A collection of stories covering the last half century. Stories about running away as a 15-year old to Paris, financed by my maternal grandma, when I fell in love for the first time, inheriting from her on my 21st which took me straight into the gay end of the Swinging Sixties in London. The south of France, before the fish-and-chips shops opened there, the then still-undiscovered island of Ibiza in the Mediterranean. Florence, Venice and Rome, before they put up turnstiles, you now have to pass through. How the Sixties turned into the sleazy Seventies, without us -in our coke haze- noticing. Stories about passion and love, which would last forever, but didn't. A buttercup-yellow 1954 Bentley R type. Travels over four continents, discovering South America, Asia and Australia and most importantly my life-long quest for the one-and-only. It took long enough, but I got there. Over all these years I became friends and lovers with beautiful conmen, models, rockstars and musicians; photographers and fashion-leaders -now household names, but then just starting out- who may choose now to forget they were there in the 60's, 70's and 80;s, testing the boundaries of their own and Society's tolerance. And I -surprise, surprise- lived to tell some tales. This collection of stories which cover events, fun and tragedy from the early swinging sixties and the sleazy seventies until now, rightly carries the title 'Diving into the Void', mainly because writing these stories over the last few years involved a dive into the void for me, apart from the fact that I wanted to start with a very short story I wrote, in 2009, after a very dear, courageous, gentle, dear friend of mine died. The title, by the way, is not mine; it's her title of the elegy she wrote in the last days of her life which was read at her funeral by her courageous son Lorenzo, who I have adored ever since, if I did not adore him and his father, her husband, already before. The painting on the cover, which has the same title, I painted in the weeks after her death. Most changes and events in my life were dives into the void, my paintings, my drawings, my novels, my watercolours and of course my photo-series were all a blind dive into the unknown, know-it-all that I am. So were my romantic involvements, some great, some disastrous. But I lived. So, dear reader, please read on, as there was a lot of fun, love and madness happening in the last 50 years and I call myself lucky to have survived it all, up to a certain point. Bangkok, July 2011 (this is volume 1 of my Collections of Stories)

Assuming 'God' as in 'God will provide' is the biggest excuse used in the last two thousand years or more, Anthony Ramekin sets about using his extensive contacts in the art-world, which he has been part of for more than twenty five years, to facilitate the rise and rise of a brilliant young photographer, Dorian Grey, his lover . Soon he realizes that the knowledge he is passing on, comes in equal measurements to the wisdom, love and fast mind of someone so much younger than himself. As Oscar Wilde so famously said: 'I'm not young enough to know everything...' Scandal, sets off a useful precedent for the people's interest in imagery, which somehow strikes a chord deep in their hearts. This is, after all, a love story, set in some of the world's great cities and Grand Hotels. The 'Hotel de l'Europe' in Amsterdam, the 'Cloitre de St.Louis' in Avignon, the 'Grand Hotel Wagner' in Palermo, The 'Hotel des Bains' in Venice. Berlin, London, Cordoba in Southern Spain, Monreale in Sicily and Bangkok all pass by. 'Recognizing fresh talent is not an act of abuse, ' Anthony is heard to say at some press-conference, beleaguered by tabloid scribblers, 'but can be gentle and enrich everybody's life.' Soon Dorian is working on his second book of photographs, cataloguing first love between two under-aged boys, with two of Luchino Visconti's most famous films, 'The Leopard' and 'Death in Venice' as background. Again Anthony is facilitating this new love-affair, which takes on an integral part of the story. Soon they realize they have a worldwide best-seller on their hands.

