the world has turned and left me here

waterskiing

Today I went water-skiing. I never did actually get going; each time I fell on my face a little farther from the landing than I had the previous time. (Progress is progress though.) It wasn't at all what I expected, because rather than starting from a standstill behind a boat, there was a wire track in the air all the way around the lake, and when you started it yanked you along off to the side, not in the direction your skis were pointing. But there were some crazy wakeboarders there jumping like 10 feet in the air on the curves (just to rub it in I think) and one of them looked eerily like Kurt Cobain, except with lots of muscles and a nice tan. I felt pretty damn white around all these people...the first time such a feeling has come over me in Germany.

more from neuschwanstein

neuschwanstein

Silly me: I stayed up all night Saturday night and then went to Neuschwanstein the next day. (Don't nod your head, just shake it in silent disapproval.) Was practically falling asleep standing up. I was drunk off sleep deprivation, and the world was like a movie playing on the back of my eyeballs that I wasn't really paying attention to. But I did get some cool pictures and will be able to speak proudly of my typical touristic (terroristic, as my friend and coworker Michael likes to say) activities.

After some hiking we made it up to Neueschwanstein itself. There we took a guided tour. I was probably at my lowest point of the day, leaning against doorways at the back of the group, nodding off periodically, but I still managed to form some vague impression of the weird interior. In one room there stood a bed and a chair with a desk. Below about eyelevel they seemed normal enough, but at the top they dissolved into this fantastic skyline of carved wood. Maybe at one time it there had been some unifying forms behind it, but if so then they had been completely worked out, like that sequence of paintings of a cat that's in all the psych books, the one that gets progressively more obscured by ornateness until there's nothing but stained glass arabesques left of the poor kitty by the end. The carving was a similar deal. It radiated madness. Supposedly it took 4 people 14 years (or was it 14 people for 4 years?) just to carve these two things.

Everywhere were signs of Wagner's influence. There was even a cave recreating some famous scene in a Wagner opera, and mural paintings from Parsifal throughout one hall. We saw probably 1/100th of the whole castle I'd say. What stands there is only a third of what Ludwig planned to build, so I guess I saw about only 1/300th of the original fantasy.

Then, after 38 long hours in which more happened than has ever really happened before in one period of wakefulness, I slept like a log for a solid 11. Have you ever woke up with a suddenly sore neck from the head-banging that you did two days ago?

search complete: 1 result found

So last night a big group of us went to the Backstage, an alternative club in the West of Munich, not in Kunstpark Ost. People in the Keller have been telling me I should go the Backstage instead and it's a good thing I did. Insanity: my ideal song selection. Weezer, Rage, Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day, Cake. By the end of it all I was seriously afraid that I was going to drop dead on the floor. Dance clubs like these kill people like me.

It was so much fun that we didn't want to call it a night at 3:30, so we went over to Wolfgang's house and had martinis and shot the breeze until it was all of a sudden light outside. We piled back in the car, bleary-eyed, and took the Autobahn back to Munich. What an incredible morning which normal people would totally miss out on: open fields layered with fog filtering sunlight from the still-orange half-risen sun.

Okay, but the title of this entry does not refer to the grand discovery of the Backstage, which granted has now become my club of choice. I met an absolutely beautiful German girl this weekend (she was staying in Startlodge only for a few days) and we connected. She's into endurance sports and is training for a marathon, which means she basically danced everyone else into the ground, hardly breaking a sweat. And she's got a great personality which synched with mine. That's all I'm willing to say at the moment so you'll have to stay tuned for further details.

slug

If you can actually tell that that's a slug then good for you. It was raining yesterday when I went to work, and the winding road approaching Siemens was covered with crawling slugs and snails. Not exactly a Yellow Brick Road on my way to see the Wizard.

Back in Junior High School my friends and I wanted to start a band. We called it Slug. I think that's all we ever got around to doing, calling it Slug that is, and even that took weeks of deliberation over a long list of candidate band names. Afterwards I made an iron-on design with a slug mired in goo. I still have the T-shirt somewhere. Maybe it's worth millions now. The fact that we never made a song shouldn't be an obstacle these days...all you need is a cool name like "Atomic Kitten" and some hype and you're a band.

just nod your head

Maybe I should start a new category for this kind of entry 'cause I write them so often. Yes, it's another "Alan identifies pop culture trend and pretends to be aloof even though he probably enjoys the pleasures of conformity as much as the next guy" entry. Hmm, too long. Anyway...

