FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH
By Steve Korver

‘Price is what you pay, value is what you get,’ the financier Warren Buffet once observed when asked for the meaning of value. When mere mortals are posed the same question, we tend to come up with repackaged clichés: ‘It’s all relative’, ‘Value is in the eye of the beholder’, ‘Everything is worth nothing without your health’… In short, value appears to be a rather random construct. And recent global financial disasters can largely be explained in terms of people and institutions being much too arbitrary – or plain tricky – in how they establish ‘value’. Now much of the world is left wondering what it actually means.

Happily, philosophers have sweated for millennia about the concept. Plato made the distinction between ‘instrumental value’ (something that can be used to get something else, such as cash, gold and real estate) and ‘intrinsic value’ (something that is worth having in itself, such as friends, family and a sense of home). Currently, many explain the current economic and environmental realities in terms of our nasty habit of overemphasizing the instrumental over the intrinsic. It is certainly impossible to deny that there has been a hidden price to many human activities. There’s some truth in saying: ‘The only time you know the true value of something is when you lose it.’

Many things blur the line between the instrumental and the intrinsic. A common example is a green, wild and dynamic natural ecosystem which has obvious intrinsic value in its beauty, but can also be taken apart into resources of instrumental value. Another example is an education. Studying can expand one’s mind to a world of possibilities but it can also aid you in getting a well-paid leadership position. If you manage to balance the two, voila: you are, or could be, a successful entrepreneur.

Information, partnerships, networks, diversity and sustainability… they’re all things that have added value from the way they can surf the wave between the intrinsic and the instrumental. Perhaps it would be wiser for us to bank more on those things that don’t qualify to be locked up in a bank.

The final word, for human value, is for the writer F Scott Fitzgerald. He advised: ‘What we must decide is how we are valuable, rather than how valuable we are.’ Perhaps there’s even value in clichés.

[Spoiler alert: Not recommended reading for those who believe in Santa Claus.]

Each year in the Netherlands during the Christmas season, the tone around the debate on whether Zwarte Piet (‘Black Peter’) is a form of racism gets darker. This year, the discourse was further inflamed by the rather violent arrest of ten protesters with ‘Black Peter is Racism’ t-shirts and the news that the Dutch-Canadian community in Vancouver decided to no longer allow Black Peters in their annual Sinterklaas (St Nicolas) procession. Meanwhile many of the Dutch-Dutch just get increasingly defensive as they treat such talk as a threat against their culture.

For the outsider, it remains a curious tradition: countless Dutch adults putting on black face, smearing on red, red lipstick, popping on a wig of kinky hair and adorning their ears with large golden hoops – and doing all this without any sense of malice. Then they hit the streets like a pack of highly caffeinated Al Jolsons to help St. Nick distribute sweets to children.  Years ago, a visiting friend and I came across such a posse. I was long used to it, but my friend’s jaw hit the ground in disbelief – and this is a man who has witnessed much weirdness worldwide. ‘What is this minstrel madness?!?’ he asked flabbergasted. (Not long after while in Russia our roles were reversed in a strange and convoluted way when we were waiting at a backwoods train station and some skinheads came to confront my friend about the colour of his skin. He stayed cool and dealt with the situation. I just stood there. Totally flabbergasted.)

Local Dutch cultural history only goes so far in giving my friend a reasonable explanation behind the Black Peter tradition. Once upon a pagan time, this was slaughter season when meat was both stored for the long winter and sacrificed to Odin – the Germanic God of War, Sea and Hunt. It became a celebration of life and done, one assumes, with lots of blood and bonking. So when the Church came to town to wimpify the whole process, they decided the party should be rebranded around Saint Nicholas, patron saint of children and whose birthday conveniently fell on 6 December.

The Dutch were forced to repress their natural urges for communal butchery by aggressively baking huge mounds of animal-shaped cookies and chewing on marrow-textured marzipan. Later Sinterklaas mutated further by going to America with the settlers, eventually getting drawled out to become Santa Claus and having his special day shifted to 25 December to compensate for Jesus’s failing of character when it came to the spirit of gross revenue. Then in 1931, that darkest of beverages, Coca Cola, produced an advertising campaign that gave Santa his current look.

