I just happened to have this picture, taken last June in Amsterdam, of a car fitted with a boot. Looks like vehicular torture.
Showing posts with label Amsterdam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Amsterdam. Show all posts
Friday, January 11, 2008
Car with Boot
I just happened to have this picture, taken last June in Amsterdam, of a car fitted with a boot. Looks like vehicular torture.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
D'Artagnan
This is in the exhibit at the Dikker & Thijs Fenice Hotel in Amsterdam.
From a slight distance.
From farther away.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Anne Frank's Birthday
No one would go with me to the Anne Frank House. I can’t say that I blame them. It’s a bit hard to plan what you’re going to do next, after visiting the Anne Frank House. Take the Heineken Brewery tour? Get stoned in a coffee shop? I don’t think so.
I’d been to Amsterdam three times before (though never for more than five days at a stretch), so I was overdue for this literary pilgrimage. Also, I’d just read Philip Roth's “The Ghost Writer,” in which Nathan Zuckerman visits the eminent writer E. I. Lonoff in Connecticut and gets snowed in and fantasizes that Lonoff’s protégée, Amy Bellette, is really Anne Frank, who has survived the war but must live under an assumed name, because the fact of her survival would undermine her posthumous literary success. If there was ever a time for me to go to the Anne Frank House, this was it.
The Anne Frank House is on the Prinsengracht, in the neighborhood called the Jordaan. I entered the house behind a troop of scouts from Slovenia or somewhere, in uniforms the color of tiger lilies. Actually, I tried to avoid being behind the Slovene scouts by going into a bagel café next door and killing some time on the Internet, which was free to customers. But I caught up with them, and then they kept catching up with me.
As a travel destination, the Anne Frank House is the opposite of the Alhambra. The building had been the office and warehouse of Otto Frank’s pectin business, Opekta, and on the lower floors there is documentation of the firm and information about the loyal employees who ran it (and who protected the Franks). There are flat-screen TVs with footage of Nazis and Allies to set the historical tone, the voice of an actress with a British accent reading Anne Frank’s words, passages from the diary, in Dutch and English, stencilled on the walls. On the second floor is the bookcase concealing the stairway to the secret annex, at the top floor rear of the building: two floors of small shabby rooms and an attic, the only decoration being the photographs of movie stars and royalty that Anne pasted on the walls of the room she shared with an elderly dentist.
I must have been about thirteen when I read “The Diary of a Young Girl,” as it was called, and I just didn’t get it. I was keeping a diary myself at the time, and had precious little to report (it snowed; I made cheerleader; maybe I would become a nun). I’d never met a Jew. I was simply ignorant. Now I am aghast. How did it escape my awareness that this girl did not go outside for more than two years? I am someone who likes to be outside when the weather’s nice, to sit at sidewalk cafes; I keep the windows open even when it’s raining, and always roll down the windows in the car. Here is Anne Frank on August 10, 1943: “When I get up in the morning ... I leap out of bed, think to myself, ‘You’ll be slipping back under the covers soon,’ walk to the window, take down the black-out screen, sniff at the crack until I feel a bit of fresh air, and I’m awake.”
The attached museum was even more stifling than the annex. I looked at the original diary, under glass, in its red plaid cover, and the documentation of the deaths, at the hands of the Nazis, of all the inhabitants of the annex except Otto Frank, and then Anne Frank said to me, Go outside and get some fresh air. Before I left, I stopped in the bookstore; it was astonishing to see the shelves and shelves of different translations. I bought a paperback copy of the diary—it was the obvious thing to read next. Anne Frank wrote on April 27, 1943, that “the Carlton Hotel has been destroyed. Two British planes loaded with firebombs landed right on top of the German Officers’ Club. The entire corner of Vijzelstraat and Singel has gone up in flames.” That’s exactly where I was propped up in bed reading, in the Carlton Hotel Jolly, on Vijzelstraat and Singel, on a Saturday night. I couldn't sleep because of the noise outside, and I couldn't bring myself to close the windows.
I’d been to Amsterdam three times before (though never for more than five days at a stretch), so I was overdue for this literary pilgrimage. Also, I’d just read Philip Roth's “The Ghost Writer,” in which Nathan Zuckerman visits the eminent writer E. I. Lonoff in Connecticut and gets snowed in and fantasizes that Lonoff’s protégée, Amy Bellette, is really Anne Frank, who has survived the war but must live under an assumed name, because the fact of her survival would undermine her posthumous literary success. If there was ever a time for me to go to the Anne Frank House, this was it.
The Anne Frank House is on the Prinsengracht, in the neighborhood called the Jordaan. I entered the house behind a troop of scouts from Slovenia or somewhere, in uniforms the color of tiger lilies. Actually, I tried to avoid being behind the Slovene scouts by going into a bagel café next door and killing some time on the Internet, which was free to customers. But I caught up with them, and then they kept catching up with me.
