Regina Glei's Blog, page 37

Metal Festival Nikki: Part 4 – Jaromer to Lichfield

It was a potential day for disaster considering the enormous travel schedule from Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic to Lichfield, UK. The journey went like this: From Hradec Kralove to Prague via train. From Prague’s train station to Prague airport via bus. From Prague to Frankfurt and Frankfurt to Manchester via plane. In Manchester I had a mere half an hour to get from the plane to the train station to catch the last reasonable connection via Crewe to Lichfield Trent Valley and ran across the aiport with my pink brick after finally getting out of passport etc. inspections.

I managed to catch the right train in the end and had to change trains once more in Crewe to get to Lichfield Trent Valley. Amazingly, everything worked and was on schedule, and when I got to Lichfield Trent Valley there was one single taxi waiting there as if I had ordered it. The taxi driver, a Dutch guy of probably Indian or Bangladesh origin who lived in the UK since 2005, he told me, turned out to become my “personal driver” during my short stay in Lichfield. He gave me his phone number and told me to call him when I wanted to go to the Bloodstock festival site on the 11th of August. He also told me that I had made a “mistake” by flying to Lichfield via Manchester. Birmingham airport would have been closer. Well, good to know for next time, but alas, will there be a next time concerning Bloodstock for me? I am not so sure!

For that night I stayed in the hotel though, quite exhausted from a 12 hour journey.

After breakfast the next morning, again being not the only metal head who stayed at that hotel, I got into gear and called “my” taxi driver, who did not expect me to call him I suppose and was astonished and happy that I did. It took him a while to come to my hotel, since he was on another job, but I didn’t mind too much, because during my wait it started to rain rather heavily, sigh… When I got into his car it was about to stop though and turned out to be the only rain of the day .

The Bloodstock site is even more in the middle of nowhere than Wacken or Jaromer, which are both more or less located in or next to their respective towns. Bloodstock is on lawn a mile or so away from any town or village.

It turned out that there is only one main stage and sorry, but that’s just not “up-to-date” anymore. In my opinion a festival like that needs two main stages and “everybody” except for Bloodstock already has them. The change over and set up time between bands is too short for the bands and too long for the waiting folk.

It also results in the bands getting only some 40 min or so of playing time. Many bands have sound issues since the set up time is too short.

The crowd “shocked” me even more than the lonely main stage though. What a lethargic gathering of people!

In Wacken there is mosh pits and crowd surfing and the crowd raises their hand and fires up the bands. There was more or less no crowd surfing at Brutal Assault, but there were huge mosh pits and more hands in the air to fire up the bands.

This last day of the Bloodstock festival though was completely lame. No cheering crowd, no surfing, even the people in the first row were hardly moving. Unthinkable in Wacken or Jaromer, camping chairs and stools were on sale inside the festival venue for 15 and 4 pounds respectively and masses of people were sitting around the Ronnie James Dio stage on their seats during gigs.

For me, this crowd was the strangest metal crowd I have ever seen and it does not compare at all to the fire and enthusiasm of Japan, and also of Wacken and Jaromer. This was too laid back for a metal festival for my taste but I shall book it under “interesting experience” or “now I know which festival to skip for future excursions”. Also the bands, notably Amorphis, Fozzy and Anthrax had a hard time with that audience as well as the afore mentioned sound problems and cannot have been entirely happy with this festival.

After Anthrax I got some food–I wanted “traditional fish and chips” but the booth advertising that was out of fish and I only got a horrible “fishpie”, so even the food was disastrous (laugh).

Upon leaving, I headed to the exit with the intention to call “my” driver again. It turned out he was already waiting at the festival site for customers and so I didn’t even have to wait for my ride back to the hotel.

After packing up the suitcase and breakfast the next morning, I left the luggage in the hotel to make a short visit to the quite large, pretty and impressive cathedral of the sleepy little town of Lichfield. Amazing, that such a big cathedral can be found in such a small town. I took some pics of the cathedral of course as well, apart from the Bloodstock pics.

Following the cathedral visit, I rode by train back to Manchester airport, where I arrived much too early and had thus some time to work on Hagen 3 while waiting for my flight.

My sister picked me up from Duesseldorf airport and we reached her house a bit after midnight. We had planned some German sightseeing before I would head to the last festival – Summer Breeze in the very German sounding town of Dinkelsbuehl. More on that day after tomorrow (since I am planning to FINALLY see Star Trek – Into Darkness tomorrow!)

Metal Festival Nikki: Part 3 – Prague to Jaromer

Unfortunately, a thunderstorm at night did not help to cool things down and another monstrously hot day burned down on the Czech Republic on the day I was scheduled to move to the city of Jaromer some 130 km north-west of Prague. I asked the hotel to order me a taxi and the driver brought me through a town that is not designed for all the cars that inhabit it now. This is a medieval town and its roads are small and mostly one way.

