Legitimacy

In my opinion, in the Dutch society, it's all about your education and the job you're doing.
When first meeting someone, the first question usually is: "what do you do?", which you are supposed to answer by telling about your profession, and not with the things that you're actually doing at that time (well, I just shook your hand, we're talking, I'm at a party, I'm in a bar). And by talking about your profession, you tell them who you are. "I'm a doctor' means: I make a good living, I own a nice house, I have a subscription to the magazine 'Doctors and cars', I have a high endurance, I'm very good at remembering Latin words, I chose chemistry in high school and if necessary, I can save someone. "I'm a cashier at the supermarket" can either mean that you're a middle aged woman, who's older husband suddenly drove her crazy when he retired, which made her decide to leave the house and get a job herself, or you're a teenage girl, who works on Saturdays and who checks out less beers for her boyfriend so they both can drink enough before going to a party later that night.

I know that I'm modest in using prejudices.
But that's because these are the prejudices that torture me when I try to define what I do and therefor who I am. When I answer hesitantly that "later, when I'm a grown-up, I want to make films", people always ask next: "Oh, did you go to film school?". No, dear, I didn't. I've studies long enough and worked even longer since to not wanting to return to school and have classes with nineteen year olds. This answer doesn't help the conversation. Neither does elaborating about how this legitimacy of my efforts to creativity is exactly what is on my mind for years now, and that this is what is keeping me from choosing it so I can be who I want to be.

A dear friend of mine in New York - the city where everyone can be who they want to be and where people react to my first answer (later, grown-up, film making) with the comment: "that's great, what kind of films?", after which a nice conversation about film making can start - I learned that I have to reply in a simple way: "No, I did it differently, I did it on my own terms and just started filming".

The next video was very inspiring to me, where Shea Hembrey talks about the hundered artists he invented. After deciding to organize an international art show, and then realizing how difficult it was to find good artists, he decided to make up the artists himself and make their art. Especially the way he talks about his characters is great: for him, they are all alive.

As long as you convinced yourself, and believe in it, I think it comes down to that. So, starting now, when someone asks me what I do: I make films, I write and I make collages. What about you?

Subway Musicians

New York is music. The city has a rhytm, a sound, a swing. At your first arrival you want to dance, because you're in New York! After spending some time in the city, you slowly discover each neighbourhood has its own melody, its own genre.
Times Square and its surroundings feels like a piece of Philip Glass, a busy, constantly repeating built up of sound, that sometimes seems to disappear for a moment, but that will return even louder than before. Chelsea sounds like the old Standards of Sinatra and Garland, swinging, longing, sometimes exited. Williamsburg is bursting of modern pop and the Upper West Side has a somewhat stiff opera sound. Bed-Stuy is of course rap. Rap 'n Roll.

Not only above ground, but also underneath, there is music. Everywhere. It's almost impossible to find a train station that hasn't a musician in it, who fills the narrow hallways with his voice or his instrument. Musicians, wanna-be musicians and true geniuses are performing everywhere, in the hope to earn some money. Some have other jobs to attend, others live from the life underground.

The subway musicians made the soundtrack of my travels through the city. On my way to work, the toothless Cuban and the melancholic music of his home country, would start my day in a special way. On my way back home, the two hipster boys and their happy songs would make me forget about my hunger, the drummer on 6th Ave and 14th st, whose sounds were hearable from afar, would fill up the train tubes all the way to Union Square and Joe, who regularly could be found at Metropolitan Station, didn't only fill my heart with his music, but, unknowingly, created even more love during a spontaneous jam session.

I filmed them, the subway musicians who give more color to New York. Hours of clips, of people perfroming their passion with love, are waiting to be edited into a story. And of course, I'm not the only one who sees them. The number of film makers, wanna-be film makers and geniuses that have just as much and even more material is countless. Although I'd rather be the only one to make a film about this subject (apart from Hedy Honigman who made the beautiful film The Underground Orchestra years ago), I realised that all the stories that are being filmed, together tell the real story. Or, at least, come close to the real story, that exists of all those different stories of musicians, listeners and travelers.

Two of the first musicians I filmed.


