Amsterdamaged

Wow, it has been some time since I updated this thing. Time has been moving far quicker than I thought it would on this trip. Presentations are next week, and while I think that our research has been going pretty well, we are going to have to be sure to sit down and do some hard work tomorrow and the next day.

Our interview didn't show up today. What a bummer. I hope we get to talk to him before Tuesday or so, because if not, then I don't know if it is worth doing.

Anyway, I have been taking a lot of photos! Here are some:

Right near the dorms. I love Europe

Look at the way the buildings lean. It'd be impossible to play marbles in there

A big Cathedral in Brussels.

Me @ the Jewish History Museum

also in Brussels

The trip so far has been a lot of fun. I will update again soon!

First Days...

So here I am, In Amsterdam. I would’ve posted sooner but it’s been a long road to getting my Ethernet controller to actually function. God I am so reminded as to why I did not major in computer science.

So what can I say? The weather reminds me of home. I like that the streets are paved in brick. I am frustrated by the frustratingly low value of the American dollar. Everything seems like a good idea when it’s only five euro. Not.

One of the things that I have been most taken aback by is the juxtaposition of the ancient architecture of this place with all of the modern amenities that it offers. One minute I’m eating a fantastic paper cone of fries covered in mustard and the next my jaw drops at the sight of a seventeenth century church. It makes me imagine the multitudes of little serfs who scurried around these same roads hundreds of years ago, living until the age of forty-two; building these fantastic monuments to appease a god whom they feared. Heavy.

My dorm room is almost as big as my studio apartment was. Sugar cookies are served with coffee. I could potentially see the works of Rembrandt and Van Gogh in the same afternoon. They sure do it right on this side of the pond.

Beyond all of this, today was the first day of research. And here I was all ecstatic that I didn’t have to go back to work for five weeks. I see it as a positive, but I am not going to lie by saying that it won’t be hard to click back into an academic mindset after two lazy months of summer. Our interview went well today, though, and it raised a number of interesting avenues of research in my mind. I gotta sit down with Jack Attack and the Crabbe Man to finalize the details, but I am confident that things should go well.

Currently Reading: Fargo Rock City by Chuck Klosterman

Currently Listening To: Jacksonville City Nights by Ryan Adams and the Cardinals.

Response to the Buruma

So I finished the Buruma book a couple of days ago, but due to my lack of home internet access and the personal initiative to raise my sorry behind off the couch during the Simpsons (kidding!), I have not gotten around to posting about it until now.

The most interesting thing about the end of this book that I read was the tracking of Mohammad B.'s transition from run-of-the-mill, hashish-loving, 2nd generation immigrant into murderous Islamic Extremist. It seems completely bizarre to me that his transformation seemed to be spurred by what I considered to be a number of really minor problems in his life. I mean, my last response to being put off by women and losing my youth club would be to adopt an extreme set of morals, distance myself from all of my well-adjusted friends and kill a chubby blonde guy with a penchant for vulgar artwork. It was amazing to me that this young man who, for lack of a better term, is completely bat-shit crazy, could do something like this and cause such an uproar. I was also...well, not amused, but curious as to how friends and relatives of Theo Van Gogh said that they couldn't believe that he was killed by such a "loser." Here's how I look at it: Losers kill people. Van Gogh was not going to be killed by a Wall-Street investment banker with a cute lil' blonde trophy wife and a BMW, so the fact that the man's lack of life achievement and status versus the immensity of his actions being pointed compared seemed odd.

All in all, I enjoyed the book. It was sad, but I thought it did a very good job of at least laying the groundwork for some sort of understanding of the skyrocketing conflict going on across the pond for an uninformed Yankee such as myself. I look forward to arriving in Amsterdam and trying to get a sense of the political environment using this book as a lens.

Interview Assignment

Name: James Matasata
Occupation: Owner, Coffee and Comics on 45th Street
Place and Date of Interview: Monday, May 21st, 5:30 pm @ Coffee and Comics

Q: How did you get involved in the coffee and comics business?
A: Well, I bought the shop about a year ago from the old owner who opened it. I also work for the phone company.

Q: Why did you buy the shop?
A: I needed something to do with my money.

Q: Did you have any experience in this sort of industry before you purchased this shop?
A: I had worked for some restaurants before, but had no real experience in the coffee business or the comics business, apart from being a collector.