'IT'S CLOSING TIME' Max Kreijn 's 2012 novel 'it's closing time' is a forceful story of passage. The writer takes us through the protagonist's growing-up in Holland in the Fifties -all the comforts of a well to do country-family in that prosperous follow-up of World War II- and quickly moves to the remaining years of the Swinging Sixties in London, the madness he used to accept as normal, after inheriting a small fortune from his grandmother, whose favourite he was. The excesses of that weird time. New, filthily rich pop stars, who did not know really what money was all about and the Australian accountant from Mildura, Vern Lambert, who really started the Swinging Sixties in the Chelsea Antique Market in the King's Road. Marianne Faithfull, once the most protected and famous of bag-ladies of London's Soho, Kit Lambert, who wrote the rock-opera Tommy for his band the Who, Jagger, Robert Stigwood, Elton John's first public appearance, in a club called The Revolution, when he was still called Reggie Dwight. All the cute boys from all over the world congregating in Central London. He encounters the decay and death that has to follow all that excess and gets away on Boxing Day 1973, during a petrol strike in England, leaving his Bentley R type 1954 in his garage in Notting Hill, first to Barcelona, then to the island of Ibiza, before it becomes the fleshpot of Europe, actually before they have an electricity grid there, worthy of the name. He becomes a well-known painter, first in his home-country Holland, then further afield. Germany, France, Spain, Italy and then Miami, San Francisco and Chicago and the European Museums of Modern art label him the worthy follow-up of Dutch 17-century realist painters, like Vermeer and De Hoogh. He ends up in Italy, first in Florence, but then unexplainably as a 34-year-old in that small bastion of religious righteousness, Assisi, where he falls in love with an 18 year-old local boy. He discovers some dark secrets of the Roman Catholic Church because he inherits some very inflammable papers, which a childhood friend of his grandmother has left him. This is where this exceedingly exciting love-story takes flight. The story of the exquisite love-affair between him and the boy Francesco is woven through this great gay novel, against the background of the protagonist's lifelong fixation with rent-boys and his inability to make sense of his life until it is nearly too late. But the death of a close friend finally focuses his mind, during a recent tour of Spain at the age of 64, on what he wants out of the remaining years of his life. The end of this novel, set in the Cordoba Mosque La Mesquita, is breathtaking and ends this great story, this tour de force of a novel. Is that all there is? Is there truth to the rumour? Does love conquer all? It's closing time, surely.

I hate winter. It probably is the result of having been a child in southern Holland and having to bike to school, always against the wind, pedaling through snowdrifts and sleet. Early on I vowed that when I grew up I was moving to a warmer climate. So for years I spent six months of the year on the top floor of a building from where I could see beautiful old churches in the centre of Rome and I lived the other half of the year perched above Darlinghurst in Sydney, looking towards the lights of the city. Some people think is the perfect life, and in some ways maybe it is. You get the best of both worlds -baroque and Bondi. And summer twice a year. The one thing is that you need two of everything -two houses, two studios and two wardrobes. And of course two fully equipped kitchens. As a painter, I worked in both places, literally migrating from summer to summer. Both in Rome and in Sydney, I spent my day in the studio, taking the occasional walk down the corridor or up the stairs to the kitchen to stir a cooking pan to retain my sanity. Sometimes I even invented recipes. I might be a painter but I can't explain art. However, I can write down recipes for the things I cook while I paint. Of necessity, the food I eat is quick and easy to prepare, since I don't have the time to stand patiently next to the stove for long periods and I do paint a lot. Although many of these recipes have Mediterranean origins, this is not an Italian cookbook. Nor are all my ideas entirely original - rather, they have evolved over the years from the dishes eaten in good restaurants or in the houses of friends, from dishes my mother made and from recipes found in cookbooks, all gradually altered over time to become new favourites. I'm a great believer in the therapy of cooking. I also strongly believe in making things easy for myself, buying seasonal vegetables fresh from the local shops whilst not being averse to using stock cubes or other harmless shortcuts. Essentially, I cook what looks good in the market on the day. Having lived in Italy for the past twenty-five years -in rural Umbria, Florence and since 1983 in Rome- I have come to understand that the perfect dish relies on just a few basic ingredients. Like traditional cooking, which uses an onion, some tomatoes, virgin olive oil, garlic and the odd egg, the best recipes are simple. I don't even attempt a dish that calls for a kilogram of sliced onions marinated in brown sugar for three weeks. That is why all the recipes in this book are either quick 10-minute jobs or slow cooking dishes which take hours on the stove or in the oven and don't require my constant presence. I have left out any dish that I've burned more than twice or that has been ruined when I was applying a coat of varnish to an oil painting in my studio at the other end of the house. The same selection process applies to the way in which I have ended up with certain plants on both my terraces- certain plants survive and are easy to look after, while others need too much attention and never last through the winter. I reckon life should be simple. So from the outset, this has been a painter's cookbook. I want to paint and cook my favourite dishes. This is the result. Sydney, December 2003 Since then, I have exchanged Rome, a city which became too boring for my liking, for Bangkok, so now I live between Bangkok and Sydney with frequent visits to Europe where my roots still lie, somewhat worn out, but they still are there, gnarled or not. I have added some more Asian recipes to this updated version. Enjoy,

