i'm just glad to be here
Just got into Amsterdam tonight after three fun-filled days in Paris with Antonin and Remi. I also got to spend a few minutes catching up with the maestro himself, Hypo, as well as an impromptu music session comprised of me and Momus on guitar (I played mine with a Bic lighter, Momus played traditional style, just with his hands), Toog, on a shiny new digital synthesier, Digiki on Windows computer, and Remi sampling and looping us in 16 bit glory with his amazing Treo palm-pilot thingamajig. I don't think the sound files will show up on this website anytime soon, they could be used as blackmail at some point in the future.
All in all, it's great to be back in Europe! My feeling when arriving, both in France and the Netherlands, is that I am back in the place where I feel most comfortable in the world. If America is from Mars and Europe is from Venus, as Rem Koolhaas said in his Content exhibits in Berlin and Rotterdam, I'll most certainly take Venus, no questions asked.
And I do like San Francisco very much also, which is good, since I just got an apartment in the Noe Valley area, it's just that it's still America, as much as it tries not to be, and America is a pretty fucked-up country at the moment, with a woefully underinformed populace and an intensely greedy upper class. Even San Francisco is full of money fascists. And you can feel that pressure in America, this intense and insane expectation by almost everyone that says that you should be working your ass off to make more dollars, and if not, then you're just a second-class citizen, condemned to ride 2nd class public transportation and eat 2nd class food. But in Europe, especially in Amsterdam, I don't sense that pressure nearly as much, if at all. I don't mean to exaggerate, it is not an artistic Shangri-la here in Europe, but it might be about the best we have on this little planet.
Comments
the same is true here in nyc right now. work or die. crazy amount of pressure to work all the time. and limited amount of work available. then high rents. can sometimes be a little much. but then left with the ironic twist, that since there is less, work, there is less money.. so though you may have more time. you can't afford to leave, and if you did. you might miss some work. nice little cycle its got going for it.
Posted by: trevor | July 13, 2004 2:19 AM
i think the way out of that nasty cycle in holland is that people are actually paid (if they are EU passport holders, anyhow) for their art here. i was speaking to someone the other night who works for a funding commission here in amsterdam, and she really worries that the quality of art suffers because of the large amounts of money that are given to the arts. her point is valid, but i still think that a culture that allows artists to survive without the stress of worrying about issues of basic survival is much healthier. if there's more art happening, of course there's more of a chance of some of it being rather uninteresting and boring. but 100 shows with 10 bad ones is still a much better situation than 10 shows with 5 bad ones.
Posted by: roddy | July 13, 2004 6:46 PM
why does hypo have to work for a livin'?
Posted by: r. | July 14, 2004 9:27 PM