Q: How many people work here?
A: two and a half, including myself

Q:How has business been since you purchased the shop?
A: Business dropped off a little bit after I initially purchased the shop, because there were a number of regulars who came in simply for the old owner, who had a strong personality. It has begun to pick back up, though.

Q: So then who do you find most of your customers are? Committed regulars or curious folks?
A: We have a mixture of both. Mostly regulars come in for the comics, although we have been able to turn a few people who walked in off the street looking for coffee on to comics, which is a good thing.

Q: Do you require people to buy the books before reading them?
A: No, people are free to come in, buy a cup of coffee and read comics, although it is always nice when they buy the books! (laughs)

Q: Do you notice any competition between you and other comic shops or coffee stores in the area?
A: Not really. We kind of occupy a different niche than those other shops; cater to a different crowd.

Q: What are your busiest days in the shop?
A: Wednesdays, which is when new comics come in, and Saturday.

Q: With no experience in the coffee industry before, how did you come up with a satisfactory product?
A: I know there are people who are very formulaic with the way they make their coffee, but I really just focus on whether or not the customer thinks it tastes good. If it does, than it is a success.

Q: Do you think your proximity to campus may put you at an advantage over other coffee shops located on the Ave?
A: Not really. The dorms are so far away that the fact that we are a bit closer doesn't seem to matter much.

Q: How do you think a business like Coffee and Comics would fare in other parts of Seattle, like Capitol Hill or Ballard?
A: I really don't think that this sort of business would fare as well in other areas of the city. There is a stigma about reading comic books prevalent among older crowds, whereas the proximity of the college in U-District works to our advantage, although I do think that a business such as this could fare well in Capitol Hill, near the community college there. It tends to be more educated people who read comics.

Q: So can you carry on a conversation with a comic nerd?
A: I wouldn't have bought the shop if I couldn't.

Q: That being said, do you think Frank Miller is past his prime? (note: Frank Miller did a super-good stint on Daredevil in the 80's, creating the Elektra character and laying the groundwork of DD's inner-workings that many writers are still mining to this day. He also did Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, and Batman: Year One, both of which were superb. Miller is also responsible for Sin City. Recently, he has written for RoboCop and put out the completely awful Dark Knight Strikes Again, sequel to the groundbreaking Dark Knight Returns)
A: Yes. Although we may see something good from him again, I think every creator has a certain period of time in which he is hungry, and I don't think Miller has that hunger anymore.

Q: As evident in stories like The Dark Knight Strikes Again?
A: Oh yeah. Talk about a waste of $7.95 an issue!

FIELD NOTES: This interview took place in Coffee and Comics while it was not too busy. Mr. Matasata checked his e-mail during the interview, which I did not mind, because I felt like less of an intruder in his life, which was good. There was an equipment malfunction, in the sense that my tape recorder failed to record anything, so we had to go over the interview again while I wrote it by hand.

So there you have it. All-in-all, I'd say the interview went really well, except for a tape-recorder malfunction that required lots of long-hand writing out of the interview after it had happened. Luckily, Mr. Matasata was a very patient man.
From this interview, I learned that if you present yourself as familiar with but not arrogantly knowledgeable of a common interest (in this case, comics), the interview tends to go smoother. Mr. Matasata was very easy going and definitely warmed up to me more once I showed some knowledge of the field. I went into this interview trying to get a sense of how a business like Coffee and Comics operates (because I'll be studying coffeeshops in a different sense in Amsterdam) and I think I achieved that. It also helped that the shop was not overly busy. Overall, I would say that being polite and patient goes a long long way.

Links I want to save

News article on the Amsterdam Model
http://www.sptimes.com/News/073001/Worldandnation/Marijuana_loses_its_a.shtml

And one from the other perspective...:
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v99.n444.a01.html

Outside the City:
http://www.hempcity.net/press/interviewWherethegrassisalwaysgreener/

A policy overview:
http://www.nlplanet.com/nlguides/topic.php?id=11

E-Research

From what I can tell, E-research is the process of researching a topic using electronic means, such as the internet. It is taking the old concept of research and giving it a new spin by incorporating the ever-changing world of blogs, online journals, and other such new advances in human communication.

