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.
1966 – Provos introduce the ‘White Housing Plan’.
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.
1979 – The establishment of Radio De Vrije Keyser (who continue to broadcast 40 years later) occurs at the height of the squat movement.
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, Societeit 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!
Pretty amazing. Via the Royal Dutch Library one can now search, or just browse through, the most important newspapers in the Netherlands between 1618 and 1995, including ones from the former Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), Suriname and the Antilles. If you search for ‘kaas‘ (cheese) you get a total of 94 763 hits… Mmm cheese.
Endless before/after postcards of Amsterdam… Much more relaxing if you provide your own soundtrack.
Eurovision song contestant Maggie MacNeal. 1980. You have been warned. But oh so scenic!
This year sees the return of the city’s edgy arts market and festival Kunstvlaai/Artpie which runs until this Sunday 23 May at the Westergasfabriek. The bi-annual Kunstvlaai was formulated as the evil twisted twin of the commercial art fair Kunstrai (who in their mediocrity decided to rebrand as Art Amsterdam so they might sound more like the ever-more-hip Art Rotterdam). As such, Kunstvlaai gives space to hundreds of decidedly less middle-of-the-road artists, groups and galleries. It’s a happy chaos complete with a 6-meter tall pink mouse and pentagrams made of homebrewed beer. Check it out while you can…
Meanwhile later this month, between 28 and 30 May, another new anti-Art Amsterdam manifestation kicks off as a few of the city’s more interesting local galleries come together to form Minimarket in an old canalhouse.
Today is Liberation Day. And it was 65 years ago that Canada liberated the Netherlands from Nazi German occupation. Sure, it was more of an “Allied” operation and the Poles did their bit to help out, but Canadians soldiers truly left their mark as they lingered in Amsterdam for months after. They even had their own Amsterdam guide book (pictured left, see full scan here).
By early 1946, venereal disease was skyrocketing and over 7000 babies were born out of wedlock (which is coincidentally around the same number as those Canadians who had died). Even today, when Canadian soldiers return to take part in the Remembrance Day ceremonies they are greeted by aging women with signs asking ‘Are you my Daddy?’.
I was clued into the raw sex appeal Canadians enjoyed back then by a friend’s octogenarian grandmother. She had been there to welcome the Canadians when they came marching into town. She described how handsome and muscular they looked, especially when compared to the local lads who had just come out of the ‘Hunger Winter’. She also mentioned how great it was to get chocolate and fresh stockings. She really went on and on… Then I got a little creeped out when I realised she was actually reliving the raw lust she felt back then for these strapping Canadians. Talk about living memories!
Later I heard that a lot of those ‘Hunger Winter’ Dutch boys remembered something else: how when the Canadians rode through the cheering masses, the soldiers would lift up women onto their tanks and trucks by picking them up like a 10-pin bowling balls… (Which is kind of weird since one of the marks of Canadian identity is a preference for 5-pin bowling.)
But anyway, I decided to just focus on the purely liberation part of the story. I started to bring my Canadian passport with me on Liberation Days in the hopes of scamming free beer for the sacrifices my country had made. Actually, I just tried it on a befriended bartender. And when he wasn’t immediately forthcoming with the free beer, I tried to suggest that he really owed me: after all, maybe I was his Daddy. After a brief lecture in mathematics he finally relented and gave me a beer. But his true gift came later. As I exited I shouted goodbye to him across the crowded bar. He returned with a: “Hey man, thanks for the liberation!” And just before the door swung shut behind me I had time to yell “Hey man, anytime!”.
It was the best bar exit scene ever. So of course I tried to relive this magic moment every year. Until a regular who had witnessed my ploys pointed out to me: ‘Yes, liberation is all fine and good, but occupation is not.’ I knew then that I had worn out my welcome as Canadian Beer Liberator.
But it still felt like destiny a couple of years ago when I was cast as a Canadian major liberating Holland in the film Snuf de Hond in Oorlogstijd [‘Snuf the Dog in Wartime’], which was based on a children book series about a Lassie-like dog who became a hero of the Dutch Resistance. Basically I played a gullible Canadian peckerhead who falls for the stories of a traitor who is supposed to show us the enemy German positions but is instead setting us up for a trap. Luckily, Snuf comes in just in time to save the day. You could say the Canadians came off quite badly in this movie. Or you could say I was being typecast as usual.
But my favourite story related to the Liberation by the Canadians I heard while taking a cab to Schiphol airport. The cabbie was an old Dutch guy and after I told him that I was heading back to Canada to visit my family he said: ‘I got a story you will just love.’
He told me how he was born a few years before WWII in the south of Holland and how during the war he acted as his blind grandfather’s seeing-eye dog. One night, his Opa and he were walking under the cover of darkness to a nearby village to trade food, milk, tulip bulbs, whatever. Suddenly his Opa heard some sort of heavy transport coming in their direction. Worried that it was the Germans, they hid behind a fence. But as it came closer, his Opa realised that the engines sounded different. So they came out of hiding and saw a whole procession of tanks and trucks. The leading tank stopped in front of them, the top popped up and a soldier appeared and asked in English: ‘Is this the way to Arnhem?’ Opa replied in the affirmative and then asked back in English: ‘Are you Americans?’
The soldier looked down at blind Opa with disgust and answered “No way old man. We’re fucking Canadians!”
Now isn’t that a heart-warming tale? Isn’t it nice to know that such a well-developed sense of Canadian-ness already existed back in 1945? Isn’t it enough to make a Canadian nationalist out of you?
Of course, I became a fierce Canadian nationalist once I stopped living there 20 years ago. For a long time, I would always be ready to natter on about Canada’s natural beauty, expansive spaces, nice folks, un-American-ness, reasonable immigration policies, multiculturalism as a matter-of-fact and not a matter of endless circular discussions…
However my nationalism eventually got dimmed by a friend in Amsterdam who happened to have an estranged Canadian lumberjack father. He once interrupted one of my pro-Canadian rants with: ‘You want to know what I think about when I think of Canada? I think of a drunk that used to beat me.’
Indeed. ‘Where’s my Daddy?’
Mokum – Trippel X ft. Sharla Sookha from Michiel Eijsbouts on Vimeo. Another heartwarming, and kind of hilarious, love song to Amsterdam with the video providing another fine, and kind of hilarious, tour of the city. In Dutch.
Yesterday I bought a Sunday paper that should last me quite a few Sundays. It’s the one-off San Francisco Panorama brought to you by the always inspired folks behind McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. It’s pretty old already but I think it took until their third run until there were enough copies leftover to make it to Amsterdam’s Athenaeum. (But I guess I could have also just ordered it here.)
Anyway, it’s pretty mindblowing. Basically they wanted to present the relevance a paper newspaper can still have in our internet world: so it’s all in-depth journalism by amazing writers complete with high quality art, photography and design. They even give a run-down of the budget to inspire others to come up with their own daily newspaper. It actually comes across as a cross between a (really really nice) Sunday paper and a (really really nice) alternative weekly. And certainly, if I was still the editor of an alternative weekly, I’d definitely steal — I mean, get inspired by — some of their ideas. It’s really, really that great. Gotta bless those paper products!