The trend which I'm pretending to be aloof from this time is that of head-nodding. Apparently head-nodding is all the rage now. Exhibit A is Eminem's "Without Me" video where he's in the Batmobile nodding away, looks over at Dre, Dre hesitates, then Dre joins in with some fierce head-nodding. Exhibit B is the MIIB video in which head-nodding is taken to the next level, with Will Smith leading an entire stadium of people in unison head-nodding, yelling "Just Nod Your Head." If you know what I'm talking about here, just nod your head and read on.

So what gives? Well, (here comes the cynical analysis section) it seems to me that all this head-nodding just caters to our desire to agree with one another, to conform by thinking the same thoughts, across the board, the final culmination of which is the video mentioned as Exhibit B. Instead of arguing or having a rational discussion, let's all just sit around nodding our heads at each other stupidly in mutual agreement. Who wants to be an individual anyway? A stadium full of synched nodding heads--it's a dream come true!

complexity

Need contact fluid. The big bottle finally ran out, and empty eyedropper bottles are strewn all over the shelf in my medicine cabinet. I thought I'd stop by kd after work today (the place that offered a 10% discount for every point the German soccer team won by) as they seemed to have an abundance of hygiene products the last time I was there. As I pulled up John Denver's "Country Roads" or whatever that song is called was playing loudly outside, but it didn't quite sound like the way I remembered it, and sure enough a thumping techno beat commenced, signaling to me that the last song remaining unmixed on planet Earth has indeed finally been remixed. Leave it to Germany. Does this mean the Apocalypse is coming mommy?

It was some sort of grand reopening after having been closed for all of three weeks. You've probably already guessed the plot of this story; Alan looks for simple item (a la power adapter, a la Residence Permit) and goes away empty-handed and befuddled. "Broken beaten down, can't even get around!" Yeah that's what happened. But listen. Every imaginable hygiene product was in this place, from Buddy Boy condoms to denture fizz, and they didn't have a single thing for contacts. I just stumbled around, labels assaulting me on all sides, and suddenly began to empathize with this poor old guy who was despondently examining strange new-fangled items and randomly placing a few in his plastic bag. Yes, I thought, agreeing with him, this has gone too far. We should go back to a time when things were simpler.

But what a complex world we grapple with these days. During the time when things were simpler, we were barely surviving, and survival necessitated a simplistic view of the world in which rules of thumb reigned supreme. "When you see a bear drop to the ground and stay still. The early bird gets the worm. Look before you leap." But we're so far above survival concerns these days that we have much less need for simplifying. We have time to sit down and think, not just a split second to act. As Eric pointed out, we continue to add adjectives to the language: instead of just "good" and "bad" we have a whole slew of in-betweens. We're slowly but surely moving away from the simple categorical modes of thought that have kept us alive this whole time, and are moving into an era where a complex take on things is all of a sudden possible.

But we all have our moments when the complexity is too overwhelming for us, and for me it is usually in supermarkets. Super-markets. Marketing is super. Don't you think?

impress me with your now

Okay I think it's time to get out of Munich. Here I am in Europe and I've never even been out of Munich, practically speaking. Haven't seen the Black Forest, Berlin, The Alps, or anything else of note really. I confess I haven't even seen the "sights" in Munich--the Deutsches Museum or Koenigsburg Platz. What will I tell the people when I get back home? What famous names will I rattle off? What proud sightseeing claims will I make?

Well that's basically why I haven't done any of this stuff--because it feels like it's for other people and not me. I am weary of such things. The last thing I want to be is a tourist, seeing everything in Europe and yet seeing really nothing at all. Better to know one place well than skim the surface of many.