Meanwhile here in the Old World, St Nick with his white beard, bishop’s robes and ridged staff remains every Dutch kid’s favourite uncle, playing the good cop by controlling the distribution of sweets. Meanwhile, his assisting and equally beloved bad cop Black Peters represent the threat to the naughty kids. The blackened faces are explained away as resulting from Black Peter’s assigned job of delivering the sweets to the awaiting shoes via that dirtiest of orifices, the chimney. (But of course this does not explain Black Peter’s exaggerated lips, kinky hair, golden-hooped earrings and, often enough, Surinamese accent.) Another rationalisation has the tradition going back to when darkness represented evil; that Black Peter is actually the conquered devil, and that his colour and joy of mischief are the only leftovers of an evil beaten out of him by St. Nick. Either way – may it be through soot or sin – blackness tends to cling. As does St. Nick during the rest of the year as the official patron saint of not only Amsterdam itself, but also other favourites of Odin such as merchants, prostitutes, thieves and sailors (who, interestingly, paid tribute to their saint for centuries by using the term ‘doing the St. Nicholas’ as slang for intercourse).

The historical Nicholas is not precisely traceable. He is likely a mixture of many Nicholi. One of them, Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64), was eventually disowned by the Catholic Church for promoting the idea that all of the world’s gods were actually the same and therefore all deserving of equal respect. And in many ways Odin and St Nick are still the same: Odin not only shares the same followers as St Nick, but also rides the same kind of white horse and, in some stories, has some dark sidekicks chained to him… So with such similarities it’s easy to assume that St. Nick is simply Odin cross-dressed as a bishop. And in turn, Odin is the devil – or so said the Church when they came to town. But as long as Satan continues to bring joy to the hearts of millions of kiddies each year, I’m pretty alright with it.

As for the Black Peter phenomena – a tradition that was only formalised during the last half of the 19th century… That just stays weird. And anything weird should be confronted. I’m just brainstorming here, but would it help if next year Black Peter was rebranded as a Jew? Or perhaps as a Canadian?

The debate will undoubtedly continue…

Yesterday I had a night full of holes. And it wasn’t about drinking to excess, but about attending the ‘On Portable Holes and Other Containers’ night at Felix Meritis organised by Paleisje voor Volksvlijt. Artists, philosophers, musicians and writers gathered to present and ponder such questions as ‘Is a hole a container?’, ‘How do we talk about something that does not exist?’ and ‘If you buy a donut, are you also buying the hole?’

It was actually quite enlightening. Lately I’ve been looking for new ways to perceive reality, and holes might just be the ticket. But I must admit I am still a little stuck on: ‘How do you successfully describe a knotted hole without refering to the immaterial?”

The night was partially inspired by the excellent and often hilarious book Gaten & andere dingen die er niet zijn [‘Holes and other things that are not there’] by the Easy Alohas. This DJ duo, comprised of Bas Albers and Gerard Janssen, were on hand for what must have been one of their easiest gigs ever: playing silence – or rather a mash-up of John Cage’s ‘4’33”’ and Mike Batt’s ‘One Minute Silence’. Because there was no turntable, the Alohas were forced at the last minute to download these tracks of nothingness from iTunes. This also meant we could not listen to the album they had brought along called The Best of Marcel Marceau – everyone’s favourite mime.  

Later I confessed to Gerard of the Alohas that my life is filled with huge, gaping holes. He reassured me as only a holy master of holes can: ‘You shouldn’t see that as a problem. These holes are just spaces that you can fill up with new people and ideas.’ I was suddenly filled with a huge sense of belonging. I was now truly part of the silent majority.

[Full disclosure:  You remember when the CERN Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator was first turned on in 2008 and it mysteriously shut down almost immediately, and it was theorised that a particle from the future had travelled back in time to do this in order to ensure that the accelerator would not form a black hole? I am that particle.]

The US economy is generally collapsing more quickly than other economies. So it’s really a perfect time, exchange-wise, to visit New York City and indulge in what is the centre of the food universe. However it does help having a food-obsessed host to point the way. And with some luck, you can also squeeze in some more traditional sightseeing.

It’s smoking
Char No. 4 is a bar-restaurant with a passion for bourbon. Its interior is appropriately amber-hued and woody. The 19^th-century row house location in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn might make it potentially pretentious. But it’s not. They serve ‘American fare with a focus on smoked meat’. And anyway, I have long trusted my food-obsessed host to regularly reward me for knowing him. He is the man who earlier introduced me to such global culinary touchstones as the ‘herring in a fur coat’ at Petrovich and the rainbow of innards that they concoct at St John.

