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.
I spent another few days in Berlin from Thursday to Tuesday. Again, I was couchsurfing and visiting my dear friend Josh. I’ve done a lot but still it feels like I could have spent way more time there, but then again, I’ll be visiting Berlin more often in the future, that’s for sure. Still, 3 times within half a year says something about this city, even though one of the visits was a business trip for only a few hours. When I arrived, Josh has already prepared my place to sleep – a little Austrian corner :)
On Thursday, not long after I landed in Berlin I attended the Girls in Hawaii concert and I didn’t expect it to be this great. I like their music, but the concert was pretty breathtaking and they also had a nice video installation and gave an overall excellent performance. Girls in Hawaii were supported by THE BAND ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER. They were pretty cool as well and I’m really looking forward to their upcoming album! Check both bands at last.fm!
Girls in Hawaii – Found in the Ground
Saturday came the ultimate stress test: I spent the day with a bunch of couchsurfers from the “Berlin photography” group and had all kinds of fun, shooting for a few hours. From what I have heard, someone was actually at the abandoned NSA listening station located at Teufelsberg. I got a few pictures I should upload to show you, even though I would never personally go in there since there’s barbed wire all around the compound. Here are a few shots, all of them can be found in the flickr set Teufelsberg:
After that I headed for the Kettcar concert. Even though I saw them live a month ago in Vienna I decided to see them again as they were playing in Berlin the same time I was there. Coincidence? I think not. But I must admit: I wasn’t as happy with the concert as with the concert in Vienna. The location was OK but the wardrobe was closed when I arrived and there was no space at all to safely discard my jacket and sweater. There also wasn’t any ventilation which made the whole experience pretty exhausting. The sound wasn’t as good as in Vienna. The band wasn’t as motivated as in Vienna. Or maybe it was the crowd. Besides that, it’s Kettcar for fuck’s sake, excellent music after all and that eliminates any negative points cumulated.
Then it was already time to head for the Trueman.tv party. Marcel, the flatmate of Josh, is streaming his life since about 450 days and will probably end the project soon. So this was kind of a farewell party combined with a farewell for Josh who is leaving in February 2009 so there were also a whole lot of Couchsurfers. Any further details of that night are not to be discussed and any photos there might be around are photoshopped. Except for those made with my Lomo Fisheye but they will be sealed and used in a proper time and manner.
Sunday was basically sleeping and at night I met up with Germany’s blog-sensation Malcolm for an enjoyable cup of coffee at a Starbucks clone (Balzac or something like that). It was about damn time we met dude! :)
On Monday I checked out the christmas market at Alexanderplatz and left Tuesday morning.
I <3 Berlin. Seriously. It’s a great city. Cheap. Full of life. So many great people that I met (well, mostly Couchsurfers. Of course they have to be great people :) I want to be there more often. More often and longer. Like, really really long. Maybe some day. After I finished evening school. But that’s another story.
The Gaslight Anthem’s music embraces many elements of the Jersey Shore sound. Indeed, the band’s fondness for Bruce Springsteen, a significant influence on their music, is a fact celebrated by fans and critics alike. Representative of such views, one critic writes, “the Gaslight Anthem are like something out of speculative fiction: this is what pop music would be if Springsteen hadn’t listened to his producer, let the Ramones record ["Hungry Heart"], and launched the C.B.G.B.’ers into mega stardom.”
can they live up to the premise these words build up? i think they do, but judge for yourself, here are my two favourites:
The ‘59 Sound
I’da called you Woody, Joe
i especially love the voice of the singer and the general flow of the songs!
and best of all: I’ll be seeing them live in Vienna in February. I can’t wait for that!
* coming to think about it now, most of the stuff I like today was somehow influenced by or recommended by my brother :D like Coheed and Cambria as well for example. thanks bro!
i just returned from a trip to vienna and sadly can’t attend I AM KLOOT in graz tonight because of lack of transportation back to klagenfurt :(
but I have managed to see Kettcar on friday, who were just about as awesome as I had expected them to be. unfortunately, I didn’t like the supporting act Kreisky at all. great concert from Kettcar, just about perfect.
I was there with Markus from graz who said that I should check out Tomte as well the following day because they are “better than Kettcar”.
they are not. at least in my oppinion. I enjoyed Kettcar way more. and it was quite a journey to get a Tomte ticket in the end because the show was sold out. luckily, there’s last.fm :)
what was surprising was that I ended up enjoying the supporting act Novillero a lot. so after the concert was over I purchased both Novillero cds and I’m listening to them right now. good choice, they are pretty cool. also I found out that they are from Winnipeg, Canada. does that ring a bell? my favourite band, The Weakerthans, is also from Winnipeg. how awesome.
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.
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?
