November 17, 2008 at 4:40 pm
campaign design (HuMobisten, 2008)
client: Int. Film Festival R’dam & Kunstgebouw
October / November 2008
We were asked (for the fourth time) by the International Film Festival Rotterdam and the Kunstgebouw to design an identity for their annual educational project called ‘Meet the Maestro’. During MTM, a super talented and obstinate film director will be the focus of attention.
November 17, 2008 at 2:07 pm
When it came out I already wanted to say something about this beautiful album, but then I forgot and there wasn’t a real reason in quite some time. As if I need a reason?! Well, I guess I somehow do. Anyway, what better reason than letting you all know about the Edison, a prestigious musical award, Benjamin Herman recently won for his album ‘Campert’. An album based upon the original score Herman made earlier for a documentary my friend Jeroen S. Rozendaal had been working on named ‘tijd duurt een mens lang’ about dutch poet and writer Remco Campert.
Many people know Herman as being the band leader of his legendary New Cool Collective and NCC Big Band, but the alto saxophone player Herman is above all a jazz cat. He’s the only young musician I ever heard who’s able to combine modern jazz with a sort of nostalgic or pure feel one has when listening to jazz dinosaurs Ben Webster, Charlie Parker or especially Sonny Rollins (who I admit is least of a dinosaur of the three but who still is born, unlike Herman, in the year 1930). His influences notably vary from Jaki Byard and Mischa Mengelberg to Defunkt’s Joseph Bowie or James Chance, but I somewhere overheard he recently is into Fleetfoxes as well. So I guess why he‘s such a great musician is pretty obvious: he simply loves all music, a quality seldom seen by at least the jazz musicians I know.
The moody ‘Campert’ reeks of fallen autumn leaves, stifled heart ache and the joy of einzelgangin’ and is already being compared to legendary jazz soundtracks like Miles’ ‘Ascenseur pour l’Echafaud’ and such, but it reminds me most of all of Gato Barbieri’s Soundtrack for ‘Last Tango in Paris’ (orchestrated by Oliver Nelson). Anyway, it’s just a really, really awesome record which can be played at least four or five times a week when the wheather’s right. Much respect for all musicians, but extra special credits go out to piano player Gideon van Gelder who genuinely plays with the subtlety of someone who does little, but is probably capable of lots.
November 15, 2008 at 5:53 pm
‘Tell me about the loneliness of Good, He-Man…
Is it equal to the loneliness of Evil?’
November 1, 2008 at 2:20 pm
My old fret Roshan has opened a brand new skateboarding shop yesterday. It’s just two doors away from my other 20 years of friendship fret shop WOEI. And besides that Frank Hartman (which is also an old skaterkid) started his business bureau mdm. there a little while ago (a bit before WOEI opened his doors). The Hoogstraat has become a street full with grandpa skaters. That’s pretty funny! Skate or Die, dude!
Check ROSH out on TV!
October 27, 2008 at 2:45 pm
I know Channel (or C-nel / Nellie) since she was five years old.. In the meantime she has become a real teenager. She wants to be an actress on Broadway.
You go girl!
October 24, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Not last night but the night before a certain girlfriend who manages to force me into occasionally watching interesting stuff on tv (like the news or a well made documentary) instead of the junk I prefer, took a look at my tv guide and highlighted this documentary called Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story. Although it was on only pretty late, we somehow managed to fight off sleep and stayed up until the midnight hour, around which our carefully selected show started. When it had finally started, we were instantly ‘grabbed’ by it. Apalled and fascinated simultaneously.
This guy, this Lee Atwater, somehow managed to be the perfect guy for the most horrific job in the world, namely: be the republican party’s spin doctor for presidential campaigning and forced both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush into being presidents by pretty much inventing the word ‘slander campaign’. Now I don’t know how you guys feel about the international influence those two, or should I say three, presidents had on the world as a whole, but I feel it’s safe to say this guy Atwater pretty much personifies the saying ‘the devil’s advocate’.
Lee must have been a real devil, a real ruthless, cynical, natural born machiavellist. But the weirdest and saddest of all is, he was pretty cool. He was funny, a great guitar player (He briefly played backup guitar for Percy Sledge during the 1960s and frequently played with bluesmen such as B.B. King) and his cynicism also worked truth provocing. When asked by a reporter about his unscrupulous methods, he simply stated ‘we never tell how me make sausages’. It’s exciting to see this guy change from the guy you love to hate into the guy you hate to love in only 86 minutes.
He was really a whole lot like Alex Keaton (Michael J. Fox), the only republican family member in the left wing, baby boomer, post hippie Keaton family in the tv series Family Ties. We all know that if power is dominated by an extreme, rebellion will be dominated by the counterpoint of this extreme, meaning ‘when the parents are hippies, their son is a huge fan of William F. Buckley Jr.’ Atwater, being rased in the South, grew a natural anti-establishment feel from the inferiority complex the south had obviously always suffered from (in their minds the South had lost the civil war from jewish New York stock brokers who basically had nothing to do with the country God had in mind for them gunslinging American good ol’ boys), plus he experienced a tragic death in the family which, according to the documentary, caused him to lose faith in god and happiness.
In short the absence of love in this man’s life caused him to have a bizarre understanding of the words ‘responsibility’ and ‘compassion’. So the lack of understanding of those two words in the life of one individual, one genius strategist, has proven tremendously important for the recent history of the US, and the now of the world. Nowadays that’s being called ‘one man can make a defference’. Finally, in the end of the documentary, Atwaters last years of his life might be best be defined as ‘Lee experiencing the wrath of God’. I don’t know, but I was like ‘no matter how bad your judgement is, you just gotta know when you’re really making a big fucking mess’, ‘What goes up must come down’, ‘what goes around…’ and so on. A must see on both political and humane level.
October 15, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Mijn vriendin d’r nieuwe winkeltje opent vandaag op de Zwaanshals 251a in Rotterdam (Oude Noorden achter het Kookpunt). Het is een tijdelijke locatie omdat ze wacht op de verbouwing van haar echte pand, waar ze in december samen met MOOSE artspace in zal trekken. Nu dus alleen kleding en schoenen zowel vintage en nieuw. Geen opening, die bewaart ze even voor december, maar neem hier alvast een voorproefje!
September 24, 2008 at 12:46 pm
I went to the CBS party the other day in the (new and improved) UNIE. Artists that made the party were I-f, Legowelt, mr. Pauli, Alden Tyrell, Roberto Auser, Intergalactic Gary and others.. Great atmosphere!
After five years it was done with the internet (radio)community Cybernetic Broadcasting System. But something new appears: Intergalactic FM.
Photo: iPhone grabbed Sierk
September 22, 2008 at 11:40 am
My very first day in art school (1995) started out with four hours of ‘form and space’, tutored by one Diet Wiegman of whom it was immediately clear he wasn’t like any other teacher me and the rest of my classmates had ever witnessed. First thing he taught us was ‘take a small piece of clay… roll it into a ball… stick your thumb in… turn it around and around… and… voilà! for starters each one of us now has an ashtray!’. I remember thinking that was kinda cool. Some time later our class discovered his shadow art and were pretty much all struck by its wit, beauty and genius simplicity. Now here’s a guy to open your mind in places that were never to be closed again.
Diet turned out to be another einselgängers dad, namely Mike Redman’s who just finished a ‘flick’ about his father called ‘Anagram’. Anagram opens this thursday at the Rotterdam Cinerama movie theatre. Party starts 6.30, film starts 7.30 and for a lousy three and a half euros you’re in.
