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You would expect that I, growing up in Germany, would be very much into soccer, or better Fussball, but that was just not so. We even had a long-term renter in our house who played soccer – made no difference.

The only time I was ‘interested’ in soccer was when I had a girl friend who was a Schalke-fan (you know, one of these teams in the national league). I always had the strange notion that you do sports instead of watching them – what do I know?

But then it happened, many many years and thousands of miles away, in Far-Away-Land California. All this ignorance I will describe is probably not good for my reputation but I hope it will have a soul-cleaning effect on me, so it will be worth it.

I was, at that time, heavily involved in my son’s school,  in the parent part of the parent-teacher organization. One of the activities was to send out emails to the parents to make them do things. Not an easy thing to do as they had already paid a high tuition so they had done enough already for the kids upbringing.

Once I got an email back (that did not happen often) asking me if I spoke German. I guess my German accent had peaked through my writing. ‘Sure,’ I said, after which I was asked if I could help with the lyrics to some music. Having always been involved with music through friends who made it, I was delighted to oblige.

I had seen this other parent in school but never interacted with him, but we talked on the phone and arranged for me to come over to his house where we would be working on that song. So far my past musician-friends had always been either students or just starting out on their career, so I was expecting to help somebody out to get started. But I was surprised when I got to the address to find a big, beautiful house, and was led to a dedicated music room with a grand piano.

Cool, I thought and asked what this music, we would be working on, was all about. Placido, this parent’s name, told me that he was competing to write the anthem for the soccer world cup that would be in Germany this year (2006) and his plan was to make this a multi-lingual song to express the idea that people from all over the world would gather peacefully, forgetting all differences. I had never been to a soccer match so how would I know how much peace there would be between the fans of two teams, one of which would lose.

The music was already composed and the text for the English and Spanish part was pretty much there, so we sat on the piano and hammered out lyrics for the German part of the anthem. It all felt rather bizarre. I f you ever get a chance to see the movie Ishtar, you will enjoy a scene where Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty compose and text a song on the piano – and that is how I felt – and extremely enjoyed it.

When our allotted time was up, we rescheduled for another meeting and on the way out I asked the obvious question how somebody in a Southern California suburb gets to write, or at least compete to write, the anthem for the soccer world cup on the other side of the planet. At that time I still thought that the chances to actually get his song in there were at least slim. His answer was something like that it helps if you are the son of Placido Domingo. Hmm, I thought, must be an important person.

Later that day I told my friend Maria about my Ishtar-experience and mentioned the name of the musician in passing. Hold on! she said, what’s the name? ‘Not sure, Placido, junior – domingo, ???’

So Maria then eradicated some of my ignorance – Placido Domingo, one of  The Three Tenors!  World famous singers!

Isn’t that amazing how you stumble into these kind of things if you are not in awe?

With this information at hand, now it looked more likely that this song would make it to the top of the competition and in our second meeting Placido, jr. confirmed that it was pretty certain that it would be his song that his dad would sing at the conclusion of the word cup.

And so it was. I later bought the CD on Amazon, checking if I was in the credits…

Moments of Passion

For years now I have this little music video Apache in my collection of notable cultural pieces. This was a version with very low volume so I always had to crank up the speakers to enjoy it. I actually considered downloading it, plugging it into Premiere and cranking up the volume.

Today, when cleaning up my G1 I ran into that little musical jewel again and decided to find a better version of it. And, sure enough, there were plenty of version on Youtube and by going through those I learned a lot about the artist, Tommy Seebach, and the long history of the song Apache.

I had the feeling that this master piece would fit right into my exhibition of visual and auditory gems from around the world that I started with Japan, continued with a stop in Germany and arriving now in Danmark.

Without further ado, here now the Danish contribution to the culture of the world…

It appears that I am not the only musical connoisseur, judging by some of the comments on Youtube:

• Strangely fascinating.
• The bass on this music rockss!!!!!!!!
• Epic music video, I wish I was in this band.
• The biggest artist Denmark ever had.
• RIP Tommy bommy
• very nice!how much??
• those apache girls…

Speaking of “those apache girls:” When I watched them my aging music teacher in high school came to mind. He was actually so old that he had manned the piano in the movie theaters during the era before the talkies. I still see him making fun of female dancers during my high school days and calling them ‘hupp Dohlen.” Sorry, if you are not a native German speaker you will miss the comedy in this. An attempt to translate would result in something like hopping jackdaw, with hopping pronounced as in the deep south; but this translation will not do “hupp Dohle” justice. Gustav Rinke must have seen exactly these apache girls in his mind when he coined his unforgotten expression. I am sure, Gustav Rinke, you have left this sphere by now – fare thee well, your creation lives on!

