During Thursdays Anniek van Hardeveld memorial race i was doing a checkppoint (yes i know i am getting lazy and slow these days…) on the head of java island. The checkpoint was at the memorial for the employees of the N.V. Nederlandse Scheepvaartmaatschapij who had died ‘at sea or wherever on the shore’ while defending the ‘liberty of their country’.

The memorial is a rather simple one made from stone. It has a 3 meter-or-so high stone base on top of which there is a 3 meter high sculpture of a sailor gazing to the west (into the sunset? after his dead comrades? at Amsterdam central station?). The base of the monument is covered by plates of shiny black marble (or something like that). Inscribed in gold on these plates are the names of the employees who died between 1940 and 1945.

Now while waiting for the first racers to arrive i started to read the names and was stuck by the fact that every second of them sounded non-dutch to me (which of course is not strange at al as we are talking about sailors here who have always been a motley crue). Took me a while to figure out that i was in fact looking at the section of the monument that lists non-dutch people. that’s right, when they set up this monument these freedom-lovin’, injustice-hatin’ Dutch people decided not to mix then names of the Dutch people and foreigners who had sailed, fought and died together. Instead they decided to list them in separate sections of the monument, The dutch with first and last names and the others only with what seems to be their last names/nick names:

Now the monument was set up in 1950, and lots of people have argued that it was ok for the Dutch to be a little bit racist back then (like it was ok that the first thing the Dutch did after being liberated was sending troops to indonesia to make sure they could go on repressing the locals some more). Guess the times were indeed a bit different then, but the fact that nobody bothers to change this fuck-up while once a year an official delegation comes along to lay down flowers also tells a fair bit about our times. So this post is dedicated to the memory of:

alimin bin alisin, abdoelatip, asan, asikin, alidjojo, astro, adoel, ardjosari, ardjiman, assan, birhasan, boewang, darboes, dasoekie, djokomarie, doelsenen, doelmanan, djojo, djin, gani, haje, ahmat emery, jamin, kadir, ladin, mat, maodin, martalie, marliat, madani, matalie, mail, moein, martiman, moeljo, moebin, matalowie, mohamad ramli, maohamad moein, moekasim, moenawie, oesman, odder, noh, oesin, ossin, rabanie, ridoean, roen, saian, safie, sanoesie, saharie, sakiman, saimin, sarie, sarmadie, satie, seehan, seger, soek, soekie, soemo, soerio, tahir & tarip

(To me this also looks a bit like they ran out of space and decided not to honour people with names in the u to z range…)

So officially queensday is to celebrate the birthday of the Queen of the netherlands, but in reality it is just an excuse to wear extremely silly orange hats, listen to bad cover bands in overcrowded streets, buy stuff that you would not buy on any other day and most importantly to get really really drunk in public and embarrass the shit out of yourself (of course if you are dutch you wont find any of this embarrassing). In order to get drunk queensday-style you must absolutely do so by drinking beer from cans (only other thing that may be consumed in between beers is oranje-bitter).

The fact that queensday is about drinking beer and nothing else becomes most obvious on the day after, when the streets are littered with green beer cans and when the supermarkets that have been open during the previous day look like they have been looted by a mob that only had one think on it’s mind (beer?). Smack in the middle of the annual madness is the Albert Heijn super market behind the palace on dam-square in Amsterdam.

The following pictures have been taken when i went there for breakfast shopping on the morning after Q-D. Albert heijn never being shy to squeeze the last cent out of every possible chauvinist occasion had literally crammed a beer display into every unused square inch of floor space.

[Note that all pictures depict seperate piles of beer found in the store. I have refrained from taking shots of the piles from different points of view]

Have always been fascinated with border towns. The fact that another national economy with other taxes and other social norms is just across the border/mountain/river/fence tends to have interesting effects on these places, and especially what is for sale in the stores and on the streets. Now my most favorite border town in Europe is Portbou on the border of Spain and France:

The tiny shops in the even more tiny city center have ridiculous amounts of Pastis on sale (for the Frenchmen who live just across the mountains where the tax on booze is much higher) and Portbou is home of my favorite memorial (for Walter Benjamin, who committed suicide in this place when the Spanish did not let him into the country in 1940).

On top of this the place has an absolutely incredible location: crammed into a little bay of the Mediterranean and surrounded by the foothills of the Pyrénées, the place ca only be approaced by the spectacular coastal road that runs from Perpingnan in France south to Girona in Spain and follows the spectacular Mediterranean coast for a good 30km. Portbou is situated in the smallest of the bays along this coast just south of the actual border. Because it is so small the center has a building density that makes one feel as if one was in a much bigger city, an effect that is reinforced by the gigantic propositions of the railway station. Being a border station between Spain and France the railway station needs two sets of tracks (standard gauge for the French trains and broad gauge for the Spanish trains) plus an enormous marshaling yard. The surface of the railway station probably equals the surface of the rest of town.

I have always wanted to explore this railway station, but on my last 2 visits I never had the time. This time i spend about an hour exploring the station which for the biggest part seems to be deserted, with closed deserted waiting rooms that seem to patiently await another emigration or immigration wave. If you ever have the chance to visit Portbou, make sure that you take some time to visit the train station. In the meanwhile i have posted some pictures to my flickr account.

