2012 - The Final ChapTour part 1 - When The Sun Burns Red

8/4 - Beverly

The sun, as it has all summer, continues to beat down relentlessly, even at 7AM.  Between one thing and another, my travel paranoia got me to the station about 45 minutes in advance of the first train, and after reading all of the Metro and the "metal issue" of the Phoenix (Nachzehrer getting press again), there's nothing to do.  There's a lot of that on tap for today, albeit mostly in New York, but right now, I can't even go replace this dying pen.  Nothing at all but to wait and sweat.



001. Merch for export.

The final total turned out to be two shirts, six tapes, like 15 authorized CDs, ten or so promo cards, like five spare new buttons, and about a hundred stickers.  I wish, Schindlerlike, that I could've gotten more on this last pass, but what's here is choice.  And what's not....



002. Scurrilous betrayal of the entire New England scene.

When life doesn't force you into asking "well, I could ditch all the camping stuff, then sleep on tables in the bar or drastically lower my standard of 'bangable'", you make comps out of it.  41 bands, 160 minutes.  I can't apologize enough to the bands whose stuff I put on here without permission -- or to those who got left off through no fault of their own, like Nachzehrer and Darkwor, who had slots before giving me actual CDs, and Faces of Bayon, who I couldn't find a track from that was both representative and short enough to fit without knocking two other bands off.  Like always, and more so, I owe you guys, to an extent that is difficult to assess, let alone pay back.

- Logan -

That hike under load must've been more dehydrating than I thought.  20-ounce water bottle, completely drained in one go.  This doesn't happen usually.

With half an hour from through security to boarding, it's a good thing that the gate is literally right across from the scan complex.  Just hoping the tapes made it through ok.

- Kennedy -

New York has a severe shortage of bars in this part of the airport, but at least you can buy a Hustler to read on the plane.  Wait, what?  I've been here about two hours with another 2 1/2 to go, and despite getting turned around and having to do security again, I'm starting to rethink going for the 5-hour layover over the 45-minute one.  Especially in the summer, there's almost nothing that can delay the BOS-NYC leg, and I didn't even have to leave the terminal.  Shoulda skimped and taken the Acela.

The only snag in this is that the dumb flight doesn't have its gate announced yet, so I need to keep checking.  If there's nothing by 4, I'll go check with someone in person, but that's a couple hours out yet.  Literally every other flight does have gate information, but of course this is how my luck seems to go.



003. Finally.  Ship's in.  Now I should be able to get a goddamned gate reference.

In this empty time, I can't help thinking ahead to the hike portion.  My pack tipped the scales at 32.5 pounds in Boston; add another 5 in kutte, water, and detatched carryon and you can see where the problem is.  It's heavier but more manageable than the training load, so that's at least something.  My legs may explode at the end, but at least I won't tear my pecs in half as well.

I fully intend to actually go to Summer Breeze, despite the record (I was supposed to go back in 2005 but couldn't get the time off due to other demands), but there's a provisional escape hatch, I won't deny.  To enable it, I need to clean myself out at Party.San, which will help on not dying on the hike as well, which then avoids the trigger.  The decision point isn't until Schweinfurt, so this will continue to hang over for a while.  Feet-down in Germany, though, and I'll have enough to do to put it from my mind, and enough cycle-up time that maybe I can stop doubting my own strength.

No official announcement yet, but by playing "spot the tail" I was able to hike over to what looks like the most-probable gate.  This may or may not pan out, but at least hiking to and fro around the terminal is something to do, and with the crew just mounting up, less than 90 minutes to presumed takeoff on an international flight, it seems unlikely that they'll move the embarkation point from the only AirBerlin-flagged gate noted so far.

There's a lot more people about with digital-slab-thingies than I recall from the last time I was this long in the air transit system; I don't know if this is a legit accessibility change or just different sample demographics.  As far back as HK, at least, I've occasionally considered upgrading my travel electronics, but never have yet.  The reason is a branching problem.  I'd like to have a reader thingy, but I'd also be wanting to take digital notes when I'm in range of power to save paper and avoid the time cost of later transcription, and at that point you're talking about something that also replaces the netbook for general connectivity -- and a tablet that can do that is like six million percent more likely to get stolen than an ancient clamshell Linux netbook covered in death metal stickers that doesn't even turn on when it isn't plugged in.  My current gear is light and robust and unwanted enough to do what I need it to, so I can just live with not being able to read Gutenberg novels until the battery explodes.  Maybe in the future I won't need to plan around the risk of tent burgulary, and will be able to justify whatever tricorder-emulator is then current, but not on this trip, and probably not for Russia either.

