Welcome to the fourth dimension. Time. Now take a deep breath. And release…
Over the years, I’ve gotten some strange gigs from the inspired ‘experience architects’ WINK. For example, they once asked me to write and narrate a washroom soundtrack around the concept of ‘time’.
The result ended up unifying two distinct genres: ‘meditation tape’ and ‘fart joke’. And thanks to the audio artistry of Arjan Beurskens of This Is Taped, it actually worked out quite, um, tastefully.
This recording was broadcast as a loop in the VIP bathrooms during Berlin’s music and street fashion festival Bread&Butter. The event took place in Tempelhof Airport which was originally built by brown-shirted Nazis. Coincidence?
For a time afterward, I fantasised about finally specialising and focusing solely on writing fart jokes for a living – with me providing the brown nouns, and Arjan providing the brown sounds. But diversification remains key since this market proved limited. However if you hear of anything, please let us know! We’re still available for weddings, funerals and bar mitzvahs!
Anyway, I will let you get to the washroom to give this a full and attentive listen – and please do listen to the very, very end…
It’s currently a pretty sweet deal for tourists in the Netherlands. They can strut through the front door of a coffeeshop, smugly engage in a simple transaction, and then smoke the sweet smoke. They can exit the same front door: wiggly, wasted and most importantly — for they have done no wrong — free of paranoia. The glitch is that the wobbly law that allows them this simple pleasure neglected to deal with how the wacky weed got there in the first place. The ‘back door’ where the produce arrives by the kilo is still a gateway to an illegal distribution system.
It’s a typical situation in the Netherlands. It may not be legal but it’s ‘tolerated’. This is why the Dutch national government has been regularly re-introducing the debate of how to deal with this situation — and all those silly, stoned tourists. Whenever this debate reared its head an editor from a foreign newspaper would call me and ask ‘Hey what’s going on? Are they really closing the coffeeshops?’ And then I would have to kill any work opportunity by going ‘No it’s all just talk’. But now the national coalition seems more serious. Crazy. But serious. They plan to institutionalise a ‘weed pass’ whereby only locals would have access to coffeeshops. Were these zealots stoned when they came up with this idea? Now don’t get me wrong, I would love to have a weed pass. I could then show it off to friends back in Canada so they can go: ‘A weed pass!?! You’re kidding right?!?’
Naturally the national government did not consult with the local city governments that have to actually implement such a policy and also deal directly with the inevitable rise in street dealing and criminal control. While Amsterdam has been very busy in the last years to lower the number of coffeeshops, the vast majority of local politicians think the weed pass is a batshit crazy idea. So things won’t change much here in the short-term. But just in case, here’s a tribute to that species that may just be one step closer to extinction: the batshit crazy stoned tourist.
Cheech and Chong’sStill Smokin’ (1983) has the dopehead duo visiting their spiritual Mecca and being consistently confused for Burt Reynolds and Dolly Parton. Yes, they were probably stoned when they came up with that scenario. They end up partaking in a long list of local activities in such landmarks as the Tuschinski Cinema, Hotel Okura and a gay sauna. While the movie features cameos by such future luminaries as Arjan Ederveen and Kees Prins, the movie is still really, really bad – and sadly, it’s not even badder-than-bad-that-it’s-good-again. A lost opportunity.
The sheer badness of Still Smokin’ has one advantage. It makes Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo (2005) more digestible. However not nearly as digestible as waffles and chicken.The movie has more stoner-esque moments but the above scene stands out for actually being funny.
Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008) is also packed with Amster-scenery – the most scenic being a cameo by Boom Chicago’s Rob AndristPlourde as the toking fifth wheel to Harold and Kumar’s double date on a canal boat (watch the unembeddable scene HERE). AndristPlourde appeared earlier in the movie as the bag of pot in the threesome scene. The dude is a chameleon. A freaking chameleon.