Nevertheless, I arrived at the station after some traffic jams and a cursing driver and was immediately surrounded by metal heads going towards Jaromer like me and I felt safe In fact the metal heads totally took over the train and the locals gave us raised eyebrows. I sat together with a girl from Italy who was also on her own and we chatted nicely.

I jumped off the train at a place called Hradec Kravole 20 km before Jaromer (which is bigger than Wacken, but nothing but a village after all) and luckily my hotel was just facing the station and no taxi actions were needed. Also the hotel was completely occupied by metal heads. I guess some 200 of us or so in total. Thus the check in took about an hour. Next came the bus to the festival site check in. Actually I had wanted to take a look at Hradec Kravole, but the center of town with its biggest church looked far away. It was just too hot to walk there and people and taxi drivers in Hradec Kralove looked like they wouldn’t speak English (or German) and understand where I wanted to go, as I judged from visiting a super market where I got a plastic bag only with hand signs. So I decided to take the bus to the festival site at 17:30.

They provided even two buses at that time and some 100 people left the hotel for the festival site. The grouchy bus driver threw us out in Jaromer at the Fort Josefov location without giving us directions and at first a few Finns and I got lost before we asked some more metal heads where the site actually was. Finally arrived there, I must say the site is impressive.

Tugged away between the old walls of the fortress were the two main stages and along the walls myriads of food stalls, bars and shops lined up. Opposite the stages was another wall with a path in the middle and a hill beyond where the festival organizers had put up benches from which you could see both stages, neat. Also, at the food stalls they put pallets onto the floor for people to sit on. The seating situation was thus much better at Brutal Assault compared to Wacken.

On the first day only the “Jaegermeister stage” operated with breaks in between for set up of the next band, from day 2 onwards the stages would alternate and we’d get metal all around.

After another epic thunderstorm during the night (man, was I happy for my hotels instead of a tiny tent!), the sky cleared again for another merciless day of heat. I’m not an outdoor person and have never been one and I am as white as a bleached wall and just cannot stay in the sun for long. Thus I chose to get on the bus to the festival site only at 15:00. Since my room’s windows faced east, it was hot since sunrise and I fled the heat in my room with my computer and settled down in the lobby after breakfast and wrote some 1000 words for Hagen 3, before heading out to the festival site.

There I continued life in the shadows and stayed mostly in the shade of the castle wall. Sometimes I feel like a vampire or some other creature of the night

I talked for a while to a Turkish guy who was staying in the same hotel as I did. We also talked about the Turkish uprising and it made me feel good that he is as uncomfortable with religious fundamentalists as I am! Metal heads are by nature freedom fighters

The music program highlights of the day were for me Ensiferum, good old Anthrax and Fear Factory. During Anthrax hell broke loose again in form of yet another epic thunderstorm. I managed to find some shelter at one of the bar tents, however I of course was not the only one with that idea and during some death squeezing I lost my treasured sun hat. And not only humans sought shelter from the rain but also an aggressive mosquito. Of all people under that bloody shelter the beast had to bite me… and that in the face. It swelled some but not to epic proportions as in Japan.

The metal heads were not deterred by the rain though and kept on without fail or pause.

During the night things cooled finally down and the next morning saw rain and clouds and after breakfast I decided to do the same as the day before, this time fleeing the cold, not the heat. I went back to bed and around noon we had the next thunderstorm. In total the temperature drop felt like some 20 degrees from 35 to 15.

I did some writing on Hagen 3 in the afternoon and headed to the festival site during yet another thunderstorm. Luckily it was the last of the day. After arrival, I escaped from the rain another little bit and had dinner at one of the excellent food stalls, then bought a new hat to replace the lost one from the night before. After buying the hat it finally stopped raining, hallelujah. The festival site had succumbed to the water and was a mud bath, if not as bad and thick as Wacken, but once again I was happy for my rubber boots.

I finally met the Australians who had helped me in Prague and we had a nice chat. The bands of interest on that day for me were In Flames, Meshuggha and Amorphis.

I will do a festival comparison at the end of this blog entry series but I must say that Brutal Assault was the best organized one of the festivals despite being the cheapest. Best organized (for example): the buses to and fro the hotel, showers for the mosh pitters or against the heat. Cheapest: Wacken plastic cups: 0.3 liters, cost for beer and non-alcohol: 3 Euro. Brutal Assault plastic cups: 0.5 liters, cost for beer and non-alcohol: ~ 2 Euro!

Since Brutal Assault runs under the label “extreme” metal the audience was maybe 80% men vs. 20% women, while Wacken was more in the range of 70% to 30% or maybe even 65% to 35% and the mosh pits looked pretty rough. Of course, the festival is much smaller than Wacken, 75,000 as opposed to 15,000. Nevertheless Brutal Assault manages to create a quite special atmosphere thanks to its awesome location in the old Josefov fort and I’ll keep the festival in good memory. You can find some photo impressions on Flickr again.