8/5 - over Britain

Feet-dry for the first time, somewhere over Ireland.  About two hours to go, after nearly an hour derping around on the ground in New York.  I'm definitely not adjusted, and parked behind another bigdood, albeit one without the social self-sacrifice complex that I have (translated: I don't put my seat back on planes.  Other people do.  Bad news if your knees go all the way to their seat back.), won't be adjusted by ground time, so more latency and less hanging about under load waiting for the hotel to come available is actually better.

- Berlin -

FILO.  It sucks.  End of story.  My bag ended up the dead last one out, but I made the bus and subway connections bang-bang-bang, ending up vor Ort at about 10AM.  Something to eat is probably a bridge too far -- since it's Sunday and nothing's open -- but I've got some water and some beer, and I should be able to work the clock a little closer to eleven.  After check-in, the plan is to unpack/repack, take a nap, and afterwards get dinner.  Since my pack made it, this stop isn't strictly necessary (included only due to previous trips where things and people didn't make the designated LZ on time); the main objective is Leipzig tomorrow morning.



004. Brilliant green on Meierottostr towards the hotel.



005. Modernistic church.  Due to coming in just before 10, bells were ringing and echoing everywhere as I found the hotel.  This is the source.

Scooters, in Berlin, appear to be the domain of fat dudes.  No idea why.  A benefit of this area, a residential neighborhood south of the KuDamm, is that there's no shortage of bakers and cafes.  The debit is that they are all too classy to go in strapped up like this.  After dropping gear, maybe, if the heavens don't open.

If things were now as they've been previously, I'd be packing up a soaking tent right now, cursing my luck and heading this way.  I'd also be treating Party.San as an afterthought rather than the main course, and losing the chance to hike the Grenzgebiet.  It's weird to not be at Wacken, after seven years in sequence, but all things eventually do and must come to an end.  This trip has me optimistic but bushed at present; we'll see how everything shakes ot from here.



006. Better view of the church tower.



007. Interesting sculpture-thingy by the Hohenzollernplatz subway stop.

008. ((not germane))



009. Plaque commemorating a former resident; there are a bunch of these in this area.



010.  Bassists aren't allowed to miss this.  I looked in, but I was hungry, their selection of food was unimpressive, and the place was as dead as you'd expect at 19:00 on a Sunday, even in always-hopping Berlin.  I kicked on and got some gas station cuisine and a new beer cap.

Spedition Gebr. D GmbH - NBL (part 1)

12/3 - Beverly

Finally, finally, a chill in the air. Just into December, and the cold is finally starting to nip. Maybe next year it'll be off for the tropics, by contrast, but for now, the cold and the bleak half-light of a northern winter afternoon are 'correct'. I head off to more dead trees and bleaker platforms, to root in the ashes of empires as Europe treads on the brink of the abyss.

I additionally have this a little harder because my brother is along, and this is a lot less 'duo' and more 'escort quest'. We'll see if A-dam's toughened him up by the time we meet up, and there aren't really and real hardmodes in this, but still. I don't Tourleiter, and our personalities are more different than is often given credit. In all likelihood, this will be a hard education in "jibun ni mite, kite, kangaitte" -- but even at this it will be fun.

I nearly bailed on HK last year; feart, sick, and demotivated, but I bit the bullet and did it, and all those fears and uncertainties are now gone. Maybe this is a false dawn, and I don't have the opportunity to do this pro anymore, but I really feel like I'm back in stride. The hills of Prague will kill that right dead, but it's nice to be optimistic.




