Escalators & Constipators

Come on, it looks more difficult than it actually is. You can do it! 

Take a good look at this picture. Let´s say you are in downtown Helsinki and you are approaching this site. Then let´s imagine these escalators in a total rush hour at 8 in the morning. Now tell me how you would use them together with a friend / collegue / lover / parent / nurse / etc. and / or just the other people on the escalator. I will be able to tell you straight if you are a native or a foreigner.

The Finns are able to perform the following cunning stunt when using this technical marvel: They form a line on the right side and let others who might be in a hurry (rush hour, mind you) walk by on the left. Unthinkable for example in Germany. Ain´t it funny? I bet a common cliché would be that Germans like to form straight lines, but no way, Sir! It´s rather the opposite!

Let´s do our little exercise from the beginning once more. This time we imagine the same escalators in a total rush hour in let´s say, Düsseldorf, Germany. This time I can tell you that the place would be absolutely jammed with people. If you have 30 seconds to get up there because you have a bus to catch you are doomed. This bus will leave without you, no doubt about it. You will never make it in time unless you mow your way through the human obsticles with a machete. Well, one of my teachers always said when I used this case as an excuse for being late: "Get up earlier!" I can´t argue with that but this is not the point here. 

How come Finns are able to make room for others while it seems impossible for Germans? I know some will play the population card now: 82 million Krauts to 5 million Finns and their countries are about the same size. Yes, you might take that into account and of course that means that Finnland just provides way more space for its inhabitants. But do you really want to tell me that a busy city like Helsinki doesn´t look like an anthill in the morning? That Mika, Jussi and Pekka can´t possibly constipate an escalator because there is nobody else but them? I´m not talking about any small village in the countryside. The countryside is what makes Finland so big compared to the number of inhabitants, there is countryside without end. I´m talking about Helsinki, a city that matches Düsseldorf almost exactly. Same amount of people, same hurries, same shit, different day. Here and there people are late for work but here in Helsinki they have a pretty good chance to catch the bus that saves them from their bosses´ anger. But why?

My conclusion is a fundamental difference in attitude and social behavior. Finns don´t have to be told to line up on the right side of an escalator, they just do it. They don´t question it and regard it as a matter of course. Germans in contrast regard it as a matter of course to question everything, especially when it is totally pointless to do so. It becomes a matter of principal and the principal is me, myself and I. Why do I have to make room? It is my right to stand in your way! Why can´t you use the stairs? Why do you bother me? The same pathological behavior applies to the road traffic. In Germany you know how to drive a car, no one else. Only morons on the street, you are the only sane person in a madhouse. And of course you let them know, let´s teach them all a lesson. The biggest problem about this stupid attitude is the fact that it leads to many avoidable dangerous situations in the traffic. But you can notice it already by the usage of the car´s horn, actually meant as a signal for danger. The Germans use it more often as "Argumentationsverstärker", as a tool to prove their point. A pointless point. Every morning on the streets of Germany: Concerto grosso! I paid a lot of attention to this over here and I can say with utter conviction that what you hear on the streets of Helsinki is: Silencio. 

Halloween

Boo!

October 31st: Samhain, Halloween, All Hallows Eve, or whatever you want to call it, today is the day. Happy Halloween to all of you, no matter if you like it or think it´s yet another corny, all-american bullshit adopted by Europeans. Well, Halloween flirt-parties, Halloween bargain advertising, Halloween cough syrup...I hate all of that, too. But still I love Halloween and the mood it sets me in because I have a liking for things dark and gloomy.

Strange that most people think it´s an (North-!)American event because the origin is definetely European. The Mexicans celebrate their Dia de los Muertos, which has certain similarities with the Celtic Samhain. Both believe that the border between life and death is very thin today, so spirits can pass through and you can communticate with the dead. In Mexico it is a happy and colorful celebration, their culture embraces death as a part of life and you don´t have to be afraid of it, death is no taboo like in most other western cultures. The pagan European celebration had a lot to do with harvest and the change of seasons. The word Samhain (originally spelled Samuin) is Old Irish and means roughly "summer´s end". In autumn the light part of the year ends and the dark part begins. Life and death.