Metal Festival Nikki: Part 2 – Wacken to Prague

My onward journey led me to Prague (after two days of sightseeing in Prague I’d be moving on to the town of Jaromer for the next festival called “Brutal Assault”.)

The train journey from Hamburg via Berlin to Prague became an unexpected drama. Everything went fine until about 100 km before Prague, where we got into a massive Wacken-like thunderstorm and the train started going in snail speed.

After many conflicting announcements, they stopped the train altogether at a station called Prague Liben. Not on any of my maps… it turned out to be a local suburb station with nothing much around it. There had been a blackout in Prague and nothing worked anymore. When the train arrived at Prague Liben, it was already delayed for an hour.

I had no clue how to get downtown, everything was written in Czech only… But there were a few metal heads around! Doing the same thing like me: going from Wacken to Brutal Assault. One Danish guy on his own and three Australians, who have come all the way from Down Under to see Wacken and Jaromer. Wow!

We checked the tram, no clue where it goes. We checked the bus, no clue where that goes either. The bold Danish guy hopped on a tram but I stayed with the three Australians and we managed to find a cab and squeezed all four of us including our luggage into the thing. The driver was super nice and even spoke five words of English.

The Australians had a hotel close to the station and they jumped off there and the taxi then brought me on to my hotel. So far so good, but my hotel was deserted and I stood before closed doors and about 21:00 (instead of 19:30).

There was an “emergency” number but that led only to an answering machine in Czech …

By the way, blessed be iPhones, though I had no wifi at Wacken, at least the phone always worked, also in the Czech Republic (don’t know what my phone bill will look like, but I’m darn glad I had means of communication). I asked at a pub next door, nobody knew anything about the hotel but at least they allowed me to use their bathroom. Then somebody came out of the hotel and let me in, though they did not speak much English and shrugged shoulders.

There was a bench in front of the closed reception and I already saw myself sleeping on that bench not knowing what to do for toilets…

Finally, three Russian girls came home and they were so super nice it was unbelievable. They spoke some if not much English but understood my plight. They went to their room and searched for another phone number (I kept calling the official one without result). They came back with another phone number and the hotel’s wifi password and I managed to reach somebody who cooly told me: oh, there you are. Your room is in the attic, number 10, the key is in the lock… Argh.

I brought my hand luggage up four flights of stairs, then went back down to get my big suitcase (called the pink brick) and one of the Russian girls even came to help me carry the suitcase! So awesomely nice! Saved by Aussie metal heads and three Russian girls, I got into my room at about 21:45 or so. Hallelujah!

The two Prague sightseeing days went almost too smooth then loads of churches, one more beautiful than the other, kilometers of old houses, again one more beautiful than the other, loads of tourists on the Charles Bridge in wonderful (hot, so hot) weather and the as expected sightly surreal Franz Kafka museum were my main points for the first day.

The second insanely hot day in Prague started for me with the Strahov monastery and its beautiful library. One cannot enter but buy a photo permission and shoot stuff. (See the pics on Flickr.) The main room has 38,000 volumes, the smaller one 21,000 volumes. It’s a beautiful place that has surely featured in some movies already. Then I went on to the castle and its St. Vitus cathedral. This is of course one of the major sightseeing spots of Prague and was bursting with people. Despite the heat, I decided to climb the cathedrals weird side tower which houses some bells from the 16th century. Though the climb of 287 stairs was tough, the view over Prague was well worth it (see Flickr pics).

After the rest of the castle was visited I went on to the museum of alchemists whose sign I had discovered the day before.

The museum itself was a bit ridiculous but they allowed pictures and I will decorate my Hagen Patterson series homepage with them

I promptly returned to the hotel since it was way too hot to keep on wandering around outside and did a bit of Hagen 3 writing before moving on into the countryside of the Czech Republic for Brutal Assault festival.

Metal Festival Nikki: Part 1 – Narita to Wacken

I’ve been on the road again and shall report about the contrasting program of European sightseeing and heavy metal festival attendance in a weird, combined fashion

Start: Narita to Wacken

The adventure started with the flight from Narita to Amsterdam via KLM. The flight was fully packed. What a difference to my last flight with KLM in April 2011, some six weeks after our big earthquake. At that time the plane was deserted since “all” foreigners had already left and the Japanese were staying put. Now though, the 747 was full and in the window row next to me (I always get aisle seats for long distance flights if ever possible) sat a mother with her two young children. Her girl was maybe six or seven, her boy was four and one bundle of energy. I don’t think he slept for one second during the flight, much to the plight of his mother. Completely unnerved, she slapped at him with a book several times, short before hitting him, but the boy did not even blink, maybe he was too used to the “empty” threats.