This is the coming-of-age story of 21-year-old gay graphic-design student Daniel. who the artist meets at the opening of a 30-year-review of his photographic works, all of which deal with that once-in-a-lifetime moment of suddenly growing up. Normally he uses models to visualize this breathtaking event and has total control of the image, or plays God without anyone realizing what he really is doing. But when he meets Daniel and is forced to let him pose for a photo-series, he suddenly realizes that the game has totally changed. He ends up just pressing the camera-button, but it is Daniel who is 'taking the photographs'. Soon the older man and Daniel realize that something serious is happening: their mutual feelings are for real and a strange love-story suddenly grows. It comes as a revelation to the photographer, whilst to Daniel it is simply logical. A new exhibition, accompanied by a book, designed by Daniel, opens at the International Dutch Art Fair in Amsterdam and together they travel through France to Bologna, where the Galleria d'Arte Moderna will show the Dutch exhibition with the Museum's own collection of the artist's photo-works added, now called 'Lo Sguardo Dentro Gli Occhi Tuoi', They make that same moment - two people suddenly growing together, growing up in a flash really- happen to people they meet on the way. 'Whatever Daniel wants, Daniel gets, ' the boy's father, the Director of the Museum where they initially met, did tell the artist right from the beginning.

THE PASSION deals with Julien, a Dutch-French boy, who takes off for the end of the Swinging Sixties in London, on his 21st birthday in 1968, becomes a photographer and in one fell swoop a very famous one, for having taken a photograph of Jim Morrison of the Doors naked in a bathtub three weeks before the pop-star really drowned in a hotel-room in Paris. 'Stars in the Flesh' is his first best-selling photo-book. His search for love becomes very intense in the months after the launch of the first book. He goes on a quest and falls in love with a cockney rentboy in Malaga. They have to escape the wrath of the English gangster who owns the boy. Soon Portugal, the south of France, Holland, Denmark, England and Italy all flash past, until Julien finds another subject in Assisi, that vertige of religious righteousness. A second book of photographs, 'Temptation', enthralls his fans, but shocks and angers the higher exchelons of the Roman Catholic Church. And Julien falls for the 18-year-old star of the book. But -most of all- the writer thinks he has managed to lay bare the basic vulnerability of Julien in love. And the stubborn pursuit of Francesco, the schoolboy from Assisi, he makes into a star, using him as the innocent in the rather wicked second book, 'Temptation', first and then nurtures their relationship towards a solid block of love. Together they work on Julien's last photo-book, 'The Saffron Soil', shot in a two-hour period towards nightfall in a forest temple in Eastern Thailand. They just photograph a group of white-clad novices, capturing their longing and desires; no nudity, just these boys making love to Julien's cameras. The book turns out to be a huge bestseller. Julien retires, aged 34, while Francesco, the boy from Assisi, becomes an film-actor.

Eddy, the altar boy, writes as a 55 year old. Flashback to 1963 when he meets Raoul, also 15 at the time, in his grandfather's orchard, they start calling the Garden of Eden. Soon they run away but their adolescent full-on love affair turns bad and they do not meet up until 20 years later, when Eddy is living in Florence. They pick up the pieces of the love, they once shared, but their new relationship unfolds like a drama that inexorably moves towards a glorious end. The grandeur of their rekindled love and the doomed end show us that the writing on the wall was always there but nobody had the sponge to wipe it all away.

Max Kreijn wrote the three novels contained in this trilogy Sleeping With Boys between 2007-2010. Now published in its totality as one book the trilogy SLEEPING WITH BOYS contains The Altar Boy, 2008, The Passion, 2009 and The Not-quite-frozen Lake Of Tender Hurt, 2010).

'All the boys I have fallen for over the last half century always had a secret story behind them, a hurt that never healed, a pain that was still there, deep down, inside, ' the author writes, 'so I have always tried to move carefully, gingerly onto the not-quite-frozen lake of tender hurt. Otherwise -I knew- the thin ice would crack and I would fail miserably and just end up with wet feet.' 'The Not-quite-frozen Lake Of Tender Hurt', a novel that somewhere in its sweeping description of a 45-year search for love, strangely or perhaps not that strangely, turns into a slightly rambling autobiography of the author, a somewhat haphazard life-story he keeps trying to treat as a novel. But somewhere in there is the reckoning of past mistakes and a lot of unraveling love affairs that were meant to last forever. The slow realization, that -in the end- everyone has his own baggage, turns the writer around to the rather shocking thought that he is probably writing the case-history of his inability to sustain his own concept of love. Even in the last chapters, he is still trying to convince himself of the possibility of falling in love one more time. And of course he does, because the boy he finally meets certainly does not have HIS baggage. This 'flawed memoir pretending to be a novel' is the ultimate part of the trilogy SLEEPING WITH BOYS, a title that did not arrive as an Einstein-like mind-flash but seemed to cover the subject quite well. These three books are not sad stories, but are based on a life spent in all the right places, London on the tail-end of the Sixties, the Spanish island of Ibiza, still not discovered by mass tourism, the South of France, before the fish-and-chip shops opened there, Rome, Venice and Florence before you had to buy a ticket to get in. And a lot of lovers, now gone or spread out to far corners of the earth. 'I now realize I was subconsciously always looking for the one-and-only, and in the end I found him.'

