Today I catched a surf towards the blog of Marie Claude Doyon and bumped into the TED video above with Stefan Sagmeister which all those dudes of the FNV must see.. Man get iCal or Excel, and give me a break!
I just read the other day in the program-folder of the STRP festival this cool quote from Laurent Garnier:
‘Rotterdam looks like the music of Kraftwerk and Liverpool doesn’t look like the music of The Beatles’. Which is a pretty cool quote! Do cities look like music? Well I know one thing, if you have time between April 2nd and 4th, you should go to the STRP festival in Eindhoven, and find out for yourself what the music for Eindhoven is. And untill the 13th you can check out the Poème Electronique –the Le Corbusier, Edgar Varèse, Xenakis and Philips superb installation ‘Philips Paviljoen’ at the World Expo (1958, Bussels)– special, with lectures, presentations and what not?
Enfin, I just downloaded two songs from Quando Quango. A band that is originally from Rotterdam (from the early eighties). And the only band from here that was on the Factory Records label (To stay a bit towards Peter Saville, or Rufus latest post). One of the bandmembers was Mike Pickering who threw parties and booked bands at HAL4 (Utopia) in Rotterdam.
In my flyer’dam book I referred to him:
Take HAL4. Now it’s youth theatre, but in the eighties the entire Neue Deutsche Welle was flowing through the Maas River. New Order had their European kick-off here and a certain Mike Pickering, who was to be right there at the Hacienda when the house revolution was just starting off.
to finish it up: See you next time, world tourists!
A while ago, I guess it was 1998, two friends of mine named Deniz Alpay and Philip Powel started organising a thing called Crime Jazz. I had learned of it from Vincent who was deejaying at these parties or gettogethers that were later niftily subtitled ‘words, poetry and beyond’.
I didn’t really know what to make of these crime jazz things, I kinda felt ‘part of the family’ since I did my first on stage spoken word performances there (read short articles, made jokes, tried out poetry) and met a lot of cool people who were into the same, or into something else in which they tricked me to become into as well… anyway, it was nice. On the other hand, it grew into something not really my cup of tea. It wasn’t hard to define the thing that I wasn’t altogether for, but it was hard speaking out this feeling. In short, me and my friends started calling crime jazz ‘the black conciousness poetry night’ more and more often as it really became an issue. Black poets are, take it from me, great at excluding whites from their audiences. They come on stage looking like Lisa Bonet (which doesn’t have to be a bad thing) in a random Cosby episode (ouch!) and start off claiming ‘Great to see so many black people in the audience tonight!’. I mean… how many ways of interpreting the adlib ‘1love’ exist out there?
In the end (period 2005 – 2008) all I did was occasionally recite an article I occasionally wrote and even that ended when Powel got me off the job after I had threatened to get on stage and go on and on and on about the white race and how fucking amazing it was to see so many Caucasians in the crowd, hi-fiving some of them as I started a rant on Rubens, van Gogh, Marcel Duchamp and Elvis Costello, entitled ‘Say it Loud – I’m White… so what’. Anyway… I did get to see a lot of crazy stuff, like Saul Williams, (lots of) Gea Russel, (the beautiful) Earl Okin, Marjolijn van Heemstra and so on, but the very best I had seen was a guy called Kelsey, a guy so much into singing and playing the fender rhodes even god knows not what to make of this guy. I bought one of his ceedees, but can’t find the guy on the www anywhere. Too bad.
Since it is a sad thing to see Crime Jazz go (because of political hassle I don’t even want to get into right now) I made them a farewell gift in the form of a graphic poem in their publication ‘Crime Jazz 10 Years – 1998 – 2008’. It’s obviously about all the things I just wrote about and about my own inner visions turning somewhat pessimistic I guess. In a way it can be seen as the opposite of Obama’s ‘hope’ campaign and thus it could have also be titled no, we can’t, but it’s not, it’s called ‘revolution’. Besides, I can be moody.
If you’re there early and cannot resist temptation, tonight you can either throw roses at classical singer Claudia Pattaca or tomatoes at three actual writers and myself. What, where?! Yes you heard right. It all takes place at the Café Rotterdam terrace, located at Wilhelminakade 699, Rotterdam (near the Erasmus bridge, on the south side). So come round and enjoy readings by Daniël Dee, Rick van Leeuwen, Ramon Stoppelenburg (, me) and who knows, maybe even throw a small tomatoe at us. More info on Daddy-o van der Kwasts’ weblog, right here.
