Steel Robbie

My old hometown of Rotterdam has finally decided to dedicate a monument to the men (mostly men) who built the city by working in the harbor. The monumentis a 24 meter high steel representation of a metal worker, for which a fromer employee of the Rotterdamse Droogdok Maatschappij (RDM, or Rotterdam Dry Dock) stood model, and which was already nicknamed Stalen Robbie.

Like most beautiful things in Rotterdam, erecting the monument is a private initiative by its artist Sandy Warnaar. A location has been dedicated by the city, steel suppliers have been contacted and a marine salvage company has promised to hoist the monument to its place. The artist is currently seeking funds to cover the production costs and has launched this website to promote her idea (disclaimer: I built the website).

Cold War Angst

I recently watched two old film-noirs, both recommended by my good friend Shane: Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, and Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street. If you ever want a double bill of original cold war angst from the 1950s, consider these two.

Pickup on South Street (1953) is a thrilling chase after a classified microfilm, stolen by communist spies and accidently pickpocketed by low-life Skip McCoy. Although the film can be considered anti-communist – the commies get their upcomence – J. Edgar Hoover personally complained with the director about the main character not being patriotic enough. More timeless is the great black-and-white cinematography of the streets of New York – the film was almost entirely shot on location – and the great oscar worthy performance by Thelma Ritter.

Kiss Me Deadly (1955) is a wacky story which gets weirder near the end. Ralph Meeker swears revenge after a blonde he has set out to help gets brutally killed. He follows the perps in the underworld and stumbles on a suitcase with a mysterious but deadly content (supposedly the source of inspiration for the object of desire in Tarantino’s film-noir homage Pulp Fiction). The deadly glow of the suitcase taps into the new fear of radioactive atomic weapons, which I find prophetic, because in the mid-1950s atomic energy was all the rave and would lead to a brave new world as demonstrated in the 1958 World Fair in Brussels.

Albume Bianco

While looking for something else on iTunes, I stumbled on this hidden gem, called Albume Bianco by Italian master of the ukulele Fabio Koryu Calabrò. He has translated the entire Beatles’ White Album into Italian, and recorded all 30 songs (yes, including Revolution #9) acoustic while accompanying himself on the ukulele. What more could you possibly want!

The result is an at times tongue-in-cheeck but most of all lovely homage to one of the most schizophrenic pop albums ever made.

All four Beatles themselves have said that the album contains some weak points that could have been shelved in order to produce a more solid album. Albume Bianco contains all 30 songs, but not all of them in full length, causing both sides of the White Album to fit on one cd. After all, why drag on a song like Wild Honey Pie. The complex rhythms of Happiness Is A Warm Gun have been simplified, the stomping saxophones on Savoy Truffle have been deleted and the fact that all songs are recorded on a single instrument gives the songs more unity and puts a heavy focus on the songwriting talents of the fab four.

Now available at iTunes for just 8,99 euro.

Stop Making Sense

Only recently I purchased myself a copy of the legendary Talking Heads live registration Stop Making Sense. Although recorded over 25 years ago, the songs are strikingly contemporary, covering consumarism, global economy, war, modern age anxiety. My all time favorite song from the album would be Life During Wartime. It’s full of one-liners you can use any time of the day at the office:

“I sleep in the daytime, work in the nighttime, I might never get home”.

“I changed my hairstyle so many times now, I don’t know what I look like”.

“The sound of gunfire off in the distance, I’m getting used to it now”.

I changed my hairstyle, so many times now,"
I don’t know what I look like!

Willy DeVille (1953 – 2009)

Today Willy DeVille passed away. Mister DeVille was the embodiment of joy, crossing styles and was haunted by a Robert Johnson “Crossroads” kind of music.

Willy DeVille was 58 and died of pancreatic cancer.

Hey Rosita! Donde vas con mi carro, Rosita?

Canal Pride

This weekend is gay pride here in Amsterdam. Highlight of four days of festivities is a parade of barges through the canals of the city. I took this picture from the Magere Brug (Narrow Bridge) across the river Amstel, about an hour and a half before the parade was about to pass. These boats pictured here are just lying and waiting for the show to start. The police were frantically trying to create a passage through the river Amstel for the 80 barges to pass. A cheer went through the crowd whenever someone took to the water.

I’m glad to see that Canal Pride, as the parade is know, gets more political every year. Gay rights were taken for granted the past years and a lot of work needs to be done to recreate those rights. So a lot of political and social organisations take a stand and participate in the parade, which used to be a float of free publicity for dance clubs and the likes. This year, for example, the mayor of Amsterdam leads the parade and performs a civil marriage on a barge of four Dutch-American couples, to make a statement to US society where same sex marriage is not a given. I also noticed a guy wearing a t-shirt, commenting the California proposition, saying “I never got to vote on straight marriage”.

