whats with Sudan?

Everybody’s talking about the situation in Tibet and thats a good thing. Chinas policy and Tibets liberation efforts are of everyone’s concern. I think whats happening now can only help China on its way to democracy. Tibets demands, carefully worded by the Dalai Lamah, are not of unaccompishable nature. He’s not speaking of segregation but exclusive rights for the Tibetians to live out their culture. He sees Tibet as part of China - I am not sure if those who fight in the streets of Lhasa are on the same opinion, though.
Meanwhile, on the african continent, China supports bad governance (Angola) and tolerates even genocide (Sudan) in order to meet their requirements, to still its hunger for oil.
I don’t see this issue to be discussed in the german public with the same dedication and passion as the military operation in Iraq by the US or the Israel/Palestine conflict. (isn’t this proof that a new form of antisemitism and anti-americanism have reached the mainstream in german society?)
There’s no day without an article about these two conflicts, when you walk the streets downtown of any german city you see kids wearing the kufiya, anti-american slogans belong to every day language. Yesterday Barbara and me saw the movie “shooting dogs” that deals with the genocide in Rwanda. Watching it was a nightmare. To see the UN failing in this very conflict gives one an idea how the UN might work in general. We should rectify our picture of the UN as a noble place where smart politicians talk about world peace.
In Darfur, officials are speaking of 200,000 deads and about 2,3 million displaced persons, where is Juergen Todenhoefer, describing an african childhood in a sudanese war zone?
Where was Todenhoefers sympathy for the iraqi resistance when Saddam Hussein was still in power?

Marbella!

Sorry folks, havent written for a while. The first couple of days of the easter holidays I’ve spent at my uncle’s place near Marbella. He’s a retired journalist and as an officer of high-rank he also worked for NATO in various functions.
My earliest memories of him were the struggles he and my mom fought out about topics like the policy of the ANC in South Africa, the peace movement in the 80ies, the pershing II discussion and so forth. In these discussions, it was my mom taking the far left position, leaving the whole of the right wing to fill in for my uncle. Nevertheless I always had the impression that these discussions were fair and constructive, yet sometimes a little louder, but more due to passion than aggression.
Its been a while since I had a longer conversation with my uncle, in fact, we only see each other once a year or so on one of our big family meetings.
A couple of months ago we started a little e-mail conversation since we found out that we think alike on various issues. Being at his place, together with his wife Carmen, we continued our discussing over a wide-spread series of topics and persons from spanish prime-minister Zapatero to Die Linke, the new left-winged party in Germany that is likely to take over opinions from the far right as well.
He told me about his work as a journalist and he was a little suprised to hear that Peter Scholl Latour is my girlfriend’s uncle. We both agreed that he’s an brave person, but we also agreed that we very rarely share his point of view.
My uncle showed me quite a bit of Andalusia, well, as much as one can squeeze into 3 days. Its such a lovely place and I plan to do this trip again!

Back home I started working on arrangements for my fellow musical friend Scott Brookman. He wrote some wonderful songs that still need some bass guitar. Keep ya updated

this and that

It looks like if we are not travelling to Los Angeles this summer but go there in fall. That means that I will be able to watch the Euro 2008 at home, unlike the world cup 2006. I am very excited about gig options in California, with Julia and Riviera, but also with Jim and Anita and EXTRA.

Julia and Probyn will come to Europe due to Brians tour schedule. It would be nice to play some live shows in Germany at that time as well.

On Saturday, there’ll be Barbaras/ barikes fashion show and I am a bit uptight because I’ll be one of the runway models. I never did that before. Well, sure’nuff that kid can walk, I can even run if the situation demands it. Well, we will see.

In the meantime, heres a funny video by someone who spared no effort to make a perfect summary of my alltime favourite movie, the Big Lebowski - enjoy

p.s. for those germans reading this blog who saw Big Lebowski in english, isnt it amazing how perfect Aimee Mann’s german accent is? Damn! She even behaves like a german!!

what a wonderful song/ video!

check out new artist Adele with her debut song “chasing pavements” I just stumbeled over it after reading a review on the web:

I love it to bits. It makes me cry. Wonderful!

summernights

Its weekend and I am sitting in my studio, working on an edit of Julia’s lovely semi-instrumental “summernights” from our last album “us, together, now!” for Barikes upcoming fashion show. 

