Mik’s Mindstorms

Sometimes a trip turns out better than you can imagine even in your wildest dreams…my weekend trip to the Italian Alps, together with my friend and colleague Danish Nadeem, turned out to be just like that. While I expected the trip to be beautiful, the Alps are a beautiful piece of nature after all, I never expected such a warm welcome from such beautiful people…

Last Friday, Danish and I left, damn early in the morning I must say, from Aachen Hbf to continue on a eight hour journey, via Switzerland, to Domodossola, Italy where we were picked up by Danish’s friend Agnese and her sister Arianne (Ari). No time was left to have a short rest as Agnese already started on what turned out a three day guided tour; only a quick pitstop was made to pick up her bella amica Marianne (Mari), after which we continued at high speeds meandering across the valleys, a couple of honks here and some flashes of light there, to finally reach Formazza cascada: the Formazza waterfall. At first, the almost-Dutch rain prevented us from having a look from the top, so we decided to go for a nice cappuccino to warm us up again, after which we dared to have a look over the ever-more daunting edge which made the continuous stream of water a lot more impressive than at first sight.

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Just back from a beautiful weekend in the Italian Alps, together with Danish, an awesome trip it was, about which I will post more later. For now, an impression of the landscape filmed by Danish:

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The third day of Pinkpop, was unfortunately the least; some of the artists I really lived up to seeing couldn’t bring the performance I expected, and because of the sunny weather my hayfever was really acting up badly; you could see me wandering the festival terrain with a constantly running nose and tearing eyes. I may sound a bit too negative about the last day, but that’s not how I really feel about it; it still was a good day, only in comparison with the previous ones it was the least.

The first band that day was Fiction Plane, featuring Sting’s son, quite allright, although most of the music reminded us of the Police. That’s why I also feel the day was really kicked of by the second band we saw: The Wombats; a great party alltogether, starting with a brilliant a capella about boys and girls and marciupials. Gavin DeGraw was the follow-up on the main stage, but it’s not really worth mentioning more about him… We continued to the tent where Kate Nash would start of her gig….which was quite terrible…Tally, Mark and I were already joking that she screamed louder than the Cavalera Conspiracy which was playing at the other stage. This had a lot of people immediately turning around, just terrible

Luckily, because we left early, we were able to get some good places in front of the stage for Racoon, the next band, to see what would become the best gig of the day, really good and brought with a flair of humour here and there. The Hives did the complete opposite of the Foo Fighters; talking too much and really these blokes are just the most arrogant bastards around, quite irritating Back to the tent again for Saybia, quite nice, but a lot of the same, and again the bad sound quality…Queens of the Stone Age was also ok, but it felt like one constant flow of music without any recognisable parts. One nice part of the Queens performance was that the security guards, who seemed a little bit overprotective and too active, we scolded by the lead singer common guys this is a fuckin’ Queens of the Stone age concert, we can have some fun without hurting each other! Unfortunately, the best Queens song, their only hit, came at the end of the set.

The next band was actually one of my favourites, the Counting Crows, and the more disappointing it was that also they could not really convince; we already left earlier for Roisin Murphy who was playing at the other stage. Surprisingly, her performance was quite good, I would have wanted to see a little bit more of it, but we needed to move to have a good place at the Rage Against the Machine gig which was next. The crowd just when crazy during that performance, and I think I was the only one really not appreciating it; too much anger, too many politics, and more importantly political statements I couldn’t disagree more with.

Still, Pinkpop has been an awesome experience, the wombats and racoon made up for what the other bands failed to bring. Also, I’m sure I’ll try to get tickets again next year, the atmosphere was just so amazing and friendly. More than 60000 people visiting every day and as far as I know no fights at all, just everyone enjoying the sun, the music, the food & beer, and each other’s company…you only wish that could happen more often in everyday life

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The second day of the festival, the Saturday, we started really relaxed with Air Traffic, a typical English band (if there’s piano in it, it’s English by definition). Also, Dirk really proved him really being a German by starting with a beer already at noon; you all must know that real Germans start with beer at breakfast ;). The day continued with Moke, a Dutch band from Amsterdam, with a British sound to it and also piano in it, and because Amsterdam is pretty close to England, my definition still holds…I think… Moke was a pleasant surprise; over the last year they’ve become more and more popular in the Netherlands, and I think that’s well deserved…I really enjoyed their gig! Still we skipped their last songs to head for Voicst.

