I think it’s been ages since they played in Klagenfurt the last time but finally they did so again and even on the Wörtherseebühne*, unfortunately not even sold out but what a great scenery and a great show and even many times unintentionally funny :)
Before I will release the post for my InterRail 2010 trip I am going to treat you with the videos I have taken during the show in Bath at Komedia. It was awesome and marked the 4th time I have seen Frank Turner live. Even bought the two DVDs as well. Hell, I’m a groupie and do want to see more shows whenever possible.
Yesterday marked the 4th time I have seen Tito & Tarantula so far. I think the first time was in 2003, also in Klagenfurt. They played here already in 2001 or something and that was when Tito Larriva passed out on stage due to him being sick and mixing Tequilla with medicine or something. Anyways, in 2003 he went on stage and said “I don’t know who was at our last show and remembers it, but i was a little sick that day, so I’m going to make it up to you today” and then he started a great concert, as far as I remember a pretty long show and a really great one. That was the “Andalucia” tour, one of my favourite albums of them.
Another time I drove to Graz to see them play at the Orpheum and I noticed in march 2008 that the audience was way different than from the Klagenfurt show. Only around a third of the crowd was under 30 I thought and when I checked the t-shirts they were selling I couldn’t believe my eyes: they were still selling the “Tarantism” shirt from at least a decade ago. A shirt which should still be somewhere around here, having it since, presumably, around 1997. That made me feel a little old to be honest :D I think the audience in Klagenfurt is much more.. “diverse” is because there’s just nothing to do here so whenever there is a concert anybody shows up :)
Now that they were back again in Klagenfurt and I was in town, too, I had the chance to take some photos. Luckily with a Canon EOS 5D with a 85mm 1.8 which was borrowed to me (thanks @mgratzer!). The cam did a great job, sometimes, gear really is everything. I couldn’t have done that shots with my 400D because anything greater ISO400 wouldn’t work. With the 5D, ISO1600 was no real problem at all.
The thing with Tito & Tarantula is, they gained their fame without a doubt from the song “After Dark” and the movie “From Dusk Till Dawn” it’s so famously placed in. And without a doubt, without that movie I wouldn’t know them myself. Now I don’t consider myself a “bigger” fan than others, of course I’m not, but with every Tito & Tarantula concert I’ve been to there clearly was this part of the crowd that didn’t know any better and was just there to see them because of that. Which is perfectly fine as well. Tito Larriva is probably used to it by now.
Only yesterday, it was getting a little too embarassing for my taste. I was standing almost in the front on the right side of the stage, next to me some other photographers and during the show also one “older” guy (around 50?). Pretty much from the beginning he was shouting “FROM DUSK TILL DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWNNN” a few times. Fortunately the band wasn’t really reacting to it (visibly at least :D), keeping on playing.
Focusing on the show, taking a hell lot of pictures from where I was standing, I noticed that Tito was either clearly in a better mood or at least way better in shape than during the Graz concert for example. He can write some dark songs but when he’s grinning there’s this child looking through and you can see he’s still having fun performing :)
Great concert, I’ll make sure to see them every time I can :)
Musically speaking, 2009 stood out for me personally because of two bands that I saw in February: The Gaslight Anthem & Frank Turner. In fact, Frank Turner was the support for TGA so I saw them both on the same evening. Both bands really stuck with me the whole year and can be counted to my most favourites now. I even made a detour during my Interrail trip to see The Gaslight Anthem (along with The Dropkick Murphys) play a big Belgian music festival.
And Frank Turner was back in Austria in December for two shows as a headliner in Vienna and Graz and I managed to attend both shows. That was totally worth it, because after the show in Vienna, most of Frank’s band got sick so the Graz concert was a totally different show altogether as it was acoustic (Guitar & Keyboard). As much as I feel sorry for the folks getting sick, there was something good that came out of it :D
See, Frank even sold the merchandise himself :D As I had a Samsung IT100 with me that I borrowed from a friend I managed to make some pretty decent videos of both concerts (HD, Stereo-mic), judge for yourself to see the difference in these shows. Both shows were absolutely awesome. Also, I caught a proposal “on tape” during the Vienna show as well.
And here’s a short best of, starting with a cover version of an ABBA classic :D
Frank Turner – PPC, Graz – Dancing Queen
Frank Turner – Arena, Vienna – Photosynthesis & probably a Proposal ;) & Finish with Jaakko & Jay
Frank Turner – Arena, Vienna – The Road
The support band for Frank Turner was by the way also pretty cool and I just had to buy their CD: Jaakko & Jay. Two guys and a very limited drumset but the drummer kicks some serious ass. He was also sick during the Graz show unfortunately. There are two videos of them in the Arena Playlist.
So, what have I been up to lately? In chronological order:
Alkaline Trio
After my trip to Sofia I had a test run for my Matura-preparation (nailed it ;) and then headed to Vienna to attend a fair and to see Alkaline Trio live (Flex). I can’t quite tell why but I expected a whole lot more of them, not a very good concert in my opinion. Had much fun at the fair after parties though :)
Barcamp
Some time after that was the Barcamp Klagenfurt at Klagenfurt university, great organization and nice location. Best pic ever credited to Markus Ortner:
The Gaslight Anthem
Then I was in Vienna once again for a concert – this time the Gaslight Anthem – and unlike Alkaline Trio they didn’t disappoint. Great show. Supported by some replaceable band and then Frank Turner, who was pretty cool I think.
