Sounds + Food 'n' Retail

I'm taking a little breather (what again?), to prepare some longer posts, a media-related one for Tech IT Easy, and some more tech- and logistic-related ones which I plan to mirror-post on both this blog and TIE. Hopefully, I'll be done with that soon.

In the mean time, I was thinking that there are actually quite a lot of songs inspired by and named after cities. The first one that comes to mind is Jacques Brel's "Le Port d'Amsterdam" (see video at the end of this post), also more commonly known as just "Amsterdam." I don't have the time to create a world-map of songs, though quite a few come to mind, which I may write about at a later date. And I'm also thinking about themes for food-venues, and where they come from.

There is a famous café in Brussels, called "A la Mort Subite," which Jacques Brel used to frequent and which has pictures of him hanging on the wall. I think it represents, for those that care, a great tourist-attraction and a piece of history. It's hard to control that, and I'm sure the café would have ended up differently, if it wasn't for Brel.



My dad told me a story about a café started in Bonn, Germany, which became a centre for political journalists in the 80s. As the interim capital of West-Germany, Bonn was important back then and it was only natural that such a place needed to exist. The café is dead now, of course, after the government moved to Berlin. Similarly, there is an artist-hangout in Dublin, one of the few authentic pubs left, and probably there since James Joyce, for all I know.

How this all happens, seems out of the control of the owners. Maybe just the right time/place, or the price being right for starving artists/journalists, who knows. Maybe there were other factors that can be "engineered." In any case, food for thought.

Enjoy the video. Le Port d'Amsterdam is incidentally also a Dutch pub in Paris.