And I think I have began to get a pretty good feel for this place and the vibe it gives off. Not the old vibe, not the thousand-year-old-vibe, but the vibe that it's giving off right now. I have kindly asked Munich not to impress me with its Past but to impress me with its Now. It has. But it's time for me to move on, things are already starting to seem too familiar, and I begin to perform things routinely. Staleness is setting in. To me it felt like Eric and I tasted everything Munich had to offer on the last day he was here, and also kind of defiled the place with our irreverent American presence. And last weekend I came close to completing the KPO experience by beginning early and seeing it all the way through to the strung-out 6-in-the-morning end.

Time to get out. Plans are already in the works for me to visit Mark's hometown in Kassel two weekends from now. The following weekend my brother Ed is flying over to visit me, and who knows where we'll end up. Looking at Durer works in Nuremburg? Visiting Eric in Berlin? At the castle Neuschwanstein? In Paris, Amsterdam, Prague? (See how good I am at throwing out these names?)

iowa welcome sign

Iowa, the state with an identity crisis, has gone through a number of state mottoes recently, among them "Iowa--You Make Me Smile" and "Fields of Opportunities." I thought I'd help out my neighbor state by offering up my own two cents on the matter.

eric

goth watching

Armed with brand new bright red shoes and new clothes, I went to fight the good fight at Kunstpark Ost last night. Ended up at the Keller, only this time it wasn't so great. There were two rooms, one in the front that was too crammed full of people dancing to music that was either completely unknown to me (man there's a lot of mediocre alternative out there!) or too light, and another smaller one in the back filled with goth types thrashing around to music that was too heavy. It was cool to watch for a while though. I think I was one of about five people in this room not clothed in all black. There was this one girl from an entirely different planet, goth, thin like a twig and folded over on herself as she stood there, arms dangling limply at either side, a beer bottle attached to one, long hair falling in front of her face like Cousin It. Her dancing had more in common with a willow tree swaying in the wind than it did with what you'd usually think of as dancing. There was some slow, solemn song on, and all of a sudden every one in the little goth circle was doing the same swaying pattern, two steps forward and two steps backwards. I knew that I was not witnessing 21st century people dancing in a club but rather Celts from the European Iron Age performing an obscure rite of passage dance. These people have a keenly developed sense of the ritual, the mystical; most of us have lost it.

I spent most of the time in the other room, though, waiting around for the few songs I actually knew and liked. I stayed to the bitter end, when the lights finally came on at 5:30. We all filed out into the shambles that was Kunstpark Ost at dawn. The variety of crap you'll find on the ground there is amazing: flyers, watermelon rinds, banana peels, condoms, bottles and cans (just clap your hands). As I passed the entrance, there were still people bungee jumping from a crane they had set up, and while waiting for the train at the station I could still make out the crane on the skyline and the tiny bodies making that first plunge off the platform and into the unknown.

prinzen rolle

Oh, Prinzen Rolle, how I love thee, let me count the ways. I'm sure these things are horrible for me--they're just low-grade grahamcrackers with simulated fudge in between--but they make me happy. Average daily intake steadily increasing.

revenge of the nerd's computer

I spend too much of my time in front of a monitor. Lately I've been having the strange feeling that one of these days, as I'm squinting at some code, completely unsuspecting, my monitor is going to suddenly explode and kill me. There's something latent in the air when I stop typing sometimes, I don't know what. It's silly. I know. But just maybe...

Maybe it will happen like this: a single pixel will turn red. At first I'll think something is stuck to the screen and try to scratch it off with my fingernail, but will be unsuccessful. Then maybe the pixel will start blinking, slowly at first, like the glowing light on the head of those weird deep sea trench fish that lures in the curious. I'll slowly bring my face closer. Then closer still, my nose practically pressed up against the screen. (If you're making a movie out of this, you must at this point cut to an ultra-closeup of the red pixel itself and its two blue and green neighbors, defiantly winking on and off with a quiet but magnified buzzing like the sound of a florescent light. Then cut away to a far shot of me from the back, my face in grave danger but stupid me completely unaware of it.) Then, a Death-Star blast erupts from my monitor and I am blown backwards out of my seat, arching midair like a high jumper.

