This Saturday me and my boyfriend went to the festival Motel Mozaique. It’s a cultural festival where known and unknown bands, art, theater and food come together.
I mostly went for Belle and Sebastian and next to José Gonzales, it was the only thing I saw that night, but it was enough! I was a bit of a late bloomer when it comes to Belle and Sebastian and only learned about them when I saw their video of Funny Little Frog (my indie cred just flew out of the window). But it was love at first site and after listening to all their albums, waiting for their newest one and even owning a calendar, it was time to see them live.
They only play one show in Holland this entire year, and I was there! It was a fun, crazy show, unlike any other I’ve seen so far. There was a lot of awkward dancing, awkward audience people and more awkward conversation. I’ve never seen this much awkwardness in one room! They pulled people on stage to dance with them, which was great fun. I forget my camera, so I couldn’t take any pictures and I still can’t find any video’s of the dancing online. So too bad, but I can’t show it to you! I really liked Chris Geddes and his piano, he looked nice and geeky in the background, but sounded really cool playing all his music. Stuart Murdoch was also being a great frontman, wearing a cool hat and suddenly appearing in the midst of the audience to do some more singing and to shake some hands. He even put on some mascara, especially for us! They are a very interesting and energetic band, which isn’t always the case with indie music. Because it had been a while since they visited Rotterdam, or Holland for that matter, they played some oldies next to their new album. My favourite album is The Life Pursuit (any indie cred I had left is now gone altogether) and I was really happy they played Sukie in the Graveyard, which is such a fun and upbeat song.
I did find two other video’s so you can also enjoy some of it. I especially like the second one because Stevie Jackson was making fun of our musical talent. Have a look and if you get the chance to see the, definitely go there! And if you can’t go see them, just listen to some of their albums, or all of their albums. I promise they will put a smile on your face.
This Wednesday Lotte and I went to Amsterdam for the Monki Party. They were having a party to showcase their spring/summer 2011 collection and everyone was getting a 20% discount on everything! We decided to spend the entire day in Amsterdam and went to Restored to buy Frankie Magazine, which is a great magazine, but I’ll write more about it when I finish it.
Lotte also bought Russh, another Australian magazine, at Athaeneum Newscentre (this is the best place to get magazines anywhere in Holland) and she bought really sweet smelling chocolate tea at Tea Bar, which is apparently delicious and even available online!
The Monki party was pretty fun. They had champagne, pink champagne, beer and non alcoholic drinks. There were two very female dj’s with very awesome moustaches and lots and lots of people. I’ve never seen a store that busy. We had to stand in line to try on the big stack of clothing for about half an hour and also had to wait the same amount of time to pay for them. But the 20% discount was worth it and we both bought some nice new items! I think it’s a really cool idea to have a party for the new collection and I hope they’ll do this again for autumn/winter.
Back in Rotterdam we went to the second edition of the Swan market. It was at Rotabs Stylecenter, which is an awesome location. The weather was delightfully sunny and the place was buzzing with people. It was nice, but we did think it was too bad that there weren’t that many new people there. We did off course, take some pictures!
This weekend I went to the Young Masters @ auction at Roodkapje organized by Ongekend. The art auction was organized for relatively unknown artists that were given a place to show off what they can do. It was my very first auction and I was pretty excited! It’s a fast paced, highly competitive business, but only when people are willing to spent some real money off course. The bids on the first couple of artworks went pretty slowly and it sort of seemed like there wasn’t a lot of interest. But soon the bids went up to 600 and 700 euros and money started rolling. The artworks were projected on a screen one by one, when all of a sudden there was a really creepy sound welling up from another room, a low, dark, drone like sound. No one seemed to notice or pay attention to it and I sort of started to freak out a bit. I looked around for impending doom or people suddenly freezing, but nothing of the sort seemed to happen. The noise stopped and I decided I was probably crazy. It's always better to just ignore these things.
There were 45 artists showing their work, and it was kind of a shame not all of them got to sell their work, but as the auctioneer said, people were being very ‘Dutch’ in their bids, which meant most were looking for cheap buys. I was a tiny bit disappointed by this ‘dream small’ mentality of the country I live in, but it was still a really cool concept and lots of people got to show their work. Besides watching the auction, I took some pictures and even found out where the creepy, doomy noise came from!
The Auctioneers
Thijs van Gasteren had brought three installations which all looked very intricate and also reminded me a bit of scary alien sentinels. They were really cool to just stare at and try to figure out what they did and how he made them work.
Nano Microscoop
Personal Computer
I also liked Nurzehra Ulukaya ceramic work, especially the Deer and an artwork called Abeyance, which hung from the ceiling right above the audience.
Untitled (Deer)
Abeyance
Erik Overmeire en Dennis de Bel made two artworks which have their basis in one art discipline that gets translated to another. The one called One Frame is an image which they used as the ‘source’ for a soundfragment, which got printed onto only 4 cd’s. Very arty indeed! Their other work worked the other way around. They used sound to generate the image and made it into a lightobject. The work was put in a half-lit room, which really showed how pretty it was.
One Second
One Frame
Sigrún Gudmundsdóttir, an Icelandic artist who now lives in Rotterdam had brought an installation called Two a Day, which really catered to my organized mind. She also brought a ‘statue’ called By the Dozen, which was a woman covered in empty medicine strips. She looked like a futuristic shiny woman, which is off course a good thing!