Large parts of Ocean’s 12 with Clooney, Pitt and the gang were set and filmed in Amsterdam. While the local response quickly soured to having Hollywood filming here, the Dampkring coffeeshop did extend their thanks for being chosen as a location by adding a special ‘Ocean’s 12 Haze’ to their menus. Now put that in your pipe and smoke it. Or perhaps you shouldn’t… Because if there is an overall lesson to be learned from the above clips it is: drugs are bad. Very, very bad. And worse: very rarely funny. So perhaps the weed pass is not such a bad idea after all. And as bonus, people could use the card to cut up their coke. Now that could make for a hilarious scene. Hmm, perhaps the powers-that-be thought this idea through after all…
For some reason I’m enjoying chase scenes set in Amsterdam. Perhaps I am being chased? Or am I chasing something? Or I just want to experience this city in a more speedy way? Regardless, I’ll try not to read too much into it. Meanwhile, Hollywood seems to filming a lot of chase scenes in Amsterdam’s canals. It turns out they belong to a long tradition that began with Hitchcock…
The oldest clip comes from Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940). Since he was filming it at the dawn of WWII, Hitchcock was forced to ask Hollywood set-builders to build a fake Amsterdam complete with ‘a few hotels, a Dutch windmill and a bit of the Dutch countryside’. It resulted in an 80-metre windmill and a 10-acre reconstruction of an Amsterdam square (with Hotel L’Europe becoming ‘Hotel Europe’), complete with sewer for the simulated storm scenes. The cameraman sent to get background footage in the real Amsterdam lost his equipment when his ship got torpedoed. But he did eventually film the Jordaan for the chase scene. Unfortunately after a jarring left-turn, the viewer lands in a countryside with an oddly Spanish-styled windmill (sadly, this lack of research also flawed the windmill scene in the South Park movie’s ‘Kyle’s Mom is a Bitch’ segment). However Foreign Correspondent does retain a realistic sense of location thanks to all the cheese references.
Another thriller that used Dutch stereotypes effectively was Puppet on a Chain (1971), a tale of illicit drugs and apathetic Amsterdam cops based on a book by Alistair MacLean. The chase scene begins at Muiden Castle and crosses the IJ before entering the city proper. If I remember correctly, the movie has its true climax when traditionally-dressed Volendammer ladies do a murderous clog dance all over someone’s face. (Will someone please load that scene onto YouTube? Meanwhile, you can watch the full film here).
The Puppet on a String boat chase obviously inspired director Dick Maas for his Amsterdamned (1988). Maas’s boat chase is only marred by similar continuity problems as those found above in Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent. Can you spot the scenes that are filmed in Amsterdam and those filmed in Utrecht?
My old friends the Anacondas have just released their third album of post-surf tunes: Bad Buzz/Lost in the Space Age. It comes with a story. After they recorded it a year or so ago, they asked me to help turn it into a ‘concept’ album. Since making a ‘concept’ album out of something that’s already recorded seemed pretty high-‘concept’ in itself, I naturally said yes. And anyway, I always do like a nice ‘concept’. And it’s really quite amazing what some liner notes, visuals and overdubs can do when it comes to fleshing out the ‘conceptual’.
The album’s ‘concept’ is really quite simple — like any good ‘concept’. It begins with the anger we all share: that the shiny space age we were promised never actually showed up (Where are our jetpacks? Where are our slow food pill packs? Who can we lynch?). Now try to imagine how pissed off and bitter a jaded and washed up astronaut would be. Of course: he would be really,really pissed off and bitter. And so Bad Buzz as a ‘concept’ was born. And from there we only told the absolute truth. And as Bad Buzz, I was given the opportunity to rant anti-hippie poetry while wandering the deserts high on Tang crystals, and sound like a psychobilly singer from Pluto (the non-planet) while grunting out the tale of a hotrod rocket race between Major Tom and Barbarella. And for these experiences I would like to say: Thanks fellas! But yes, it’s now best for all parties if they return to their instrumental ways.
The release party is at Amsterdam’s Paradiso on November 6. Oh, and the coolest thing: this album is also available in vinyl. Now there’s a ‘concept’! And a big thanks to Unfold for indulging the above advertorial. Maybe next time they’ll actually get paid — yet another ‘concept’.
Today is Liberation Day. And it was 65 years ago that Canada liberated the Netherlands from Nazi German occupation. Sure, it was more of an “Allied” operation and the Poles did their bit to help out, but Canadians soldiers truly left their mark as they lingered in Amsterdam for months after. They even had their own Amsterdam guide book (pictured below left, see full scan here).