Computer takes revenge on Alan.

hier Franz

Waking up late, meeting at the same place as before, going to eat Turkish Doener for lunch, getting coffee and becoming altogether too caffeinated so that we're buzzing at the edges, listening to Bach fugues pouring forth from a seated accordion player in a tunnel, clinging change thrown into velvet box, some solar power rally going on with a line of twenty-something bongo drum players waiting for the speaker to finish so they could show us all how happy solar power makes them feel, finding the English Beer Gardens, a clarinet player in a gazebo, Bochy-balls, the announced "Number One" turning out to be rapid German read by overly dramatic woman and punctuated by Schoenberg bursts of atonality from an accordion, total crap, seeking and finding the Chinese Pagoda, drinking liter beers together, Eric becoming suddenly more interested in physics and the explanation thereof, having a huge prezel, stumbling around, sitting down, getting up again, revisiting the solar power convention where the solar-powered bongo drummers have been replaced by a Mexican band with too many guys playing too many lame clacking instruments, eating sausages at the ghostly quiet Hackerbraeu Haus and laughing about anything and everything, the bathrooms afterwards deserted as was everything today and reeking of excrement, "Hier Franz," Eric getting his train ticket to Berlin, both of us laying down in the middle of the Karsplatz in front of the Neues Rathaus, remaining this way until we gradually acquired acolytes to whom we passed the torch of this newfound religion when we got bored and left, walking back to Eric's hotel, awkward goodbye, then to the U-Bahn for me, trudging the last several kilometers by foot through sinister empty marshy fields, then down S-Bahn side trails with distant pinpoint orange glows at the end which never seemed to get any closer, finally, home again home again jiggity-jig.

thematic material explained

Why is it that all my recent entries center around clubbing experiences and the pursuit of girls, you may ask? Well, to this I can only say

This is my time, this is my life
And I'll live it the way that I wannoo.
This is my time, this is my lihaha-hahaha-hife.
This is my time, this is my life
And I'll live it the way that I wannoo.
This is my time, this is my lihaha-hahaha-hife.
This is my time, this is my life
And I'll live it the way that I wannoo.
This is my time, this is my lihaha-hahaha-hife.
This is my time, this is my life
And I'll live it the way that I wannoo.
This is my time, this is my lihaha-hahaha-hife.
This is my time, this is my life
And I'll live it the way that I wannoo.
This is my time, this is my lihaha-hahaha-hife.
This is my time, this is my life
And I'll live it the way that I wannoo.
This is my time, this is my lihaha-hahaha-hife.
...

Barf.

indecent proposal

Let the tour de force continue: tonight Eric and I went to (you guessed it) Kunstpark Ost and had a blast clubbing it. To the two stamps still on my hand from last night I added a third. Maybe, if I don't bathe regularly for the rest of the summer and make it my special endeavor, I'll collect all thirty. I'll look like the Illustrated Man with club stamps up and down my arms.

We settled down in a club called Stars which had a live DJ mixing house and techno. As before, when we got there things hadn't quite gotten started, and everyone was playing that increasingly irritating "I'm stuck to the wall" game. There was a big open space. The music was playing. The dance lights were going. But nobody was dancing. Sometimes you have to bring the party with you, I guess, and Eric and I just started doing are own thing out there. He was wearing this black shirt with "sgi" (Silicon Graphics Incorporated) on it. I think people were laughing at the sight of us but we couldn't have cared less. After about five minutes or so we acquired some satellite girls who were ready to get the party going. Within an hour the floor was packed, and the roof was on fire.

As I've said before, in general the dancing ability of the average German has left me unimpressed. The guys often have no clue what to do, and there are still a few girls who are stuck in this silly swinging from side-to-side 80s mode. It's hard to find a girl who dances with energy. (Okay, except for the ones in the Keller, but they're psycho freaky alternative girls mostly.) At one point during the night, though, I found this girl who matched my energy and beamed my smile back at me. We had a crazy little bout that lasted for the duration of a song. And then she went back to her lame-looking boyfriend. (Why are the good ones always already spoken for?) But it was fun all the same.

Eric and I parted ways around 2:00 am so we could get back home at a reasonable hour. As I was waiting for my S-Bahn, I looked over at this girl sitting next to me on the bench staring at me all doe-eyed. She asked me a question in German but I had to make her repeat it in English. "Will you go to bed with me?" she asked. I was like whoah! stop the music! and just stared stupidly at her, and the guy who I had assumed was her boyfriend peering out at me from behind her. Could this be happening? Maybe she had been serious at first, just testing the waters or something, or maybe it had been a joke to her all along, for she quickly explained that she had only been joking. Joking? Stop freakin' messing with me!

