Cliff Chan’s Weblog

On June 21, 2008, a team of over 40 Dutch adventure seekers headed from Amsterdam to the Olympics in Beijing this summer. Why leave in June when the Olympics take place in August? Well…. the journey takes place not by plane, but by cars and motorbikes. Yes, all 17,500 kilometers of it. And oh, did I mention all participating cars and bikes are in the Dutch national color orange?

Apart from experiencing probably the biggest adventure of their lives, the Dutchies contribute to charity along the way through their link with Right To Play, an international humanitarian organization with a mission to improve the lives of children in the less fortunate area’s of the world. The Dutch adventurers will visit projects set up by Right To Play in Central Asia to generate publicity in order to collect money to support such projects.

This wonderful initiative involving sports, adventure and charity, has drawn Nam Kee restaurants in Amsterdam to proudly support one of the bikers Veenerick Vos: Team Nam Kee is born! 

Find out how you can support this journey of a life time and Right To Play by visiting the following sites:

www.amsterdambeijing.com

www.righttoplay.com

I just published a post on the watchfreaks blog addressing the line (if any) in haute horlogerie between classic watches and show-off-ish watches. Check it out and please share your thoughts with me!

With soul music and hip hop, maybe even more than with other genres, a strong tendency seems to exist to make a distinction between mainstream and underground.

For soul music, there has been the so-called “neo-soul” movement since the late 1990’s which is considered ‘more soulful’ and is, undeniably, more reminiscent of the ‘old’ soul from the 1970’s and 1980’s. As for hip hop, the more underground and ‘raw’ counterpart of the hip hop music that is topping every chart nowadays, is sometimes referred to as “conscious hip hop”, and often features more socially conscious lyrics.

Most of the time you can tell upon the first listening whether certain material may be qualified as mainstream or underground. However, I do often wonder what exactly makes something either mainstream or underground. Also, why does the one seem to exclude the other? Well, I don’t know. All I know is, to me, it doesn’t really make sense to be a fan of just either one. My CD collection includes for example Usher and Amel Larrieux, as well as will.i.am and Dilated Peoples.

Yesterday, I came across a great article by El Keter on Okayplayer.com which, amongst others, describes the distinction between underground and mainstream music, and how he loves to see the two go hand in hand. I liked the article so much I just had to share it. I’ve inserted the complete article below - enjoy the article I wish I wrote… Read the rest of this entry »

This week my friend Alon Ben Joseph, who got me blogging in the first place, tagged me in what he calls The Blog Game. The rules of the game (copied from my tagger) are as follows:

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules;
2. List EIGHT random facts about yourself;
3. Tag EIGHT people at the end of your post and list their names;
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged; and,
5. E-mail your tagger, the link to your post.

Since Alon was out of tags when he found out I started blogging, he introduced a rule number six: you’re allowed to tag three more people within a month after you publish your eight facts. Given this, I kind of owe it to him to respond to his tag

So here goes, eight random facts about me in random order. Read the rest of this entry »

Some people say vinyl sounds better and ‘warmer’ than a CD. I myself have too little experience with vinyl to argue with the true audiophiles.

Being born in the late 70’s, when I first started consciously enjoying music and started buying music, vinyl had long made way for the CD already. Since I bought my first CD (I’m guessing sometime in 1991), I have built up a modest collection of 785 CD’s (and counting). At least, that’s the number of albums indicated by the iTunes browser.

So yes, I do convert each and every CD I own into mp3’s. But I never download any music - the only reason I turn CD’s into mp3’s is that I can have my entire collection with me when traveling. I guess I like to ‘own’ the music, the recordings. I need to have something physical, something that I can hold in my hands. I like to arrange CD’s in alphabetical order on shelves. I love to go through the booklets to read the lyrics, to check out the credits, to see who’s playing those drums on that track. I like to know who’s responsible for the production and who wrote the words to the song. To me, that’s half of the fun about music. And, of course, I like to believe that I respect any copyrights involved (although I realize allowing my friends to make copies of the digital back up of my CD collection sure should not qualify as such….).

I must admit that somewhere, all of this has to do with sentiment as well. I grew up with original recordings on CD and for me that’s one of those things that you just don’t wish to change. I don’t mean to get too nostalgic about it, it’s just that I simply feel like I’d be missing too much if I were to download music.

So in a sense, I do get a better and warmer feeling when collecting and listening to original recordings on CD as opposed to downloaded mp3’s. Maybe the audiophiles weren’t so far off after all. Maybe vinyl does ’sound’ better…