Well, we’re giving away 20 duo tickets so you can go see his amazing paintings for yourself!
All you have to do is send us an email with your full name and address. That’s it!

What are you waiting for? Go Go Go!

Late night. The night howls around your house. Floorboards creak upstairs, moaning out like sinners who have been in Hell for too long. The wind creeps its way in through the cracks in your psyche and gleefully whispers threats into your ear. You’re all alone. Nobody cares. You are a social failure and terrorists will invade your house and sacrifice you to their angry God, a useless fat pig to a vindictive butcher. Suddenly, the earth shudders as if pounded once by a divine fist. The last of your stale beer stirs in its glass. You instantly shit a brick and whimper a plea for a quick demise. No fight, no flight – just meek resignation and fearful anticipation. The strong survive and you’re not one of them. You walk towards the front door and put your hand on the knob, sighing once before you pull it open – expecting immediate death at the hands of who- or whatever has finally come for you – only to see nothing standing before you.

There are no jihadi to claim your life, no immigrants to take your job. No social circle to judge you and no parents to dissappoint. No bankruptcy, no tumor. There is no judging God standing outside, holding up the balance book of your life while shaking His/Her head in foreboding denial. In truth, there is really nothing to be afraid of – nothing except the all new spine-tingling horror of Postrmagazine #13: The Fear Issue – OUT NOW IN TERRIFYING 3D-VISION!!

HURRAY FOR WASHINGTON!

With judgement day coming closer yours truly, A&Gallery and Avenue L are set to host a suitably glamorous Presidential Evening inside the Ghent White House: Sandton Grand Hotel Reylof. Why? Because elections are fun!

On Tuesday November 6, from late in the evening until early in the morning, we’ll toast to the results as they come in, and eat hamburgers, buffalo wings and other nutritious American fare. We’ll serve Bud Light, Californian wine and bourbon, while talking politics, birth certificates and gay marriage. We’ll dance to some real jazz, hire a comedian to make wise-ass remarks and put Belgian politicians to the test: what do they know about American politics? Like really.

Prices & Booking

PRESIDENTIAL EVENING + NIGHT € 72

From 8pm till 8.30pm, you are cordially invited to a complimentary cocktail by NJOY, the hotel’s infamous cocktail bar. Then, from 8.30pm till 10.30pm, free drinks (American beer, wine & soft drinks) and a three-course American BBQ (including hamburgers, steak, buffalo wings, veggie delights and other nutritious American fare) will be served – prepared by the hotel’s exquisite restaurant Lof. A jazz band will provide the dinner soundtrack – alongside DJs Franklin & Roosevelt. Afterwards, we will ask you to accompany us in the hotel’s winter garden for Bourbon & cigars – followed by our Presidential Night.
(Cocktail, beer, wine, soft drinks, three-course BBQ, bourbon, cigar + all activities and foodies of the Presidential Night – see below – are included in the price)
Reservation code: JFK
Book now at info@restaurantlof.be

PRESIDENTIAL NIGHT € 20

From 10.30 pm onwards, you will be able to watch the results of the presidential election as they come in on the big screen – CNN, NBC and Fox News are in the house! We’ve hired a jazz band to accompany you through the night – alongside DJs Franklin & Roosevelt and a special surprise – and will serve you hot dogs, chili dogs and veggie delights from midnight until 4am. An American comedian will also perform a half-hour stand-up comedy show and we’ll play a quiz with several well-known Americans and Belgians – who knows most about American culture and history? From 5.30am onwards, breakfast will be served in the presidential salon.
(Hot dogs, chili dogs, veggie delights, breakfast and a welcome drink – American beer, wine or soft drink – are included in the price)
Reservation code: NIXON
Book now at info@restaurantlof.be

PRESIDENTIAL STAY

Want to have your own special retreat on Tuesday November 6 and stay the night at Grand Hotel Reylof?
Yes, you can!
Book your room now at reservations.reylof@sandton.eu

CHARM ROOM € 119
1-2 persons, including breakfast
promotional code: WASHINGTON

DELUXE ROOM € 129
1-2 persons, including breakfast
promotional code: REAGAN

FULL PACKAGE € 190
1 person
Deluxe Room + Presidential Evening & Night
promotional code: BUSH

FULL PACKAGE € 250
2 persons
Deluxe Room + Presidential Evening & Night
promotional code: CARTER

Visit the Hurray For Washington website for more details and updates.

