+++ title="weeknote #23.4" slug = "weeknote23.4" date="2023-07-22" description = "zola, JitMachine, korčula, Manja Ristić, queer camp and Mad music" +++

• For the whole week (and more) of vacations at the Korčula island I've been hacking bits and pieces of this Zola-based web-page. Been organizing content around, fixing some broken stuff, wrote some Tera templating code... not sure I like it - my code AND Tera templating language that is, but I seem to be able to arrive at solutions to the problems. Wrote/updated the page roadmap, still dreaming of php-based simple cms, as simple as zola but without the generating step, from source to rendered html. It feels inconvenient. But currently I don't have the knowledge, time and resources to dive into such project.

• Finally started (again?) some programming work on my long-term JitMachine project. It's just frustrating because these are tiny little baby steps and I'm not sure I can arrive at the final solution of my problem. It seems like a 8k mountain wrapped in fog. But I'm enjoying that start and I want to continue, I want to persist. It is also a dependency for an upcoming project, a very live, costumed, queer, personal, music-performance project. Nuff said, it has to happen before I talk about it further. But JitMachine is an open source instrument - based on a touch screen interface - that I want to develop.

• This is 14 days of vacations on island of Korčula. Since we (Kamizdat) are releasing an album by Manja Ristić and Robertina Šebjanič in november and Manja lives in town Korčula, we naturally had to meet for a coffee. And we did, and we had a lovely time, including amazingly tasty cake at this patry shop & cafe Aurora.

• I've been contemplating (and some reading) about the music I want to work on for Mad Jakale project. Since the project somehow also departs from queer and camp (theory) I've been asking myself how to queer the music, how to camp it? Discussions with M. point at the possible view of camp as a relationship, a relationship to high style through exaggeration, or at least purposeful display or pose. Also, camp has been very mainstreamed in recent decades, and queer became not just mainstream, but a hyped buzzword, so these are not the simplest waters to thread. But anyway, How could a music or production style employ such strategy? What kind of strategy is camping the music or queering the music? For me, queering means de-normalize, un-polarize from the binary, uncis it. When one queries the internets about queer music it is of course all about lgbtq contexts. And while these queer (lesbian, gay and trans) roots are material historical fact, I'm interested perhaps in the queer as in gender-queer and that means in non-binary, gender-punk, unpassable trans, kind of music. What kind of music is this?

  For our clubnight Major Arcana G. said it's not a genre night. We play and invite guests with varied electronic dance music tastes - within the same set. I've been thinking about this a bit further and came up with genre-queer descriptor of eclectic crossing the genres (is this genre-crossdressing?) So perhaps queered music could be worthy of that descriptor when it crosses multiple genres. Of course this is nothing new per-se, but in these times it's interesting. Same things have different names in different times, right? Those different names are always also context-dependent, so an eclecticism (within the playlist/dj-set or within the same sound/track) is called genre-queer today, and was called something else before. But still, the queer post-fix does also point at gender context, doesn't it? It does point at what we learned and we're still learning from these non-binary gender minorities and their struggles in the last few decades and their voices in present times. These are situated in critical re-thinking about society as a whole, and such rethinking cannot be blind to neolibaralism, decolonial struggles, anti-capitalism, safety of communities, etc etc.

• It's been very hot here at Korčula, and we've kinda naturally slipped into a different eating habits (regime?) with much less snacking and sugary products. It seems this has a good effect on my weight, despite the fact that there's no scale in sight. I also sleep better (when it's not too hot, of course).