Global warming etc.
Exposure or ‘De Hurkende Man’ (The Crouching Man) is a 25 meter high metallic sculpture in Lelystad by British sculptor Antony Gormley. We paid a visit on a dull, cold January afternoon after reading about it in the inflight magazine on our way from Singapore.
Lelystad was founded on reclaimed land in the 1960s and lies 3m below sea level. The sculpture rests on a polder. As global warming causes the sea levels to rise and the dykes around the sculpture are mended, it is supposed to get buried progressively.
Close to the sculpture, is a huge shopping complex with an enormous car park - perhaps the largest I’ve seen in the Netherlands. The complex looked like it had been modelled after a citadel. Naturally, there was a McDonalds here.
At this McDonalds, you could only place your order on a large touchscreen. Once you had paid, you’d get a number on your receipt and wait for it to be called. Very few McDonalds outlets here carry vegetarian burgers on their menu. This one did. Our order was assembled with the typical speed and efficiency of a fast food chain - except for the vegetarian burgers. Hardly anyone orders them, so they are never ready in time. We took our trays sans the burgers but with another number to display on our table so that someone could find us and give us the burgers once they were done. And someone did. Within 10 minutes.
They’ve probably honed the process to handle such exceptions over years. There was no crowding at the counters, orders kept rolling in, food trays kept flying off the counters.
I tried not to choke on the guilt and profound irony of indulging in the sort of consumerism1 that has gotten our planet on the brink, this close to a sublime monument to global warming.
As we went past it again, the statue seemed to be gazing into the water longingly - like a stranded merman waiting for the sea to claim it again.
1To say nothing of the fact that I found about it in a 13-hr long flight when returning from a vacation halfway across the world.
p.s. You can see the flood sirens in the right edge of the last photo. There are several of them throughout the country and are tested regularly at 12 noon on the first Monday of every month.
p.p.s. Sometimes I wonder if I should continue living in a country that is already partially below sea level. A part of me thinks that this is precisely what makes the Netherlands the right place - they’ve had years of experience of dealing with water and will probably be best prepared for the rising seas.
p.p.s. From below, the sculpture looks like a confused jumble of scrap metal. I also understood why a plaque at the entrance forbade visitors from climbing it. For those who have appetite for this sort of adventure, those bolts must appear like footholds.
Amsterdam’s waterfront in 4K
The Kodak Super 8 Camera announcement has received a lot of attention from the press at CES this year.
While I understand the nostalgia associated with vinyl and to some extent with film (the still variety), the original Super 8 was so much before my time that it’s hard for me to work up any enthusiasm for it. The camera will take Kodak cartridges for a 15 minute shoot. The cartridge will need to be sent to lab for processing - only for it to come back as a digital upload for you to share or work with.
But I guess it will appeal to some people - if not for the nostalgia or its novelty, for the evocative look of its output.
I for one don’t intend to forgo the convenience of my iPhone 6s plus for a 1960s visual aesthetic. The phone allows me to shoot, edit and share gorgeous, optically stabalised 4k footage:
[Remember to switch the quality to 4k and go full-screen!]
This clips shows the IJ’s western waterfront shot from one of the public ferries on a cold December morning.
Mariza in Amsterdam
Mariza performed at the Concertgebouw last week and we happened to be in attendance. That she is a talented Fado singer is something I knew from her recordings. Turns out, she is also an engaging performer.
At one point she asked the audience if we could sing along a couple of lines from Rosa Branca. She’d sing:
Quem tem, quem tem
Amor a seu jeitoAnd we’d simply have to reply with:
Colha a rosa branca
Ponha a rosa ao peitoMost of us laughed because we thought it was some kind of practical joke. There were islands of Portuguese speakers in the audience, but by and large, the audience did not know Portuguese. Written down this way, these might not seem like a lot of words. But to sing something quickly after hearing it for the first time in a new language felt like an insurmountable challenge. Mariza divided the hall into five sections and section by section we mastered these lines and eventually sung with her.
Her troupe was very talented too. I guess to perform internationally at this level you need to be. Since most of them had their own solo careers, the program for the evening was organised in such a way that the members of the troupe also got to perform their works without Mariza getting all the limelight. Literally so - she’d step off the stage and let the members of the troupe take over!
When the concert ended, she thanked everyone involved in producing the show by name - right down to the person controlling the lights on stage and her makeup assistant - a kind gesture one doesn’t encounter often. Usually it’s the diva and the countless, nameless others that work in the shadows.
And then came the encores, which went a full fifty minutes over the scheduled time. She joined the audience, sung numbers the audience kept requesting and even welled up a little at all the adulation she got from the crowd.
And to think she’d be performing all over again in Hungary the very next day…
p.s. Given that Concertgebouw is a venue I usually associate with the dry, formal atmosphere of Western Classical performances, the warm and intimate air of this performance felt pleasantly out of place.
p.p.s. I have no idea how I came across Mariza’s first album. I was already listening to Fado 10 years ago and buying CDs online. I suspect that it might’ve been a recommendation by Amazon.