During my first semesters at the University of Dortmund a break-through in album sales happened. While at the regular record store you had to shell out over DM 20 (that’s Deutsch Marks for all you young kids, the currency they had in Germany before the Euro) for a 30cm album, some entrepreneurial students started to sell those same albums for DM 14.95 or less in the entry hall of the cafeteria (mensa in latin-german).

This is where I got pretty much the whole collection of my albums I still have after so many years. Some of the early and important items in this collection are records from the Doors. Sure, we knew Jim Morrison by name but the other members of the band were more or less face and name-less.

Until today, when I found the great video site called L-Studio. L must be standing for Lexus as this site is hosted on a subdomain of Lexus.com. And why not – BMW sponsors TED, why should Lexus not have it’s own video site with – I have to say – excellent video.

Some of these videos are with and about Ray Manzarek, the creator of the Door’s characteristic keyboard sound. Hear him tell about the Door’s beginnings …

… and then look through the other video for more Ray Manzarek and try not to miss the series of Web Therapie with Lisa Kudrow.

UPDATE: just ran into the new video of Weird Al Yankovic – ‘Craigs List’ – were he pays homage to the doors – in his own special way. And the great thing is that Ray Manzarek actually plays the keyboards in this spoof of the doors! No wonder that Yankovic version sounds so authentic…

It was at a fundraiser for KCET or some similar TV station many years ago that I learned about the – then – 13 year old Charlotte Church. I was amazed and even though I usually don’t think highly of fan-dom of any artist or star I ordered – to support KCET, you know – her CD and Video.

Recently I stumbled over her CD in my collection and I wondered what had become of her. Thanks to Google I found out quickly. Here is a before and after (so-to-speak)…

After some more investigative work I found out that it is rather quiet around her now, the last album released dates back to 2005 and it is very different in that it went away from the opera repertoire she had before into the land of pop, where she has to face quite a bit of competition. I personally like her new music but it is not something that would get me up and buy her CD.

One of the songs on that CD gives an idea why she went away from the arena where she was so amazingly successful. The title is “Finding my Own Way,” where she tells her fans in poetic form, that they might disagree with her and that it might be a mistake, but that she has the right to make her own choices and possibly  mistakes and that that’s OK.

I believe that is a very honorable thing to do. There is the temptation of riding the wave of safe continued admiration and she has chosen a way that is not so safe but is her own. So, she does not fall into the trap I described when I mused about the curse of good looks.

For me the old and the new Charlotte are just two different worlds and I fortunately have the choice where I spend my time. I want to share one song I found on Youtube that is a neat combination of John Lennon, the master song writer, and Charlotte Church, a singer that can make my tears flow freely…

What a beautiful song – so take five, relax and enjoy!

Never forget what this is all about – it’s not running after fame and fortune, it’s about enjoying the “Right NOW” where all the rest of the world can handle its own affairs for a little while…

“Change” seems to be all the hype right now. Even the presidential campaign was won with this slogan. There seems to be so much people don’t like and want to change (or have changed for them) that simply using ‘change’ as a buzz word will get attention.

Now mostly change is not really what we want. Maybe we have something in mind that is so far beyond everything we can imagine, that simple an end of the current situation looks appealing. But, in my own experience, the universe has a strange kind of humor. It tries to comply but if the goal of the change is not clearly specified we will get a change but the new situation might not be what we really had in mind – hidden back there in the crevices, afraid to verbalize.

Let’s take a look at politics right now – we will have a president that will implement change – he did not say what the change will be so this is a pretty smart move as now everybody has a very own version of that change he or she envisions in mind and thinks that’s what will come. And if that’s not what will get implemented then it becomes obvious why not – because it was never even promised. And something is always changed, so the promise is kept.