At one time they had to reboot the entertainment system and I whipped out my iPad and started playing around a bit and he was standing in the aisle watching me. Well, not me, but the iPad I offered him to play and the kid promptly beleaguered me for the better part of an hour, much to the distress of his mother, who was worried he was bothering me. I asked him how old he is and the answer was four. Man, the kid was smart! He tried Archanoid, but that was too fast for him, I guess.

Then he tried Paper Toss, he managed to get the paper into the bin quite a few times. Bored with that he tried Smoody, a puzzle game, and he managed the first few levels without problem. But then he discovered “his” game – Angry Birds. Man, the kid was amazing! Just four years old! Impressive. I told his mom so and she said he plays sometimes with papa’s iPad. Still, the kid left me highly impressed and I think his Mom was happy that he was occupied for a little while and thanked me very Japanese style so much for having played with her kid. Cute guy, but a handful of work, I can understand his unnerved mother!

The logistics worked out perfectly and I met my ride to Wacken at Hamburg airport after waiting for only ten minutes: two British friends came in from Bristol by car, I via plane from Tokyo. After a relatively smooth ride despite a bit of a traffic jam on the way to Buesum where our hotel was, we arrived there at about 9 in the evening. On the road between Hamburg and Buesum lies Wacken, and half the highway was full of metal heads with W.O.A. = Wacken Open Air written on the back windows etc, of their cars. Most of them left the highway at Wacken to stay at the campsite.

My British friends and I chickened out of camping and stayed in a hotel in Buesum as mentioned already, which is 30 km north of Wacken at the North Sea (and we were not the only metal heads in the hotel).

In Buesum we found our hotel promptly since the town doesn’t happen to be very big and during the last bits of daylight we went in search for the beach, however, the entire seaside of Buesum seems to be under reconstruction and was one huge off limits construction site.

After a late dinner in a pub on the Main Street, we fell into bed, ready for Wacken day one.

The site is huge to say the least since it includes a vast field for campers and the “Wackinger Village” with food stalls and shops and goodie stalls, as well as the main arena that has three stages, the Black, the True Metal and the Party stage and we had quite a ride to find a place where to park our car. During that we passed of course already tons of metal heads and also noticed that every single house in Wacken has a flag hanging out its door. The village truly embraced the metal heads

Everybody knows that already in the metal world but now I know it too. Wacken is awesome: metal from noon till three in the morning. Great bands, big bands, Stone Age bands (e.g. Alice Cooper and Deep Purple), medium famous band, small bands, Wacken has it all.

On the vast field next to the village black clad people create a unique and a bit magical atmosphere.

It was reconnaissance for my two British friends and me on the first day, exploring the village and the stages and finishing the day with Rammstein (yes, Heino was there for one song).

This year Wacken had everything in store. Soaring heat on Friday, a monstrous thunderstorm on Saturday, with the ensuing mud bath later on and rapidly dropping temperatures.

The metal heads are rough but have their hearts in the right places. Dudes are pissing into the mud not bothering with toilets but carry you across the mud when you ask them to.

On the first night, someone close to me collapsed during Rammstein. Immediately, metal heads ran to the closest security guys who wired the rescue squad and within three minutes someone was there to help. The security guys are like the metal heads, tough and nice at the same time. They are tough when it comes to the festival rules but they also heave the crowd surfers to safety and provide the first row with cups of water.

Every metal head is happy and appreciates to be in metal holy land. People randomly just shout “Wacken!” at each other or sing “Wacken is only once a year”. The bands are happy to play there as well (of course) and many do special shows and some record their shows, etc. It’s all one amazing atmosphere that makes Wacken the special place it has become.

The shows that impressed me most were Rammstein, Powerwolf, Sabaton, Nightwish, Agnostic Front and my favorite Amorphis of course, who did an awesome special acoustic set before the head-banging songs.

Maybe the funniest gig was Alestorm with people crowd surfing in rubber boats, on their bellies and two on top of each other and the mosh pit suddenly sat down and pretended to row their pirate ship.

You can find some 30 or 40 or so pics of the hundreds that were taken on my Flickr account.

It was a rough three days and I wonder just how many people got sick, had heat strokes and alcohol or other drug overdoses and caught colds on the last day during the thunderstorm, the mud and suddenly 15 degrees Celsius.

It was over all too quickly and on the 4th of August my two British friends brought me to Hamburg’s main train station from where I would be heading to Prague and they to Calais to catch the tunnel train. All in all, Wacken was awesome, and I don’t think it will be the last time I have gone there.

Stay tuned for part two of the journey tomorrow

Gear!

There is a saying in German that means something like this: “anticipation is the best form of fun”.

I am preparing and gearing up for four heavy metal festivals in Europe within the next three weeks and I feel like I am going on an expedition to climb Mt. Everest.

