Friday night at Lost&Found

First things first: There is no photographic evidence, and there won’t be any (what the hell) the slides are up now.

The Lost&Found evening went down like this: the doors opened, I was playing some obscure Meat Loaf songs, including a lot from his Motown soul era [download .mp3], and some related musical goodness (like Ellen Foley, Karla de Vito, et al.).

The event started with a ten minute, one shot movie about a car crash frozen in time (Simone Bennett‘s Truth machine), followed by a presentation by Michiel Roskam about how Rembrandt painted lions and elephants before he’d ever seen one. This led into in interview with Caspar van Gemund, a painter who has nearly lost all his vision, and how this affected his painting. Next up was Astrid Bussink’s I shot the mayor, another short movie about some village in Spain, and then it was my turn.

I was asked to tell something about the myth surrounding the ‘that’ which Meat Loaf sings about in “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)” [download .ogg *]. Although my train of thought derailed near the end, I was told it was great, and the crowd seemed to like the presentation. In the following break in the schedule, I was supposed to play more obscure Loaf, but hardware failure made it impossible to do so. Bummer.

Following the break, there was a reenacted dialog with an Japanese photographer of people (watching people) having sex, Night School (a film by Erkka Nissinen — excerpt), a presentation on elfriendo.com (a MySpace related service) and finally an old public service announcement by Peter R. de Vries, warning you that anyone can break in anywhere (Iedereen kan overal naar binnen, again by Simone Bennett).

All in all, I had a great time. I’m not quite sure if I agree with all people telling me I did great, but hey, if they say so, who am I to argue? De allerhartelijkste to the organization.

Finally, I should say that I loved the location, De Waag in Amsterdam. It is the oldest monument of the city, and the room the evening was held in was gorgeous. It was the “Theatrum Anatomicum”, for which Rembrandt’s “Anatomische les van dr. Nicolaes Tulp” was commissioned. The masonry guild-hall wasn’t bad either.

* Ogg Vorbis should play out of the box in any halfway decent audio-player like WinAmp. Since almost all music on my harddrive is in this format, you can expect more of this in the future. If you hit any unovercomeable problems, let me know. [back]

Update 25/2: added some links and names.