Char No. 4 can indeed provide complementing bourbons to accompany each of their morsels of comfort food.  The fried jambalaya rice balls with Andouille aioli had me feeling like I was back home in the land of Dutch kroketten and bitterballen – and I mean that in a good way and not a bad. But I am an emotional eater and I only really started to get weepy when I tasted the house-cured lamb pastrami with coriander aioli, pickled onions and grilled rye-caraway bread. By the time we were served the roasted salmon with black kale, roasted garlic and smoked pistachio-preserved lemon vinaigrette, my eyes had turned into waterfalls. It was all top nosh. On our way out, we bumped into the chef who said it was his last night before heading to California. Now it was my food-obsessed host’s turn to get overly emotional.

Borscht memories
After visiting the stacked silver boxes of the excellent and appropriately named New Museum, I was standing on the corner of 2nd and 9th in East Village waiting to meet friends for lunch at the famed Ukrainian eatery Veselka (read a great profile here). I used to eat here regularly years ago as a displaced teen and remember it always being filled with one half Ukrainian locals and the other half proto-hipsters (this was in the late 1980s before the neo-hipsters found succour in Williamsburg).

While watching the traffic going by I leaned back on a newspaper box for Village Voice and started to wonder why this weekly seems to halve in size each time I visit. Certainly Craig’s List took a big bite out of their classifieds business. But did Chowhound take a bite out of their reviewing business?

Suddenly my food-obsessed host bikes by. I experience the moment of recognition as a small stroke as he lives in Brooklyn and this just seemed like too much of a coincidence. But he just happened to be having lunch with his own food-obsessed friend a few blocks up. After I recover, he reassured me that while the rest of the hood has gentrified, Veselka remains a prime choice for lunch. (Later I would bump into him again a couple of times nearer his home while he was out getting Montreal bagels or sourcing fresh sardines from one of the excellent food shops along Court Street. This is just how it flows in a megapolis.)

Veselka’s borscht proved to be perfect and the varenyky dumplings divine. My first urge when confronted with the cabbage rolls was to just slap my face down hard on top of them and just start truffling down like a hog in heat. But to avoid burning my nose and eyes in the rich mushroom sauce, I tried to slow down by telling the story about my best friend growing up. His mother was Ukrainian. Whenever we were overly-energetic little boys, she would yell: ‘Boys please calm up; you are making me climb the ceiling.’ Oh, we would laugh. And then the next day we would point and laugh at my Dutch mother whenever she got all freestyle with the expressions of her new country – ah, the lot of the immigrant. Actually now that I think back, my friend and I were not actually to blame for our excessive energy levels. We were just still buzzing from the beet sugar in the borscht his mother had fed us for lunch.

Veselka’s borsht gave me the drive to walk very, very quickly across Manhattan towards Chelsea and finally check out the much-hyped ‘green’ (read: ridiculously over-designed but nice) High Line walkway that used to be the elevated train track that brought all the meat in and out of the Meat Packing District. Food history: it’s everywhere in New York.

The bread of Georgia
It was assumed by my food-obsessed host that we would stop off at Georgian Bread on our epic bike ride to Jacob Riis Park. Riis (1849-1914) was not a foodie but a journalist-reformer who used his camera to document slum life and invented flash photography on the way. So in a way, he can be considered a father of food photography.

As we cycled through Brighton Beach, not far from Coney Island, I was triggered by sense memories from years past: the sweat of a Russian bath house, the gentle squeak of a Nathan’s hotdog, being hypnotised by an old man slowly baking mighty pies in a pizza joint called Di Fara. This imperturbable Italian would pull out each pizza during the long baking process to give the bubbling mass a few massaging pokes with his fingers. He would then slice out some more fresh mozzarella here, and ladle out some more sauce there. Then he would put the pizza back into the oven for a few more minutes before repeating the whole process again. Meanwhile the line of saliva puddles would extend around the block. When I asked my food-obsessed host about the current state of Di Fara, he answered: ‘Now it’s just completely Disneyland.’

