In Support of President Obama

I´ve been following the American mid-term elections and with every day I feel a bit more enraged. As a European you get no chance to participate, little chance to vent your frustrations, and yet what wind blows from America effects the temperature world over.

This video blog by Michael Tomasky (The Guardian) really brings home how disturbing things have become:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/michaeltomasky/video/2009/sep/17/barack-obama-anti-christ-republicans

A recent poll showed that 18% of Republicans in New Jersey believe that Obama is the Anti-Christ, while 17% voted not sure.

Today partisan politics is in danger of tearing apart America. If ever there was a time
in American history when people across the political divide need to rally, to come
together, it is now. Instead the right wing press has created an us vs them culture.

It is a black hole which threatens to derail not only the American project - but has ramifications for the rest of the world.

Modern Republicans have sacrificed their own dignity, honor and even policy - in a desperate bid to return to power. At a time when modern politics needed to rally around the President - like Roosevelt in the 30´s - they have failed.

Perhaps the man who puts country above politics is a thing of the past?

It is just not acceptable. Our times require more spirit, more courage, not less.

To believe in hope requires courage. To effect change requires commitment. To stand up against the sweeping tide of things takes character.

It requires steadfastness when times are tough, something which goes back to the heart of the American project.

Personally, I am concerned that the landslide of propaganda, bullshit, racism, political double speak & hate will lead to Sarah Palin being voted into power. As far as I am concerned that is many times worse that a new Bush administration.

I believe that if Palin wins the presidency the dark age everyone is terrified of will sink its claws into our modern history.

We are too far down the line in terms of peak oil, environmental chaos, Iran, Israel, the dialogue with the Muslim community & the clash of civilization to step backwards a generation. There is too much at stake to take political sabbatical at this stage.

Remember the fervor that swept Obama into power? It was not based just on hope, but on the prescient need for action - for change. Action on the economy, action tackling the international banking system, action for the climate, action for dialogue with the Muslim community amongst many others...

How fickle is human memory. How easy our convictions take flight when challenged.

Is it a consequence of modern media & our inability to concentrate on any one thing that leads to a lack of substance, a lack of conviction - or the old fashioned fire which keeps a man standing by his cause because he dam well believes in it?

I think our whole culture needs a steady boot up its ass. Roll the sleeves up because there is work to be done brother. It is not good enough to be too distracted not to believe in anything anymore - the stakes are too dam high. We cannot hold back on action for the climate - politically and personally - and we cannot stand by and watch Sarah Palin or some other Bush clone come into power.

The question is, what am I willing to do? Am I willing to play my part? It is not about preaching, and it is not about righteousness, it is not about podium fist banging, arm-chair politics or scratching chins. It is about what we do in our own lives - how we are willing to effect the great debate. Are we playing our part? Are we doing our little to effect change? The problems are too deep set to need discussion. If you cannot feel the problems facing humanity - and our humanity - then you got to get out of your cotton wool brother.

Song

I am devoted to song. I give my all to song and for song. It may make me rich, it will probably make me poor, but where ever it leads I go gladly. I believe in its power to heal, to help, to effect change. It has guided me and sometimes it has left me broken. But at every stage it has taught me and before it and its practitioners I stand humbled. Give me the grace to channel song. To be its vessel and its voice. Give me the strength to accept its burden. Let me be the catalyst through which it can find its audience, from where ever it came. Thank you song, for all you have given to me, and all you have taken away. I hope I can live up to you & prove myself worthy.

Goodbye Myriad Creatures & thank you everyone x

 I never got to say goodbye to two things. First, and most importantly all the most beautiful people who ever supported Myriad Creatures. There was never an official announcement that I left the band, so I never got to say goodbye properly. So here it is.

Second to the band itself.

Thank you so much everyone who gave me the best years, the most rocking gigs, the most surreal raging, craving, fire flashing extraordinary experiences of fulfillment and wonder I could ever expect to feel. If it ever gets half as good again, dam, then I give myself to God and to life and will never expect anything more. It was nothing without each and everyone one of you who from all your far out places & countries (most of which I have never known or experienced) gave the best dam atmosphere and sweat and God knows what else I could ever expect to experience.

To this heart, there is a past that will live forever on into my last days. Thank you.

For me tonight I ended up in a bar alone, and buying drinks, and cursing the barman, and with too much smoke in my jacket. And I drank a quiet whiskey and had one of the moments when things become clear. When you are happily anonymous, and you realize that life will continue without you, but may also continue with you.

I had just been to a great show. And it is important also for me to address the guys, and to say rock on brothers, good luck, and turn it all to light and fire. And I recommend all my friends and so on to roll on and go see the show when it next comes to town.

And for me that is the past. It ends and it begins with love, a smile and a willingness to go on.

This is my last dwelling on it. For me my future is about music. And doing everything in my spirit to make the dam best music I can. And supporting every friend and foe who has the guts to turn his life to do something that gives something that gives something to someone else.

Thank you everyone. And now a goodbye.

And here, a hello.

