sat 19 mar 2011 05:50:45 — witte de withstraat
anisimowicz at van gogh
friday morning, we had a visit from two electricians and jon. the mischief was kinda sleep-deprived grumpy, came up here to hang around while they were working downstairs, then went downstairs when they came up to work here.
by some strange rule-giving of amsterdam, every electric outlet in any habitable room must be a double outlet. and every habitable room must have at least two double outlets. so it doesn't matter how many you have or how many you want or need. wherever there is one, there must be two. even the electricians were saying 'the people who made these rules must be drunk'. so now i have lots of double stopkontakten. if i want, i can plug four things in right next to my bed.
•••
friday night pani and i went to the van gogh museum, where aleksandra anisimowicz (soprano) and maria prokofieva (piano) were performing 10 songs. i had the zoom recorder with me and managed to record it all by hand. strange performance situation because people were also hanging around in the café area chatting, so there's this constant murmur behind the piano and opera singing. kind of like opera in a piano bar would sound.
also slightly unsettling was that the venue in their program had misspelled aleksandra's name as 'anisimocz', which i guess in polish is particularly unflattering since 'mocz' means something like 'urine'. stom. i mean, how hard is it to spell the singer's name right?
after the show pani and i went upstairs and floated thru the permanent exhibit of van gogh paintings -- just for a few minutes cuz the museum was closing soon.
then we took a cab to rembrandtplein and went to de nachtwacht, and ate and talked. grabbing the 14 at midnight we ran into jon. i went to jon's place and drank some vodka and talked with him for an hour or two.
then i went upstairs and loaded the sound from the performance at van gogh, divided it up and made an album of mp3s.