001. Cracking weathered concrete on the platform. Actually, this is out of line, I'm not going to Poland.


- Logan -

The thing that's uniquely annoying about American airports, relative to the rest of the world, is the incessant noise. Nowhere else beats up travelers with constantly blaring TVs and elevator music. I pack a mp3 player almost exclusively for this purpose, but the Christmas tunes in this bar are too damn loud to be overpowered, even on the highest volume. Get to fuck!

On the PA for the above: "Baby, It's Cold Outside". Appropriate.




002. Dusking skyline into the Financial District.

About two hours to kill, so enough time to check the sked and see that I have less time in A-dam than anticipated, but hit ground in Berlin earlier. I'm still not in Prague before dark, but it's better to get a more concrete sense of how things will go.

About an hour to go, and jamming-out aside, it's getting a little boring. Of course, at this time of year, you can't plan on short lines and relatively little security theater.

25 minutes delay, fuck off. Still got the two hours, but Schipol is a big airport, and I'll probably have to do security again.

There's something uniquely empty about the Mountain Goats' "Game Shows..." when interspersed with loudspeaker calls for passengers rattling around a half-empty airport as evening settles in. Tuning out the muzak does not replace the environment, but it does define distinct sides to things.


- off Newfoundland -

Fuckin Amis. Cheese in the salad, cheese on the pasta, and an extra minibrick of cheese for afters, just because. Instead of making food taste better an sich, we throw more goddamned cheese at it. Way to go.


- over the Dutch coast -

As cool as we have it with the Atlantic washing against our dooryards, it's still special to see the "rose-fingered dawn" coming up over the clouds, in the dead silence as the engines are spun down to reserve power for the final glide in. It's not why I do this, but it's a nice side benefit.


12/4 - Amsterdam

You get this to a certain degree with any densely populated area, but coming in to Amsterdam in the dark (like a 7:30 landing this time of year) is really cool. The geology doesn't really allow for skyscrapers, so you've got this infinite sea of Christmas lights, strewn flat across the ground. Really cool, and it reminded me of the good/bad old days of working in Dresden, where I'd not see the sun all week in the winter: in the fab by 8 and it's not up yet, out at 5 or 6 and it's gone.

Only one sec-check, and a mild one compared to the bollocking at Boston; it's another hour before gate open, and the flight won't leave for another hour and a half. Hurry up and wait...and my bro better hurry up, or I'm gonna lose my shit waiting.


- Berlin -

So he didn't show, and after a nervous hour in the air and some furious texts on the ground, shit got sorted. New plan, new place, seven hours wait.



003. Berlin bleakness.




004. The dying sun under concrete.

The approach to Tegel is wicked cool, apartment blocks unwinding like concrete serpents, the TV tower looming like it's built at the wrong scale, the plane tipping and flowing like you imagine the airlifters did. Not so fun to be going through the hood by Ku-Schu on the bus to the U-bahn and seeing jets come in scraping the roofs, but it's still real, and you can almost understand the suburban/Bild-driven initiative to save the place.

M underestimating his alarm capacity has given our plans a wee bend: by the time he gets in, the Czech border will be closed. So we're going to Dresden, we're gonna hike around Altstadt begging at the sides of the Pragerstrasse for a room (and WLAN), I'm gonna organize a hotel in Prague to replace the one we're gonna bust on, and tomorrow morning we have a 7AM date with the Elbtal. Medetashi medetashi.

In a way, this is good; M gets to see some amazing countryside across the Frisian plain, and then at least the experience of having been in Dresden. It's just stupid fucking expensive. And I? I get to spend too much money wrangling trains, peoplewatch a little in the Hbf, and catch up on writing.




005. Geometry after the rain.




006. Himmel über BerlinWashingtonplatz.




007. Across the other way to the Bundestag.

This does avoid trying to get into deepest Žižkov in the dark, at a cost of almost no Prague days, but I'm worried about hoboing it up in Dresden, about what kind of hotel we're likely to fall back to, etc etc etc. This is why duoing is harder than soloing this shit: so much more can go wrong.

That said, technology is awesome. Absent cell phones, what the fuck would I do in this instance? The answer, of course, is "know khed's hotel and flight arrangements and give a call on landing in AMS", but this is far too social. Better to run up stupid bills texting.

