Day Six in Amsterdam

One of the things I've been working on during my time in A'dam is some art. I love collage art. It's an addiction. I'm surprised I don't belong to a scrapbooking circle or something. Anyways, A'dam is a great place to work on collage art because of all the FREE paper with stuff printed on it around. I pick up anything free and try to incorporate it into my collage. This collage is actually a sort of magazine/guide/tribute to A'dam. I even made a little fold-out map to the Rijksmuseum that slides into a baggie from a coffeeshop (incidentally the first such purchase I made this trip), my horoscope, some Dutch funnies, an attempt at Sudoku, and a few other things I either like to visit or plan on visiting this trip. It took a massive amount of time to do, but I'm rather happy with the end results thus far. There are still a few things I want to add before I'll feel it's complete.

Another big moment today. I finally went and visited Amnesia (cofeeshop, Herengracht 133), which I somehow never have managed to make it to. I was particularly interested because they won the Cannabis Cup last year for their sativa "Acapulco Gold". I bought some, vaped it up, and had a really nice time there.

The toilet at Amesia I am not kidding is on a slant. You cannot tell from this picture but there is something horribly disorientating about trying to maintain your equilibrium while peeing only to realise it's the toilet not you that is off kilter. Especially given the circumstances.

At Amensia I asked the friendly dealer behind the counter a few questions. I found out they're owned by the same people who own Barney's - another shop with lots of cup winning cannabis and hash. From him I learned that a pure joint is 3x stronger than one mixed with tobacco and that medically speaking one shouldn't mix tobacco and cannabis because while THC opens the lungs, nicotine constricts the capillaries. It's actually better to smoke pure, he assures me, "some people say it is better than smoking nothing". He's Dutch so he admits he still things spliff (50/50 mix cannabis to tobacco) is the best way to smoke for social reasons and because it keeps things mellow.

I went around the corner to The Grey Area, which is perhaps my favourite coffeeshop. I picked up some of the Silver Bubble. Very nice. Got to put a sticker on the wall and eavesdrop on some French kids. Then I decided it was time to play some pool.

The only place I like to play pool in A'dam is at the coffeeshop Prix d'Ami (Haringpakkerssteeg 3, near close to Centraal Station). There's lots of pool tables and it's fairly cheap. You put down a 10,00 euro deposit and it's 7,00 euros an hour. I lost horribly.



Today's random photos.

Today when I passed "Cup a la Cake" it was open so I couldn't resist going inside. I bought 2 cupcakes - Strawberry/Chocolate and Chocolate and then 2 "cake pops". The cake pops have been devoured (as seen below) and were delicious.

Other things? Found an amazing takeout Indonesian place (that appeared to have no name, I just followed some Dutch people in when I couldn't decide where to eat). For 8,00 euros I got more noodles and super spicy and delicious Indonesian food than my stomach could handle. It's on the Elandsgracht and the inside is mint green. I am going to assume that only one restaurant on Elandsgracht is mint green inside. I should maybe double check.

The moon is getting full! I wrote a short story today that I think I'm going to polish up and illustrate "collage style". I can't wait to put together my little "experiment" and see if I can't get some kind article out of it! I'll be posting it up here on my blog at any rate.

Bonne nuit les petits and thanks for reading. I have readers in the Ukraine, Japan, India, and all kinds of places now. I hope my blog adds a little something to your day.





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The Droste Effect

One night while watching Modern Family it dawned on me that the opening credits are a sort of example of the Droste Effect - in fact it might be where they got the idea from. One family hell is another family hell (the infinite recursion is implied), etc. Or I've got it all wrong and this is an example of what the Droste effect isn't.

Read this to a friend, played the above video, and he thought it was an example of the Droste effect too, except it isn't.

The Dutch Cocoa tin, from which the effect gets its name and its picture of the nurse holding a tray with a tin of Droste, etc., ad infinium, isn't new either. One of the earliest uses of "The Droste Effect" was by Giotto di Bondone in 1320 for his Stefaneschi Triptych .

We cannot speak about the Droste Effect without mentioning another Dutch staple, artist M.C. Escher. There is an entire project devoted to Escher's work and the Droste Effect, and what could possibly be in the inky blotches that Escher left on his work. The project is being done through the university in Leiden not far from the museum that houses Escher's works in Den Haag, which I might make a trip out to see via the Dutch railroad as it's only 1 hour from A'dam.

