just watched corpse bride (imdb), a beautiful love story done completely in stop motion. besides being technically perfect, basically making one feel the thousands of hours of work and devotion spent in the creation of the movie, it tells a gorgeous story about love and death, marriage, treason, goodness and malignity, well, a cute tale about life. a pitty i haven’t seen this one earlier.
as promised, some panoramas from our trip to monte generoso on last weekend.
today i’ve been attending a festival in dietikon, eight bands playing in 9 1/2 hours. out of these eight bands, two were crap, and five were pretty good (finsterforst, trimonium, kivimetsan druidi, korpiklaani and moonsorrow), which made this festival quite a success. my two absolute favorites today were korpiklaani and moonsorrow, two finnish bands which were the main reason for me to show up at the festival after all.
the finnish humppa metallers korpiklaani entered the stage as the seventh band. as they started playing, the crowd basically went wild, everyone starting to move, to dance. it was simply amazing. the idea to combine humppa with metal is simply great. and they also played happy little boozer, to which a friend of mine once wants to dance drunken on a table (if you’re reading this: you missed a great concert!). unfortunately, korpiklaani had to leave the stage after one hour… i really want to see them again, and then a bit longer…
finally, as the eight band, moonsorrow—one of my favorite bands—appeared on stage. for 80 minutes. and even after the crowd has already been active for around eight hours of concerts (my bones were hurting, my neck aching, my brain complaining, my feet weary), people still managed to adequately honour the great music and stage performance by banging like crazy, by dancing to the great tunes. it was simply fantastic. unfortunately, it was over at some point. too bad.
conclusions:
- one should kick the sucking bands out of the schedule and increase the playing time of the best ones.
- one should replace the mixer by someone who more successfully tries to compensate the bad accoustics of the hall and does not simply makes it worse by fucking up the mixing…
- humppa rocks.
- moonsorrow rocks even more. (regardless what the bavarian guy is saying.)
and now, it’s time to grab some sleep. thank you and good night.
no, this post is not about the area of abstract algebra in mathematics, but about the experimental metal project abstrakt algebra founded after candlemass‘ dismanteling by leif edling. they released one album and started with a second, but ran out of money, and leif ended up escaping bankrupcy by re-using some of the second albums material to create another candlemass album, dactylis glomerata (named after a flower he’s allergic to). the 2006 reissue of dactylis glomerata contains as a bonus disk the unfinished version of the second abstrakt algebra album, entitled abstrakt algebra ii (now guess how the first one was called). well. the arrival of that one kicked me out of bed this morning, when the mailman rang the doorbell. but it was worth getting up for it, and even if it is not a very good album, it is not good, it is interesting, and it is one of the albums every mathematician who has a similar strange taste of music than me should have in his cd shelf. of course, together with their first album, which i just ordered. ;-)
on saturday, we hiked the monte generoso, located next to the city of mendrisio in the ticino. here are some pictures from our trip.
first, some pictures from the cogwheel train ride up to bellavista:
then, some pictures from our walk from bellavista up to the top of the mountain:
and that’s me on the top of the mountain, one step from the abyss:
a picture of the village mendrisio:
finally, some pictures from my train ride to northern germany on sunday:
after returning from bordeaux, the return having been quite adventurous, i traveled trough the alps into the ticino, to the monte generoso. here are some photos from the train ride.
a few days ago i wrote about my small hotel room. well, it’s about time to add something. first, inside bordeaux’ trams people get packed together like sardins. and in paris’ metro, it’s even worse. in particular if it stops in the middle of the tunnel while one is compressed by an enormous amount of people around oneself. i’m really happy that this is over.
right now i’m listening to mandylion by the gathering, their first album with the great dutch vocalist anneke van giersbergen. (if you’re interested, take a look at her new solo project agua de annique. if i recall correctly it’s not metal, so worth listening to for everyone reading here.)
this is one of the first metal albums i bought, after hearing the song leaves too many times on some sampler (called dark winter nights; that one also introduced me to rage and samael). it’s a really great, emotional song, touching me deep inside. probably the first song qualifying to be called gothic rock/metal which i loved listening to. a few lines from the song:
“now that you’re gone i don’t know
how to really feel inside
baring the hope to see you again
i guess i never will”
i’ll stop typing know, in favor of catching some sleep… closing with a tbl quote: thank you & good night!
how small a hotel room can be? by induction on the ones i’ve been in, and in particular the one i’m in right now, probably infinitely small. well. it could be much better, if someone (from here on known as the interior designer™) wouldn’t have messed it up and arranged the things inside here a bit more clever, i wouldn’t feel like being in a puppet house, without space to move…