Doner for late lunch, cap, and change for tour. To keep occupied, and keep from falling asleep. Pre-Rundfahrt pix:




008. New construction in perfect light.




009. Cool industrial storage cylinders on the north side of the Hbf.




010. TV-tower over older buildings and S-bahn.




011. Across Washingtonplatz to the Kanzleramt.




012. Moar Fernsehturm.




013. Not, maybe, my view of Berlin, but a view, regardless.




014. Ramparts on the floodplain.




015. Front of the Hbf.

In a Ku-damm stop:




016. Bellevue palace, residence of the German head of state, who cuts ribbons and pardons turkeys so the Kanzler can get on with running the country.

I took advantage of the break to move upstairs on the tour bus; better views or at least less-spotty windows. This is supposed to kill about 2 hours, so I might as well not look out of regular bus windows.




017. Ku-damm kitschmarkt view out the front of the bus.

The bus went on, as did the rain.




018. "Dancing Spaghetti" sculpture, actually symbolizing the four former occupation sectors.




019. Chamber music building by the philharmonic.




020. Matthiaskirche, again from the bus.




021. Public sculpture without comment; obviously somehow about love and conflict.




022. Along the back of Potsdamer Platz.




023. Unrestored Wall in place.




video 1: Along the wall. Add your own AggroBerlin-worthy gangsta lyrics.




video 1a: An easier version for doing just that, with the instrumental from Fler's "NDW 2005", at least until GEMA gets it taken down.




024. On the Gendarmemarkt.




025. A little different view by the side.




026. Bus stop over the Christmas market to the theater.




027. Weihnachtsmarkt at the Marienkirche.




028. Winter rain on Unter den Linden.

The guide's English is ok, but those who don't understand German missed a lot, among which were some hideous, hideous puns.

Back at the Hbf, just about 1700. Nachfassung:




029. Original Hummer limo in front of Madame Tussad's.




030. Side of the Brandenburger Tor.




031. Full view along the back side. I don't have a lot of touch points on Berlin at night, mostly because the sun never goes down in the summer. This is a cool side I haven't seen so much.




032. The Bundestag is all blow'd out, since the bus started moving right in the middle of the exposure.




"video" 2: Hideously wrong or hilariously appropriate shadow from a graphic on the front of a stall door in the Hbf men's room. This is a still from a video because the camera doesn't make shutter noises taking them; shutter noises in public bathrooms here, like anywhere else, are excellent ways to proc aggressive and suspicious police attention.

Two hours till warning text and platform. Maybe go get a beer now that I know I'm not perma-cut off at the cashomats, but I need to be alert and watch my cashflow.

I really have to hand it to Beck's. With their "Gold", they have made an American beer, something previously thought impossible for Germans. It's a new cap, but that was also the case for Skol last year, and Beck's doesn't have any hilarious Engyu on the bottle.

There's certainly less hops in it, though. This is like the anti-Jever, particularly since Jever is wicked awesome.

Germany remains Wicked True; hanging about, I've seen dudes in sweatshirts from Carnifex, Blind Guardian, and Dysentery. Ok, the last is kind of a plant, but the point stands.

One hour left, and up on the third level. The wind is a cold bastard, but the second level is getting a little deserted, and there's more traffic up here. Also, I eventually have to climb up to the uppermost deck and flag down an ICE, and "do it now so you're closer later" is the whole reason we're headed for the DD rather than cajoling a closet at the Meringer or Motel 1.


- a random siding in south Brandenburg -

So Dresden was a dumb idea. The train is stuck for the foreseeable. However...this is as cheap as cheap hotels get (see my mania for ferries), and we only need to be in Dresden by 7 AM. And if this isn't possible, we're not in Germany.

As far as positives go, this trip is not short on adventure. The challenge is to actually take on that adventure, rather than yearning hobbitlike for convenience. Running around in circles in the middle of the night sucks for the regular passengers, but us roving Amis have the liberty to rightly consider.

The right consideration, of course, was to stay in one of the many cheap hotels in Berlin and pick up the adventure in the morning, but the more predictable it is, the less adventurous it becomes by definition. I'm not adventurous enough to do homeless in Dresden for real, having lived there, but in a real pinch there is always Cafe Europa, and if there isn't, I know where the field office at least was, and that there aint many cops out that way. Meilen nach Meilen, Rumgang nach Rumgang.