My goal is it to make an extended version of about 12 minutes length that features western guitars, out-of-space keyboards, strings, harmonicas and more. It should capture the feeling of a lonely, melancholic - well - summer night

So I added some danelectro baritone guitars to it, a twangling melody line, some chords. I recorded some layers on my farfisa and put a noise gate that is triggered by the bassdrum on that track to recieve a funky phased filter sound. Its now 8 minutes long, not bad for a 2:55 track. I need to make it even longer, since Barbara wants to have only one piece of music for the show.

windows 98…

…really sucks!
its a pain in the ass to enter the www with my windows pc here. Luckily I made it to run an old profile on my Mac, so I can go online here.
Our soundcraft 24 track desk is out of order, so I took it out and replaced it by an old farfisa organ that was sitting in another room. I dont need that mixer so badly since I have 8 inputs on my MOTU 828 running.
I am thinking about buying a full drumkit, though. Doing this, I might also need a little mixer to get the various drums mixed down to one stereo track.
Call me nostalgic, but I somehow love that old desk. Whirlpool productions recorded their club hit “from disco:to disco” on it before we bought it from Hans Nieswandt. We produced all of our albums with the help of that mixer.

I just love this!

Sorry, german language only. This is a spoof of Tom Cruise doing a speech at a german award ceremony. This reward “Orden wider den tierischen Ernst” is given to people for their remarkable and outstanding performances in the field of humour and wittiness.

Enjoy Oliver Pocher as Tom Cruise.

Mmmh.

Er.

Well, I just noticed that youtube took off this video. :(

Instead see a part of the Pocher/Schmidt wherein they make fun of Al Gore and the hysteria all around climate change and the knee-jerk effects and actions followed by.

avalox

I’ve been sick for the past 6 days or so, lying in bed, feeling miserable. The first two days I could hardly speak. Then I took Avalox, an antibiotic that not only kills bacteria but also makes you feel not so good after taking it. So it seems like not only the bad guys amongst the micro organisms get harmed by this magic potion. collateral damage, so to say.
Anyway, the overall effect was a good one, in a few minutes I will leave my home to go to work. I have a band workshop, all kids about 10-12 years, we rehearse on “SATISFACTION” by the Stones. I hope my voice will stand the wall of sound produced by 4 kids in a rock mood.

we played Wii at the weekend!

That was a lot of fun. Friends of us recently bought the Wii along with a bunch of the hottest titles for this console. I had the chance to play Resident Evil 4, one of my favourite games, with the Wii controler and nunchuk. That was a great experience and my friends had to jump in to stop me from a killing frenzy.

Later on we all played Wii Sports, especially bowling and golf. My girlfriend Barbara once dropped her controller during bowling and for a short moment it was like she might hit the TV screen with it.

“Shall we use straps to tighten the controller to our wrists?”

“Paah, no. Thats not neccessary!”

Anyway, I consider buying the Wii for myself now since its really a totally new experience playing with this kind of controlling devices. And with “Mario Galaxy” theres a title that is so spaced-out it makes LSD look like sandwich spread.

McCain plays Bonanza on my new Baritone Danelectro

I just saw on CNN that Clinton and McCain won the elections in NH. I am happy for McCain whom I would support if being an american citizen. I’m not so deep into the election process, neither do I know too much about the candidates. But I read an interview or two with some of the canditates, and McCain to me appeared to be a cool guy. I dont know too much about everybody’s darling, Barrack Obama so I can’t judge him. I talked with american friends who usually vote for the democrats and they also do not know what Obama really stands for.

Two weeks ago I bought a black longhorn Danelectro Baritone guitar and since that I tried it on every track I have here. It simply sounds awesome, its like how low can you go without sounding muddy or something….?

BTW, you can hear a Baritone guitar on “wichitalineman” as well as on the title theme of “Bonanza”. A hell of an instrument, but like garlic in cooking, you should never use too much of it to not ruin the overall flavour.