Gracefully

This is a post about ugly pictures of beautiful people.

We freeze people’s images in time, preferably the time of our choosing. Take Grace Kelly. A short lived movie career; 11 films in 5 years time. Then she got snatched away by an anachronistic prince to live the remainder of her life in a damp grey castle on a barren rock off the coast. Ironically in To Catch A Thief, she called that rock the most beautiful place on earth. She was to star in Hitchcock’s Marnie, but Prince Rainier wouldn’t let her because a job in entertainment is unbecoming a princess.

So, we are left with her image from those productive five years – those gleaming eyes, that happy smile and a voice that breaks several times during one syllable. She performed wonderfully in timeless pictures as the political High Noon, the dark Dial M for Murder and the gleeful To Catch a Thief (“So this is where you live? Mother will love it up here”). Those images are frozen. And google images doesn’t help either. Of all the pictures a quick search on Grace Kelly, only one is not from the mid 1950s. In it she is flanked by Jimmy Stewart, her co-star in Rear Window, and Bob Hope.

I couldn’t trace the origin of the picture. I don’t know when it was taken, at what occasion and by whom. You might ignore it if you came across it, thinking it to be just someones grand parents anniversary picture.

Toots

Yesterday was one of the most joyous days my life when I got a chance to see harmonica jazz legend Jean “Toots” Thielemans perform live on stage at the North Sea Jazz festival in Rotterdam. Toots is one of those rare living legends whose music is ubiquitous having played with all the other legends from Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan, Quincy Jones to Paul Simon. Oh, and he did the harmonica solo in the Sesamestreet tune.  Toots, 87 years old, frail and missing a beat here and there but content none the less, performed for an hour and a half promising to come back next year, and the year after that.

I love the NSJ, especially since it moved from the cramped Congresgebouw in the Hague to the spacious Ahoy’ Halls in Rotterdam, for its atmosphere, its size, divers program of living legends, crowd pleasers and young talent. You can browse and sample 16 podiums from stadium sized halls to small piano rooms. In one night I enjoyed the talents of Christian Scott, a 24 year old trumpeteer from New Orleans, Han Benninks extravagant percussion skills and sales pitch techniques, blues master Joe Bonamassa, grand dame Greetje Kauffeld, Toots and an ass-kicking John Zorn (this year’s artist in residence) with his Masada Sextet. And that made me miss out on Joshua Redman, Roy Hargrove, BB King, Hank Jones, George Benson and countless other small bands I don’t know of yet but know I want to. Every year I go for the full monty, three days, each with a different friend, compadre or family member, making sure I get to see three different programs.

Sarah does the Beatles (She’s So Heavy)

I am a great fan of both the talents of Sarah Vaughan and a long time cult follower of the Beatles.

So you can imagine my joy when I came across a copy of Miss Vaughan’s 1981 album Songs of the Beatles. The songs are in a cross-over style of a cool funky jazz and laidback disco and wouldn’t be out of place in a lounge bar. This effect is mostly created by the suave sound of Toots Tielemans.

But what attracts me most is the choice of songs on the album. Titles such as Get Back, You Never Give Me Your Money and especially I Want You (She’s So Heavy) are not the most likely to appear on a jazz vocal album.

Arthur Erickson (1924 – 2009)

Today I learned Arthur Erickson has died.

Mr Erickson was my favorite architect whenever I visited Vancouver. He brought 1970s concrete architecture to a completely new level. He sort of was a running gag when walking through town. Sometimes it looked every building of grey concrete was his. Either that or there are a lot of copy-cats around. Truth be told, in a city with a lot of 1980s speculants’ throw-away-architecture, Mr Erickson sturdy buildings had a lot of things going for, most notably the human scale. These days we tend to not like concrete but he called it the 20th century marble. Mr Erickson built concrete buildings without any ornamentation but still they had a lot toshow for. My all time favorites are the Law Courts in downtown Vancouver and the Museum of Anthropology at UBC. The last has the wonderful rotunda especially designed for Bill Reid’s The Raven sculpture (for those of you living on the east coast of Canada, Bill Reid is the guy from the 20 dollar bill). According to legend Mr Erickson designed the pavilion without knowing what Mr Reid was creating and vice versa. I never saw a space and its contents in such perfect harmony. That shows genious.

Arthur Erickson was 84 and died of the consequences of Alzheimer’s disease.