As Anonymous exposes Pedobears worldwide and Chinese government hackers activate your webcam while you masturbate, the POSTR-offices have been buzzing with that same good old paranoia that got us involved in this dirty business in the first place. What have we been doing, you ask? Oh, nothing more than the usual: following that moneytrail, connecting those little dots and digging up those obscure links between the CIA and Facebook. It’s a filthy and frustrating job and nobody asked us to do it but Hell, who else but us will tell you that they told you so when the New World Order comes to be.

Internet police on Twitter – Facebook friends on the Interpol-watchlist – wiretaps on your Skype-conversations…find out the titillating quasi-truth about all this and much more when we release POSTRmagazine #12: The Privacy Issue, a piece of print so hot off the press it scalds the fingertips and stings the eyes. For those lucky enough to be living in the beautiful metropole that is Berlin, come pick up your issue personally at our July 19 exhibition at Letters Are My Friends in X-Berg where our ferocious flagship of content will enter into battle with the exceptionally gifted designers of VA300. Call it Content vs. Form vs. BBQ: join us in the Boppstrasse for burgers and beers with a side of truth and good looking print.

There’s nowhere to run to baby, there’s nowhere to hide.

lettersaremyfriends.com
va300.de

In light of these developments we decided to publish our story again.

THE BLAND FACE OF DANGER
An altar boy with assault codes

Pieter De Crem is a dangerous man. Not because he’s the Secretary of Defense and accordingly also sort of the supreme commander of Belgium’s elite fighting forces. Not because he gets drunk during state-sponsored trips to New York and makes an ass out of himself while representing our already ridiculous excuse for a nation halfway across the world. Not even because he’s the embodiment of irony, being a Christian in charge of defense matters (turn the other cheek, remember?). This man is dangerous because he went on the record as saying that blogs are dangerous. Yes, you read it right. Blogs. Dangerous. Flee in terror and don’t turn back for your precious belongings or left-behind toddlers, our Defense secretary has declared a Blogging Threat Level 5.

According to Petey, the blogosphere is a dangerous thing because it allows anybody to just say whatever he or she wants on a public forum. Anything! About anyone or anything they feel like talking about! Without being held accountable for it! This is an outrage! Being the critical audience that we aim for, you might not take our word for it, what with this being the 21st century, and with us having had freedom of speech for quite some time now and all. Ok, then let us quote the good man himself:

“I want to use this non-event to point out a dangerous phenomenon in our society. We are living in an era where everybody is completely free to post on blogs at their own whim, without any responsibility whatsoever. This even surpasses the most rabid smearing campaigns. And together with you Mr. Chairman, my other colleagues in parliament and the government, I have to conclude that it is nearly impossible to defend oneself against this sort of thing. Every one of you is a potential victim. And I ask of you that we all contemplate this matter.”

Wow. Dangerous. Free to post. Potential victim. Yes, god forbid a critical citizen speaks of a figure as public as a politician, someone who of all people has been elected by the people. Of course, this sort of talk is always the result of a tangible case. In this particular scenario (the non-event he mentioned earlier in his tirade), the anyone was a Dutch waitress working in a New York bar; and the something she wrote about was our minister of defense tumbling into her establishment of employment in a drunken stupor while on a government assignment. A governmental mission to the UN, to be exact. He was supposed to have a load of meetings with a bunch of other officials about some topic or other, meetings that later turned out never to have taken place because half of the people who were supposed to be there were somewhere in Europe discussing something entirely different. Anyhoo, when a member of the opposition asked him about whether or not he knew of this mass Inattendance before he hopped on an A130 to the Big Apple, Mr. De Crem cleverly sidetracked the matter and focused instead on his own set of hurt feelings. Either way, in the end the woman got fired from her job after a phone call had been made from his cabinet to the B.Cafe in New York City.

