(c) 2009 Nils Wieland / Odyssee Publishing

 

New York 5-24-2009

 

Hi Everybody

 

Something really funny happened in Manhattan today! A swarm of bees on 14^th street forced a Game shop’s personnel to close themselves in for several hours; after some time a classical ‘Good Samaritan’ sacrificed his well being at the risk of being stung to death by hordes of these horrible insects.

 

He managed to lure about a thousand bee fellows into a box, put the box into a garbage bag, then put a big box over the garbage bag  & then placed the whole thing at the kerb under the eyes of countless hurrying on, baffled  New Yorkers. Only after hours of useless phone calls from one institution pointing to another for a possible solution to this ‘bee problem’ a specialized police bee-keeper finally arrived who ‘imprisoned’ the bees by utilizing ‘the queens scent’, as the guy put it.

 

It all seemed like a terrific metaphor to me pointing to today’s crisis:

‘A swarm of bees’ (>Wall Street, the banks & other legalized thiefs) ‘forces a gameshop’ (>the crashing economy) ’to close down for several hours’ ( >foreclosures, bankruptcies, etc).

‘A Good Samaritan’ (>Obama) ‘catches a thousand bees’ (>Obama’s first hundred days),

‘but needs several hard to influence higher institutions’ (>the Senate , Congress, the ‘Fed’ & ultimately world governing institutions), & ‘a bee keeper‘ (a radical, total expert; no, it’s not Timothy* I guess! ...) to completely solve ‘the bee problem’( >the brainless greed of the rich).’

 

‘The box’, ‘the garbage bag’ & ‘the big box’ ofcourse stand for the shameless cover up of dangerous Wall Street maniacs & ‘friends’. The baffled hurried N.Y. sidewalk crowds are no doubt, in this context, symbolizing politicians (representing ‘the general audience’) who all for years ignored the obvious signs pointing to today’s crisis.

 

So what does the intriguing expression ‘the queen’s scent’.... stand for ?; still figuring that one out! Aah!.... I suddenly realize what it must stand for; ofcourse it refers to the world’s delusional impression (including ‘Timothy’s’) that the crisis is going to disappear ‘somehow’ with some cosmetic measures, with a bit of solid old fashioned expensive make-up: ”a bit of ‘Chanel’ will do the trick, guys!”.... (*TARP & so forth).

 

My estimate is that a lack of real change in humanity’s macho thinking patterns is the underlying deeper cause of it all; it will take much more than any vast quantity of ‘Chanel’ to get any real healing done; if ever.

 

‘A perfumed garden of Paradise’ to quote a non existing expression, will remain to be an illusion for ever: hardly a surprise is it!

 

”But let’s drink to that & the passing time!”...... (Jacques Brel)

 

Anyway, been back & forth to Amsterdam & ‘we’, ‘Nils Wieland & the Legendary Last Ones’ that is, are making substantial progress with the band’s recording efforts. Our long planned CD might now finally be on its way, late October seems like a realistic option for a

possible release. Also a keyboardist is going to do a session with us within due time, maybe he’s the extra guy we need.

 

Talking ‘bout music; Bob Dylan once more topped the record charts here in the U.S. with his latest CD, who would have ever believed that twenty years ago! Congratulations with your 68^th birthday, Bob. Saw one of your April shows at ‘Heineken Hal’ Amsterdam, wouldn’t have wanna missed it for the world, but it’s sure been quite a while I must confess!

 

Third time around!..... (Dylan insiders joke). I attended at earlier Dylan shows two times:

one at ‘Ahoy Hal’ Rotterdam in 1987 and another at ‘Staten Hal’ The Hague in 1990.

 

What else can I say, not much more I figure.

So okay! That’s about it for now, C U guys all pretty soon I guess!

 

Nils

 

 

 

*Timothy Geithner is the Treasury Secretary of the U.S

*TARP: the billions of  dollars ‘stimilus’ the U.S. Government  has been handing out to fix the economy

 

 

(c) 2009 Nils Wieland / Odyssee Publishing

New York 4-22-2009

 

Hi Everybody

 

What is the world coming to? ....I picked up this particular phrase for the first time somewhere around 1965 when I was 11 years of age. I heard it in a song recorded by Marianne Faithful I seem to remember, the rest of the lyrics don’t surface on my internal hard disc right now, but that one phrase is definitely timeless

 

People have probably been asking themselves this question since the beginning of time,

but in this era it’s probably being asked by more people than ever since the big depression of the twenties & thirties, in the U.S. anyway.

