Volume 4, Issue 40
4 - 10 OCTOBER 2007 Climb aboard for adventure, your eyes on a new romance.
Finding yourself on a journey... pages 6-10
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Five plans to save the planet page 4 A waste of money? Asks the skeptical environmentalist page 4 The world in a bookstore page 5 FOOD: Plenty of empty Moroccan restaurants this time of year p. 18 / FILM: Studio Ghibli: animated Japanese p. 19
Short List . . . . . . . . . . . .10 Music/Clubs . . . . . . . . . .12 Gay & Lesbian . . . . . . . .14 Stage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15 Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15 Events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17 Dining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19 Film . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19 Classifieds/Comics . . . .21
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Amsterdam Weekly
ATTACHMENTS In this issue and... 2002 was a big year for Amsterdam as a pilgrimage destination, when the Catholic Church officially announced that the much-debated Mother Mary visions of Ida Peerdeman (1905-1996), were authentic. This industrial office worker had 56 chats, between 1945 and 1959, with the Holy Virgin herself. She’d chosen Ida to spread a message that warned against ‘humanism, paganism, godlessness and snakes’ and to announce that from now on She could be used as an equally efficient road to Eternal Salvation as her Son, Jesus. Mary also imparted some prophecies: ones that correctly predicted such non-trivial things as the death of Pope Pius XII, the meltdown of the Chernobyl reactor, and the war in Yugoslavia. And there were others: ‘The Russians will not leave things the way they are at present’, ‘I see something like a cigar or a torpedo flying past me so rapidly that I can scarcely discern it—it’s the colour of aluminium’. It’s obvious that the Virgin had come to Earth to tell humankind of Sputnik. And it happened here in Amsterdam. How’s that for cosmic?
On the cover HOLY CRAFT! Embroidery by Karen Willey
Next week Kunststad
Letters Got an opinion? We want to hear it. inbox@amsterdamweekly.nl
Amsterdam Weekly BV De Ruyterkade 106, 1011 AB Amsterdam Tel: 020 522 5200 Fax: 020 620 1666 www.amsterdamweekly.nl General info: info@amsterdamweekly.nl Agenda listings: agenda@amsterdamweekly.nl Advertising: sales@amsterdamweekly.nl Classifieds: classifieds@amsterdamweekly.nl PUBLISHER Todd Savage EDITOR Steve Korver ASSISTANT EDITOR Kim Renfrew AGENDA EDITOR Steven McCarron FILM EDITOR Julie Phillips PROOFREADER Mark Wedin EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Sarah Gehrke ART DIRECTOR Bas Morsch PRODUCTION MANAGER Karen Willey PRODUCTION DESIGNERS Mattijs Arts, Rogier Charles SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGER Carolina Salazar ACCOUNT MANAGERS Florrie Beasley, Marc Devèze, Simone Klomp OPERATIONS MANAGER Monique Gruter FINANCE ASSISTANT Simone Choi DISTRIBUTION MANAGER Patrick van der Klugt FINANCIAL ADVISER Kurt Schmidt (Veresis Consulting) PRINTER Corelio Printing Amsterdam Weekly is published every week on Wednesday and is available free at locations all over Amsterdam. Subscriptions are available for €60 per six months within the Netherlands and €90 per six months within Europe. Agenda submissions are welcome, at least two weeks in advance. New contributors are invited to visit Amsterdam Weekly’s website for contributor guidelines. Contents of Amsterdam Weekly (ISSN 1872-3268) are copyright 2007 Amsterdam Weekly BV. All rights reserved.
10 CLOUDS by Arnoud Holleman
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4-10 October 2007
AROUND TOWN
JORAIMA TROMP
Is that recycled paper?
Five Plans for the planet How to go green and save greenbacks. By Sarah Gehrke Four hundred and thirty-nine people sent in eco-business ideas for this year’s Picnic Green Challenge. The award is a collaboration between the Postcode Loterij and Picnic, aimed at finding the best plan for a product or service that fights climate change. The winner gets €500,000, professional help with developing and implementing their plan, and a handshake from Richard Branson, who is head of the jury. Five entries were nominated for the final: Plan #1: save the planet through Web 2.0. Andy Hobsbawm’s idea is to establish an online community called Do the
Green Thing, and to get all those Myspacers and Facebookers out there to do one little thing per month that’s nice to Mother Earth. Like walk to work instead of drive. Supported by leading creatives, the site will offer cool films and texts plus a possibility to track your personal CO2 savings. The goal is to make it fun to be good. And that’s not even taking into account the peer pressure those virtual friends can apply. The idea didn’t win, but Hobsbawm plans to launch the site in the UK and California within the next year. Plan #2: save the planet with trams. Michael Hendriks’ CityCargo company has been heard of before. It was founded in February 2005 by his father, and ran a successful pilot project in Amsterdam earlier this year. The idea is to use trams and electric cars to deliver goods within city centres, thereby keeping trucks out—according to Hendriks, using CityCargo would reduce the number of lorries in city centres by 50 per cent. It’s a more efficient—thus cheaper—way of goods transportation, too. Fresher air and fewer cyclists being run over: sounds like a good idea. It didn’t win, though from the sound of it, it seems they might be doing fine without the prize money, anyway. Plan #3: save the planet by dancing.
The Sustainable Dance Club idea by Michel Smit is aimed at the wasters. Large clubs are pretty big environmental nasties, producing lots of waste and using up in one year 200 times the energy that an average household of four people uses. So it’s about time to get clubs to be good. The flashiest part of the plan for the SDC is to generate electricity from the dancers by building sensors underneath the dancefloor— however, it turned out that would only account for one per cent of the energy needed to run a club for a night (and that’s only if the DJ gets at least 500 people to boogie hard). But by using alternative energies, Smit claims it is possible to reduce a club’s emissions by about 50 per cent. The idea didn’t win, either, but Smit will reopen Rotterdam’s Nighttown club next year, applying his ideas. Plan #4: save the planet with a lamp. Combining sustainability with good design, Damian O’Sullivan’s project aims to take the solar thing a bit further by making a solar lantern that a) can be carried around and b) looks beautiful. The downside is that the lantern will only give light for three hours after having hung out in the sunshine all day. It’s also quite expensive. And it didn’t win. But it does look quite beautiful, and O’Sullivan has already won the Red Dot concept award for it. Plan #5: save the planet with a box. The most complicated idea of all the nominees aims to revolutionise electricity distribution in private households and companies. Igor Kluin’s project Qurrent uses a combination of renewable and traditional energies. Local energy networks will be created, so the energy consumption for entire clusters of homes will be optimised. The goal is to reduce energy consumption by 50 per cent. Furthermore, in each house a thing called a Qbox will be installed. It measures and optimises the energy flow and makes it easier to save energy, for example by automatically running household devices at the most efficient time. Those who now have visions of ghostly washing machines suddenly starting up at four o’clock in the morning, fear not: apparently there’s an override button. The box won the prize. Kluin will now spend the money and the next two years getting it to hit the market. The rest of the contestants are all optimistic with regards to their business ideas as well, and they don’t rule out ideas of future cooperation, either. So in time, we might all make appointments with our green online buddies to go out to a club where we generate energy by jumping up and down. Note to DJ: play hiphop, ska and punk-pop, and leave those R&B and lounge records at home. Otherwise the lights will go out. Or maybe they won’t, because the club will be lit by solar lanterns. It will be powered by Qbox-optimised energy, and the beer delivery will be made by trams. Do the green thing.
Plan #6 Save the planet with economics. By Mark Wedin Something of a media slut, Danish economist Bjørn Lomborg’s been travelling the globe giving interviews to every major news, radio and print outlet around. But he’s not just trying to sell his new book, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming, he’s trying to sell a new perspective. Lomborg believes there are far better ways to save the planet than the current methods most commonly advocated, and he’s got a lot to say on the subject. Ask him four questions and he’ll give you an afternoon of information. What’s wrong with the current approach to solving climate change? Everybody says we should cut carbon emissions right now and, while that makes us feel warm and fuzzy and good, the honest assessment is we aren’t doing it, and even when we are, it doesn’t have much of an impact. In 1992, at the Earth Summit meeting, we promised to cut emissions to 1990 levels by 2000 yet, instead, they increased by twelve per cent. Then we met at Kyoto in 1997, and we said: alright, let’s get them below five per cent of the 1990 levels by 2010, but in reality, they probably increase by twenty per cent. There’s something funny about saying, ‘We failed twice, let’s make it harder and see if we can do it this time.’ But the main problem is that cutting emissions costs quite a lot and yet it has little impact far into the future. If everybody had implemented Kyoto Protocol, including the US, it would’ve postponed global warming seven days at the end of the century. Even if we had stuck with Kyoto standards for the entire century, it would’ve postponed global warming for about five years. Where do these numbers come from? From an article in Geophysical Research Letters, by one of the lead authors of the UN climate panel. It’s entirely uncontroversial. Anyone would tell you that that’s the effect. Additionally, the cost would be about one hundred and eighty billion dollars. It’s very costly to cut carbon emissions. So maybe we should cut the price. You can get rich people in rich countries to put a solar panel on their roof—mainly to look good— but most people won’t bother, and certainly nobody in poor countries will. So instead of trying to make people buy expensive solar panels, we should rather invest in research and development in solar power and the many other non-carbon emitting energy technologies, so they could become much cheaper. If we did, then, say in 2030 or 2050, everyone could use them: our kids and grandkids and crucially, the Chinese and Indians. Listening to you, it sounds obvious that Kyoto won’t work. But why are so many people behind it? Several different reasons. One is, notice
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Travel by the travel book All the world’s a page, and we are merely adventurers. YVO SPREY
By Dara Colwell
Bjørn Lomborg: rattling eco-orthodoxies.
how all politicians who make Kyoto-style promises are essentially saying, ‘I promise that someone else will cut a lot of stuff after I’m out of office.’ That’s not very hard to get a politician to say. Even Tony Blair, who came into office in 1997, [has left] office before they actually have to implement Kyoto in 2008. Schwarzenegger promised in 2006 that California would cut its emissions to Kyoto levels in 2020. It’s very obvious why politicians find it irresistible to say they’re going to do something that everybody seems to care about, and do it when they’re no longer in office. The US, in a sense, was at least honest and said they didn’t want to do Kyoto. Look at Canada, one of the leading Kyoto proponents, one of the major US-bashers: they were supposed to cut, I think, about eight per cent, but they’ve had an increase of thirty per cent. It’s similar with Japan and most European countries. Quite frankly, the only two countries that are really going to do well are Britain and Germany, because both of them already matched Kyoto levels once they signed it. So you’re not behind Al Gore’s mission statement... Al Gore says climate change is our generational mission. He asks: what do we want to be remembered for? It’s an important question. Do we want future generations to remember us for spending one hundred and eighty billion dollars per year doing the Kyoto protocol, essentially doing no good one hundred years from now, or rather, for less than half that—just to give you a sense of proportion—the UN estimates that for about seventy-five billion dollars a year, we could give clean drinking water, sanitation, basic health care and education to every single human on the planet. Do we want to be remembered for spending lots of money doing little good far into the future, or would we rather be remembered for basically solving all major problems in the world at half the cost? It sounds almost flippant when you put it that way, but that is really the conversation we should be having. Bjørn Lomborg debates with Femke Halsema (GroenLinks) and Liesbeth van Tongeren (Greenpeace, Netherlands), Felix Meritis, 11 October, 20.30, €12.50.
According to Ankie Szlapka, the item most crucial to travel is a map. ‘It’s the first thing I buy—then I can see what’s possible. Next, I plan. And last, I buy the book.’ Understandable, given that Szlapka is co-owner of Pied à Terre, the sizeable travel bookstore on the Overtoom that boasts 68,000 maps. ‘If you have fun in your job, you want to have everything. I’m a bit like a hamster, stockpiling information,’ says Szlapka, listing some of her substantial catalogue: nautical, geographical, topographical and satellite maps; maps for walking, climbing, and cycling, Colombian military maps, German political maps, charts plotting the routes through Russian national parks and others logging world terrorism. There’s even a cookie map of the Netherlands, broken into biscuited regions, hanging next to the coffee bar in the back. ‘When I was a child, we always had a National Geographic map in the hallway and an atlas nearby,’ says Szlapka, noting how her fascination for topography started at home. ‘My father was a journalist and needed to know everything. So you see, I make my living from what has been a long-time hobby.’ A Mecca for travel enthusiasts, Pied à Terre, a spacious, light warehouse devoted to every imaginable kind of voyage, draws cartographers, architects, travellers, writers, their editors and, of course, bookworms. There are books covering virtually every country, region, city or recorded route, grouped into achingly specific categories such as cycling in Holland, which is further broken down into cycling/eating, cycling/B&Bs, cycling/camping, cycling along farms, along waterways or specifically along Belgian waterways. The store is housed in a former cinema and theatre, which later morphed into baths, a homeless shelter, a refuge for recuperating WWII soldiers and finally, a church, before Szlapka got her hands on it, transforming the space into a chapel for the travel-minded. Now, it’s adorned with a chandelier, every kind of imaginable globe—from the earth or moon to a favourite amongst deans and professors, the globe bar—and shelf after shelf of information. Of course, to own a travel bookstore, it goes without saying that Amsterdamborn Szlapka, who has run the business for 20 years, is an inveterate traveller. After quitting her job as a pharmacist to take over Pied à Terre’s helm, she sailed
through the Caribbean for a year, spent six months in Cape Verde, later lived in Africa and Central America and, in fact, has travelled so widely—a particular Dutch affliction—that she finds it easier to say where she hasn’t been: South East Asia. ‘Travel broadens your horizons,’ she says excitedly, her arms outstretched mimicking the distance. Szlapka rolls a number of reasons—which most travellers clocking frequent miles would also mention—off her tongue: it helps you learn about the world or others from first-hand observation, it stimulates and satisfies curiosity, provides instant education, and teaches you that everyone’s basically alike even though we don’t always share the same beliefs. But she finds it difficult to speak in generalities without mentioning the highlights of previous trips—like following St Paul’s trail in Cappadocia, Turkey with her 6-yearold granddaughter or cabbing it to Harlem for underground jazz concerts back when visiting the Manhattan bor-
Gleaming orbs at Pied à Terre.
ough was more like crossing the Mexican border. Szlapka obviously likes adventure— maybe not so obvious given today’s glut of pre-packaged holiday tours that often pass as travel. ‘These days, people do travel more, but they’re not more adventurous,’ she says. ‘So many people like to have the path cleared for them—they go knowing where they’ll sleep every night before buying the ticket. But for me, adventure is the exact opposite—it’s not knowing where or how you’ll sleep tomorrow. When I was six, I took the tram by myself because I wanted to know where it stopped. I travel the same way now—I just get out, wherever I am, if I think it’s nice,’ she says. Then, of course, she looks at her map. Pied à Terre, Overtoom 135-137, 627 4455, www.jvw.nl.
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4-10 October 2007
A JOURNEY TO MYSELF
IT’S GOOD TO HAVE A REASON TO TRAVEL: TO HUDSON FOR A LOST FATHER, TO MOSCOW FOR SPACE, TO VEGAS TO FIND ONESELF, TO BERLIN FOR THE WALL OR TO MECCA FOR HAJJ...
FROM HERE TO PATERNITY Tripping in a train towards the Old Man in Hudson BY MARK WEDIN
Sleeping through the overnight flight from Amsterdam to New York City was delightfully forgetful. But the two-hour train ride to a small town north of the big city made an indelible impression. It was comfortable enough sitting on the rough new upholstery of the Amtrak seats, smelling the sour scent of air conditioning, and watching the gorgeous view of the glistening Hudson river on one side, and the lush, verdant landscapes on the other—altogether though, a strange garnish for the surreal sensations hovering about. At age 27 and 28, my sister and I were en route to meet our father for the first time in almost 25 years. ‘Did he say how many goats he has?’ ‘I think five or six.’ This was last spring. We had found him a month before, communicated mostly in letters and a couple awkward phone calls. He had been searching for us for about 10 years. We had no clear expectations, hoped for many stories about our origins and looked forward to finding out what kind of guy he is. My sister and I had already discussed everything we wanted to before embarking, and were hoping to simply relax on the train and not think about anything. But anxiety was hard to avoid, and I found myself looking for distractions. ‘I wonder why there’s no sailboats on the river.’ ‘That’s a really good question.’ My sister seized on the topic. She was also looking for distraction. We came up with a variety of reasons, which kept us busy for a good 15 minutes. Behind us was an older German couple who spoke little English. Some woman got it into her head that she could help out by speaking to them like they were morons. ‘That’s a bridge. Yes, yes, over the river, we have bridges. Yes, yes. A bridge. Yes, yes.’ When that was finished, we opened the package of 12-dollar sushi we bought at Penn Station. ‘This better be good.’ ‘Seriously.’ Everyone’s got their sad song. Ours, unfortunately, was made into a feel-good movie starring Will Smith. Well, not exactly, but the parallels in The Pursuit of Happyness are eerie—same city, same year, same subway stations used as makeshift hotel rooms. Though, it was actually our hippy mother trying to keep us alive and well on the streets of San Francisco. (We haven’t found her yet.) Where our father was at the time, we were hoping he’d explain. But we harboured no ill feelings. We didn’t exactly know
what happened and, having been adopted at an early age, we spent most of our lives not really thinking about it at all. ‘You want the last yellowtail?’ ‘Nope, it’s yours. I already had two.’ On the way, we meditated on the cute town names, like Yonkers and Poughkeepsie. ‘This is Poughkeepsie folks. Poughkeepsie. Last call. Poughkeepsie.’ The engineer announced it a dozen times, until an old lady with a duffle bag came rushing up the isle. ‘Scuze me. Scuze me. Hold the door please.’ How she missed the first 10 announcements, we could only imagine. And we did imagine, with several different scenarios. Then we considered the possibility of our father being freakishly deformed. ‘He looked alright in the pictures.’ ‘Those were ten years old. Anything could’ve happened since then.’ We prepared for the worst. Lingering in my mind, however, was my girlfriend back home. I was hesitant to travel without her, but she persuaded me. ‘It’s only a week, I’ll be fine.’ She was five months pregnant with our first child. (In the year I met my father, I also became one.) She told me a story about an ape mother, whose infant was taken away shortly after birth and returned six weeks later to gauge its reaction (this was back when the humane treatment of animals was less of an issue). The young ape recognised its mother, and panicked. As a survival mechanism, he had accepted that he would never see her again. He soon became angry, throwing rocks at his mother and hitting her hard. She sat quietly, doing nothing. When he was finished, he started to cry. At this point, the mother took him into her arms, and they began to rebuild what was lost. Naturally, I wondered if I’d react in a similar fashion. Train stations have plenty of loose rocks lying around. You never know. Lost memories could rush forth. Or nothing at all. Just a stranger standing in front of you. Like any journey, the mystery and magic of it all could climax before you actually reach your destination. And on arrival, everything you’ve anticipated might vanish the moment you behold the real thing, at which point a new mystery and magic could commence. ‘Well, this is it.’ ‘Yeah, okay.’ We grabbed our things, stepped off the train and walked up the stairs to where he was waiting to say hello.
