Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Grey matter


As I am writing these lines, there are only a few clouds in the sky and the sunlight makes for a beautiful day. This has been a rare sensation as of late. Many days presented themselves as grey, heavy mess with drizzling and cement-like skies. If you are predisposed to melancholy, this overpowering grey can give you the blues. And then it isn´t very beneficial for your mood either that the days are constantly getting shorter this time of year.

When I broke the news to family and friends back in Germany that I am moving to Finland, some of their reactions reflected certain misconceptions. "But it´s always dark there!"
Some had heard about the Finnish summer and seemed to reduce the local seasons to exactly two: summer (sunshine 24/7) and winter (eternal night). Combined with the remaining two stereotypes about Finland known to many German minds - alcohol and suicide - (sorry Finns, I know your list about Germany is long, but that´s all there is) my plans earned sometimes frowns and raised eyebrows.

On a side note: I think stereotypes are merely indicators for certain tendencies. They absolutely fail to take into account individualism and thus can sometimes not be farther away from the truth. But I digress...

Who knows me well knows that I am no stranger to melancholy, a fact that induced some of those reactions. I told all them who worried that when it hits me, it just hits me. I can be all happy happy, joy joy on a rainy day and mope about in the summer sun. The weather conditions can of course boost or dampen emotions that are already in effect but weather itself is hardly ever the sole reason for me getting the blues. Anyway, even many Finns
don´t like November - because it´s mostly dark, grey, rainy and it gives them the blues, ha!

Everybody waits for the first snow to fall, nature´s remedy for mental and environmental darkness. As soon as the land is covered in white, nobody cares anymore about the few hours (or minutes) of sunlight. The snow makes a real difference as it lights up everything. And when that´s not enough, switch on your light therapy lamp and treat yourself with up to 10000 lux of happiness.

Utsjoki, a muncipality located in Northern Lapland, is already by now bathed in only twilight. Needless to say, the sensation of permanent darkness increases direction north, getting closer and closer to the polar circle. Said Utsjoki is the most northern aria on Finnish territory but it´s also more that 1000 kilometers away from Helsinki and me, so I am never exposed to such extremes, be it summer or winter.

Somehow funny: with my mid-European mindset I like to think of myself as living in the high north. Almost the whole of Finland can only laugh at this assumption.
Helsinki is one of the most southern cities in the country.

SONGS FOR TODAY:

Visage - Fade to grey


Agent Orange - Everything turns grey

Thursday, November 24, 2011

NeverEnding Story

Yours truly, Krisu and Pate
Or at least so it feels. It took us a long time to finish the recordings for our first demo, but it looks like we have arrived now and can finally close the chapter. Last update on the project was posted over a month ago and already back then I mentioned that we had to leap all kinds of hurdles. Well, that didn´t change ever after and we kept hurdling.
I wanna spare you the details. Nevertheless, the recording process is done and things are looking up - per aspera ad astra!
Next step is knob twisting, fader pushing, button pressing and a lot of auto tune using, hahaha...so the story continues. Will it ever end?

SONG FOR TODAY:

Limahl - Never-ending story

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Jump ´n´ Run


Spotted in my hood. This beauty is entirely made out of cloth straps and looks like there´s a bit of 16 bit action going on. Is it depicting a Nintendo game? I´m clueless and I´d like to know, so if you know, please let me know, you know? Any ideas?

ADDENDUM 24.11.11
Today an anonymous comment disclosed the secret.
Kiitos paljon, now I know: this unusual piece of urban art pays tribute to an arcade game, released in 1986 by Taito. Later it ported to home computers and game consoles. Speaking of dinosaurs, the idea is to navigate the dragons Bub and Bob through 99 (!) levels to finally rescue their girlfriends from monsters. Yeah! Name of the game:

And here´s a screenshot from the actual game, as it is linked in the comment section. Thanks again!

Bubble Bubble can be played with 1 or 2 players simultaneously.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Riddle me this

Actually I had been looking forward to post a review of last night´s concert in Jäähalli.
By the time I left the venue though my enthusiasm had already vanished in a puff of smoke. How can I possibly review something that I fail to understand without calling it complete and utter bullshit in every second sentence?

That mistake has been made countless times by "music critics".
Would I want, let´s say, a Britney Spears fan to review my music? NO WAY!
Well, I´m no Britney Spears fan and the allegory is maybe a bit exaggerated.
I am by no means a music critic either but a musician and devoted fan of (mostly) heavy music, be it punk, hardcore or metal. So what you´re reading here isn´t cast in stone, it´s my opinion only and you know what Dirty Harry said about opinions:


Opinions are like assholes

What I came to see were Ghost, who stood out like a sore thumb and played a set way too short, comprised of only five or six songs. Still their show was awesome and I´m happy that I finally got to see them! Hopefully the next time will be a club gig, where they can play more songs. Unfortunately, both Ghost and me were misplaced in that big ice rink (=jäähalli) last night and the "crowd", filling maybe 2/5 of the venue, reflected that.