It is also a concept that escapes me. As somebody who doesn't even have the internet in his apartment (gotta call Dell and fix that one) , I kind of feel like a cave-man in terms of my familiarization with online technology (I have learned so much from this seminar, y'all have no idea). Sure, I can use the internet to check my e-mail, wikipedia something, or bitch about a movie I don't like, but I still find that most of my research stems from reading books and analyzing them (English major thing, I guess). Plus, looking at a computer screen for too long hurts my eyes. However, I think the internet provides some really cool resources for finding information that previously would have taken a ton of foot work to locate, if it was even locatable at all.

I think that my group's topic will actually be able to incorporate e-research very well. People from the Netherlands as well as people who travel there are bound to be broadcasting something (I mean, I can find a complete online library of people complaining about being single, why shouldn't I be able to find something about people going on vacation or complaining about people who are vacationing in their city), and this is kind of the core of our project--finding out about social norms and how well people behave regarding them. Although I think the meat of my side of the project will still probably be interviewing people (it's so much warmer, more personal, and I get to move around), I still think that it would be interesting to see what kind of online transmissions there are about this sort o' thing, on account of that it fits well into the transmission of information.

The Irony Assignment/ Response to the Readings.

Initial Response to the Murder In Amsterdam readings:


"Rappers play at being murderers. Perhaps they were Dutch enough to have adopted the national penchant for vicious irony" (143).

I liked this quote a lot, although I gotta say that "playing at being murderers" seems to be a quality shared by rappers all around the globe. I found it very ironic that the group DHC got sued and then sentenced in Holland for an offensive rap song, especially one about a very present politician, one who made the film Submission, which seems to target a whole lot of people rather than just one very public figure. The fact that this happened is completely crazy to me, especially coming from a country whose world image is one of tolerance. I wonder what they would have to say about Eminem or the (now defunct, I guess) Jay-Z/Nas battle...hmmm....

"Irony ...is such an essential part of the Dutch make-up. I really notice this
after Theo's death. It's so much part of our tradition" Irony can be a healthy antidote to dogmatism, but also an escape from any blame" (Buruma, 112).

I really enjoyed this quote and thought it was very telling in terms of where much of the conflict in current Dutch society originates from. As Buruma said, these statements are only played up as "in jest" or "ironic" after the damage has already been done, and are also paradoxical in the sense that people like Van Gogh, while touting images as "the village idiot" also have a strong desire to be listened to and taken seriously. It seems that the argument of a statement being ironic is only going to fly if somebody isn't already off-kilter enough to kill over it.

As I read this book more and more, I began to equate Van Gogh with an overweight Trey Parker (sorry Matt Stone, but when was the last time you wrote a South Park episode?!) in the sense that he often times makes very aggressively offensive statements about topics that many people consider sacred. Although Van Gogh seems a bit more crass, I also found it very ironic that he was killed over a west meets Muslim conflict, especially since FOX News always seems to play it up as an American problem...

I have to say that I did notice other instances of irony all throughout Buruma's book (like, oh, a gay, right-wing [huh?] politician who was never actually elected to a position of power getting a statue for being the greatest Dutch man in history [really?!]). It seems as though the Netherlands have become increasingly more ironic in the sense that they are so dead set on holding on to their socially liberal visions of tolerance that they are willing to be very intolerant of certain view points in order to maintain it (although I gotta say, as being a person who enjoys liberal outlooks, this doesn't offend me as much as somebody who has moral issues with the Dutch outlook).

"It is as though religious attire is often worn as a fashion statement, or an assertion of difference, as much as a sign of devotion" (Buruma, 123).

This statement can be extended to the United States as well. It seems that more and more, religion is crafted less as a personal faith and more as a marketable skill (Matisyahu, anyone?), which is a peculiar thing given that it's still a mindset that people are willing to kill and die for.

As for the Wouters and Beaulieu article, I found a lot of it to be very technical, which went a bit over my head. I will say, however, that I think that the entire idea behind the VKS is really cool. The internet allows humanity access to a completely unprecedented form of interpersonal communication, and it is continually expanding and manifesting itself in the real world, away from the computer (people can get TV shows from shit they made on YouTube, and have y'all looked at that Tucker Max site yet?! That guy was on the New York Times best seller list for weeks) and creating a specific institution for charting the cultural implications of this new technology is really cool. I hope to familiarize myself with it more as the quarter continues.