The Sandoz Collection by Sandoz Diego Cerveza (best short books to read .TXT) 📖

but it's also a repository of some of the finest damned architecture in Amsterdam.

Walk down the winding streets and you'll swear you've stumbled into a fairy tale realm and the buildings will remind you of times and ages long gone in the forgotten ghost shoud of time. The District is also home to a bustling and mysterious Chinatown, a Jewish quarter with the some of the best pastrami this side of the Wailing Wall, and a daily flea market that is a must for the rummager and collector of trash as treasure. Got Sex? Amsterdam does!

MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES
Amsterdam is also the Netherlands never ending haven for art and antiquities. The country has over 400 museums that delve into a variety of cultural corners of the Dutch. The glutton for art galleries will certainly satiate his or her hunger at a myriad of reknown art enclaves highlighting the works of Van Gogh and Rembrandt to lesser known painters and other artists and art forms, including photography and film.

Among the the museums of the more sedate and serious nature you'll find the Anne Frank House and Museum and also the Dutch Resistance Museum. Both focus on a dark period of world history and the bravery it evoked in a whole populace as well as the heart of one young girl who found her inner strength through her beliefs. There is also a Jewish Museum, Dutch History Museum and a variety of science and natural history museums, including a childrens hands on experience to explore the mysteries of the world of science.

Nautical and tropical themed museums exist, and in addition to a Dutch Shipping Museum there's even a small Houseboat Museum. The Brew Happy Lager Heads will be overjoyed to learn there is a Heineken Experience and brewry tour that gets up a full head of steam, and you can even get a peek under Marilyn Monroe's skirt at Madame Tussauds Wax Museum.
The more macabre sensibilities will be tickled pink with a jaunt through the world of torture and pain at the famed Torture Museum.

All the tools for extracting a witches confession are on hand along with a variety of restraints and cages. The cannabis cannibal crowd will enjoy a tokin' tour through the Hemp Marijuana Museum and find it a truly enlightening experience.

There is also a Tatoo Museum for the tat crowd and from tat's to tit's, its the Sex Museum and also the Erotic Museum in the heart of the Red Light District. Like a matching pair of breasts, the museums hightlight the history of the district as well as including erotic art, paintings and objects from around the world. The Erotic Museum is five full floors of fantasy.

If you're on the art and culture side of the coin and want to maximize your museum clout, you can purchase a Museum Card that for a small price allows you unlimited access to over 400 museums in the Netherlands with 30 of them in Amsterdam alone. The pass is good for a year, so if your kickin' off your shoes for awhile or expating it...it's a bargain!

Amsterdam has it all. Houseboats, canal cruises, pedal boat tours, bikes and dikes, cannabis and sex, culture and counter culture. No matter what your looking for, the Dutch do it right. So when you're trying to figure out where to go off the beaten path...just do what I do...and Amsterdam It, damn it!

The Laundromat Louvre

Does the Guggenheim Groove gitcha down, Luv? Is the Museum of Modern Art too moderne for your truest scholar and bluest of collar concept of art? Is the Smithsonian stuffy, staid and as stale to you as a flat-ass two day old beer in a mug sitting next to a jumble of wet cigarettes ripely fermenting in an ashtray in some dingy dive in the Tenderloin?

Does your dictionary spell art "prissy" and "sissy"? Man-up! You know damn well and you have a $10 bet to back you up that the heavy-metal mucho machismo macho-machino Diego Rivera could kick whitebread milktoast Monets lite-rock soft-pastel ass in a fair fight!
Flashback. An evening with imposters and impossible poseurs at the galleria; joining hands with the incurable curators who act as secretive as ever; stealing and smuggling art and antiquities from the backalleys of Tangier and Cairo.

Goodfellas and Artfellas smoke dreaming of lit-fame and big chunky bricks of "dumb blonde" hashish. Flashforward. The effected t-girl "Toodles" and Ru-Paul "Ta-Ta's" following at the end of the sequined evening, Dahlings! Dreadful wine-in-a-box puns, "Got to go, Sweetums, it's getting latte!" Ha! Guffaw!

Listen up! All is art, and art is well. There's narry a Mary Martin lostboy or sweet Sal Mineo lostgirl in all of Neverland that has to search very far for it. Far from it. Great walls of art everywhere, along with painters and pirates inhaling pixie dust, and there's a full jammin' needle loaded with kreative karma to ease the pain of the summertime art-fix cold turkey blues.

Look, art is where you find it, and most of it is right in front of you. The cost? Free, at least a lot of it, amigos y amigas. Cities and towns circling the globe in 17 languages have vibrant art scenes and communities popping up like a garden of peyote buttons in the desert. So, what the hell, grab a crowbar and a chainsaw, it's time to tear down the academic Walls of Geritol Jericho and take to the streets, as mad for art as a French student is for leftwing politics. It's time for the Spare Change Asphalt Kickin' Street Fightin' Art Attack!

'Merika is high on art, from the urban crossroads of cocaine and concrete to the rural regions of barnyard methlabs and farm fields of beans, corn, wheat, surrounded by purple mountains filled with manure and majesty. Visual arts come into clear focus in the worlds great cathedrals of creativity to be "oooh and ahhhed" at by the toney tuxedo'd crowd and not necessarily by the brigands and brigades of bowling shirt Bolsheviks.