By early 1946, venereal disease was skyrocketing and over 7000 babies were born out of wedlock (which is coincidentally around the same number as those Canadians who had died). Even today, when Canadian soldiers return to take part in the Remembrance Day ceremonies they are greeted by aging women with signs asking ‘Are you my Daddy?’.
I was clued into the raw sex appeal Canadians enjoyed back then by a friend’s octogenarian grandmother. She had been there to welcome the Canadians when they came marching into town. She described how handsome and muscular they looked, especially when compared to the local lads who had just come out of the ‘Hunger Winter’. She also mentioned how great it was to get chocolate and fresh stockings. She really went on and on… Then I got a little creeped out when I realised she was actually reliving the raw lust she felt back then for these strapping Canadians. Talk about living memories!
Later I heard that a lot of those ‘Hunger Winter’ Dutch boys remembered something else: how when the Canadians rode through the cheering masses, the soldiers would lift up women onto their tanks and trucks by picking them up like a 10-pin bowling balls… (Which is kind of weird since one of the marks of Canadian identity is a preference for 5-pin bowling.)
But anyway, I decided to just focus on the purely liberation part of the story. I started to bring my Canadian passport with me on Liberation Days in the hopes of scamming free beer for the sacrifices my country had made. Actually, I just tried it on a befriended bartender. And when he wasn’t immediately forthcoming with the free beer, I tried to suggest that he really owed me: after all, maybe I was his Daddy. After a brief lecture in mathematics he finally relented and gave me a beer. But his true gift came later. As I exited I shouted goodbye to him across the crowded bar. He returned with a: “Hey man, thanks for the liberation!” And just before the door swung shut behind me I had time to yell “Hey man, anytime!”.
It was the best bar exit scene ever. So of course I tried to relive this magic moment every year. Until a regular who had witnessed my ploys pointed out to me: ‘Yes, liberation is all fine and good, but occupation is not.’ I knew then that I had worn out my welcome as Canadian Beer Liberator.
But it still felt like destiny a couple of years ago when I was cast as a Canadian major liberating Holland in the film Snuf de Hond in Oorlogstijd [‘Snuf the Dog in Wartime’], which was based on a children book series about a Lassie-like dog who became a hero of the Dutch Resistance. Basically I played a gullible Canadian peckerhead who falls for the stories of a traitor who is supposed to show us the enemy German positions but is instead setting us up for a trap. Luckily, Snuf comes in just in time to save the day. You could say the Canadians came off quite badly in this movie. Or you could say I was being typecast as usual.
But my favourite story related to the Liberation by the Canadians I heard while taking a cab to Schiphol airport. The cabbie was an old Dutch guy and after I told him that I was heading back to Canada to visit my family he said: ‘I got a story you will just love.’
He told me how he was born a few years before WWII in the south of Holland and how during the war he acted as his blind grandfather’s seeing-eye dog. One night, his Opa and he were walking under the cover of darkness to a nearby village to trade food, milk, tulip bulbs, whatever. Suddenly his Opa heard some sort of heavy transport coming in their direction. Worried that it was the Germans, they hid behind a fence. But as it came closer, his Opa realised that the engines sounded different. So they came out of hiding and saw a whole procession of tanks and trucks. The leading tank stopped in front of them, the top popped up and a soldier appeared and asked in English: ‘Is this the way to Arnhem?’ Opa replied in the affirmative and then asked back in English: ‘Are you Americans?’
The soldier looked down at blind Opa with disgust and answered “No way old man. We’re fucking Canadians!”
Now isn’t that a heart-warming tale? Isn’t it nice to know that such a well-developed sense of Canadian-ness already existed back in 1945? Isn’t it enough to make a Canadian nationalist out of you?
