Amy Winehouse is alive. Though perhaps we shouldn't call it life, as she stands in all her corpse-blue glory, looking bewildered at the audience in the Muziekgebouw for an hour. A bit like we know her from those tragic last concert recordings, where she was stiff with all the chemicals and liquid aids to perform a few last notes. She is now the funniest backing vocalist that I have seen in a long time, and also the youngest member of the illustrious band The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, a New York punk band formed in the last century.
The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black has thus itself survived the death of Punk, which entered when the genre, once introduced by The Stooges and later made great by The Sex Pistols, collapsed thanks to The Tubes who reduced it to a dubious circus in the US (White Punks On Dope).
Aunties
'Karen Black' is from the early 1980s and played clubs in New York and wide when many an audience member in Amsterdam was still only a vague idea of conception in the minds of their future parents. At sixty-two, the lead singer of The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, along with the at least equally old high-blonde bassist, is the ideal paragon of the kind of aunties you like to see passing by at silly family parties.
And what fun they had in Amsterdam. The infectious punk rock of The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black also got the Holland Festival audience moving. An audience that got a big kick out of a very different kind of world art this weekend than any of the previous editions anyway.
Au
Thanks to its firmly rooted in the North American alternative scene associate artist ANOHNI this festival is a celebration for anyone who loves queer, of femininity, of different. This elicits sometimes bewildered reactions from representatives of the traditional media, who spoke of 'monkey cries' when listening to Navaho singing. Which just goes to show that in this edition, the Holland Festival has succeeded in opening some windows, even if that means quite a bit of 'ouch' for some people.
That not everything from that underground scene is immediately high art is part of it. The support act for The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black was Future Feminism founder and DJ Johanna Constantine's 'Tenebris Suspiria Naturae ('The dark sigh of nature')', an obscure little work in which Constantine, with two non-binary seconds, gave away a rather predictable sample of 'slow moving in beautiful light' that kept you awake mainly thanks to the rock-hard drone she attached - on tape.
Rave
For the younger guests, there was also a real rave organised this weekend in an old garage near Sloterdijk Station. I was there briefly, on my way to the train, and thanks to the earplugs provided, I could feel what it's like: going crazy on hard beats in a location that feels and sounds illegal, surrounded by sweet people who want nothing but peace. Something like that.
Łukasz Twarkowski is a Lithuanian artist who created a six-hour version of the illegal parties in the forests of Lithuania that we also know from Belgian villages that are brightened up for a few days by a visiting swarm of dance enthusiasts.
Quite unique that something like this can happen at the Holland Festival. That festival is taking a whole new direction thanks to new programmer Kasia Tórz, where ANOHNI's input has been given all the space it needs in a wonderful way. This tastes like a lot more. The Netherlands needs to be shaken up a bit more.
'The Future is Female' reads the latest thesis of the Future Feminism Manifesto, which can also be seen these days in a beautiful, hushed exhibition at the Muziekgebouw. That's a future I like to see.
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