Hans van der Kamp

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As a collector of material related to photography and film I have gathered a lot of very early movies on my hard drives. I love this material, but I do often find it tiring to watch very long silent movies, because I am used to today’s editing techniques. Somehow the rhythm of the scenes, especially in early 1900s movies is a bit too slow for me.

Just yesterday, while mining Usenet for old material, I stumbled upon an old short entitled A Winter Straw Ride, made in 1906 and I was surprised to see scenes following up on each other in a rhythm that is almost modern. Maybe one could even describe it as ‘action packed’. The photography is brilliant too. It is hard to work in the snow, using black & white material. Either the whites start to lose detail, or the darker shapes lose most of their grays.

I could not find any information on the director or the camera crew, just that the film was produced by the Edison company.

I do detest that Happy Holidays spirit. It seems to be somewhat of a taboo to say so, but I really do. Of course I do not mind a few days off, although I will not take full advantage of the opportunity, because if I do, I will only have to catch up work later on. That is one of the less attractive qualities of being an independent Internet entrepreneur. On second thought; forget about those two or three days. Christmas starts way earlier, somewhere end summer or begin fall if you ask me. Suddenly the majority of people can’t think straight any more.

This year the kick-off event of global Christmas madness was when the Nobel *Peace* Prize was given to a man who is a representant of a theocratical system which has repressed and still is repressing any form of environmental awareness to trade it for blazing wars or short term economical opportunities. That gullible Swedish gesture is not just plain dumb, it is dumb *and* sentimental; the exact two ingredients marking the true Christmas spirit. Time’s choice to make Vladimir Putin Person of the Year has a certain Christmas touch too, but at least the editors do not leave us in the dark any longer on the issue of American priorities when it comes to a choice between democracy and economical gain. Now, that is a relief for many and a Christmas bonus above expectation. (I mean, we all know how it works by now, we just want the assholes to admit it for a change.)

Do not get me wrong here; stupidity, hypocrisy and sentimentality do not exclusively belong to the Christmas spirit, but somehow things get worse this time of year. Suddenly everything is green, gold and red. Designers go flaky in a literal sense. Walt Disney, the godfather of ugliness rises from his tomb and spontaneously starts to puke up snowy Java applets. For crying out loud, the web is ugly enough as it is…

The worst part however is that if you complain, people start to ask if you are alone with Christmas. Why? I am surrounded by my loved ones, of course! I will be locked up with them in a room and a bright television set will be splattering those same ugly Christmas colors over the carpet, while I am eating like a pig and drinking until I can not drink any more. These are the two days of the year nobody can blame me for being an outcast or an eccentric, but will somebody please tell me what it is we are celebrating? Peace on Earth with a Nobel committee deviating to an off topic winner, due to a lack of real candidates? Or the ugliness of life in general and the birth of a child we are going to feistily nail to a cross once Easter comes?

So, eh.. Mmm.. My very best wishes for 2008! In all sincerity. Yes..

By the time I was finished building the new Amea Vintage Movies site, I had seen so many Burlesque Queens of the 1950s that I could recognize Virginia Bell just by the shape of her pubic hair and I only needed one close up of a nipple to see that the breast belonged to 1950s Playmate Elaine Reynolds.

I was also amazed how large my collection of vintage movies had become over the years. It made me wonder where it all started. Somewhere around age 10, I guess, when I fell madly in love with Betty Boop.

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Didn’t I promise some time ago that this weblog was never going to be a video blog? I just could not resist it, I guess.

Yes, I made it. AmeaMovies.com is now live. The old AMEA movies site was a project I have regretted for a long time. The site was a pain in the neck to update and the members were rarely very pleased with the site. For some time now, with an ever expanding AmeaNet and more photographic work, I find myself in the situation of my father who once bought a house that was too big for our small family. He had promised himself to redecorate the place in his spare time. When he finally finished the last room, the first one was on top of my mother’s list to be redecorated. It was a painful circle that only ended when he sold the house.

For three years now I have been showing quite some discipline when it comes to updating, rebuilding and restructuring sites, although it is never enough for the members who do not fully understand that I am a one man’s band as far as the technique, the design, the graphics, the server and most of the content are concerned. The old portal may look the same, but the code behind it has completely been altered at least twice. The same goes for the Vintage Photographs site and The Hidden Archives. The BDSM site has not been upgraded yet, because the site is fairly new.

All this time I was ignoring the movies site, because I knew it had to be rebuilt from scratch and that is a lot of work, but in the end it just had to happen. I have not been very successful in building video sites. The first one, AmstelVisie.com was a complete disaster. The second one CamDogs.com needed a complete make-over before it became half a success, without making any or very little money, so I had to delete it eventually. So, obviously I was quite insecure about building yet another movie site.

Although I am quite chaotic, I do have a planning. Actually Karin, my partner is my planning. I walked up to here and said: “I think it is time to build that new movies site.” She was skeptical at first. She showed me how many subscriptions we had sold for the old movie site. That was quite depressing. I told her it would take at least a month of working 7 days a week to build the new site. She was relieved, thinking that I always produce a site in half the time of my original planning. Once I start fiddling around with code and design, I can not stop. Not because I like it, but because I want to get it over with as soon as possible. After that I usually fall apart for a week or two. It is not a healthy attitude towards work, but this is how it has been since 1995 and I still do not see how I can change that routine.

“I really need that month,” I said. “It is not the coding, it is not the design. It is all those videos that have to be converted and rendered. Computers can only work as fast as their processors are.” She still did not believe me, so we made a bet. She figured the site would be ready mid November and I aimed for December 3rd. I won. But I am really sick and tired of hard drives making these funny noises when 2 Gigabyte video files are rendered in two or three hours. In the end I had two computers simultaneously rendering and converting video. I would even get up in the middle of the night to start new conversions, so that no computer time was wasted during the 4 to 6 hours I tend to sleep.

But now that the site is finished, I do not even feel like falling apart. I am not stressed. I love this site and I know it is going to be a success. Third time’s the charm.

Yesterday I sent out the mailing to most of our members and in the middle of the night I sat behind my desk, staring at my screen waiting for new subscribers, but nothing happened. I finally went to bed in one of my worst moods to wake up a few hours later with a luminous idea. Maybe I had changed the e-mail address for incoming payments? Yes, I had. When I opened my other mailbox I could not believe my eyes. This site is a bigger success than any other member site I have ever built.

Tonight I am going to walk to the bar on the corner and wash away a month’s worth of designing, coding, converting and rendering — and feel good about myself for a change. If I can still see straight when I return home, I am going to pretend I am a member and log on to the site to really enjoy all the marvels I have posted there.