Amsterdam

Sunday

Sean Thomas

Why I can’t resist a red-light district

From our US edition

I am writing this on the 17th floor of the Novotel Sukhumvit, on Soi 4, aka “Soi Nana,” in Khlong Toei, Bangkok. For anyone that knows the Big Mango, they’ve already guessed where I am, psychogeographically: from that tell-tale word “Nana.” For those still in the dark, I am on the rude, ribald, rambunctious street that is Soi 4, which is full of tattoo parlors, 7-Elevens, dried-squid-sellers, fake Italian winebars, blaring “British” pubs, slightly dodgy pharmacists, hair salons that do laundry as well – it culminates in Nana Plaza, a multitiered al fresco mall of gaudy and noisy go-go bars that probably constitutes the single largest collection of sex workers on the planet.

Alexander Larman

Stop trying to make Margot Robbie a movie star

From our US edition

Two of last year’s biggest commercial flops, Amsterdam and Babylon, share certain DNA. They’re both big-budget, adult-oriented, period dramas of a kind that aren’t supposed to be made any more (except the fact that there are two of them suggests they are) from edgy auteur writer-directors who had big hits a few years back and have been busily spending the credit that they acquired from their success ever since. Both mix comedy and seriousness in a fashion that ought to attract critical plaudits but has brought little public interest. And they’re both long: Amsterdam is two and a quarter hours, and Babylon is a frankly staggering 189 minutes, which is near-Avatar levels of endurance. And, finally, both star Margot Robbie.

Tuesday

Bart van Es

How Anne Frank’s photograph became as recognisable as the Mona Lisa

Anne Frank died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen in late February 1945. Her last days were spent in the sick barracks caring for her sister Margot, who had a high fever and smiled contentedly, her mind already wandering. Anne, too, had been feverish, but ‘friendly and sweet’, according to witnesses. Her last recorded words were: ‘Margot will sleep well, and when she sleeps I won’t need to get up again.’  Ruth Franklin’s superb and subtle book pivots around this moment, which is described in a starkly titled central chapter, ‘Corpse’. Half her study tells Anne’s story up to the tragedy of her death.

Thursday

Amy Rose Everett

London to Amsterdam via Brussels: taking the long way

From our US edition

Brexit, the gift that keeps on giving: from June 14, 2024 to January 2025, a reduced Eurostar service will run between London and Amsterdam. Why? Part-closure of Amsterdam Centraal leaves no space for the extra bureaucracy now necessary. Passengers returning to London will change at Brussels to go through security and passport checks, adding up to almost two hours of extra journey time. Global travel booking platforms such as OMIO have reported a surge in train travel in recent years. Cheaper prices (compared to flying) and environmental concerns are cited as the main drivers. But Eurostar’s capped passenger numbers and indirect routes will surely increase air travel in 2024, literally flying in the face of Dutch sustainability policies.

brussels

Thursday

Deborah Ross

An endurance test that I constantly failed: Occupied City reviewed

Occupied City is Steve McQueen’s meditative essay on Amsterdam during Nazi occupation, with a running time of four hours and 22 minutes. There is no archive footage. There are no witness testimonies. It’s not The Sorrow and the Pity. It is not half-a-Shoah. Instead, this visits 130 addresses and details what happened there between 1940 and 1945 while showing the building or space as it is today. It should have its own power – what ghosts reside here? What was life like for the Jews who were deported from this square and perished at Auschwitz? – but I watched it from home via a link, as I had Covid, and after the first hour started to wonder: if I die will it be from the virus? Or the boredom? After the first hour I started to wonder: if I die, will it be from Covid?

Wednesday

Cockburn

Lizzo doesn’t want anyone to out-fat her, dancers claim

From our US edition

Earlier this month, a lawsuit was filed against Lizzo, the plus-size flute-playing singing sensation. It was alleged that she created a “hostile work environment and engaged in sexual harassment.” Lizzo has denied the allegations. But one week later and lawyers representing three of Lizzo's former dancers say they've received new complaints. Ron Zambrano said that his firm, which specializes in employment law, is vetting new allegations from at least six people who said they toured with Lizzo, including other dancers and some who said they worked on her Amazon reality show, Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls. The allegations are of a “sexually charged environment” and failure to pay employees.

lizzo

Tuesday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

A last-minute escape from the Holocaust

At the beginning of his profoundly moving memoir of his grandparents, parents, the Holocaust and the Gulag, Daniel Finkelstein writes: This the story of how my family took a journey which ended happily in Hendon, eating crusty bread rolls with butter in the café near the M1, but on the way took a detour through hell. Who would have guessed what those people, tucking into rolls at the newly-opened Brent Cross shopping centre in the mid-1970s, had been through?