About the rest of the package...hmm...well, first off, I missed Insense, who had to start the festival at 5.15pm, so I can´t say anything about them. And now for the tricky part.
To use yet another metaphor, with my taste in music I felt most of the time like a compass needle pointing in exactly the opposite direction. Not knowing most of the other bands at all I went to the event with a slight premonition of things to come but was still surprised when it hit me: tagged metalcore (Rise to Remain, Trivium) and melodic death metal (In Flames), the genres sounded interesting. I had no concept of metalcore and had somehow figured that metal + (hard)core = metalcore must be cool, mais au contraire, chéri!
It proved to be a bunch of unlistenable bullshit. There - I said it!

Thanks to Rise to Remain and Trivium, metalcore equals for me from now on good musicianship and very bad music that tries to be everybody´s darling. In Flames were a riddle to me as well. When I finally left Jäähalli they were still playing for their audience, which almost filled up the venue by then. The crowd loved them and there´s nothing wrong with that. It was their territory after all, they had come to see their heroes and it was me who somehow had stepped through a wrong door into a parallel universe I don´t belong.
If that´s the future of metal and/or hardcore, they can have it.
I don´t want it.

To end this post on a conciliary note, I´d like to mention at least something positive about the bands:

- Rise to Remain features Bruce Dickinson´s son on vocals
(see Iron Maiden: "Dickinson of a Dickinson")

- Trivium´s guitar players were quite impressive

- In Flames had a nice light show

Make sure to form your own opinion here:

Insense
Rise to Remain
Ghost
Trivium
In Flames

SONG FOR TODAY:

Minor Threat - I don´t wanna hear it

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Freikarte für die Geisterbahn


Tonight!!!

The mighty Ghost summon us to Jäähalli in order to collect what´s left of our poor souls. Holy shit, I missed them time and again due to several reasons. For instance, I don´t live in Germany anymore, where they seem to play all of the time. A club show in Helsinki earlier this year got cancelled. The few times they came to Finland, they only played bigger Festivals with unaffordable ticket prices. It´s no different today but this time around fate dealt me a good hand: A free concert ticket! Yes!!

Ghost will share the stage with four other bands, none of which triggers any kind of emotion in me. They are In Flames, Trivium, Rise to Remain and Insense.
Well, there´s always room for pleasant surprises at live shows. As Henry Rollins put it:
"Hail Satan, party hardy, surf naked!"

Papa Emeritus and the nameless ghouls of GHOST

SONG FOR TODAY:

Ghost - Elizabeth

Monday, November 14, 2011

Kirjasto 10


Something I really like about Helsinki is the huge number of libraries. They are spread all over town and it doesn´t cost you anything to become a member - null, nolla, zero!

My fave library is Kirjasto 10 in the city center. It focuses on everything related to music, so of course all kinds of music books, sheet music and magazines but also LPs (!), CDs and DVDs can be borrowed. Due to the Finnish liking for extreme music their supply is more than interesting for me. Coolest thing about kirjasto 10 is that it provides instruments, soundproof rooms and all equipment to rehearse or even record! It´s not that I would be dependend on that offer but - man! - I´m impressed that as a member you could simply reserve some time and rock out if you wanted to!

It´s very convenient to browse HelMet, the web library, where you can search the stock of all libraries and as soon as you get your membership card (immediately when signing up), you can reserve whatever is desired right on the net. It´s even possible to request for your item(s) of choice to be delivered to your nearest library. In my case that´s Kallion Kirjasto and I just picked up a book there that I had been waiting quite some time for:

A beauty, innit? You should see it from the inside!
Since I got my membership I have devoured the biographies "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath" and "The Bloody Reign of Slayer" by Joel McIver as well as MegaDave´s autobiography "Mustaine: A Heavy Metal Memoir" and "Motörhead: In The Studio" by Jake Brown. Oh, and one of the greatest graphic novels of all time, "Watchmen" by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and John Higgins.

I have to admit that I got a bit bored with reading biographies after a while because most of them suffer from the same flaw: If the author is not able to provide anything interesting after the formative time of a band, all you get is the natural studio-tour-studio-tour rut.

This can´t possibly be the case with my new reading material:

I am scared shitless.
I´ve been wanting to read this for a long time now. Tom Gabriel "Warrior" Fischer is quite a character and mastermind behind two of the most influential bands in extreme music(k): Hellhammer and Celtic Frost. Fischer is eloquent and to the point so this promises to be an interesting read. Plus, with Hellhammer only existing for two years and Celtic Frost being covered only in their beginning, there is no room for any routine. Hell yeah!
Have to start reading now...