10 gets 1 the Bionade on offer as Entschuldigungsgetränk aint even gratis....or they're only giving away weird flavors.

As soon as the situation clicked over to 'ridiculous', the mood improved noticeably. People smiling, laughing more, stress cleared, even exhaustion cleared. And what cleanses these debuffs? Adventure -- that and a potential 25% rebate.

Seriously, there's not a lot of problems with German trains. But going by mass transit rather than something you think you can directly control does kind of require that adventuring good spirit in any case. Homeless and gearless to Oslo, starving through Sweden, waiting with bated breath in this crisp Nicolas Eve night -- how silent! how still! -- you float on the waves of fate every day and in every way regardless, but here you can see the swells. At least we don't have to change bogies before we turn around....or was that "spoke too soon"?

Ingesamt hat diesen Tag uns beide zu viel gekostet, trotz des Rabattes. Deswegen isses aber nicht "Abenbillig" genannt.

The plan is to hit the DD at "stunde null" -- we'll see if our luck changes on the 5th, because the 4th has been pretty tough so far. Trotz den aktuellen Fahrtrichtung, eastbound and down.

More signs of civilization, but we're going far too fast to read station signs. In a way, of course, this is a good thing.

We thunder through a freightyard. The lights bounce ghosts of structures between the windows. I miss the IGl (wrong approach?) and we are are in Altstadt, skipping it. Wir erreichen Reiseziel Dresden Hauptbahnhof.




033. Christmas tree in the renovated station. No boards, no mud, almost no exposed ironwork -- where is Dresden Hbf and what have you done with it?

Spedition Gebr. D GmbH - introduction

Between one thing and another, my brother M and I ended up doing a tour of various points in central Europe at the end of 2011. This was a bit of an 'odd couple' act; he needs time to understand his surroundings and hadn't left the US on his own before, and I adjust to different places by osmosis and have the kind of passport that CBP doesn't bother hogging room in with reentry stamps. He doesn't do museums, and I have to be pulled out with ropes and chains; he takes few pictures, and I, as previous chronicles will show, should probably look into one of those ear-mounted coaxial video cameras. He does the "vaca" in "vacation", the sense of empty space, and I do the "ation", where everything is all blastbeat all the time, always in motion.

Despite this, things worked out, and we saw a bunch of cool stuff and had essential European experiences. We got stuck on a rail siding in the middle of the night and wrote out refund forms for the DB, and pitched up at a budget hotel on a wing and a prayer. We did half of Prague zonked out and loaded up, drinking coffee in a tiny cafe run by an aging expat hippie, blowing a last cooldown to get that last mile. We used flowery formal German and punchy umgangsprache to grease shit through in a Viennese Adelhof, and good sense to buy yummy food rather than expensive and probably illegal junk in the Naschmarkt. We camped out in drafty railway stations, and we saw high-stakes championships in footnote sports like snooker and curling as well as do-or-die Champions' League matches and an El Clásico. We ate local food, a lot of Turkish takeout, and more Central Asian stuff than might have been expected. Our pockets were full of rye bread, sausage, hummus, beer caps, and validated subway tickets. We saw the Alps in winter and the sun on the rolling hills of Bavaria, and dawn amid the sandstone bluffs of the Sächsische Schweiz. We drank a lot of beer -- halves with normal meals, nach Mass killing Brotzeit plates around Munich, half-liter bottles just hanging out, and 33s only once, with Uighur plates -- but also a lot of wine and punch standing around Christmas markets in the dark. We saw pagan fires, Christian cathedrals of both species, and both synagogues and the shadows where the black tide of '38 had swept them away. We saw the window, the car, and the beerhall (or, more accurately, the Hilton where it once stood), and perhaps understood things a little better. This was not a perfect trip, but perfection is seldom adventurous, and as long as you're not dead yet, you might as well have some fun with it.

Sofort, how Spedition Gebr. D GmbH undertook this undertaking, in four hopefully-convenient parts:

1 - NBL
2 - Bohemia
3 - Ostmark
4 - Bayern

Suomi Finland Tourkele part 12: Move On!