It’s all due to the fact that the banks & the money institutions have crossed lines that should never have been crossed, and that’s putting it very mildly indeed.

 

In New York lots of shops seem to be disappearing. A friend of mine who’s in the snowboard.trade has seen several important shops go out of business since last year & it’s pretty much the same in lots of other branches.

The ‘shop till you drop’ attitude is definitely a thing of the past, everybody here is trying out ways & finding ways to not have to spend money.

 

But then again there’s lots of shops putting on the ‘GOOB’ sign (‘going out of business’) that have reportedly seen up to a 400% rise in profit; they’ll probably try to keep the signs on for the time being, even though the law forbids this nowadays.

It’s an old trick that’s been used for ages to elude tourists here. I’ve seen it on a very small scale in Amsterdam as well;

I happened to know of a clothing store there with a similar approach, it’s been ‘closing down’ for the past twenty years as far as I remember.

Frankly, I don’t blame them since I bought some excellent & extremely cheap top quality jackets there.....

 

And putting money in the bank?, I don’t know, the proverbial old sock is probably a saver option these days than a ‘bank’. In due time banks will probably change their institutional name to ‘church’, or even better, to ‘safe haven’, in order to try to get rid of the stigmata they’ve been dealt in the past year or so. Still, anybody who’s ever took the time to study what banks actually do could have known about it all ages ago. But the bourgeois driven clouds of ‘reliability’ the financial world has been choking us with since god knows when lulled most of us into an almost fatal sleep; or is ‘coma’ the right word here?.

 

Recently, by the way, I’ve been redefining for myself what the word ‘bourgeoisie’ actually  stands for in the present world, in the widest context possible that is. Got into the word when I first read Marcel Proust in 1973, so I knew what stood for around the year 1900.

 

Marianne definitely knew what it was supposed to mean! But does Madonna know what it means? She once mentioned the word in one of her songs, ( “Music makes the bourgeoisie & the rebels”). She was once a desperate seeker & probably still is; I do have my doubts about this one though. Maybe ‘Susan’ knows; in the end it all boils down to studying, not a Madonna favourite I guess.

 

Cohen knows the score, he’s written the song, so he seems to really get it. Or didn’t he get her in the end, I don’t think he did, that’s what his lyrics on ‘Susan’ spelled  & pronounced differently suggest anyway. Please, correct me if I’m wrong Leonhard!

 

Saw your show last year in Amsterdam man!; it was a royal performance, I must confess. ‘Lenny rules the poetry waves of rock!’is the crown I now lend thee, (if you can call it ’rock’);

god bless your breathtaking oeuvre, mr. Cohen!

 

But anyway, ‘bourgeois’ thinking in my view is mainly characterized by a lack of  willingness to go for ‘the real thing’, whatever it might be, and prefer second best, or even an imitation of second best

Today’s victims of ‘bourgeois’ thinking typically tend to have an approach to life that generally lacks any kind of originality & often exposes superficial mannerisms in a useless effort to suggest the absence of any form of neurosis. Also they often tend to believe that ‘art’ is a ‘business’ by nature (instead of a calling), or at best something that’s done by dentists spouses. The afore mentioned lack of originality typically tends to reveal itself  by imitating others as if an inescapable option.

 

Maybe all of this points to a certain ‘talent within itself’, some might argue. Smartly said but it’s definitely not the kind of talent that strikes me as being remotely representative for the mindset of people who ‘changed’ the planet in any kind of creative sense of the word. 

 

Ok!, I’m now going to bed in this ‘never sleeping city’, I’m bloody tired of writing all this.

 

It was a bit of an intellectual flight this time guys, but I was in the mood for it, so take it or leave it!

 

CU all pretty soon

 

Nils

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(c) 2009 Nils Wieland / Odyssee Publishing

 

New York 03-10-09

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                Hi Everybody

The situation is getting real crazy here in America. Obama’s doing what he can, but there’s limits to what even the ‘Chicago miracle man’ can achieve, especially given the short time he’s been in charge & the staggering mess he’s supposed to clean up. His approval rates are skyrocketing though; when he started out six weeks ago only 12 percent of Americans were ‘confident about the future’, now this percentage has risen up to a flabbergasting 42 percent.