The most amazing part of the story is perhaps the round of applause that befell poor Crembo after delivering his heart-felt speech to his fellow members of parliament. Everyone seemed to have forgotten that the man had gone on a fully paid trip to New York when he knew (how could he not know?) that the majority of the meetings he was scheduled to attend, had been cancelled, or that he had a woman fired (don’t deny it, what did you think the manager of the restaurant was going to do after a phone call from a Minister of Defense, for crap’s sake) for taking up her responsibility as a concerned civilian. In conclusion, Pete added that he would be talking to his staff (which is like, the army, man) to evaluate how the esteemed minister and his integrity could be better protected from these sorts of vicious attacks in the future. Mr. De Crem, if you’re reading this: the Belgian military is not your personal goon-squad, and the thing about your alleged integrity is that it is something that can only be protected by you. How, you might ask? For example by not being drunk out of your ass when going on a non-justified, tax-funded trip to New York. Goddammit.

Another reason that the High Commander of Aalter is dangerous is the fact that he doesn’t always do what he says he will, and he doesn’t always say what he’s going to do. For example, when he sent a bunch of Belgian soldiers over to Afghanistan, he said they weren’t going to participate in any field operations, instead retaining a strictly a formative role by working as advisors and instructors in the training of Afghani soldiers. However, they turned out to be patrolling right alongside these soldiers during a weapons raid that took place on a dusty Monday in April, in Kunduz, swinging their guns around and shouting orders.
Now we’re not saying that it’s wrong to take weapons from terrorists, but we do think that it’s wrong when a minister of defense lies about what our troops are doing. It seems that Pieter De Crem wants to paint a big bull’s-eye on Belgium, just to show that he won’t be deterred in his mission to become the Warlord of Western Europe. Really P, who are you trying to shock & awe? Those terrorists hiding in their sandy dunes and humid caves under Afghan soil, or the big shots from NATO and the USA who wear three-piece suits and whose favorite pastime is taking out rural settlements with $84,000 Sidewinder missiles?
Another Crembo classic was the one where he absent-mindedly admitted that the military base at Kleine Brogel had a nuclear capacity. When asked about it, he was all like ‘duh of course it does, what are you, like, retarded?’ when NATO has always considered it good practice to neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear warheads in any base, ever. Not for you, ey? Never mind that a report by US scientists recently declared a lot of nuclear bases (including Kleine Brogel) as dangerously unsafe, claiming they needed to be either revised or closed, you just had to shoot off your big mouth and tell everybody that we have a couple of nuclear bombs lying around in a military base that has been deemed unsafe by experts. About the unsafe condition of the base itself, no further statement was made. Not important.

So yes, Pieter De Crem is definitely dangerous. He is a pathological megalomaniac, a Napoleonesk general who doesn’t feel the need to either motivate or seek support for his policies. He does what he feels like, and the rest of parliament and the public need to accept his decisions, simply because of the fact that he is the one who makes them. If he could, he’d probably answer every critical question with “because I say so.” If we had a properly functioning democracy, he’d be a menace to it, not only because he blatantly disregards democratic principles, but also because he’s pushing our country higher and higher on the terrorist hit list, without being able to provide the military fire power or intelligence to deter or disarm potential attacks. A word of advice to Le Crem: quit your day job and rack up your little gang of reactionary military thugs, take a complimentary C-130 ride to Afghanistan and become the warlord of your own little province. Then you can go after who ever you want without bearing the flag of a country that never gave you the democratic mandate to do what you’re doing.

MILITARY COUNTERINTELLIGENCE

Pieter De Crem is the mayor of Aalter, just like his daddy was before him. This family dynasty has led the people of Aalter to rename the local city hall. It is now lovingly or grudgingly referred to as ‘The Cremlin’.

Even though Pieter De Crem is quite the tough-talking Minister of Defense, he himself never actually was in the army. Now we can hear you thinking: “didn’t they have a draft back in those days, and wasn’t everybody supposed to serve his time in the military?”. Yes, they did, and yes, they were. But Pieter De Crem was granted a free pass for ‘medical reasons’. We reckon he was granted a free pass because his daddy was the major, because as far as we can see, there’s nothing that indicates that he couldn’t have done the job. Great way to serve your country, Pete!

This article was first published in POSTRmagazine #2: The Politics Issue — June 2009

Here are a few impressions of the second day of the festival.

Facing Pages is a biennial festival about independent magazines. With a three-day event, Facing Pages (formerly O.K. Festival) brings leading independent magazine makers and aficionados to Arnhem, The Netherlands. The event shows what part the independent magazine currently plays in the development of our visual culture.

