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Bootie!

I had seen Client several times before – mostly in Germany, though, where they are more popular than in the UK (1). Sarah Blackwood (aka the lovely ‘Client B’) had started to substitute some of the lyrics with their German translations. However, last November when supporting Anne Clarke in the Underworld in Camden  I heard her sing “gib mir mehr, mehr, mehr” instead of “give me more, more, more” as the chorus for Pills for the first time in London – much to the delight of the not-so-small German crowd in the audience. (Actually, my mate and I reckoned that about a 1/3 of the audience must have been German.) The same thing happened on the 28th of  March… and when DAF had finished their set you could actually hear the audience shouting “ZUGABE!” instead of “encore!” or whatever English fans might be shouting in situations like these.

Well, all that might only be a slightly amusing anecdote and not overly surprising. London is an international city and nowadays it is not so unusual  to combine a gig with a weekend stay in London thanks to budget airlines. What became apparent, however,  is the absurdity of the record label system in our time and age.

CLIENT are quite an independent band in the truest sense of the word. Both founding members having had plenty of experience with the music business in their earlier careers decided to do their own thing. They manage themselves, they have their own record label (in the UK) and instead of a gigantic marketing machine they cleverly used the Internet and an approachable non-rip-off attitude to build a solid fan base. However, since the release of Heartland they do have a German record label (Out of Line), which in itself is not a bad thing. But it can lead to a rather absurd situation like the following:

The new album Command has been released on March 6th in Germany. It won’t be released in the UK until sometime in June! Asking Client B who (wo-)manned the merch stand whether they might be selling copies of the German release she said that no, they were not allowed to do that. Indeed, they did not even play any new songs – according to another fan on the CLIENT forum again due to label requirements. Apart from the irony of a German who moves to the UK, the motherland of CLIENT, and who now has less opportunities to see them live and get his hands on the new album later, there is another annoying fact here.

Why, on earth would anyone still do silly things like this?! We live in the age of the Internet for eff’s sake. People can and do jet over to another country to visit a gig by their favorite band. Yet you still see a CD published in one country months earlier than in another and the band is not even allowed to do what importers or people on Ebay will do anyway: selling copies of their new album  on their own concerts!

And no, of course you can’t get it as a legal download from iTunes of eMusic because those bastards also compartmentalise MP3 downloads by country. I am not a fan of stealing music myself (although I do defend very strongly each person’s right to make a copy of a CD that they own (2)) but this is another case that makes me wonder why the music industry does not see why some people resort to illegal downloading. Do they really think that while everyone is preaching globalisation  consumers will much longer be content with DVD players with regional codes, DRM and messages like “Sorry, the video you requested is not available in your country”? Wake up, guys!

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(1) That is true for several artists… Actually, when Anne Clarke was on stage last November someone from the audience shouted “We love you Anne” to which Ms. Clarke replied “You must be German then”. And yes, I do know what you’re going to ask next. No, I don’t know why the Hoff was so popular in Germany. Yes, I do apologise for this on behalf of my country.

(2) Although the music industry sometimes tries to make you believe otherwise it is (at least in Germany) still perfectly legal to make a copy of a CD that you own and GIVE IT AWAY to a friend. Can you believe that? Outrage! Theft! Lock them away – they’re even worse than rapists or murderers those damned pirates! Well, I think that it’s perfectly alright as long as you don’t upload it on some file sharing service. I myself have discovered more than one artists by someone giving me a copy and I then continued buying their music when I liked it. Apart from that… half of today’s kids would not have been born had their parents not been able to give a mix tape to their sweetheart. Anybody ever thought of this?

Cover of Wormwood episode 22: A farewell to (f)arms

How I made this picture? Well, that’s an entirely different story for another time. Suffice it to say that there is far less digital image tweaking in there than it seems.

Stephen Briggs, Terry Pratchett collaborator, Ankh-Morpork coat-of-arms designer and narrator of the Terry Pratchett audiobooks (the unabridged versions, that is) also holds the exclusive rights to dramatise Sir Terry’s books for the stage.

I found out in late 2007 when I saw a poster for the stage production of “Making Money” in the town centre of Abingdon. The play was due in two weeks time and naively I sent an email enquiring whether there might be any tickets left. Little did I know then that these productions by the Studio Theatre Club have achieved some form of cult status in the area and among Pratchett Fans so that getting tickets is not exactly easy. However, I kept an eye on their website and last year I was lucky enough to get a ticket – at the beginning of October for a performance in January!

