In the City!

We have arrived safely in the big City and had 1 day to spend (we flew out of bf a day early because of the possibility of weather (bad weather, that is, the kind that prevents planes from flying and gets you stuck places), just so in that case we'd be able to take the bus instead. Luckily that wasn't necessary, the sky was clear, the plane departed and arrived as scheduled. Better safe than sorry, as the saying goes.

So what do you do with a day in the city?

That's right, you spend some cash. I came here with 700 bucks in my pocket, and I had the same 700 bucks this morning, but now, in the evening I only have $280 left. Where did the money go?

Well, I purchased:

- 1 pair of nice shoes, some kind of crossover between a hiker and a dress shoe, waterproof, pretty conservative looking, but then again they're good for slushy weather, and I can always fall in love them later (89 bucks, with taxes)

- 1 brand new digital photo camera, Samsung, 14 MP, shoots HD video, too (149 dollars, without taxes)

- 2 memory cards, 1 SD for above mentioned camera, 1 micro SD for my mp3 player (about 70 bucks before taxes)

- 1 brand new Behringer 90 Watts Bass Amp Combo (which will be stored in the city until I come back), 1 instrument stand, 1 pack of bass strings (about 290 bucks altogether)

- 1 meal for 2 at a fast food sushi place

- 1 slightly used book that looks brand new (Daniel Quinn, Ishmael)

- assorted small odds and ends

(yes yes, you smart-ass mathmaticians (?), it doesn't really add up. That's because I paid some of it with my VISA.)

What a nice way to spend a day. We finished it with an awesome supper in a pretty cool and classy restaurant, with elk and blueberry-brandy sauce, and veal, and duck-bits in dough and whatnot, very delicious. Place is called "Inferno".

Buying musical equipment, by the way, is always an experience. I usually expect staff to be all talkative and tell me all about the differences between this amp and that amp, and why the pro's don't use this brand but use that brand instead and so on. So the first store we went to they had a Treynor (or so, I don't quite remember) combo 50 Watts for 280 bucks, and next to it a Fender combo, 75 Watts for 275. So you get more power for less cash, right?

What's up with that, I asked the guy, what's the difference?

He's like: Dunno, the manufacturers make the prices.

Then he gave me a bass and I tried the Fender combo (I didn't wanna go below 50 Watts, and why go for 50 when you can have 75 for less?). Nice sound, I take it, I said, but I need a box, because I have to ship it in a small plane, and I've seen those guys handle luggage, trust me, I want this thing in a box.

Uh, he said, we don't keep boxes, no room, but I'll go and have a look-see.

Did I really want a Fender combo?

I've never really liked Fender as a brand, no particular reason.

10 minutes later: no box.

So I said: Well, can't buy it without a box, I'll come back when I am back in town.

Off to the next store.

There the guy was just as I had imagined: he kept talking about touring and pro musicians, making the romantic dream of life as a musician in a band come true before my eyes (and yes, it is awesome, and no stale sandwiches and cases of cheap beer and quiet crowds can ever take that away from me - in fact, playing music in a band together with others is the only time my mind goes blank completely, and when the practice session is over, or when we walked off the stage after a gig for me it was always like waking up to the real world again; however, the guy there kept talking about this and that and about how Behringer equipment, because not as sturdy, might crap out on me on tour; but I didn't care, because I won't go on tour anytime soon and I have always liked Behringer as a brand, maybe because I've had a Behringer mixer for so long and it has never failed me, never ever. So I bought the combo, and the guy went to the basement and found me a box and some air-filled bags, and we taped it all up and I bought it. 90 Watts! Yay!

Now I have all the tools to drive the neighbor-nurses to madness with constant rumbling bass lines.

It is now midnight, my flight leaves in about 6 hours. I am getting excited. Travelling on planes internationally always remains so unreal until you are actually on the plane, realizing that it is actually happening.

I'm gonna go and see if I can catch a bit of sleep.

Good night. See you on the other side.

Oh, one more thing:

Check out this blog, I am mentioned!

