New Orleans Doll

You know how you start out surfing the web with a particular goal and with in no time you're totally sidetracked and end up god knows where. This is exactly what happened to me last night. I was looking for a large but still handsome and stylish rucksack (quite a quest I can tell you) when I found some very strange and somewhat disturbing pictures on some sort of 'life style' blog...

The pictures were of New Orleans singer Ernie K-Doe. Now Ernie made some great tunes in the early '60s, with and without the legendary artist/producer/songwriter Allen Toussaint. His biggest hit was Mother In Law. Probably lots of people could relate to the lyrics "The worst person I know / Mother-in law, mother-in law... Satan should be her name / Mother-in law, mother-in law...". Other songs, like Here Come The Girls and Certain Girl are absolute stompers! I never knew much about Ernie besides the fact that he was a great singer and I absolutely loved these songs. But after seeing these pictures I became curious. Turns out this guy was quite a character!

☝ Ernie at the beginning of his career (please note this is not one of THE pictures I was talking about).

After his success in the '60s and some flops in the early '70s Ernie developed an alcohol problem. But he managed to turn his life around in the '80s when he got a radio show. It was pretty popular, thanks to his "explosively energetic announcements and frequent self promotion", calling himself "Emperor of The World" and “the Greatest Boy-Child ever conceived at Charity Hospital in New Orleans”.

In the '90s he and his wife opened up a bar in New Orleans and called it the Mother In Law Lounge. Ernie sang his greatest hits on Mondays and his wife Antoinette would serve soul food. Sadly Ernie died in 2001 of liver and kidney failure. Antoinette continued running the Lounge and she turned it into a shrine for her late husband. She even had a MANNEQUIN of Ernie made! It would sit in the bar somewhere and it would regularly change outfits. So here come the slightly weird pictures I was referring to:





☝ Ernie the doll. On the last two picture with his wife.. euh widow Antoinette. And Usher.

The doll even ran for mayor of New Orleans in 2006!

During Mardi Gras 2009 Antoinette passed away. Their daughter kept the bar going for some time, but she closed it in June last year after a car drove in and crashed the place.. What a pity!! From what I read it must have been a great place! She sold a lot of the paraphernalia and fixtures of the bar at a garage sale. I sure hope she kept the mannequin!

"The Emperor is dead. Long live the Emperor!"



Ernie K-Doe - Here Come The Girls. Get it here (YSI).


Ernie K-Doe - Certain Girl. Get it here (YSI).

Heaven is a place in Wales

As it happens I live near one of the best places on the planet. It’s called Hay-on-Wye and it’s a beautiful little town on the border of Wales and England (population: 1469). It surrounded by glorious hills and it has 30 (!) secondhand bookshops.

So when we had friends visiting last week we took them to this quaint village. Unlike my Canadian friends I didn’t have to worry about excess baggage, so I came back home carrying kilo's of books (and extra body fat - a full English breakfast at the B&B and a delicious meal at the Old Black Lion were to thank). These are a couple of the books I got...

From the Honesty Bookshop (unattended outdoor bookcases, you just put the money in a box) I picked up some great cheap old books with lots of pictures of flowers and (extinct) animals for making collages.

I got a book by pop culture whiz Chuck Klosterman Killing Yourself to Live. I thoroughly enjoyed his other books, and so far I’m really enjoying the tales of his road trip visiting places where rock stars died. Though it’s not so much about the dead artists or their deaths; Chuck gets easily sidetracked by memories of his childhood, of songs, scenes from movies, ex-girlfriends and drugs. Chuck is funny.

As some of you will know I got more and more obsessed with patterns since I moved to this country, an obsession which has been particularly fueled by carpets in pubs and other unlikely places. So I bought myself English Printed Textiles 1720-1836, published by one of my favorite museums in the world: the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. It contains some great patterns with birds!

My biggest gem must be The Royal Family Pop-Up Book, published in 1984. Oh it’s so great, the royal family portrayed as cardboard puppets! I wanted to make a video while flipping through the book, but when I googled the book I found out some Chinese person already did that. With dramatic orchestral music!