Yesterday was the great day and so off I went to Abingdon. The Unicorn Theatre is a faux Elizabethan theatre in one of the few remaining buildings of the medieval abbey. A very nice location, but those bare stone walls did a rather poor job of keeping the cold of a January night out… Thank goodness for the mulled wine!

The performance itself was brilliant! Amdram, of course, but good amdram. The play was tremendously funny and staged with an eye for detail. The actors were good and I dare say they enjoyed it as much as the audience.  A thoroughly enjoyable experience and I will keep my eyes open for the next performance!

If you are interested in staging on of those play that are available with amateur drama society you should get in touch with Stephen Briggs via his website. There is a licence fee but all money goes to a charity to protect the librarian of the Unseen University orangutans (Ook!). There is also some funny Discworld merchandise available, most of which at reasonable prices methinks.

EDIT: You can find a longer review here: http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/2716970/38788848

Find some pictures below. There is a no photos rule during the performances, which I can totally understand and to which I adhered to not spoil mine and the audiences enjoyment of the evening. Hence, there are no pictures of the play in action.

Anyway, some years ago I had the pleasure of being involved in one of those episodes of weirdness, and apart from having a nice story to tell it also taught me a valuble lesson: How (not) to be a car thief. (You can skip to the relevant advice right at the end of this post if you want to. You will miss a true and funny story, though.)

M. has a friend who at the time of our story was not living in Saarbrücken anymore. On his way back home from a visit to his old haunts his car broke down and he barely managed to get off the Autobahn and left it on a parking lot close to a motorway junction. The car was a proper POS (Piece Of Shit), a twelve-year-old Opel (1) Corsa  which he had bought only a few weeks before.

Assuming that the car was beyond repair he asked his good mate M. to get rid of it for him. Now, you have to know that at that time to properly, i.e. legally, dispose of your car, cost you money. Roughly a 100 Euro. (Simply leaving your car somewhere could get you into trouble). So, he sent the registration certificate and all the necessary paperwork to M., whom he asked to do this for him as the breakdown had happened quite close to Saarbrücken and he was living some 200 kilometres away. The parking lot, in turn, was quite close to where I lived, so M. asked me to give him a hand, fully prepared to having to tow the Opel POS.

When we got to the car we found out two things. Firstly, M.’s friend had bought this car from a woman who had not bothered to de-register the car before selling it. Mr. Friend in turn had not bothered to register the car in his name in the few weeks of his ownership so technically and according to the papers the car still belonged to the previous owner. Great!

Secondly M. found out that the car was actually still in a drivable condition. If hobbling along at 30 miles an hour whilst  a broken engine mount is making strange noises is what you would call driving.

Nevertheless, we almost immediately developed a most cunning plan. Scrapping it would cost money, so why not… sell it! Hey, there must be someone out there who’d be willing to buy a car, which had amongst its multitude of special features a full petrol tank (probably worth more than the car). Most used-car dealers operate a garage as well, so maybe one of them would share in our logical assessment as follows: Buy a car for 20 Euro, fix it, sell it for 250! Not exactly a big profit but better than nothing. We’d be happy, Mr. Friend would be happy, new owner would be happy. What a clever trick… But it has to work. (2)

Spending some time with the yellow pages we called about a dozen used car dealers. Here’s a typical conversation:

“We’ve got this twelve-year-old Opel Corsa and we wondered whether…”

“Well, at the moment it doesn’t make more than 50 kp/h…”

“But it has a full petrol tank!”

“No? Okay, thanks anyway.”

At this point yours truly remembered a used car dealer whose offerings he had seen just a few months before whilst looking for a new car himself. From what I had seen there I assumed that he might be our man! So, I got into my car and the intrepid M. voluntered to drive the POS. We got to the premises of said car dealer and looked  at what he had on offer. A strange mixture of high-class, yet used, cars and… well, wrecks. I mean proper “This car was on the receiving end of an accident” kind of wrecks. (Strangely enough among them a rather battered London black cab.) We were sure, this guy would know how to do business our way!

We mustered our best salesman attitude and pitched our merchandise.