The Georgian bakers were however keeping it very real. In a small, hot room with a single clay oven, two men made two types of bread: a baguette-like shotipuri and a cheesy khachapuri. We opted for the cheesy to go. The older baker bagged it and passed it over a narrow counter. A small fridge was filled with a few dips and the intensely-mineral Borjomi mineral water. (And just to be clear: we are not talking about Georgia the state of pulled pork, but about Georgia the country in the Caucasus, much celebrated for their culinary skills, winemaking traditions, and being the birthplace of Stalin.)

Later on the empty and windswept beach of Jacob Riis Park with its abandoned art deco pavilion, we pulled out the crispy Frisbee-sized disk filled with salty, pudding-textured cheese. As it melted in our mouths, we all stared at each other with disbelief. Can something made by humans actually taste this good? We aided digestion by contemplating the sea, until someone tells us that this is the point where Hurricane Irene entered the city a few weeks earlier. ‘NYC has become a tropical climate, don’t you know?

A perfect Mexican. Dammit!
Perhaps my food-obsessed host had climate change in mind, when we later went to the Mexican restaurant Fonda in Park Slope. After cycling away cheese bread calories, it proved to be the perfect spot to unwind over a couple of spicy michelada beer cocktails. And dammit, the food was excellent again. But I was enjoying it less now because I was beginning to resent not living fulltime in a culinary capital. There were a few moments, for instance when picking at a huge wooden bowl filled with perfect guacamole, that I got distracted and started to unconsciously hum a happy tune. But otherwise I just complained about how Amsterdam has little range when it comes to cheap eats – Suri-Indo-Chin and, klaar, that’s it. Give me cheap Mexican! Give me cheap Vietnamese! Give me cheap sushi! Hell, I’d even be happy with a mid-range Serbian!

Finally, something real to complain about
Welcome to Williamsburg. My food-obsessed host warned us against going to Diner on a weekend, but we did not listen. We were stupid. But we had to be in the neighbourhood anyway and who can resist an authentically rundown diner in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge serving locally-sourced dishes? But while wedged in among the hipsters, we ended up waiting an hour for a table and then an hour for our food.

Except for a signature burger, Diner’s specials change daily – to the point that the amazingly chilled wait-staff sit down with you to write down all the specials on the paper table cloth. But in the end we were too hungry to care. We inhaled once, maybe twice, and our plates were empty. But the meals were obviously straight-up fine. It could have been quite possibly perfect on a week day. But I would never rebel against my food-obsessed host again.

Holy duck
My food-obsessed host remembered that I come from generations of duck harvesters. So it was sweet of him to take me for our last lunch to the corner of 2^nd and 13^th to Momofuku Ssam Bar, owned by the acclaimed Korean-American chef David Chang (a man known for his swearing and his love for offal). Their duck lunch is definitely of a whole fresh other feather. First a duck-and-pork sausage is embedded under the duck’s skin. This mutant hybridogenesis is then roasted on a rotisserie before being cut up and served with rice (which absorbed the melange of fats), duck confit (which adds yet greater depth to the melange of fats), chive pancakes (also handy to absorb the melange of fats), Bibb lettuce for wrapping (which help keep your fingers less sticky from the melange of fats), and a quartet of freaky sauces (which each combine in their own exotic way with the melange of fats).

As we made quacking and snorting sounds of delight at the bar, a brown-roasted pig buttock – a rather cute, rounded one – is served to the table across from us. It comes with a dozen oysters and rows of bowls with different kinds of fermented kimchi. Meanwhile in the open kitchen a guy is handling tripe that looks as if it came from a water buffalo. Serious stuff. A few weeks after our lunch, NY Times food critic Sam Sifton cited Momofuku Ssam Bar as his top choice for ‘For Blowing the Mind of an Out-of-Town Guest’.

I totally agreed. My mind was blown. And certainly my belly felt pretty blown on the airplane back home.

[I’ll pause for effect...]

Of course this gig should come as no surprise to those who already know that I get my savvy selection of seasonal clothes here and my 1960s welfare-recipient glasses here. But for some reason whenever I mention this whole ‘Steve in fashion land’ concept, friends generally break down into hysterical laughter. Why do they do that? During the whole process, there were really only a few moments of complete Mr Bean-like slapstick.