And for a tenner I picked up a dented (hence the price) copy of Dancehall – The Rise of Jamaican Dancehall Culture by Beth Lesser. I already own the 2 cd-box set that goes with it, so I was overjoyed to find this beautiful book. The book focuses on Jamaican music in the 1980s, the "golden age of dancehall". It has loads of pictures and interviews and stories about the biggest artists, producers and sound systems of that decade. And Lesser provides us with some historical context. I’m always quite fascinated to read about how the political, economical and geographical situation of a certain place influences its music. For example one of the reasons that there is so much emphasis on the bass in Jamaican music can be traced back to the fact that Jamaica was a poor country and not a lot of people could afford a record player or a radio, or go out in clubs. So they would gather outside (as it's always good weather in the Caribbean) where some people had set up a turntable and a speaker. These soundsystem parties were extremely popular, sometimes thousands of people would turn up. So the music had to be really loud, and had to have a lots of bass! And then Dub was, as King Tubby stated, his attempt to recreate the natural effect of the delay you would be experiencing when you're in a large open space surrounded by multiple speakers.

There’s also a section about what was hot and what was not, fashion-wise. Well the clothes that were hot were literally hot. Apparently preppy clothes from the UK were all the rage. Pretty bizarre to see all those men in woolen sweaters and hats in what must have been a blazing heat!





Well, I leave you with two of tracks from this excellent Soul Jazz Records compilation...


Tenor Saw - Pumpkin Belly. Get it here (YSI).


Barrington Levy - Here I come. Get it here (YSI).

F.A.R.T. in the bathroom!

This must be one of the weirdest places we’re ever going to DJ (though our party in the elevator, that got stuck by us jumping, is one for the books too)… Tomorrow we’re going to play in the bathroom of a hotel room. Somewhere between the bathtub, the sink and the toilet Dutch Dolls are going to whoop it up! How appropriate for a festival called F.A.R.T.. All kinds of artists have been asked to fill the rooms of the hotel and hostel with installations, mini-exhibitions and performances. At 23.00 the warehouses open up for DJs and live performances.

So on invitation of Johan Kleinjan we’re playing at his SUPERRRMINIFEEST in Room 31 of Boutique Hotel Quartier du Port from 20.00 till +/- 22.30. We already got some great suggestions what to play, from Piss Up A Rope and Don’t Shit Where You Eat by Ween, Ring Of Fire, Drop It Like It’s Hot, Push It, Earth Wind and Fire and Golden Brown by the Strangles, to anything by George Michael. Alas, since it’s vinyl only this rather limits our selection of bathroom-themed songs. But don’t worry we’ll be bringing some other great stuff to make sure it gets hot and steamy in there! Better leave your kids at home...

At 22.30 we’re crossing the street to the Westelijk Handelsterrein where we’ll play a set over a proper PA in warehouse no.15. Come and shake your booty between 23.00 and 24.00, and stick around for more great performances by the likes of zZz, Doktor Schnitt, J.C. Thomaz & The Missing Slippers, DJ Shitmeister T!!

70% awesome, 30% weird

Last Sunday was another one for the 'plain weird' tag.

Photo by www.mathildekarrer.com.

Slightly hungover, our alarm started ringing at 09.00h... We dressed up with lots of fake fur, leopard print, gold chains, pearls and more things that are cute, but wrong. We put Blanche together and wheeled her over to AHOY, Rotterdam to deejay at the 100% tuning event. Which was as cool as we hoped it would be. Actually, it was cooler. Words do not describe what the event was like, but once we hooked up the battery, and DJ Assault was blasting through the speakers.. jaws dropped. Ooow, how awesome it felt to walk through all the extreme cars, with smoke effects, major sound systems, video screens, pearl paint jobs, airbrush, Svarovsky, rims from outer space... and lots of girls in skimpy outfits lying on top of them and twirling around them. The rollator fit right in. As did we... ahum.

After playing every nasty tune that we had, we went home. We took the subway and the elevator. We decided to party a little in the elevator and cranked up the volume as we went up. Eh... as we should have went up. The elevator broke down and we were stuck!! Even the guy of the helpdesk that answered our distress call thought it was funny. Two policemen and a mechanic had to come to set us free. What a Sunday..... really weird, but a 100% awesome!

