RUHM UND EHRE DER ROTEN ARMEE!

RUHM UND EHRE DER ROTEN ARMEE!

Today, while in Berlin I paid tribute to the liberators of the city. Since there was a lot of snow it added to the somewhat "Russian" atmosphere. By the way, they should serve Vodka there. Too bad the maintenance of that memorial is now in the hands of the German government.


And while we are on the subject, I recently found this on Youtube:



The footage from Madison Square Garden in that video is from a gathering of the German American Bund, an interesting organisation that I was not aware of until recently. Find our more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_American_Bund.

INTERVIEW WITH KARL WALTERBACH

INTERVIEW WITH KARL WALTERBACH

I scanned this little interview for you. It is from the Berlin Magazine Tip from 1982 and unfortunately all German, oh well. It is with Karl Walterbach, the man behind AGR (Aggressive Rockproduktionen Label, Noise Label and the KZ36-Samplers). It gives you some insight into the German punk rock scene of the early 1980s. Besides working knowledge of the German language you will need Adobe Reader to see it -- enjoy!

Read the PDF

RANDOM STUFF FOUND IN MY ADDRESS BOOK

RANDOM STUFF FOUND IN MY ADDRESS BOOK

From the early 1980s I collected all sorts of newspaper clippings with various junk and put them in a box. It is never wrong to cut out interesting (well) stuff that one can use as layout material for a zine, a release or as cover artwork for mix tapes. One day when I retire I promise to start making mix tapes again. I think. Besides the box I kept several other things I collected while I was travelling in my phone book. This phone book has been with me since around 1985 and it is still not full of addresses and phone numbers, so if you want to know where some members of your favourite old bands lived, I might have the addresses, which are probably the addresses or phone numbers of their parents in many cases. Now, over 20 years later there is a thing such as the internet and these things can come out of the box or the address book. Anyway, today I started scanning some of those things for ya.


Maybe this is hard to understand if you don't know German and the term "Taschenbillard" oh well. This was a print ad for the Berlin Billiards Association and it so good it almost got me off of kicker which is my favourite bar sport for many years.


This was the label of the Norwegian 1.5 liter Sprite bottle of some years back. Since motocross and rock go so well together I guess, they ran a little campaign. In the corner the label has GLUECIFER which supposedly were Norways "feteste liveband" of the time (remember TURBONEGRO) posing which had Arne ex-ANGST on guitar. They also had the decency to call themselves the "Kings of Rock". Yeah right. But if you know another ex-member of a HeartFirst band who has made it on the label of a Coca Cola Corporation drink, please let me know.


This Flyer is from around 1988 and has been sitting in my address book since then. As far as I remember this was an extra flyer which was included in a SEPTIC DEATH 7". Don't order the NEUROOT/FRATRICIDE Split LP or the SEPTIC DEATH - "Strings..." 10" - I tried it and it didn't work. The FRATRICIDE 7" on HeartFirst is gone, too.


This was recycled from MRR fanzine who recycled it from the SF Chronicle. When did you last think about the New Romantics, their postive message and their beautiful outfits???


There are many ridiculous graphics and slogans relating to Straight Edge but this is one of my all-time favourites. This xeroxed version came to me as the back side of a letter sent to me by the infamous Herr Bodonski. A man who is today mainly remembered for putting out the first HAMMERHEAD 7" and who later turned into a full-time right winger, but of course this is from the time when he was still right on. Apart from being great art done by someone, at age 15 I guess who has never done anything mind expanding, I wonder: Why does the rabbit not answer the question straight and instead tells such a outrageous lie??? Of course you can have LOADS of fun drinking but unfortunately yes, alcohol can harm your body, too. Just like crossing the street can. Also look at the last "Well Wabbit" rule. It should read: "I will not let stupid X'd up rabbits keep me from things I want to do."

SMOKING CAN DAMAGE YOUR VISION

SMOKING CAN DAMAGE YOUR VISION

The fine people at LM cigarettes are currently running this ad campaign in Germany with city light posters, billboards and some point of sales stuff. It is much appreciated that the iPod toting creative scene realizes that it cannot make fine looking ads from downloaded tunes, or use the zombi-like CD format and still look cool. So they want to use vinyl and a good old fashioned turntable in their visuals.


And I can understand that is is a challenge for the art department to make this look good when you desperately want to have the pack of cigarettes in that bottom right corner. So hey -- let's just mirror this picture, ok?
But would it not be great if they had someone who knew how a record player looks and works.


Maybe the device in the campaign is a special turntable I have never heard of that is made to play records backwards so that you can listen to the satanic messages more easily. Or is it for left handed people who own vinyl records which are cut backwards??? Hey wait -- I got it wrong, too.


