousands of paintings at dozens of museums that I have seen? If so, is it different in an interesting way?". Tolerance builds, even to amazingly accurate paintings. I begin to understand how art critics can get so into discussing even crap art, as long as its *different* crap.

Stuff I liked:

Honore Daumier sculpture - he did caricatures of peoples faces with twisted expressions.

Karen Knorr photography - the museum had some work by photographers taking pictures of sculpture. This chick put monkeys and apes in the museum, let them look at the sculpture, and gave her photos titles like "The Amateurs of art" and "The artist, the model, the art critic and the spectator".

Monet rocks, of course, and I liked Pisarro's impressionist stuff and Signac's pointalism as well.

As for people like Courbet and Cezanne: "A dead fish. How exciting. NOT!" What is with still lifes anyway? Yawn. Although I couldn't help but admire the boldness of Courbet's painting of a woman with her legs spread and a sheet covering her face, her genitalia completely exposed, and the title "The Origin of the World".

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