Voicst, also Dutch, was playing at the GM Next stage, which is located inside a tent (previously known as the 3fm tent), and therefore the sound was just miserable…not because of the band, but mostly because of the bad acoustics of the tent…Dirk and I already soon decided it was time for an early lunch (+beer to keep up German traditions), mostly because a) it wasn’t really our music, b) you couldn’t see squat inside the tent, and c) we were hungry and thirsty According to Tally and Mark we missed one of the most interesting gigs, with really cool crowd interaction, a shame, but at least we were not hungry anymore, the others were. So again our roads parted and had Dirk and me visiting KT Tunstall and the Eagles of Death Metal, while the others were looking for a bite to eat.

KT Tunstall on the main stage was unfortunately not really convincing. The music that was played was quite good, and I really admire KT as a musician, not so much as performer though… The interaction with the crowd was minimal, and also the music is not really something that evokes a reaction of the crowd. I think the tent would be a lot better place for an artist like her. Mostly, because of the intimate atmosphere of that tent, if only the sound was better….

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Last Friday, I took half a day off and together with Dirk, Tally and some friends of his we headed for the oldest festival in the Netherlands, called Pinkpop (Pink of Pinksteren, the Dutch for Whit Sunday, and pop you can figure out yourselves I hope). For as long as I can remember this festival is held in my home town, and this year the programme was so good, we immediately decided to attend this edition. For me, it was the second time, after my last visit 9 years ago.

After a twenty-five minute walk from my house we arrived at the terrain, in time for the first band of the day, called Sat2d, a high school punk band, which sounded a bit like a mix between krezip and blink 182, and reminded me of the good-ole days at high school, going to the surf-punk gigs of my friends. Although the band was not too bad, it wasn’t that appealing either, so we decided to head for the main stage for Flogging Molly. Flogging Molly, for those who do not know them, is best described as drunken Irish folk on steroids, that just invites to jump around and drink more beer (no Guinness around ). Although Flogging Molly was already better than the band we saw before, the music was much of the same; Tally and I were already joking that they just kept playing the same song all over, just with different lyrics. Next band was Incubus, which again was a little bit better; I did hear of them before, but I didn’t hear them before. Quite nice rock music…but to be honest, I think most of us were more eager on hearing the final gig of the evening…which was…

Metallica!!! Damn and did they rock! I was the only one that saw them before, but we all agreed that this was the best gig of the entire day, well worth their price I think (which allegedly was over 1 million euro). Of course they played a lot of their old songs, especially from the Master of Puppets and Black Albums; Enter Sandman, One, Fade to Black, Nothing else Matters, Seek and Destroy, etc., etc. They were also the only band playing for more than 2 hours, including some extra songs in the end. Metallica was also a master in getting the audience just crazy, everyone was singing with them, jumping around, and soon we found ourselves, unwillingly I must add, in the middle of a pit However, this was just a minor spot on the rest of the show, which was just amazing; apart from the real fireworks they provided, there music was also just that, leaving the audience wanting more, and raising expectations for the rest of the festival!

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More on my splendid PinkPop adventure later but for now one of the most amazing gigs/bands I’ve ever seen:

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Ok, I admit this is work-related, but I’m really happy about it, and hence sharing it with you here as well. My second journal article seems to have beaten the first one in being published. It’s accessible via the ET&S website. If you’re interested, go here. This again is an important milestone in my PhD, and therefore reason for a small party. So for the coming weekend, I will invite some of my friends, like for example Metallica, KT Tunstall, Counting Crows, and Alanis Morisette over to Landgraaf and together with 90,000 other people I’ll celebrate

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Hi everyone, for those who are interested in what I’m doing for a living, I know started a work blog at our newly created Open University Elgg system, you can find my profile here:

 http://elgg.ou.nl/tjo/profile/

This also means that most of my work-related stuff will not appear anymore on this blog, as sometimes happened before. I will focus on personal things and hobbies here now, which basically means not much will change.

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I wanted to blog about this already for quite some time, but somehow all the time something interfered…

It’s now already I think about 10 years ago that I’ve started to play guitar. If I remember correctly it was somewhere during November 1997, that after a admiring the beautiful instrument and especially some friends playing it, Pieter, an old-time friend of mine, taught me to play my first two rifs ever: the intros of one and fade to black, both songs of Metallica. After that, followed a period of enormous addiction which lasted until this day. I also still remember the days of struggling in the first couple of years; trying to teach myself to play the notes without buzzing, open chords, and finally the general-pain-in-the-arse of barre chords which took me something like a year to master. While I’ve come a long way already on my own, sometimes my enthousiasm was really lacking, just because there was no one around that could help me further with some of the techniques, and I had to figure it all out by myself. Partially, this of course was my own fault, because I’m too damn stubborn to go for music classes and prefer to teach myself. Now, finally, I’ve found some resources which, I feel, are really helping me further as a guitarist, and more importantly, have really sparked an even greater enthousiasm for playing that beautiful instrument.

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