But anyway, the periodical is CODE (‘documenting style’), and the issue’s theme is an enticing one: ‘2012 Survival Kit’. It poses the question ‘What would you design for a hypothetical toolbox meant to help you survive the apocalypse?’ It’s also an international creative call to artists, architects and designers of all stripes to come up with their own ultimate survival products. The results of this ‘co-creation’ will be touring the world as an exhibition through 2012 – from Amsterdam to Kobe, Japan. You can find more information about the project and how to get involved here.

The issue’s main features focus on the survival tactics of sideshow circus freaks, new agers, off-grid pioneers, emerging tech gurus, urban warfare clothing designers and the brave and delightfully eccentric characters who fish off the decaying piers of Brooklyn.

CODE’s ‘Survival Kit 2012’ magazine is distributed worldwide (check out this week’s window display at Athenaeum in Amsterdam). 

See you in the hills! Looking sharp! And sustainable!

As deeply enigmatic tubes, eels are 100-million-year-old slime wonders with authentic phallic mystique. A connoisseur no less than Freud spent a summer as a medical student slicing and dicing hundreds of eels in what proved to be a failed search for their sex organs. And to this day, their sex rites remain shrouded by the bottomless Sargasso, leaving scientists to hypothesize about the actual nature of the orgy of lust that climaxes the eels’ journey of thousands of miles.

Indeed, this mysterious beast generates more questions than answers. How can a decapitated eel still find its way to the nearest water? How can they so effortlessly alternate between salt and fresh water? Is it true that a ‘drinking wine suffused with fragments of its skin might turn a drunkard into a teetotaller’? And why would Sophia Loren, at the height of her loveliness, choose to play an eel factory worker in the film La Donna del Fiume?

But of course the fundamental question remains: why are they so darn tasty? Aristophanes rightly described their gustatory delight as ‘oh my sweetest, my long-awaited desire’. It was certainly easy for eels of yore to suavely slither into Amsterdam’s mass culinary consciousness by allowing themselves to be smoked and then sold from fish stalls. People can say I’m full of brown trout, but I believe that the eel – intent on becoming Amsterdam’s spirit animal by broadening its appeal to politics – allowed itself to get caught up in a local sport popular in the 19th Century called palingtrekken (‘eel pulling’). This game involved dangling a live-eel-on-a-rope over a canal and trying to jerk it off from a wobbly boat below. Our slippery friend ‘won’ whenever a puller failed and fell into the canal.

It was this sport – one that can be argued as the evolutionary missing link between dwarf-tossing and Ajax football – that led to the Eel Riot. By that time the sport had been banned but it continued to be practiced in the Jordaan, then a staunchly working-class district. One day, when the police attempted to break up an illegal game of eel-pulling, the people decided to fight back – not for the right to pull eel, but to live life in less poverty. The army was called in to enforce the peace, with usual tragic results: 26 dead.

The newly united neighbourhood went on to organize peaceful social change. And according to Amsterdam, een lastige stad (‘Amsterdam, An Awkward City’) by JM Fuchs, the eel that sparked it all was later sold in 1913 at an auction for 1.75 guilders before disappearing from view. Let’s take a moment to remember this working-class eel-ro.

American country singer Buck Owen’s only hit in the Netherlands: ‘Amsterdam’. In 1970 the song spent eight weeks in the Top 40. Now I’m wondering if his song ‘Made in Japan’ was a hit in Japan. Perhaps targeting specific spots to write songs about – and hopefully scoring a local hit – was his business model after his American hits dried up.

But whatever: ‘I picked peaches in a Georgia town / And I picked cotton down in Birmingham / At the day I’ll get out of Alabam / I’m goin’ back to Amsterdam. / Amsterdam, old Amsterdam…’ 

The FSTVLisation of everyday life
Amsterdam Weekly, 31 May 2007
By Steve Korver, Illustration by Robin van der Kaa

There’s one incontrovertible explanation for the explosion in the number of festivals over recent years: festivals can be fun and people like to have fun.

Amsterdam-based cultural analyst and theatre scholar Dragan Klaic, however, has a deeper view. Among his many activities as a Central European intellectual type — lecturing here, leading discussion groups there — he is chairman of the European Festival Research Project (EFRP), and plans to lead a workgroup at the University of Leiden’s Faculty of Creative and Performing Arts to research what he calls the ‘festivalisation of everyday life’.

In short: he’s a festival professor.