Anyway, this unlikely opening led into a nice little conversation with her and the guy. We talked about pleasantries, the States, Munich, and Germany in general. We parted on pretty good terms. She seemed pretty interested in me and the guy didn't get sullen or jealous or anything, so maybe she had been serious with her question. But there's no way to know--the crafty little thing concocted a situation in which she couldn't possibly lose, at my expense. Girls can go to hell.

the keller

Last night I decided to go do the Kunstpark Ost thing alone. It was threatening rain when I got on the S-Bahn. Eventually we came to a standstill for some reason or other, waited like this for half and hour, and then started going backwards again towards Ottobrunn. Everyone seemed pretty hacked off about this, but honestly, the transit system is so reliable the other 95% of the time that it's wrong to complain.

I got there an hour later than I had planned but was still early; the party hadn't really begun yet. I payed 4.50 just to find out that one club totally wasn't scene. The music was cool--this is what had interested me from outside--but the place was one small room with about 20 people all standing around the edges not dancing or anything. In my initial disbelief at the lameness of the place I paced all around room looking for doors, staircases, trap doors, anything that would lead me into that crazy back room where everyone was getting down rather than standing straight up. I moodily had a beer and left as soon as I could.

Eventually I discovered where it's at (got two turntables and a microphone!). It was the Keller, which means "Cellar" in English. (Incidentally, it's also the last name of my mother's side of the family. Which is, also incidentally, of mostly German origin.) When I got there not a whole lot was going on, but the place was big and gave off cool vibes. For a while I sat at the bar and looked on as this guy with long headbanger hair and studded leather wrist cuffs thrashed about by himself. Except for him the dance floor was empty. As before, noncommital people clung to all the walls. Spectators.

I didn't have to wait long for a song I knew--STP's "Plush"--and then I was out there jamming with this guy. Pretty soon, some other guys joined in, and a hardcore girl who was to continue unfaded early into the morning made her appearance. This was only the beginning.

Maybe I should have said first off that the Keller plays alternative. Now, it is unclear to me exactly how one should dance to alternative; with hip-hop or techno there are well-established means of expressing yourself eurythmically, but with alternative this isn't the case. Unlike the former, alternative frequently has changes in rhythm, switches to double-time, to half-time, or even to sections during which there is no real discernible beat. Dancing to an alternative song you don't know can be perilous. By the end of the night I was comfortable and dancing to pretty much everything, but at first I would only dance to songs I knew. And the DJ wasn't helping me out much here by playing junk that neither I nor anyone else had actually heard.

So we had a little talk, and I told him that if we wanted to get this party started we needed to go back to some stuff everybody knew, Weezer's Blue, Green Day, Rage's Self-titled, etc. His idea of Weezer that everyone knew was "Island in the Sun" and this wasn't heavy enough for most of the people there. But the Rage, holy shit, the Rage...

It was a good thing he didn't play more than one Rage song back-to-back. The first one he put on, Know Your Enemy, illicited some beer bottle smashing right away. Total frenzy. Later we heard Wake Up, and around 4:00 am Killing in the Name, which killed me. It was the pinnacle of the whole outing for me, and after being in ultra-high-rabid-jumping-up-and-down-foaming-at-the-mouth mode for those euphoric 5 minutes 14 seconds I felt drained, and was ready to call it a night.

On a sidenote: met a cool freaky alternative girl from the south of Bavaria, and we may hang out again tonight at a different club. On another sidenote: I thought alternative was dead, but apparently it has just split into lots of little subgenres, the harder, newer of which I heard more and more of as the night went on. I didn't recognize a lot of those songs but people went absolutely crazy over some of them. Don't know yet if I'm down with the new sound.

Well after all this revelling there was the problem of getting home. I left the Keller at 4:00 am, and the next S-Bahn came at 5:46 am. I misread the signs and didn't notice that the 5:00 am one only ran on working days, so I had a lot of time to kill. Luckily for me I had my iPaq along with a bunch of Pocket books. I read Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher" while I waited.