Another person we can not forget to mention is French writer André Gide who originally termed mise en abyme (which means placing into infinity). The French meaning is different from what mise en abyme has come to mean in Western art history - in French the phrase describes the visual experience of standing between two mirrors, seeing an infinite reproduction of one's image and in Western art "mise en abyme" is a formal technique in which an image contains a smaller copy of itself, the sequence appearing to recur infinitely.

The definition from Hollman and Harmon's Handbook to Literature is much better.  It says:

Mise en Abyme In heraldry, the representation of a small shield on a big shield (escutcheon) is called en abyme. More generally, placement en abyme has to do with any occasion when a small text is imprinted on or contained in a bigger text that it replicates. Fairly often, a film will contain another film, which serves as a commentary of sorts on the outer story. Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948), for example, contains a performance of the ballet The Red Shoes. Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust includes The Burning of Los Angeles, a surrealist painting by the character Tod Hackett. At the end, the novel and painting seem to merge.

As one critic has observed, not only does Hamlet contain a play-within-the-play, it contains a Hamlet-within-Hamlet. An inner text placed en abyme has a way of making the surrounding outer text seem relatively lifelike, especially if the artificiality of the inner text is emphasized (as is the case with the inner television news program en abyme on the outer Mary Tyler Moore television program, or the inner soap opera included in the outer text of Twin Peaks).

[Reference: Lucien Dällenbach, Le Récit Speculaire: Essai sur la Mise en Abyme]

Gide took this term originally used in heraldry (coats of arms, etc.) and used it to describe self-reflexive embeddings in various art-forms and to describe what he himself sought in his work. Gide often mentioned Hamlet (see above) as a literary example of a "play within a play" and the art of Diego Velazquez, specifically Las Meninas.

Las Meninas uses an effect found in a much earlier painting in 1434 called the Arnolfini Portrait painted by Dutch painter Jan van Eyck. Notice the mirror's reflection.

But where does the interest in all this Droste effect come from? Why did I spend such a vast part of my day searching for this Amsterdamn tin box? Borges of course.

Borges mentions this tin of Dutch cocoa specifically. Mise en abyme is what the Borges story The Aleph is all about. The labrinyths, the mirrors, the library - add staircases and you might start to get to wondering about the connection of Borges writings and Escher's works.

In Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter wove a network of connections linking the mathematics of Gödel, the art of Escher, and the music of Bach. According to Hofstadter, the common denominator shared by these three masters of contradictorily similar yet dissimilar arts can be identified in their application of the phenomenon known as the "Strange Loop." As Hofstadter defines it, a strange loop "occurs whenever, by movement upwards (or downwards) through the levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started".

Although many of Escher's prints illustrate this concept, a particularly striking and familiar example is "Drawing Hands," in which two hands appear to be drawing each other. We can solve this puzzle in different ways. One way to approach the paradox of "Drawing Hands" is to recognize that it is Escher, the artist, who is drawing both hands and who stands outside of this particular puzzle. Alternatively, we may adopt a Zen-inspired solution and let mystery be mystery by choosing to embrace a unity which contains oppositions. Jorge Luis Borges described a similar type of recognition in his poem, "Labyrinth," which begins with these words:

There'll never be a door. You're inside
and the keep encompasses the world
and has neither obverse nor reverse
nor circling nor secret center.

Apparently I'm not the only one who wondered. There's even books on the subject for sale on Amazon, though mostly in Spanish.

Here's an interesting article that caught my attention: "Borges and Escher are both favourites of stoners" I found while searching to see if Borges and Escher ever met. It would have been possibly as Escher died in 1972 and Borges in 1989. I wonder how Escher would have described to the blind Borges what he drew. This is a question I will have to find an answer to...an excuse to go to the Escher museum perhaps?

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Amsterdam On the ISO Setting of My Digital Camera



A house is on its last legs.




Random street fair.




Random street fare.




Operation Tardis notebook has commenced Doctor.



The Tardis with her first coat of paint and an "odd" plant...




I love how this turned out like a painting almost.