Make sure to check out:

Kirjasto 10
HelMet (Both pages also in English)

SONG FOR TODAY:

Celtic Frost - Circle of the Tyrants

Saturday, November 12, 2011

DeJott JottEff

Last night´s Future Shorts event in Dubrovnik Lounge was fun! A real cool location with a vintage atmosphere, not too big, not too small. I´m terrible at estimating the amount of people in a crowd. But when the short movies started, the room was nicely filled with spectators. Good movies - I can´t decide what flick I liked best!

Acoustic punk duo Jaakko & Jay rocked the house as if there was no tomorrow, quite amazing band. They got signed a while a go and I can see why. After short movies and band the crowd condensed into the hardcore, if you will. So I didn´t exactly play music for the masses but was able to put some ants in their pants and made them dance. The snap shot (thanks Rasmus) btw is not a pose but a funny coincidence:
Black Flag - TV Party on the turntable!
That about sums it up...

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Harakointi - mitä vittua?!

Today´s topic is going to be a delicate one. It was brought to my attention by a friend of mine, who told he had come across a Wikipedia entry about an old Finnish ritual called harakointi. When he elaborated on the whole thing I couldn´t help myself but wonder what he had actually been searching for on the net.

Harakointi, so he said, dates back to the times people believed in witchcraft and could only be performed by women. Why? Because they showed their vaginas to their enemies in order to curse them, that´s why! Naturally, this raunchy bit of information induced pictures in our minds that had us in stitches! Just imagine the following scenario:

Witch: "Hey you, dickhead! Yeah, you! Look over here!" - lifts skirt - "GRRRRR!!"
Dickhead: "Fuck, I´m cursed! Aaaaargh!!"


Trying to do some research on harakointi I had to realize that www´s info on the matter is very sparse, to say the least. I only managed to find an English translation of the original Finnish Wikipedia entry and an excerpt from an essay by Sari Näre. She is an adjunct professor of sociology at the University of Helsinki and has published widely on gender and sexual cultures (among other subjects). However, both sources shed light on that ancient rite and show there´s apparently a bit more to it than my friend and me have conceived.  

First off, here´s what Wikipedia has to say:

"Harakointi means revealing a woman's genitals as a supernatural magic to protect or curse an item, cattle or person. The woman who does harakointi reveals her vulva, which depending on the purpose either curses or blesses the target. Cattle could be subjected to harakointi when they were let on the summer pastures by showing the lower parts to the passing animals. Farmland could be harakointi'd by doing the sowing or harvest with the genitals bared. Men, weapons and tools going to hunt or to war, as well as those traveling abroad and children left alone have also been harakoiti'd."

"Women have also needed to be careful with their magic powers, for some male items like fishermen's nets and horse harnesses may in some traditions have been considered ruined if a woman stepped over them. The female gender has apparently been considered a threat to male-dominated fields of life."

"Harakointi speaks of how the female genitals have been considered strong in magic power. This was based in the strong taboos, myths and fears related to the female sexual organs. A woman's ability to give birth has been considered supernatural. The magic known harakointi has only been practiced in Finland, but similar magics can be found from cultures around the globe."

Sari Näre mentions harakointi shortly like this:

"In pre-Christian Finland it was believed that women had magic powers to hurt and heal from their vulva. In pre-Christian folk tradition, sometimes women also used this magical power to protect their family members, intimate fellows and animals: the person or animal to be protected had to go under the woman’s naked bottom. This ritual called harakointi would take place, for example, in or outside saunas, especially when something new was happening, like someone going travelling or getting married. So, it was a kind of transformation ritual."

And that´s about it, nothing else surfaced on the net. Since Wikipedia claims that similar magic rituals can be found all over the world I tried my luck again. A word to the wise and you guessed it already: when you type the tags witch, ritual, spell, vagina, etc. into a search engine you will find all kinds of things but most will be off-topic. If you thought porn now, you´re wrong. Surprisingly the vast majority is about love spells or potions until Google starts listing pages about satanism or cannibalism.

This is a paper drawing from 1514 called Neujahrsgruß mit drei Hexen (=New Year´s wish with three witches) by German Renaissance artist Hans Baldung Grien (1485 - 1545) .

Especially shown in his later oeuvre, Grien had a thing going for witches, virgins and goddesses. He was fascinated by the beauty of the naked female body and some of his works have a surprisingly strong erotic, sometimes even sexual element (mind the times).

This particular artwork pops up quite often in the context of harakointi but I couldn´t find any sources that pin it down to that. Seems like an old sophisticated picture was needed to illustrate the ritual. What other could you possibly use and still appear scientific to some extent? Thought so.