Spain is probably the worst place in western europe to be a vegetarian. When i flew to Argentina last year, it was absolutely impossible to find a vegetarian meal in all of Barachas airport. Of course Iberia had fucked up my request for a vegetarian meal so i had to spend something like 20 hours on snickers and peanuts. Now i do not have to deal with the spaniards complete ignorance when it comes to vegetarianism anymore, but my vegetarian colleagues have had to suffer a lot in the first 3 days of our workshop in Spain. After two days of pasta with a tomato sauce made from watered down ketchup, the cooks finally came up with something else, which they referred to as ‘vegetarian risotto‘:

Because of the color we immediately had the suspicion that the thing might contain squid, but because of the funny taste it was kind of difficult to confirm, so we asked them what the fleshy bits in the thing were. Waiter, smiles makes some fishy hand movements that resemble the tentacles of an octopus and tells the two people who had requested something with neither fish nor meat that it was indeed squid. So i start telling him that this is unacceptable and he runs back to the kitchen come back and declares that it is not squid but asparagus. Meanwhile another waiter arrives tells us that it is neither squid nor asparagus and draws a mushroom and tells us it is mushroom. Closer inspection confirmed our initial hypothesis. Later in the discussion one of the vegetarians, in a desperate attempt to justify the fact that he had eaten the entire risotto, came with the theory that actually there was no difference between eggs and squids because they both miss a brain.

Have been going out in Amsterdam for the first time in what seems to be ages. went to a night called ‘labyrinth’ or something like that in paradiso. In the small room there is a quite prominent LED display which displays (no not the BPM count, that would have been like 10 years ago) but the noise level in decibels:

Now how silly is that? Are people constantly checking this and leave the room when the level exceeds what their doctor recommends? Are thy going to the DJ and asking him to turn down the volume to a specific level do they can have chat with their mates? Seems like the this whole idea that consumers have to make informed choices all the time (like choosing an electricity provider, or choosing for a call by call long distance provider) is getting a bit out of control. If you go to a club you get loud music period. If do not what loud music, or if you are concerned about the little hairs in your ears, well then do not go to a club.

So i got stopped for running a red light today while on the way from the dentist to work. The cop who struggled with reading my (dutch government issued!!) id card asked me at some point if i wanted to make a statement regarding the reasons for running the red light, to which i replied that id do run every second red light and that this happened to be one of them. She politely asked if i wanted her to write this down in the incident report which i confirmed. Unfortunately it turns out that my statement was a bit of a twisted description of my actual behavior: on the rest of mty rout e to work i actually ran all 8 red traffic lights that i came across…

[btw can someone explain me why the price for running a red light has suddenly doubled from €25 to €50]

… and thus you have to fly around french airspace when you are going from Amsterdam to Lisbon and back. Takes about an hour and twenty minutes more than the direct route, but creates a somewhat beautiful route display on the in-flight entertainment system:

Also reminds me of a picture i took like three years ago in the train station in Strasbourg. you simply gotta love the french (seriously! for lots of reasons!)

Right now i am at the media shed in Southend on Sea (a.k.a.the end of the world) just out of London where mongrel is hosting a launch party for two new projects: Hairy MP’s & Telephone Trottoire. One of the people giving a speech is Yoshitaka Mouri of the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts & Music. He just showed Lampedusa, a disturbingly beautiful project about the ‘two sides’ of the island, by Frederico Baronello & Takuji Togo:

Lampedusa is the southernmost summer resort island of Italy, the border between Europe and Africa. In recent years there has been a massive and constant influx of immigrants who try to illegally enter the country by setting off in small boats from the coast of North Africa. The CPT (Centre for the Immigrants’ First Acceptance) is a detention house next to the airport of Lampedusa. Here, foreigners who have been denied refugee status are sent back to Libya, and arriving tourists are welcomed to visit the island. There is also a space of the island cemetery dedicated to the refugees, many of whom died trying to make the journey across the Mediterranean to Europe.

Check it out here (and make sure you have sound enabled).

Rana Dasgupta has just published an essay of the same name on his site in which he explores the devellopments behind the recent rise to media stardom of cities like Johannisburg, Bombay, Caracas, Lagos and Nairobi. from the essay:

Dismissive talk of Chinese “sweatshops” that would never meet EU regulations does nothing to dispel the sense of a stupendous fertility, for the contents of every western household are “Made in China”, and most Europeans and Americans are so entirely ignorant about how things are made that the production of the objects in their lives seems a kind of Asian alchemy. There is more: the Third-World city has many economies, not just one, and even this they are exporting. Large parts of western cities are now gleefully given over to an international pirate economy of CDs, DVDs, computer software and branded goods manufactured in Lagos or Shenzhen at almost the same time as the Parisian and Californian originals, and almost to the same quality.

[…] The happy fiction of Europe’s robust liberalism is in severe doubt as it fails even to accommodate a single group of dissenters: politically articulate Muslims who wish to assert a different vision of social life and law. Compared to this, my adopted city of Delhi, which has its own disputes and violence, seems positively tranquil when one reflects that it must balance the life demands of 15 million people with so many languages and cosmologies, and such varied notions of commerce, law, healthcare and education, that they are not a “population” in the European sense at all. “When will all the camels and cows depart, when will all these strange human varieties finally be banished and India become modern?” tourists ask. They forget two crucial truths - first, that Europe’s centuries-long project to banish all life forms it could not understand or empathise with was a destructively violent process; second, and most importantly, that Delhi already is modern, and this - all this - is what it looks like. It is an alternative kind of modernity: a swirling, agglomerative kind that seems, at this point in history, to be more capable than the western version of sustaining radical diversity - to be better equipped, perhaps, for the principle of globalisation.

This brings us to the most perverse suspicion of all. Perhaps the Third-World city is more than simply the source of the things that will define the future, but actually is the future of the western city.

Go read the entire text here.

Picture taken by Guido van Nispen before the p2p workshop at felix meritis last friday. from looking at the timestamps of the photo and the previous entry (all the way to the bottom in the white box) it seems that he has actually captured me writing the previous blog entry…

See the rest of the Guidos workshop pictures here.