Evening school – Matura
As you may know I’m doing evening school to get some kind of school leaving examination. And now the classes for German and English finally came to an end. The last teaching units were barely bearable so me and the person sitting next to me slacked off even more than usual during the year and made some pictures. The sad part is that even while we were fooling around… let me rephrase that… even while we were not really an active part of the class we were still head of our class in terms of participation. I’m not lying. So school was something that occupied me two evenings a week for the past year and I don’t really have the feeling that I learned much in German and English.
Here’s a best of:
English
English wasn’t that much fun because besides hopefully improving grammar a bit I didn’t learn anything new. The shock came when we started with practicing for the oral exam. The setup was a 10 minute oral presentation on one of 14 topics. First lady up for the trial run made a perfect 10 minute speech. She was a complete tool, not using a single word or phrase outside from what was in the documents and it was like listening to a computer generated voice reading a text. And our teacher said: “Well, that was just perfect!” Just perfect? Just fucking perfect? Completely memorized. And that was fucking perfect?! I got pretty upset because I thought it was more about being able to speak english instead of learning something by heart. Not that I shared my opinion with the rest of the class though.
The reason I got upset was probably that I still had to learn the 100 pages :D So i started reading the topics and the only hard thing was to memorize all the details. According to the test runs it was important to know a great amount of detail, like dates for example. I read through all of the topics but got pretty fed up with it and was unwilling to learn more. Two days before the exam I decided to type everything I knew on these topics down into a single word document. This was the first time I really spent time on preparation and that’s how I got to know where I still lack background information on the various topics. I noticed that I wasn’t in class when they were watching “We feed the world” so I got the movie and watched it the day before my English exam.
By the way: I was the first one to go in at 8:40 on Thursday morning. I had to pick two papers and only then look at the topics and decide which one I wanted to do. I picked Amnesty International and We feed the world. So, what do you think I presented?
Amnesty International. :D
Because it’s still way easier to talk about AI than about “We feed the world” with all the special vocabulary on food and factory farming.
I had 20 minutes time for writing a summary to a given text and to prepare myself. I had the summary in 10 minutes and spent the rest of the waiting time with writing notes on the topic so I don’t forget anything. Then I had to introduce myself, read the summary and talked about Amnesty International for about 5 minutes (not counted) before the teacher said “Thank you”. Other people had to talk somewhere from 8 to 15 minutes, so that was obviously a good sign. Still, I had to wait until 13:00 for my grade and got the best one possible: (1/Sehr gut/A). Finally, English is over. Two hours later I was already throwing away all the stuff from the last year.
German
German was fun though during the year – at least at times – because the teacher actually tried to make people think and to start discussions. Too bad for him that none of the other people in school joined in. Plus we went to the theater several times which was pretty cool, better than expected. As for the test exam I wanted to scan the pages our teachers gave us afterwards. A best of from all the mistakes people made. You wouldn’t believe it. But hey, kudos for trying to anyone going through evening school and working at the same time. For me it was rather easy so far but there was a vast amount of different backgrounds in class and it’s only natural that there are people who are having a hard time. Thumbs up.
Then on Friday it was time for my German exam. Because I have to take one of my four exams for the Matura in an external school and not the WIFI I had to drive to a school a bit outside of Klagenfurt. Scheduled start: 7:30 in the morning. I showed up at around 7:10 and bumped into the teacher responsible in front of the school building. I started at 7:15 and was pretty confident about the topic and being able to write enough. Still, I was the only one there taking the exam.
Then 7:30 someone showed up from another WIFI course and she got her own two topics to choose from and immediately completely broke down. “These are not the topics we prepared ourselves for in class!” she said to the supervisor. And “I want to call my teacher and ask her what I should do now”. I didn’t quite understand and still don’t. There are two topics to choose from in German: one topic is a question about a book that you had to read. The other topic is about a given topic, either something up-to-date or very general. Like death penalty. Or immigration. Or advertising and society. Or truth. Or aggression (my exam topic). But mostly something you could write about when you’re not a complete moron. Or when you’re actually reading news papers or care about what’s going on in this world. There are also a few sub-questions to make it even easier for you for every topic. So there’s basically no excuse not to write about either one of the given topics since the list of books from the WIFI course is the same as the list from the school. I guess she expected a topic they already discussed or wrote about in school instead of something new.
Anyhow I wasn’t bothered by that, just slightly amused. I had all the time in the world from 7:15 to 12:15 and the only thing that slowed me down was the manual writing on paper. Would I have had a keyboard I would have finished way earlier. So I wrote a 6 page essay and then had to transform this into a clean copy. I took my time because my fingers hurt – I was glad I wasn’t bouldering the day before :D I finished the clean copy at around 11:40 and then voluntarily drove to the WIFI where the rest of my German class was having the exam with the exact same topics as me. Only my essay would be graded by the school and theirs by the WIFI. Most of the people were still writing when I arrived at 12:15 so I went up and sat next to the teacher, talking to him about my adventure in the school, waiting for the rest to finish to talk to them. It will take a week before they get to know their grade but I will know mine Monday morning. I expect a great or at least good grade :D
Outlook
After getting my grade for German on Monday I will have 75% of the Matura because I already finished math in 2006. So only one course is missing and there would have been two choices: computer science or business administration. I wanted to pick computer science. I really did. But there is no such course this year because there are not enough registrations. So I’m practically forced to do business administration instead. This will take another year but then at least in March 2010 I will have my Matura. Whee.
Musically speaking, 2009 stood out for me personally because of two bands that I 
By the way: I was the first one to go in at 8:40 on Thursday morning. I had to pick two papers and only then look at the topics and decide which one I wanted to do. I picked Amnesty International and We feed the world. So, what do you think I presented?