BEST. COPSHOW. EVER. It’s called Baantjerand it’s set in Amsterdam, a gloriously scenic Amsterdam where it rarely rains and its inhabitants – a rich interactive tapestry of cops, penose, squatpunks, Suri-Vlaamse hipsters, Yugo mafia types, e-clubbers, admen, real estate speculators, prostitutes and fishmongers – all run the risk of being murdered at any moment.
Happily those Amsterdammers that do get offed can rest in peace with the knowledge that police detective De Cock (’ceeooceekaa‘) – played by Piet Römer using a static minimalism that he fine-tuned as a celebrated interpreter of Beckett plays – will unmask the perpetrator through sheer doggedness and a Zen-like tolerance of all who he encounters within the victim’s milieu. Watching Baantjer is like putting on an old comfortable sweater: one that begins with a bloody corpse and then ends with a flashback of the bloody act while De Cock explains to his wife and colleagues, during a gezellig dinner at his home, how he managed to put his finger on the pulseless pulse.
But the most charming part of the show occurs about 37 minutes in when De Cock goes to his favourite Red-Light local (Cafe Lowietje which is in fact located on a very quiet Jordaan street, 3e Goudsbloemdwarsstraat) to ruminate over a ‘cognackje’ and to shoot the shit with his pal the bartender who acts as a local gossip encyclopaedia. At one point, a usually inane comment from this bartender triggers a dramatic swoop in the soundtrack and a subtle glimmer in De Cock’s eye that works to tell the now happily hypnotized viewer: EUREKA! Other recurring elements that makes the show more about blissful familiarity than elbow-chewing suspense are: De Cock’s smartass sidekick Vledder nursing a hangover, De Cock’s petty-minded boss screaming ‘Get Out!’ after De Cock subtly makes him aware of his own stupidity, and product placement in the form of Yakult yoghurt drink (in earlier seasons) or Lipton Cup-A-Soup (in later seasons). As bonus, the acting is in fact quite fine and the script quite well researched – though the latter is probably aided by the fact that many of the shows are based on the books by a former Warmoesstraat cop Appie Baantjer (books that in the English translations curiously transform ‘De Cock’ into ‘De Kok’).
But the real star of the show remains the setting: Amsterdam rarely looks sweeter. It makes you proud to be an Amster-burger. Perhaps it’s just the pacing: the calm slow pans of gables, water, parks and trams that actually hold to the speed limit. It’s an idealized vision of Amsterdam you can turn to when you are too lazy to bike through the rain to see it for yourself.
RTL4 is currently prescribing the Xanax of copshows on Saturday nights.
I guess I have been avoiding blogging because I would then have to say something about the gains made in the last Dutch election by an amateur film-maker and populist politician. It is indeed depressing that something like 15% of the population can still fall for the same, old nationalist story: that all social ills can be blamed on some scary ‘other’. Yes I can understand how some of the population can feel fear and uncertainty. But do they have to buy into such a transparent hate-monger? But anyway… it does reflect the power of a simple story.
I have been doing some work for the European Cultural Foundation (ECF). Yes: ‘Europe’ and ‘culture’ are two words that usually inspire the glazing over of eyes. But the ECF is starting a very interesting project: looking for stories/narratives that can cross borders instead of define borders. Nationalist stories are clear and effective: one collection of people is deemed great while another collection of people is made responsible for all of society’s problems. Play on fear and you’ll do well at an election — just look at WWII and the wars in ex-Yugoslavia. This is all pretty straightforward. But where do you find stories that work to bring people together? And how do you promote them and spread them without sounding like a freaking hippy? That’s trickier.
A couple of months ago ECF brought together a group of academics to discuss ‘New Narratives for Europe’ and how they can perhaps work as a positive force. I had to write a report. The process hurt my brain but at least this Canadian boy got his crash course in European Studies (thanks Sarah!). And while the resulting report is too sprawling to get a general audience excited, my greatest personal goal has become: to be able to bring up some notion of Europe into a conversation without losing the attention of whomever I am talking to. Reach for the stars, I say, reach for the stars! And if it ever happens: what a story it will be…
A website charts out all that is weird and wonderful in the world.
By Steve Korver
Attention, jaded travellers who are convinced that everything exotic has long become familiar to them. The website Atlas Obscura — “a compendium of this age’s wonders, curiosities, and esoterica” — should get you all worked up enough to hit the road again. Their Canadian listings alone should give you a taste of what’s in store: the Diefenbunker nuclear shelter in Ontario, the Gopher Hole Museum in Alberta, and the Downtown Hotel that serves Sourtoe Cocktails (a combination of champagne and an amputated toe) in the Yukon.
When it was launched last summer, the website seemed to tap into something that was still missing from the internet and went immediately viral and contributors lined up to donate their own desperately odd destination — ones that have not yet been co-opted by package tours or beer ads.
Atlas Obscura’s mission statement is a noble one: it’s the place to look for: “miniature cities, glass flowers, books bound in human skin, gigantic flaming holes in the ground, phallological museums, bone churches, balancing pagodas, or homes built entirely out of paper.” And who isn’t looking?