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SPACE IS THE PLACE Kitsch, dreams, people, borscht: Moscow, 50 years after Sputnik. BY STEVE KORVER
An aluminium ball with four antennae. All it did was go beep and it made America scared. The Sputnik may look like a failed prototype for a designer lemon-squeezer, but its launch as the first artificial satellite represented a profound leap forward. Towards the stars. Finally, the lonely moon had a friend. Finally, we had a Plan B if we totally mucked things up on the Mothership. Of course, 4 October, 1957 is the date the Venusians began to shit their heat-resistant pants. We’re coming! Once upon a time, I was set adrift in the Soviet Space Age. Growing up, I never had time for the clinical, nerdy ways of NASA. Where’s the romance in that? Later, a friend in Moscow began sending me letters with stamps depicting a sort of retro-futurism where space was a wacky place with designs that screamed ‘quality propaganda!’ Soon, I learned that the Russians had been obsessed with space long before Cold War competition, dreaming of a vastness that not only stretched from St Petersburg to Vladivostok, but also from ‘Moscow to the Moon, Kaluga to Mars’. In 1903, the same year as the Wright brothers’ flight, a deaf and largely self-taught son of a Polish lumberjack, Konstatin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935), published a formula that made rocket flight possible. (I’ll let this sink in: a deaf Polish lumberjack. With a huge beard and even huger home-made ear-trumpet. Can a space mystic get any cooler?) Throw in a visionary ‘Chief Designer’, the Ukrainian-born Sergei Korolyov (1907-66), who returned from Siberian imprisonment as a victim of Stalinist purges, to invent the intercontinental ballistic missile and head a space programme that offered an attractively street version of interstellar exploration: where duct tape was duct tape and oxygen could be recycled from urine. Instead of spending a million on developing a pen that worked in 0-G as NASA did, the Russians came up with a more universal solution: ‘We decided to use pencil.’ What can you not like? And what hot-blooded heterosexual boy hasn’t dreamed of getting it on with Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space? And the rest could settle for the easy grin of Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, who yelled ‘I’m an eagle!’ when his ass got blasted into the
Great Unknown in a hyped-up tin can. These were true starfuckers—yet still so human. So my photographer bud and I hit the roadski towards the wide brown boulevards of Moscow in search of stories we could title: ‘Star City: Cosmic Suburbs on the Skids’, ‘Yuri Gagarin, the Bolshevik Elvis’, ‘Belka&Strelka’s Embalmers—The Immortalising of Astrodogs’ and ‘A Freudian Interpretation of Cosmonautic Monuments and Memorabilia’. We were two peckerheaded Westerners on a space quest and with a raw hunger for cosmonautic kitsch. And life proved good: we found massive swoops of rusty/shiny titanium depicting Flash Gordonov types, the Buran space shuttle re-invented as a Gorky Park fairground ride, window grilles formed into Sputnik shapes, neon billboards pointing us towards Cosmos Casino, and much more—including borscht in a toothpaste tube. We were kids in a candy store. But as we met more people, we discovered that you make more friends by raving about the conspiracies around Gagarin’s premature and mysterious death than about gulags, gangsters or Putin Youth. Then the kitsch gave way to the real stories—the ones that really lingered. The clubber who remembered the arrival of house music and the decision to call them not raves but ‘Gagarins’. The sweet couple who welcomed us to their ‘town of phalluses’ before taking us to their tiny home to stuff us with sausages. The artist who reminisced about spending a night as a boy staring transfixed at a stuffed astrodog which his aunt, a curator, was transporting back to her museum in Riga. The excitable space engineer with a heavy accent who asked us to truly imagine confronting outer space for the first time: ‘Horrifying! Terrible Blackness! Like a cemetery at midnight!’ The cab driver who lamented how his kids cared more about Coca Cola than the cosmos... It turned out that our souls were more Slavic than spacey, and that space can be a place right here down on Earth. Who needs a flight on Virgin Galactic when Moscow is still so close at hand?
BRIGHT LIGHTS, FAKE CITY Finding yourself between the glitz and the gutter. BY LIZ ARMSTRONG
I want to tell you about the blonde girl in silver platform boots and miniskirt woozily trying to claw her way out of the back of an ambulance, presumably to get back to her SUV, which was all crumpled into the highway wall. I want to tell you about a rednosed, glazed-eyed, bruised-up alcoholic who stumbles home at 7am with his shirt off, pours himself a pint of Red Bull and falls asleep on the couch watching TV while his Chihuahua shivers and shits all over the carpet. I want to tell you about the rival gangs of people who honestly believe they are vampyres, about parents who sell their children’s bedroom furniture to fund gambling habits, about protected wetlands routinely catching fire, about brothels run from storage lockers, about body parts in suitcases, about sunsets and mountains so gorgeous they’re proof enough that science and magic are the same. I want to tell you about Las Vegas, and why I moved there to be a hermit. About a year ago, I checked out of Chicago, my hometown, leaving behind my family, oodles of fantastic friends, and a pretty fabulous job as a social columnist where I was paid well to write about whatever seemed most interesting in my life. On the surface, it seemed like I had it made, but I was rewarded whenever I got into a particularly fucked-up situation, or instigated a fight, or took drugs and did something at a new level of crazy, or met someone so weird and possibly insane it seemed like I could be lying. It was a hard, dramatic, dangerous life, and it wasn’t the kind I wanted to die from. If I kept up my shenanigans I knew I would. To get out, I envisioned a romantic fantasy that involved taking up residence in the desert as a lone wolf, so I quit my job and found a new one in Las Vegas, the only city in the United States where I have no friends or family. I sold or gave away more than half my possessions, and moved across the country alone. My escape hatch opened to a brand-new, four-bedroom, three-bathroom house in a quaint subdivision where all the buildings are purposely, creepily designed to look exactly the same. Since I didn’t bring my bed, I slept on an air mattress on my bedroom floor, covered in a carpet harbouring ants and crickets, plus the occasional roach, all of which liked to jump on my face while I was asleep. My housemate/landlord, a wellmeaning but extremely depressed drunkard who I hadn’t met before moving in, told me the exterminators don’t work in the winter. We lived near the mountains in the south-western part of town, eight miles away
from signs threatening fines if you were caught feeding wild donkeys, the part of Vegas that was still developing so rapidly it wasn’t on any map. Miles of gravel sprawl separated me from the nearest sign of civilisation, which happened to be an enormous, overly air-conditioned bar with steaks and video games. Roads widened, houses grew roofs, and streetlights sprouted out of the ground every single day. And these changes were so subtle and so sudden that I’d often feel like I was trapped in a lucid dream, the kind where I’d be pretty sure I was in the right place but then again something would be slightly off and I’d have to recalibrate my surroundings to make sure I was flesh, not a vapour of neurons. Most people think Las Vegas is a land of indulgence; actually, it’s a land of confusion. Nothing there is designed to give you any sense of landing or settlement; everything—architecture, street names, clubs, celebrity—is borrowed or stolen or twisted into oblivion. The average life span of a building is 12 years. The infrastructure is designed to be instantly collapsible—the street I lived on was starting to crumble before it was finished being paved—so nothing stays. To live there, you must succumb to the bliss of invention without purpose. All the vacancy manifests as danger, not wilful sinister malice but lazy craziness, a bleary meth rat nihilism that’s stupid and aimless and violent out of boredom. My second week there, I was jumped and robbed—two separate incidents in one glorious night spent at an ugly suburban karaoke bar. Three months in, my car was broken into, right in front of my house and my outdated, barely functioning iPod was stolen but my 700-dollar designer shoes were left alone. Six months in, some creep broke into my garage and attempted to cut off the power in the house while I was asleep. These incidents fazed no one there but me. In fact, everyone I complained to considered me lucky. I, on the other hand, was scared out of my mind. Though a desert mountain vortex is a good place to narcissistically contemplate the meaning of one’s life, it’s not a good place to stay sane, especially when desperation abounds. The day after my house was invaded, I realised I’d left one well-meaning but ultimately perilous and empty life for another. I decided I’d called my own bluff: I am not a lone wolf; I am a sensitive human who needs other humans who care about community and decency. So I sold or gave away more than half of my possessions, and moved back across the country to find them.
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BERLIN, BERLIN Walls, like stories, have two sides. BY KIM RENFREW
It wasn’t there. And then it was there. And then it wasn’t there again. These are the facts. The Berlin Wall, begun on 13 August, 1961, lasted until 9 November, 1989—a relatively short chapter in history, though a rather long piece of architecture: 155 kilometres, in fact, which I am steadily working my way around. Perhaps it’s strange to devote so much legwork to something I have no links with. I’m not German, not even slightly. I wasn’t one of those people who turned up to witness its demise. I didn’t raise a hammer (though I do have a chip—genuine, as far as I know—of wall, given to me by someone who did). I never, to my eternal regret, went to a ‘proper’ communist country. But I am a child of the Cold War, born and bred, with all the fear that entailed, including nights spent lying awake, sometimes in tears, because I thought that one day very soon we would all melt away in a mushroom cloud. And the Berlin Wall was the enduring symbol of the East-West divide that caused my night terrors. Except, of course, that it didn’t endure. I began following the ghost of the great divider a couple of years ago. It’s something you have to do in Berlin, at least in part, as the wall-which-isn’t-there still casts a shadow over the city. And so, one autumn day in 2005, I found myself at Gesundsbrunnen SBahn station (out of use during the wall years, as it happens: it was in the East) in a nondescript part of Wedding, peering up at a Berlin Mauerweg signpost, one of hundreds that mark the course of the reinforced concrete construction that snaked through, then looped around the city, knotting the Westerners into their island of decadence. Walking down Schwedterstrasse in Prenz’l Berg (once proletarian, now firmly in the hands of the artfully ruffled creative classes: scratch the grimy surface and smell the money), flipping left into Eberswaldestrasse, much of the route looks unremarkable, dull: wide streets, low-rise apartment blocks, standard European cityscapes. The wall bulldozed through all this ordinariness, heedless of obstacles. Here, at Bernauer-
strasse (a couple of hundred metres of expressionless concrete still stand as memorial) is where it all began with a straight line drawn on a residential street. When people leapt out from East to West through windows, they blocked them up. A solution so simple it was absurd. The route continues—Boyenstrasse, Kielerstrasse—through the Invaliden Cemetery, where the dead were once divided between two cities and which is guarded by one of the few preserved watchtowers, then over the river and across Unter den Linden. This is where things start hotting up—literally. If we were all going to perish in an atomic holocaust, then this is where it could have happened: on 26 October 1961, at Checkpoint Charlie on Friederichstrasse, Russian and American tanks amassed barrel to barrel for a tense two-day standoff. Mercifully, things cooled down again for another 20-odd years, and the DoomsdayClock went back to seven minutes. After this Cold War hotspot, you soon get back to the endless acres of flatpack flats of Mitte, Kreuzberg. I don’t know how much of the route I’ve covered, but right now I am somewhere near Baumschulenstrasse, on a dreary grey street in Neukölln. It’s these suburbs that make you think most, because you know least about them. Uninteresting places that had interesting times thrust upon them—Heidelbergerstrasse, Grenzalleedamm—you might have lived here yourself, but for a random alignment of genes and geography. What would you have been like if you had grown up here or—you dance a few inches to the right—here? Two steps. Two cities. Two worlds. That simple. To think that you could to split a city in two, and keep it that way, by picking up a piece of chalk and drawing a line across it is a solution so silly, so surreally literalminded that it could have been lifted straight from the pages of an East European short story, whose logical punchline is this walk around the Berlin Wall. Why? Because it isn’t there.
THE JOURNEY OF A LIFETIME Finding home 5,000 km from home. BY RABI’A FRANK
8 january 2005: After being a Muslim for about 10 years—I converted in 1994—today’s the day that I go to the most sacred of places for any Muslim. I am so excited! I’m going to see the Ka’aba, the first building for worshipping God in the grand mosque of Mecca. I’m going to the place where every Muslim must visit, if able, once in their lives. I don’t really know what to expect. My hopes are high but I try to be realistic. Basically, I hope that this journey will change my life, that I will become a better worshipper of Allah, my Creator. That this journey will boost my imen—my belief—and that I will never lose that feeling. I’m exhausted. The days of Hajj haven’t even begun and already my patience is being tested. We got on the plane in Amsterdam at 4pm and arrived in Saudi Arabia at 1.30am. And that wasn’t it: we waited until 8.30. in Jeddah for a bus to Mecca, finally arriving there at 2.30pm. We drove by the mosque, but I was so tired, I didn’t even notice it. When you go to Mecca, one of the first things you do, after eating and sleeping, is to make the Umrah—the little pilgrimage, following the footsteps of the prophet Abraham. My husband, mother-in-law and I walk to the mosque. I’m amazed by the crowd and all the different people. We didn’t really know where we were going, but then... there it was. The Ka’aba. It’s huge! I can’t help being overcome by all these emotions. I start crying. I’ve never felt this way before. My hopes, fears, dreams, all flood into this one, big sensation. I start to supplicate to Allah that He would accept this Umrah from me and that He would lead me and my family to be the best Muslims we could. When you reach the Ka’aba you go around it, counter-clockwise, seven times while supplicating, reciting Qoran and wishing the best for everyone you know and don’t know. It’s crowded, but doable. The three of us walk hand-in-hand, so that we won’t be separated. As I watch my husband through my tears, I see that he’s impressed too. After we complete the circumambulation, we pray behind the standing place of Abraham, where he and his son rebuilt the Ka’aba for worshipping Allah. Then we go to Safa, a hill in the mosque, where Abraham’s wife Hajar had desperately searched for water with her baby, Ismail. On the other side, about 500 metres away, is the hill of Marwa: she ran between them, hoping to find water or someone to help her. The story goes that the angel Gabriel showed her a well, now known as the well of Zamzam, which is still in use (we drink some of the water). As we walk between the hills seven times, as Hajar did, I think about how this strong woman was once all
alone in the desert, but now millions of people remember her. This pilgrimage ends with my husband shaving his head, and my mother-in-law and I cutting little pieces off our hair. The Umrah takes about two-and-a-half hours. We walk back to the hotel, first through the crowded mosque, then through the equally crowded streets of shops, gold, books, women with modest clothes, all wearing the veil, some covering their faces. I feel so much at home. It is too crowded, and people aren’t always as civil—pushing, always wanting to be first—as Muslims should be. There are a lot of beggars from Nigeria with babies; buses and taxis make lots of noise. But still, this is my home. I never want to leave and go back to my country, where people won’t accept me for who I am, who criticise the way I live, the way I dress. I want to stay here with my brothers and sisters in Islam and fill my days with worship and doing good deeds, unbothered by worldly things. Though this is just an illusion: even in Mecca, there is a lot of worldly distraction. But I enjoy being in this Muslim country, going to the mosque five times a day and listening to the imam. It fills my heart with imen. Ten days later, and the actual Hajj begins. Three days of sleeping in tents, praying, supplicating, reading, contemplating and crying, but also three days of never being alone, in the company of three million other pilgrims, disgusting toilets, selfish people and little sleep. But the reward, if Allah accepts your efforts, is great: forgiveness of sins, being as clean as a newborn baby, and a renewed belief to last a lifetime. The experience was one of the most important of my life. It wasn’t all ‘hallelujah’, as some people try to make you believe. You are tested, especially when it comes to your patience. Patience with a whole different lifestyle where you wait and wait and nothing happens; patience with hygiene situations you aren’t used to; patience with your fellow Muslims who don’t always seem to get our bond of brotherhood; patience with the crowd; patience when you are just too tired to be nice. I experienced a whole range of emotions but now, three years later, there still is no place I would rather be than the place of birth of my beloved religion, Islam. And I will be coming back, inshaAllah, if God wills.
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4-10 October 2007
SHORT LIST
Boban i Marko Markovi´c, Friday, Tropentheater
THURSDAY 4 OCTOBER Events: Sputnik, 50 years later Bleep. Bleep. Bleep. It was 50 years ago today that the universe shifted, we all became fellow astronauts—or rather, cosmonauts—and the space race was born. Our once horizontal reality now had to embrace a vertical one and space became the place. Those darn Russkis—with Khrushchev feeding the fear by threatening to pump out rockets like sausages—beat those darn Americans by launching an 84-kilogramme aluminium ball with four antennae. Panic ensued, bucks were spent and many cheesy B-films were made. Everything shifted. Throughout town, various events are commemorating this singular event: this afternoon at the Posthoornkerk (Haarlemmerstraat 126A) from 13.00 to 17.00, space journalist Piet Smulders will be presenting his lastest book 50 Jaar Ruimtevaart—In het spoor van de Spoetnik in the presence of Dutch astronaut André Kuipers, with a live video link to Moscow with several Russian cosmonauts. From 19.30 in Artis there will be more talks and films. But since this a tribute to a now united humanity’s trip to the universe, the real party will be at the Volkskrantgebouw (Wibautstraat 150) when Cosmic Mania 2007 breaks out from 19.00 to 01.00 complete with Cosmic Light Cocktail Bar, Space Food, Cosmic DJs, Cosmic Party, Cosmic Live TV and much more. Stay tuned for 3 November, when we can all pay tribute to the planet’s first cosmic emissary, Laika the dog, who was launched in the Sputnik II. (Steve Korver) Various locations, times and prices.