What does the festival goer (at least me) need for events like that and what do I imagine I need to make this the roundabout worthwhile experience it is supposed to become

First of all there are the tickets of course. All secured! Especially the Wacken Open Air ticket is critical and I have it since August 2012! (the thing was sold out in November or so, or was it October?)

Hotels, (I am not an outdoor = tent person, have never been and don’t want to be one either) and means of transport from A to B of course.

But now the more personal stuff – what have I bought or what did I already possess that will be taken along?

Camera (newly bought for the occasion), opera glass (new), iPhone, band t-shirts, in general black clothes, Doc Martens like black boots, black rubber boots, black outdoor hat, since this will all be open air.

Sports towels, belly bag, fancy belly belt (to store things), small purse, since I don’t want to carry around my big purse with “everything” in it, PET bottle holder (by the way, all this gear is of course in black! )

Other nicknack: mini-electrical fan, many earplugs , tiny fold-able chair, fold-able mini-cushion, (I can’t stand for three days in a row, my back ain’t the best anymore (even the cushion is black)) sun cream, mosquito repellant, sun-glasses, rain gear, spare lipstick, appropriate jewelry, band aid… Is that it? I think so at the moment – now am I well prepared or what?

But it does not end there. Tomorrow I will dye my hair red again (it’s time anyway, or rather I timed it so that I would add color shortly before leaving). After that I will go (don’t laugh) to a nail salon for the first time in my life and will let some Japanese girls paint me “heavy metal” nails. I made the appointment two weeks ago and I am wondering whether it’ll look the way I want it when I leave the studio. I shall tweet pics of the result.

It was and still is great fun to plan, organize and gather all the gear and the two days left at work seem like quite a nuisance. On the 31st I will board a plane… Wacken, etc. I’m coming! Appropriate growl

My Five Cents Worth on Rowling’s Secret Publication

A lot has been written and said the past few days on the topic of JK Rowling publishing a crime novel under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith.

This whole story has equally frustrated and delighted me.

The book didn’t sell so well when nobody knew who Robert Galbraith was. It didn’t sell well despite a big publishing house and an agent behind her/him. It sold 1400 print and 800 eBook copies in the UK since its release in April. No author can live on such sales.

The story proves how ridiculously difficult it is to “break in” and to “get noticed”, even if you have a big publisher behind you.

The quality of your writing has absolutely nothing to do with whether you get noticed or not either. Some described Galbraith’s crime novel as astonishingly “mature” for a “debut” writer, or as “well written but quiet”.

It is enormously frustrating that there is so much luck involved in this business which is beyond the author’s control.

There are tens of thousands of authors out there who write good books but who never get noticed – in the sense of being able to make a living on writing nothing but fiction.

It drives me up the wall when “lay people” who have no clue about the business of writing and publishing tell me, oh, so cool that you write books, oh, fantasy – like JK Rowling.

NO, not like her!

It is sort of an insult for an aspiring author to have lay-people compare him or her to Rowling. She was and is one in a billion who won the jackpot of a lottery, period. Her writing may be good but there are tens of thousands of authors whose writing is equally good and sometimes even better and they still have dayjobs because they didn’t have the luck to win the darn jackpot.

The personal lesson I am taking away from this Robert Galbraith stunt is that we can’t all be so lucky. The delightful part of the Galbraith story is that nobody can be so lucky twice, it’s not the magic quality of her writing which made her famous but simple luck.

Considering such odds, the most important thing an author has to ask him/herself is whether writing gives you something or not. It does in my case. It’s the one thing I love best in the whole bloody world and there is nothing like being able to hold that stack of paper in your hand that has sprung from your imagination and that makes you laugh and cry. I intend to continue writing until I’m 80 or 90 no matter what.

Avantasia, Psycho Tests, and Anime Restaurants

Shall I write about an Avantasia gig I went to, or the MBTI, or a weird restaurant visit? Instead of either or there shall be all!

Avantasia:

On Wednesday the 10th of July, I went to see their “Mystery World Tour 2013″ gig in Tokyo. The gig was their only one in Japan for this tour. I had never been to this hall before, the Shinagawa Stellar Ball, and had never heard of it before either. The Stellar Ball hides very unspectacularly inside the “Aqua Stadium” which seems to be an aquarium that I didn’t know anything about yet either and that I shall explore some day. Both venues are behind the Shinagawa Price Hotel.

There was no announcement or billboard far and wide for the gig but the metal t-shirt gang showed me the way. It’s the usual suspects! I saw Loud Park t-shirts, Loud & Metal Attack (Finland Fest) t-shirts etc.

I had to go “incognito” though since I came from the office and would have to go to a hotel after the gig for two days of MBTI seminar (more on that later) and had only limited luggage space. I locked my luggage away at the station and promptly forgot my earplugs inside it, which I realized the moment I entered the hall.

