Hello,

Steven van Lijnden's

Shamelessly Self-promotional Website

Welcome to my website. On here you will find some personal info, my CV and some articles, stories, links to photo's and blogs and even a few cartoons. I hope things are organised clearly but if you have trouble finding your way around or have suggestions for improvement, give me a yell (though an e-mail might be more effective). Please note that a fair amount of the site is in Dutch, as I am of that persuasion.

A Brief History of Me

(See also my CV)

Once upon a time I was born, and I am still living happily ever after. To be specific, I was born on the 24^th of October 1975. After a relatively uneventful couple of years in Abcoude, during which I wore diapers, drank milk from a bottle, was elected class president (first grade), drew spaceships on the sidewalks in chalk and almost set fire to my parents’ hedge, my parents my sister and me moved to Bloemendaal.

The house was big and charming and creaky with lots of hidden spaces to be transformed into spaceships with the help of Styrofoam, string, felt-tip pens and bottle-caps. I spent most of my puberty being a geek, spending way too much time behind my MSX computer playing Konami games and reading books and comics and having only a passing familiarity with the outdoors.

After making the discovery that school could actually be cool only during my last couple of years at the Stedelijk Gymnasium in Haarlem, I went off to the University of Amsterdam to study Dutch. A year of commuting later, an apartment became available in the Spuistraat, a former hotel room, next to a porn theatre. I would live there for the next 8,5 years - the former hotel room, not the porn theatre. Most of that time I cohabitated with my partner, which considering the size of the place was quite an achievement.

I got bored with Dutch so sidestepped to Cultural Studies, which combined theoretical classes about art history and culture with practical writing courses. I was starting to get involved with the student body of Cultural Studies and published some articles in Cultus, a student-magazine. I also got hired at Kriterion, a movie theatre and café, run by students. Here I could mostly be found during the day behind the bar – making sandwiches, pouring drinks and smiling at the customers like I meant it. This job had the added perk of being able to get into any movie-theatre for free, meaning I spent a lot of time in the dark staring at the big screen. My latent love of movies now blazing in full, I wrote my final thesis around the subject, researching whether or not critics judge movies in the same way as a general audience. They do. (Only I said so in 80+ pages.)

After I earned the right to call myself a Doctorandus - or Master of the Arts, which sounds much more impressive - the door was not being stomped down by people offering me jobs, so I became a receptionist at the site office of Cirque du Soleil for a couple of months during their stay in Amsterdam. Shortly thereafter I landed a job at the American Book Center, where I still reside unto this day. In 2007 I started to write a series of articles for the magazine Gay & Night, about gay dating, relationships and sex. They should appear in stores in book form early next year, in a retooled version with a lot of additional topics. (The Dutch version is already available.) More information at: Gay & Happy.

My Blogs:
PopCultJunk
Gay & Happy

It's a Gay World After All

I can also be found here:

Blogcritics.org

The American Book Center Blog

Old (and potentially embarrassing) Writings & Drawings:

My Photos:
Flickr

And now, for no good reason at all, a ‘likes’ list:

Music: Depeche Mode, Garbage, Basement Jaxx, Röyksopp, Imogen Heap, Moloko, lounge (in general), Randy Newman, Laurie Anderson, Robyn, E.S. Posthumus, Daft Punk, Aerosmith, basically just about anything that isn’t hard house, hip hop, rap, reggae or heavy metal.

TV Shows: Buffy/Angel, Six Feet Under, Will & Grace, Spaced, Farscape, Veronica Mars, Coupling, Monty Python, Blackadder, Queer as Folk, Lost, Bones, Dexter, True Blood, The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones.

Games: Maze of Galious, Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath, You Don't Know Jack, Burnout Revenge, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Portal 2, BioShock, Mirror's Edge, Dead Space 2, Fallout 3, Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age: Origins.

Writers: Armistead Maupin, Janet Evanovich, Douglas Adams, David Sedaris, Peter David, Michael Cunningham, David Leavitt, Robert Rankin, Tom Lanoye.

Magazines: Attitude, Edge, SFX, Focus, Mental Floss, Entertainment Weekly.

Movies: Moulin Rouge, Lola Rennt, Amélie Poulain, Priest, Airplane!

Food: Greek, Indian, my mom’s apple pie.

Role Model: Ghandi (though that might be a tad too ambitious)

Discuss amongst yourselves.

This – for better or worse – is me in 2010.