Of course, I became a fierce Canadian nationalist once I stopped living there 20 years ago. For a long time, I would always be ready to natter on about Canada’s natural beauty, expansive spaces, nice folks, un-American-ness, reasonable immigration policies, multiculturalism as a matter-of-fact and not a matter of endless circular discussions…
However my nationalism eventually got dimmed by a friend in Amsterdam who happened to have an estranged Canadian lumberjack father. He once interrupted one of my pro-Canadian rants with: ‘You want to know what I think about when I think of Canada? I think of a drunk that used to beat me.’
Is there a future in Croatian Science Fiction films?
By Steve Korver, 31-03-2004, Amsterdam Weekly
Long ago on a planet very much like this one, I spent a year or two being a B-actor in a whole slew of Asian B-movie productions. Sometimes I was lucky and got to wear a black cape, fly around and leave bite marks on the necks of exotically nubile women. Other times I was yet luckier and got to wear a white suit and deliver a bulletgram to some fat and stupid Mr. Chang. But mostly, I just got beaten up rather quickly in low-budget kung fu flicks for being a white trash loser. What can I say? I was just doing what I was good at.
I even had a whole career trajectory planned out: learn the trade in Bangkok and Bollywood before moving onto Hong Kong to make some decent cash, and then later onto Tokyo to make some really decent cash. Sadly I hit a bit of a brick wall in Hong Kong — or as I came to call it: Hong Fucking Kong. Thanks to its history as a Brit colony, the place was already a garbage can overflowing with the whitest of trash. It was just too damn competitive. Sure I could make a living, but never my first million. Besides, my agent freaked me out. He was a tank-like Polish polygamist who liked to hint at his murky past by showing off his numerous inch-thick sword scars.
Abandoning my Tokyo Dreams, I returned to the West with my tail between my legs. When I ended up in Amsterdam, I was cruelly forced to abandon my B-actor Dreams almost entirely since there was no real Dutch kung fu flick tradition with which to earn a decent living. Hell, even when Jackie Chan did come to the Netherlands to make a movie, the bastard chose to film it in Rotterdam! (Though it must be said that the resulting Who Am I? is worth seeing for the klog fu scene alone. Respect.)
But happily through the kindness of both friends and strangers — or rather, cultists who strangely respect the fact that I die on five or six different occasions in Once Upon a Time in China, Part II — I still do get occasionally asked to re-indulge my B-movie acting fantasies by doing the voice-over of an alien here, or by being the first to discover a dismembered corpse there. I figure it helps keep me young.
I gave little thought to my B-movie past until last year when I befriended a Mexican colleague of sorts who had built up a mighty impressive list of B-movie credits in Los Angeles. He was always the bandito. So of course I had to tell him of my own Asian adventures of always being the peckerhead. And either he was impressed or just being nice, but after listening to my tales he said something that I can use to cheer me up in all my future dark moments: “Wow man, being a Canadian in Hong Kong sounds as rough as being a Mexican in Hollywood.”
You said it my greasy-haired cigar-chomping brother!
Indeed, stereotyping is a nasty universal phenomenon that is not just restricted to Hollywood films — for example, the white boy gets pigeonholed just as bad in Bollywood as the Indian does in Hollywood (The Simpsons’ Apu Nahasapeemapetilon being a rare exception of course). For most people this is the most obvious of facts. But since I have always found stereotyping’s embrace quite sweet, I had never given it much thought. Any negative feeling I may have had about show biz was always directed towards whoever my agent was at the time. But one prejudice I held about stereotyping was that it was something generally restricted to B-flicks. So hence, I was shocked when I finally had my own personal experience that taught me of the true dangers of stereotyping, it was during the highbrow premier of a truly “A-is-for-Arty” film at the De Balie a couple of weeks ago.
Initially I went with high hopes since I still had fond memories from two years earlier spent filming with a remarkably multiculti cast for Oxygen4, an ambitious 90-minute experimental “social science fiction” video by Croatian director/artist/all-round-nice-guy Dan Oki. I even had the smug memory of playing a Canadian commander of the International Space Station. This was the sort of juicy role (we are speaking relatively here of course) that I hoped would be a step up from all the truly cheesy parts I have played in the past.