And this is a film about my New York subway friends

Happiness

Everything and everyone seems to be focussed on only one thing nowadays: happiness. Every magazinehas at least one article about how to reach it, some are even devotedto the subject. At Barnes and Noble, both Philosophy and Religion and Inspiration are filled with paperbacks and hardbacks that lead you in x steps closer to this desirable state of being. TED offers hours of inspiring speeches about exactly those steps and other succesful experiments.

It's possible to spend days and weeks learning about happiness. But then what? After spending all that valuable time, that you could also have spend sitting in the sun with your love or with friends and good food, on a huge amount of information. Then what?

Will you start using all the advice you got? Will you make a list, so you can check of the things you've done - because that's what makes the average person happy - and did you put some simple tasks on that list - because that makes you feel satisfied and leads to more action? Or do you try to let go of everything - because only than, real happiness appears - and do you move to a mountain in Asia to start meditating in a colorful dress - because there, people understand happiness better?

Let me be clear: I've spend many hours of reading articles and watching films that inspire for a happier life. Of course, I would do anything to make my life even richer. Because I also need to say: I'm pretty happy already. One of my friends rolled his eyes and asked: "Oh, no, not one of those books about how small things make you happier and spending time in the sun with friends and good food does too?" I just started talking about The Happiness Project, a book by Gretchen Rubin, who experiments with little changes in her life to become an even happier person.

On one hand, of course he's right. We've heard it all before. On the other hand, I do believe that you cannot hear it too many times. Because apparently, listening is pretty hard and it's not that easy to start making those little changes. Rubins book show how you don't have to change your life to become a happier person. A little more sleep, a little more love and attention can make a huge difference already. And that, I believe, is not a bad message to all those people - including me - who sometimes wonder: what to do now?

Routine

The alarm goes at eight, for half an hour of snoozing. Too warm. Too cosy.
Too late. Douche, tea, down the stairs with wet hair.
Two blocks to Lafayette, take a left to Bedford. Hi men at the bodega. Hi men at the bus stop.
Down the stairs. To the fright down stairs. Walk to the end because the train only stops there. Waiting.
Getting in. Standing at the door on the other side.
Myrtle-Willoughby. Flushing. Broadway. Metropolitan.
Watch other people.
Walk up the stairs, against the line of people trying to get down. Running along with the rest.
Down and up the stairs. Listening if the train is coming already.
Walk to the second posters on the platform.
Getting in. Trying to find a seat.
Bedford. 1st Ave. 3rd Ave. Union Square. 6th Ave.
Getting out and take the stairs to the left. Hoping the F is about to arrive.
Walk up to the wooden bench. Maybe see a subway performer to film.
Getting in. Standing in the isle.
23rd.
Get out and walk up the stairs on the left.
Fresh air. Rain or sun? Right turn to 6th Ave.
Cross the street halfway down the block if the traffic allows it.
A large earl grey tea with milk please.
$2.45
Cross 24st
Walk towards the green canopy. Paws in Chelsea.
Leave the barking dogs down stairs and take the elevator to the second floor.
Let the day begin.

Marketing

I'm sitting behind my Apple laptop, with in my hand a new opened bottle of Mountain Spring water from Trader Joe's. Next to my computer are the remains of a Wholefoods scone. With my blue Wolky boots, I slowly tap the floor while I'm searching for the right sentences. The label of my Victoria Secrets bra scratches my back, forgot to remove it. I take another sip of water and get up to make some Twinnings Earl Grey tea. In the meantime, I try to figure out where I will eat later today. At one of the nearby restaurants, or at one of the bigger chains, like Humus Place or Sushi Samba?
Too much choice.

I want to see a movie, and luckily, there's no Pathe here in New York. I can choose either Angelica or IFC. My eye, with contacts of Bausch & Lomb, catches The greatest movie ever sold. I take the MTA subway to Broadway and Lafayette and not much later, I sink in the red chair.

When the lights go out, commercial images follow each other for one and a half hours on the screen. It's going fast and I distrust everything I see. Why do we find it so normal that companies and organizations crush us with their messages of dream worlds on a daily basis? How did we let this happen, that we don't think of something to do ourselves, but that we need others to tell us? And, even more important: why do we buy it? Why do we shrug our shoulders and move on? Doing exactly what the corporations have told us we want to do?

After the film, I walk outside feeling dizzy. I'm thirsty. I walk into a bodega and by a POM drink. Weird, I never wanted to buy that before.