 

Still lots of people are wondering why they’re handing out 170 billion dollars to a failing insurance company like AIG (American Insurance Grabbers?) instead of letting them go broke and let others take over. Even the New York Times, not exactly a left wing institution, is trashing these kinds of companies. Obama is trying to have ‘the best people’ run the treasury in Washington but whether they really know what they’re doing remains to be seen; a crisis of this proportion has simply never been dealt with since World War II.

 

But the ‘Stimulus’ measure of  700 billion pumped into America’s economy only weeks ago seems to already have ‘hit the streets’, if I’m to believe’The Huffington Post’, ( America’s no #1 internet newspaper, 12 million visitors daily), getting lots of unemployed workers back on the job, building roads, bridges and so forth.

 

This friend of a friend of mine, who’s now actually my friend as well, Geraldine, (she’s not exactly a ‘poor girl’ by the way), invited me to accompany her to take a look at a place she might wanna buy at 340 East 64^th street; it has the most extraordinary views on Manhattan imaginable only in the wildest of dreams.

It’s on the 21^st floor of a 34 floor building & calling it anything else than breathtaking is nothing less than a shameless lie. One is looking at skyscrapers all around from different angles, thousands of city lights shining in at night, superb sunsets, you name it (see the photo on top). It’s useless to even try & put it into words, it really is! Wanna be her friend for evermore, as you will all more than definitely understand!

 

Been out to Amsterdam & back to do some more recording for the band, the radio station, and the new TV-station I told you about. I’d like to repeat that the trailer for this new station is to be seen on Salto 1 somewhere in March. As you’re reading this it might be on in a matter of days, or a week, whatever! Keep your eyes open for it.

You can see me do my ‘Art-Part’ in it while I’m babbling my way through the Allard Pierson Museum. I’ll once more mention  the name of this new TV-station, which is (don’t laugh, this is serious business! )‘het Gewilde Oude Westen’. Don’t let me hear you guys saying you missed out on it when I’m back, I won’t even look at you anymore! you hear me!..., aha...., just joking!.

 

Also found an interesting contact to push my band’s videos in Amsterdam, I’ll keep you informed on that one, too. Gonna start another painting of my Amstel-landscape series tomorrow morning, it’ll take my mind off of all the hustle & bustle of the big Apple, superb therapy I would say, absolutely superb...

P.S. Latest news: Wallstreet is suddenly regaining lost ground, a temporarily thing?, or a sign of better times? God knows...                   

CU guys soon     

Nils                                                 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(c) 2009 Nils Wieland / Odyssee Publishing

New York 12-02-2009

Hi Everybody

 

Since Obama has been sworn in it feels like being in a different world here in America. Pronouncing the word ‘hope’ is suddenly no longer met with a raised eyebrow by lots of people & not only within my new circle of friends here in Manhattan. It actually now stands for the meaning it once had, no matter how the economy is plummeting, no matter the mess this country is in. ‘Hope’ has escaped out of the dirty alleys and messy backyards it had to hide itself in for almost a decade.

 

Okay, everybody’s shitting their pants over what disaster is next; unemployment rates are up as much as straight after 9/11in 2001. Some say we haven’t seen ‘nuthin’ yet! Others are seeing progress at the end of 2009.

 

The wonderful Virgin Megastore on Times Square is closing its doors in April yes, but not because of bad business, it’s because the owners think they can make more money by having clothing store ‘Forever 21’ in there. What a pity! It was & still is a great place to hang out. They have an incredible CD & DVD collection selling big up till now in spite of today’s massive music downloading. What worries me is that other important Manhattan stores are closing down soon as well they say; don’t know what to make of it, nobody knows! 

 

A positive note; something great happened last week! I actually met a publisher through a friend of a friend who wants to publish my column in book form in about a year from now. He says my style of writing is “very easy to digest”, “highly readable” & “has something of a 60’s & 70’s feel to it”. He concluded that it was exactly what lots of people in the U.S. crave, referring to younger as well as older generations.