Departure Imminent

Last post before traveling.

Off we go.

Unglaublich aber wahr! Der Ausverkauf geht weiter!*

*roughly: "Unbelievable but true! The sale goes on!"

Take this, fellow bloggers, internet surfers, music and/or video enjoyers, crowd, recipients, world! Brato gives you yet another old piece of music. Why? Because he can. Because he likes his post count to increase. Because this stuff isn't wine and doesn't get better with age, rather the opposite is true.
However, this time it is really highly original, and even an Hommage, a nod, no, more than a nod, a bow to the master who came up with it. Then again...
Ah, well, it's probably just a nod, if even. The tiniest of nods?

I myself have thought about this lately, this being the human need for story, both telling and receiving. Haven't come to any conclusions yet, though. Maybe next week.

In the meantime, eat this:



Travel time tomorrow.

Freeze No More

It
is
cold
these
days.

Walking to work at -32 (windchill -42) is no sugar-licking. Sometimes it feels like my nose is burning off from frost, and my eyebrows are frozen. My beard regularily turns white - it gets all frosted up (frozen breath I suppose).

Only 2 days to go before holidays start!

For obvious reasons I found it quite fitting to post the following video, which is kind of about the complete absence of snow, frost, ice and the likes. But it is a little bit sad, too.



This might just as well be the last one for a long, long time.

Android

We never go out, host no parties, drink no booze, smoke no smokes, do no drugs and are altogether completely boring and always at home by ourselves.
This week however, we are very social. Yesterday we had a bunch of nurses over for supper (I made pizza from scratch), and today we had people over again, this time a.o. from the supermarket. Very enjoyable.
(I must say here though that the supermarket folks were a lot more fun than the nurses, who just couldn't stop talking work. This can be kind of annoying for people like me who really really don't want to know about what sicknesses you can suffer from in this world, people who have a very quick and visual imagination and therefore are easily disgusted by descriptions of ulcers (?) or abscesses or even rashes - I don't even want to remember what else they talked about, you probably get the idea; but try to combine these stories with the prospect of a nice evening with food and wine and fun conversation and you will find they won't go together, in fact, they'll clash terribly.)

However, here's again another piece of not so new music.

...And So Should Be Art.

I'd like to quote my good friend E. from the country of G. at this point (live on stage, right after a song that had been announced a b-side): "Das war mindestens ne C-Seite!"

...which roughly translates to "This was actually with much goodwill a c-side!"

This being said, go ahead and make yourself at home with Brato Useba's latest old tune.

Day Off

I very excited about travelling next week (gonna leave town 7 days from now already). Seeing everyone again is something I am very much looking forward to. Whee! Planes! Airports! Rental Cars! Javaanse! Autobahn!

An additional piece of information: Today I have a day off.

Life Is Suffering, Says The Buddha...

It is rather unbelievable, but the formidable record "Rumpo Auriga & His Brother Frango" is full of outstanding musical phenomenons; therefore it is not really a surprise that I myself have found another almost unpublished pearl of melody, another hidden gem of musical genius, which, and that is the most amazing fact about this track, through its never-before-heard mellifluous cantability for the first time ever in music history gives voice to one of the most grievous deficits of today's consumer oriented society.

But see and listen for yourself:

Sleazy Porn Music

I really should get some better software. I used to use some crappy video editing program that came with my old miniDV camera, but I didn't install it on this computer. So at the moment I am working with Windows Movie Maker.
And let me tell you one thing: For making movies, Windows Movie Maker sucks. Big time.
It is okay though if you just quickly want to combine some pictures with a music track. But just okay. I mean, they could at least have implemented some kind of rudimentary "conform to BPM" function.

Therefore, even though this is a video, it is not meant as a video. It is just a vehicle to easily upload an mp3 to this blog. Hello blogspot people? Would you please program in some kind of "add-mp3" button next to those "add picture" and "add video" buttons, so users are not forced to find webspace elsewhere or fuck around with shitty programs like Movie Maker?

