Infantile pictograms

Using ones mobile phone is prohibited in French trains, safe for platforms and dining cars. How do you explain this to the weary passenger? By using this brilliantly clear albeit a bit infantile pictograms.

Pépé le Moko

Pépé is a gangster from Marseille hiding from the police in the ancient labyrinth casbah of Algiers. Accustomed to a lush life in Paris, he hates the dark alleys where it seems there is nothing else to do but drink and play cards. This vanity will be his downfall, when he is lured from the no-go area into the colonial port side town.

File under film noir. Avant la lettre. There is a criminal posed as a hero, there are corrupt cops, an abundance of outcasts, a beautiful femme fatal, great acting and bad camera work and plenty of guns. Also, there are some great views from pre-war Algiers, the Casbah as well as the colonial town with a supporting role for the Hotel Aletti.

Lucky for me I could get hold of a region 2 dvd, distributed by Studio Canal. (There is a more luxurious edition distributed by Criterion, but this is only available in region 1, which is like putting a sticker on a book saying “you are only allowed to enjoy this artwork on your own continent”.)

Amsterdam City Scape

I visited the open days at the conservatory today. They moved to a new building last year, which sits on a man made island overlooking the city center. I was there in the middle of a break from performances and public classes, so there was nothing much to do than to take pictures of the city-scape through the colored glass windows.

Planets ahoy’

Ever since my nephew learned how to pick up a book, his learning curve is off the charts. His latest fling is the rotation of planets in our solar system. Time to show him the Eise Eisinga planetarium in Franeker. This home made planetarium (literally, it hangs in the guy’ s living room) dating 1781 is so accurate that today the position of the then known planets is still in alignment with the astronomical reality.

On this great site you can check what the current position of the planets is, and what their’s will be in a couple of days. Call it a solar system’s webcam.

Gloria sings the blues

After her successful comeback in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, Gloria Swanson was approached to star in a to be created musical. Ms Swanson answered she would do no such thing, unless the musical in question was an adaptation of Sunset Boulevard. The writers – Dickson Hughes and Richard Stapley – took up the challenge and worked hard on getting a stage adaptation on paper. The studio, who owned the rights to Billy Wilder’s script, refused to cooporate. So all the writers were left with was a copy of the script Ms Swanson had kept after shooting the film.

The play was never staged and all that remains is a demo recording of the songs, starring Richard Leibell and Laurie Franks as Norma Desmond. But underground record label Stage Door comes with this glorious issue of the original demo recordings. As a bonus, it throws in a couple of songs by Ms Swanson herself.

It would have been ironic that one of the greatest stars of the silent era would end her career doing a musical. It’s even frigtingly uncanny that producing the musical resembles the plot of Sunset Boulevard. Just like Norma Desmond, Ms Swanson hires someone to write her a script.

Gamelan

My good friend Giles is a dedicated student at the Conservatorium in Amsterdam. Trained as a classical baritone, he loves his Bach and his Dvorák.

As a side course he’s learning to play the gamelan, a traditional Indonesian percussion instrument. Or rather, a collection of instruments of drums, gongs, xylophones, vibraphones and a set of what I can only describe as copper pots (pictured left) with an amazing, heavenly sound.

Tonight he and his group from the Conservatorium gave a beautiful concert at music center Rasa in Utrecht.

Now, Indonesia is a vast country so there is an equivalent diversity in the built and use of the gamelan. This particular one was Javanese, which has a more meditative sound, unlike the Balinese, which is more funky.

I liked the music for its basic melody with subtle variations, not unlike Steve Reich. The progress of the melody and the basic rhythms of the pieces, written by composers at the courts of Javanese princes and lasting 5 to 10 minutes, was mathematical and structured according to deceitfully simple algorithms.

Propaganda Architecture

I just visited the open studio days at the Rijksacademie (Academy for the Visual Arts) and got blown away by this great book by Erik van der Weijde who photographed dozens of houses built by the German Nazi party to house their party members.