Monday

Francesca Peacock

How to see two sides of Vermeer in the Netherlands

Why is it that the world of critics, gallery-goers and art-lovers is so overwhelmingly enthralled by Johannes Vermeer? His subjects – quiet interior scenes with women writing letters or playing music – are hardly the stuff of radical innovation or surprise. He wasn’t even that original: his works often have a similar focus to those by his contemporaries from the Dutch Golden Age, from Pieter de Hooch to Jan Verkolje. Nor is his biography the perfect fodder for endless books and feverish interest. So little is known about the man, and his way of painting, that the moniker he was given by the French art critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger in the 19th century – 'the sphinx of Delft' – is still used today to imply his inscrutability, his opacity and his ambiguity.

Monday

Francesca Peacock

Avoiding the brash side of Amsterdam

From our US edition

More than forty cities have taken it upon themselves to claim the nickname “Venice of the North,” but only one can use it without any hint of irony. When leaving Amsterdam Centraal station — either fresh off the Eurostar or via a quick train connection from Schiphol airport — it is hard not to be momentarily dazzled by the spectacle of glassy-surfaced grey canals, all reflecting narrow, higgledy-piggledy gabled houses. I was in Amsterdam for the Rijksmuseum Vermeer exhibition, but took the opportunity to see more of the city than a quick day trip would have afforded.

Friday

John Ehrett

Amsterdam explores friendship in a complicated world

From our US edition

David O. Russell is one of a small handful of directors whose involvement with a project is enough to get me to see it immediately. From the offbeat energy of Silver Linings Playbook to the tangled period drama of American Hustle, his films are tightly edited and always thick with talented actors. Amsterdam, his latest, is no exception. While it’s thematically fluffy and periodically tends toward the indulgent, it's never anything less than entertaining. There are far worse ways to spend a few hours, especially in the midst of a cinematic drought. Picking up in 1933, Amsterdam is the tale of two injured World War I veterans, slightly disreputable doctor Burt Berendson (Christian Bale) and successful attorney Harold Woodman (John David Washington).

Monday

Bruce Bawer

How Amsterdam ceased to be gay heaven

From our US edition

Last month, in preparation for an article about the growing gay backlash against trans ideology, I spoke with Bev Jackson, the co-founder of LGB Alliance, a gay and lesbian activist group that opposes the hijacking of the gay rights movement by transfolk. Bev told me about her background — fifty years in British gay activism, a resident of Amsterdam for four decades — and asked me about mine. I mentioned my 2006 book While Europe Slept, a cri de coeur about the Islamization of Europe. I heard in her voice a degree of disquiet about its topic. Nonetheless, she asked me to participate in the LGB Alliance’s forthcoming annual convention. I accepted, but when I hung up I told my partner: “I’ve been invited to a convention in London.

Thursday

Gerard Lyons

No, Amsterdam hasn’t overtaken the City

London is Europe’s major financial centre and one of the world’s two leading financial hubs. This is unlikely to change following Brexit. Its main competition is with New York, Singapore, Hong Kong and other centres like Shanghai that will emerge in the coming years. However, the headline of today’s main story in the Financial Times proclaimed, 'Amsterdam ousts London as Europe’s top share trading hub'. The article correctly reported that more shares were traded last month on 'Euronext, Amsterdam and the Dutch arms of CBOE Europe and Turquoise in January' than 'in London'. While the data in this story is naturally correct, it needs to be put within context in order to draw the right conclusions.

Wednesday

William Cook

Leiden: The eccentric city that’s worth leaving Amsterdam for

I’m on a narrowboat in Leiden, nursing a filthy hangover, watching this antique city floating past, when I’m awoken from my daydream by a strange whirring noise above me. The glass roof of the canal boat is rapidly descending, and the jolly Dutchman at the tiller is telling me to mind my head. I end up flat on my back, with the roof a few feet above. ‘We have some low bridges here in Leiden,’ says the tillerman, by way of explanation, as if this weird contraption was the most natural thing in the world. For me, this canal boat with its collapsing roof encapsulates the quirky appeal of Leiden, and why I was so keen to come back here.