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.
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!
We just returned from a profound week in Moscow reinvigorating our Yuri Gagarin project. We met some profound cosmonauts, space psychs, arctic survivalists and regular good ol’ folk — all of whom knew how to toast us into submission. A big story is coming out of this and we shall return soon! So stay tuned… Space is indeed the place!
Allain de Botton visits the artificial residental island of IJburg outside Amsterdam.
via videosift.com
Mmmm. Breakfast.
Ten years ago Serbian warlord Željko ‘Arkan’ Ražnatović was shot dead in the lobby of a Belgrade hotel. He was a gangster. He was a nationalist. He was the Mr Clean of ethnic cleansing. I wrote about him in ‘Arkantecture: A Field Guide to Serbian Gangster Kitsch‘. The picture on the left is of his former home in Belgrade where I believe his widow, the turbofolk queen Ceca, still lives. Apparently a movie about Arkan starring Vinnie Jones will be released later this year. Ouch.
Last month Virtueel Platform, “the sector institute for e-culture in the Netherlands”, asked me to write a report about their Hot100 programme taking place at the new media lovefest PICNIC ‘09 where both design hipsters and billionaire entrepeneurs come together to chart out our transmedia futures. Hot100 brings together the hottest new media students for a day of lectures and workshopping. And it turned that, indeed, the kids are alright… Read my report here.
I’m no fashion guru. Nope. But last year during Amsterdam International Fashion Week (which is opening this Wednesday and running until 26 July), I had a roundtable with three local fashion gurus and was highly entertained and educated. But even though ‘everything is allowed’, I’m still no fashion guru. Nope.