As a travel destination, the Anne Frank House is the opposite of the Alhambra. The building had been the office and warehouse of Otto Frank’s pectin business, Opekta, and on the lower floors there is documentation of the firm and information about the loyal employees who ran it (and who protected the Franks). There are flat-screen TVs with footage of Nazis and Allies to set the historical tone, the voice of an actress with a British accent reading Anne Frank’s words, passages from the diary, in Dutch and English, stencilled on the walls. On the second floor is the bookcase concealing the stairway to the secret annex, at the top floor rear of the building: two floors of small shabby rooms and an attic, the only decoration being the photographs of movie stars and royalty that Anne pasted on the walls of the room she shared with an elderly dentist.
I must have been about thirteen when I read “The Diary of a Young Girl,” as it was called, and I just didn’t get it. I was keeping a diary myself at the time, and had precious little to report (it snowed; I made cheerleader; maybe I would become a nun). I’d never met a Jew. I was simply ignorant. Now I am aghast. How did it escape my awareness that this girl did not go outside for more than two years? I am someone who likes to be outside when the weather’s nice, to sit at sidewalk cafes; I keep the windows open even when it’s raining, and always roll down the windows in the car. Here is Anne Frank on August 10, 1943: “When I get up in the morning ... I leap out of bed, think to myself, ‘You’ll be slipping back under the covers soon,’ walk to the window, take down the black-out screen, sniff at the crack until I feel a bit of fresh air, and I’m awake.”
The attached museum was even more stifling than the annex. I looked at the original diary, under glass, in its red plaid cover, and the documentation of the deaths, at the hands of the Nazis, of all the inhabitants of the annex except Otto Frank, and then Anne Frank said to me, Go outside and get some fresh air. Before I left, I stopped in the bookstore; it was astonishing to see the shelves and shelves of different translations. I bought a paperback copy of the diary—it was the obvious thing to read next. Anne Frank wrote on April 27, 1943, that “the Carlton Hotel has been destroyed. Two British planes loaded with firebombs landed right on top of the German Officers’ Club. The entire corner of Vijzelstraat and Singel has gone up in flames.” That’s exactly where I was propped up in bed reading, in the Carlton Hotel Jolly, on Vijzelstraat and Singel, on a Saturday night. I couldn't sleep because of the noise outside, and I couldn't bring myself to close the windows.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Junket
Last week's Times was full of interest--the cell-phone parking lot at JFK, the truck that was too tall for the Lincoln Tunnel but went through it anyway, "peeling back the roof of his tractor-trailer as if it were a tin can," and, on the weekend, the plot to blow up the jet-fuel tanks at JFK--but it was all eclipsed here in Amsterdam by the news in La Repubblica that Bush was afraid to go to Trastevere. Pietro was delighted: he lives in Trastevere. But what a pity for Bush to have missed the mosaics at Santa Maria in Trastevere, and the Church of Santa Cecilia with its white marble martyr and the Last Judgment fresco in the choir loft. The change in Bush's itinerary set off the feud between Prodi and Berlusconi (called il Cavaliere). Berlusconi said he was ashamed of the country; Prodi, au contraire, said that it was il Cavaliere who was a discredit to Italy.
So I am still deep into Italian, even though I am in Amsterdam. I'm staying in the Hotel Jolly Carlton, or the Carlton Hotel Jolly, which is an Italian chain, at the expense of the I.I.C. (the Istituto Italiano di Cultura per i Paesi Bassi). There is a three-pronged opening of works by D Artagnan, who was an artist and in the end a homeless person in Rome but who is being celebrated here through the window of his connection with Fellini. There is a show of faces, or masks, in the hotel bar of the Dikker & Thijs Fenice, on the Prinsengracht. It looked to me like a portrait gallery (I'll post pictures). The bar was down a few steps from the street, with a view of the people going by in boats, on bikes, in cars, on foot: trees, a big round kiosk whose purpose seems to be as a posterboard, fresh air, and a glass of prosecco ... Yes, you too can lead la dolce vita.
The party had begun the night before, in the Paramariboplein, where Ella Arps put on a Fellini theme party. Her gallery has a show of D'Artagnan's erotic work. The I.I.C. has a show of priapic art and documentation of his career. Here on Thursday night was a kind of conference on D'Artagnan, with the launch of Pietro Gallina's memoir "On the Margins of La Dolce Vita." This is the saddest book I've ever read: Michele Stinelli, as he was then called, was an orphan, abandoned in Venice; he played the trumpet, was beloved of Fellini—that's him under the black umbrella at the end of "Amarcord"—and became obsessed with finding his true parents. He learned that his mother had been a harpist with La Scala, and it's possible that his father was Toscanini. But he died homeless, never having been accepted by any family except Pietro's, when Pietro's mother rented him a room in her home in the old Roman Forum, back in the fifties.
