Museumnacht Hangover

(me captaining a U.S. WWII army jeep).

Museumnacht is the one night each year that most Amsterdam museums are open until late, 2 a.m. or later, and it's always a lot of fun. Unfortunately, certain people drank too much last night and are regretting it now.

Our evening began in the Verzetsmuseum (=Dutch WWII Resistance Museum) and ended up at an extremely weird (and fun) Halloween Party on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal. For those of you not familiar with Amsterdam, that means, in the Red Light District, the seediest underbelly of the city.

My head was hurting before I crawled into bed at around 6:30 a.m.; been a long time since I was out carrying on until all hours like that.

Now I have parenting duties, on a weak stomach, ugh.

Here's a quick clip of "De Fanfare van de Eerste Liefdesnacht" ('The Fanfare of Love's First Night'), a great band that performed at the Verzetsmuseum. They played authentic numbers that were popular at the time of the Dutch Liberation Day, May 5, 1945.
I'm afraid my hand wasn't very steady...


Both May 5th and Halloween hold special significance for me. MORE

Van Gogh - Letter Sketch - Loving Couple - Langlois Bridge

(vincent van gogh - the plan)
(vincent van gogh - what remains of the canvas, which he destroyed)
(vincent van gogh - a later, calmer painting from near the same spot)
(vincent van gogh - the concept once again)

The AP has a story about a nice display at the Van Gogh museum.

Basically, from the above pictures you can see the way that Van Gogh planned his compositions carefully, even though as a (post) Impressionist, he painted somewhat spontaneously at the spot. It all went wrong when he had to take the canvas back to his studio to finish, and he ended up cutting out the couple and throwing away the rest.

"With the sketch blown up to scale, the "Loving Couple" would fit perfectly onto it, matching notations of the colors van Gogh intended to use, down to the word "jaune" — French for "yellow" — on the man's hat. The canal water is emerald green, as van Gogh planned, and the woman is draped in an orange shawl. Although the path is mostly brown, rather than pink, as the artist indicated, he began with pink and then later colored on top of it."-AP

Google has the best layout on this that I've seen.

The one problem is, the story doesn't really lay the images in question side by side, or at full resolution. So I've taken the liberty.

I wonder only slightly about the copyright issues here. After all, Van Gogh's paintings and letters are surely in the public domain (?!).


By the way, tonight is Museumnacht, or "Museum Night" in Amsterdam, when all the musuems are open until 2 a.m., and I'm planning to go out and take some photos, weather permitting.

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Philips - Compact Discs

(Photo taken by me at the Philips Technology Campus in Eindhoven: it shows the inside of a CD player, blown up to much larger-than-life size as an educational tool).
So, the Compact Disc turns 25 this month. For people of a certain age it seems like only yesterday. I was 10 years old, and there was a whole new range of products I never knew could exist but suddenly wanted and couldn't afford.



10 years later I remember the bitter pain I felt when someone stole several of my favorite CDs during a party my little sister threw at our house while I was gone, including my "Jackson 5 Greatest Hits" album, and CD 2 of my "JB (James Brown) and the Horny Horns" featuring Maceo Parker. That one was unreplaceable.

Now I have like 300 CDs and never listen to them; too much work to find the ones I want; and "ripping" them all to Mp3 would be more than a week of work (I calculated it).



But I digress.



As it happens, I recently had cause to check out Philips' corporate museum in Eindhoven, and I can recommend it to anybody who basically is interested in old technology, antique radios & microphones, that kind of stuff. I think it's a little bit like the Smithsonian used to be.

Despite the rather hard-to-fine entrance, and unpromising location near a construction pit, it was full of things like original neon lights that still work, funky old art deco advertisements, televisions ensconced in cabinets made of tropical rain forest wood (in the 1950's when that was not politically incorrect), those weird static bulbs that do something with electricity. Edison records. You get the idea. A mad scientist's laboratory. I have a lot more pictures, I guess I'll add them to my Flickr feed eventually. Oh by the way, as far as the Dutch are concerned, Edison didn't really invent the lightbulb: Philips did. I saw something similar recently about how Alexander Gram Bell didn't invent the telephone. Maybe I should look into this, it could be hot news I suppose. MORE