FRIDAY 5 OCTOBER Art: CASZuidas The aim of the Virtueel Museum Zuidas is to ensure that the ever-growing business district made of sheet metal and plate glass does not become a cultural desert. ‘If buildings and roads are the hardware of the city,’ they state, ‘then culture is the software that brings the city to life.’ And if the city is a machine, then its workers are the fuel that turns its cogs. So the museum, together with SKOR, has set up the Contemporary Art Screen Zuidas to sprinkle a little magic on the clockwork grind of the daily commute. The big screen, stationed outside Zuid/WTC, will beam out nuggets of art from six in the morning to midnight, from a broad global line-up of artists both established and up-and-coming. First off is a Jan Schuijren-curated programme of
international work; in the future, there’ll be collaborations with the likes of Holland Festival. Tonight is the official opening, with films being shown from 4pm onwards; Councillor Maarten van Poelgeest snips the ribbon at 5pm, followed by a ‘sensational’ performance by Roel Wouters and Luna Maurer. See caszuidas.nl and www.virtueelmuseum.nl for more. (Kim Renfrew) NS station Zuid/WTC, 16.00, free. Screenings 06.00-00.00.
Roots: Boban i Marko Markovi´c Orkestar OK, first you eat. Then drink. Then you’ll be ready to dance when the planet’s most primary wedding and funeral band hits the stage. The Serbian Roma brass band Boban i Marko Markovi´c Okestar know what they’re doing and have been doing their version of trumpet and tuba party violence for generations. Their tunes—a version of oompah-pah brass that makes speed metal sound like a lifeless and limp waltz—rock with dynamism and swoop with trippy Eastern melody, have helped make such Emir Kusturica films as Underground into cinematic carnivals. Your loins will be blown away—well, thrust about a lot anyway. In short, Balkan beats are no empty hype when in the right hands... (Steve Korver) Tropentheater, Grote Zaal, 20.30, €20.
Roots: Old Crow Medicine Show There’s a case to be made that it is way more punk to sneer your songs acoustically than to hide them behind a wall of distortion. Old Crow Medicine Show’s last two albums, both produced by guitarist David Rawlings (Gillian Welch, Robyn Hitchcock), showcased a band that perfectly surf the wave between traditional bluegrass and rock ’n’ roll ’tude—singing about that sweetie but also about that one coke-fuelled night. And it only adds to their street cred that they originally got discovered by Doc Watson’s daughter, Nancy, while playing on the street. So come on down and join Critter Fuqua, Kevin Hayes, Morgan Jahnig, Ketch Secor and Willie Watson for an edgy hoedown. Tonight’s admission includes the option to take in soulful new alt country kid on the block Jeffrey Foucault at 19.30, and the ‘amphetamine-fuelled streetgrass’ of banjo punks 357 String Band at 23.00. Yeefuckinghaw. (Steve Korver) Paradiso, Kleine Zaal, 21.15, sold out.
Gay: Galore The venerable homosexual institution ArtLaunch is a many roomed mansion. Or a many stringed bow. Or a many glitter-balled disco—as you will. Cheeky young whippersnappers Unk are also catching up in terms of diversification. So it is only natural that these movers and shaker-uppers of the (often dreary) Amsterdam gay scene should gravitate towards each other and set up a night together, as they did with
4-10 October 2007
Amsterdam Weekly
August’s Desperate Pride Party at Sugar Factory. Tonight is the reprise, and after that, Galore plans to put its face in (and on) every couple of months, with a combination of live performance, DJs and those strippers du jour, Burlesque artistes. This evening’s DJs include Prosumer and Murat Tepeli from Berlin, plus local lads Lupe and Martijn; performance comes from Gloed, and visuals come from, you guessed it... AlexEtJeremy. The target audience is gays, lezzas, straights and coolios. Go go Galore! (Kim Renfrew) Sugar Factory, 23.00-05.00, €10.
SATURDAY 6 OCTOBER Procession: Let it Rain As if we need such an exhortation to the weather gods! Of course it will rain. Necessity is the mother of invention, and this is a practical sort of land, so it was only a matter of time before the city’s creative minds fused together crappy weather and art. Jarno Gnirrep is the brolly-brained mastermind of this colourful procession that will wind through the streets of Amsterdam between the set-off point in Nieuwmarkt through to Westerpark. Gnirrep’s inspiration came a couple of months ago, when he found an abandoned umbrella on the number 1 tram; he thought that he could improve on the design, and invited his friends and fellow artists to help him found a new discipline: umbrellART. Artists from all over the world have collaborated on the project, and names include Morcky, Xstreets and Laser 3.14. As we slop into another sopping autumn, this could be just the thing to brighten up another dreary day. Feel free to join in. Just remember to bring a brolly (the crazier, the better) and keep your fingers crossed that it isn’t sunny. Or, to paraphrase Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl: do rain on my parade. (Kim Renfrew) Nieuwmarkt, 14.00, free.
Classical: Mozart’s woodwinds There are two kinds of people in this world: those who love Mozart’s Gran Partita and those who’ve yet to fall in love with it. If you’re lucky enough to be part of the latter group, then you’re in for a treat this Saturday because the Ottetto Amsterdam, led by Krijn Koetsveld, will perform this woodwind extravaganza at the intimate Noorderkerk on period instruments. In Milos Forman’s film Amadeus, this piece is described by Salieri as ‘filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing. It seemed to me that I was hearing the voice of God.’ No joke. Oboes, clarinets, basset horns, bassoons and French horns colourfully recreate the sound and feel of 18th-century live entertainment. Showcasing contemporary musical practice, the Ottetto Amsterdam specialise in captivating variants of the original score. Treat yourself to this special performance of one of Mozart’s most remarkable and justly famed compositions. (David Lee) Noorderkerk, 14.00, €12.
Club: Andy Warhol Club—The Party Seems like the whole city is going hoopla for the geeky boy from Pittsburgh who made a career of arresting poster art and pretending to be dim. First, there’s the whopping retrospective at the Stedelijk. Then there’s Factory Boy Lou Reed’s exhibition at Serieuze Zaken (with an appearance by the man himself on 10 Oct, 4pm). Tonight there is this party in honour of the silver-wigged one, from nightlife superstars Meubel Stukken (appropriately enough, given that Warhol was generally about as animated as a piece of furniture). The parties will take place every first Saturday of the month for the length of the Stedelijk exhibition, at different locations around town, and the organisers assure a sound and vision extravaganza with a feel for the excesses of Studio 54 (so don’t forget your white charger and do forget to wear your panties). This inaugral one is in the suitably industrial surroundings in the bowels of Post CS, with DJs Spencer Product (pah: bet that’s not his real name!) of Misshapes and Ruffclub in NYC; Riotous Rockers from Kill em all, Nottingham; our own Martin Duvall; and Matik performing live (including one Velvet Underground cover). 00-Kaap provides the visuals. Bring a Super 8. Stand in the corner. Say ‘hey’ a lot. Look blank. Smile. You’re Andy. (Kim Renfrew) BG, 23.00, €27.
TUESDAY 9 OCTOBER Theatre: De Vliegende Panters For more than 12 years, these three predators—Ebbinge, Vrijdag and de Bekker—of priceless cabaret have soared above the competition, conquering the airwaves with their own wildlife show and two Top 40 hits filled with crooning catcalls to boot. Their mottled fur may have acquired some patches of grey, and their flesh is beginning to sag, but then again, they’ve sown some wild oats here and there in their fruitful career. Let’s hope they stick to savaging each other and spraying the occasional unsuspecting audience member with their scent, along with proclamations of their ‘Anus-monologues’, howling jazzy tunes and gospel at the moon. See them jump through the hoops of political correctness and good taste, all the while nimbly dodging between their hunting grounds of sharp sketches, hilarious songs and assorted diatribes. So put on your top hat and take along a chair and a whip for your own protection: these cats aren’t just scratch and sniff, they’re going in for the kill. (Luuk van Huët) Carré, 20.00, €15-€29. Until 11 October.
Send details and images for listing consideration at least two weeks in advance to agenda@amsterdamweekly.nl.
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Amsterdam Weekly
4-10 October 2007
Jim Hall, see Wednesday, Bimhuis
MUSIC Send listing suggestions at least two weeks in advance to agenda@amsterdamweekly.nl. For full listings,see www.amsterdamweekly.nl.
Thursday 4 October Singer-songwriter: Pete Murray Trio Commercialsounding acoustic pop from the Australian chart topper. Paradiso, Grote Zaal, 19.30, €20 + membership Hiphop: Akon Apologetic hiphop from the shrill-voiced Senegalese-American pop star. Heineken Music Hall, 20.00, €39.50 Classical: Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Daniel Harding leads the orchestra through Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.27, Bartók’s Divertimento, and Dvorák’s Golden Spinning Wheel. Concertgebouw, Grote Zaal, 20.15, €52.50 Rock: 4xLive An indie rockin’ collection, with sets from The Wave Pictures (London), Lisa Li-Lund (NYC/Paris), The WoWz (New York) and Diego’s Umbrella (San Francisco). Stubnitz, 20.30, €8 Experimental: Muziek Kapot Moet! Electronics, drones, drilling sounds and surprises from Providence musician Shawn Greenlee; noise jazz from French duo Kandinsky; and devilish rodent noise chaos from White Mice. OCCII, 21.00, €5
World: Boban i Marko Markovi´c Orkestar Serbia’s number one swinging brass orchestra. See Short List. KIT Tropentheater, 20.30, €20 Contemporary: Ives Ensemble The new Proms aan ’t IJ season gets under way with a programme titled ‘Thalys PBA’, making for a journey that begins in Amsterdam, stops off in Belgium, before finishing in Paris. With vocalists Marije van Stralen and Beatrice van der Poel. Muziekgebouw, 20.30, €22 Experimental: 3xLive Sets from Tommy Simatupang (Berlin), Deirdre Dolittle (Berlin), and Brandon Miller (Philadelphia). Stubnitz, 21.00, €8 Experimental: Hamburg is Coming! A Germanic musical mix-and-match, with sets from Gladbeck City Bombing, Puddle Parade, Tschlip and Karl Heinz. OCCII, 21.00, €5 Jazz: Monsieur Dubois CD launch party for the nujazz band. Bitterzoet, 21.00, €7.50 Jazz: Tony Scherr/Peter Scherr/Anton Fier Best known for his roles in Sex Mob and The Lounge Lizards, Tony Scherr is also a talented singer-songwriter in his own right. Special guest is mouth organ master Hermine Deurloo. Bimhuis, 21.00, €14 Bluegrass: Old Crow Medicine Show Traditional acoustic folk. See Short List. Paradiso, Kleine Zaal, 21.15, €10 + membership Folk: James Gornall & Clinton Fitzgerald (See Thursday) Mulligans, 22.00, free
Saturday 6 October
Vereniging Ondergrond Rock ’n’ roll sets from Valerrius, Mr Love and the Stallions, and Venus Hill. Bitterzoet, 21.00, €5
Classical: Mozart’s Woodwinds Mozart loved his woods and winds. See Short List. Noorderkerk, 14.00, €12
Folk: James Gornall & Clinton Fitzgerald Contemporary Irish duo. Mulligans, 21.30, free Jazz: The Ploctones Funk jazz. Badcuyp, Noordpool, 21.30, €8
Classical: Holland Baroque Society Joined by viola da gamba player Paolo Pandolfo, it’s not all as Baroque as you’d expect, with modern works and improvs thrown into the melting pot, too. Concertgebouw, Kleine Zaal, 14.15, €25
Pop: Tom Pintens Intimate adult pop from the Zita Swoon star. Paradiso, Kleine Zaal, 22.00, €7.50 + membership
Classical: Utrecht String Quartet A Russian programme to open the Bolsjoj Festival 2007. Posthoornkerk, 15.00, €9.50
Rock: Los Banditos Amsterdam BeatClub ’60s night, with the sci-fi twang surf outfit. Maloe Melo, 22.30, €5
Classical: Dutch Chamber Music Meeting Short presentations of the best that the Netherlands has to offer from the field: top soloists, duos, trios and other ensembles with repertoire that reaches from ancient to new. Until Monday. For full programme see www.dutchchambermusicmeeting.nl. Bimhuis, 15.00, 20.30, €7.50
Friday 5 October Americana: Jeffrey Foucault Tender folk blues from the Wisconsin singer-songwriter. Paradiso, Kleine Zaal, 19.00, €10 + membership Pop: Anna Vissi Commercial dance pop from the Cypriot-Greek singing star, known best in this land for her performances at the Eurovision Song Contest for both Greece and Cyprus. Melkweg, The Max, 20.00, €37.50 + membership Rock: Southside Johnny & The Asbury Jukes Party rock ’n’ roll, soul and blues with all horns a blazin’. Paradiso, Grote Zaal, 20.00, €22.50 + membership Classical: Cecilia Bernardini & Mirsa Adami Chamber performance from the young violinist and pianist. Concertgebouw, Kleine Zaal, 20.15, €18.50 Classical: Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (See Thursday) Concertgebouw, Grote Zaal, 20.15, €52.50
Jazz: Jaijazz Festival Spanish-Dutch jazz crossover projects, with film screenings, live sets and a late night jazzy dance party. Zaal 100, 19.30, €6 Ska: Rx Bandits An energetic mix of Californian ska, punk, rock and reggae. Paradiso, Kleine Zaal, 19.30, €7.50 + membership Jazz: Jazz Impuls With Trio Wim Bronnenberg, sax player Tom Beek and singer Anne Chris. Concertgebouw, Kleine Zaal, 20.15, €19 Classical: Nederlands Philharmonisch Orkest Performing Berlioz’s Le carnaval romain, ouverture caractéristique, Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade; with violinist
Amsterdam Weekly
4-10 October 2007 Vadim Tsibulevsky and conducted by Arild Remmereit. Concertgebouw, Grote Zaal, 20.15, €33
Rock: Handsome Furs Raw indie rock from Montreal. Paradiso, Kleine Zaal, 20.00, €8 + membership
World: Nana Kwame Ampadu Former frontman of African Brothers, a swinging Ghanian highlife outfit, who were as popular as The Beatles in the ’60s and ’70s in their homeland, he’s now touring with a new ensemble. KIT Tropentheater, 20.30, €20
Classical: Belcea Kwartet With pianist Aleksandar Madzar. Concertgebouw, Kleine Zaal, 20.15, €33.50
Rock: Cool Schmool! Sets from Blockshot (DE), The Curves and Helluvah (FR). OCCII, 21.00, €5
Awesome Color (S!CR)
Jazz: Baseline & John Abercrombie The sparkling and swinging chamber jazz trio, led by bassist Hein Van de Geyn, teams up with renowned American progressive electric guitarist Abercrombie. Bimhuis, 21.00, €16
STEFANO GIOVANNINI
Soul/R&B: Rose Slick beats and smooth soul in the style of Erykah Badu, Jill Scott and Joss Stone, but young performer Rose Spearman need only travel from Den Haag. Melkweg, Oude Zaal, 21.00, €9 + membership
Classical: Nederlands Philharmonisch Orkest (See Saturday) Concertgebouw, Grote Zaal, 20.15, €33
Pop/Rock: S!CR The mutant radioactive child of Subbacultcha! and Club Rascal, this new monthly party night gets going with a blend of live bands and indie disco loafing. Bands for the opening edition include Americans Awesome Color and The Stutters. Studio K, 21.30, €7.50, free before 22.00
Lucky Fonz III
Rock: Trenchcoat An Amsterdam BeatClub special featuring the swinging rock ’n’ roll ensemble. Maloe Melo, 22.00, €5
Singer-songwriter: Lucky Fonz III Tonight’s CD release party is for a local lad whose prize-winning tunes get him described as the love child of Johnny Cash and Blind Willie McTell. Yes, he’s that good. Melkweg, 21.00, €10 + membership.
