One of the favorite films of both Gyz and myself is the 1987 Oliver Stone classic Wall Street. Especially Gordon Gekko, innocence lost personified, portrayed by one excellent Michael Douglas (who for the first time in his career over-classes his dad, except for maybe ‘A Chorus Line’) is a class A movie personage and the film might not have been as good when someone else instead of Douglas would have been doin’ him, but hey… good casting is also good film making! If you’ve never seen Wall Street, go out and (tor)rent it, it just can’t disappoint.

You can imagine how thrilled we were when we found out couple months ago that the sequel was on its way and is to open in Rotterdam theaters some time (september) this year. Until… last night I saw it already by accident. Or actually I saw Steven Soderbergh’s ‘The Girlfriend Experience’, starring (a dynamite) Sasha Grey and furthermore mostly people playing themselves or kind of themselves. Soderbergh uses this people-playing-themselves-and-do-not-know-exactly-when-they’re-being-filmed-or-not technique to bring the realness of chaos in his films, which works out pretty well in both this film and Soderberghs often misunderstood masterpiece ‘Full Frontal’, which —I guess— best resembles TGE throughout his ‘body of work’ so far.

The Girlfriend Experience, about the growing smart of a two thousand dollar an hour escort isn’t so much about sex as it is about ‘the economy of modern day America triggered by the biggest crisis since last century’s thirties’, or about ‘transactions’, as Soderbergh says so himself in this Wall Street Journal interview. This and the fact that it seems the film’s made with the same nonchalance everyday life is being led these days (including how banks and corporations are leading their lives as if they’re adolescents having fun taking her easy) makes TGE the financial film of the times.

It’s not as interesting if you like top notch acting as it is when you’re down with spot on reflections of the human condition under, in this case, eerie economic pressure. In that light The Girlfriend Experience had also better gone for Wall Street 2’s tagline ‘Money never sleeps’ (quite the word play if you ask me), instead of the one they’re using now (probably aiming for a broad and pheromone driven target group) ‘see it with someone you ****’. Which, come to think of it, might just be some sort of contemporary joke on ‘love’ since there’s absolutely nothing to be X’ed going on in this film. Too bad, or maybe not, I don’t know. Maybe me getting my hopes up for ‘some of that’ is part of the Soderbergh experience as it did make me feel part of an absolutely sickening, or at least frightening, or at least pretty damn cold economy in a way, so…

Sasha Grey by the way is a stone fox. Just looking at her made my **** hurt… In a good way, though.

These are five records I designed the album covers of this year. They are Choca Alazaba’s ‘Reverse Bad Energy’ / The New Earth Group Prouctions, Benjamin Herman’s ‘Blue Sky Blonde / DOX Records (which became the best selling jazz record of the year thank you very much), Sir Ian’s ‘Apathology’ / Dying Giraffe Recordings, Rosa Ensemble’s ‘No Ark Dead Eel’ / Dying Giraffe Recordings and Hidde van Schie’s musical alias The 21st Century’s ‘Nocturnal Tellurian’. The last three are to be offically released in 2010 but they’re already done and sent out to be reviewed, so here’s a sneak peak anyway.

I’d like to say they’re my Album Top 5 of the Year, but that would be too much of a coincidence. They are, however, great records all five of ’em! So be on the lookout! Suus and I also did the design for the new The New Earth Group album ‘Eurafricarabia’ this year, which is to be released february 20 in Rotown (Rotterdam) and will be released through Excelsior Recordings.

I suppose this is my last post for the year, so I leave you all with the almost genuine dutch fireworks slogan: ‘You are a cunt, if you with fireworks stunt!’ and hopefully see you all in 2010!

I too participated on Veenman Drukkers (Rotterdam based printers) ‘Kredietposters’ (credit posters) manifestation. It’s their opinion that we shouldn’t mope and make things worse than they are and instead try and turn things around. They practise what they preach and came up with the following: ‘you design a (more or less upbeat) poster on this crisis and we print 350 of ’em, keep 100 for ourselves and give you the 250 remainers for free!’.

I did the one presented above, other people made these.

Although I’m always the first to say ‘we shouldn’t actually be talking about the economic crisis, ’cause the talk itself is already fifty percent of the problem’ or interpreting Dutch fluxus professor Willem de Ridder (thank you Boris) ‘no one can ever solve a problem while trying to solve and thus concentrate on that problem’, here’s my latest attempt to try and make at least three people crisis-proof.

My friend Bart, who some of you know as bass player of this great new band called organisms, some as ‘Bart de Belg’ and some as a guy who works at Humanique, a company that —in short— truly makes good websites (Kunsthal, Oxfam Novib, Lantaren/Venster, WATT to name a few), gave me a call the other day and asked me if I had heard of people looking for one of the following jobs:

• interaction designer
• lead web developer
• project leader

I’m not sure if ‘project leader’ is translated correctly, but it means ‘being boss of a certain project’. If you think it’s you, all you do is respond to this add-like post. Easy as that, you don’t need to mail me your portfolios or what have you, just type ‘me’ as a comment, don’t forget to write down your email address and you’re already halfway in. You’re welcome, baby!

What would my life have been like without Big Black, Slint, Shellac, June of ’44, Brainiac, PEGBOY, The Monorchid, Girls Against Boys, Calexico, !!!, Blonde Redhead or The Jesus Lizard? Who knows, maybe sort of the same, probably not. Probably the word ‘edgy’ would have had less of a meaning in my perception of life.

Fact is, yesterday —on the day I heard the first new U2 single since ‘numb’ (from the 1993 album ‘Zooropa’) that didn’t suck ass… or sounded really nice actually— the mighty Touch & Go (both an indie record label and a major distributor for indie labels such as Drag City, Kill Rock Stars, Merge Records, Trance Syndicate) bowed for the world wide economic situation and called it quits. Read former Corey Rusk’s statement on the whys ’n hows and, to end this thing on a brighter note, how he feels this can lead to something fresh as Touch & Go will from now on transform into, once again, a small independent record label. Thank you, Corey Rusk and Godspeed!