Anyway, this is way better. I saw a similarly wrong design for one of those over-30 parties in Bremen some weeks ago. It was a local phenomenon -- I thought. But instead it seems to become a trend now.

CHURCH OF SARAH PALIN PT. I

CHURCH OF SARAH PALIN PT. I

I know it's nothing special to laugh about Sarah Palin but the first 30 seconds of this CBS clip blew me away. Sorry about the commercial in the beginning. Obviously she is not much into reading. That's why she is on TV now for FOX "NEWS". She will come up with many new train wrecks as she speaks her mind. The whole interview with Steve Schmidt gives a good insight into American politics. Oh my....


Watch CBS News Videos Online

VINYL ABUSE - IN THE USA

VINYL ABUSE - IN THE USA

On a recent trip to New York I found several cases of vinyl abuse. I don't know what urges people to turn records into clocks to hang on the wall, ashtrays and fruit bowls.
These victims were found on the Brooklyn flea market. New York does not seem to have a big flea market culture but they sure like to mess around with those records.


Since I am a big fan of 7" vinyl the next example was even worse to see. This was in the museum store of the Brooklyn museum. This exhibit must have taken a long time to complete as you had to piece the singles together around the mirror. This leaves little space for the actual mirrow and makes it pretty useless. Like the mirror is just a cheap excuse to mess around with the dead records.

YEAR 2009 TRIP REPORT - VENICE. HOW MUCH ART CAN YOU TAKE?

YEAR 2009 TRIP REPORT - VENICE.
HOW MUCH ART CAN YOU TAKE?

I spend all my money on travelling and buying records. One of my top destinations in the summer of 2009 was Venice. No, not the one in L.A. with Muscle Tendencies and Suicidal Beach, but the real thing in Italy. The trip I made together with my friends Jack and Jackie who are rich Americans. Jack is a famous professor in the field of gender studies, and he owns a fancy boat which took us around.


This was very helpful since as you might know you cannot go around Venice by car. Partly because of all the streets being made of water, but mainly because you would inevitably run over lots of tourists even if you drive very carefully. They are everywhere. One of the highlights of the trip was the Biennale. For some reasons several of the pavilions there full of animals this year. The German one had a speaking kitchen cat. The environment did not really look like a kitchen but apparently there is such thing as a kitchen cat. But most of them cannot speak.


You can check out this link http://www.deutscher-pavillon.org/ and get a great description in very British English of what it was all about.

But also the Hungarians had little furry creatures in the house.


Instead of animals the Scandinavian pavilion had a great house with a pool which turned out to be a crime scene. The victim of the crime could be found in the pool.


As I am not into too complex art which I cannot understand my favourite part of the Biennale was the Finnish pavilion. The Finns do not consider themselves to be a part of the rest of Scandinavia, so they had their own thing going. It was a Finnish Fire & Rescue Museum which they had transplanted to Venice. Besides two gazillion little things and photos that had to do with firemen around the world (all compiled by just one guy), they had great exhibits of nuclear war emergency action paintings from the former Soviet Union. Educational paintings of nuclear bombs exploding over Russian cities, then firemen moving in to put out the fire and save the citizens from their bunkers. These paintings looked like nuclear war wasn't all that bad at all. Yet a little more grim that the old US "duck & cover" routines. I will not post pictures here as I intend to steal some of that stuff for label artwork in the future.

Other good exhibits included this record player which was the only installation in that room. As far as I remember this was not a country specific thing.


I also really loved the sign below. When you have your pavillions full of stuffed animals, record players with red vinyl LPs and other weird looking stuff, I guess it is necessary to stress such things. Also the word "touch" is quite hard to spell it seems.

TURNTABLE MISUSE - EXHIBIT I

TURNTABLE MISUSE - EXHIBIT I

I will start two new sections on the blog. One will be about the inappropriate use of vinyl turntables and the other one will be about cruelty done to vinyl records. See the other post about the atrocities witnessed in Brooklyn. As I travel around I constantly find out about weird ideas that people have and what they do to their turntables and vinyl records.



Here you can see a perfectly fine Technics SL-1200 deck of a pair (as usual missing the singles adapter) that is being used as a storage place for CDs. Which seem to be home made by the way. The cover has been removed, too. Now that's not right on! Also I can assure you that no vinyl was present, so there was no excuse. I saw this atrocity at the Registratur Club in Munich in the late summer of 2009. The place got closed down shortly afterwards. So this should be a warning to you. Don't do this to your wheels of steel!