Sunday 7 October
Experimental: DNK-Amsterdam Weekly concert series for new live electronic and acoustic music. OT301, 21.30, €5
Classical: Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (See Thursday) Concertgebouw, Grote Zaal, 14.15, €52.50 World: Kasai All Stars Traditional Congo rhythms receive a contemporary twist. Think Konono No.1 and prepare for thumping tribal melodies. KIT Tropentheater, 15.00, €20 Singer-songwriter: Gert Vlok Nel Seated concert by the renowned South African poet and songwriter. Paradiso, Grote Zaal, 16.00, €17.50 + membership Pop/Rock: Unleash Festival Solo sets and collaborations from Theo Sieben (De Raggende Manne/4tuoze Matroze), Jelle Paulusma (Daryll-Ann) and Rob Klerkx. Cafe Pakhuis Wilhelmina, 16.00, €5 Jazz: Warm Bad The atmosphere of a New York piano bar, with top vocal guests joining pianist Amir Swaab and DJ Rudy. Sugar Factory, 16.00, €10 Rock: Funeral for a Friend Stare into the heart of deepest, darkest Wales, with this blackened pop metal act. Melkweg, The Max, 20.00, €15 + membership Flamenco: Mujeres de Hoy Traditional flamenco music and dance. Concertgebouw, Kleine Zaal, 20.15, €28.50 Classical: Rafal Blechacz Part of the master pianists series. Concertgebouw, Grote Zaal, 20.15, €26/€32 Jazz: Jazz Orchestra of the Concertgebouw Big band party, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Fonds voor de Scheppende Toonkunst and the 60th anniversary of Donemus. They also present their new live album Riffs & Rhythms, featuring works by Henk Meutgeert. Bimhuis, 21.00, €16 Hiphop/Electronica: Le Peuple de L’Herbe Driving beats, drum & bass, jungle, hiphop, electro and reggae. The explosive fusion sounds from this creative French outfit already has a strong following throughout the Netherlands. Promoting new album Radio Bloody Money, they’re joined by Sir Jean and JC 001. Also at P60 on Saturday. Melkweg, Oude Zaal, 21.00, €12 + membership Rock: Living In Oblivion Embracing the darker side of Amsterdam rock ’n’ roll, there’s a live performance from Red Zebra, an album release party for The Sixteens, and a black-hearted dance party. Winston Kingdom, 21.00, €6 Jazz: The Alchemysticals Acoustic melodic jazz, with guitarist Iain Murdoch and saxophonist Willem Hellbreker. Badcuyp, Noordpool, 21.00, €5 Blues: The Spoolies Swamp blues and Americana from Texas. Maloe Melo, 21.30, €5
Monday 8 October Classical: Dag van de Kamermuziek 2007 Three blocks of concerts spread throughout the day, including presentations from Matangi Kwartet, Nieuw Ensemble, Brisk Recorder Quartet Amsterdam and others. Muziekgebouw, 10.00, €7.50
Singer-songwriter: Chuck Prophet The gravel-voiced songwriter-guitarist and former member of Green on Red returns for more slices of Americana, folk and country rock. Paradiso, Kleine Zaal, 22.00, €12.50 + membership
Tuesday 9 October Singer-songwriter: Richard Thompson A master wordsmith and guitar virtuoso, Thompson started in the late ’60s with electric folk band Fairport Convention and has been recording and performing ever since. Paradiso, Grote Zaal, 19.30, €22.50 + membership Classical: Nederlands Philharmonisch Orkest (See Saturday) Concertgebouw, Grote Zaal, 20.15, €33 Contemporary: The Karnatic Lab A concert series devoted to exploring elements of Karnatic music from southern India and fusing them with jazz styles. Led by Ned McGowan and Gijs Levelt. Badcuyp, Noordpool, 20.30, free Jazz: Incognito Dance jazz and funk from the acclaimed English outfit, rolling out songs and band members since 1980. Melkweg, The Max, 21.00, €22.50 + membership Electronica: NonLine Diverse electronic sets from Youmeelectricity, Doonix & Airway, and Commu & Paul Niezen. Winston Kingdom, 21.00, €5 Rock: Eric Clapton Session Yet another Prof Nomad special with a host of special guests. Cafe Pakhuis Wilhelmina, 21.30, €7.50 Americana: South Austin Jug Band Traditional bluegrass meets contemporary country folk. Paradiso, Kleine Zaal, 22.00, €7 + membership
Wednesday 10 October Classical: Lunch Concert With harpist Miriam Overlach. Concertgebouw, Kleine Zaal, 12.30, free Classical: Muir String Quartet Boston ensemble performing works by Kreisler, Tower and Schubert. Concertgebouw, Kleine Zaal, 20.15, €35 Classical: Panteleev Duo Violin and piano married couple, performing works by Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, De Falla, Ravel and Bartók. Muziekgebouw, 20.30, €25 Jazz: Jim Hall Trio An American jazz guitar legend, Hall made his mark in the ’50s and ’60s performing with the likes of Chico Hamilton, Ella Fitzgerald, Lee Konitz and Sonny Rollins. Now 76, he is regarded as a magnificent composer in his own right, and is backed tonight by pianist Geoffrey Keezer and bassist Scott Colley. Bimhuis, 21.00, €20 Hiphop: Lifesavas Spiritual, emotional and melodic funky hiphoppers from Portland, Oregon, with Ish of NY hiphop group Digable Planets. Melkweg, Oude Zaal, 21.00, €15 + membership
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CLUBS Thursday 4 October Cosmic Party Hail Sputnik! 40 years on, a tiny satellite is still reason enough to break out the vodka and strap on a helmet covered in tinfoil. See Short List. Voormalig Volkskrantgebouw, 19.00-01.00. PROPAGANDA! A night to head east for the best Balkan beats, Russian disko, mestizo and folk party grooves. Special guest is La Troba Kung-Fu with their international accordion dub vibes. Melkweg, Oude Zaal, 23.00-05.00, €5 Vreemde Weird and wonderful noise from Richard Parker, Tadeo (Spain) and Tony Boogs vs Boris. Sugar Factory, 23.00-05.00, €10
Friday 5 October B-party It’s everyone’s birthday. Club 8, 22.00 03.00, €5 Planet Delsin A Hard Wax Berlin Special, with Substance & Vainqueuer (live), Marcel Dettmann, Shed and Tim Nieburg. 11, 22.30-04.00, €12 90’s Now It may smell like teen spirit but it certainly won’t look like it. Hotel Arena, 23.00-04.00, €12 Puerto Rican Reggeaton Party Including a live performance from Arcangel. The Powerzone, 23.00-05.00, €17.50 Crash Zone Bollywood beats meets urban London, with the Panjabi Hit Squad, DJs Irwan and Rishi Bass. Melkweg, The Max, 23.00-late, €13 GRAparty Pesky art students go wild for art, music and cake. Studio 80, 23.00-late, €7.50/€10 Knockout Steaming hot reggae and danceball from DJs Herbalize It, Chaos and special guests. Melkweg, Oude Zaal, 23.00 -late, €12 + membership Rehab Soul, funk, hiphop, broken beats, two-step, Detroit house. Club Meander, 23.00-late, €5
Saturday 6 October Addicted New night offering two rooms of deep house sounds. Opening proceedings are French producer David Vendetta, Erick E, Baggi Begovic, Philip Young and Mark August. Panama, 22.00 04.00, €15/€18 RobotRock Robotic dancing in this two-year birthday party featuring DC20, DJs Tom Waist, Dirk Diggler, Atomica and Andy Royd. Club 8, 22.00 04.00, €5, free before 23.00 All You Can Eat Diverse electronica in this Eat Concrete special. OT301, 22.00-late, €6 Deep With the Black Helicopters (live), T.A.F.K.A.S., Eva Maria, Daniel Tomacheck, Arter and many more. Stubnitz, 22.00-late, €15/€20 Ratio? With DJs Sascha Funke (Berlin) and Melon. 11, 22.30-04.00, €12 Andy Warhol Club—The Party Andy Warhol looks a scream, hang him on your wa-ha-hall. See Short List. BG, 23.00, €27
Les Temoins, see Tuesday, Prik
GAY& LESBIAN Thursday 4 October Exhibition: Monument van Trots Exhibition on the Homomonument, housed in the gay and lesbian archive’s new home. See www.monumentvantrots.nl for more. IHLIA-Homodok, until Sunday 6 January
Friday 5 October Social: Thank God It’s Friday Weekend drinks with DJs, snacks and drinks from 5pm until three in the morning, when it isn’t even Friday any more. De Engel van Amsterdam, 13.00-03.00, free Club: Women’s night Busy, popular night for lesbians and their friends. Cafe Sappho, 22.00, free Club: Fresh An Ibiza-fresh blast of house, with DJs Doug Gray and Giangi Cappai. Escape Delux, 23.00-05.00, €15 Club: Galore Yet another frock in the ArtLaunch and Unk diffusion range. See Short List. Sugar Factory, 23.00-05.00, €10 Festival: Lesbian Festival Nijmegen The third national Lesbian Festival includes workshops, (heated) debates, (sensitive) performance, parties, exhibitions and surprising acts exploring every aspect of lesbian life under the rubrics: Empowerment, Body & Mind, Family and Lifestyle. See www.lesbianfestivalnijmegen.nl for the full programme. Various locations, times and prices
Saturday 6 October Club: Garbo for Women Early shift Saturday session for women only, with DJ Dees, saxophonist Babette Jane (17.00-19.00) and food. Strand West, 17.00-24.00, €5 Film: Gay Classics Another screening of Plata Quemada, an Argentinian film (in Spanish, English subtitles), based on a true story, about two bank robbers on the run who become lovers. Pathé De Munt, 21.00, €7
Bed Marly Mar, Jeroenski, Denniz, MC Knowledje, Goodgrip, Fullscale and Yasmin Le Bon get under the covers. Hotel Arena, 23.00-04.00, €15
Club: Twisted Classic & Electric Tunes DJ Nooky plays everything from Blondie, Pointer Sisters, Stevie Wonder, Kelis, Peaches to New Order. And you can’t get a better playlist than that. Except perhaps for New Order. PRIK, 22.00-03.00, free
Solo for Dolo Hiphopopotamous grooves from Mr Wix, MC Lyrical Tie and DJ Edzon. Bitterzoet, 23.00-04.00, €7.50
Sunday 7 October
Jungstar Growing out of the well-known Zeitgeist events, this new night searches far and wide for the best young DJ talents. Special guests in this edition are Stockholm DJ duo Mr Miyagi. Sugar Factory, 23.00-05.00, €10
Social: Prik’s Pleasure Palace Loosen those chakras, rest your inner eye and get a massage, new hairdo, a tarot reading and all kinds of other New Age gubbins. There’s still prosecco on tap, mind... PRIK, 20.00, free
Sunday 7 October
Tuesday 9 October
WickedJazzSounds Jazz, hiphop, broken beats, nu-jazz, funk and Afro sounds, as classic vinyl collides with live musicians. This week’s invaders include Kraak & Smaak. Sugar Factory, 23.00 05.00, €10
Film: Movie Night Les temoins. André Techiné’s film about Paris at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. PRIK, 19.00, free
Monday 8 October
Club: F*cking Pop Queers Qu**rs love p*p, and this is where they get their fill. Expect Madonna and electro, urban and indie, new and classic. ArtLaunch Cafe in the smaller room. Studio 80, 23.00-05.00, free before 00.00, €5 after
Cheeky Monday True skool jungle and drum & bass, featuring players from the local and international scenes. Winston Kingdom, 22.00-03.00, €6
Wednesday 10 October
Amsterdam Weekly
4-10 October 2007
Hidenori Mitsue: It’s There, It’s All There Paintings by the Dutch-based Japanese artist. Yoshiko Matsumoto Gallery (Wed-Sat 13.30-18.30), opens Saturday, until 17 November
STAGE
Jimmy Nelson: Desolate Places Striking photographs with an almost surreal atmosphere. Studio White Space (Mon-Fri 10.00-18.00, Sat 12.00-17.00), opens Saturday, until 24 October
Opening Dance: Drawn Onward Nederlands Dans Theater, performing Jirí Kylián’s Bella Figura, William Forsythe’s Trio and Lightfoot León’s Drawn Onward. Het Muziektheater, (Thur-Sat 20.15), €20-€36
Open Atelier Route De Baarsjes One of the biggest open atelier routes in the city. The central exhibition and info point is Het Sieraad (Postjesweg 1), but you can also plan your day in advance at www.stadskunst.nl. Various locations (Sat, Sun 12.00-18.00), opens Saturday, closing Sunday
Theatre: Dick Bos Known for absurd comedy performances, Toneelschap Beumer & Drost are now offering up a blood-curdling thriller centred around comic book hero Dick Bos. In Dutch. Theater Bellevue, (Fri, Sat 19.30, Sun 15.00), €16
Open Atelier Route Westerpark Art out west. Central location, and ideal place to pick up a route map, is the Bonte Zwaan (Stavangerweg 890). Various locations (Sat, Sun 11.00-17.00), opens Saturday, closing Sunday
Theatre: Honger A theatrical dinner party, as Nanna Tieman makes you a partner in an unexpected twist in her life. Frascati, (Tues 19.00), €9/€20
Open Ateliers Nieuwmarkt 50 diverse artists open the doors to their souls. As a bonus, you can check out the exhibition Woord en Beeld in Openbare Bibliotheek Pintohuis and also catch a film on the Nieuwmarkt from 21.00 on Saturday. Chiellerie (Sat, Sun 12.0018.00), opens Saturday, closing Sunday
Dance: Jeuk Production by Lonneke van Leth featuring live jazz from Michael Varekamp and The Cosmic Scene. Theater Bellevue, (Tues 20.30), €13.50 Performance: Reverse Music, theatre and animation are combined in this performance, but at the heart of it all is the audience. Each adventure seats eight people, so reservations are recommended. Frascati, (Tues, Wed 19.00, 20.00, 21.00, 22.00), €12
Triënnale Amstelveen 2007 Artistic dialogue bursts out of Amstelveen. CoBrA Museum (Tues-Sun 11.0017.00), opens Saturday, until 28 October Capital Moves Marc van der Aa’s take on the Amsterdam dance scene. Hotel Arena (Daily), opens Monday, until 2 November
Lust en Vraatzucht A mini theatre festival featuring short works by talented young writers. Works include De Syndicaat Schrijversdagen: Secreet by Hekelien van den Herik; Warm by Anouk Smit; Lola by Jibbe Willems; and Lunch by Steven Berkhoff. In Dutch. Rozentheater, (Tues, Wed 20.00), €11
Museums
Theatre: De Vliegende Panters Comedy trio transfer from the small screen to a big stage. See Short List. Carré, 20.00, €15-€29 until Sunday 14 October
Off Screen With their videos, audio works and sculptures in this exhibition, several artists investigate visual and acoustic space in relation to one another. The discrepancy between image and sound is central to their investigations, in which the tension between visual and auditive space is sought out and exploited. Montevideo/Time Based Arts (Tues-Sat 13.00-18.00), closing Sunday
Music/Theatre: Fame the Musical It’s gonna live forever. Or possibly just until the weekend. In English. RAI, (Wed 20.15), €39-€55 Performance: Dansstorm Primarily an opportunity to catch a glimpse of new choreography talents, tonight’s show features Giulia Mureddu’s Mighty MatPogo and Gabriella Maiorino’s Anarchistas. As a bonus, there’s also a musical performance by Theo Nijland. Theater Bellevue, (Wed 20.30), €13.50
Ongoing Theatre: Mightysociety4 Part of a social consciousness-raising theatre project that’s been running for several years, this fourth instalment is a political thriller about globalisation and personal happiness. Selected for the recent TF-1 festival, it’s now last chance saloon if you wanna catch it. In Dutch. Frascati, (Thur-Sat 21.00), €12 Theatre: Desilucy A black comedy about the double lives of Cuban big-band leader and TV producer Desi Arnaz, and American comedy actress Lucille Ball. In Dutch. Rozentheater, (Thur-Sat 22.00), €7.50 Theatre: Onomatopee A co-production from tg STAN, De KOE, Dood Paard and Maatschappij Discordia, expect healthy offerings of politically comical theatre. In Dutch. Frascati, (Thur-Sun 20.30), €12 Cabaret: Goedkoop Cabaret 30 -minute comedy sets. In Dutch. CREA Theater, (Fri, Sat 20.30), €6.50
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Open Atelier Route, see Opening
ART For full listings,see www.amsterdamweekly.nl.