Enough of that, here's a piece of sleazy porn music I recorded myself back in summer 2009* when we first came to this town. The piano I hacked in myself through MIDI.

The track is called: "My Heart Is A Strawberry".




*Off the album "Rumpo Auríga & His Brother Frango". It's never to late for a another single.

Pro Tools Test Track

Today it was time to try out my new M-Audio Fast Track recording interface. So I downloaded the latest Win7 drivers from their website and installed the device. The first thing I noticed was that instead of two input channels it has only one, or more precisely: You can connect your mic and your guitar to the thingy, but internally it records only one channel, putting the vocals on the left and the intrument on the right. In other words: You can only record mono with this thing.
But what do I care, I can always make fake stereo from mono, and nobody will ever know; what is stereo anyway - not having to deal with any input level fucked up shit is totally worth it.

Since it came with Pro Tools Essentials, I installed that also. It version 8, not the latest, but still a nice piece of software. You can pretty much do your music LEGO style; just drag and drop from samples provided, down-mix to disc and there you are.
It takes a bit of getting used to, but I managed to click together this track (for blogger-upload-convinience I embedded it in a video file):



You can hear in there a South-American style guitar and percussion, some kind of pop/rock piano, a jazz trombone, a noisy garage break beat, several different bass samples, some weird electro synth, some kind of funk guitar and some other stuff I didn't have a problem putting in there. The whole thing, by the way, is completely in E minor.

My next goal is getting more comfortable with Pro Tools' real recording and mixing functions, and to record a real tune that I write and play myself. That's more fun anyway. Samples are nice, but a tune like this is just not satisfactory for me, because it is not really me*.


*When listening to my own music I also like the feeling of surprise in remembering how I wrote and played certain bass lines, solos or whatever else I recorded. You can't have that with prerecorded samples.

Beach Boys

I took the liberty to add the two links from the last post to the more permanent link list on the right. Why did I do that?

I thought it wood be nice.

Missing Link

Today, while doing dishes, I cracked a glass. It didn't break, but I heard the characteristic sound of breaking glass, and then I watched a long crack appear down the side.
I had to throw it away. Well, on to happier things:

We are, I have to admit, by now a little bit tired of eating turkey.

Apart from that there is not much going on right now. My wife's working her ass off, day and night, all the time, all day and all of the night so to speak, healthy or sick, storm or no storm. And if she is not at work, she's on call.
Whee.
How does she do that I don't know. She just does.

Me myself works nine to five pretty much monday to friday, there's not much going on at the supermarket, mostly "spring" cleaning (As if january could ever be considered spring, on top of that in a country where spring effectively starts in late may or so. Then again, if it's minus three these weird Nationals here think it's summer and break out their flip flops.)
The cleaning consists mainly of rediscovering old merchandise in places you'd never suspect and making sure some fools still spend money on it.
I mean costumers.

Remember I mentioned all that wood a while back? All those nicely cut pieces of wood, if I recall correctly over one year I had collected about 7 long boards (maybe 1,3 meters each), 6 medium boards (about a meter each) and several short ones, 70 cm each perhaps.
I was also ready now to take them all home, because I felt I had almost enough to build a nice fine dog house for that friendly black dog that walks with me to work every morning. His name, by the way, supposedly is Shaka, but I don't find that name satisfactory, so I call him Black Dog.
Or Sneezy (because he sneezes sometimes). For a while, when he had been hit by a car or something, and he walked funny, I called him Limpy.
But that is beside the point; Last monday at 8:45 in AM I came to work and discovered all my wood was gone, appearantly somebody had gotten rid of it, the place where I had stored it was empty, the wood was gone, the wood was gone, all gone, baby, gone.
For a long moment there (until about maybe noon the next day) I felt my heart was just like that glass I cracked in the sink today.

I also discovered that the person most likely responsible as of late has his own blog.
For those interested: click here.

