Drift in Amsterdam

Beautiful evening at Drift, and now that I’ve been told that the Amsterdam readership of the blog is larger than I realized, I’ve decided that they deserve a bit of public praise, or at least description.

As many of you know, I taught a semester in Amsterdam while on sabbatical from Cairo, Fall 2007. The philosophy student community is very much alive in Amsterdam– I believe the number was 140 freshman Philosophy majors at UvA during my semester there. The Heidegger class was bursting at the seams. In addition to being rather sophisticated people, the UvA Philosophy students show up very mature from the start, and many of them have had serious interests in philosophy since their mid-teens. Another trait they have is that at first they tend to be very deferential about the professor/student gap wand not want to bother you on the street when they see you, things like that. But all I had to do was complain mildly once about that, and suddenly I was getting invited to everything in the most generous possible way– dinners, parties, a walking tour of Rotterdam, a ride to a restaurant on the back of a bicycle. I couldn’t possibly have better memories of that semester.

So, imagine my pleasant surprise… Not only did I get to see three of those students again in London and Bristol on this trip, I also was informed that by sheer coincidence, my one-night layover in Amsterdam (namely, tonight) just happened to be the night of the annual Drift festival– a giant combination of lectures, concerts, and parties all in the same three-floor building (a building described to me as an “anarchist squat”, perhaps sarcastically without my realizing it, or perhaps that is literally true).

There were a number of faculty members there as well, but the entire thing appears to be student-organized. It certainly runs on a young person’s schedule– from around 8:00 at night to 3:00 in the morning, though I had to bail out at midnight due to my travel schedule.

There was a large lecture hall on the bottom floor and a small one on the top. (I must admit that I couldn’t endure the small one, which was nearly as hot as a sauna.) Next to that small hall was a small bar with an ongoing live jazz group featuring two of my ex-students playing piano and drums and a very good vocalist I didn’t know personally; later a nice saxophone was added.

Oh yes… There was also an inventive “stairs” option running simultaneously with the large and small lecture halls. There was a cube-shaped black wooden podium on a landing between two of the floors. The speaker ascended the cube and took a microphone. The speaker was also flooded with powerful light. I preferred watching the shadows of the speakers, because the male speakers’ shadows all looked like Jesus of Nazareth and the female speakers’ shadows all looked strangely like either Winston Churchill or Alfred Hitchcock.

Total attendance must have been… oh… maybe in the 200-300 range? Something like that.

My only pang of guilt was that Bastiaan and Roel were stuck in Bristol while I was here enjoying their own Department’s festival. Otherwise, it was a great mood lift to see about 15 of my favorite students and 3 of my favorite colleagues for the first time in over a year. Until two days ago I had no idea this would happen. Thanks to all of you. See you next time.