Opening 50 jaar Spoetnik A totally spaced exhibition, including archive photos of Sputnik and more. See Short List. Posthoornkerk, opens Thursday, until 30 October Hommage à Roland Topor Photos, lithographs, drawings, prints and books, by and about the surreal French artist. Maison Descartes (Mon-Thur 10.00-18.00, Fri 10.00-17.00), opens Thursday, until 19 October Paraat #3 Two art initiatives team up to bring you some of the best final-year art projects in the land. Works also displayed in De Veemvloer. Horse Move Project Space (Wed-Sat 13.00-18.00, Sun 14.00-17.00), opens Thursday, until 28 October The Spider Anansi: A Web of Tales and Images Fourteen artists from the Netherlands and Ghana have created works for this exhibition inspired by the stories about the spider Anansi. These will be dis-
played in combination with videos of storytellers recorded in both countries. Tropenmuseum (Daily 10.00-17.00), opens Thursday, until 13 January 2008 Aap, vis, boek. Linnaeus in Amsterdam Celebrating the 300th birthday of the renowned botanist in style, by displaying extremely rare books and other treasures of the period Linnaeus spent in Amsterdam. UvA: Special Collections Library (Mon-Fri 10.00-17.00, Sat, Sun 13.00-17.00), opens Friday, until 25 February 2008 CASZuidas The official opening of Virtueel Museum Zuidas’ big screen at WTC station. See Short List. NS station Zuid/WTC 17.00, opens Friday
Art Moves Art in Red Light presents works from more than 30 international artists, taking in installations, paintings, photography and multimedia art. Oude Kerk (Mon-Fri 11.00-17.00, Sun 13.00-17.00), closing Monday Anne de Vries: Metafiction Constructing unusual and puzzling images using familiar, everyday objects, De Vries explores the boundary between the real and the unreal, resulting in a colourful series of fresh and surprising images. Foam (Sat-Wed 10.00-18.00, Thur, Fri 10.00-21.00), closing Wednesday Bestemming Amsterdam Creative futuristic visions of metropolis Amsterdam, presented by 19 artists making use of a diverse array of disciplines. Zuiderkerk (Mon 11.00-16.00, Tues-Fri 09.00-16.00, Sat 12.00-16.00), until 17 October
Anneke Wilbrink: Local Ground Paintings of panoramic abstract constructions from the Koninklijke Prijs voor Vrije Schilderkunst 2006 winner. AYAC’S (Fri, Sat 13.00-17.30), opens Saturday, until 10 November
Hans Eijkelboom Over the past few years, Dutch photographer Hans Eijkelboom has worked in three of the world’s megacities: Paris, New York and Shanghai. Like a consummate sociologist, Eijkelboom has focused his camera on hundreds of individuals who all behaved or dressed in the same way. These shots were then chronicled and presented according to a set pattern as a catalogue of minute forms of human behaviour. Foam (Sat-Wed 10.00-18.00, Thur, Fri 10.00-21.00), until 21 October
De Grote Etsen Etches by Paul van Dongen. Plus paintings by Bas Meerman. De Praktijk (Tues-Sat 13.00-18.00), opens Saturday, until 10 November
Michaël Borremans: Veldwerk A respected photographer, graphic designer and also painter, now the Belgian artist is taking on the medium of film, with this
Under the Bridge & Other Places Conceptual photography from artist duo MariaMaria. Melkweg Galerie (Wed-Sun 13.00-20.00), opens Friday, until 28 October
Amsterdam Weekly
4-10 October 2007
solo exhibition featuring the first peak at his cinematic works. De Appel (Tues-Sun 11.00-18.00), until 4 November Thomas Zipp: White Dada Solo exhibition of works by the Berlin artist, who writes texts and music, makes paintings, drawings, sculptures, objects, collages and photos, which he brings together in room-filling installations. De Appel (Tues-Sun 11.0018.00), until 4 November Melvin Moti: E.S.P The latest film by Rotterdam artist Melvin Moti combines hypnotically slow-moving images of a bursting soap bubble with the story of the dream logs kept by JW Dunne, a British military officer endowed with paranormal powers. Stedelijk Museum CS (Daily 10.00-18.00), until 4 November Held/Hero Commemorating the 400th birthday of one of the greatest heroes in Dutch history, Michiel de Ruyter, this exhibition focuses on heroes, hero status and hero worship in the Netherlands. Nieuwe Kerk (Daily 10.00-18.00), until 11 November Gert Jan Kocken: Defacing The hundredth exhibition in SMBA (since 1993) is devoted to the work of Amsterdam photographer Gert Jan Kocken. He is showing a series concerned with iconoclasm: photographs that focus attention on the fury that images have provoked in the past. Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (Tues-Sun 11.00-17.00), until 11 November Working Apart Together How do young architects currently function in Amsterdam? How do they go about setting up their own firms, and with whom do they seek to collaborate? How do they find and finance their office premises? This exhibition not only offers young architects a platform, but also provides insight into the daily experiences of young urban creatives. ARCAM (Tues-Sat 13.00-17.00), until 17 November
Galleries Claudy Jongstra Diverse works from the artist and textile designer. Lloyd Hotel (Daily 08.00-01.00) Full Circle Using the figure of the ‘circle’ as a conceptual parameter in this project, Eduardo Padilha and Michael Schwab have created a systematic multimedia installation, with the artists’ separate works overlapping and intersecting both visually and conceptually. Huis Rechts (Thur, Fri 14.00, 16.00, Sat 13.00-17.00), closing Saturday Eindexamens Fotografie Photos by Derk Alberts, Ruth Catsburg, Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk, Niek Geurts, Nathalie van Helvoort, Ernst van der Linden, Eyal Pinkas and Sabina Theijs. Amsterdams Centrum voor Fotografie (Wed-Fri 13.00-17.00, Sat 11.00-17.00), closing Saturday Johannes Girardoni, Paul Raguénès Diverse objects from French artist Raguénès and Austrian Girardoni. Galerie Roger Katwijk (Wed-Sat 12.00 18.00), closing Sunday Extra-Room Getting global with artists like Lucio Auri, Mat Brinkman, Knut Henriksen, Jeroen Jacobs and many more. Arti et Amicitiae (Tues-Sun 13.0018.00), closing Sunday Ik liet alles lopen One big space, in which separate installations by Bart Scheerder, Arjen Lancel, Sander Goosen and Mies Baars both grow together and reject each other. Arti et Amicitiae (Tues-Sun 13.00-18.00), closing Sunday Judith Quax: Sporters Photographs of diverse sports competitors in action. Het Ketelhuis (Wed, Sat, Sun from 13.00, Mon, Tues, Thur, Fri from 16.00), closing Sunday
Scenes and Traces A lengthy exhibition focussing on three parts of the Stedelijk Museum collection: design, video, and photography. Stedelijk Museum CS (Daily 10.00-18.00), until 25 November
4 Galleries Featuring diverse contributions from galleries Witteveen, Maria Chailloux, Roger Katwijk and Wit. Loods 6 (Daily 11.00-19.00), closing Sunday
Meesterwerken uit de Gouden Eeuw Around one hundred 17th century drawings by Dutch artists, borrowed from the collection of Jean de Grez. Rembrandthuis (Mon-Sat 10.00-17.00, Sun 11.00-17.00), until 25 November
Andres Serrano, Joanneke Meester New York artist Serrano presents the series Cycaden. Meester, AKA ‘scary skin sculptor’ from Kunstvlaai 2004, presents the installation ‘Need You’, featuring a large aluminium frame in which mutilated dolls hang and seedy mysteries unravel. Artspace Witzenhausen (Wed-Sat 12.00 -18.00), until 12 October
The Present Order Group show exploring themes of sci-fi, pop and pop culture. De Hallen (Tues-Sat 11.0017.00, Sun 12.00-17.00), Haarlem, until 25 November Planet Ocean Another outdoor photography exhibition hits Amsterdam. This time it’s the oceanic photography of Haarlem-born Dos Winkel. While the shots are undoubtedly beautiful, an ecological theme runs throughout the collection. Stopera (Daily), until 27 November Heringa/Van Kalsbeek: Cruel Bonsai The first ever major museum solo exhibition by artist duo Heringa/Van Kalsbeek. Their extravagant sculptures appear at once poetic and slightly morbid and are inspired principally by nature in all its capricious irregularity. Stedelijk Museum CS (Daily 10.00-18.00), until 6 January 2008 Chairs of Rank and Distinction Chairs. Yes, chairs. Bloody expensive chairs. Posh chairs. Sometimes even pretty chairs. Museum van Loon (Wed-Mon 11.0017.00), until 14 January 2008 Barcelona 1900 Celebrating the astonishing transformation of this vibrant city between 1880 and 1909. In this period Barcelona underwent an impressive architectural development and flourished socially and artistically, reflected in paintings, drawings, sculptures and designs by the likes of Picasso, Isidre Nonell, Santiago Rusiñol, Alexandre de Riquer, Ramon Casas and Gaudí. Van Gogh Museum (Mon-Thur, Sat, Sun 10.0018.00, Fri 10.00-22.00), until 20 January 2008
Falke Pisano New works that originate from the artist’s ongoing investigation into the curious existence of objects and the linguistic possibilities of the structure and properties of matter. Also works by Steve Van den Bosch. Ellen de Bruijne Projects/Dolores (Tues-Fri 11.00 -18.00, Sat 13.00-18.00), until 13 October Black-Out Antwerp photographer Charif Benhelima both mesmerises and seduces the spectator with his latest photographic collection. Experimenting with Polaroids, the only non reproducible photographic medium left, he let his subjects evaporate until the very verge of recognisability. De Brakke Grond (Mon 10.00-18.00, Tues-Fri 10.00-20.30, Sat 13.00-20.30, Sun 13.00-17.00), until 14 October Inger Kolff: Niet voor de poes Recent paintings. Suzanne Biederberg Gallery (Wed-Sat 14.00 18.00), until 18 October Old Masters, Gangs & Fashion Models Paintings and photography by Katinka Lampe, depicting children and adolescents in culturally and socially loaded attire. Additional works relating directly to Lampe’s will also be featured, including artists Charles Fréger, Ruud van der Peijl and Michelle Sank. Ronmandos (Wed-Sat 12.00-18.00), until 20 October The This & the That of a Category Error Works by Glasgow-based artists Joanne Tatham and Tom O´Sullivan. Collaborating since 1995, they make enigmatic images, sculptural objects and installations that are designed to inhabit a range of scenarios, activating their surroundings and cajoling the viewer into participating in an absurd kind of theatre. SMART Project Space (Tues-Sat 12.0017.00), until 20 October The Mills of God Grind Slowly Film and drawings by Riccardo Arena. Galerie Knap (Tues-Sun 12.0018.00), until 27 October
China Now
CHI PENG
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China Now Featuring 75 works by 40 artists, many of which come from the Essl Museum in Vienna, this exhibition aims to highlight some of the best examples of contemporary Chinese avant-garde art. CoBrA Museum (Tues-Sun 11.00-17.00), until 27 January 2008
Christien Jaspars: DO Emotional, poetic and beautiful photographs. Hup Gallery (Tues, Thur, Fri 10.00-17.00), until 31 October Rob Houkes Portrait photography. As a bonus, there’s also prize-winning works from the Zilveren Camera 2006 competition. Fotogram (Mon-Thur 09.30-21.00, Fri, Sat 09.30-17.00), until 31 October Marieken Verheyen: Elswhere Photographs taken in Western Africa, Arab nations and former Dutch colonies. De Balie (Daily), until 7 November
Amsterdam Weekly
4-10 October 2007
ADDRESSES
European Outdoor Film Tour, see Tuesday
EVENTS Book presentation: 50 jaar ruimtevaart—in het spoor van Spoetnik Sputnik love from the Russian space programme obsessed writer Piet Smolders. In Dutch. See Short List. Posthoornkerk, (Thur 15.30), €5 Poetry/Music: The Open Stanza A mishmash of poetry, spoken word, music and performance, which offers an international collection of literary guests including poets Travis Jeppesen, Eric van Hoof, Merapi Obermeyer, Todd Watkins, Julian Stannard and DJ Sudomodo. Special for tonight are performances by comedy theatre group Sin Sin. Hosted by Australian poet Prue Duggan. In English and Dutch. Sugar Factory, (Thur 19.30), €5
Friday 5 October Architecture: Friday Night A thematic conversation and presentation on design and architecture from Barcelona. Van Gogh Museum, (Fri 20.00), museum entry cost Film: Think Brain A snowboarding premiere. Dude! Winston Kingdom, (Fri 20.00), €5
Saturday 6 October Procession: Let it Rain More than 50 artists worked on umbrellas for this city parade, which begins at Nieuwmarkt and finishes at Westerpark. See Short List. Nieuwmarkt, (Sat 14.00), free Dining/Party: Chocolate Club Toxicity-free dining and partying that’s all about raw food, cocktails and the only vice in the venue: chocolate. Dinner begins at 18.00, while a chilled party follows from 20.00 onwards. See www.chocolateclub.nl. DanceStreet, (Sat 18.00), €5, €35 incl dinner Film/Music: Pavarotti Memorial Remembering the world-famous tenor through talks, films and a vocal recital by André Post. Oude Kerk, (Sat 20.00).
Sunday 7 October Literature: Het Utrechts Literatuur Festival Eleven hours of wordy goodness and diverse literature guests. In Dutch. See www.slau.nl. Louis Hartlooper Complex, Utrecht (Sun 12.00-23.00), €15
Tuesday 9 October Film night: European Outdoor Film Tour Groundbreaking documentaries and action-packed sports features, as the EOFT kicks off its winter tour in Amsterdam. Think climbing, BASE jumping, kayaking, mountain biking, snowboarding and so on. Helmets not essential but welcome. Pakhuis de Zwijger, (Tues 20.00), €12 Debate: 19e Globaliseringslezing Bjørn Lomborg discusses his new book Cool It!. See article p. 4. In English. Felix Meritis, (Tues 20.30), €12.50
Wednesday 10 October Film/Music: Yugoslavian Underground With video clips and movies, plus a live set from Serbian band/creatives Klopkaza Pionira. Stubnitz, (Wed 20.00), €5
11 Oosterdokskade 3-5, 625 5999 Amsterdams Centrum voor Fotografie Bethaniënstraat 9, 622 4899 Annet Gelink Gallery Laurierstraat 187-189, 330 2066 De Appel Nieuwe Spiegelstraat 10, 625 5651 ARCAM Prins Hendrikkade 600, 620 4878 Arti et Amicitiae Rokin 112, 624 5134 Artspace Witzenhausen Hazenstraat 60, 644 9898 AYAC'S Keizersgracht 166, 638 5240 Badcuyp 1e Sweelinckstraat 10, 675 9669 De Balie Kleine-Gartmanplantsoen 10, 553 5151 Bethaniënklooster Barndesteeg 6, 625 0078 BG Post CS, Oosterdokskade 5, 626 2256 Bimhuis Piet Heinkade 3, 788 2150 Bitterzoet Spuistraat 2, 521 3001 Blijburg Bert Haanstrakade 2004, 416 0330 De Brakke Grond Nes 45, 626 6866 Bushuis Kloveniersburgwal 48 Cafe Pakhuis Wilhelmina Veemkade 576, 419 3368 Cafe Sappho Vijzelstraat 103, 423 1509 Carré Amstel 115-125, 524 9452 Centrale Bibliotheek Oosterdokskade 143, 523 0900 Chiellerie Raamgracht 58, 320 9448 Club 8 Admiraal de Ruyterweg 56B, 685 1703 Club Meander Voetboogstraat 3, 625 8430 CoBrA Museum Sandbergplein 1-3, Amstelveen, 547 5050 Concertgebouw Concertgebouwplein 2-6, 671 8345 Consortium Veemkade 570, 06 2611 8950 CREA Theater Turfdraagsterpad 17, 525 1400 DanceStreet 1e Rozendwarsstraat 10, 489 7676 De Engel van Amsterdam Zeedijk 21, 427 6381 Ellen de Bruijne Projects/Dolores Rozengracht 207A, 530 4994 Escape Delux Amstel 70, 030 231 1577 Felix Meritis Keizersgracht 324, 626 2321 Foam Keizersgracht 609, 551 6546 Fotogram Korte Prinsengracht 33, 624 9994 Frascati Nes 63, 626 6866 Galerie Binnen Keizersgracht 82, 625 9603 Galerie Gabriel Rolt Elandsgracht 34, 785 5146 Galerie Knap Huidenstraat 21 Galerie Paul Andriesse Withoedenveem 8, 623 6237 Galerie Roger Katwijk Lange Leidsedwarsstraat 198-200, 627 3808 De Hallen Grote Markt 16, Haarlem, 023 511 5775 Heineken Music Hall ArenA Boulevard 590, 0900 300 1250 Hermitage Amsterdam Nieuwe Herengracht 14, 530 8751 Horse Move Project Space Oosterdokskade 5 Post CS Hotel Arena ’s-Gravesandestraat 51, 850 2400 Huis Marseille Keizersgracht 401, 531 8989 Huis Rechts Vinkenstraat 154 Hup Gallery Tesselschadestraat 15, 515 8589 IHLIA-Homodok Oosterdokskade 143, 5230 900 Het Ketelhuis Westergasfabriek, Haarlemmerweg 8-10, 684 0090 KIT Tropentheater Mauritskade 63, 568 8711 KochxBos Gallery 1e Anjeliersdwarsstraat 3-5, 681 4567 Lloyd Hotel Oostelijke Handelskade 34, 419 1840 Loods 6 KNSM Laan 143, 418 2020 Louis Hartlooper Complex Tolsteegbrug 1, Utrecht Maison Descartes Vijzelgracht 2A, 531 9500 Maloe Melo Lijnbaansgracht 163, 420 4592 Mediamatic Post CS, Oosterdokskade 5, 638 9901 Melkweg Lijnbaansgracht 234A, 531 8181 Melkweg Galerie Marnixstraat 409, 531 8181 Montevideo/Time Based Arts Keizersgracht 264, 623 7101 Mulligans Amstel 100, 622 1330 Museum Ons' Lieve Heer op Solder Oudezijds Voorburgwal 40, 624 6604 Museum van Loon Keizersgracht 672, 624 5255 Muziekgebouw Piet Heinkade 1, 788 2010 Het Muziektheater Amstel 3, 625 5455 Noorderkerk Noordermarkt 44, 626 6436 NS station Zuid/WTC Zuidplein OCCII Amstelveenseweg 134, 671 7778 Odeon Singel 460, 624 9711 OT301 Overtoom 301, 779 4913 Oude Kerk Oudekerksplein 23, 625 8284 P/////AKT Zeeburgerpad 53, 06 5427 0879 Pakhuis de Zwijger Piet Heinkade 179-181, 788 4444 Panama Oostelijke Handelskade 4, 311 8680 Paradiso Weteringschans 6-8, 626 4521 Pathé De Munt Vijzelstraat 15, 0900 1458 Posthoornkerk Haarlemmerstraat 124 The Powerzone Spaklerweg, 681 8866 De Praktijk Lauriergracht 96, 422 1727 PRIK Spuistraat 109, 06 4544 2321 RAI Europaplein 22, 549 1212 Rembrandthuis Jodenbreestraat 4, 520 0400 Ronmandos Prinsengracht 282, 320 7036 Rozentheater Rozengracht 117, 620 7953 SMART Project Space Arie Biemondstraat 107-113, 427 5953 Stadsschouwburg Leidseplein 26, 624 2311 Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam Rozenstraat 59, 422 0471 Stedelijk Museum CS Oosterdokskade 5, 573 2911 Stopera Waterlooplein 22, 551 8117 Strand West Stavangerweg, 682 6310 Stubnitz Odinakade, NDSM-werf Studio 80 Rembrandtplein 70, 521 8333 Studio K Timorplein 62, 692 0422 Studio White Space MJ Kosterstraat 18 Sugar Factory Lijnbaansgracht 238, 627 0008 Suzanne Biederberg Gallery 1e Egelantiersdwarsstraat 1, 624 5455 Theater Bellevue Leidsekade 90, 530 5301 Tropenmuseum Linnaeusstraat 2, 568 8200 Under the Grand Chapiteau Next to ArenA, 621 1288 UvA: Special Collections Library Oude Turfmarkt 129, 525 2141 Van Gogh Museum Paulus Potterstraat 7, 570 5200 Volta Houtmankade 334-336, 628 6429 Voormalig Volkskrantgebouw Wibautstraat 150 Winston Kingdom Warmoesstraat 129, 623 1380 Wolf & Pack 232 Spuistraat, 427 0786 Yoshiko Matsumoto Gallery Weteringschans 37, 06 1437 0995 Zaal 100 De Wittenstraat 100, 688 0127 Zuiderkerk Zuiderkerkhof 72, 552 7987
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Mokum’s Moroccan Biladi Borgerstraat 189, 422 5796 Open Mon-Thu, Sun 12.00-00.00, Fri 15.00-02.00 Cash Salaam, O honoured readers. This week I went to a traditional Moroccan restaurant, an oasis of yumminess, located just around the corner from that fabulous rotisserie chicken place on Jan Pieter Heijestraat I reviewed a few months back. Biladi looked modestly inviting: a few mosaic tables outside, a menu board proclaiming the daily fare, all sheltered by a striped awning. Inside this quiet lunchroom and restaurant, however, awaited flavoursome delights to make the taste buds sing with pleasure. A friend alerted me to its existence, enthusing about what she had eaten: no-nonsense home-style cooking and couscous to die for. I passed a man on his way out, who warned me, bizarrely, that I would find Moroccan cuisine beyond the doors. My entry made the two chefs behind the counter look up from their chopping boards. The place was empty, because of Ramadan, and because I was late for lunch and early for supper. One chef left to go shopping. I studied the menu, my tummy rumbled. There were starter specials, like briwat, flaky pastry filled with chicken, caramelised onions and almonds, at €1.50 a piece. There was also—this made me titter—Fingers of Fatima, a rolled pastry filled with leek, potato, carrot, peas and minced meat, also €1.50 each. (I asked for one as a starter, but didn’t get it). There was also good old pastilla (€4.50) a traditional pastry filled with
THE UNDERCOVER GLUTTON A basket, brimming with warm bread, landed in front of me, along with some butter and something I mistook for tapenade. It was harissa... and strong. sweet turmeric, chicken (the authentic stuff uses pigeon), onion, raisins, cinnamon and almonds. My eyes scanned salads (the fish couscous one sounded intriguing) and soups like lentil with
fresh cream and chives, or the very traditional— and warming—baisara, thick pea stew with olive oil. There were eight types of couscous. I went for the chicken tagine (€10).