Two 26 year-olds, the film-maker Dylan Thuras and the science journalist Joshua Foer, came together after discovering a shared passion for the desperately obscure. They met three years ago organising a society meeting for Athanasius Kircher, the 17th century Jesuit scholar and “last renaissance man” who is listed as the inventor of both the “vomiting statue” and the “cat piano”.
But their taste for the wondrous began much earlier: with travels across that most obscure and wondrous of countries: their very own US of A. Dylan Thuras recalls: “I was twelve and my parents took me on a family vacation around the mid-west which is filled with all kinds of bizarre places: Wall Drug, the South Dakota Badlands, and the most amazing and unbelievable was ‘The House on The Rock’. It was like entering a fantastical universe someone else constructed for you.” And indeed, its Atlas Obscura write-up does make it sound enticing. It’s a sprawling construction in Wisconsin that houses a collection of automated orchestras and a 200-foot model of a sperm whale.
Joshua Foer’s coming of age came later: “I was 19 and I bought a beat-up minivan and spent two months driving around the country. At the time, I’m not sure I could have told you why I was doing it, except that I was curious to know what the rest of America was like. I spent a lot of time trying to find wondrous and curious places. It was a life-changing experience.”
Both quickly realised that was no single, great resource for travellers like themselves. Until they realised the power of the Internet and user-generated sites. But while all are welcome to contribute, the listings are edited and fact checked. “We love these places and want to respect and honour them,” says Thuras.
So yes, it turns out that our Earth is still, as Thuras describes it, “a very big and very weird and interesting place, and there are plenty of things left to be discovered by the traveller.” Isn’t that wonderfully reassuring?
The editors of Atlas Obscura Editors give their top wacky destination tips — as of September 2009 (since “our favourites are always changing”).
Dylan Thuras: 1. “The Root Bridges of Cherrapungee in India take at least ten to fifteen years to build. Locals guide tree roots over a river and have them take root on the other side. Some of these living bridges are over a hundred feet long and strong enough to support fifty people. There’s even a double-decker one.”
2. “The Gates of Hellis a 328-foot wide hole in the desert that has been on fire for thirty-eight years after a Soviet drilling rig accidentally drilled into a massive underground natural gas cavern, causing the ground to collapse and poisonous fumes to be released. To head off a potential environmental catastrophe, they set it on fire.”
3. “The Relampago del Catatumbo is a near-constant lightning storm over a river in Venezuela. For almost half the nights of the year, for ten hours at a time, there’s almost constant lightning. Weirdly, it is silent because all the electrical activity happens way up in the air. It’s just insanely cool.”
Joshua Foer: 1. “The other day someone posted an absolutely frightening place that I have no interest in ever visiting: Snake Island off the coast of Sao Paulo, Brazil that is filled with venomous pit vipers: one snake per square meter. Try to picture that…”
2. “The Tempest Prognosticator (a.k.a. the ‘Leech Barometer’) is an ingenious weather-prediction device that debuted at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. Leeches get really worked up before a storm, so if you attach bells to them you’ve got yourself a pretty good barometer. A full-scale working model can be viewed at the Barometer World Museum in Devon, England.”
3. “I long to visit New Zealand to see the Electrum, the world’s largest Tesla coil, in action. It stands four stories tall and zaps out three million volts. It’s absolutely beautiful.”
Usually I don’t have a lot to say about orange. And certainly my football strap starts twanging hollow as soon as I have played out my two basic one-liners:
‘Wouldn’t two balls solve the whole problem?’
‘If two teams can’t get it together to share, what hope is there for the bleeding billion different teams that make up this planet?’
It would be easy to smirk my way through some smart-ass facts like orange being the colour of the sex ’n’ spleen chakra, or that orange was considered by Goethe as the colour of the rough and uneducated, or that orange is the favourite colour of everybody’s favourite god of wine ’n’ bonking, Bacchus.
I could even dwell on the irony of orange — despite advertising’s Golden Rule: ‘Never Use Orange’ — becoming a marketing phenomena where seemingly everything that is now currently being sold in this country, from condoms to contact lenses, is orange.
But actually I’ve been getting into the spirit of things and now when those orange guys score, I even catch myself jumping to my feet as if an industrious fart of mine has suddenly harnessed the secrets of rocket science. So out of respect, I choose to discuss the aesthetics of football. It is such a purty sport after all…
For instance, when the mass psychosis surrounding the game gets too much for my weak and dicky ticker, I let my eyes glaze over and randomly follow the lil’ orange blobs darting about the green field until the sport takes on the vibe of fireflies darting about in a kid’s glass jar (or flames randomly darting about in a campfire…). It is all so very relaxing and probably similar in effect to staring into an orange hypno-pinwheel and getting very, very sleepy.
But before I get too lost in these visual games and a dull-voice inside my mind starts chanting ‘Must… Buy… Orange… Products… Must… Buy… Orange… Products’, I redirect my focus to take in the equally pleasing rhythmics of relaxation to be found within the stadium crowd scenes. The texture reminds me of those scrambly computer-generated pictures that you stare at until a 3D image pops out at you. And yes, invariably out of the sea of distorted orange comes a freaking huge orange clog to kick me upside the ass and onto my feet again and thereby forcing me — albeit happily — to start the whole process again of trying to regain my preferred state of freestyle floating.