‘While it may seem that a festival is running every weekend, it’s a bit of an illusion,’ observes Klaic. ‘Many are one-off affairs with no aim to achieve continuity. They are called “festivals” out of fundraising or marketing opportunism. They take, for example, four separate events in one week, and prop them up under the festival banner with an English-language name and go: “Look! We’re not business as usual!”

‘Of the true festivals—ones that seek a certain, usually annual, continuity—there are three basic types: very commercial ones, crowd-gathering events inspired by someone who wants to make a buck; then there are festivals as identity celebration, where a specific community wants to show that they are here, and will always be here, selling cookies, or showing off costumes or traditions; then there are festivals driven by an artistic agenda: they often have an international component, and inevitably need some sort of public support and funding. This is the type I concern myself with.’

Klaic’s findings may disappoint both organisers and politicians, who use festivals as a way of boosting image — and tourist numbers. ‘Cities increasingly see festivals as having a positive economic impact. But this is simply not true. Only very few artistic-based festivals can generate any real economic impact for a city. Edinburgh… yes. Avignon… yes. Holland Festival… perhaps. But most don’t. Politicians want to see money made and so the city festival organisers tell them that that is exactly what festivals are doing. A lot of these economic impact studies of specific festivals are pre-cooked and pre-determined in their conclusions—not exactly reliable in their methodology.’

The idea that festivals can promote a sense of community may also be partly a myth: ‘This is exactly what we must research more,’ says Klaic. ‘Just because different peoples are brought together in the same space for a few hours doesn’t mean that this adds anything to social cohesion. Of course, since politicians are always talking about social cohesion, the organisers say that festivals help in order to get funding. Like economic impact, this belongs in the wishful thinking department.

‘But we do know that festivals can achieve cohesion on another level and that’s very interesting. They can work as a platform of cooperation to create or strengthen ties between existing cultural operators who are usually too busy with their standard bickering and competition for public subsidy and exposure. A festival can allow them to see the advantages of cooperating as well.

‘In addition, these artistically driven festivals are enriching the European cultural space. While they are not a symbol of “European culture”—because that doesn’t exist—they are connecting different cultural expressions. They are enhancing this emerging European cultural space which is divergent, dynamic, polyphonic and, hopefully, inclusive. And in that sense, festivals are contributing to a sense of European citizenship — by enriching what we know and what we think about our fellow Europeans and thereby, hopefully, going beyond the usual prejudices, stereotypes and embarrassing ignorance.’

But Klaic remains disappointed about how few European cities and countries have actual festival policies. ‘Why do we want festivals? Which ones should be funded? And with what objective? Based on what criteria? A city might have ten festivals in a year and they will all ask for money, and then ask: “Why don’t I get more?” And what does the city base its generosity on? Habit? Tradition? Personal hobbies?’

Klaic pauses for effect before continuing: ‘So this must be articulated, and that is why the EFRP is coming up with recommendations on how public authorities can set up their own policy to deal with these competing demands for funding.’

And how does Amsterdam rate in the festival department? ‘Since Amsterdam has such a regular flow of cultural output throughout the year, it’s harder to say anything about the impact of festivals. But Amsterdam’s cultural operators can always more fully realise that festivals are an opportunity for collaboration. You can see now when cultural operators come together, like in Groningen, some interesting formulas can be developed that actually do change the position of the city. The number of visitors, type of visitor, economic impact have all changed in Groningen thanks to the Diaghilev Festival, a one-shot event taking this Russian impresario as the emblem for the avant-garde arts of the 1920s. And since the cultural organisations all worked together, they could get extra money, extra sponsors, money from both the city and the province and come up with a quite ambitious package. In a way, they actually improved Groningen’s image as a juicier, more appealing, city.’

www.efa-aef.org

Guardian Travel playlist for Amsterdam by De Jeugd van Tegenwoordig by Guardiantravel on Mixcloud

The Guardian just published their online guide to Amsterdam. It’s quite fine indeed and features some fine local contributers — including the folks behind Unfold Amsterdam. My contribution involved asking the Dutch gibberish-hop collective De Jeugd van Tegenwoordig about their favorite Amster-songs. The interview was both hilarious and exhausting. Sadly much of what they said proved to be too racy for a family newspaper. My favorite part was when they claimed that volkszanger Andre Hazes was the nation’s Tupac and was actually black — ‘but you know how the history books always change everything.’ ]]> http://www.stevekorver.com/2011/06/guardians-amsterdam-city-guide/feed/ 1