4-10 October 2007
A basket, brimming with warm bread, landed in front of me, along with some butter and something I mistook for tapenade. It was harissa and so strong that it made my eyes water. After waiting patiently, the chef brought a steaming hot, conical pot to the table. He lifted the ceramic lid, allowing aromatic steam to escape. A plate with spiced fried potatoes was brought by the other chef, who’d come back with shopping parcels. (He smiled at my pop-eyed reaction.) I became a giant nose, snorkelling the aromatic vapours. I peered in to my tagine. My chicken portion, a thigh and leg, lay in a tomato, aubergine, onion and vegetable broth. To this ravenous beast, it looked rather meagre. But when I mixed the potatoes into the stew, it bulked out perfectly. I added the harissa—cautiously this time—and a little butter to jazz it up. The soft, flavoursome textures were delightful. Personally, I would have loved some chopped coriander leaves to sprinkle on top of my dish. But hey, it was divine anyway. The remaining bread mopped up the pot. Desserts are pretty standard: ice cream with chocolate sauce, say, or a more traditional fresh fruit salad, to cleanse the palate. I—for once— was full, so I left it at that. Biladi is one of the many specialist restaurants that festoon the busy area around Kinkerstraat. I love going on walkabout to discover new places like this; it is one of the great joys of Amsterdam. We foreigners are here to stay. Our different cuisines have enriched the Dutch kitchen. If you enjoy meat, as I do, then the many Turkish and Moroccan grill houses in the area do very affordable ones, using excellent quality meat. I’m going to return to Biladi to eat their mixed grill, which looked so appealing on the menu, and enjoy the welcome and hospitality once more.
Amsterdam Weekly
4-10 October 2007
19 Princess Mononoke out to kick
An animation retrospective at the Melkweg celebrates Studio Ghibli and its godfather, Hayao Miyazaki.
FATHER AGAINST SON, MOUSE VS RACCOONS FILM Japanese Anime: Studio Ghibli 4-31 October, Melkweg By Luuk van Huët
Hand-drawn animation suffered a serious setback when Disney decided to switch to CGI from 2000 onwards. Fortunately for enthusiasts, the celebrated Japanese Studio Ghibli, founded in 1985 by Hayao Miyazaki and his mentor and friend Isao
Takahata, allows only 10 per cent of their footage to be rendered in CGI. Besides aesthetics, this also highlights a fundamental difference in philosophy which might explain why these animators have prospered, leaving the Mouse with his tail between his legs. For Ghibli, the Manichean battle between good and evil, in which good always prevails, is unrealistic. This tends to confuse the casual viewer, since many Ghibli films are influenced
by Western art, literature and culture. However, these Japanese movies endow their characters with unexpectedly nuanced and complex motivations, which also evolve and grow over the course of the film. Thus, the witches in Spirited Away (2001) and Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) transform from harpies into matrons, while the battle mage Howl himself has to fight his inner demons to keep himself from passing over to the dark side. The main conflict in most Ghibli films isn’t moral as such, but takes place between the forces of nature and the juggernaut of technology, where nature is lamentably often on the losing side, but can still pack a considerable punch. This conflict is central to films like Takahata’s Pompoko (1994), which receives its Dutch cinematic premiere during the retrospective. The film shows a community of mythical tanuki, shape-shifting raccoon dogs who coexist with humans in the countryside, until their habitat is threat-
ened by urban expansion and they are forced into action. Another example of the eco-mindedness of Ghibli films is Miyazaki’s Western breakthrough Princess Mononoke (1997), which sets a feral female sovereign and enraged nature spirits against a polluting industrialist, while a cursed hero is caught in the middle. Strong female characters are a forte of Miyazaki’s, even though their strength is not always apparent. For example, what the bumbling eight-year-old girl Chihiro in Spirited Away lacks in grace and dexterity, she makes up for in courage and tenacity. The only blemish on Miyazaki’s oeuvre (encompassing three decades and counting) so far is that his willingness to put enterprising youths in the spotlights in his films hasn’t always translated into the real world. When his son Goro Miyazaki was appointed to direct the recent Ghibli film Tales from Earthsea, rumour has it that Miyazaki Sr protested, claiming his son was too inexperienced, tried to warn away animators working on the project, then refused to speak to his son altogether. Whether this has anything to do with the patricide in the film is better left to the Freudians. Luckily, the rift seems to have mended as father attended the preview and later sent son a congratulatory note. Even though it seems like the pensionable patriarch Hayao can pass his pencil and brush to a younger generation if he chooses, ensuring Ghibli output for future times, animation lovers all around the globe should be glad to know that the master himself is working on what he promises (or threatens) to be his last movie—yet again.
Five-Word Movie Review
FILM Edited by Julie Phillips.This week’s films reviewed by Massimo Benvegnù (MB),Sarah Gehrke (SG),René Glas (RG),Andrea Gronvall (AG),Meltem Halaceli (MH),Luuk van Huët (LvH),JR Jones (JJ),Dave Kehr (DK),MarieClaire Melzer (MM),Mike Peek (MP),Marinus de Ruiter (MdR),Bregtje Schudel (BS),Linawati Sidarto (LS).All films are screened in English with Dutch subtitles unless otherwise noted. Amsterdam Weekly recommends.
New this week Azur & Asmar In this animated French fantasy by Michel Ocelot (Kirikou and the Sorceress), two boys, one blond, the other dark, become rivals in the quest to free a fairy princess. Showing dubbed into Dutch, alas. Filmmuseum, The Movies Duska The absurdist plot of Jos Stelling’s latest film revolves around timid film critic Bob (Gene Bervoets), whose life takes an unexpected turn when a strange, Russian-speaking man (Sergei Makovetsky) arrives at his doorstep. Bob reluctantly lets this character, Duska, in for a drink, after which he never leaves. In a series of slapstick interactions (with hardly any dialogue at all, Duska is reminiscent of silent cinema) he maintains a ceaseless joviality while he slowly wreaks havoc in Bob’s life. Stelling leaves it to the viewer to decide whether Bob is going mad, whether or not Bob and Duska have a shared history, whether Duska is real at all. This lack of closure might raise an eyebrow or two but it doesn’t lessen the enjoyment. (RG) 108 min. Het Ketelhuis, Pathé Tuschinski
BLOOD SWEAT TEARS WOODEN STICKS Goud Het Ketelhuis, Kriterion
Still playing
Duska
Goud Those who have lost faith in professional sports after outrageous football transfers and Tour de France doping scandals should immediately watch Goud. This documentary about the Dutch women’s field hockey team captures the players’ hard work and struggles in their road to victory at the 2006 World Championships. Director Niek Koppen successfully manages to insinuate himself into the lives of coach and players, while keeping himself out of the frame. The title gives away the ending, but through its close look at the pain and joy of the team, Goud evokes sympathy and remains thrilling right to the finish. (MdR) 106 min. Het Ketelhuis, Kriterion Rush Hour 3 Brett Ratner’s action-comedy franchise is aimed at the international box office, so in this entry, mismatched cops Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker are lured to Paris by a Japanese assassin (Hiroyuki Sanada) who has kidnapped a Chinese consul’s daughter (Zhang Jingchu). Noémie Lenoir is the eyecandy love interest, and Max von Sydow, Youki Kudoh, Yvan Attal and Roman Polanski help legitimise the silly plot. Chan shows he still has the chops during a showdown at the Eiffel Tower, but you’d think
the movie’s reported budget of $140 million might have bought Tucker at least one side-splitting gag. (AG) 90 min. Pathé ArenA, Pathé De Munt
Stardust The small print noting ‘Based on the novel by Neil Gaiman’ should send ravenous fantasy fans flocking towards the cineplexes, but sadly, this was not the case in the States. And while Stardust is less subtle a fairy tale than Gaiman in written form, it still has a bubbly, brash and occasionally muddled charm of its own, even if some of it is drowned out by bombastic background music or generic special effects. If you’re yearning for a cheap and cheerful fantasy fix and you don’t mind your popcorn flicks on the butteryslick and cheesy side, follow that star! Directed by Matthew Vaughn; with Claire Danes, Sienna Miller, Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer. (LvH) 130 min. Pathé ArenA, Pathé De Munt Timboektoe Dutch-language children’s film, based on the books by Carry Slee, about two kids whose parents move to France to run a campsite. Stellar cameos.Cinema Amstelveen, Het Ketelhuis, Pathé ArenA, Pathé De Munt, Pathé Tuschinski
Una Ballata Bianca Actors Carmela and Nicola Lanci make their debut at age 80 in this poetic exploration of loneliness, love, age and death. Director Stefano Odoardi based his first feature film on a play by Dutch theatre director Kees Roorda. In Italian with English subtitles. 78 min. Filmmuseum The Bourne Ultimatum The third and probably best entry in Paul Greengrass’s Bourne series sees the return of Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, who’s hiding from his former principals at the CIA. A meeting with reporter Simon Ross makes him realise they’re still looking for him and activates memories from his dark past: Bourne must stay alive long enough to find out who he really is. In effect, this is an excuse for a really long, intercontinental chase sequence, as the film criss-crosses the world at an incredible pace. The definite highlight is a long pursuit on foot over the roofs of Algiers, ending in a really, really tough fight scene. It’s all a bit over the top, and The Bourne Ultimatum doesn’t have the same realistic feel that the first two movies had. You get amazing action in return though, with a little surprise at the end to top things off. With Joan Allen, Julia Stiles, David Strathairn and Albert Finney. (MP) 111 min. Pathé ArenA, Pathé De Munt, Pathé Tuschinski
Amsterdam Weekly
20 The Brave One It is a well-established rule that when a film starts with scenes of a ridiculously happy couple, catastrophe will befall them. This is the case with radio presenter Erica Bane (Jodie Foster): after a brutal assault in Central Park, her fiancée dies and Erica is severely wounded. Once she’s patched up, she starts roaming the streets at night as a wrathful vigilante. At first director Neil Jordan cleverly avoids the pitfalls of this kind of revenge movie. There’s no such thing as righteous violence; it’s an addiction to which Erica slowly succumbs. It’s a shame Jordan decides to change sides at the end. (BS) 122 min. Pathé ArenA, Pathé De Munt
Crank If there’s a film that will consign to an unmarked grave the tired critic’s cliché about how flashy flicks feel ‘just like a video game’, it’s the hilarious and delirious Crank. Jason Statham is at his most hooliganesque as the assassin Chev Chelios, who is injected with a Chinese designer poison that will kill him unless he keeps his adrenaline levels unnaturally high. The mayhem that ensues seems to be inspired by a marathon session of Grand Theft Auto on acid, condensed into 90 minutes of pure, unadulterated, drug-saturated ultraviolent fun for the politically incorrect action junkie. (LvH)Pathé ArenA, Pathé De Munt
Disturbia Disturbia Probably the only factor saving Transformers from devolving into pure military and/or robot fetishism was lead actor Shia LeBeouf. In Disturbia, his screen presence isn’t occluded by giant robots, so he can truly shine in this charming thriller about suburban voyeurism. LeBeouf plays Kale, a teen under strict house arrest who suspects his neighbour of being a serial killer. His suspicion slowly turns into an obsession, making the film into a modern take on Hitchcock’s Rear Window. It’s a shame that the ending feels so out of sync with the rest, but by then Disturbia has probably won you over with its slow but suspenseful build-up. Directed by DJ Caruso; with Sarah Roemer and Carrie-Anne Moss. (RG) 104 min. Pathé ArenA The Diving Bell and the Butterfly The latest from painter-turned-director Julian Schnabel (Basquiat) is a poetic, moving filmed version of the memoir by Elle France editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who at age 43 suffered a stroke that paralysed his entire body except his left eyelid. With Mathieu Amalric and Emmanuelle Seigner. In French/English with Dutch subtitles. 112 min. Cinecenter, The Movies, Pathé Tuschinski Goodbye Bafana Director Bille August tells the story of Nelson Mandela as seen through the eyes of his prison guard. In 1968, James Gregory (Joseph Fiennes), a white South African policeman fluent in Xhosa, is transferred to Robben Island, the notorious prison where Mandela (Dennis Haysbert of 24) is being kept under tight control. Obviously, their relationship will be distrustful at first, and border dangerously on friendship by the end of the movie (and the consequent end of apartheid in South Africa). In its didactic pace, Goodbye Bafana plays more like a history lesson on the life
and times of the African leader than the powerful, must-see political drama it could have been. (MB) 118 min. Pathé Tuschinski Iklimler Bahar, a young television director, and Isa, a middle-aged teacher, are breaking up during a summer holiday in Kas, on Turkey’s Aegean coast. Isa blames the age difference, but in fact the problem is his affair with another woman. In rainy Istanbul the sequence of poetic images is disrupted by a long shot of rough sex. Isa decides to follow Bahar to Agri, where she is shooting a movie. Breathtaking shots of falling snowflakes follow, but will Isa be able to win back broken-hearted Bahar? Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, with himself and his wife Ebru Ceylan in the starring roles, Iklimler (‘Climates’) uses the director’s familiar technique of long steady shots and natural sounds to tell a sad love story in which the weather and beautiful landscapes reflect two people’s sorrowful separation. In Turkish with Dutch subtitles. (MH) 97 min. Rialto
Knocked Up The premise is simple: a constantly
stoned loser (Seth Rogen) and a successful young career woman (Katherine Heigl) get drunk and sleep together, with an accidental pregnancy as a result. The way writer-director Judd Apatow blends a geeky comingof-age flick for guys with a heartfelt romantic comedy is outstandingly smart but above all hilarious. Normally you should trust your own judgement, but in this case it is best to just follow the hype. Let’s add to the hyperbole: could this year’s sleeper hit be one of the defining comedies of this decade? I wouldn’t mind. (RG) 129 min. Pathé ArenA, Pathé De Munt, Pathé Tuschinski
A Mighty Heart Mariane Pearl’s 2003 memoir about
the terrorist kidnapping and murder of her husband, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, is ideal material for a suspense film, and this docudrama manages to be gripping even though the outcome is no mystery. Closely adapted by John Orloff, the movie functions as a police procedural, with the journalist’s pregnant wife (Angelina Jolie) and a team of US and Pakistani officials struggling to navigate the Islamic underground of Karachi as they search for Pearl. But Orloff also captures the book’s human drama, as Mariane tries to remain hopeful in a steadily darkening situation, and its international sweep, as the rescuers are frustrated by tensions between Pakistan, India and the West. Director Michael Winterbottom is known for his war-zone dramas (Welcome to Sarajevo, In This World), and his crisp documentary style enhances the emotionally charged story. (JJ) 108 min. Cinecenter, The Movies, Pathé ArenA, Pathé De Munt, Pathé Tuschinski