“Well, it’s a twelve-year-old Opel Corsa. The engine mount seems to be broken and it doesn’t do more than 50 kp/h but it has got a full petrol tank. You know, this car belongs to this friend who bought it off this woman, and he never bothered to register it, which is why her name is still on the papers, and the car broke down and now he asked us to scrap it and we thought we might just as well sell it…”

Slowly it dawned on us how improbable the whole story sounded.

He blinked and looked at us like we were complete twats. Then he looked at the car. He looked back at us shaking his head solemnly and said in a broad eastern-european accent:

“No, not interested. But venn you haf ozzer car – Audi, BMW, Mercedes then come back.”

“Well, Sir, we’re afraid that we don’t have a Mercedes, or Audi, or BMW.  We know our car isn’t not in the same league as those are, but maybe someone could  fix it and it might make a nice car for someone on a small budget. Also, it has got a full petrol tank.” (3)

His expression did not change and he said, slowly now: “Come back venn you haf ozzer car. You know… Audi, BMW, Mercedes.”

“Unfortunately we only have this twelve-year-old Opel Corsa, but it does have a…”

He said, for the third time and with a strange emphasis on the ‘other’: “Come back venn you haf ozzer car, okay?”

This guy was not only giving us a broad hint, he was literally shelling us with whole broadsides of them. When we left I said to M. “When this guy gets home he’ll probably tell his wife ‘Today I hef met two most stupid car thieves in ze world.’”

Adding insult to injury

With heavy hearts we abandoned our plan and decided to scrap our POS in the end. Again, we brooded over the yellow pages to find the cheapest junk yard in the area. Once we got there we were welcomed by an elderly guy, wearing an oil-stained undershirt. Grey stuble, a cold cheroot in the corner of his mouth. (Seriously)

We paid the money said goodbye to the Corsa and went back to my car. It was a Suzuki Swift, which has now long gone to car heaven, after carrying me many a kilometre and never letting me down. However, it did have a rather annoying feature. You could lock the driver’s door without using the key. Now, as soon as I realised this I paid extra attention to always make sure that I had taken the key with me. I always did, for four years. Until, well, I think you can guess. Standing outside my car, looking at the key in the ignition M. said: “Let’s crack it. It’s an old and cheap car. Shouldn’t be too difficult. Have you got a wire clothes hanger with you?”

I thought about that and looked in my pockets. “Not today, no”, I said.

“This is a junk yard. Surely they must have a piece of stiff wire here somewhere.”

We went to the owner. “It appears like we have to have to break into our car. You wouldn’t happen to have a piece of wire we could use?”

He blinked and looked at us like we were complete twats. He shook his head solmenly and said: “Nope.”

We looked around us. Dozens of car bodies, engine parts, scrap metal worth thousands of Euro but no piece of wire for a cent per metre? (4) His wife, who, after looking at us like we were complete twats, tried to be helpful, went to their office and came back with a wide selection of old car keys:

“But that’s a Mazda key!”

“Yeah, I thought that’s one of them Jap cars as well so maybe…”

After several failed attempts with car keys for every possible make and model (apart from a Suzuki of course, they’re quite rare you have to know) we had to abandon our plan of breaking into my car and – rather crestfallen – call for help. A friend brought my spare key in the end.

So what’s the morale of this story? If you decide to become a car thief you have to keep two things in mind.

1. Choose your target carefully! A twelve-year-old Opel Corsa with a broken engine mount and a max speed of 50 kp/h won’t do. (No, a full petrol tank does not make any difference!)
2. Always bring the right tools. Don’t think you can improvise, unless you’re fucking McGyver.

Anything else will seriously lower your street credibility and will make you look like a complete and utter twat. Oh, and should you have “ozzer car” call me. I have connections.

(1) That’s a Vauxhall for you Brits. Yeah, that’s right – Vauxhall don’t do their own cars, they’re just licenced Opels. And Opel belongs to GM. Remember, they don’t make cars in the UK anymore.

(2) Any blog that does not have a reference to Das Boot somewhere is not worth a tinker’s cuss. Seriously, I mean it.

(3) This is what they call a Unique Selling Point or USP in economics. See, these lessons at uni were not entirely in vain.

(4) Alluding to Das Boot twice in one post might be considered a bit too much, but hey, the opportunity was just too good to let it pass.

Not entirely sure what to think about it myself, at least it sounds like an interesting concept and the cause is laudable. But read for yourself.

