Fire to screen

Hello there,

last Friday i went to another concert of one of my favourite bands: Green Day. Now, on rock concerts, of course it'd be best to be in the crowd in front of the stage. Unfortunately i checked for tickets quite late when it was already sold out. But i was lucky and got tickets from a friend of a friend who couldn't go. Great to be there, but our places were 'somewhere up left' with no access to the 'field' in front of the stage.

Great show, as expected after having been on an American Idiot-concert. An interesting thing was also to see the Web2.0-thingie going on. Usually on such concerts you might see a lot of lighters when the band plays a ballad, but this one was a little different: since i overlooked the whole crowd from my viewpoint i saw that there were amazingly many lights on all through the crowd. All the time. Not fire from lighters, but from a sea of screens of digital cameras and mobile phones. Easily distinguishable by its blue glow.

Having realised that, check this: search for "Green Day Wien" on youtube. And you'll find a lot, really a lot of videos from the concert. Of course they're all in crappy quality, especially the sound. But fascinating nonetheless, to have so many recordings from a concert you've just been to. To give you an idea of my not-so-great viewpoint, it was more or less like this, but on the other side of the stage (video quite bad).

Anyways, more about the concert. I was quite happy that they once again played an Operation Ivy song and announced it as the highlight of the evening.
They also once again brought three fans on stage to play their instruments. King-for-a-day moments of those young musicians, for sure ;-) and in the beginning of the show they got a younger fan up on stage 'for baptism' according to their show. Turned out he was a brave young Slovenian. Hope that inspires them to play more shows in our neighbour's country as well.
Speaking of making it a Viennese concert: besides addressing us by shouting 'Vienna' and 'Austria' numerous times the lead man also played 'Eine kleine Nachtmusik' on his electrical guitar every now and then inbetween songs. Pretty good one that.

Anyways, 'nuff said, to give you a taste of the concert i embedded this video:

Magritte toilet

I've been to Brussels recently. Wonderful city - if you don't mind the rainy weather. But i love the international atmosphere and all the European institutions, and, well, Belgians are cool people anyways. Hehe.

They also got their fair share of interesting museums. And they had a new one since my last visit in March 2008: the recently opened Magritte museum. Now, i love his surreal work. And i can recommend that museum. Well, it's not the ultimate Magritte experience because many of his famous paintings are spread all over the world's big museums (and private collections, i guess). But there are many good paintings on display and the new museum architecture is also worth a look.

Taking pictures was forbidden inside the museum. But if you know me well you might have guessed i couldn't resist shooting photos anyways. So here a shot of the interesting Magritte-esque mirror in their toilet:


Cool, huh? Unfortunately they weren't selling any mirrors like that in the museum shop. So i just bought two magnets.

Cheers.