Mr Brooks Mr Brooks Finally, Kevin Costner seems to have seen the light. After innumerable performances as a tragicromantic-heroic Lone Ranger, Costner has once again—as he did in Clint Eastwood’s A Perfect World (1993)—started acting against type. In Mr Brooks, where he plays a respectable man who is also a notorious serial killer, the interaction between Costner and his
bloodthirsty alter ego William Hurt is pure gold. Unfortunately, the story itself is rather clumsy and top-heavy with a lot of unnecessary subplots. Writer/director Bruce A Evans should have had faith in his intriguing lead character instead of burying him in an implausible storyline. (BS) 120 min. Pathé ArenA, Pathé De Munt
Opera Jawa A two-hour feast of dance, drama, music, shapes and colours by Indonesia’s most important living film-maker, Garin Nugroho. The story in this ‘gamelan musical’ is based on a fragment from the Hindu epic Ramayana, in which Sinta, the wife of King Ramaya, is abducted by the demon Rahwana. Translated to present-day Indonesia, it becomes a tragic love triangle between village potters Siti (Artika Sari Devi) and Setyo (Martinus Miroto), with the local bully Ludiro (acclaimed dancer Eko Supriyanto) trying to lure Siti from her marital bed. Central Java’s rural beauty is intensified by a use of cloth and colour that would make Christo whistle, while the music was written especially for the film by composer Rahayu Supanggih, who has worked with Robert Wilson and Sergio Leone. The result is a spectacle showcasing the best of Java’s music, dance and art. In Indonesian/Javanese with Dutch subtitles. (LS) 120 min. Rialto
La Sconosciuta
La
Sconosciuta A mysterious woman (Kseniya Rappoport) from an Eastern European country moves to a quiet, provincial town in Italy. Her goal is to get a job as a nanny for a wealthy family of local jewellers, taking care of their little daughter. Only through a series of hints and flashbacks do we come to know her past and, ultimately, her plans for the future. This gritty, noir-ish thriller from Giuseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso) won all the major Italian awards last year. A wonderfully gripping score by Il Maestro Ennio Morricone contributes strongly to its Hitchcock-like settings. In Italian with Dutch subtitles. (MB) 118 min. Cinecenter, Kriterion, Pathé Tuschinski Sextet Dutch director Eddy Terstall shares with Woody Allen a fascination for people and interpersonal relationships and a talent for depicting them in a natural and humorous way. As far back as the romantic comedy Hufters & Hofdames (1997), Terstall has shown himself to be an excellent actor’s director, and Sextet is no different. But while the performances in the six short ‘sex films’ that make up this omnibus picture are consistently good, the style, tone and quality vary widely, and the films often seem like vehicles for Terstall’s views on religion, sex, freedom of speech and so on. Opinions are fine, but a good film also needs a gripping story and/or some style. (MM) 100 min. Het Ketelhuis, Kriterion, Studio K Sunday in Kigali, A Canadian journalist Bernard Valcourt (Luc Picard) goes to Rwanda in 1994 to make a documentary about AIDS. He falls in love with a pretty waitress (Fatou N’Diaye), then gets separated from her in the growing storm of violence. Directed by Robert Favreau from an autobiographical novel by Gil Courtemanche. In French with Dutch subtitles.118 min. Rialto
4-10 October 2007 Talk to Me Don Cheadle stars as Ralph ‘Petey’ Greene, who followed a prison term for armed robbery in the early ‘60s with a long career as a media personality and social activist in Washington, DC. After playing such upright guys in Hotel Rwanda and Reign Over Me (unreleased here), Cheadle must have reached naturally for the part of the raunchy, rebellious Greene, but he would have been better cast as Dewey Hughes, the AM radio programmer who gave Greene his first shot (well played instead by Chiwetel Ejiofor). The early scenes of Greene misbehaving on the air are pretty funny, thanks mainly to Martin Sheen as the apoplectic station manager. But I was bummed out by the movie’s trite cartoon of the black power era—especially coming from Kasi Lemmons, who made her directing debut with the hauntingly ambiguous Eve’s Bayou. (JJ) 118 min. Pathé ArenA, Studio K Transe A devastating film about trafficking in women by Portuguese film-maker Teresa Villaverde. Sonia, a young Russian, is forced into prostitution in Western Europe in a theme that recalls Lucas Moodysson’s Lilja 4-ever. But in style Villaverde is closer to David Lynch, and at times the film’s tone approaches pure horror. In Portuguese with English subtitles. 126 min. Filmmuseum La Vie en rose Any director would have had a hard time adapting Edith Piaf’s eventful life—filled with neglect, disease and death—into a 140-minute movie, yet Olivier Dahan eschews any pretence of coherence. Seemingly at random, he jumps through time, barely differentiating between important and less relevant events. We get to see the winning match of Piaf’s lover, boxer Marcel Cerdan, but not her role in the French resistance. Both Piaf and Marion Cotillard (giving a remarkable, fragile performance as ‘The Little Sparrow’) deserve better. In French with Dutch subtitles. (BS) Pathé ArenA Vier Minuten German prison drama with Monica Bleibtreu starring as a stiff piano teacher who struggles with her past. Hannah Herzsprung plays her pupil, a rebellious inmate and former piano wunderkind, who in between outbursts of violence slowly finds her way back to music. Directed by Chris Kraus. In German with Dutch subtitles. 112 min. Cinecenter, The Movies, Rialto
Vier Minuten You Kill Me John Dahl’s previous neonoirs have been too cynical for me, but this crime comedy has such a goofy script (by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely) and such an eccentric cast that it kept me curious about what would happen next. An alcoholic Polish-American hit man in Buffalo (Ben Kingsley) gets sent to San Francisco by his uncle and boss (Philip Baker Hall) to dry out. Thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous and the funeral home where he gets a job, he winds up with a strange assortment of company, including a gay man (Luke Wilson), a real-estate broker (Bill Pullman), and a well-to-do lover (Téa Leoni). Even if you can’t accept all the movie’s curveballs, you might still be amused. (JR) 92 min. Pathé De Munt
Special screenings André Breton’s Naughty Bits A BBC documentary (2003) about the auction of the French writer’s unusual art collection—an event which, the film claims, led to a revival of the surrealist movement. OT301 Body Rice German juvenile delinquent Katrin is sent to Portugal as part of a programme to resocialise teen offenders, but finds only loud music and loneliness. This film by Hugo Vieira da Silva is showing as part of the Binger Filmlab series; interview with the director follows. In German/Portuguese with English subtitles. Rialto Freaks and Witches Two evenings of strange and little-known films presented live by underground film collector Jack Stevenson. They include the Danish silent film Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922), the notorious German satanic short Schwarze Messe (1966), underground film clips and images from circus culture. Cavia I Know Where I’m Going Michael Powell’s 1945 film resists easy classification: it opens as a screwball comedy, grows into a mystical, Flaherty-like study of man against the elements, and concludes as a warm romance. Wendy Hiller, in one of the best roles the movies gave her, is a toughened, materialistic young woman on her way to meet her millionaire fiancé in the Hebrides; Roger Livesey is the young man she
meets when a storm blows up and prevents her crossing to the islands. Funny and stirring, in quite unpredictable ways, with the usual Powellian flair for drawing the universal out of the screamingly eccentric. (DK) 88 min. Filmmuseum
visual elements include a shoot-out in a field of sunflowers; Cinemanita’s programmer claims this is ‘the most bizarre gangster film ever made’. Michael Ritchie (The Candidate, The Bad News Bears) directed. Also showing: Scorpio Rising by Kenneth Anger. De Nieuwe Anita
Manufactured Landscapes As a teenager in northern Ontario, Edward Burtynsky worked in a gold mine and an auto plant, and he brings to his panoramic still photographs a fascination with industry and the natural landscape that’s magnified in this big-screen documentary. Film-maker Jennifer Baichwal trails him on a tour of industrial sites in China and Bangladesh, and her opening sequences are breathtaking (an eight-minute tracking shot along a giant factory floor, a scene of the photographer posing yellow-clad workers on a road flanked by yellow buildings). Burtynsky is drawn to spots (and lives) that have been disfigured by commerce—like the awful ‘waste’ dump where poor villagers harvest metal from junked American computers—and the open-endedness of his images is the key to their power. Special screening; interview with Burtynsky follows. (JJ) 80 min. Rialto
Snowcake Director Marc Evans brings us a portentous tale of friendship, loss and uninteresting dark secrets. Depressed ex-convict Alex gets stranded in a sleepy Canadian town teeming with such quirky-yet-loveable characters as high-functioning-autistic Linda and sexcrazed Maggie. Alan Rickman and Sigourney Weaver undoubtedly thought they were doing something special (and disabled characters and Oscar nods tend to go hand in hand). Yet the developments feel forced, or unfocused at best. Weaver’s portrayal of Linda could have been the icing on the (snow)cake. Instead, her performance is all quirks and no personality. (BS) 112 min. Pathé Tuschinski
Prime Cut A 1972 film starring Gene Hackman as a midwest cattle baron running a meat-packing plant that doubles as a headquarters for the white slave trade. Lee Marvin is the Mob enforcer sent to shut him down; Sissy Spacek, in her debut, plays a naked sex slave. Unusual
Stalker Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 masterpiece, like his
earlier Solaris, is a very free and allegorical adaptation of an SF novel, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic. After a meteorite hits the earth, the region where it has fallen is sealed off. Known as the Zone, it is believed to have magical powers that can grant the secret wishes of those who enter it, but it can be penetrated only illegally and with special guides. One such guide, the stalker of the title, leads a writer and a professor through
the grimiest industrial wasteland you’ve ever seen to reach the epiphany. Tarkovsky, who regards their journey as a contemporary spiritual quest, does remarkable, mesmerising things with his mise en scene, particularly very slow and elaborately choreographed camera movements. Not an easy film, but almost certainly a great one. In Russian with English subtitles. (JR) 155 min. De Roode Bioscoop Umm Kulthum: A Voice Like Egypt A documentary about the legendary Egyptian singer, narrated by Omar Sharif. Umm Kulthum was said to combine the voice of Ella Fitzgerald with the politics of Eleanor Roosevelt; she built bridges between classes and cultures, and when she died in 1975, Cairo was overflowed by millions of people wanting to attend her funeral. The film is based on original archive material and interviews with friends and colleagues. Directed by Michal Goldman. (SG) 67 min. De Balie Waarom heeft niemand mij verteld...With the camera of his mobile phone, film-maker Cyrus Frisch recorded tensions in his neighbourhood between immigrants, locals and the police. In Waarom heeft niemand mij verteld dat het zo erg zou worden in Afghanistan?, he presents this documentary footage as the observations of a traumatised soldier just back from Uruzgan. Frisch will be present at the screening on Friday, June 8. In Dutch. 70 min. OT301
Amsterdam Weekly
4-10 October 2007
FILM TIMES Thursday 4 October until Wednesday 10 October. Times are provided by cinemas and are subject to last-minute changes. Film times also at www.amsterdamweekly.nl. De Balie Kleine-Gartmanplantsoen 10, 553 5151 Umm Kulthum:A Voice Like Egypt Thur-Sat 20.30. Cavia Van Hallstraat 52-I, 681 1419 Freak Show Flickers Fri 20.30 Freaks and Witches Häxan:Witchcraft through the Ages Thur 20.30 Strange Magic Fri 22.00. Cinecenter Lijnbaansgracht 236, 623 6615 The Diving Bell and the Butterfly daily 16.15, 19.00, 21.45, Sun also 11.00, 13.30 A Mighty Heart daily 16.30, 19.30, 21.45, Sun also 11.15, 14.00 Once daily 19.30, Sun also 13.45 La Sconosciuta daily 16.00, 21.45, Sun also 11.00 Vier Minuten daily 16.15, 19.15, 22.00, Sun also 11.00, 13.45. Cinema Amstelveen Plein 1960 2, Amstelveen, 547 5175 Copying Beethoven Sun 16.30, Tues, Wed 20.30 Death at a Funeral Thur-Sat 20.30, Thur also 15.00 Ratatouille (NL) Sat 15.45, Sun 12.00, Wed 13.30 De Simpsons Film Wed 15.45 Timboektoe Sat 13.30, Sun 14.15. Filmhuis Griffioen Uilenstede 106, Amstelveen, 444 5100 Death Proof Fri 19.30, Tues 20.30 Deep Blue Thur 19.30. Filmmuseum Vondelpark 3, 589 1400 Azur & Asmar Sun, Wed 14.00 Una Ballata Bianca Sun 16.15, Tues 18.00 Belle de jour Thurs-Sun, Tues, Wed, 19.30, Mon 18.00 Belle toujours Thurs-Sun, Tues, Wed 21.45 César et Rosalie Tues, Wed 17.00 Fatale Sun 16.00 I Know Where I'm Going daily 19.45 La Marea Fri, Sat 17.30 Sven en zijn Rat Sun, Wed 14.00 Transe Thurs-Sat, Mon, Wed 17.15, 21.30, Sun 17.25, 21.30, Tues 21.30 Willie en het wilde konijn Sun, Wed 13.45. Het Ketelhuis Haarlemmerweg 8-10, 684 0090 Adam's Apples Sat, Sun, Wed, 15.00 Duska Thurs, Sat-Wed 17.00, Thurs-Sun, Tues, Wed also 19.30, Sat, Sun, Wed also 12.45 Goud daily 19.45, Thurs-Sun, Tues, Wed also 21.45, Thurs-Tues also 17.30 Das Leben der Anderen daily 21.15 Sextet daily 22.00 Timboektoe daily 16.45, 19.00, Sat, Sun, Wed also 14.30 Waar is het paard van Sinterklaas? Wed 13.00, 15.15 Willie en het wilde konijn Sat, Sun, Wed 13.15 Wolfsbergen Sat, Sun 13.00. Kriterion Roetersstraat 170, 623 1708 Goud daily 17.30, Sat, Sun 15.30, Sun also 13.15 Half Nelson Thur-Mon, Wed 21.45 Meet the Robinsons Wed 15.30 Plop en de pinguin Wed 14.00 La Sconosciuta daily 19.30 Sextet Fri, Sat 23.45 Sneak Preview Tues 22.15. Melkweg Cinema Lijnbaansgracht 234A, 624 1777 The Cat Returns Sun 15.00 Death Proof Fri, Sat 21.30 Howl's Moving Castle Mon, Tues 19.00 Pompoko Fri, Sat 19.00 Princess Mononoke Thur, Wed 19.00. The Movies Haarlemmerdijk 159-165, 638 6016 Azur & Asmar daily 17.15, Sat, Sun, Wed also 15.00 Death Proof Fri, Sat 23.45 The Diving Bell and the Butterfly daily 16.45, 19.15, 21.30, Sat, Sun, Wed also 14.30, Sun also 12.15 A Mighty Heart daily 17.15, 19.30, 21.45, Fri, Sat also 23.50 Pan's Labyrinth Fri, Sat 0.00 Ratatouille (NL) Sat, Sun, Wed 15.00, Sun also 12.30 Rescue Dawn daily 17.00, 19.45, 22.00, Fri, Sat also 00.15, Sun also 12.45 De Simpsons Film Sat, Sun, Wed 15.15 Vier Minuten daily 19.30, 21.45, Sun also 12.30. De Nieuwe Anita Frederik Hendrikstraat 111, 06 4150 3512, Prime Cut Mon 20.30. OT301 Overtoom 301, 779 4913 André Breton's Naughty Bits Tues 20.30 Vergeef Me Sun 19.00 Waarom heeft niemand mij verteld... Sun 21.00 Zeitgeist Tues 20.30. Pathé ArenA ArenA Boulevard 600, 0900 1458 1408 daily 14.40, 17.30, 19.50, 22.10, Thur, Fri, Mon-Wed also 12.10 Alles is liefde Tues 19.00, Wed 21.00 The Bourne Ultimatum daily 21.20, Thur-Tues also 12.40, 15.10, Thur-Mon, Wed also 18.00, 20.40, Tues also 17.30 Bratz: De Film Sat 12.15, Sun, Wed 13.25, Wed also 11.10 The Brave One daily 13.30, 16.10, 18.50, 21.30, Sun, Wed also 10.55 Crank daily 22.15 Disturbia Thur-Mon 19.15, 21.35, Thur, Fri, Mon, Tues 12.00, Thur, Fri, Mon also 16.50, Wed 18.00 Evan Almighty Fri, Mon, Tues 11.45, Fri, Tues also 13.50, Fri also 16.30, Sat, Mon-Wed 17.30, Sat also 14.35, Sun 15.45, 18.00, Mon, Wed also 15.30 Evenement Thur, Wed 10.00, Thur also 12.00, 14.30, 16.20, 18.10, Wed also 10.45
