Welcome back, monkeys.
I had a great week off. I slept until my back ached. I thumped tubs all weekend long in the Talstrasse. The children loved it, as did them hippies, and joined in. Neither groups seemed to have any particular natural sence for music, but late in the night when dozens of people played together the arhythmical cacophony seemed to take on a sort of rolling cohesion of its own. Kind of like crickets.

I did some translating this morning for the subtitles in a Rammstein video presskit. My contact person seemed adamant that I hyperbolize everything with superlatives, which I resisted. The argument was that since the presskit is meant for American contacts, that’s the kind of bullshit they want to hear.
Like I said, I resisted and did good work. Now, through my years as a musician, a student of music, an intern for BMG I’ve learned a thing or two about PK’s and the language they use. Of course, no one will put down their own act in the presskit, and everyone knows who wrote those little info blurbs. So if you are an act with a great emphasis on good lyrics, you write “weaving thoughtful lyrics…” and if your band likes them roots, “…in and earthy, soulful sonic tapestry”. Then you have some decent copy. If you get a PK, on the otherhand, which writes such puffed up claims like “mixes incredible lyrics with impossibly brilliant musicianship” or “the most earth-shaking, revolutionary music ever!” chances are no one will even bother to listen to the tape. No music industry person would ever fall for that kind of rap, and is likely just to get the impression that some amateur band thinks they can play him for a chump.

Unfortunately there are plenty of folks out there in that industry who firmly believe that the public is inherently stupid and ultimately exploitable not by effort and quality, but rather by hype and novelty.

Which brings me to my first link this week, which I decided to add after hearing Ms. S’s dynamic presentation on spam. Spam, like telemarketing, canvasing, etc. are, I argued, symptomatic of a much larger, more nefarious and parasitic form of business practice.
Here is an article from a personal website about unauthorized signposting in Sacramento. It is already a year old, and yes, there is also a translation in German. So you may have already read this before. But if not, read it, and see how everytime you get a spam for diet pills chances are the sender got duped himself into 4000 dollars debt just to have the privelege.

On a lighter note, look everybody, it’s the air car!

This “game” is just a shameless promo for a new book which I intend to buy after I have read part one in the series (I ordered it two weeks ago, but has not yet arrived). It’s nothing that clever or original in this day and age (the link, I mean) but it is absolutely adorable.

This story reminded me of Chancellor Karl Toffel’s suggestion to save the planet in “Raumschiff Erde”: “turn the books back into trees!”

Like I always say, start with stupid, end with stupid.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2003 at 10:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.