Shop girl.




Cure song maybe?




That's a 16 letter word.




Gay club.




Look up. It's the moon over Amsterdammy.




One last canal pic.



Liberace's childhood photo.



Fishes!

They were singing Hallelujah and projecting a b&w film on the buildings in front of the boat
they were all standing on. I stopped thinking it was some type of memorial service. It was
a birthday party...

Letters.



The statue in the wall on the Prisengracht.



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Books, Tea, Time, and The Droste Effect in Amsterdam

Day two in Amsterdam was recovery day. I did a little grocery shopping at the Albert Heijn, made sandwiches, and did a lot of napping. I blogged about finding a copy of The Olympia Reader and the famous scandal surrounding Lolita. Day three however after enough rest this wicked girl was ready to hit the town a little bit.

So I headed to Centraal Bibliotheek. It's located between Centraal Station and the NEMO Science Center in front of the massive floating Chinese pagoda restaurant. You can't miss it. It is afterall the biggest library in Europe.

Inside I managed to discreetly snap photos for the purpose of this blog. See the world's best reading/writing chairs are inside the Amsterdam central library. I tried to find online who designed them and how to get my hands on one, but so far nothing has turned up. Here are some pictures, if you know who made them or where to buy them I would be most thankful for the tip.

I headed up another level to take a look at some of the books in the Centraal Bibliotheek's "Amsterdam" collection and ended up finding a book (in Dutch, English, German, and French no less) about the pews of the Oudekerk (The Old Church, Red Light District) and learned a new word in the process.

miserichord: (sometimes named mercy seat, like the Biblical object) is a small wooden shelf on the underside of a folding seat in a church, installed to provide a degree of comfort for a person who has to stand during long periods of prayer.

I also had a seat to enjoy the view, another reason besides books to visit the Centraal Bibliotheek.

One last snap of possibly Satanist magazines in the religious magazine section, and I was back out on the street.

I wandered around and fell upon this creepy, creepy thing I had made a note in my notebook to try and pass by again for the purposes of getting a photo for my blog. Isn't it horrible and yet quite amazing in it's own way? It's in the window of a Dutch restaurant on Zeedijk.

Another random Amsterdam window, this time instead of taxidermy there's a tiny world beyond the glass.

I had lunch again at Thaise Snackbar (Zeedijk) and it was as delicious yet again. I will eventually eat at another restaurant and possibly one day vacation in a different city. Until then, the pad thai was too good for words.

The plan was to first go to the Waterlooplein market to find an old Droste Dutch coccoa tin. I saw about seven the other day and could barely find one when I went back specifically to find the damn thing. I finally found one and a cute little milk jug and sugar bowl set. Total for everything was 5,00 euros.

I wandered back up towards Nieuwmarkt towards a secondhand bookstore called The Book Exchange because I wanted to browse for some books, but I found the passage of books again (on the same street at TBE, but before Ruusland street) and bought some there first. Then I went to The Book Exchange and bought some there too.

The new plan was to find an art store and buy the supplies necessary to make my Tardis themed notebook while having tea and Dutch brownies. I planned to make from scratch meatballs and spaghetti sauce for dinner. I found the supplies (less than 30,00 euros and will probably be enough materials to make several Tardis themed notebooks) and then it started to rain so I popped into The Bushdoctor Coffeeshop to have a smoke and wait it out.

Once home I did have tea and brownies and homemade spaghetti and meatballs with foccacia bread and I did watch Monty Python and The Holy Grail, but didn't get to the Tardis notebooks. Tonight I suppose will be leftovers and Tardis. Will have to watch some old episodes of my favourite Doctor (I guess it's probably David Tennant).

Enjoy some random A'dam photos:

Swans and bicycles on a bridge near Waterlooplein.

Near this bridge. (See above.)

Postcard I personalised for a friend.

My moleskin pages from yesterday with my spirograph.

Another postcard (Nirvana) to send to my neighbour's son.

This might be a bad translation, but "Bread has a point"? Please help if you speak Dutch!

From under my umbrella...

Yes Pizarro, what have you done??

Odd car.

Books bought. A few Tardis supplies.

Tea, books, Droste tin, tea set, Tardis supplies.

Yummy.

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