The worldwide fascination with female genitalia through the ages is of course no rocket science at all and since the dawn of humanity men agree that pussy can be curse AND blessing. Yes, pussy! Why do I suddenly use this rather indecent term? Well, after my unsuccessful attempt to track down harakointi in other countries I´m returning to the native country of today´s subject matter - Finland.

Although I´m pretty damn sure harakointi has ceased to be executed in its original form over here, its main component is very well on everybody´s lips.

(Sorry, couldn´t resist - one pun has to be allowed.)

What is cunt or pussy in English is VITTU in Finnish and dear non-Finns, let me tell you, you hear it everywhere and everyday in Finland! Statistics claim that the word vittu and its seemingly endless variations are the premier swear words in Suomi. It feels as if there is a higher number of possible combinations than the decimal places of Pi. The word becomes so omnipotent because it can also be used as "fuck" as in "to fuck/mess with somebody". You want to add some force to your statement or expressed frustration?

One fits all:
"Mitä vittua?" = "What the fuck?", "Haista vittu!" = "Fuck you!" (literally: "smell pussy!"),
"Mua vituttaa!" = "I´m angry!", when you are angry you can even "olla naama norsun vitulla" = "have a face like an elephant´s cunt". Things can be "vittumainen" = "annoying" or become "vituiksi" = "fucked up", etc. pp. Used as a genitive it is combined with literally EVERYTHING. "Vitun hyvä, huono, iso, paska, juntti" = "fucking good, bad, big, shit, idiot" make sense but "vitun homo?"

Most unbelievable is that women use the word as often as men, absolute gender equality! Adults sometimes refer to it as "v-sana", the v-word, when children are present. Then they turn around to their friends and complain about "vitun" something...Still I´m surprised to find both ends of the life span joining the party. I don´t mind grumpy old geezers but sometimes you hear it from speakers so young that you wonder if they have a full concept of the word they´re using. Hopefully not!


In English and German spoken countries it´s more about ass (Arsch) and shit (Scheisse).
"You stupid asshole!" (Du dummes Arschloch!) will always make for a good insult. Someone told me that in southern European countries the male penis is used as main source of inspiration. And supposedly almost everywhere people swear with some form of "fuck".
I have no idea from where the fixation on dicks or asses originates in the rest of Europe but I am starting to get a hunch about the Finnish vittu.

It seems that the Finns have all but forgotten about harakointi and its magical powers to bless people or things. But they definitely have not forgotten how to curse with a vagina!

Make sure to check out:

Wikipedia on harakointi (Finnish only)
Sharing Waters - Sari Näre´s complete essay (English only)

Monday, November 7, 2011

Sid & Nancy


Spotted at Nosturi. Over 30 years after their untimely death someone in Helsinki paid tribute to punk rock´s most notorious couple. Who needs John and Yoko?

SONG FOR TODAY:

Sid Vicious - My Way

Friday, November 4, 2011

Disco in


Lo and behold, dear blogheads!
Next Friday, 11.11.11. - a date that you simply can´t forget - yours truely is gonna spin the wax in Dubrovnik Lounge, owned by famous Finnish directors Aki and Mika Kaurismäki! We have already the next big movie happening coming up in Helsinki, this time it´s the 
short movie festival. The HLEF is gonna be held in three different venues, namely the cinema Orion, Andorra and said Dubrovnik. The latter will be besieged on that Friday by the Future Shorts club Helsinki who will show six short movies from different countries, among them are USA, Germany and Australia. A few words about Future shorts:
It´s a worldwide organisation dedicated to short movies which started out with its first chapter 2003 in London. FS has spread over many countries since its foundation and Finland is one of them, having chapters in Helsinki, Turku, Tampere, Pori and Rovaniemi. 
My friend Rasmus belongs to the Helsinki crew. Needless to say that they will be part of the HLEF and since they wanted a DJ for the night, he asked me if I´d like to do the job.
"Hell yeah!" was my reply cause I´ve always liked to be behind the turntables at cool events. Back in the day in Germany I had a DJ slot every two weeks in a crazy little bar which was good fun. I have kinda missed that and am happy I´m given the opportunity now.
First time in Finland! Expect the unexpected!

There will also be a band playing. Folk punk duo Jaakko & Jay hits the stage after the movies, armed with only acoustic guitar and a sparse drum kit they fit into the smallest corner but manage to make big waves, check em out! I´m on during the breaks and after the band - then the evil entity known as JottEff will take over completely! 

Dubrovnik Lounge & Lobby
Eerikinkatu 11
8pm - sometime after 2am 
Admission: 7€+2,50€ jacket

Make sure to check out:

Future Shorts Event, 11.11.11 (no English, sorry)