Sadly this was not to be… The film goes terribly wrong terribly quickly. It turns out that my character (who, incidentally, I created a quite moody type out of) becomes one of the first to die from a mysterious space malady — a twist in the plot that I immediately perceived as a very dangerous precedent. Not only could I no longer save the film with my undeniable talents at being moody, but since it’s pretty much an accepted fact that it’s always the black guy who gets killed first in Hollywood science fiction films, does my character’s early death now mean that it will now always be a poor hapless Canadian who is the first to get killed in all future Croatian science fiction films? It’s something to think about. After all, only by ignoring history do we risk repeating it! Pantpantpant! Blahblahblah! Huffhuffhuff! Etc!
But now that I’ve thought about it some more, I am of two minds. One part of me is politicised and wants to start organising protests and picket lines at all future screenings of Croatian science fiction films to make sure that this scenario never occurs again and hence save future Canadians from being typecast; while the other part of me just wants to move to Zagreb and start auditioning. It might not sound as romantic as settling down in Tokyo’s Chiba City and getting all those meaty blind swordsman roles, or selling my perfect face to Manga artists, but at least there might be a market for my talents there in Zagreb.
Anyone out there know an agent with some solid Balkan connections?
The Cinemasia Festival opens with a mockumentary that goes in search of the new Bruce Lee — while sending up Hollywood stereotyping in the process.
By Steve Korver, 27-03-2008, Amsterdam Weekly
In 2005, a life-size bronze statue of Chinese-American martial arts star Bruce Lee was unveiled in the Bosnian city of Mostar. It was meant to unify a city fractured by the wars in former Yugoslavia. One of the organisers stated: ‘We will always be Muslims, Serbs or Croats. But one thing we all have in common is Bruce Lee.’
So true. Lee could pop a 100-kilo opponent back almost five metres with a one-inch punch, and he could throw grains of rice in the air and catch them with chopsticks while in mid-flip. Bruce Lee was the most influential martial artist of the 20th century. In the early ’70s, his starring roles in films like Fist of Fury, Way of the Dragon and Enter the Dragon made him a cultural icon. His status only increased when he died under mysterious circumstances in 1973 at age 32, leaving just 12 minutes of footage behind for what would have been his last film, Game of Death.
This year’s CinemAsia film festival, along with some 70 other Asian-rooted films never before shown in the Netherlands, is screening as its opening film the Hollywood production Finishing the Game: The Search for a New Bruce Lee. This ‘mockumentary’ by director Justin Lin (Better Luck Tomorrow, Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift) begins in the aftermath of Lee’s death, when the studio is scrambling to find a suitable substitute so they can finish Game of Death. In fact, the studio did exactly that: Robert Clouse, the director of Enter the Dragon, ‘finished’ the film in 1978 with the use of body doubles and a new script and cast.
But Finishing the Game is not that story. Instead, it’s a Spinal Tap-style ‘behind-the-scenes’ parody of Hollywood’s first flirtation with martial arts films. It follows a series of Lee-wannabes as they go through the casting process. There’s Breeze Loo, a minor kung fu star who denies being a Lee-rip off: ‘That cat was always wearing a yellow jumpsuit. I wear a blue one.’ There’s a slightly cross-eyed Indian doctor who dreams of being a martial arts legend. There’s Tarrick Tyler, who rants about his exploitation as a ‘yellow man’ but is actually very, very Caucasian. And then there’s Troy Poon, a vacuum cleaner salesman who has a lot of experience playing ‘Chinese food delivery boys’ and had a brief moment of fame as a TV cop with the catchphrase: ‘I ain’t gonna do your laundry.’
Yes, it’s all quite corny. But the excellent, albeit over-the-top, art direction does suggest that the film was actually made right after Lee’s death, and the film also does a great job of capturing the B-movie business and its unorthodox casting process. Plus, the parodies of 1970s TV shows and chop-socky films — Fists of Führer, for example — are hilarious.
The lampooning of Asian stereotypes in Hollywood is probably the film’s strongest point, and one that echoes parts of Lee’s own life. Lee was the one who came up with a TV show in which a Shaolin monk would wander the Wild West. But the studio cast not him but white actor David Carradine in Kung Fu, claiming that audiences were not ready for a Chinese leading man. And that can be regarded as a universal shame. Who would you want to be: Carradine or Lee?