Hi guys, as many of you might know I have been in the writing game for a
long time, and I have seen some pretty sad stuff. But this week I
embarked on something I hope will bring some lightness, and dare I say
it unity (not community – different concept) to people around the world.
It is simply the acceptance that we are each different and unique. I
started the Uttuku, something about this can be found at

www.uttuku.ning.com – still early days yet, but I have planned a year
long spreading of the word Uttuku. There is even a new fun writers site
started up under the name www.ausodomy.ning.com by Uttuku451

What is happening and I hope will happen is that whenever some one has
to register a screen name, or logon ID they use the word Uttuku and
assign it their favourite number, much like Uttuku451 has and Uttuku01
and 231.

By promoting this sense of unity and acceptance of being different it is
hoped that whenever you see the Uttuku login in, or even see anyone
wearing the Uttuku symbol that you will just go up to them and say hi,
I’m an Uttuku too.

Of course this is a mighty grand plan, science fiction thinking
actually, and it in all probablity might not even work. The world has
become very insular of late, so much so we are digressing back to
cultural identities and no longer accepting open cultural or even
literature exchanges.

If this project works, then great. A little bit of social unity around a
common symbol (not thought, creed or belief) will go a long way to
helping us accept each other for who we are.

That’s the idea anyway.

Thanks for hearing my little rant. I have a year of working this
through, and I am going to need quite a rest come next Christmas.

All the best

Robert N Stephenson

[Used with permission by the author]

One tiny little thing that comes to mind. If this really were to grow, just assigning numbers is probably not the best way forward. Think of Uttuku 1254689…

Do I really have to explain who Neil Gaiman is? If you do not know who he is, you will probably not be interested in this post anyway and you might just as well stop reading. Or, even better, go to the nearest book store, find out about what you are misseing out on and then come back.

The Graveyard Book

To promote the publication of his most recent novel – The Graveyard Book – Mr. Gaiman came to London on the 31st of October for a public reading and signing in the Old Theatre of the London School of Economics.

I got there well in time, which meant that I was pretty much in front of the queue and got to see how slowly but surely the foyer was filling with other Gaiman afficionados. The atmosphere was a strange mixture of pop concert and fandom. There were people in costumes (several Deaths amongst them) and business men, who could have easily been mistaken as lecturers at the LSE, if not for the assortment of Neil Gaiman books they were carrying, waiting to be signed. Mind you, I probably looked rather business-ish, as I had travelled to London straight from work, looking like the smart-casual consultant that I am most of the time these days. I have not been to a convention in ages, and all of a sudden I could feel this tingle of excitement. The feeling of being amongst people from completely different backgrounds who nevertheless share the same passion. I know it sounds geeky, it probably is, but what the hell.

I managed to get a seat in the second row, the first one being reserved for special guests. Whilst this meant that through most of the reading I could only see Mr. Gaiman’s head (leading to the brief consideration whether Neil Gaiman is actually a Futurama character) it also meant that I was sitting right behind Dave McKean, longterm collaborator of Neil and illustrator of the Graveyard Book. Which is a great story to tell, should I ever try to chat up girls who are fans of Dave McKean’s artwork. Or maybe not.

I had already listened to a few recordings of Mr. Gaiman that are out there for free on the web, but if I ever needed any more convincing to get some audiobook recordings of his works (read by him) this was it. Not all authors are good at reading their own works, but not so Neil Gaiman. Not only has he got an amazing voice, he is also an experienced performer with years of practice. The performance was almost flawless and throughout the reading of a whole chapter there was only once or twice a slip of the tongue.

What else can I say? I thouroughly enjoyed spending a Friday night listening to a great storyteller and apparently so did the rest of the audience, all 550 of them, as opposed to going to the pub, or watching a DVD or spending it in front of my laptop. It has been way too long since I’ve done anything like it and it felt good, worth my while, and special.

I don’t feel ashamed to admit that I carried my Absolute Sandman Vol. 1 down to London to have it signed and taking the opportunity to ask Mr. McKean for the same thing. To which he obliged most patiently, considering that he probably had not planned for this and the staff had to open up an ad hoc queue for him as well.

What a great night out! I got to enjoy my geeky side and was part of a crowd of people who essentially came to listen to a story. Something that is very rare nowadays and lamentably so – its stories that make us human.

See some more pictures, unfortunately not the best…

Twa...err Twitter

Warum mir dazu selber was ausdenken, wenn es OK/Cancel doch schon so perfekt ausdrückt.