Anyway, a CD of hers went with me on long drive from Bangalore to Shimoga once. I had no idea what my friends made of the music, but they put up with it. I even remember one of them asking if I knew what “tristeza”, a word that came up a lot in the song Ó Gente Da Minha Terra, meant. (It means sadness, which I didn’t know then). We had stopped along the way to ask for directions (or to let a particularly heavy spell of monsoon shower pass), and I caught a reflection of the CD lying on the dashboard in the windshield.
Who knew, I would be attending a live concert of hers some 9 years from that day in Amsterdam?
p.p.p.s. I knew I had the picture somewhere but finding it took a lot more effort it should have. Back then, I was terrible at organising my photos. This was the hierarchy under which it was finally found:
Really Old Shit > DColon > images > sorter2 > Shimoga
I am thanking myself of 9 years ago for having the good judgement to name at least the last folder correctly.
p.p.p.p.s. It’ll be gravely remiss of me to leave you without Rosa Branca.
Update (2018-12-28): Found another reference to the CD above in another old blog post from 2006. I’ve ported it over to this blog from archive.org.
Photoblog: Photo #75 - De Lezende Kip
While walking through a quiet neighbourhood in Amsterdam today, I came across this gable stone depicting a rooster reading a book.
The inscription reads:
De lezende Kip - 1992
Which translates to:
The reading chicken - 1992
This being a warm afternoon, the French window on the first floor of the house bearing this gable stone was ajar. Just as I was about to walk off, the window opened. A kindly, bespectacled man - probably in his late 70s, looked out, noticed me, and asked me if I knew English.
I answered in affirmative but I wasn’t sure where this conversation was going to lead. I began to prepare myself for being admonished for having taken the picture. Not that anything like this has ever happened, but I can see that some people might get touchy about tourists going around taking pictures in a quite street.
The man said, and I paraphrase, that back in the day when houses didn’t have numbers, you could get directions to the right house by using these gable stones. Like “walk past two houses after so and so gable stone and you’ll reach my house”.
Here comes the spiel about privacy - I thought to myself. But I was so wrong.
He then mentioned that his father was really into books and his girlfriend’s father a merchant. Both the fathers put in a little bit of money to help them build this house. So when the house was ready in 1992, to commemorate their contributions, he got this gable stone commissioned.
“Why the chicken?” I asked.
“Oh, because my girl friend’s father was a poultry merchant”
I thanked the man sincerely for sharing this bit of private history. The gable stone would definitely not be the same without it.
This city never fails to surprise.
In which Amsterdam poses me a musical riddle
For a long time I’ve been fascinated by the colourful gable stones that adorn the houses of Amsterdam. They are usually found just above the door of a house, but really can be pretty much anywhere on the face of a building. Some of them are new, some centuries old. Most of them are regularly restored and painted. They add a dash of colour and variety to the city’s architecture.
A few weeks ago, I acquired a 135mm telephoto lens that allows me to snap these gable stones up-close. Now that I am actually looking for them, I spot a lot of them. Familiar streets that I’ve been walking through for close to 4 years, have been hiding beautiful specimens in plain sight.
The stones cover a wide spectrum of topics ranging from religious scenes to happenings from daily life. There are stones commemorating important events and ones that depict important people. Given the rich maritime history of the Netherlands, it’s probably not surprising that ships and fishes appear quite often as well
When I spotted yet another gable stone with a fish on it, naturally, I didn’t make much of it. Looking closely however, revealed that the stone bore a short musical score just above the fish. My curiosity was immediately piqued. What did those bars sound like?
I’ve lamented about the poor quality of art education in my school in the past. Music education in my school was an even bigger sham. Till my 20s I was completely ignorant of even things like where on a piano is the middle C, how the notes are written on a score and so on. When I moved out of my parents’ house to Banglaore, I took piano lessons. I didn’t get very far, but now at least understood the basics of western classical music.
The first thing I did once I reached home, was to start Garageband and try and play the score from the gable stone on my computer’s keyboard. I failed miserably. I had forgotten to sight-read music. I also couldn’t keep time with a precision that’s needed to play the 1/8th and 1/16th duration notes that this little piece is peppered with.
I wasn’t going to let this music go unheard. I signed up on NoteFlight and with some persistence managed to transcribe the bars more or less accurately. NoteFlight, or for that matter pretty much any music writing software these days, allows you to play the score as you are writing it. Here is what the score on the gable stone sounded like:
Photoblog: Photo #71 - The antique book/art shop
On my way from work I often walk past a shop on Haarlemmerstraat that sells old books and works of art. I’ve never been inside the shop, but from what I see in the show window, the art on offer ranges from old lithographs of Amsterdam to rare prints to cubist paintings. Their prices are scribbled in pencil on the white margins of the cardboard frames that these works are usually mounted on. Most works tend to start from 250 € onwards. That doesn’t stop them from flying off the shelf within days though. Especially if it’s a reproduction of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe. You can probably still make it out despite heavy processing by Waterlogue.