If we want a situation to be different we have to be specific in what we want the outcome of the change to be otherwise the change itself will be the outcome and this is certainly not what we want. It reminds me of the sign at the bar stating “Tomorrow free Beer” – obviously attractive so that patrons return, but of no consequence and cost for the proprietor – he is keeping his promise.

In other words – change is not what we want and we have to be honest with what we actually want, take away the attention from what is and see the outcome now. Remember Mahatma Gandhi’s quote “You must be the change you want to see in the world” with the stress on BE.

Change has become an emotionally loaded word and the following video is definitely a prime example. It made me cry (in a positive way, I might add)…

This is from Playing for Change, a project to ‘bring change’ through music. I can imagine that this project could benefit from clearly stating what the outcome will be after the change is accomplished.

Other videos on this foundation’s web site do show what the change will be – eduction, building, improving situations through music, etc, so the outcome is stated and the video with it’s emotion caused me to look, so I guess it all worked out OK.

Who would ever forget the Hinoi Team I told you about some time ago?

For reason of variety – not that this is any better than the Hinoi Team – I would like to pass on another find…

(watch in higher quality)

Watching these Japanese videos – and other Japanese TV clips on YouTube – I notice that most of the girls really look like girls, don’t they. I mean in contrast to women.

I can not imagine that these girls are really as young as they appear to (western) eyes, so I am wondering if the Japanese culture has bred its women looking so young-girl-ish. There seems to be an ideal woman type that is noticeable different in different cultures. How else could you tell, on first glance, that this is a german woman, the next one is from Mexico and yet one over this girl (!) is from Thailand?

But maybe we don’t have to think too much about this as over time McDonald will make them all the same – I noticed that when hanging out at the Thai temple, that more and more young Thai girls look like the good BigMac fed American girl. Any insights…

In 2005 Brian Greene explained superstring theory to the TED audience in laymen’s terms in a very engaging presentation.

Three years ago the Hadron collider at CERN, which has one if its goals to confirm string theory, was still a few year away from completion. But now we are nearly there. Interestingly the public is taking notice now as voices have been raised that this machine might be dangerous. Loud voices actually, so that the CERN website for the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) has to address these concerns and dispel them…

TGVs and mosquitoes

The total energy in each beam of protons in the LHC is equivalent to a 400 tonne train (like the French TGV) travelling at 150 km/h. However, only an infinitesimal part of this energy is released in each particle collision – roughly equivalent to the energy of a dozen flying mosquitoes. In fact, whenever you try to swat a mosquito by clapping your hands together, you create a collision energy much higher than the protons inside the LHC. The LHC’s speciality is its impressive ability to concentrate this collision energy into a minuscule area on a subatomic scale. But even this capability is just a pale shadow of what Nature achieves routinely in cosmic-ray collisions.

During part of its operation, the LHC will collide beams of lead nuclei, which have a greater collision energy, equivalent to just over a thousand mosquitoes. However, this will be much more spread out than the energy produced in the proton collisions, and also presents no risk.

Microscopic black holes will not eat you…

Massive black holes are created in the Universe by the collapse of massive stars, which contain enormous amounts of gravitational energy that pulls in surrounding matter. The gravitational pull of a black hole is related to the amount of matter or energy it contains – the less there is, the weaker the pull. Some physicists suggest that microscopic black holes could be produced in the collisions at the LHC. However, these would only be created with the energies of the colliding particles (equivalent to the energies of mosquitoes), so no microscopic black holes produced inside the LHC could generate a strong enough gravitational force to pull in surrounding matter.

If the LHC can produce microscopic black holes, cosmic rays of much higher energies would already have produced many more. Since the Earth is still here, there is no reason to believe that collisions inside the LHC are harmful.

By all probability these concerns are in the same category as the fears that people would die when going more than 50 miles an hour on this devil’s machine called train. But there have been experiments in the past that seemed rather harmless and turned out to be deadly. I am thinking of Pierre and Marie Curie,
who discovered radioactivity. They did not know that this new phenomenon they had discovered was poisoning them during their work and I remember the anecdote of demonstrating their discovery to friends at a party by circulating a vial with this new substance which you could see with your eyes closed.

So, there is a chance that this microscopic black hole that might be created by the LHC does indeed attract matter and energy from its surrounding, grows and swallows the universe as we know it.