Event Location:
Trans 6
6811 HR Arnhem
The Netherlands

We’ll be handing out copies of POSTRmagazine #11: The Legal Drugs issue so if you’re there, come meet us and have a chat. I’ll be the one wearing the Nixon mask.

In light of the Mike Daisey vs. This American Life/New York Times discussion we’d like to publish our Google story again. We ran this little field report in our first issue. The subject was Media so we wanted to visit the brand new Google data center located in our very own Belgium. This report is what people might consider Gonzo journalism. If they do, we consider that a compliment but more importantly, would you consider this a journalistic article? We’d like to know. Try to find the parts we exaggerated or made up and leave a comment below. You’ll be surprised how factual fiction can be.

We would like to point out that we are not saying that our Google story is in any way as important as a story on a corporation abusing it’s employees in China or that we are investigative journalists.

GOOGLED, APPROVED AND GOOGLED AGAIN: LE BORINAGE
When revolutions collide, you can find us playing golf in Digital Innovation Valley

Digital Innovation Valley truly exists, we can say so because we were there. But contrary to popular belief, the hills of convenience, information and progression are actually an unimaginitive, industrial landscape situated in a run-down area of Belgium called the Borinage. While still being considered as one of our nation’s most impoverished regions, it’s a place where the very last scraps of the Industrial Revolution absurdly collide with the freshly arrived and by many cordially hailed technological era. And where helicopters make daily fly-overs to surveil the area, according to one of its blurred inhabitants. We paid the “economically promising” valley a visit, suspiciously investigating the arrival of one of the largest internet data centers on the Old Continent. We got tailed by arduous security guards, walked knee-deep in the mud and eventually ended up playing ‘le golf du pauvre’ in the shadows of the valley of information technology, where rhum is served abundantly in large soda glasses.

This fine piece of what we would like to call corporate madness meets beautiful simplicity has its origin in 2005, when a representative of an American company called Zenzu registered at the reception desk of a distinguished castle in Garfield Street (Washington DC), currently giving shelter to the Embassy of Belgium. The mysterious company had a strenuous wishlist, mainly consisting of three essential elements: water, space and electricity. To be searched and found on Belgian territory by the local government and preferably in large amounts. The eager, ‘unknown’ bidder —that later on turned out to be none less than the giant internet company Google— specifically demanded a domain counting at least 220 acres, the proximity of water and the possibility to consume 150 megawatt a year, a ridiculous amount that even dazzled Belgium’s main energy companies Electrabel and Elia.

After the Belgian diplomacy forwarded Google’s proposal to the three regions in the country, only the southern part was really taking the bait. The Walloon representatives of the OFI, the Office for Foreign Investors, soon set up a meeting with the people of Zenzu. Undoubtedly unlike what they were expecting, three young men around their thirties showed up, carrying nothing but a backpack. But as relaxed as they looked, the more determined they came through, considering other areas in France and Sweden and juggling with mind-boggling amounts of cash. The private money to be invested would run up to 250 million euro, the amount of tax payer’s money was initially set at 5 million euro. However, the factory that was going to be built, would do something in return, creating about 150 temporary jobs and later on employing about 120 people permanently, mostly vacancies for highly educated people. The negotiations were difficult but the agreement could soon become the symbolic saviour of an economically faltering region.

Saint-Ghislain, January 2009. As the data center was set to open at the end of 2008 in the industrial zone Ghlin-Baudour, we decided a bit of field research on how Google had affected the Borinage couldn’t cause any harm. After all, this is Google we’re talking about, the company with one of the strongest brand names of this spanking new century. And it’s making a triumphal entry in a region where generations after, people are still suffering from the closing of the coalmines such as the Grand Hornu that once employed about 1,500 people. The perfect spot for a brand that has established itself as the most prominent name on the information highway; gathering the world’s information through a search engine. What can go economically wrong with a company that even makes it possible for you to explore the bottom of the ocean on your computer or to virtually visit almost every location in the world? Oddly enough, Google Maps, the ingenious online tool that recently enabled the Palestinian political party Fatah to find Hamas’ target locations, somehow couldn’t help us on our search for a data center of almost one square kilometre. Google is literally publishing the entire world and facilitating freedom of information, but when it comes to sharing information about themselves, the company seems to be veiled in silence and secrecy.