And since I am linking pages right now, for those who would like to more about the landscape in certain communities, and those who are interested in eating soup, you might want to check out this blog written by a person who may or may not have witnessed the tragic disappearance of my beloved wood collection, a person by the way, who also most of the time tries to laugh at my jokes (which I find very nice and friendly, that's a good character trait). Please feel free to click here.
The fireworks pictured there seem to be just the ones I totally missed out on this year for reasons of being asleep.

Another thing: For the new year and all the rest of my future I have decided to try to concentrate on the present more. The past, as well as the future after all exist only through thinking in our minds and both are therefore non-existent. So why divide my attention equally among the three? I will consciously try to allow 2 thirds of my attention to the present from now on, and have yesterday and tomorrow share the remaining 33 percent among them.

How to achieve this, I don't have a masterplan. Participate in things even though you have to get up early next morning? Say yes to going into the wilderness even though the mere thought of outside makes you freeze with cold?
Any helpful hints are appreciated.

I will now lean back and enjoy listening to Ennio Morricone, at the moment "Le Marginal".

Bunnyrabbit

According to our culture's calendar it is the new year now. What's the name of the band again:"So this is the new year, and I don't feel any different..."
One of those Indie bands, I think. Can't remember which one, though. Any help?

I myself do feel different now, but that is only because I did feel sick on last year's last day, in fact I spend most of it sleeping. And when I finally woke up it was this year's first day already, 11 o' clock.
Oh God, I missed all of the fireworks!!

Since this is the first post of this new year (the year of the rabbit, some say, therefore much better than last year, of course), it is also time to take inventory. What was Christmas good for this time?
Let's see what I got:

- a fuckload of Ferrero Rocher. (1 giant 48pack, 2 16packs, 1 mixed 8Rocher/6Garden (which is Raffaello, to all you Europeans)/6DarkRocher (which actually go by a different name, but they used such a fucked up scripture font on the label that I find myself unable to read it), 1 mixed 8 of each pack (or so)
- 1 external HD 1 TB for backup purposes
- 1 M-Audio Fasttrack Recording Device, which actually comes with a free version of ProTools (I always wanted to try that), and which enables me to record two input channels at the same time through a USB port (goodbye windows-asshole-motherfucking-microphone-input-level-automatic-userfriendly-fucker-upper); I haven't tried it out yet, but I will do so soonish
- several cookbooks, a.o. one big fucking Harrowsmith 3-in-1 super all editions not available anymore super-duper cookbook with all the standard and non-standard recipes you may ever need; also one cookbook for fast veggie dishes, which is nice (maybe this one will be able to finally give me the answer to the question: where can I find an adequate vegetarian substitute for meat? - On the other hand, maybe it is me who is asking the wrong question.)
- several German books, a.o. Die Vermessung der Welt (Kehlmann), Wir hatten mal ein Kind (Fallada), Der Turm (Tellkamp) and Garou (Swann)
- several English books, a.o. two Jack Londons and three John Sandfords
- 1 Sandisk SansaClip+ 8GB mp3 player (imho the one and only real alternative to an ipod nano)
- lots of Christmas candy and goodies from both sides of the Atlantic, including Stollen, Lebkuchen, Toblerone, Mercy (...daß es dich gibt), Kinder Schokolade and various other chocolates

I would like to thank you. Thank you, Santa Claus.

I also read two books this holiday season which I found very interesting and would like to recommend to everybody (for more information, clicking the titles will take you to Amazon):

Sex at Dawn (Ryan, Jethá), which explores the prehistoric origins of human sexuality, and The Fall (Steve Taylor), which actually suggests very convincingly that it is not human nature to make war, oppress women, destroy nature etc... We don't have to be evil!

What a relief.

I'd like to end this post with a little joke I read in a book the other day:

A guy comes home and finds his girlfriend outside the door, with her bags packed, all ready to go. "What's going on?" he asks.
"I'm leaving you!" she says.
"Why? This morning everything was alright! What's wrong?"
"Well, " she says, "I heard you were a pedophile."
"Pedophile?" he replies, "isn't that an awfully big word for an eight-year-old?"