I know Germany as a very diverse country but judging from this excellent photographs the Nazis were boring to the banal. All houses look exactly the same like the one pictured here: a freestanding, white plastered oblong structure with few small windows and a pitched roof.  (I believe the roof vault in this example was a later addition).

Ofcourse that was exactly the idea in a country where every decision from the government was turned into propaganda. The Nazi government left no opportunity unused to make party members subservient to the state and created this archetype of an all-German dwelling.

Erik van der Weijde’s book stresses this point by depicting all houses in the same murky grey photographs. The book is bound in canvas with the single word Siedlung (german synonym for sprawl) on the cover in gothic type face, as was so popular in the 1930’s.

Double Spinoza

With a small ceremony a statue to the 17th century philosopher Baruch de Spinoza was unveiled in Amsterdam on Monday 24 November. More than life-size and made from bronze by artist Nicolas Dings it is a majestic and beautiful tribute to the man who reshaped social and political ethics. The statue, which according to the city’s wishes resembles his picture on the 1000 guilder note, stands on a low pedestal engraved with Spinoza’s quote “The Purpose of the State is Freedom”.

Spinoza is hot in the Netherlands because politicians believe his writings can inspire the public debate on the integration of immigrants in a predominantly white and Christian nation. He was the son of a Jewish merchant who fled from Portugal and later catholic Antwerp to seek refuge in a country being born from the religious oppression of Hapsburg rule. Although I believe the Dutch are not as tolerant as they claim, because of this struggle, freedom of religion is a matter of fact an nonnegotiable. To stress his role of a self-made intellect from foreign parents in a strange land, the cloak on his statue is covered subtly with domestic and exotic birds.

The statue was born out of a frustration for the lack of a worthy monument to such a great man. Unbeknowst to many, an earlier statue stands in the suburb Zuider-Amstel in front of a college school that bears his name. The lime-stone statue, although not as elegant as the new one, was made by the famous sculptor Hildo Krop, whose work decorates many buildings and public works throughout Amsterdam.

Rotterdam rebuilt

My good friend Shane pointed me to this website of a guy who painstakingly recreates the inner city of Rotterdam from before the war.

Rotterdam is the second city of the Netherlands and was a fast growing economic center of the country for nearly a century when the German Nazi regime decided to bomb the city center on May 14 1940 in a perverse attempt to have the Dutch army surrender itself. They called that Blitzkrieg, we now call it shock-and-awe: the idea is the same. On midday, with just a couple of brisance grenades, all but a few buildings were destroyed by a fire that lasted for a couple of days, leaving over a thousand dead and tens of thousands homeless. A mere weeks later the city decided to tear down the ruins that were left standing and start the city afresh.

My late dad lived in the center with his parents and baby sister when the bombs fell and always refused to talk about it. But what he did do was collect hundreds of books and old photographs from the city he grew up and played in. Flipping through these books as a teenager I was always fascinated by the fact that there are two cities: the one he knew and the one I biked through, even though the street names remain the same.

Although the former city is extensively researched by the city archives and by nostalgic old folks, there is not much tangible. So I am very much interested where this project is heading. For now a small area around the old train station Beurs (now Station Blaak) is recreated in miniature buildings, figurines in period dress and a working scale model of two street cars. I guess I have to be patient: another project of this guy has been left unfinished since 1986.

Brideshead Revisited

No other studio has perfected the genre of costume drama more than the BBC. Their adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited proves this again abundantly.

But the best decision of all was to cast the true main character by the same actor who played it in the tv adaptation of nearly 30 years ago. For despite the great acting by the cast, the true star of both tv-series and the film is Castle Howard. Grandest of all British country estates, this baroque masterpiece is the perfect setting for an orthodox catholic family that slowly suffocates in its own self created bubble.

The lush architecture and Italian decorations make it easy to understand what the protaganist is really after: not its inhabitants, but the building itself. It’s fitting that he enters the building for the first time through the servants entrance under the grand stairwell and exits through the main entrance addressing the staff by their first name.