Around 1830 the Irish packed their culture, jack-o-lanterns and pumpkins in a bundle and left for America. That´s where it got re-packaged and commercialized to a product that most people know today. I have to admit that I like this product but I liked it so much better when it was still only available in limited quantities in Central Europe. Most people didn´t know it in Germany when I started to celebrate Halloween with a bunch of like-minded friends as a teenager. It gave me the feeling to really be into something special and secret. My link to the whole thing was again music, as almost always. The German metal band Helloween (no misprint) had (and still has) a pumpkin in their logo and I wanted to find out what their name actually meant. What I found out was cool and spooky, so I went with it. Thanks to Helloween for the impulse, although I can hardly listen to their music anymore.

Shortly after this discovery I wanted to find about another thing: What was this strange band on almost every shirt the guys from Metallica were sporting in the 80ties? When I then discovered the Misfits I was taken into another dimension and to this very day it is a love that doesn´t grow cold! I became a horror fanatic and the Misfits provided the perfect soundtrack. Punk + horror = Horrorpunk. Brilliant! I even started my own Misfits inspired punk band in 1996 to somehow fill the void they had left after their demise.

The Noctunes from Flensburg played some shows in Northern Germany, released a demo CD and were featured on a local sampler called "No limits", the second incarnation of the band in Düsseldorf recorded another demo and was part of the "This is Horrorpunk, Vol.1"  sampler on Fiend Force Records. Due to problems in the band and my venture with Black Raven I laid the Noctunes to rest in 2004. Every now and then I thought about resurrecting the dead but for quite a while now I´m 138 % sure that this sleep is an eternal one.

You wanna know why? I´m bored beyond belief with what happened to both Halloween and horror punk. What is cool about something that EVERYBODY is doing? This whole horror punk thing took off a couple of years ago and went through the roof all over the world. I could start my thing again, I still have a bag full of songs nobody has ever heard except for close friends. But when I founded the Noctunes there was no trend, no formula and at least I didn´t know any other band doing the same stuff in Germany at the time. And even if there was somebody else, that didn´t make the thing generic like it is today. We were known in only small circles in our heyday, so if I´d do the thing again everybody would think I´m just another copycat. No thanks, I rather pass and leave the field for others. By the way, I came across some lame ass band on the net that took the name. They are from the South of Germany and play some kind of college rock. I can only say that I check potential band names first and see if they are already taken before chosing one that is and trying to be original. Oh, I might want to add one more thing: Fuck you, assholes!

But let´s get back to the initial topic: Halloween. Every American will laugh at my complaints that nowadays accountants and bank clerks are celebrating it because in the US of A, really everybody from kindergarten to retirement home is doing it. I quit going to parties years ago when the trend hit Germany. The parties I went to before that were mostly organized by myself and friends. I miss the intimacy and the uniqueness of it all. Oddly enough I still get a thrill, a restless excitement every year when Halloween arrives and I gotta say that I still celebrate it each time. It´s not a big party anymore and I don´t even leave the house. It has become something personal and I´m back to what I did when I was a teenager: light some candles, spin the Misfits and watch some good old horror flics. Happy Halloween, goddamnit!

SONX FOR THE DAY:

Halloween - Misfits
Halloween - Siouxsie and the Banshees
Halloween - Rob Zombie and The Ghastly Ones

No sleep till Sunday

Was that a great weekend or what?! Sure this posts title is a bit exaggerated but with Mighty as our first guest we tried to squeeze as much as possible into the little time we had. And we did that quite successfully, so sleeping long was not on the menu. The mighty man arrived last Friday noon at Helsinki airport. After a lesson in Dos and Don´ts concerning how to use Finnish cash machines (Blue slot? Jackpot! Go and spend your money. Yellow slot? Tough luck! Stay and spend one hour in the bank.) we had a good meal to prepare for the upcoming event: The Kallio Big Night Out. The plan was to check out the cheap bars in Kallio and many of them! If you want to make your night out a big one over there you better start early because they got this unpleasant 2 a.m. curfew. I think our saldo was a total of seven bars in the end, including a karaoke session.