I am actually sure that this will happen, at least in a number of parallel worlds. These parallel worlds are, as far as I know, also postulated by string theory, so we are really approaching the unified theory of life, the universe and everything, a theory that contains its own annihilation – cool!

I have worked at CERN for a little bit, being involved with the old myon-neutrino experiments and I have to admit that it would be a fascinating experience to be at CERN for the first activation of the LHC. I imagine a scene similar to the setting in Douglas Adam’s ‘Restaurant at the End of the Universe‘ – everybody is seated in an exquisite restaurant expecting a great show watching the universe to end.

And, you know what – in one of the parallel worlds according to the string theory to be tested – that will be so!

While working on the new Joomla site NoFearIRS.com, testing some new media plugin for the new Joomla 1.5, I found this fascinating little video of Tommy Emmanuel playing the Guitar Boogie…

…and as I don’t want to just leave you with this feeling of inadequacy, here some lesson that will get you on the way to play just as well – in a few years or decades…

This is Edgar Cruz showing you how to play Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody.

Was working on content for a new web site www.UniversalSerenity.com and I had finally figured out how to do the recordings that I needed for that.

I had tried many different combinations of microphones and pre-amps, USB interfaces etc and had settled down to recording onto the laptop with a Plantronics USB headset. That worked OK but even though the laptop is pretty quiet, it does have a fan and is was audible in the recording so I had this extra step of removing the noise.

I had experimented with my iRiver H340 and the sound recording with the built-in microphone was pretty good, but unfortunately this mike also picks up the hard drive when it starts up to write some recorded data onto it. There is an external microphone for this mp3 player (which by the way can do mp3 encoding on the fly when recording) but I have not managed to get one – the only place apparently selling them is in the UK and they just don’t want to talk to me.

Finally I managed to use a good dynamic phone with a pre-amp feeding into the line-in of my iRiver and that works like a charm.

That’s what I did this morning – recording a training session to groove in ‘create and destroy’ – and it worked nicely.

Now, having the mike connected to the iRiver and monitoring with headphones when I was done I just looked around my music collection which calls the iRiver its home I ran into the Beatles song ‘Across The Universe’ – a song that has some impact on me. I still remember the emotion I had listening to it many, many years ago when I just finished a science fiction novel from the Perry Rhodan series. This story, the song and the emotion of huge space of multiple dimension is – since then – intricately entwined.

Today, after finishing my recording, I listened to this song for the first time with headsets. I can listen to lyrics much better when they are crooned directly into my ears – believe it or not – this was the first time I really listened to the lyrics!

And I was fascinated. It was such a surprising match to what I had just done before – training to create my own world, and then listening to the Beatles telling me from a time rift of 40 years that nobody can change that creation – I suppose they implied ‘except for I myself’ in contrast to an external force.

So, thank you, John, Paul, George and Ringo for telling me – it only took me 40 years to get what you said – a short time, all things considered.

Words are flying out like
endless rain into a paper cup
They slither while they pass
They slip away across the universe
Pools of sorrow waves of joy
are drifting thorough my opened mind
Possessing and caressing me

Jai guru deva om
Nothing’s gonna change my world
Nothing’s gonna change my world
Nothing’s gonna change my world
Nothing’s gonna change my world

Images of broken light which
dance before me like a million eyes
That call me on and on across the universe
Thoughts meander like a
restless wind inside a letter box
they tumble blindly as
they make their way across the universe

Jai guru deva om
Nothing’s gonna change my world
Nothing’s gonna change my world
Nothing’s gonna change my world
Nothing’s gonna change my world

Sounds of laughter shades of life
are ringing through my open ears
exciting and inviting me
Limitless undying love which
shines around me like a million suns
It calls me on and on across the universe

Jai guru deva om
Nothing’s gonna change my world
Nothing’s gonna change my world
Nothing’s gonna change my world
Nothing’s gonna change my world
Jai guru deva
Jai guru deva
Jai guru deva

The Beatles – Across The Universe

I had to look up “Jai guru deva OM.” The internet, through some of it’s representatives, told me that it means something like “Hail to God Devine” with “OM” representing the vibration of the universe used in meditation.

keep looking »