MAX KREIJN 'SLUITINGSTIJD' de roman inhoudsbeschrijving 'Sluitingstijd', de nieuwe roman van Max Kreijn uit 2012, nu naast 'Het doorgeven van Kennis' en 'Het boek van Daniel' uitgebracht in een aangepaste Nederlandse vertaling, is het verhaal van een doorgrondig geleefd leven. De schrijver voert ons door de jeugd van de protagonist in de vijftiger jaren in Nederland -al het comfort van een gegoede burgelijke afkomst, zo vlak na de oorlog- en arriveert snel al in de aflopende Zestiger Jaren in Londen, de gekte die hij automatisch als normaal beschouwt, nadat hij op zijn 21ste een klein fortuin georven heeft van zijn grootmoeder, van wie hij het favoriete kleinkind was. De uitspattingen van deze vreemde tijd, de stinkend rijke nieuwe popsterren, die niet echt weten wat ze met al dat geld aanmoeten en dan is er ook Vern Lambert, de australische boekhouder uit Mildura, die eigenlijk echt degene was die de Swinging Sixties uitgevonden had in zijn modewinkel in de Chelsea Antique Market in de King's Road. Marianne Faithful ooit eens de meest beroemde 'bag-lady' van Soho, Kit Lambert, die de rockopera 'Tommy' schreef voor zijn groep 'The Who', Robert Stigwood, Rod Stewart, Jagger en kornuiten, Elton John's eerste optreden in een club 'The Revolution' genaamd, toen hij nog gewoon Reggie Dwight heette. Alle mooie smakelijke jongens, die van over de hele wereld elkaar tegen het lijf lopen in centraal Londen. Hij komt oog in oog te staan met de aftakeling en dood, die daarna volgt op al deze uitspattingen en hij ontvlucht Londen op tweede Kerstdag in 1973, gedurende een benzine-staking, zijn R type 1954 Bentley achterlatend in zijn garage in Notting Hill. Eerst naar Barcelona, dan naar het eiland Ibiza, voordat het de vleespot van Europa wordt, eigenlijk voordat het eiland iets heeft, dat de naam electriciteit verdient. Hij wordt een bekend kunstenaar, eerst in zijn geboorteland Nederland, dan ook verder weg: Duitsland, Frankrijk, Spanje, Italie en dan Miami, San Francisco, Chicago en de Europese Musea van Moderne Kunst beginnen hem de waardige opvolger van Hollandse 17de eeuwse realistische schilders, zoals Vermeer en De Hoogh, te noemen. Hij komt in Italie terecht, eerst in Florence, maar dan onbegrijpelijkerwijze wordt hij verliefd op zijn 34ste in dat kleine bastion van godsdienstige overdrijving, Assisi, op een 18-jarige plaatselijke jongen. Hij ontdekt een paar donkere geheimen van de Rooms-Katholieke Kerk, omdat hij een aantal paperassen erft, die een kindervriendin van zijn grootmoeder hem heeft nagelaten. En hier neemt dit opwindingrijke liefdesverhaal een grote vlucht. Hier is het, waar die prachtig beschreven liefdesverhouding tussen hem en de plaatselijke jongen de vleugels uitslaat en zich vermengt in deze grandioze gay roman, tegen de achtergrond van een levenslange fixatie van de protagonist met hoerejongens en zijn onvermogen zijn eigen leven te begrijpen, totdat het bijna te laat is. Maar het overlijden van een heel goede vriendin leert hem tenslotte zijn gezichtsveld en de toekomst te overschouwen -wat wil hij eigenlijk nog doen met de nog overgebleven jaren?-gedurende een recentelijke reis door Spanje op de leeftijd van 64 jaar. Het uiteindelijke hoogtepunt van deze roman, geplaatst in 'La Mesquita', de Moskee van Cordoba, snijdt ons de adem af en passend beeindigt het dit prachtige verhaal, deze 'tour-de-force' van een roman. Is dat nou alles, wat er maar is...? Is er waarheid in het gerucht...? Wint de liefde uiteindelijk...? Het is natuurlijk SLUITINGSTIJD geworden.