Tonight it may all happen over again. My friend Eric arrives in Munich this evening and we're going to do whatever spontaneous things occur to us as suitable for the day and age. So I've got to lounge around and recover from last night. My neck is getting sore!

plan to not have fun

It was a day full of experiences. I will begin at the beginning.

This morning I saw Mattias whiz by the kitchen on his bike, going off to work, and I thought "Let me see if I can catch him." I estimate he had about a 1 min. headstart by the time I finally pulled out of there. For the longest time I didn't even see him. Then I would see him rounding a corner off in the distance way up ahead. Gradually I gained on him, and finally overtook him just outside of Siemens after about 15 min. of riding--hard work!

I had to leave work early to try and get a residence permit. Even though I've been living here for over a month now, I still haven't taken the time to get this (bureacracy, bureacracy, everywhere, and not a drop to drink). Finally the pressure was put on me by HR so I had to. After waiting for an hour and a half, I was told that I had come to the wrong bureau, that because I lived outside of Munich, I wasn't in their jurisdiction but instead in this other jurisdiction blah blah blah. I asked them if the bureau in my jurisdiction used the same form, which was four pages long and tedious to fill out, so that I could reuse it. They said no. I left, thwarted. Kafka wrote books about such things.

The plan at this point was to go to the English gardens and have a picture-taking contest with Florent and Norman. Whoever took the picture of the hottest girl would win. I was in a pretty crummy mood after my dealings with The Authority, but it improved as I got nearer to the gardens and the impressive concentration of hotties thereabouts. It was a perfect hot day for such an endeavor.

Well, this was the plan anyway, but instead we played frisbee for a while and met a really weird guy from Barbados who threw a simple backhand with Baroque flair and claimed to be into all kinds of extreme sports, sometimes sounding Hispanic and at other times breaking into a Texan drawl. He offered to take us windsurfing, hangliding, waterskiing, "whatever we wanted to do," and he looked money, you know, but came across as a con man. After we parted ways we three made an attempt to do the picture thing but just weren't feeling it. What few pictures we took didn't turn out, and we felt kind of weird and covert about the whole thing.

Florent left for the beergardens to meet up with his French pals. Norman and I got to talking and found out we had come to the same conclusion independently: that the picture contest hadn't been fun because it had been planned too far in advance. It wasn't spontaneous enough. Planned fun is usually like this; it's almost work to go through the motions you've scripted for yourself ahead of time.

So we walked around for a while and did spontaneous things, and hey, what do you know, it started to get fun. We gawked and whoahed at girls instead of capturing them surreptitiously on film.

Why is it that German TV always shows the most sickening crap right when I sit down to dinner? I should have seen it coming this time. As I cooked my omelette, I looked at the TV and there was this huge, malformed breast completely filling the screen. It was from a botched boob job. Next, they had an interview with the owner of the malformed breast and she was expressing her dismay at owning such a malformed breast and not the Pamela Anderson Lee perkies she had paid for. (You see the rising action but I didn't at the time.) So I sit down and put the first bite of my tender, foamy omelette in my mouth, and what do I see on the TV screen but the very instant in the repair operation at which the implanted sack of whatever pops suddenly out the side of this woman's malformed breast? And this isn't the first time for such things. If it isn't a repair boob job it's some other horrendous surgical procedure, and you can count on it appearing at about 6:00 o'clock, as you're enjoying your dinner.

Meanwhile, somehow the hot sunny day had morphed into a threatening gray rainy one outside. I went out and had a cup of coffee in the rain, for the experience of having a cup of coffee in the rain. People need to go out in the rain every once in a while just like people need a good cry every once in a while. Standing out in the rain is like having a good cry, only you don't have to do any work at all.

the kaltenberger knight tournament

Yesterday we spent way too much in order to see a knight's tournament held yearly in Kaltenburg, outside Munich. It was a little more authentic than an American Rennaissance fair but not by much. The joust itself was an elaborate scripted battle between four good knights and four bad, the latter led by the "Black Knight," whom we cheered for loudly whenever possible. Unfortunately his unjust, backstabbing ways eventually brought about his own downfall (darn). Then the cast was introduced to the refrain of Beethoven's Ninth, a moving experience the first time around, but becoming plain old irritating after it had looped for about the 20th time.

