Keep your paws off my city

Blijf van me stad af. Positive city propaganda from amsterhoppers Surya & Pharao.

Amsterdam cops with Harry Enfield and Chums

The accent is quite uncanny… While the military police can often look like illustrations from A Field Guide to the Inbred, I’ve always regarded the local police as nothing less than cute and cuddly. And it’s that warm fuzzy feeling that is reinforced when watching this clip.

Ai ai ai Amsterdam

The local anti-vertrutting (”anti-frumpication”) action group AI! Amsterdam, who this summer successfully lobbied for the easing of terrace laws, has changed their logo after being threatened with legal action from the city since their original logo was a parody of the I Amsterdam city marketing campaign. Hmm so not having a sense of humour is good for the city brand?

These are complicated times we live in. It was all much simpler back in the 1970s. To entice more people to visit Amsterdam all you had to do was put out some posters cajoling long-haired American targets to “Fly KLM, sleep in the Vondelpark”. Word of mouth did the rest.

And then there was the tourist board’s Get In Touch With The Dutch campaign during the 1960s. This one just gets me all misty-eyed; those must have truly been the most innocent of times.

And for the last few years, it’s been I amsterdam. I can imagine it can work to help attract tourists and business. I only start seeing red when it peddles the delusional idea that it also works to unify regular Amsterdammers. It’s as if the local government actually believes that culture is not a grassroots phenomena but rather something that can be shoved down our throats from the top down.

OK, it’s easy to criticise. Marketing a city can’t be easy. I certainly can’t come up with anything better. “Ich bin ein Amsterdammertje” would probably generate the same confusion and controversy as JFK’s grammatical gaffe, “Ich bin ein Berliner”. And “Handy Airport. Lotsa Coffeeshops”, while appealing to both the business- and leisure-minded, lacks a certain elegance.

I think I’d just opt for golden oldies like ‘Amsterdamned’ or ‘Amsterdamaged’. I regard these lines as way more effective ambassadors. After all, the visiting dope smokers of today may just hold our city’s future in their hands. I figure it was mostly sentimental ex-hippies who invested in this city during the booming 1990s. They figured it would be a good excuse to come and visit a few times a year, and maybe recreate certain perfect relaxed coffeeshop moments from decades past. (And these investments got the city thinking that they could get even more by coming up with that era’s ho-hum city marketing ploys — “Gateway to Europe”  and “Capital of Inspiration” — that resulted in the building of lots of new office space that today stands largely empty…).

Anyway… it was short-sighted to force Ai! Amsterdam to change their logo. The city is losing a perfect co-branding opportunity with a group that is both grassroots and community-driven.

A monumental day

Now what kind of self-respecting secret society opens its doors on “Open Monument Day“? The Freemasons that’s who. Yep, as a boy’s club they’ve been coming out of the closet for a while now–apparently membership numbers have been dropping steady for some years now.  And so just like everyone else these days they are going through a rebranding process. Today I saw both their “red temple” and their “blue temple” at their lodge at the corner of Vondelstraat and 1e Constantijn Huygenstraat. Sadly, I did not get to see the beer-tapping room donated by Freddy Heineken’s dad Henry Pierre…

The general impression was, um, it’s a tad shabby. Yo Grandmaster: time for a paint job and some new carpeting, perhaps? But I shouldn’t judge: maybe seeking world domination isn’t the high-paying gig we all assume it is. Or maybe they really are just some fellows banded together who use building metaphors in their voyage towards self-discovery. The Freemason I talked to said their secretive reputation comes only from the fact that they are protective about their rituals so that when new members experience them they are more emotionally affected. Regardless, they certainly aren’t Bilderberg. [Please note: out of respect for the Freemason's once-secretive reputation, I only took a picture from the outside.]

I also got to look inside some of the houses along one of my favourite residential streets, Bellamystraat, that runs up from the center of Ten Katenstraat market. At number 74, small-scale industry is alive and well in the form of the blacksmith company GF Meister en Zonen who have been at it since 1909. Compared to the Freemasons, this place is more manly than merely men-only.