Bill

Bill

New York is like all other metropoles. The real New Yorkers have moved out of the city. Just like all real Amsterdammers mostly live somewhere in Almere, most New Yorkers have moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn, Queens or the Bronx. So to who does New York belong to? The tourists, that wander the island with forty-seven million every year? Or the eight point two million INWONERS, who moved here from all over the world to this place to try their luck in the city where everything is possible?

Do the bankers own the city, in their little southern tip of the island, an area that involves just a few square miles, where they make decisions that influence the rest of the world? Or is the city owned by the companies, that are all trying to earn something on the energy that is a part of the city? Or is it owned by the artists, the Andy Warhols and Woody Allens, who create the cultural values of all these different genres?

If it would be possible to say that someone owns New York, I think it's the city of Bill Cunningham. He moved to New York in 1948, and since then has not only photographed special events in the city, but also the fashion that he sees on the streets. His first spread in the New York Times was the beginning of an ongoing collection of pictures that show fashionable New York in a wonderful way. Bill brings the catwalk to the streets and shows how 'normal' women invent their own creations after the fashion of the big designers.



The film Bill Cunningham New York shows a portrait of a very amiable and moving man of eighty. A man with a big smile that opens his face and his eyes. A man who, despite his age, still crosses the city on his bike, from one society event to the other, where he chats with the guests - who all know him of course - but where he won't ever eat or drink. "I'm working there," he says. A man who lived over forty years in one of the artist lofts of Carnegie Hall, until new regulations drove him and his fellow artist to other places, who filled his small room with archives of his pictures and who slept on a single bed between his files, with just a sheet and a blanket. In his new apartment with a view over Central Park, he asked the movers to tear down the kitchen, to make place for his cabinets. A man who will always wear his blue coat, because this is the only one that can stand the movement of the camera without breaking. A man who has a million friends, but who keeps everyone at a distance. No one knows his history, no one knows wether he's been in love or who his 'real' friends are. A man who doesn't want to be at the centre of the attention, who doesn't think about the impact he has on others, but has one without a doubt. A man who knows exactly what to say in images, but who stops talking when he's the subject of the conversation. A man that belongs to New York, who lives from the city and gave his life to the city. By being there and by capturing what he saw.

"He who seeks art will find it," he says in the end. Indeed.



Bill still works for the Times.

Earthalujah!

New York is the city of consumption. Food, clothes, stuff, ideas, experiences. Everything is for sale. Thousands of restaurants, diners and bars try to lure get you inside to eat your next meal. Stores seduce you with cheaper, more expensive, better or more special clothes than others. In Manhattan, every street with beautiful and desirable stuff follows another, leaving you in a world of greed.

A while ago, before leaving for New York, I decided to consume as little as possible. Why would I need so much things in my house? Why should I buy new clothes that often? With these questions in mind, I try to be aware of my choices. Why do I want that, do I really want it? Does it make me happier?
Partly it's easy: it's impossible to buy everything, to own everything. My shrinking bank account, helps me to pass those beautiful and tempting stores without a lot of trouble. But on the other hand, I sometimes wish I would have a pot of gold, so I could buy beautiful notebooks, that desirable bag and wonderful shoes and all the great food that stares back at me from the counters.

I have been searching for soul mates for a long time, people that share my beliefs. Then, I found Reverend Billy and the Church of Earthalujah, who not only share my beliefs, but also act on them. Much better than I do. During the sunday service, the Stop Life After Shopping Choir sings songs like 'Stop Shopping, Shop no more, We won't shop again, forever and amen' , 'Earth is speaking, do you speak earth? Got to listen harder, put your ear to the dirt'.



But apart from their weekly services in the theatre, they also act out outside, in parks, squares and preferably in shops, where they try to awaken consumers and DUIVEL KASSA. They have organized events against Starbucks, Victoria Secret and shopping in general, but also have different campaigns that are all part of their bigger goals:

* stimulating and pleading for sustainable consumption
* stimulating strong local economies
* defending the First Amendment and public space.

This all lead to campaigns for the conservation of Union Square park, Coney Island and more recently Mountaintop Removal,which means that mountain tops are destroyed for cole mining.

Reverend Billy and his choir have inspired me. Apart from their high entertainment level, they have a strong message that I support. Their way of viewing the world is one that I'm likely to adapt, and that I want to share with others. In other words: I am a believer.


Earthalujah!