Due to this negligence, I decided to “escape” to the far right side of the stage out of the blasting range of the speakers. That also provided the comfort of a rail to hold on to. The Stellar Ball is astonishingly big and has a capacity of about 1800 people according to the Internet. I guess about 1500 or less showed up and you had space to move and dance at the sides and in the back. Without a support band the show started punctually at 19:00 and Tobi kicked it off himself but from the second song onwards the guest vocals started to appear.

Avantasia fans forgive me, but I have only the Scarecrow album and nothing else and don’t know much about Avantasia and needed Internet, flyers and expert help to figure out who the guest singers were: They turned out to be Michael Kiske (ex-Helloween), Eric Martin (ex-Mr. Big), Ronnie Atkins (Pretty Maids) and Bob Catley (Magnum), apart from the “back vocals”, who were pretty much lead vocals from time to time, Thomas Rettke (ex-Heaven’s Gate) and Amanda Somerville. She’s one impressive lady and has a great voice and looks like a true Valkyrie

I liked Ronnie Atkins and Michael Kiske best. It was a great show and they did me the favor to play Twisted Mind and the Scarecrow from the Scarecrow album. At times, especially the last song, where all vocalists were on stage, it was a bit “crowded” for my taste. Seven vocalists are too much for me to handle! lol. All in all I’m happy I went and it was a nice teaser for the masses of metal I’ll have in August – Wacken awaits!

Psycho Tests

I had the work sponsored opportunity to attend an MBTI seminar. Now what is MBTI? It stands for Mayers-Briggs-Type-Indicator. In a nutshell the idea to classify people into character types is based on Carl Gustav Jung and the MBTI was then developed by the mother-daughter duo Katherine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Meyers. There is a ton about this in the internet – see wikipedia and also the homepage of the Meyers-Briggs Foundation.

The MBTI separates people into 16 character types, which are all indicated by a four letter combination. I found the structure of the seminar very interesting, since you do an individual paper test first which delivers a “reported” result for you, and after that you spend about one and a half days with “verifying” if your reported result is also your “best fit type” or not.

You do this by digging deep into the meaning of the four letters and the categories behind them in groupwork and discussions with your fellow seminar buddies. An astonishingly high amount of people change their four letter combination throughout the course away from the reported type to their best fit type as they understand the letters and their meaning and the categories behind them more and more. I won’t get into detail about the categories here, this has all been done before and you can read it in the Internet.

I for my part strayed some from the reported type throughout the one and a half days of discussion (the teacher encourages you to do so) only to come back to the reported result, meaning I realized that it is indeed my best fit type. About half of the participants though found other best fit types for themselves.

The seminar was quite an eye-opener concerning why certain people behave like this and that under certain circumstances, myself included. I highly recommend this test and such a seminar.

I won’t tell you my type just like that, if you rally want to know – email me

Anime Restaurants

After the seminar, I went back to town and met a friend of mine visiting from Hong Kong for dinner. We had not planned anything, walked around in Ikebukuro and decided to go to an izakaya (most common, cheapish but usually good “we have everything” Japanese restaurant with loads of booze along with the food). There are many izakaya chain restaurants and one of them is called “Hananomai”. I’ve been to this chain before but not in that particular one in Ikebukuro. I have NO clue about whether a campaign was going on at this Hananomai or whether it is a permanent installation or not, but this particular Hananomai had an anime thing going on.

I have zero interest in anime (or mangas for that matter). When I started out learning Japanese, I read some Doraemon and this and that and I had one favorite manga called “Dragonball” and have indeed read all 47 issues that exist, but ever since I finished with Dragonball, I completely lost interest in manga and in anime in particular. Mostly due to the ridiculous way in which many many mangas and anime depict women. I won’t get into the topic now (don’t get me started) but I basically don’t like the proportions of female bodies in anime and the horribly high and unnatural voices they give 99% of the female characters.

So, I have NO idea about anime and no desire to get any idea either. The Hananomai we went to now was decorated all over with drawings from an apparently insanely popular anime series for girls depicting “pretty” boys. There were six or seven “guys” and they were all dressed in “classic” Japanese costumes (samurai like stuff).

On the menu were 6 or 7 alcoholic drinks and the same versions without alcohol (since many of the fans of this series seem to be under 20, Japan’s drinking age) and each character had his themed drink.

For the fun of it, my friend from Hong Kong and I ordered drinks from the anime menu and the staff brought our two drinks and in a separate bowl two coasters with pictures of the dudes. Mark the separate bowl with the coasters – so that the coasters don’t get wet from the drinks in case you want to take the coasters home with you as a souvenir. Now that is Japanese service for you! My friend from Hong Kong said she knew the name of the series but not much else but she knows someone who likes it in Hong Kong and she indeed took the two coasters as a souvenir.