8/14 - Berlin

I didn't write anything on the actual trip out due to circumstances; jetzt, Nachfassung.

Around 7:45, Mitzi came by to pick up the Gwynbleidd shirt I'd been holding for her since Thursday. With this, it was all up; down to 5 Rampant Decay buttons out of about 35 buttons, 2 shirts, 90 CDs, and 150 or so stickers imported. I didn't think it'd all go, but it went; a light pack makes a light soul.

It's a bit disappointing to have only seen so few bands -- like 20 at Wacken, and about 10 here -- but I missed those bands having more fun, not sitting in a tent being miserable. In addition to keeping up with the two crews from last year, I hung out with a new huge bunch, and met or brought into the orbits of the above a bunch of other more tenuously-connected people, singletons like myself, going alone for that reason, to meet new folks, swap stories, and go halves on crates of 29. I've seen a lot of great music at festivals, but little that will be a stronger memory than Dennis literally falling over himself laughing as Müller attempts to push an unconscious Knut back into his tent by shoving him in the butt. Fucking balls-off hilarious.

All good things must end, though, and I had to drop my trash, hike to the bus, and then spend the better part of five hours getting back to Berlin. Decompression's hard when the train's overflowing and you're standing in the hall the whole way. Despite the Invalidenstrasse being completely dug up, the hotel was a little better in this regard: shower, shave, real Turkish food, a 6-pack, and Real v. Barca, and I'm almost acclimated to civilization.


8/15 - Berlin

All caught up; now I just need to catch a plane, and hope my pack makes it back ok.




445. Good news on the plane to Dublin. Aer Lingus is really good with legroom, but more is always better.

Dublin

In Dublin I dropped exactly 10 euro on lunch (water, ploughman's, cookie, so not exactly 100% worth it but airport prices), cleared US customs, and got on the plane, all told, with a couple minutes ot spare despite like 3 security checks. The flight across the Atlantic was long enough to listen through the new Motörhead and Social Distortion records a couple times, write up some interview questions based on the experiences of the trip (there's that old-and-getting-consumed-by-work thing again from the first post), watch Jeremy Clarkson call God a loser (a redeeming feature at last, but he obviously isn't a Lordi fan), put together the thankslist before I forgot people, and observe, via the cute education-policy funcionary seated next to me, that it's not uncivilized, among Irish people, to put jam on butter on a scone. I was going to do it anyway, because you eat the calories the airline gives you for free, always, but you never know how embarrassed you're supposed to be. Land in Boston, strap up, negotiate the T, short hike through the rain, pick up the car, and somehow, home again.


Years have passed, closer to the grave; this may be the last such expedition, but this was a good one, and you never go out on a high, because you think "yes, I can do it again" straight on until the point where you fail, and can't. I will continue to go out and do adventurous things until my body breaks down, and Party.San was so good, in environment and music, that I still want to go back, likely pairing it with Summer Breeze rather than Wacken, but Amon Amarth and Forbidden and Scorpions and Henry Rollins have already announced for next year. We'll see how this shakes out: the struggle between Kommerz and DIY is an eternal, and perhaps, a political struggle, but hopefully one that the rebels will win. In the meantime, there's Party.San, our own fortress island hidden in the Thuringian heartland, where only "heavy metal is the law", and if you've got at least one in the set [beer,booze,bratwurst,craic], you'll get hooked up with the rest, from some of the coolest metalheads on the planet, in practically no time at all.


Final stats and points:
--
Wacken day 1: 5 bands, average 5.6/7
Wacken day 2: 8 bands, average 5.69/7
Wacken day 3: 8 bands, average 5.56/7
Wacken total: 21 bands, 118 points, average 5.62/7
--
Party.San day 2: 5 bands, average 6.1/7
Party.San day 3: 3 bands, average 5.83/7
Party.San total: 8 bands, 48 points, average 6/7
--
trip total: 29 bands, 166 points, average 5.72/7

Yes, Party.San was that good, and yes, Wacken was that good, even with the mainstream stuff playing boat anchor. That's an improvement of nearly 0.3 from last year, and even Party.San is up trivially over last year's wicked good results. Even if you're going for the first time, fucking go: the ancillary stuff only gets tiresome enough to weigh down the fucking awesome music when you've been a few times, and are in that demographic that will end up scoring free bratwurst and playing Dosenfußball while cranking Scaphism and Exhumed, which just makes the awesome experience more awesome.

