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ABC Holland
My first ABC book! It covers 26-plus things that visitors find delightfully eccentric about the Netherlands – such as bitter balls, wooden shoes, drugs, herring and Hazes.
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Book of Denim, Volume Two
After googling ‘sex’ everyday for four years, it was time to cleanse the palate. So I immersed myself in a whole new and alien supply chain: textiles.
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Obscure weekend guide to Amsterdam
I visit a nun. I visit a parrot. I cruise through primordial soup. I get all esoteric. I play a pianola. I indulge in a bit of bio-hacking.
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Kaliningrad: A deeper shade of gray
“Even when suppressed, history has a way of bubbling up to the surface. In Kaliningrad, that gray blob of dislocated Russia in the heart of the EU, local creatives have turned this bubbling into an arts scene. For visitors, the city-formerly-known-as-Königsberg provides a surreal, and economical, crash course in Teutonic Knights, WWII, the Cold War and today’s Russia…
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Hospitality, Moscow-style
I’ve had recurring dreams about showing my parents around the world city of Moscow. I would be taking them to major sights or exposing them via friends to that majorly psychotic brand of Slavic hospitality. But alas, such a trip never happened. (I did take them to former-Yugoslavia once. It was a mixed success…)
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CODE’s ‘edit and reconstruct’ issue
I was managing editor for the spring/summer issue of CODE magazine. I also wrote a travel feature about grey – but mighty and magical – Kaliningrad. I also had the honour of interviewing Magnum Force of Street Style (and cover boy) Nick Wooster and the Dutch artist/designer Joep van Lieshout.
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NYC through the stomach
Reviews of some NYC’s most iconic eating establishments: Veselka, Momofuku Ssam Bar, Georgian Bread, etcetera. Thank you to my food-obsessed host!
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The fine art of Yuri Gagarin
The booklet ‘Yuri Gagarin, 50 years of Human Space Flight’, part of our on-going Road to Gagarin project, won the first prize in the BLURB Photography Now Competition, in the category Fine Art.
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Mladic found
While Yuri Gagarin was my heroic rocket into Russia, General Ratko Mladic was my runaway genocidal horse cart into Serbia. I would never compare the two men. I’m just saying it’s sometimes handy to have a focus when entering new territory.
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Yuri Gagarin, human (50 years human space flight)
Our Road to Gagarin project was originally inspired by what we came to call ‘cosmonautic kitsch’ and the JFK-level of conspiracy theories around Gagarin, the myth. But recently we got to meet people who knew him. Here are some extended excerpts from these meetings with remarkable people.
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Yuri Gagarin in Cuba (50 years of human space flight)
The first human in space, Yuri Gagarin (1934-68), was our rocket into Russia. But it was usually a wintery Russia. So it was a refreshing change when last month he had us blast us off to a warmer place: Cuba. It was also a bit of a different planet…
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A Messe of Books (aka why there are so many cat memes on the internet)
I just returned from a few days at the biggest book fair on the planet. I got lost in the mass that is Frankfurt’s Buchmesse with its 300,000 visitors and 7500 stands belonging to publishers, printers and distributors from 111 countries. As examples: there was one publisher from Haiti, two from Albania, 16 from Iran, […]
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Atlas Obscura: Talking with the founders about the weird and the wonderful
What a mission statement: to be the place to look for “miniature cities, glass flowers, books bound in human skin, gigantic flaming holes in the ground, phallological museums, bone churches, balancing pagodas, or homes built entirely out of paper.”
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Routes Award winners: Borka Pavicevic and Stefan Kaegi
I got to interview two inspiring people for their work in theater, championing the voices of the “other”. One was already a hero: the founder of the Centre for Cultural Decontamination.
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On Wall and Currywurst
My Globe & Mail feature on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall is also a tribute to the 60th anniversary of the mighty currywurst. And yes, these stories are related.
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Magritte & Tintin in Brussels
My piece about the new museums in Belgium dedicated to surrealist Rene Magritte and Tintin-creator Herge has been published in today’s Globe&Mail. Read it here before rushing out to buy a bowler hat of your own.
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A B-actor looks back
I’ve been filmed flying as an overly-tanned Dracula. I’ve delivered bulletgrams for Mr Chang. But mostly, I got beaten up in low-budget kung fu flicks. And now, I plan to revive my B-acting career with Croatian Sci-Fi. But will the typecasting never end?
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Belgrade, a Lonely Planet
What are the chances of getting Belgrade on the EasyJet circuit any time soon? Serbian rock star and media pundit Vladimir Jeric of Darkwood Dub gives us a tour of the White City and all its shades of grey.
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Peckerhead in Bosnia
Thanks to ‘The Professor’, my first visit to Sarajevo and Mostar proved to be a crash course in the events and aftermath of the still-fresh war. Plus, we almost crashed several times as he insisted on blasting Serb partisan songs in Croat sections, and Croat hit parade in Muslim sections.
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Flying High with Mira
Lady MacBeth of the Balkans versus Boy Peckerhead from Suburbia… I sat behind Mira Markovic flying back to Belgrade after she visited her jailed husband Slobodan Milosevic in the Hague. It was very surreal. And boy, did I fail as a journalist…
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Power lunch
Is this General (ret.) I’m mix-grilling with a war criminal? Or just deeply conflicted? Later, a knowledgeable person erased any sense of “ish” from war criminal-ish. At the same time, this knowledgeable person suggested that the General (ret.) was too much of a drunk to deal with the logistics of genocide.
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Arkantecture: A Field Guide to Serbian Gangster Kitsch
The house belonging to Zeljko Raznatovic, the warlord and gangster known as Arkan, is the perfect starting point for an architectural tour that takes in Sci-Fi gas stations, glass-floored tv stations, mobster-built theme parks and hastily constructed refugee housing.
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Return to Sarajevo
Four years after my first visit to Sarajevo, a Dutch-funded project to connect survivors of the Balkans wars by video launches in the former war-torn capital. Some things have changed, some not so much…
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East Side Story: the socialist musical
‘Jean-Luc Godard once said the history of film was the history of boys photographing girls. But Stalin had another fantasy—boys photographing tractors.’ Welcome to the dream factorski!
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The Road to Gagarin
Here is a digital version of an exhibition photographer Rene Nuijens and I made for the European Space Agency, which then went on to be exhibited in Yuri’s hometown of Gagarin, Russia, and have a version of it published in McSweeney’s Quarterly, Volume 12.