Rotterdam
Trip Start
Mar 02, 2006
1
4
40
Trip End
Jun 22, 2006
Rotterdam,
Netherlands
Sunday, March 12, 2006
I'm eager to see Mark this time because we've got a lot to talk about: getting our CD released, planning a duet tour of Holland and Germany, assembling a band and dealing with the logistics for our concert in Rome next month. Mark invites me to join his band, Raskolnikov, for a concert in Delft on March 18th honoring the memory of the crazed Dutch artist, musician and poet Herman Brood. Then he has to go to work Monday and Tuesday nights as the night porter at the Hotel New York, a steady gig that pretty much takes care of his rent bill and provided the title of his new solo act: Night Porter.
On Tuesday evening I walk up Noorder Boulevard over to the Bergweg and catch the No. 4 for Nieuwe Binneweg, my first stop ever in the Netherlands and home of some of my favorite spots in Rotterdam: Rotown, the Emma Hotel, the Laughing Pope dope store, the Wester Pavilioen café, the original Sensi Seeds, the coffeeshop Desire, the jazz bar Dizzy and other outposts of the imagination.
Mark Ritsema on Guitar
After a nice coffee and a thorough reading of the International Herald-Tribune I duck around the corner to Breitnerstraat and down the street to visit my dear friends Ben Schot and Anneke Auer and their daughter Puck. Ben is a teacher, artist and fiercely iconoclastic intellectual long active in Rotterdam avant-garde art circles and publisher of Sea-Urchin Editions. He's also the mastermind behind the Buggers, an oppositional website dedicated to provoking radical political and cultural thought and action.Anneke Auer is an artist and digital media manipulator who creates, designs and manages websites like my own site, www.johnsinclair.us. She's just added our mutual pal, Cary Loren, and his BookBeat headquarters in Oak Park, Michigan, to her client list. Cary is an original member of the avant-punk band Destroy All Monsters, a composer and artist in his own right with ensembles like Monster Island, a teacher and art scholar and proprietor of BookBeat, the greatest traditional book store in Detroit. Anneke has done a beautiful job with my site and taught me how to interact with it, something I've been dying to do for 10 years. Now I've added my vast literary and poetry archives to the site and continue to develop it when it's up. Our web server, CannabisHosting in Amsterdam, has been having some trouble with invaders lately and Joeri is rebuilding my site as we speak.
Ben announces the good news that he has a couple of gigs we can do together, introducing an evening of films of Sun Ra & His Arkestra in Nijmegen on March 25th and Den Haag on March 31st. I enjoy a fine meal, a good smoke and a great evening with Ben and Anneke and catch the No. 4 back to the Noord. The next day is Mark's 44th birthday, and we celebrate with a tasty meal at our favorite local stop, Café Salerno, around the corner on Zaagmolenstraat. Mark's got to ride over to Amsterdam for a rehearsal with the band called Mechano, and I settle in for an evening of reading and writing. Mark and I have incredibly similar tastes in music and literature, and I dig into his copy of Jack Kerouac's journals from 1947-54, edited and introduced by my friend Doug Brinkley from New Orleans. Mark gets home around 2:00 am and we have a spirited conversation until the wee hours. In the early afternoon we finish our leisurely breakfast and split, Mark heading for the school where he teaches Muslim youths and me back to the Centraal Station to catch the train back to Amsterdam, arriving around 4:00 o'clock Thursday evening.