The poor people in that karaoke place got completely steamrolled by us. Whispering into the microphone to mellow tunes at a ridiculously low volume they were unaware of things to come. You had to fill in a little form with your name, your requested song and believe it or not: the volume you want your song to be played in. One top of that tiny bill was a scale with ballot boxes from -5 to +5 where you had to mark your desired level of noise with a cross. We decided to turn the place into CBGB´s and yell along The Ramones´ "I wanna be sedated" (somehow fitting to the place), needless to say we made our cross at +5! The bartender lady asked me in disbelief whether we were sure we wan´t the highest volume possible. I made her understand that our decision was well considered and thoroughly thought through (I´m getting a lisp here) by saying: "Of course!" And lo and behold! They really cranked it up! BOOM! Some people even did a little pogo, quite cute. For our next song I had drawn an additional box on the bill for +6, maybe to make a point, and as we screamed at the top of our lungs to "No sleep till Brooklyn" by the Beastie Boys the whole bar was shaking. Well, at least we had the feeling it was.

Karaoke attack! Old farts need glasses to read the lyrics!

Saturday surprised us with perfect weather and was packed with record store tours, sightseeing, kahvi ja korvapuusti, sauna and a nice trip to Suomenlinna. That is one of the many islands at the shore of Helsinki. You can reach Suomenlinna by a ferry that belongs to the public transportation HSL, it´s like taking a bus or tram in Helsinki. The trip takes about 20 mins and I can only recommend it. Very nice view on Helsinki´s harbor with the big ferries going to Sweden, Estonia, Germany and Russia, the city skyline and all the other small islands surrounding you there. When you arrive at the island your feet touch the ground of an UNESCO world heritage site that is popular with both tourists and locals. Suomenlinna means "Castle of Finland" and is a very important strategic defense spot for the Finnish military, protecting the mainland. 900 people are living there and many Finns frequent the island for more peaceful purposes. In the summer time it is a picturesque picnic site, buns not bombs, just the way I like it.

Susu and Mighty on Suomenlinna.

 On Sunday we went to an indoor flea market, which is said to be the biggest in whole Finland and provided Mighty with a good variety of souvenirs. I wonder what his salmiakki craving collegues thought about his collection of licorice that he brought for them. Salmiakki chocolate anyone? Certainly unique. In the afternoon it was time to say "Auf Wiedersehen" and Mighty hopped on the plane back to Germany. Thanks a lot for the visit, my friend. It was great having you here! So schön, schön war die Zeit...

Daughters lock up your mothers!

Mighty and me going mental at Wild at Heart, Berlin

The man is coming to town!
Mighty Mayer has booked some extra large space on our sofa bed for the weekend which makes him our first visitor from Germany! Trophy is gonna be in liquid aggregate state, I figure he won´t mind at all. Mighty and me go way back and we did a lot of cool stuff together, most remarkable in the public eye was maybe our band Torpedo Quintett. I´m very excited to have him here. We share the love for hot music and cold beer, now it´s time to put Helsinki to the test. Banzai! 

Make sure to check out:

www.myspace.com/torpedoquintett

I´d like to buy an Ä

Bing-bing-bing-bing-bing-bing-bing...There you see. No, wait. I´m not talking about these blind German retards who insisted on dolling up all by themselves for their big moment of fame on Glücksrad. I´m talking about the unique nature of suomen kieli, the Finnish language. If you are from another European or English spoken country and you stumble over finnish noums like posti, grilli, bussi, taksi, etc. you might think that a) this is rather cute, b) this sounds all pretty familiar and therefore c) learning the language is gonna be a piece of cake. Well, you are terribly wrong. Forget everything you know. It ain´t gonna help you because you are fooled by loan words and here the similarity ends abruptly. In my first post I described Finnish as close to extraterrestrial, which was maybe a bit mean (Yours truly was in for a dramatic effect as usual). But it´s fair and more friendly to call it a secret language. The term is accurate because a) it´s spoken by 0,05 % of the global population, b) even if you learn it, spoken Finnish and its many dialects might differ so much from its written form that you´re still absolutely clueless and c) to further round off the mystique Finns sometimes start to whisper at the end of a sentence. They sound as if they are exhausted from carrying the burden of a dark, well-kept secret. And they can talk while inhaling! It´s like writing with magic ink or something...just miraculous! Today the first part of my intensive language course has endend. I like to imagine that I get a glimpse of light at the end of a long tunnel but quite much still looks like this to me:

Bon appétit!

Let´s face it, it´s not the easiest language on the planet. It doesn´t belong to either the indogermanic or romanic family and that makes it so difficult for many foreigners like me. Finno-Ugric, that´s what it is. Estonia and Hungary are linguistic relatives and while you can really see some similarities between Finnish and Estonian, love letters between Helsinki and Budapest will most likely be written in English. All of the above makes Finnish highly unique and interesting. I am surrounded by that secret language every day and I wanna crack the code to become agent 00 JottEff with the licence to spell. If you like to aim high I recommend you to try it yourself. You will find that Finnish sounds very nice (listen to a sample), the grammar is in fact very logical and it is one of the world´s best languages to curse in, perkele! You will start to like these funny details that make Suomi so adorable. For instance, there are no equivalents for the words he and she. Both is hän in Finnish, that´s why Finns mix up the English personal pronouns on a regular basis. Don´t be confused when you hear someone say "I was talking to my girlfriend and he said..." That doesn´t mean that his girlfriend is still a boy about to have a sex change. The more plausible explanation is that this person has made a common mistake, Finns are just not used to distinguish between male and female personal pronouns, the context tells them if the conversation is about a woman or a man. One thing you should always keep in mind when speaking Finnish is the pronounciation. Of course this is important in every language but the Finns are pretty uptight with it. Some words look almost the same but it´s a double consonant or vowel that makes the difference. The difference though might be enormous. For example, if I say: "Minä tapaan sinut kello viisi" I tell you that I will meet you at five o´clock. If I say: "Minä tapan sinut kello viisi" it translates to "I will kill you at five o´ clock." So if you confirm a date and she starts running for her life, you know that you screwed up the pronounciation. Quite interesting somehow that the Finnish verbs "to meet" and "to kill" are so close to each other. Wonder why...has anyone done some research about this? Another curiosity is the shortage of words at first sight. Sentences can manage quite well with only one or two words: "Oletko iloinen? -Olen." ("Are you happy? -Yes, I am"). Even one word alone can be bursting with information. If someone tells you for instance that he is "talossani" you have a quite distinctive description of his whereabouts. He says "house-in-my" or "in my house" without wasting too much breath. Then there are so many other interesting things like untranslatable words and verbs, or words that even the Finns regard as sounding funny like "lämpimämpi"(comparative form of warm, = warmer). The list is long and you should really take a look at it. Needless to say that I am still making many mistakes but at least I have heard some nice compliments about the way my poor broken Finnish sounds. Sometimes I´m a bit frustrated when the grammar won´t penetrate my thick skull but giving up is not an option! The quest continues next week.

The house of horrors, I´m in torture chamber No. 17 on the 3rd floor. Just kidding, of course...

I´m attending class at Työväenopisto in Herttoniemi, that´s just three metro stops from my place. Hopefully four times a week, three hours a day will do the trick in the long run. Part 2 of the course is ahead of me and the going is about to get tough. No easy way out anymore with explanations in English which was the habit in the first part. Our (very nice and friendly) teacher told us (very nicely) that from next Monday she will speak Finnish 98% of the time and expects us to answer in Finnish, too (not so very nice but more than reasonable). I know that the day will come when I´ll be able to communicate with people over here in their mother tongue, it is just a question of time. If I just wasn´t so impatient...