It was medium grade fun but a bit too predictable. The coolest part of the whole excursion came after the tournament when we listened to an outdoor band consisting only of bagpipes, horns, and drums, with no mikes or electronic anything. There were about eight guys in the band, most clothed only in slatted leather barbarian kilt-like things. One was completely bald except for two tiny red horns of hair on either side. Another, the lead singer, had a long brown mane and evoked Mel Gibson from Braveheart. In the back there was a drummer with red hair and a skinny build whose arms flew up, repelled, from the drum which he beat on slave-ship style, and he was probably the most fun to watch. And the sound, the sound of these guys, was strange, a mix of Scottish bagpipes, primeval drum rumblings, and something like Rammstein unplugged.

Here's a colorful character we ran across. Don't even try to tell me he doesn't look like Gimli...

too much

Whoah, last night was just too much for me. Mark and I met Norman and Uva (another guy from work) at the University of Munich, where there was a party going down, a once per year thing. I think there must have been about five thousand people there. It was filled to the point of overflowing and we had to wait in line for about an hour just to get in.

Once in, we commenced with the drinking and dancing. There were supposed to be four different bands playing there but I only saw one. We moved from room to room, each one playing a different kind of music, and eventually settled down in the "pop" room (I think), where I commenced to get even drunker so that beyond about 3 am there are big gaps in my memory. Apparently Mark and I took a taxi part of the way home (do not remember any of this). I recall walking from the S-Bahn station in Ottobrunn to Startlodge; it was already light outside. What is normally a 10 minute walk seemed like 10 seconds. Do not remember getting into bed, or slamming doors, although Claudia remembered this detail quite well and chided me about it when I woke up. They said my alarm clock went off for an hour straight this morning. I never heard it. Eventually it must have realized that I was in a deep drunken slumber and just given up. When I finally did roll out of bed, both Mattias and Holger greeted me with "Oh, you're alive."

Yes, I'm alive, though I have to admit I've felt more alive on other occasions. It will probably take me all day to recover.

Definitely, this was the drunkest I've ever been. Only my 21st birthday comes close. Still, I remember nearly everything from that night, and last night there were many things which supposedly happened but do not exist in my version of reality. Where did these moments go? Was I aware of them but not making memories out of them, or was I not even aware of them at the time? Does my brain omit them only when I try to remember, or did it omit them to begin with? It is impossible to know.

It was too much.

ads

I heard the full version of that one song used in the Coca-Cola (Coca-Cola? maybe it's some other product, I should pay more attention) ads: "This is my time, this is my life, and I'm gonna live it, the way that I wanna." Repeat 20x. Ad nauseum. Ad infinitum. What a comprehensively lame song, you know, proclaiming that this is my life and I'll live it the way I want to, but so in need of reassurance that it has to deliver the message twenty times over until you as the listener finally agree that, yes, you can live your life the way you want to. If you really live your life the way you want to you don't have to ask for permission. Or write a pop song about it. Just live your freaking life, okay?

The latest fad is to have dolphins splashing alongside whatever product you're advertising. I saw this recently in a Nissan commercial and have seen it before. Although Portishead was playing in the background (since when did Portishead become mainstream enough to advertise cars to?), the premise was still pretty suspect. What does it mean, anyway? Do we need the approval of the most intelligent members of the animal kingdom now too? "Yes, your SUVs are swell. Don't worry. So long and thanks for all the fish."

And again, I was in the changing rooms of a trendy clothing store on the weekend. I looked over at the wall and saw myself peering back, the words "You look great" inscribed over my head on the mirror. Then, inside the stall, "Shop until you drop" was written down the side of the mirror. Trendy pseudo-techno rubbish designed to massage me into buying decisions was piped in over the loudspeakers. Now if this isn't blatant then I don't know what is.

pinkerton

By now you've probably heard of this band called Weezer, "the guys who did that Happy Days video" or the "H*** Pipe dudes, yeah, man!" Or maybe you know them through sundry other channels like the "guys who consistently make lame music videos to pretty good songs," the Sweater Song singers, the Say-It-Ain't-So young budding alcoholics. But I'm here to tell you that, if any of the above applies, you may be completely in the dark about the best album that Weezer ever cut.