The life may have been sad, but the paintings are happy, and Pietro is giving his boyhood friend a robust afterlife. There is a new film—not so much a documentary as an homage—"Sognando Fellini" ("Dreaming Fellini"), by Alberto Felicetti, which edits the movies D'Artagnan was in, picking out his silhouette and isolating it on the screen, and making him the star of a three-minute version, while superimposing details from drawings of his that date from the time of the filming (all the works are heavily documented by D'Artagnan himself, on front and back; Ella Arps has figured out ways to frame them so that you can see both sides). The festival culminates this afternoon at the Museum of Cinema with a double feature of Fellini films and another showing of "Sognando Fellini."
The sun is starting to shine in Amsterdam, and it's time I blew this coffee shop. Could it be that I'll need sunglasses? I got caught in the rain twice, once, delightfully, at a bar when I had taken a table inside by an open window and everyone at the outdoor tables had to hustle when the rain and wind came. Then one night when I was supposed to meet some people in the Rembrandtplein, when the sky opened and I ended up in a pizzeria called Pinocchio, where the pizza, like Pinocchio, seemed to be made of wood (it taught me never to eat in a restaurant named for a liar), watching the street flood and the lightning and a parade of tourists with Amsterdam souvenir umbrellas.
Yesterday, in my search for lunch, I went past the Argentine and Thai and Italian and Indian and Indonesian restaurants to an Irish pub in Chinatown, where I had a peaceful table alongside a canal that runs behind the church of St. Nicholas (Santa Claus lived there). It was the best shepherd's pie I've ever had.
Coming Soon: The High Price of Internet Access for Tourists in Amsterdam
So I am still deep into Italian, even though I am in Amsterdam. I'm staying in the Hotel Jolly Carlton, or the Carlton Hotel Jolly, which is an Italian chain, at the expense of the I.I.C. (the Istituto Italiano di Cultura per i Paesi Bassi). There is a three-pronged opening of works by D Artagnan, who was an artist and in the end a homeless person in Rome but who is being celebrated here through the window of his connection with Fellini. There is a show of faces, or masks, in the hotel bar of the Dikker & Thijs Fenice, on the Prinsengracht. It looked to me like a portrait gallery (I'll post pictures). The bar was down a few steps from the street, with a view of the people going by in boats, on bikes, in cars, on foot: trees, a big round kiosk whose purpose seems to be as a posterboard, fresh air, and a glass of prosecco ... Yes, you too can lead la dolce vita.
The party had begun the night before, in the Paramariboplein, where Ella Arps put on a Fellini theme party. Her gallery has a show of D'Artagnan's erotic work. The I.I.C. has a show of priapic art and documentation of his career. Here on Thursday night was a kind of conference on D'Artagnan, with the launch of Pietro Gallina's memoir "On the Margins of La Dolce Vita." This is the saddest book I've ever read: Michele Stinelli, as he was then called, was an orphan, abandoned in Venice; he played the trumpet, was beloved of Fellini—that's him under the black umbrella at the end of "Amarcord"—and became obsessed with finding his true parents. He learned that his mother had been a harpist with La Scala, and it's possible that his father was Toscanini. But he died homeless, never having been accepted by any family except Pietro's, when Pietro's mother rented him a room in her home in the old Roman Forum, back in the fifties.
The life may have been sad, but the paintings are happy, and Pietro is giving his boyhood friend a robust afterlife. There is a new film—not so much a documentary as an homage—"Sognando Fellini" ("Dreaming Fellini"), by Alberto Felicetti, which edits the movies D'Artagnan was in, picking out his silhouette and isolating it on the screen, and making him the star of a three-minute version, while superimposing details from drawings of his that date from the time of the filming (all the works are heavily documented by D'Artagnan himself, on front and back; Ella Arps has figured out ways to frame them so that you can see both sides). The festival culminates this afternoon at the Museum of Cinema with a double feature of Fellini films and another showing of "Sognando Fellini."
The sun is starting to shine in Amsterdam, and it's time I blew this coffee shop. Could it be that I'll need sunglasses? I got caught in the rain twice, once, delightfully, at a bar when I had taken a table inside by an open window and everyone at the outdoor tables had to hustle when the rain and wind came. Then one night when I was supposed to meet some people in the Rembrandtplein, when the sky opened and I ended up in a pizzeria called Pinocchio, where the pizza, like Pinocchio, seemed to be made of wood (it taught me never to eat in a restaurant named for a liar), watching the street flood and the lightning and a parade of tourists with Amsterdam souvenir umbrellas.
Yesterday, in my search for lunch, I went past the Argentine and Thai and Italian and Indian and Indonesian restaurants to an Irish pub in Chinatown, where I had a peaceful table alongside a canal that runs behind the church of St. Nicholas (Santa Claus lived there). It was the best shepherd's pie I've ever had.
Coming Soon: The High Price of Internet Access for Tourists in Amsterdam
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