"The Milky Way was opened in the late sixties... in the building of a former milk factory." "A place where people can sit together listen to things, see things and do things." "ICONOCLASM A STORM OF IMAGES" "WE DEMAND HAPPINESS" "We do a Black Magazine." "It's printed in Paris." "But the distribution and that sort of thing... we try to do that ourselves." "We are collecting material for a brochure." "A brochure with all the information for black people." "We didn't have that yet." "In that way the Dutch are ahead of us." "That's what I'm working on." "EAST, WEST HOM E'S RADIO-ACTIVE" "What's the idiot put on now?" "Oh, the Dead Kennedys." "Shit." "Do you like it?" "They're making a movie and it'll come to Norway." "They asked her what she thinks of hash and marihuana." " Are they filming this?" " Maybe my parents will see it." "We can ride with three people on one bike." "'Would you buy a beer for me?" "'" "WE DEMAN D HAPPI N ESS" "Hey, your change!" "Four guilders change." "Do you have a guilder?" "I'm German." "I was born in north-east Germany in a small farming village near the East-German border." "That's where I grew up for the first ten years of my life." "My father was in the military in those days." "I had very little contact with my father, even as a child." "Traditionally in our family one of the men should join the army." "My older brother didn't feel like it and I even less." "I just didn't go." "I refused." "My younger brother is twenty now." "He's not joining either." "The conflict between the young and the old took place between 1970 and 1980." "The first conflict was the student revolution in Germany." "It's because the older generation is still lingering in the Nazi era." "The war was finished but especially older people have retained a lot of it." "In 1970 I went to India for the first time." "In Indian cities there are many people who came from the country to find a job." "But there are no jobs." "Nowhere." "I spent three weeks in Bombay with former lepers." "There is a small park in Bombay where forty of fifty people had come together." "They were all cured of leprosy." "They missed fingers, hands or feet." "It was a kind of commune." "Those who earned some money shared it with others." "There were shoeshine boys and there were people who cooked." "And they were always smoking hash." "It was great to see." "Now I'm doing a lot of leaded-glass work." "Two or three hundred years ago people who worked with glass were alchemists." "Every workshop had its own secrets its secrets and its own special colours." "Even as a child I was fascinated by it." "Burning." "On the edge of every page there is a soldier." "A boy still, with matches." "The president looks at him from the flames." "The president is dead, he says." "This is his face." "Look how it curls up and shrinks." "A photo of a burning photo." "On whose side is light?" "Which party does oxygen vote for?" "In the flames, an indifferent balance is dancing." "Only in words it's a burning question." "Only questions." "REAGAN TOMOR ROW'S CANCER" "Hello Fred, how are you?" "It's Odongo here." "I hear you've got only ten mikes?" "One two three..." "As a child I was very much into legends especially the story of Till Eulenspiegel." "You could really learn from what he did especially as a child." "He had a special philosophy you could call anarchistic." "He showed people how stupid they were and what stupid things they could believe in." "And how to do things differently." "More simply." "And all they could do was to exile him." "In his old age he'd been exiled from almost everywhere." "Cabinet Van Agt rest in peace." "Cabinet Van Agt rest in peace." "Go back to square one." "Go rot in your grave." "Cabinet Van Agt rest in peace." "Cabinet Van Agt rest in peace." "Dammit!" "The ministers in Van Agt's cabinet... aren't very nice just look at Mrs Haars whose policemen frisk you in cunt and arse but only gypsies and not the rich in their villas." "Cabinet Van Agt rest in peace." "FREE THE SQUATTERS" "I don't know..." "What should I say to a white Dutchman?" "That his forefathers made slaves of us bla bla bla?" "They're the standard stories, but I know better ones." "I'd never try to stop peoples' ears." "The whole bomb..." "it's none of my business, really." "I can always hide underground." "But everybody dies anyway." "Why don't you care about the bomb?" "That's what I was going to explain." "The whites invented the bomb." "Even if the professor was black." "It's comical." "The same whites are now warning me for the bomb as if I was deaf:" "The bomb is coming!" "It's very simple." "It's the same the other way round." "It's no life here... everybody in his own closet." "The whites learn this from me:" "If the bomb falls on Europe, who is to say that the earth will go on turning?" "It won't be spherical any more." "They get in touch with nature anyway." "We're not stopping anyone." "If everything keeps on being meohanised people are going to get frustrated." "We want to live with nature." "But in a mechanised society you too are in a closet." "Yes, in a way we are also in closets." "We call that reality." "A closet is the space you allow yourself when you're working." "Well, I always say:" "Holland is too small." "The Milky Way is too small." "For the Dutch it is an international scene but not for us Surinamese." "So when we go there, we feel strangers sometimes." "You see?" "They see you as a foreigner, a little man from Mars." "And in the provinces, ...they run after you, calling out:" "Hey, a black man!" " What does that to you?" " It gives me a kick." "I'm in the spotlight." "Sometimes I'm struck when I see a white man here." "Hey, look at that strange fellow!" "When I see a Russian, I sometimes think that's strange, too." "It's just what you're used to." "If you're in the minority do you need to be strong?" " Minority?" " On