“Like all our data centres, the St-Ghislain centre will process and store information that enables us to power a range of our services”

Nevertheless our intuition and a GPS-system carrying the little information we could find, lead us to what we thought of as a good base to start our search, close to the industrial zone Ghlin Baudour. After we did a bit of wandering around, a gigantic and completely fenced off, domain alongside the river attracted our attention. It was accessible only through two small, supervised gates, and our attempts to find out whether this bulking buidling was or was not the infamous data center were swiftly extinguished by a very grumpy and very silent security guard, who kindly obliged us to change tactics when we arrived at the second gate. When asked if we were at the right location for our appointment at the Google data center, the guard confirmed our presumption by answering “Maybe”. But he wouldn’t enlighten us any further, nor would the security car that tailed us when we were defying the natural barriers surrounding the center. It almost made it impossible to take some decent photographs. Digital Innovation Valley didn’t seem very hospitable to us, untill we got charmed by Google’s neighbours: a little farmhouse called Pic & Plat, almost looking fairy-like in the hillock landscape.

“In these modern times, privacy no longer exists”

What initially looked like a prestigious hideout for bored Google moguls playin golf, appeared to be one of the authentic diamonds of the area. Inside the rural tavern, the elderly people present didn’t seem to have any clue of the activity going on in their backyard. They hardly paid attention. “What is the exact purpose of this Google building?”, a middle aged man would ask us when we informed about the data center. More important were the first served beers of a bleak day, after which a significant number of economically ignorable, local elderly started to collect their equipment, went on to the playground and played their favorite game, La Crosse en Plein. A traditional sport, deviated from golf, that barely turns up any search results when Googled and clarifies the mistery of this data center even less.

“Like all our data centres, the St-Ghislain centre will process and store information that enables us to power a range of our services”, Google spokesman Al Verney answered later on. “But we’re currently still constructing the facility. It’s a big project and although we’ll be in construction for some time to come, we expect to be operational as scheduled. The final scope of the project —both in terms of scale and economic impact— will be determined over time, but we’re providing employment for a significant number of people during the construction phase, and expect to continue investing in people for a range of positions as the facility develops.”

A lot of questions remained. What kind of information are we specifically talking about? Will these humongous servers even be used to carry any information and if so, will it make us any smarter? Maybe these weird constructions are predestined to store incriminating nude pictures of Mr. and Mrs. Boring, an American couple that recently sued Google for invasion of privacy after a Google Street View spycar illegally drove down their private driveway and took a bunch of 360-degree, both pan-and-zoomable pictures of their home and swimming pool? “In these modern times, privacy no longer exists”, Google would argue after the Borings lost their battle against the internet giant that seems to be attempting to spy on the entire planet. Will they state the same comment when Pic & Plat has to make room for digital innovation as well?

Who knows what to take two of in a world of expiring patents and renewed marketing strategies for the kind of pills that can take the gloom out of a depressed rhino – if said rhino had somehow managed to find a prescription. Oh yes, the newly emerging mental marketplace offers a lot of high-powered medication for a lot of disorders whose symptoms sound a little vague to say the least. Some would say that treating ADHD with Ritalin is the medical equivalent of pulling out weeds with a rocket launcher. Others argue that problems like depression and relational disorders are often caused by social issues and shouldn’t be medicalized since drugs don’t tackle the actual root of the problem and instead focus on a quick fix to get you to the next stop.

In our next issue, POSTRmagazine brings you a look into the 900 billion USD market that is the pharmaceutical industry. We will shed some light on why some drugs are legal while others are smuggled into the country in homemade submarines and armored car convoys – even as the death penalty looms in some of the more dissuasive regimes in the world. We take a look at an aspect of our evolution – the power to heal ourselves – and how we have used it to improve our public health. Consider it a self-diagnosis – based on hard work & research and fueled by conspiratory paranoia & delusions of grandeur.

WARNING: POSTRmagazine #11: The Legal Drugs issue may cause erratic behaviour, insomnia, heartburn, severe depression, epileptic seizures, psychotic episodes and explosive diarrhea. Always consult your physician before reading.