Suomi Finland Tourkele part 8: Zwey Seele Wohnen Ach! In Meiner Brust

8/7 - Wacken

The rain came down so fucking hard through Children of Bodom and Subway To Sally that I was unable to write, and the notebook was so waterlogged as to be unusable until the end of the Berlin phase; three goddamn days out of the jacket, on top of the vents on an old CRT TV to dry out. Things were a little out of order there, but have been rectified in this publication, and despite the wet, I kept going, and got the following shots and observations in.

The rain trailed off in the morning, and I packed up, got breakfast, and packed out.




398. Flaneurisme Wacken; metal hands and windmills in the distance from the breakfast tent.

On the buses out, I got to listen in to some other Wacken experiences; everyone's is different on the surface, but fundamentally the same. We come in, drink heavily, meet new friends and have fun with old ones, grapple with the exigencies of the festival, and yet have a great time seeing awesome bands. Averaging over a sample space of n=70000, this is the Wacken story.

However, Wacken is not so simple. As was more obvious this year than ever, Wacken is a brand underwritten by other brands. It is brought to you by national beer and energy-drink brands, and its distinctive logo is printed on about everything that will carry it. It does promo for punk bands decrying "brand synergy" in synergy with national TV broadcasters. Wacken is a mess of commercialism and self-contradiction....but it is also a mass of 70,000 mostly-anticorporate metalheads, who strain against the bounds of Kommerz to establish their own synthesis of what Wacken should be. In seven years, the meme goes, every molecule in your body is completely replaced. I don't know that I'll be back next year to do the comparison, but I would suspect that the same idea will hold. Already, there is little left of the festival I saw in 2005; "Planet Wacken" exists, but much more as a circumscribed rather than a created space. The DIY tendencies here, weak then, have gotten further limited. Wacken is still a good festival -- this year, musically awesome, maybe even better than '06 -- but it's a huge and commercial festival, and the things that make it cult, rather than just another among German rock festivals, are fading. We'll see if things change, but the only way that things might be altered is if the wave of people drops, then flows crosswise to another festival in defiance of the power law. As long as Wacken sells out, Wacken will keep selling out; a guaranteed max headcount is a recipe for stasis, not change.


Berlin

I got in from Hamburg in decent order and found my way up to the hotel, which was located directly under the main approach to Tegel. Shutting the windows helped cut down the airplane noise, but the primary concern was like always: shower, eats, sleep.


8/8 - Berlin

Like usual, I went out to do laundry, and since I was feeling like crap, decidd to just go to the known-good laundry in Friedenau rather than mess around trying to find one in my own neighborhood. U6->U9, go.




399. Umbau in der Neidstraße. The feeling of the steel I-beams jutting out where balconies used to be just looked cool.




400-402. Some different views of the church, trees, and clouds at the end of Friedrich-Wilhelm-Platz. They're decent as they are, but I'm still not sure the scene eventually came out as intended.

With laundry done, I headed back and ended up sleeping a lot. Sick again.




403. Hotel Bärlin and clouds over Kurt-Schuhmacher-Platz.



404. Dinner. The Lidl by the hotel was out of spoons and forks, so I was restricted to combinations of stuff eatable with a plastic knife. There are people who do this shit, and then there are people who aren't hardcore enough about pack weight.


8/9 - Berlin

Pretty much the entire day needs written off. I was sick to a degree that I hadn't been for a long while; maybe the old hotel, maybe the jet fumes, maybe some strange bug picked up from the nonexistent sanitary environment of the W:O:A. (See previous years' comments about inevitable cholera epidemics.) Regardless, I slept, then got in a lot of groceries to try and retank on nutrients before heading off to another camping weekend. It seemed to kind of work, at least until I woke up coughing at 1 AM. Bad air; it'll heal itself once I get out in the field.