a numerical level." "Politically." "If you believe in numbers yes, then we are numerically in the minority." "We think in terms of people." "It's the spirit that counts not just the bodies." "When a black group is playing anywhere nobody can stay still." "They obey... they follow the music." "Everybody." "Everywhere It's a known fact." "We're not a minority, we're the majority." "Because even if they don't love us they get orders to love us by what we do:" "We bring them life." "Here, everything is dead." " Western culture is dead?" " Yes, there's no rhythm." "There was a song once:" "Allogi, come dancing..." "Allogi was a black slave." "His masters were always asking him to dance." "Now it's the opposite:" "Allogi gets the bosses to dance." "Wherever we go, they have to jump." "Now it's the other way round." "It's the bosses who dance." "I went to a secondary school... it was like a factory." "I thought they were so childish those pretty-faced girls who only cared about their make-up and if the boys noticed them." "I hardly ever went back home to my parents'." "They took no interest in me, only in themselves." "Everything they taught me was in their own interest." "Hey, calm down, skull-face." "What's up?" " Open up!" " OK." "So in the end I decided to leave." "When I ran away, I really felt that it was something I'd wanted to do for years." "Finally I dared." "That's very important." " How old are you now?" " Sixteen." " So you left at fourteen?" " Yes." "At first it's difficult." "You're all on your own." "It isn't any fun." "There's so much to learn." "I get support from other people, but mostly from myself." "I have lots of friends who help me when I'm in the dumps." "But you've got to do it all by yourself." "I want to explain something about punks, riff-raff, squatters." "In every society, every country there are people like us." "Other people told us we didn't belong." "Told us to bugger off." "But I think people are mistaken in who rejects who from society." "All these laws they've thought up are no fucking use to me." "They've made the laws in their own favour." "Buses and trams schools the post office, the police and so on, that has nothing to do with feelings." "I believe that it's people who create society and put love into it." "Other people is what's most important, right?" "Why are you filming this, you jerk?" "OK, I believe in my own ideas, and in reality." "That what I'm doing now is important for myself and for the children I may have one day." "When I look around I often think:" "What the hell are they doing?" "And what the hell am I doing myself?" "It's all so childish." "And that can be dangerous." "The arms race even." "It's just:" "He's got more marbles than me, so now I want more, too." "I have no idea about the future except that the world is going to be in a mess." "It's getting so heated that it could all blow up tomorrow." "But when it happens, we'll see." "I have always had a kind of dream for the future." "I'd wanted to study biology to learn how animals live together." "That must be interesting." "It interests me: how alike they are and the cohesion they have." "There must be something that unites them just like people, who are also beasts, of course." "It's a pity what people have done to the world and to themselves." "They suppress they've abused what mother earth had given us." "What gave them the right?" "If you're attacked from behind..." "One: weight in your right foot." "Two:" "left hand forward." "Step out to the left." "Three: push." "Weight in your left foot." "Four: step up." "Five." "Turn from the waist." "Nose straight above your navel." "Six." "Right foot forward." "Fist under the left elbow." "One." "Open up." "Don't stretch your arms right out." "Two." "Back to the nose navel line." "Three." "Bring the left arm in." "The Dutch word for nice is 'lekker'." "It's good for you and 'lekker'." "That's Dutch." "I don't think they're really going to arrest people." "...unless there's going to be a real fight." "We must make sure we enter the site not as a group, but in small units of just two." "Do you hear that?" "After Nicaragua, all of Latin America." "We used to go every year." "And it always gave me gooseflesh to..." "The demonstrations for Chile always moved me, somehow." "When the coup took place I was in my fourth year at secondary." "I remember so well the night before." "I was watching the news on TV and I was very impressed." "The next morning we had a German class with a teacher who was himself Jewish, and gay." "He explained to us what it meant to be a Jew in Germany." "He had left the country." "What I remember from that class was the awed silence." "We were all so moved." "It was the first time politics were discussed at school." "They never did." "And we saw, coming from the direction of Hamburg flying over Beerta on the way to Rotterdam a big, silver cigar floating overhead, slowly and stately like an airship a miracle of beauty and dignity." "Stately movement, all in silver." "Everybody looked u p and sighed until Harm Vlo, trader in clothes, linen and drapery, said:" "'How is it possible?" "'" "Jacob Broekema, who had built his own radio, answered:" "'Oh man, it's only gas.'" "That's all." "The next participant in our air show is the Lockheed SP2H Neptune." "Not a man, not a woman, not a cent for the army." "Dirty poofs!" "Fuck off!" "Fuck off!" "Spongers!" "Ambulance!" "Ask the cops to ring for an ambulance." "Get them to do their job!" "Keep your distance." "There were riots in twelve English cities last night." "The worst ones were in Brixton, a coloured area." "The cause was the arrest of one coloured person." "A hundred other coloured people then attacked the police." "One rain turns red dust into green forest." "With one raindrop the universe begins." "When the raindrop dries worlds come to their end."