Wie schön das ist

It's 19.00 and I'm ready for bed. My eyes are droopy and the skin below them is a dark shade of purplish blue... I am recovering from a fantastic weekend. Friends of mine got married on Saturday, but the celebrations lasted the whole weekend! It was a special day for a number of reasons. Of course it was special to see my friends getting married, but there were a lot of details that made this wedding an extraordinary one: the fantastic setting of Cardiff Castle, the cake and the stunning wedding dress (both made by the bride herself!), the Dusty Springfieldesque hairdo’s of the bridesmaids, the beer (smuggled across the German border by two of their friends) and last but not least the ORIGAMI FLOWER ARRANGMENTS (also made by the bride herself!!).


For the party they’d booked the EXCELLENT Klezmer Kollective, an 8-piece outfit from Cardiff. Their music led to wild and ecstatic dancing by all guests (as you can vaguely see on the picture above)! As there weren’t any DJ-facilities the couple had asked me to put together some compilation cd’s for the evening and night. Because the now-husband is German and the now-wife is Welsh I dug up songs by German and Welsh artists and some odd covers in either German or Welsh, some of which I’ll share with you here. I especially love Motown ‘auf Deutsch’, they sing with the cutest accent. Sehr süß!

Marvin Gaye - Wie Schön Das Ist. Get it here (YSI).

The Beatles – Sie Liebt Dich. Get it here (YSI).

Marty Roos - Blauer Montag. Get it here (YSI.

Tom Jones – Ring Of Fire. Get it here (YSI).

Alex Warren and Terema Wainwright - Newport Ymerodraeth State Of Mind. Get it here (YSI).

Where there's a Street With No Name

It’s not always easy for the Dolls to be living in different countries. We miss each other a lot. During the day I miss not working together (thank god for Skype), at night I miss not partying together and I miss the other Doll dearly at certain other occasions, like heart breaks and birthdays for example…

We hadn’t seen each other since March so we had all the more reason to meet up for my birthday and celebrate! We chose to meet sort of half way in Ghent, Belgium. We’d never been there before but we heard lots of good things about it. And rightfully so! We had a great time. We went on a boat tour through all the pretty canals and we ate proper fries with delicious Belgian mayonnaise (slightly more sour than Dutch mayo). We went to the excellent museum for contemporary art S.M.A.K. and to a crafty market (so nice to be on the other side of the stall for once!). We enjoyed Belgium beer in the sun and went clubbing till the wee hours. And of course we went for some (secondhand) shopping. Geeske extended her collection of weird objects with eyes and iffy 80s pop singles, while I bought some kitchenalia to add to my collection of food shaped objects (my latest obsession - also added to my collection that weekend: a hamburger phone, a birthday gift from my dear friends).

But what I loved most about Ghent were the street names. Like…

Little Shaking Fish Steet

Smut Street or Sludge Street.

And what about...

Zonder-Naamstraat - Street With No Name

Pensmarkt - Paunch or Gut Market

Kluizenaarstraat - Hermit Street

Pekelharing - Pickeled Herring

Heilige-Geeststraat - Holy Spirit Street

Gelukstraat - Lucky Street

Kapucijnenham - Capuchinham

Zwartezustersstraat - Black Sisters Street

But my absolute favourite was…

Little Street With No End

Which was of course a dead end street. Aah, gotta love the Belgians!

Slightly Surreal

What to do on a (rainy) Sunday after one of the best nights out you ever experienced in your life?? That was exactly my question the day after the Warehouse Project in Manchester...

Well, after a sturdy breakfast of scrambled eggs, coffee and freshly squeezed OJ my boyfriend and I decided to drag ourselves to the Manchester Art Gallery for the exhibition Angels of Anarchy - Women Artists and Surrealism. They had great works on display by a.o. Francesca Woodman, Frida Kahlo and Meret Oppenheim. But my heart truly skipped a beat when I saw some collaborative pieces. They were made along the same principle as our drawings for the Freikörperkult t-shirts! I had never seen these before.

Y. Tanguy, Joan Miro, Max Morix and Man Ray (1927).

Andre Breton, Jacqueline Lamba and Yves Tanguy (1938).

Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Nusch Eluard and Valentine Hugo (ca. 1930).

Andre Breton, Valentine Hugo, Greta Knutson and Tristan Tzara (ca. 1933).

I didn't know this 'game' had a name. It's called EXQUISITE CORPSE. The Surrealists used to play it with words as well, and exquisite corpse is taken from the first sentence that was produced this way: "Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau.", which translates to "The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine."

The title of our t-shirts was sort of randomly picked after one of our favourite German words: Freikörperkultur, roughly translated as Free Body Movement, which advocates a naturistic/nudist way of life. We encountered the Freikörperkultur up close and personal at the swimming pool in Berlin this summer. The word suited our drawings perfectly, especially when we shortened it to -kult.

Anyways, I just thought it was so cool to see these drawings that I wanted to share them with you. I now know our drawings aren't just weird, no, they are Surreal!

Puberty rocked the cardboard!

Eleven weeks, 700 students, 9 teachers, an empty gym (not so empty now), 600 cardboards, miles and miles of tape makes a huge piece of art!

As you may have read in the blogpost of 30 september, I was part of an artist collective that was responsable for writing and teaching an educational program for 700 adolescent students. The program was part of Blurrr in exhibition space for contemporary art TENT. Together with Judith Vorwerk, S.P.A.M. van Griensven, Maartje Aben, Ivo Vrouwe en Olivier Otten, we came up with the idea of Wildgroei. Which basicly means; out of control stuff!

The assignment was for the students to leave themselves behind in the former gym of the building, using only cardboard and tape. Explaining this, they would look at you as if something green was dripping out of your mouth. But then the ideas would start to come, and evolve and boy did we have fun with it! I have seen kings, racecars, lots of dreadlocks, a big booty, a black cat with very suspicious looks, a huge hamburger, loads and loads of cellphones, lots of Iceberg clothes out of paper (?), uggs, a DJ booth, skateboarders, punkers and whatnot?! Today was the last day of Wildgroei and I think that we succeeded! The gym is packed, and by the hugeness, you can tell that a large amount of kids were part of it! Below you can check out some of the highlights of the project and here you can watch a timelapsemovie of the whole thing, made by Olivier Otten. Well done all of you!

my weirdest finds, part 3

Last weekend we discovered a new store just around the corner of our house, called the 80's toyshop. It is packed to the roof with vintage BMX and chopper bikes, Hulk Hogan action figures, Star Wars memorabilia, arcade machines, Amiga computers and much much more. My beau was drooling over the Kuwahara BMX in the window, but instead of laying down 600 quid he decided on spending £2,50 on a game for his Gameboy.

Now where was his ancient Gameboy? It had to be in one of these boxes that were still unpacked, gathering dust in our storage. Now comes the good part: in his quest for his Gameboy my man found my bag-that-looks-like-a-rock!! So here it is:

Does it look like a rock or what?!

And while I was doing some cleaning out over the weekend, I came across another great German fleamarket buy, that easily makes it into my top 3 of weirdest finds...


Now if it's true that the tie was designed to focus attention on a man's crotch, I think this tie definitely succeeds in that goal.

Weirdest finds part II - The Swedish Bag

Okay, I admit it. I totally gave up my animal-lover-credibility when I bought this bag. It's made of a toad, a swedish toad. With fake eyes.

When I bought it, my naive mind thought that the animal had died a natural death and that some taxidermist dude turned him into a bag. Turns out it did not quite happen like that, but I'll spear you the details. The thing has been on my case me eversince I bought it. When friends come over, I hide it... I can't throw it away, because it will have died for nothing... I certainly can't wear it. The toad haunts me.

Suggestions anyone?

my weirdest finds, part 1

Look what I found in a charity shop! I just couldn't resist...

So I thought I'd do a post about my weirdest finds ever; I also wanted to put up a picture of a bag, which I bought at a flea market in Berlin, that looks like a ROCK. Yes, it looks just like a real stone! But I couldn't find the thing. I suspect my boyfriend of secretly getting rid of it!! I promise I'll post a picture if it ever turns up.

Now I just know Geeske has enough weird finds to write a 'my weirdest finds, part 2'. Oh please show us that bag you bought in Sweden!