Accidental

admin — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:34:07 +0000

Long weekend

admin — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 13:44:59 +0000

I organised a Quiet Night In at the Anita on Thursday, followed by a Big Night Out on Friday. Lots of happy people; very rewarding.

Here’s one of the compilations we showed on the night

This weekend was also the Dutch Sinterklaas celebration.

When I first arrived in the Netherlands about 30 years ago, it was still a more important event than Christmas to many people here, as far as I can remember. It still is to many, especially kids, but Christmas is competing ever more strongly.
So the upshot is that December starts and ends with gift-giving – good for kids and the retail industry.

One of the things that distiguishes Sinterklaas from Christmas is that gifts are supposedly given by the Sint (an alternative take on Saint Nicolas), rather than family members. ‘He’ writes a poem about some aspect of the recipient’s character or what they’ve done during the previous year, and the present itself somehow relates to the content of the poem. Also, traditionally in any case, the presents are fairly modest – it’s about the message and the gesture more than the material value.

So the kid reads the poem out loud before opening the present. It can make for an amusing and sometimes touching kind of social theatre when people come up with good poems and presents. It introduces another level of creativity that you don’t generally find at Christmas.

But the strangest thing about Sinterklaas celebrations for an outsider, is that in instead of Santa Claus’s elf helpers the Dutch Sint is assisted by black-skinned ’servants’. They are played by blacked-up white people with afro wigs.

Many otherwise rational Dutch people apparently don’t recognise the racist undertones and origins of the tradition and claim that the Black Petes get their colour from chimney soot, for example. But to anyone else it looks like the sort of racist stereotyping that finally disappeared in the 1970s elsewhere in the West.

Last year a museum exhibition opposing the tradition had to be cancelled due to protests.

But there are other eloquent commentators on the subject.

Master satirist Wim de Bie, for example

and the lads from Draadstaal

(huge props to Caspar for the original tip and the handmade subs for both of these)

Both went down a storm at Quiet Night In.

Telling stories

admin — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:06:16 +0000

IDFA’s on this week in Amsterdam and Ira Glass appeared there, but I missed him. Didn’t know much about him till a few weeks ago. Seems like an inspiring chap. Did however see his uncle playing piano in the Mazzo of all places, about 100 million years ago — a long time.

Wish I’d checked out the IDFA programme a bit earlier, I got a lot to learn:

An accident waiting to happen

admin — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 10:28:30 +0000

Sometimes my eye catches something on the street and I wish I could have recorded it, captured it somehow. I guess it’s a feeling many people share. Perhaps one day we’ll all be permanently equipped with high-resolution panoramic camera’s recording every detail of the days events. Then we’ll be able to spend the evenings editing the highlights. Let’s hope not.
But I do usually carry a camera in my bag, just in case.

Passing some folded-up cardboard boxes that had been chucked out, my mind was snagged by the odd phrase printed on one of them: ACCIDENTS GIFT. I walked on, my brakes rendered momentarily ineffective by a mixture of laziness and slight social embarrassment at the thought of taking a picture of cardboard boxes. But manly man that I am I overcame the inertia and took the left picture of the two below.

As I turned to walk on again, I saw the boxes toppling over. It must have been a gust of wind caused by a passing car, because it wasn’t a windy day. An accident.
It struck me that this was a lovely sequence of events, and I took the second photo. To me, the two together tell a tiny, poignant story: accidents gift, followed by the gift of an accident.

Accident's Gift

First draft

admin — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:49:28 +0000

Together with some friends I’ve been running a comedy video event in Amsterdam for a couple of years now. It’s called Quiet Night In (QNI). It started off as (very) occasional afternoons watching videos of funny stuff we liked on telly, and then developed into a very enjoyable irregular series of evenings at one of the most treasured and splendid venues in Amsterdam, De Nieuwe Anita.

The Anita is a small but perfectly formed space with about 40 seats downstairs, most of which are filled at most QNIs. Like a big living room really, which is part of the reason people seem to fall in love with the place the moment they walk through the door.
The comedy? Mostly British television comedy, with some clips from Australia, America and New Zealand thrown in for good measure.

I’m sure I’ll write more about it in the future, but for now here’s a couple of QNI favourites.