Amsterdam > Dusseldorf > Detroit
Trip Start
Jun 15, 2007
1
17
25
Trip End
Sep 05, 2007
Dusseldorf,
Germany
Thursday, July 26, 2007
(Detroit, Wednesday, July 25, 2007)-This Wednesday was a long travel day, starting in Amsterdam at 7:00 am with a flight to Dusseldorf, a four-hour layover and then a flight from Germany to Detroit, setting down around 6:00 pm EDT, some 19 hours after my takeoff from Schipol. Again I'd like to thank Jim Epstein and Adam Brook for combining to make these flights possible, and Dana Beal of the Yippie Museum for underwriting them.
There's been a lot of frantic activity over the past week since I got back from London, with our krewe trying to complete the filming for our Alternative Amsterdam DVD, several meetings to shape the future of our Radio Free Amsterdam project, and a couple more to plan the Cannabis Cup screening of TWENTY TO LIFE at the annual Grass-A-Matazz party sponsored by Ceres Seeds, Hempshopper and SelfHemployed.
Sidney Daniels of Ceres Seeds and Hempshopper and his partner in SelfHemployed, Joeri Pfieffer, have recently joined Henk Botwinik, Larry Hayden, Rev. Ferre van Beveren and myself in our little Radio Free Amsterdam collective, bringing their Dutch enthusiasm and business acumen to the table and pledging to help us get organized at last.
Henk, Larry and I began this project in November 2004 with just our imagination, persistence and Henk's production skills to our credit. We've always had the dream that we could procure sponsors for our programming and find a way to get paid for our efforts, but our talents are as content providers and there's nary a salesman among us. Rev. Ferre took pity on us some time ago and committed his internet skills to the project, redesigning and managing our website at www.RadioFreeAmsterdam.com and making sure we get the widest possible exposure on the world wide web.
Joeri has also served the project for some time as our ISP and webspace manager, donating his time and effort to make sure we have enough bandwidth to carry our programming and troubleshooting problems whenever they pop up. Now, as a key part of our organization process, Joeri has promised to increase the size of the RFA site so that we can not only podcast as much new and future programming as we may assemble, but also move all our program archives from the several places they've been stashed to the main RFA website and keep them available on the site at all times.
My dream for Radio Free Amsterdam has always been to get all the great radio programs made by roots music scholars and fanatics across America who have been making that one great program each week for the local college or public radio station and gather them together to be programmed on our internet radio station so they can be heard in one place by people all around the world.
I think by the end of the year we will be moving concretely toward this goal. With our expanded bandwidth we will be able to solicit programming from independent broadcast producers all over America and the world and add their shows to our mix as we've done on a trial basis with Cary Wolfson's Live from the Red Rooster Lounge and Tom Morgan's Jazz Roots.
We're also planning to establish a broadcast stream at our website that will provide continuous music and program productions from our archives. Our stream will feature blues, jazz, R&B, gospel, the sounds of New Orleans and roots music of all sorts, interspersed with programs stored in our archives and new programming as it is produced and acquired. We hope to have this service up and streaming by later this fall.
Sidney and Joeri have also pledged to help us create a solid organizational basis with a board of directors that can interface with government entities, banks, cultural and arts agencies and other businesses and also secure sponsors and other forms of financial support so that one day we may operate on a professional basis and pay our staff and program producers.
This was all pretty heady stuff for some guys who started out making simulated 'live' radio broadcasts from a bunch of coffeeshops during the 2004 Cannabis Cup just for fun, but we've been serious and consistent in making and podcasting what now amounts to 140 episodes of the John Sinclair Radio Show, and in trying out our ideas for creating our own internet radio station based in Amsterdam, and it's definitely time to take our project to a higher level. Stay tuned for further developments.
With all this creative ferment going on as I was preparing to leave town to spend almost six weeks in Detroit and Michigan and most of the fall away from this beautiful city, it was even harder to leave Amsterdam than usual. But I've got my ticket in my hand, my bags all packed, my other belongings stored away and I'm ready to go early this morning when I make my way to Schipol Airport. I've got to turn in the keys to the lovely apartment in the Jordaan that I've enjoyed for the last five months, and November will bring another temporary housing adventure, but I'm thankful for the time in Reza's place on the Lijnbaansgracht and pretty much ready for whatever might come next.
-Detroit
August 30, 2007