 

As a publishing down payment I’m allowed to travel freely to Amsterdam & back whenever I want to for the year to come, great right? The only limitation being that I can’t travel freely to other places than Amsterdam & also I’m not allowed to mention the company name till two weeks before the book is published, when they’ll do some blitz media promotion on it. I’ll definitely need all of this to do my monthly radio & TV-show in Holland.

 

Talking about Holland; the TV-trailer for brand new Amsterdam TV-station ‘Het gewilde oude Westen’, for which I will be the presenter & editor of the art segment, is launched somewhere in the second half of March on SALTO 1 (check their site if you like). I will also keep presenting my monthly duo show on SALTO with Anne Rodrigues for ‘Radio Sicada’, always on air on Thursdays & available on line till two months after the show.

 

There’s new stuff on my music projects on Youtube by the way; there’s a new video of a Christmas solo-gig I did in Amsterdam, and sometime this week a second video of my Maloe Malo show of a year ago, featuring an up tempo rocker called ‘Economy’, is available on Youtube as well, so put on your dancing shoes everybody!

I wrote the song 25 years ago & it’s still in my Warner publishing contract; maybe I could score a hit with it. The Warner guy I spoke to on the phone recently gave me a spark of hope I must admit since the song really taps into today’s global situation, no need to explain why I guess.

 

Oh, I almost forgot, I think I indeed saw Woody Allen near Central Park just a few days ago, if it wasn’t him it was a double, I couldn’t possibly be wrong though. He seemed troubled, too, by Mayor Bloomberg’s announcement on the $ 4 billion deficit for New York City which, then again, seemed ‘manageable’ Bloomberg claimed: sure hope he’s right!

 

Okay! Greetings from a still staggeringly cold ‘New Amsterdam’; a while ago they renamed it ‘New York’,

guess you people picked up on that story...

 

Be talkin to you soon.... Nils!                                                     

                                                                                                  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(c) 2009 Nils Wieland / Odyssee Publishing

New York 01-19-2009

Hi Everybody

Still getting used to my friend's apartment here in Manhattan. It's just great that he had to go out to Asia for business; here I am in an incredible studio in the centre of the Big Apple. I still have a hard time realizing that it's actually all true!
And it won't even cost me a single penny! ( my NY friend got two of my paintings in return for it, pretty cool deal right!)

It's not too far from Times Square but that's just about all the adress information I'm gonna disclose.
 
It's a historical moment now in America as everybody knows; tomorrow the Obama inauguration is finally happening & everybody's simply crazy about it here!

But to write about it to my fellow dutch citizens, when all of Holland and the rest of the world is following the whole story on tv or on the internet even in far away corners like Hawaii or Anchorage (...), seems like a little too much of the same information to me.

I'm also not gonna write about 'Sullenberg-hero-of-the-Hudson-flight 1547'; he'll definitely have enough coverage without my observations.

What I like about it though is that for once an older guy gets in the news in a heroic kind of way. When you look at newpapers or on the internet it's all as if life starts at 17 and ends at 29 maximum.

The somewhat wrinkled new hero we all craved has emerged!; finally America has one!, it's 'Sully'!

Don't you just love that name? It's simply 'terrific' as Woody Allen used to put it, ( whom I'll soon run into in the vicinity of Central Park my neighbour assured me just yesterday! ).

I love it here in New York, but for the time being I'll be inside most of the time, it's darn cold over here, just like in Amsterdam.

I'm working on my new series of dutch landscapes for my next exhibit in 2010 and sending them home rolled up just as 'Vincent' used to.

I'll never touch the hem of his garment I'm perfectly aware of that, (who will !...), no guys,

I wasn't suggesting anything on that level. It is a practical method though to deal with what otherwise would have been a real problem; thanks for the idea, mr V.!

A friend of mine collects the 2 to 3 weekly roll at the post office, reframes it &  then stores the painting at his studio.

I work from 17th century engravings so it doesn't much matter where I am, it's all in the mind brother!

Great that everything's opened here 24 hours a day, it's exactly what an artist needs.

Tonight a girlfriend & I are to go to her favourite Italian restaurant here &
I'm really curious about the atmosphere over there; she told me that it's "just fabulous!".

Have to restart working on my newest canvas now, ladies & gentlemen!, so that's about all for now.


Talk to you guys soon.

Nils

This column is also published on www.ronaldofferman.nl

(click on Ron's 'gastcolumns')