The rest of the menu was “normal” and not anime themed. There was one funny scene though I have to mention from the neighboring table. Two young women, looking under 20 indeed, sat there and one had a magazine which does not exclusively deal with anime or with these characters but apparently there was an article on the series in it with a big photo of two of the characters hugging each other. The one kid who did not own the magazine gave off a moan and tore the thing out of the other giggling girl’s hands to look at the article and the picture. So sweet, and yet my advice is: become fans of, for example, a boy band, then at least you can see your dream-dudes in the flesh from time to time!

Kabuki, Business, and Art

At a work event, I had the rare opportunity to talk to a famed Kabuki actor by the name of Nakamura Shibajaku.

Here is a link about his “clan” in English. And here is the link to his “real” homepage in Japanese where you can see a picture of him. He is an “onnagata” – a man who plays female roles in the all-male art of Kabuki theater.

We had invited Shibajaku san for a work event on the topic of leadership and to all our surprise he agreed and came.

I think we were all surprised because we expected a Kabuki actor to be a bit “out of this world” who would not know what to talk about to business people. Far from that.

We met him for a dinner cruise on a “yakatabune” – a small dinner cruise ship.

Shibajaku san turned out to be more down to earth than many of my office colleagues! He, very rationally, presented his work as a business that happens to be a form of art. Nowadays, the just renewed Kabukiza theater is astonishingly well filled, but he spoke of a time in the 70ties and 80ties when the Kabukiza in Tokyo’s Ginza had to share its stage with “enka” (heart-wrenching “folk music”) and other performances in order to survive. Thanks to a general “back to our roots, and we are proud of our culture” movement in the Japanese society and thanks to creating some Kabuki stars, the art managed to survive and find a steady audience (most of which are women over 40).

This is a pic of the renewed Kabukiza while driving by in a bus to the harbor to meet Shibajaku san on the dinner cruise boat

One keyword of Shibajaku san was “customer satisfaction”. The Kabuki actors have to give their audience what they want. They also have to uphold tradition while going with and reacting to the modern times. Shibajaku san has a homepage (see link above) and blogs, for example.

I was highly impressed by this very down-to-earth and rational business man who on the other hand acts out emotions and high drama on stage.

This is exactly what we writers have to be and to do as well these days, at least in my opinion. There is a necessary schizophrenia going on. On the one hand you have to produce emotions, on the other hand you not only have to follow certain “rules” to create them (like show – not tell, a grasp on POV, etc.) but you also have to be a business man/woman, who has to study the market and who has to try to reach his/her audience. Art, of whatever form, has a business side to it. That may sound like a platitude but I don’t think you can succeed in nowadays world without realizing that in the very depth of your guts.

The most important message here is that nothing is wrong with art being a business. Many writers still turn up their noses at the “dirty” side of our profession, or, like me, would just love to write all day long without having to care about this bothersome marketing business. Shibajaku san however displayed a remarkable extend of grace in his business like manner and his matter-of-factness. The two are not opposites but composites. For him the business side of things appeared to be an integral and natural part of his activities.

I was quite wowed by his attitude and I can say that he inspired me to look a little more coolly at the business side of things and consider it as a part of the job. But, as always, there must be balance. The smaller part of Shibajaku san is a business man and the bigger part is the actor. As soon as the business man’s part becomes too strong, the art surely suffers. Too much business man – the art “dies”, too much art – nobody will ever hear about you. I shall seek to further perfect the balance between being a writer and being a business woman, but one thing is for sure, meeting Shibajaku san was an awesome experience.

Marketing Weekend

The things a modern day writer has to do: first of all there is the decision – do I write today or do I market?

Last weekend, I decided to go for the marketing and here is a summary of the numerous things that I did:

Emails: There was a number of emails flying back and forth between Dark Quest staff and myself and Big Pulp staff and myself on various issues and between my cover-artist and myself.

Tweets (and Facebook):

Quite a number of tweets streamed out from me this weekend – most of them related to either the anthology with my Wolpertinger short in it or the Kindle free-download campaign that I had scheduled shortly after coming back from China business trip with a 29th of June starting date.

Kindle free download campaign:

How do you advertise a campaign like that? The best method I know is via “free books, free eBooks” sites on Facebook (if any reader of this blog has any other ideas, please let me know). So I am searching all those sites and am going to them one by one, placing my announcement about free downloads with links to the books on them. Half of the sites do not let you post, and on Saturday I got a warning that some site considers me as spam. It takes quite a while to go to all these sites, check them and then post.

I was wondering what else I could do to get the word out and Googled wildly for “free promotion opportunities”. I stumbled over some site with a few tips and links, but most of them turned out to be either dead or dubious or I’m already doing it (registering as an author at Goodreads for example).

There was one hopefully helpful hint/link though to a marketing method I did not know anything about yet.

