Songsmiths

Tu Fawning's 'Heart on Holds'(2010) is a project album by two Portlanders: Joe Haege of the '31 knots' and Corrina Repp. The song here featured is 'I know you now'.

Juffrouw Jo

On a lucky day, you may come accross Miss Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse on her stroll through Amsterdam. It is easy enough to spot her. Always and everywhere, she wears period clothing from the 1930s and 1940s (see for yourself in her photostream).
Juffrouw Jo is not alone: there are 80 members and counting in her Club Interbellum.
Jo's years long passion for this historical period eventually led her to invent a dream job for herself. For 10 years already, Jo has been advising clients - film producers, theatres, museums, schools... - on how to visually and otherwise correctly recreate this historical period.
The above photographs feature the interior of Jo's Advising Buro 30-45 that can be found in Amsterdam (Oost) at Tweede Boerhaavenstraat 71-2. The buro also doubles as a WW2 apartment (still in the works): before it is finished, it can be rented as a film location at a reduced fee. The Amsterdamse School furniture originates from the 1920s, the radio from the 1930s, and the magazines from the 1940s.
In the apartment, it is still war.
The year is 1943.

De Batavier outdoor library

This library of 250 ceramic books in the facade of De Batavier was created by Sanja Medić, an artist resident in Amsterdam. It was commissioned by the housing organisation De Alliantie and HVDN Architects in the process of developing a new residential building in Lootsstraat in Amsterdam.
The streets in this neighbourhood in Oud West are named after the Dutch poets and writers, and the titles on the spines of the books are taken from the works of these same authors.

Oerol

We are now a mere week away from Oerol. During Oerol, the entire Frisian island of Terschelling is turned into an off-Broadway stage with a circus atmosphere. Nomadic old-fashioned caravans of art troupes, and an odd art installation here and there, are scattered amidst the grazing sheep and horses. You will find actors on the beach, in the dunes and even in your room or tent.
Act normally. People may otherwise mistake you for an act. They might sit down in a circle around you and wait for your next move.
Bring a hat.

Balkan summer

To camp once again in the ruins... the old forgotten ruins predating the last war, and the one before that...


To jump aboard the shaking shackle boat led by a solitary boatman... heading for a lovely lonely island counting seven heads, and not a head more...


To find once more the opening into the rocks, leading to a dimly lit cave, and further to an underground beach...


To enter the old white house that has curtains for doors, at the place where storytelling is more commom than books... and ohhhh, to welcome the evening breeze while playing an ancient card game with the hosts...


At 7 a.m. to head for the island tavern where you can listen to the news told on the radio...


To return to the day when the seventh donkey of the seventh man died... To the moment when the seventh man interrupted our breakfast to summon help for the burial at sea...

News travel over the seas in bottles, and so they tell me that now, since a year or so ago, also the seventh man is dead... and buried at sea...

All photographs are taken from the website of Cocomat's furniture and accessories.

On my way

Any time now, I won't have to hack my way to you any longer

Vanished Amsterdam

Jodenbreestraat in the 1940s, with the Rembrandt's house at the right corner

You can stroll through the old center of Amsterdam this very evening, and realise somewhere along the way that you might just as well be strolling through 17th or 18th century Amsterdam. Unless you are strolling through the area of the old Jewish district, that is: on Waterlooplein, in the Jodenbreestraat or on Nieuwmarkt.
Let's say you are.
The year is 1930. The old Jewish district has over centuries past developed a special and distinct atmosphere. The inhabitants are extremely poor here, but the street life is all the more colourful for that. Jews are everywhere. They represent about 13 per cent of the Amsterdam population, and many of them live in this very area. By now, Jews have been living in Amsterdam for over 400 years and as much as 90 per cent of the population in this area are Jewish. The wealthy Jews live along the nearby canals and in the Plantage neighbourhood, but they are really all over the city. After all, half of the stalls on the Albert Cuypmarkt are Jewish. As are all the big department stores: the Bijenkorf, Metz & Co, Maison De Bonneterie..., and the atmospheric Tuschinski movie theatre.
You are therefore strolling through the heart of Mokum: for the year is 1930 and the city is still Jewish. This is the Jerusalem of the West. It is here that the main European synagogues were built. And above all, this is where there has always been a large open-air market with stalls. That's why you are here, and you are here every weekend. You know that in the old days the fish market was held along the Houtgracht canal, the vegetable market beside the Mozes and Aaron Church, and the hay market along the Leprozengracht: the canal of the lepers.


Leprozengracht canal with view of the Mozes and Aaron Church, prior to the creation of the Waterlooplein square

In 1882, however, both canals were filled up and turned into a huge windy Waterlooplein square. At the time of your stroll, there is no opera house on the square yet. It's just a large, open square full of stalls. You were also strolling here two days ago, on Friday morning, when the stalls were only being prepared. It really looked exactly like Sani van Bossum vividly described:
“Friday morning in the wee small hours, people are putting up stalls… there’s so much to be done. The boards must be laid out across the packing cases, and the baskets must be lined with clean newspaper, the fruit must be arranged attractively, so that the oranges whose scent wafting towards you makes your heart lift, stand out among the luxuriant bunches of grapes and the soft blushing peaches. Glory be, what a display! It’s a work of art! The passers-by have to stop and gaze and their shopping baskets open of their own accord and their mouths begin to water and out comes their money. Then they buy this and that and the stallholders have a blessed Friday with enough money earned by the end of the day to make a good Shabbat!”



2011 Exhibition on Waterlooplein of the former Jewish market at Waterlooplein

Now let's go back to 2011. Where in 1930 there was a huge Jewish bazaar, there is now no bazaar and there are no Jews. Even the large market square is gone.
“I see my shadow dancing on the stalls,” Ed Hoornik, a Dutch poet, prophetically wrote in 1938. “The train to Berlin only takes ten hours.”
Only four years later, the train with number 11537 began regularly transporting Jews to Westerbork, from where they were taken on to the extermination camps. Abram Icek Tuschinski was one of them.


The demarcation of the Jewish Ghetto in Amsterdam in the 1940s, at Nieuwmarkt

This regular train line was cancelled in September 1943. It was no longer needed.
For nearly a year, the old Jewish district lay dormant and silent, a ghostly city within a city. Finally, in the hungry and cold winter of 1944/45, Amsterdammers looted the district in droves and destroyed even what little there was left of it.
So the 5,000 surviving Jewish Amsterdammers (out of 80,000), in 1945, had no home whatsoever to return to.
In the absence of Jews who co-created this city over the centuries, their shadows are everywhere. Many streets still bear Jewish names. The particular slang of Amsterdammers still uses Yiddish words. Amsterdammers still refer to Amsterdam as Mokum. Mokum... the Yiddish name that was lovingly given to the city by the Jewish Amsterdammers: 'the place'.