Hairspray daily 12.20, 14.50, Thur also 19.20 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (IMAX) Sun, Wed 13.00, 16.00 Knocked Up daily 18.20, 21.10, Thur-Tues also 15.30, Thur, Fri, Sun-Tues also 12.50 A Mighty Heart Thur-Sun, Wed 20.00, Thur, Wed also 17.40, Thur also 11.55, 14.20, Mon 12.30, Tues 16.20, 18.40, 21.05 Mr Brooks Thur-Sun, Tues 21.20, Wed 21.30 No Reservations daily 21.50, Thur, Mon, Tues also 14.25, 17.10 Plop en de pinguin Wed 11.45, 13.30, 15.30 Ratatouille Thur-Sun, Wed 14.00, 16.25, Thur, Fri, Sun, Mon, Wed 11.20, Sat also 11.35, Tues 12.00, 14.25, 16.40 Ratatouille (NL) Fri-Sun 12.00, 14.30, Fri also 16.40, Sat, Sun also 12.40, 15.10, 16.50, 17.40, Wed also 12.35, 15.05 Rush Hour 3 daily 19.00, 21.00, Thur-Tues also 13.00, 15.00, 17.00, Thur-Sun, Tues also 19.55, 22.00, Thur, Fri, Sun, Mon also 11.00, Thur, Fri, Mon, Tues also 11.30, 13.40, 15.50, Thur, Fri, Tues also 17.50, Sun also 10.50, Wed also 10.45, 19.30, 21.30 Shoot 'Em Up Fri, Sat 22.15 De Simpsons Film Fri-Sun 11.50, 14.25 The Simpsons Movie daily 17.20, Thur also 21.40, Fri, Sat, MonWed also 19.25 Sneak Preview Tues 21.15 Stardust daily 12.15, 15.20, 18.10, 20.50 Surf's Up Sat, Wed 12.00, Wed also 14.00, 16.00, Sun 11.00 Talk to Me Thur 20.15, Fri, Sat, Tues, Wed also 19.45, Sun 20.30, Mon 20.00 Timboektoe daily 14.10, 16.40, 19.00, Thur-Tues also 11.40 La Vie en rose Tues 13.30 Waar is het paard van Sinterklaas? Wed 11.30, 12.00, 13.45, 14.15, 15.50, 16.20 Wedding Daze daily 19.30, Thur, Mon, Tues also 12.00, Fri-Sun also 16.20. Pathé De Munt Vijzelstraat 15, 0900 1458 1408 Thur, Fri, Sun-Wed 16.45, 19.15, 21.50, Thur, Fri, Mon, Tues also 12.05, 14.15, Sat 15.00, 17.15, 19.45, 22.15 The Bourne Ultimatum daily 18.45, Thur, Fri, Sun-Wed also 16.00, 21.40, Thur, Fri, Sun-Tues also 13.00, Sat also 10.15, 12.45, 15.45, 21.45, Sun also 10.20 Bratz: De Film Sat 10.25, 12.40, Sun also 14.10 The Brave One Thur, Fri, Sun-Wed 18.00, 21.00, Thur, Fri, SunTues also 12.20, 15.10, Wed also 15.15, Sat 11.30, 14.30, 17.45, 20.45 Crank Thur, Fri, Sun-Wed 17.10, Sat 19.10 Georgia Rule daily 13.45 Hairspray Thur, Fri, Sun-Wed 20.45, Fri, Sun-Wed also 18.20, Fri, Sun-Tues also 13.15, 15.45, Sat 15.40, 18.15, 21.15 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Thur, Fri, Sun-Wed 19.45, Thur, Mon, Tues also 14.00, Sat 21.30 The Kingdom Sat 23.15 Knocked Up Thur, Fri, Sun-Wed 15.00, 21.20, Thur, Fri, SunTues also 18.10, Thur, Fri, Mon-Wed also 12.00, Wed also 18.25, Sat 13.30, 16.30, 19.30, 22.30 A Mighty Heart Thur, Fri, Sun-Wed 12.10, 14.45, 17.30, 20.15, Sat 11.45, 14.15, 17.00, 20.00, 22.45 Mr Brooks Thur, Fri, Sun-Wed 20.00, Thur also 14.40, Wed also 14.50, Sat 21.50 No Reservations Thur, Fri, Sun-Wed 17.45, 20.30, Thur, Fri, Mon, Tues also 12.45, Thur, Mon, Tues also 15.15, Sat 18.30, 21.00 Ocean's Thirteen Thur, Fri, Sun-Wed 21.10, Sat 18.40 Plata quemada Sat 23.30 Plop en de pinguin Wed 13.00 Ratatouille Thur, Fri, Sun-Wed 17.20, Thur also 12.05, Sat also 19.15 Ratatouille (NL) Fri-Sun, Wed 15.15, Sat, Sun also 10.15, Sat also 12.30, Sun, Wed also 12.45 Rush Hour 3 Thur, Fri, Sun-Wed 12.15, 14.30, 17.00, 19.30, 22.00, Sat 10.45, 13.00, 15.30, 18.00, 20.30, 23.00 Shoot 'Em Up Sat 23.40 De Simpsons Film Fri, Sun, Wed 12.50, 14.55, Sun also 10.45, Sat 11.40, 14.00, 16.15 The Simpsons Movie Fri, Sun-Wed 12.40, Fri, Sun-Tues also 14.50, Sun also 10.40, Sat 12.15, 14.20, 16.45 Sneak Preview Tues 21.45 Stardust Thur, Fri, Sun-Wed 12.30, 15.30, 18.30, 21.30, Sat 10.20, 13.10, 16.00, 19.00, 22.00 Surf's Up Sat 11.10, 13.20, Wed 12.30, 14.40 Timboektoe Thur, Fri, Sun-Wed 13.30, 16.15, 19.00, Sun also 11.00, Sat 12.00, 14.45, 17.30, 20.15 Waar is het paard van Sinterklaas? Wed 12.00, 14.10, 16.20 Wedding Daze Thur, Fri, Sun-Wed 16.30, Sun also 11.20, Sat 11.00 You Kill Me Thur, Fri, Sun-Wed 18.40, Thur, Fri, Sun, Mon, Wed also 21.45, Tues also 21.10, Sat 16.20, 21.20, 23.35. Pathé Tuschinski Reguliersbreestraat 34, 0900 1458 The Bourne Ultimatum daily 15.15, Thur-Sun, Tues, Wed also 18.00, Fri-Sun, Tues also 21.00, Fri, Sat, Mon, Tues also 12.30, Mon also 18.30 The Diving Bell and the Butterfly daily 21.40, Thur-Tues also 15.30 Duska daily 19.00, 21.45, Sat-Mon also 13.30, Tues also 13.45 Goodbye Bafana Thur, Fri, Sun-Tues 12.45, Fri-Wed 18.50 Hairspray Fri-Sun, Wed 18.15, Fri, Sat, Mon also 12.15, Tues also 16.10, 18.40 Knocked Up Fri-Mon 15.00, Fri-Sun, Wed 20.45, Tues 21.20 A Mighty Heart Thur, Wed 21.00, Thur also 12.30, Fri-Tues 15.45, 21.15, Fri-Sun, Tues also 18.30, Fri, Mon, Tues also 13.00 Ratatouille Thur 16.00, Fri-Wed 16.15, Wed also 13.30 Ratatouille (NL) Sat, Sun 13.00, Wed 12.45 La Sconosciuta Fri-Sun, Tues, Wed 21.30 Snowcake Thur, Tues 13.30 Surf's Up Sat 12.45, Wed 12.00, 14.15, 16.30 Timboektoe Thur-Sun, Tues, Wed 18.45, Thur-Sat, Mon-Wed 13.15, Thur, Mon also 15.50, Fri-Sun, Tues, Wed also 16.00 Waar is het paard van Sinterklaas? Wed 12.30, 15.00. Rialto Ceintuurbaan 338, 676 8700 Body Rice See www.rialtofilm.nl IklimlerSee www.rialtofilm.nl Das Leben der Anderen See www.rialtofilm.nl Manufactured Landscapes See www.rialtofilm.nl La Marea See www.rialtofilm.nl Opera Jawa See www.rialtofilm.nl Summer Palace See www.rialtofilm.nl A Sunday in Kigali, See www.rialtofilm.nl Vier MinutenSee www.rialtofilm.nl. De Roode Bioscoop Haarlemmerplein 7H, 625 7500, Stalker Sun 20.30. Studio K Timorplein 62, 692 0422, Infamous daily 19.00 Sextet Thur, Fri, Sun-Wed 18.45 Talk to Me daily 21.30 Zodiac Thur, Fri, Sun-Wed 20.45, Sat 18.15.
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PARKING PERMIT Car for rent with parking permit in centre. Car is old but in good condition. Contact apartmentinamsterdam@hotmail .com.
THERAPY/COACHINGI am a European-licenced psychotherapist. I make use of different interventions that are synthesized from diverse therapies such as client-cen-
15 YEARS IN A'DAM Brit with experience writing English guides to city, editing, proofreading,creativereviews, articles etc. Available for similar work and advice/assistance on English-language publishing projects. Extensive WORK WANTED knowledge British/Dutch culCLEANING/IRONINGEffi- tures. 24/7 availabilty. Andrew cient and experienced cou- 698 1998 or firebird@dds.nl. ple looking for more house cleaning/ironing work in BUSINESS ADVICEAre you A’dam/A’veen. Reasonable thinking about starting your price and nice work is guar- own business? Do you have a anteed. References avail- company but administration and papers are not your thing? able. Call 06 4365 9790. Do you need a business plan, labour from abroad, to buy FOR SALE real estate or moving abroad? LEATHER COUCH SET Call Tulipany on 06 1021 8271, Navy blue leather couch, email info@tulipany.nl or go chair, ottomon for sale. Excel- to www.tulipany.nl. lent condition, only €100 for all. Located in centre. Must HEALTH & WELLNESS be able to remove yourself. TIRED OF BEING STUCK Please call 06 4370 9291. Heighten your quality of life. WASHING MACHINE from Improve your relationships, Indesit, 1.5 yrs old, good con- with the help of native Englishdition. Has to be picked up in speaking therapist. My 20 yrs centrum oost, 4th floor. War- of professional experience and ranty until Jan ‘08. €150. cor- understanding can help you nelia_graebner@yahoo.com. better cope with feelings and sortthroughstressfulthoughts. VEHICLES Call Sagar on 06 4626 5412. CAMPER VAN €2500 LDV ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE Freight Rover Camper, 2lt in A’dam zuid & rivierenbupetrol engine, dble fold-out urt. Reduce muscular tension bed, 3 hob gas cooker, 50lt and learn efficient coordiwater tank, 2 batteries, great nated use of the body for mencondition. UK Mot and Tax tal, physical and emotional until May ‘08. Purchase balance. Individual lessons. includes everything you need Simple, effective. Qualified to start camping. Email teacher: 06 3861 9234. jesaquil@hotmail.com for www.ingridvanschuylenmore information and photos. burch.nl.
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Amsterdam Weekly
4-10 October 2007
Amsterdam Weekly
4-10 October 2007 vidual goals. Sessions on Mon, Wed and Sat mornings. FIRST TRIAL SESSION IS FREE! Email Sarah at fitandfabuLIFE AND CHALLENGES lousnl@hotmail.com. Life is forever changing. Let MASSAGE me help you let go of what was, accept what is and create IL CIELO TREATMENTS what can be. Carol White, Craniosacral treatments, registered therapist. Mem- Dorn/Breuss massage and ber of BACP and ABvC. Call workshop for beginners at 06 3856 7510 or email carol- the Mirror Centre. Treatments can be reimbursed by white@planet.nl. health insurances. For more ACUPUNCTURE Certified Americanacupuncturisttreats info call 06 3004 9738 or check bothmenandwomenforawide www.ilcielo.org. tered, cognitive, behaviorist, trans-actional, psycho-analytical and transpersonal. Info: www.corakoorn-praktijk.nl.
range of ailments at two locationsinA’dam.Coverageoffered bymanyhealthinsurancecompanies.Call0627399789,email info@acupunctuurnoordholland.nl or visit www.acupunctuurnoordholland.nl. KORUA'DAMMindBodySoul. Here at KORU, we integrate all 3 aspects through massage, hypnotherapy, counselling, nutritional guidance. For Sept/Oct see our gifted massagetherapistw/herownbrand of shiatsu & deep tissue. Our hrs/days fit into your schedule. Call for a chat & appt. koruamsterdam@gmail.com.
TANTRA MASSAGE Sacred sensual massage created to arouse, circulate and increase sexual energy throughout your entirebody.Movingeroticenergynotonlyenhancesawareness and the capacity for pleasure, it can also be a powerful healingexperience.Info:www.erostrance.com, Shanti@erostrance.com, 06 4277 3290
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HOUTEN VLOERDELENNu bij Klaas Bierman: eiken en jatoba vloerdelen, multiplank. Tevens leggen en verduurzamen. Bel voor info of advies op ART GROUPbased on Gestalt 0229 542 179 of 06 5533 4838. Communication and Aware- RENO-BOUW-RAJCZYK ness. For people who long to House renovations. Do you live their life in a creative way need cost-effective and highand step out of the victim role quality full house renovation? by writing, singing, moving, Professional, experienced drawing and playing. Week- and with excellent references. ly on Thur evening or every Online links to past projects. other week on Sat. Tine van Call now and ask for appointWijk: dewalvis@xs4all.nl t/f ment: 06 4451 7410 or 331 6550, www.reno-bouw.nl, 683 5874. FEEL FIT & FABULOUS! karol-rajczyk@hotmail.com. Group fitness for women in the Vondelpark. Join us outide for a fun and effective workout. Exercises are done at your own level to help achieve indi-
UPHOLSTERERForre-upholstering of all kinds of furniture, modern and antique, boat and caravan cushions recovered or made to measure, also
23 to Rennaissance polyphony to more modern works. Check out www.gregoriaanskoor.nl and www.musiekindenicolaas IMPROVE YOUR DUTCH! for more details and opportuConversation, study groups, nities for YOUR voice type. private classes, intensive coursPERSONALS es, city language walks, NT2. Starting every week at Link SEX AND PLEASURE Nice Taal Studio. Info: 06 4133 9323 young man wants to meet or linktaalstudio@gmail.com. ladies for sex. No money, just pleasure and fun if we find INTENSIVE DUTCH ourselves atractive. If you are COURSE at Joost Weet Het! lonely or feel like having an Small groups, fun classes and experience contact me at inexpensive! Excellent and doninha333@yahoo.com. fast learning method. Energetic, accessible and uncom- BDM PROJECT Latin man in plicated teachers. Classes search for experience with een 4x4 hrs/wk, 2/3/4 wks cours- echte hollandse man. Physical es. Start 6 Aug and 1 Oct. Vis- approach.bdm_p71@yahoo.com. it http://www.joostweethet.nl ANNOUNCEMENTS or email info@joostweethet.nl call 420 8146. VOLUNTARY WORKNEEDLEARN NOW! Castilian ED I have repaired my glass(Spanish), Italian, Dutch, es and I still want to help English & more, with native people. No money, or gratiteachers. From Oct ‘07 to June tude requested. It is my grat‘08 in A’dam. Stichting Unlim- itude to give something back. ited Europe Amsterdam offers Thank you, Paul. 06 2234 3294. courses and conversation, If in doubt don’t call. www.excellentdutch.nl. New: Super-intensivesummercourse. Info: excellentdutch@hotmail.com, 06 3612 2870.
curtains made to measure, all styles catered for, wide selection of fabrics to choose from in all price classes. Contact Sophie Filangi 06 4154 7557/www.alabonnechaise.nl.
COMPUTERS PC HOUSE DOCTOR Specialised in virus/spyware removal, h/w, s/w repair, data recovery, wireless, cable/ADSL installation and computer lessons from friendly and experienced Microsoft professional for reasonable price. Contact Mario 06 1644 8230.
shops by professional artist, various techniques, all styles. CELLO TEACHER! Enthu- Contact joneiselin@ hetnet.nl/www.joneiselin.com. siastic, professional cellist from Australia, with 10 years UPHOLSTERY WORKSHOP teaching experience, avail- in Westerpark! Recover and/or able to teach beginner and repair your own furniture with intermediate level. Come for the professional advice of a FUN, FREE first lesson on Sophie Filangi. Every Tues a Prinsengracht houseboat to and Thur 19.00-22.00 (by appt discover the wonderful world only). Including use of tools, of cello. Contact Anita: 06 excluding materials. €30 per 1656 3638/agluyas@pega- session. Call for information on 06 4154 7557. sustech.com.au. CARDIO STRIPTEASE,gogo HEALING / MEDITATION dancing, belly dancing, pole This course teaches the healdancing, cheerleading and ingartofSatNamRasayan,genmore in our new dance studio tle healing art that works on a in center of A’dam. www.sexyin- deep level. It is old, simple, structors.com. Phone 06 1211 effective. You will learn to meditate a tool which benefits 4828 and ask for Sara. entire physical, mental & emoVIOLIN LESSONS Master tional being. For info call Har student composition at Con- Kirat on 06 1146 4372. Also for servatorium van Amsterdam Kundalini yoga classes. gives violin lessons in English. LANGUAGES Broad experience in giving lessons at conservatories in DUTCH LESSONS A'DAM Greece. Call 06 21931571 for Improve conversation/profesmore information or a free sionalpurpose/studies/NT2.Also introduction lesson. Email online. Min indiv rate €15/hr. sik_tania@hotmail.com. Adults&childrenMon-Sat,10.00-
fees. Starting 7 Oct. Check www.myspace.com/baukwww.usc.uva.nl. jewesterlaken. AGAMA YOGAbased in Thailand, now in A’dam De Pijp, starts 8-week beginners yoga course on Sat 14 Oct (11.0013.15 hrs). 1e van der Helststraat 70/1, (in between Sarphatipark and Albert Cuyp market). Open classes on Tues and Thurs 10.00-12.00 hrs. www.agamayoga.nl, 06 4912 6884 (Lilian). SINGING LESSONSOn Prinsengracht, beautiful atmosphere. Classical voice training, breathing techniques, vocalization, scales, etc. For beg & professionals. From classic to jazz pop or rock, and all styles of singing. Good prices + free intro lesson. For more info call Michael on 320 2095 or mail ajara77@yahoo.com.
NEED HELP WITH YOUR MAC? MAC-lover helps you with basic setups, minor troubleshooting, install, networking, basic MAC lessons, setting up programs, MS Word, QuarkXpress, etc. Help with purchasing the right MAC. DRUM LESSONSDrummer Contact Sagar at 779 1926. with international experience teaches drums on every COURSES level. Focus is the joy of playSTUDENT ICE SKATING ing! Subjects: technique, coörWant to join in this typical dination, music styles, improDutch winter sport? At the visation, ensemble playing, students sports centre USC, reading music. €12,50/half UvA/HvA students get 75% hr. Rental drum kit available. AUTUMN WORKSHOPS 21.00. Also intensive courses. discount on DuoSport course Call 06 5590 0888 & check Drawing and painting work- Min.intensive:15hrs=€215,55.
groups of up to 6 people. More info email unlimitedeurope@gmail.com or see www.unlimitedeurope.org. SPANISH LESSONS With a native speaker (more than 5 years of experience). Different fun topics: travelling, Latin America, literature, music, art, culture, etc. Plus wine or tea/coffee in cosy environment. All levels, help with grammar, reading if needed. Individual €20/hr, groups (2-3) €15/hr. Natalia 06 4299 9648.
MUSICIANS WANT TO SING? The magnificent Nicolaaskerk (opp. A’dam CS) has a rich singing tradition-fromGregorianchant
PEOPLE OF POLANDIf you are serious, ambitious, positive, goal-getter & want to achieve great heights you can become a leader in business in Poland by having your own company. Check www.reneheeren.acnrep.com select your country & you can see all in Polish. Interested how you can do it, call me 06 2602 0136. PLAYAUSSIERULESTheFlyingDutchmenistheDutchAustralianRulesFootballteam.We are going to Hamburg in Sept for the EU Cup and there are still places available on the team. No previous experience is necessary. So go to www. devliegendehollanders. nl or email Jase on jasonvdven@ devliegendehollanders.nl.