There is something called Google Books. I promptly registered. I don’t know exactly what merit will arise from that but here is how it works. You can register your books there for free (all you need is a Google account) and they “promise” the search engine will bring up your book more promptly. Every publisher can register his/her books there. I did so now with my two self-published novels. They need/want the ISBN, the title and a web page where the book is advertised (but they don’t like amazon , so you better have another link to your book somewhere and I used my homepage). Next you upload either a pdf and an epub file, or you send them the physical book. Since I don’t have the epub file ready (I let CreateSpace do all this stuff), it was easier and quicker for me to send them hard copies, which I did today. You don’t have to send it to the US. The system promptly gave me an address for Japan. Let’s see what happens next. They are apparently scanning the hard copies. The whole service is for free and I’m thrilled whether anything good will come from it.

Anthology marketing:

The next thing I did was updating my homepage and also the blog page (the “shorts” page) with latest info and links on the Wolpertinger. I also wrote a quick press release and uploaded that one to the free service PRLOG.

Niche market:

Then there is this thing about niche markets. I read a blog entry recently by some self-publishing guy who said that you should search for a niche market, otherwise you are just one tiny tiny tiny fish in the big big pond that will be overlooked. He is right, but easier said than done – my books ain’t for example about fly-fishing so that I could try to guest blog in every fly-fishing blog in the Net. I tried now one niche approach. “She Should Have Called Him Siegfried” was inspired by the Ring of the Nibelung by Richard Wagner, but actually I’m not a classics fan but a heavy metal girl and got interested in the story via the German metal band Grave Digger, who have made a concept album called Rheingold, which deals with the Ring of the Nibelung in 45 minutes of heavy metal. I placed a message on the fan forum of their homepage now, carefully “advertising” my novel. Well, so far my comment there got me 3 likes and 1 dislike… so much for niche markets. I am doubtful about Richard Wagner related sites, first of all the Hagen series has not that much to do with the Ring of the Nibelung, only some bits and pieces and second, is that a niche market that would “help” me and that I would want to be involved with?

I’d rather stick to the heavy metal dudes…

What’s a niche market for Dome Child? Is there a niche market that deals with giant mutant lizards? Or chewchips? Not that I know of! And global warming ain’t no niche market. So, in my opinion this niche market idea is nice, but has its limits.

What else did I do this weekend – my usual once a week update of the Odyssey Online Critique group whose moderator I happen to be, reacting and responding to the replies of tweets and Facebook actions and finalizing my trip preparations for the World Fantasy Con in November in the UK.

Did I get in any writing done this weekend? No… – oh, I wrote this blog article today – almost 1000 words…

I shall go back today to Hagen 3 which is 20,000 words in so far!

Beating…

Japanese television in general pretty much sucks, since 80% of its programs consist of silly game shows and people eating whatever crap on TV and screeching “oishii” = tastes good. However, there are a few programs that display a reasonable amount of intelligence. One of them is “close up gendai” (with gendai meaning: “modern times” or “present-day”). That program is on more or less every weekday after the NHK news at 19:30 for half an hour and deals with all sorts of society related issues (mostly, but not exclusively, Japanese topics).

Recently they had a program about physical punishment in sports in Japanese schools and universities that I found noteworthy.

Last year, the suicide of a teenage boy in Osaka who, as one of the reasons for killing himself, cited the physical punishment he received during his basketball classes in his farewell note, brought the topic into the spotlight. That was shortly followed by the revelation that also in the Japanese women’s Olympic Judo team physical punishment was widely practiced.

In the half hour TV program they more or less stated that physical punishment during sports lessons in Japan is not an isolated phenomenon at all but happens country-wide, all the time.

I am rather shocked by this, since in German schools stuff like that is not allowed and if it happened it would result in a major scandal. Teachers are not allowed (anymore) to beat up their students. Physical punishment was officially abolished in Germany only in the year 2000 (according to Wikipedia), but ever since the 1970ties such punishments were not practiced anymore, at least not that I know of. I wonder what’s it like in the US for example or at other places in Europe?

The tone of the program was weird, to say the least. Sorts of, hell, we didn’t know stuff like that was happening at our schools. Aren’t we more evolved than that? It shouldn’t be happening. It can’t be good. How shocking that it’s still rather normal.

The program did not, however, outright condemn the issue and did not make a strong statement like: hell, this has to stop right here and now. It remained in the elusive area of: stuff like that should stop…

Weird. I would have wished for a much stronger statement.

However, coming to think of it, I guess the nations where there is no physical punishment of any form in schools, be it at sports or normal classes, is probably quite rare and not a matter of course as I had thought prior to watching that program.

It’s a sad thing that someone needed to commit suicide here before people started to talk about this topic, but at least now they do. I hope there will come a day when thinking that physical punishment in schools as a thing of the past will be a matter of course for many more people. Japan needs to address this much more aggressively and openly, but alas, change like that has the tendency to happen awfully slowly…