But I wouldn’t dare to come across all flaky like psychic spoon-bender Uri Geller who has spent a lot of energy trying to convince people that if enough fans of a particular team focus on an orange dot placed on their TV screen, the resulting convergence of cosmic energies will lead to certain victory for your team… I’m no jock pundit, but that sort of stuff doesn’t strike me as very sporting.
Dutch election campaign advert (Dutch only) from 1966 featuring the late Hans van Mierlo. Not only does it have a great last sentence but it also features Amsterdam playing a rainy, melancholic side roll… Now stay tuned for today’s election results.
Squatting has been declared illegal by the national government. Is it really the end? My friend Lennart Vader of Nepco, who I used to hang out with in squats building UFOs (long story), wrote an excellent editorial last week in Het Parool newspaper where he argued that the ban was a blow against creative culture. Read it here (Dutch only). It’s simple really: free space begets free thought which begot all the things that make Amsterdam great. Including some really freaky UFOs. Below I’ve pasted my long-evolving Squat Time Line which has been published in various forms over the years.
~1000 AD – First inhabitants (i.e. fishing squatters, homo squatus) come to the boggy mouth of the Amstel to settle what is to become Amsterdam…
1275 – By granting toll privileges for beer to the hamlet, Count Floris V establishes a viable business climate.
1342 – With the building of the first city walls, the economically-challenged must now squat outside the wall’s perimeter. This establishes the trend of the poor ever moving outward as the city expands.
1613 – With the Golden Age in full effect, the canal ring is being dug and built for the housing of the prosperous. Squatters are pushed outward again…
1965 – The first squatting (in the modern sense) occurs when a young family moves into an empty living space on Generaal Vetterstraat. The general populace — not sympathetic to the way speculators held on to their (empty) properties to drive up rents and property values — begin regarding it as a viable way of dealing with the housing shortage.
1969 – ‘Handbook for Squatters’ becomes national best-seller
1970 – May 5th first national Squatters Day
1971 – The High Council determines that squatting does not conflict with the law — namely, entering an emptied house is not trespassing on private property. May the squatting begin… but with the extra danger of property owners now doing the evicting themselves with the aid of knokploegen (‘fighting groups’).
1975 - Ruigoord is squatted as an artists’ village of eco-hippies. Even though it was threatened to be submerged as part of the new Africa Haven, it exists to this day as a kind of snow globe for a lost age.
1978 – Groote Keyser (Keizersgracht 242-52) was established and became the focal point for the city’s 10 000 squatters.
1980 – Regarded as the most violent year since World War II. In February, hundreds of by now highly organised squatters retake Vondelstraat 72 by constructing barricades — until tanks deal with the situation. On April 30, the date of Queen Beatrix’s inauguration, huge riots break out — until tear gas deals with the situation. Squatting becomes yet more highly politicised with as a result, factions emerged and infighting occurred — just like in the real world. The beginning of the end…
1981 – A bailiff who had regularly tipped off squatters with the ‘removal’ dates of squats (so they could be ready and barricaded…) receives a gilded crowbar as thank-you.
1986 – The heyday of hard-core squatting considered over.
1998 – Two mega-squats who represented more the cultural/artistic side of squatting are emptied. After 10 years, De Graansilo, with its bakery, cafe-restaurant, dozens of artist residents and 100 000 visitors per year is emptied for high rent housing. The 1994-established Vrieshuis Amerika — home to regular parties, the largest indoor skateboard park in the country, and 75 artists and businesses — is emptied and destroyed in the name of the Sydney-fication of the harbour front…
1999 – The former Film Academy, OT301, is squatted and granted a sense of permanence as the city belatedly realises that there are no affordable inner-city spaces left for artists. The concept of establishing broedplaatsen– ‘ breeding grounds’ of the arts — enters local politics. Tax money is found to basically rebuild what had already existed at no cost…
2000 – The concept of broedplaatsen establishes itself over next decade with NDSM in Amsterdam North as poster child. Some keep the political squatting dream alive. While other more culture-oriented squats such as ADM, Sociëteit de Sauna, Service Garage and Schijnheilig continue to do wacky things in wacky places.
2010 – Squatting declared illegal by national government of the Netherlands. Meanwhile most city governments (the ones who actually deal with squatting) will likely just ignore this ban for the short-term anyway.
For those who want a, um, concise view on the national Dutch elections, my pal Floris Dogterom is writing a series of reports on the still very-BETA website of Unfold Amsterdam. This web/paper publication is a very welcome endeavour to fill the void left by Amsterdam Weekly’s demise and includes a lot of Weekly alumni. They won’t be truely kicking off until 1 September but meanwhile the website already features a savvy choice of what’s going down in town. Check it out! It will rule! Support!
Usually I don’t have a lot to say about orange. And certainly my football strap starts twanging hollow as soon as I have played out my two basic one-liners: 
