[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.]

[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…’ 

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 http://www.stevekorver.com/2011/05/stoned-tourists-rip-a-youtube-tribute%e2%80%a6/ http://www.stevekorver.com/2011/05/stoned-tourists-rip-a-youtube-tribute%e2%80%a6/#comments Tue, 31 May 2011 12:53:32 +0000 stevekor http://www.stevekorver.com/?p=2630 It’s currently a pretty sweet deal for tourists in the Netherlands. They can strut through the front door of a coffeeshop, smugly engage in a simple transaction, and then smoke the sweet smoke. They can exit the same front door: wiggly, wasted and most importantly — for they have done no wrong — free of paranoia. The glitch is that the wobbly law that allows them this simple pleasure neglected to deal with how the wacky weed got there in the first place. The ‘back door’ where the produce arrives by the kilo is still a gateway to an illegal distribution system.

It’s a typical situation in the Netherlands. It may not be legal but it’s ‘tolerated’. This is why the Dutch national government has been regularly re-introducing the debate of how to deal with this situation — and all those silly, stoned tourists. Whenever this debate reared its head an editor from a foreign newspaper would call me and ask ‘Hey what’s going on? Are they really closing the coffeeshops?’ And then I would have to kill any work opportunity by going ‘No it’s all just talk’. But now the national coalition seems more serious. Crazy. But serious. They plan to institutionalise a ‘weed pass’ whereby only locals would have access to coffeeshops. Were these zealots stoned when they came up with this idea? Now don’t get me wrong, I would love to have a weed pass. I could then show it off to friends back in Canada so they can go: ‘A weed pass!?! You’re kidding right?!?’

Naturally the national government did not consult with the local city governments that have to actually implement such a policy and also deal directly with the inevitable rise in street dealing and criminal control. While Amsterdam has been very busy in the last years to lower the number of coffeeshops, the vast majority of local politicians think the weed pass is a batshit crazy idea. So things won’t change much here in the short-term. But just in case, here’s a tribute to that species that may just be one step closer to extinction: the batshit crazy stoned tourist.

Cheech and Chong’s Still Smokin’ (1983) has the dopehead duo visiting their spiritual Mecca and being consistently confused for Burt Reynolds and Dolly Parton. Yes, they were probably stoned when they came up with that scenario. They end up partaking in a long list of local activities in such landmarks as the Tuschinski Cinema, Hotel Okura and a gay sauna. While the movie features cameos by such future luminaries as Arjan Ederveen and Kees Prins, the movie is still really, really bad – and sadly, it’s not even badder-than-bad-that-it’s-good-again. A lost opportunity.

The sheer badness of Still Smokin’ has one advantage. It makes Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo (2005) more digestible. However not nearly as digestible as waffles and chicken. The movie has more stoner-esque moments but the above scene stands out for actually being funny.

Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008) is also packed with Amster-scenery – the most scenic being a cameo by Boom Chicago’s Rob AndristPlourde as the toking fifth wheel to Harold and Kumar’s double date on a canal boat (watch the unembeddable scene HERE). AndristPlourde appeared earlier in the movie as the bag of pot in the threesome scene. The dude is a chameleon. A freaking chameleon.

Large parts of Ocean’s 12 (watch the unembeddable coffeeshop scene HERE) with Clooney, Pitt and the gang were set and filmed in Amsterdam. While the local response quickly soured to having Hollywood filming here, the Dampkring coffeeshop did extend their thanks for being chosen as a location by adding a special ‘Ocean’s 12 Haze’ to their menus. Now put that in your pipe and smoke it. Or perhaps you shouldn’t… Because if there is an overall lesson to be learned from the above clips it is: drugs are bad. Very, very bad. And worse: very rarely funny. So perhaps the weed pass is not such a bad idea after all. And as bonus, people could use the card to cut up their coke. Now that could make for a hilarious scene. Hmm, perhaps the powers-that-be thought this idea through after all…

The oldest clip comes from Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940). Since he was filming it at the dawn of WWII, Hitchcock was forced to ask Hollywood set-builders to build a fake Amsterdam complete with ‘a few hotels, a Dutch windmill and a bit of the Dutch countryside’. It resulted in an 80-metre windmill and a 10-acre reconstruction of an Amsterdam square (with Hotel L’Europe becoming ‘Hotel Europe’), complete with sewer for the simulated storm scenes. The cameraman sent to get background footage in the real Amsterdam lost his equipment when his ship got torpedoed. But he did eventually film the Jordaan for the chase scene. Unfortunately after a jarring left-turn, the viewer lands in a countryside with an oddly Spanish-styled windmill (sadly, this lack of research also flawed the windmill scene in the South Park movie’s ‘Kyle’s Mom is a Bitch’ segment). However Foreign Correspondent does retain a realistic sense of location thanks to all the cheese references.

Another thriller that used Dutch stereotypes effectively was Puppet on a Chain (1971), a tale of illicit drugs and apathetic Amsterdam cops based on a book by Alistair MacLean. The chase scene begins at Muiden Castle and crosses the IJ before entering the city proper. If I remember correctly, the movie has its true climax when traditionally-dressed Volendammer ladies do a murderous clog dance all over someone’s face (will someone please load that scene onto YouTube…).

The Puppet on a String boat chase obviously inspired director Dick Maas for his Amsterdamned (1988). Maas’s boat chase is only marred by similar continuity problems as those found above in Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent. Can you spot the scenes that are filmed in Amsterdam and those filmed in Utrecht?

Okay, I got to slow down.

328 Stories is a production house for some of the more happening film-makers in the Netherlands and beyond. They aim to produce 328 stories every year. I helped out by writing 10. Check out their website, click on a ‘storyteller’ and then scroll over their name. There’s a pop-up in which I tried to tell the storyteller’s story in less than 90 words. It was a fun gig. It  also reminded me that there are still many, many, many stories out there. So listen people: let’s go out there and nail them!

Of the hundreds worldwide, three Gagarin-related events are taking place in Amsterdam tomorrow on 12 April 2011, the 50th anniversary of Yuri’s flight around the planet.

Between 4 and 10pm: Cosmic Mania Anno 2011 is the official Yuri’s Night party and features an exhibition of press photographs from the collection of cosmonautics obsessive Jaap Terweij.

Between 5 and 7pm: Opening of small exhibition of Gagarin-related books at University of Amsterdam’s PC Hoofthuis library on Spuistraat. I’m being interviewed by librarian/rocker Marko Petrovic who has lived intimately with Yuri’s legend: he grew up on Yuri Gagarin Boulevard in Novi Belgrade, Serbia. Free vodka. While it lasts.

From 8.30pm until late: International Day of Cosmonautics at the Smart Project Space. Ambitious-sounding programme of space art, microgravity performances, video and swinging Soviet space tunes. Entrance 9 euros.