Dit is de gereviseerde tweede editie van de nederlandse vertaling uit 2013 van 'Het Boek van Daniel' een roman, 2011 Dit is het opgroeiingsverhaal van een 21-jarige gay grafisch-ontwerp student, Daniel. De kunstenaar ontmoet de jongen bij de opening van de retrospectieve tentoonstelling 'DOUBLE TAKE," een overzicht van zijn fotografische werken, al meer dan dertig jaar gebruik makend van zijn schilderijen als een integraal deel van zijn fotowerken.(zie omslag) All deze werken hebben uiteindelijk iets te maken met dat eens-in-je-leven moment, van plotseling je realiseren dat je ineens opgegroeit. Normaal gebruikt de kunstenaar hier modellen voor, om dat adembenemende moment vast te leggen en heeft hij totale controle over de afbeelding, of hij speelt God zonder dat iemand maar bedenkt waar hij eigenlijk mee bezig is. Maar wanneer hij Daniel ontmoet en vrijwel geforceerd wordt hem te gebruiken voor een foto-serie, begrijpt hij plotseling dat het spel geheel en al is omgedraaid. Uiteindelijk zet hij de camera's klaar en drukt om de knopjes, maar het is opeens Daniel 'die de foto's maakt'. Spoedig begrijpen de oudere man en Daniel dat er iets serieus aan de gang is: De wederzijdse gevoelens die ze voor elkaar ontdekken, zijn echt en een vreemd liefdesverhaal ontwikkelt zich ineens. Het komt als een revelatie voor de fotograaf, terwijl het voor Daniel zo logisch is, dat het gebeurt. In Nederland of in het oerwoudhuis van de kunstenaar in Bangkok eerst -en dan tijdens de 2010 revolutie daar- worden ze een team. Een nieuwe tentoonstelling, vergezeld van een kunstboek, dat Daniel ontwerpt, opent bij de Internationale Nederlandse Kunstbeurs in Amsterdam en samen reizen ze door Frankrijk naar Bologna, waar de Galleria d'Arte Moderna de tentoonstelling zal laten zien als een zomer-show -Lo Sguardo Dentro Gli Occhi Tuoi- met de eigen collectie van het Museum van de kunstenaar's fotowerken toegevoegd. Ze creeeren dat zelfde moment van twee mensen die plotseling samen opgroeien -in een flits opgroeien eigenlijk- en dat gebeurt met mensen die ze onderweg tegen komen. 'What Daniel ook wil, dat krijgt ie', vertelde de jongen's vader, de Directeur van het Museum, waar ze elkaar in het begin ontmoet hebben, hem van af het begin al.

Het Doorgeven van Kennis een roman Anthony Ramekin gelooft dat de verwachting dat 'God zal voorzien' een van de grootste excuses van de laatste 2000 jaar is en hij besluit zijn uitgebreide contacten in de Kunstwereld, waarvan hij al meer dan 25 jaar deel uit maakt, te gebruiken om te helpen bij het omhoogstoten van een briljante jonge fotograaf, Dorian Grey, die toevallig zijn minnaar is en de zoon van zijn beste vriend. Spoedig ontdekt hij dat de kennis die hij doorgeeft, in dezelfde verhouding staat tegen de wijsheid, de liefde en het scherpe brein van iemand die zoveel jonger is dan hij. Schandalen, zoiets als 'stront aan de knikker', zetten een precedent neer voor mensen die geinterresseerd zijn in deze afbeeldingen, die om een of andere reden een snaar diep in hun hart raken. Uiteindelijk is dit een verhaal over de liefde, die ontluikt in een paar van 's werelds mooiste steden en Grand Hotels. Het Hotel de l'Europe in Amsterdam, de Cloitre de St.Louis in Avignon, het Grand Hotel Wagner in Palermo, het Hotel des Bains in Venetie. Berlijn, Londen, Cordoba in Zuid-Spanje, Monreale op Sicilie, Bangkok en Sydney komen allemaal voor onze ogen langs. 'Het herkennen van nieuw talent is geen daad van misbruik, ' horen we Anthony ergens zeggen tegen een volle zaal schrijvertjes voor de schandaal-pers, 'maar kan ook verlichtend zijn en iedereen's leven verrijken.' Er komen natuurlijk ook een hoop interessante krantenkoppen uit dit soort uitspraken... Al snel is Dorian druk bezig aan zijn tweede fotoboek, dat de prille liefde catalogiseerd tussen twee minderjarige jongens, met Luchino Visconti's twee meest beroemde films 'The Leopard' en 'Death in Venice' als achtergrond. Opnieuw maakt Anthony deze situatie mogelijk, deze ontluikende verhouding, die spoedig integraal deel uitmaakt van het verhaal. Spoedig worden ze er zich bewust van, dat een wereldhit in hun schoot is gevallen.