Peoples art, volksart, is readily available everywhere and freely viewable too. Depictions painted on buildings along the strolling boulevards of the city and on the beatup grey weathered old barns off the beaten path of forgotten two-lanes.

It's on daring display in parks populated by people and the bovine enriched dung filled cowpie pastures of plenty. There are festivals of arts and celebrations of crafts in big cities and small burgs; and art is not marooned on the Devils Island of academia either. Today art is not only visual, but viewable in diverse venues such as, but not limited to public libraries and public reading rooms.

It's alive on the mass-transit systems and can be savoured on subways, muni-cars, buslines, trolleys and railcars. San Fran-freakin-cisco is most creative culturally when it comes to the display of all things art for arts sake, fer Crissakes.

Masterpieces for San Franciscos tired, poor and huddled masses can be enjoyed in varied locales in The United Nations of Art. Elvis kitsch kulture is on display in a unrinal packed mensroom in a metro-sexual fern bar and literally plays to a standing room only crowd. That would make it the first Uri-National Art Gallery of the Porcelain Proletariat, wouldn't it?

Next stop on the trolley ride ain't exactly the Louvre, but is a peculiar "peoples gallery" that opened it's doors amidst great flamboyance and fabric softener fanfare at a laundromat! Now, that is artful power to the artful people, not to mention whiter whites and bluer blues...Right On!

Murals are the Katherine Hepburn of art forms. Elegant, stately and regal, they dress up the austere highrisers with imaginative and colorful imagery that induces a mild art-cotic narcotic buzz. Bangor to Boston; St. Loo to San Fran, all jump and jive with outdoor visual art feasts delighting the eyes.

Jazz and blues themes dress up the West coast as sexy as a female impersonator in black fishnet stockings doing Liza justice in fresco Frisco's frisky North Beach enclave of cleavage, Italian sausage, cheap wine and ten dollar whores. Midwestern murals depict the turn of the century age of raucous ragtime and tickle the ivories of the highrise and sedate Scott Joplin streets of Sedalia, Missouri.

Street art itself is schizoid, with a mean streak and a soft spot sharing the mind. Visceral and existential to a fault, it's created in pshyco-science labs by visionary Sterno holymen disguised as monks and madmen. Street smart art also comes in a can well shaken, as great-gonzo grafitti articulations appear on masonry palettes created by crazed dayglo tribesmen who've braved the journey across sea-beast infested oceans sailing on flimsy straw rafts.

In time, with fast currents and favorable winds, they arrive safely ashore from the bitchin' beaches of the Islands of Graffiti.
Contrary to public belief, the subway IS the underground and it's a full metal jacket of gangbanger art created by an army of 9mm graffti commandos who watch it all glide by on electrified third rails below the ground.

Railyards too, have been known to shapeshift into lonesome whistle gallerias du arte as the graffiti ghosts decorate the rusted, weather beaten boxcars of the Haiku Hobos. This is a mobile art attack on the march at 45mph-ish.
Sculptors of metal mold shapes and forms from whitehot fires produced by the redhot lava that flows slowly from deep inside old black volcanos.

Musicians without stages or roofs play chords on a bluesy guitar or on a jazzy sax. These lost chords were once lost and tossed haphazardly into dark alley dumpsters and forgotten. Soon they're found in the piles of trash and castaway garbage by street-music saints who have the word "crazy" written all over them in invisible ink. The band cranks up the volumn to play as they wash down a feast of diuretics and meds with bottles of warm Night Train wine.

The panhandlers pavement is alive with homeless poets, prophets and discarded prophylactics. The passing parade includes mimes who speak in stony silence, as though their tongues have been removed, and jugglers who juggle torches, gas powered chainsaws and swords of Toledo steel. Vendors line the streets, like mucho sand dollars on a golden beach in old dusty Mexico.

Tables laden with fine crafted riches as if it were stolen booty from the hulls of Spanish galleons sailing from the Phillipines. Beaded jewelry from the Orient; Black gold from the Black Hills; Arizona turquoise and New-Mex silver from deep inside the mines of the old Southwest. Mandolin makers and makers of handmade lutes and homemade flutes.

Hemmingways and Steinbecks offering for sale stapled books of xeroxed poetry and prose.
Rural 'Merika ain't immune from the art junkies' needle neither. The highest of plains in plain old Kansas are anything but plain what with whirlygig artfarms and hayseed haystack tom-foolery with feet emerging from the inside of large round bales of hay to haystack fabrications of giant Area 51 alien monsters from outer space staring in a vacant purple haze from the hayfields with giant hubcap eyes, All this and more, displayed with a devilish hayseed wink of the eye to delight the most skeptical who happen by.

The Lone Ranger, Hi Yo Silver, Away! and longneck beer Lone Star State of Texas has a chrome-magnon Motor City phenom of cool Cadillacs. They're set at a weird angle nose-down, chrome down, and look for all the world as though they crash landed; a metallic heavy meteor of unknown substance, composition or origin from somewhere deep in space at