Dave Raphael

come on home, little bear.

someone else’s dog.

Rense and I were in the same orbit around the soundgarden in June of 2009.  We enjoyed many wonderfully sunny turned freezing dutch summer nights slinging Budels on the best back patio in Amsterdam.  That’s no moon, that’s a bar…

I started hanging around Amsterdam on an increasingly frequent basis in the winter of 2005, one of those bad break up lost weekends that lingered for three years or so…  In March of 2005 I discovered the best thing on television, maybe ever, (obviously discounting Magnum PI) broadcast late night on SBS.  Come the summer of 2009, after being officially ejected from Spain among some scandal, the multi-national scam call in game shows was a news item that people were talking about for many more reasons beyond the muppet-tastic posturing of Gigi Ravelli: second best thing that has ever happened on broadcast television next to Bob Barker.  Not even kidding.  Bob Barker would have completely pwnd Richard Dawson in The Running Man but Gigi could have been in fucking Predator but maybe this is a different discussion all together…

So, one afternoon, I meet this guy, Rrrrrrrensen [who’s name I’ll never be able to say ’cause no Americans can roll a Dutch ‘RRRRR’ worth a dam(n)] and it turns out he’s like, coder, techie, super genius.  I know a guy who writes the satellite uplink code for the BIG cell phone giant in North America (or at least something equivalently mind shattering) and Rense puts that guy to shame…  People make movies about hackers, you know, crap like War Games, or some other garbage with Sandra Bullock in it.  But then, every so often, you meet one of the guys that like, WROTE the fucking matrix…  After long discussions on rapping in Den Haag, graffiti and exodus, he drops the bomb that he worked for the company doing the scam shows.  Oh, you’ve seen Belspelletjes?

had I seen Belspel…  Well, sad to admit, its where I picked up my first bit of conversational Dutch.  After the *fabulous* Dutch curses I learned from Tos, the first Dutch I learned on my own was defintely the words Nul, Zes and Negen.  Yes, I had seen countless hours of Belspel, mistified that such a thing could be broadcast on television and absolutely FLOORED that SBS was able to find a host with the energy and stamina of Gigi Ravelli.  All joking aside, as a guy with a career in the movies and TV and one step removed from radio, I have never *ever* heard anyone carry the energy for the hours that Ravelli did hosting Belspel.  No American in media that I can think of, has done anything approaching what this girl had done, unquestionably the most understated, underestimated and frightfully undertasked media personality from the turn of the century.  Sadly, it was in the small market of NL TV, if this shit was broadcast in North America, she would unquestionably be ruling the world.  Beyond her talent however, the broadcasts were mesmerizing.  They were live, and that meant that hosts were coughing, drinking water, wine, tripping, falling, mics coming off, engineers fixing lavaliers under clothing, chroma key not working, hair getting tweaked, phones not working, all live, on camera, broadcast throughout the Netherlands every night.  It was kinda like the television station at your high school, except broadcast to the country, and bilking that population of a small mountain of Euros every night.  It was, it was pretty amazing to see.   And then it ended.  But every country had their own belspel scam and the companies would operate from other countries making the whole thing very difficult to track and prosecute and of course, there was a technical crew, doing a job not much different than the job I have on American television.  And Rense was one of those guys.

Obviously, he had my immediate respect.  A seriously good time commenced.

There was much more to talk about than some shitty television garbage, and many of our discussions that summer kept reverting to the dutch skies, the quality of the light there and Rembrant.  I suppose if you hang around Amsterdam long enough, you have an absolutely inevitable, fully comprehensible discussion about the national treasure painters in store for you and Rense was nice enough to deliver that to me.  Rembrant, the light collected in the bottom of cumulonimbus reflected off the north sea and hip hop via Den Haag.  No where else but Amsterdam will you find casual communication so specific, so sophisticated and so beautiful.

Rense was the first guy I had ever seen with a Sea Shepherd t-shirt.  This led to days of discussions on the glory of Pirates, the English and Dutch fighting over contracting Hudson to find the Northwest passage and accidentally settle the New World (eat it Columbus), mutiny and why so few Americans read Shorto.

We pondered some kind of mutual respect for Bon Scott and while he was worried that someone would steal his low rider bicycle, I was aggrivated that I didnt have one in the first place.

Fun, fun summer times with very rad people.

I much prefer programming from the 70’s, so I found this nice old Zenith black and white round screen.

sadly, it plays the same crap on TV today.  I guess I shouldnt complain though, it came with this free 12K Texas Instruments computer replete with dot matrix printer.