Rotganzen, an art collective from Rotterdam, brought a huge fluorescent lollypop with the word hexamethylphosphoramide on it (it’s a mildly toxic liquid). It comes from a series called Gangredine Consumptus.
Hexamethylphosphoramide
What war once was (Pocket edition)
The scary noise I heard apparently came from this big black box made by Daniel Maalman. It’s a soundproof, one-person, completely dark box which gives you a sound experience. The low bassy sounds already frightened me enough, so getting the full experience didn’t seem like a great plan to me, but others told me it was pretty cool and intense.
The Blackbox
When I left to get my coat I was in for one more art-experience. The girls hanging everyone’s coat were from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie concocting a artwork of their own. It was called Coat Check and involved them putting on everyone’s coat and taking a picture of it next to a sign with the person’s name on it. The images were projected and repeated on a screen, but in case you missed them wearing your jacket, they also printed the picture and pinned it to your coat. It was sort of an invasion of privacy, but I thought it was a really fun idea to take something ‘intimate’ and turn it into something public. And it was great that you get a picture of it!
Coat check wearing my coat
As said, I liked the auction and it was a great opportunity for a lot of new artists, but I would love to visit a real auction with really known artists and see how that works. If you know any I could go to, please let me know!
This week Starbucks shocked the world, or at least me, with the introduction of their new cup size. It's bigger than most people's stomachs and it reminds me of those Big Gulps that I could wear as a hat when I visited Chicago. Now, of course Starbucks is still very exotic for us Dutchies (there are only 5 in the whole country!) and we still love to go there and feel like worldly citizens, but there are more coffee bars, that are arguably even more awesome.
A coffeehouse or coffee shop is an establishment which primarily serves prepared coffee or other hot beverages. It shares some of the characteristics of a bar, and some of the characteristics of a restaurant, but it is different from a cafeteria. As the name suggests, coffeehouses focus on providing coffee and tea as well as light snacks. Many coffee houses in the Middle East, and in West Asian immigrant districts in the Western world, offer shisha (nargile in Turkish and Greek), flavored tobacco smoked through a hookah.
From a cultural standpoint, coffeehouses largely serve as centers of social interaction: the coffeehouse provides social members with a place to congregate, talk, write, read, entertain one another, or pass the time, whether individually or in small groups of 2 or 3.
Says Wikipedia
In The Netherlands there is no word for it yet. A Dutch coffee shop is a place to buy weed and a café is a place to go to get drunk.
Coffee houses are the perfect places to just do absolutely nothing. I always felt a bit awkward going out for a drink on my own, especially when I'd just moved here and had no friends yet. Rotterdam was a new city, a totally new life. I am a small town girl and was so excited about all the new possibilities in the city. I just wanted to get out of the house to take pictures, people-watch and have a damn good cup of coffee.
What makes a coffee place a good cafe? In my opinion, this is the ultimate combination:
* It should be dark with dimmed yellow lights
* Not too noisy - make those ice coffees in the back please!
* The people who work there should be friendly and preferably good friends to each other - the people who visit must be nice too and preferably creative and silent
* There should be good coffee music; something jazzy or laid back folky
* There should be cozy clean chairs; faux leather preferably or maybe vintage soft real leather
* The coffee should be amazing; there must be great espressos and ristrettos but also yerba maté and mint tea and funky weird coffee with all kinds of flavours
* There should also be a variety of milk to choose from - they should at least have soy milk. * The coffee should be sustainably farmed. It makes the coffee good for the soul too. * The coffees and teas must have epic made up names like: Carolina Honey Breeze (Argo Tea) or Campfire Mocha (Caribou Coffee).
And it should have a nice view, like this (the photographer didn't make his photo's available for sharing, but it's definitely worth clicking)
These people agree :)
This picture was taken by Valerie You can find Descartes at 327 N Michigan Ave in The Loop
I have travelled on my own to Toronto and to Chicago. In Chicago I had an amazing couchsurf host who showed me this awesome coffee bar. Coffee bars are safe havens for me when I travel. I spend my days outside, just walking around and getting lost, try to meet nice people and take loads of pictures - my tourist senses on full alert. After a few hours I get incredibly tired and drag my weary feet to a coffee bar to photoshop and send messages to the home front.
This was another favourite in Chicago:
The Noble Tree is my most favourite cafe to date. It's like several stories of an apartment. It's a library, living room, cafe, lookout and pastry paradise in one building - really awesome.
These pictures of the Noble Tree Coffee House were taken by Gingerbydesign You can visit the Noble Tree at 2444 N Clark in Lincoln Park
You can visit the Coffee Company in Rotterdam at Eendrachtsplein
And this is my most favourite coffee bar in The Netherlands. It's actually the first cafe that really made me appreciate coffee. The atmosphere is cozy and there's lots of interesting people to look at. The baristas are really kind and the coffee is great.
The big boss is called Dick de Kock (which is an amazing name if you want to be succesful abroad) or coffeedick on Twitter. And the icing on the cake is the huge statue of a gnome with a buttplug standing right in front of the building.
I wouldn't want to end this post with a dirty gnome, so for more coffee inspiration you should visit this Flickr Pool - The Coffee Bar