Now don't get me wrong, Blue Album fans, that thing was tight as all get out, and it is only after some calm and prayerful deliberation that I decided their Sophomore album narrowly beats out the Blue.

The album I'm referring to is, of course, Pinkerton.

And, the way things like this go sometimes, it was kind of a flop in terms of commercial success. Certainly nothing like the Blue, or the Green, with its radio-ready 28 minutes. As of this writing Maladroit is poised to surpass it in sales. But Pinkerton had a slow burn. The radio stations discarded the thing soon after El Scorcho hit the airwaves (perhaps because it didn't sound "produced" enough, and we wouldn't want to subvert Big Brother, now would we?), though the jury was still out with Weezer fans. And many Weez fans did the same, turning their back on the band because it didn't deliver a Blue sequel. Still, some came back to it and found a different (but equally good) album. Others discovered it for the first time way after its release, as I did in college, with only a dim memory of that crazy hang loose El Scorcho sound guiding me.

And on Pinkerton I found more where that came from. It's frayed at the edges. The guys don't sing in tight harmony; rather, they shout and scream and make silly noises, because music isn't always about restraint. It can be about lack of restraint too, and you'll also pick out this theme if you listen to the lyrics. If you want to get silly, it's here: Pink Triangle talks about the big whoops of falling for a lesbian:

Or if you 're in need of a good cry, listen to the last track, Butterfly:

If you're bitter about that downer of a last relationship you had, old man Rivers knows you're pain. He prescribes Why Bother. Then there's the opener with the unlikely name Tired of Sex, for all the playas in the house who are tired of playin'. Need motivation? Have a little of The Good Life. Rivers wrote it after being crippled for months after an operation, which prevented him from doing all those Weezer-like things he wanted to do.

As with all Weezer discs, there are some rock songs, namely Getchoo and Falling For You. They're not as personal as the other stuff on Pinkerton but are still way more so than any track off the Green Album or Maladroit.

If this weren't enough, you throw in the fact that Rivers had been studying creative writing at Harvard on the proceeds from the Blue album, and you can understand Pinkerton on a totally different level. There are all kinds of parallels between Pinkerton and Puccini's opera "Madame Butterfly" if you're willing to listen for them. For instance, the last words of the album are

the first two lines of which are Captain Pinkerton's words to his Japanese bride Cio-Cio San, whom he later forsakes. When you first start to pick up the thread it's eery. Gave me the shivers.

But, if commercial failure weren't enough to malign this gem, we have Rivers' own denial of Pinkerton. After the fact he really regretted laying so many things bare, so much so that he wouldn't play Pinkerton songs in concert, even when Weez fans finally started warming up to it. The embittered Rivers once described the album as "getting really drunk at a party and telling everyone your darkest secrets and then waking up the next morning, hung over as hell and regretting it." Weezer plays more Pinkerton in concert now than they did before but it's still way underrepresented in my opinion.

If I haven't piqued your curiousity yet I probably won't. Maybe someone else could do a better job than I. At any rate, don't settle for the Green Album, Maladroit, or even the Blue (yes I know what tenuous strands of blasphemy I tread upon), but go out and get Pinkerton. They're all Weezer, but Pinkerton is Weezer unleashed, sloppy and happy and a little cynical at times, but genuine Weezer nonetheless.

alan's brain v21.0

If I were to sell my brain as an Operating System, an (honest) advertisement would go something like this:

1. Doesn't multitask. It's about one thing, one thing at a time, mono e mono, a monomaniac I am. I have to turn off the radio sometimes when I'm driving.
2. Has no memory. I usually remember how to do things, but not the things themselves. All code and no data.
3. Slow loading time. Takes me forever to switch from doing one thing to another; inertia, you know.
4. Compile-time only. I have a compile-time brain, not a run-time brain. Were you to talk to me in person, you'd think I was a bumbling fool, not the writer of this spell-checked and spell-double-checked weblog you're reading right now.