Turn it all to light and fire.

x

You can find me here:

www.facebook.com/jimkroft

Berlin Arts Week - Preview Exhibition at Tempelhof

This week is Berlin Arts week so I headed up to Tempelhof Airport where the Preview exhibition was exhibited and took some shots of my favorite pieces.

The airport is a work of art itself. Monumental, austere, foreboding.

During the 1930s, the architect Ernst Sagebiel expanded it for Adolf Hitler into what was then the largest building in Europe, a triumphal entryway into the new Germania, smack in the heart of Berlin. (NYTimes)

Where else but Berlin would you find one of the world´s oldest and greatest airports, shut down for flights, but opened up for the arts, music and even the runways for the public?

Bankrupt, bust & beautiful - it is good to know that there is somewhere in Western Europe where the town planners aren´t bureaucrats but some whack ball loon-jobs dreaming up eccentric schemes that serve no purpose financially but perfect sense culturally (if only that were really true....)

Love it or loathe it, it does fill you with wonder that there are places where things can be senseless. Then when you head into certain types of senselessness, you find deranged forms of perfection.

That said there is always some mindless pig on an exercise bike dreaming up schemes to fuck everything up for the rest of us. This year the bureaucrats tried to shut down the Tacheles (again) only to be aced by resident warlord Ludwig Eben. They are also trying to shut down Bar 25 (again). Why destroy the things that give a city its identity?

Ben Okri - The acknowledged legislators of the world take the world as given. They dislike mysteries, for mysteries cannot be coded, or legislated, and wonder cannot be made into law. And so these legislators police the accepted frontiers of things.....But the dreams of the people are beyond them, and would trouble them.

Yes sir, the dreams of the people are bold and beautiful and filled with aching and wonder.....
as well as all the terrible things that we do to one another,  and all the mysteries of the world are populated by their opposite, by both the filth & the fantasy, the goodness and the grime....

Art exhibitions are great. There is all the chin scratching and serious talk, but if you observe high society in groups, they are all checking each other out....our brain tries to trick us that we are not animals, but you open your eyes, or you look at history....and we´re as un-evolved as the rest of the species.....the animals just have the decency not to strut around dressed up in hypocrisy.....protect something innocent and you remember what actually still has meaning....

This little girl was the most high-brow art observer out of everyone - this exhibit was not a PG rating though! Here is a close up:

Now that was the most surreal thing I saw all day! The world invents ironies much more hard to imagine than 

 people can come up with intentionally....

It would have been John Lennon´s 70th Birthday yesterday. Happy Birthday John. Love, love, love:

 

Anyway, all in all the exhibition was great, provoking some thoughts, some smiles, an opportunity to observe and be observed, hang with some old friends and combat a puncture during a brilliant sunset on the landing strip:

But a nice end to a perfect day:

  At the end a Hefeweisen to right all the worlds wrongs - and a Bloody Mary for the girls...

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Thank you all the amazing artists (and friends) who made it such a great day and event- and congratulations! x

While Playing Chess she said:

While playing chess maestro Janette at Zapata last night James Brown´s This is a Man´s World was playing.

I said: Woa that boy could sing...

She said: No he was just able to suffer....

Papering The Walls With Song

There is a well known story about the hyperfinflation in Germany in the 1920´s. After mass
reproduction of money during WW1 the Mark became so inflated that people used
notes as wall paper - amazing to imagine Marks worth a million per note, lining the
walls where you sleep, breathe & love.

It is an analogy I think of sometimes as a modern musician - especially living in Berlin. Song has lost all its value, a strange irony, that something as precious as a song, has become a casualty of technological advance.

It is a brave new world for musicians. Everyone knows that the music business was in
free fall years before the financial crisis of 2008. My publisher groaned on the phone
to me recently - `its just not fun anymore ´. Well unlike him I never knew the careering
around in first class during the 1980´s (thank God).

But we are in a paradoxical time where music is easier to make (and that does not
mean the music is good), there are more bands and musicians than ever, and yet
to make a dime from a song is harder than it was, well, since pre-Beethoven.

So what do you do? You quit complaining and you get on with it, you roll, you man-up,
you find a way. Making music is a privilege, and if you need to make it enough you will
get it made, and if what you have to say has enough heart or just matters, then it will
find its own way.

There is a quote I love by Jonathan Coulton:

If art has an audience, and if that art is allowed to go wherever it wants to, it will eventually find its way to where it´s supposed to be.

It is the idea that once a song is written, it is set upon a journey, the destiny
of which is the receptive audience who awaits it.

Romantic notions aside, it can be quite overwhelming when starting out - the amount of noise on the net, the quantity of music put out. How do you get your head above water in a storm? But if a song is good it takes on its own life. That is what keeps me going anyway.

I look back on the last 3 years of Berlin, at all the fury & playing many gigs,
& lost nights, & yearning & and random beautiful meetings & encounters, friendships made & broken - and it is a full tapestry. And yet it still feels like just a beginning, and that is the
beauty - to be a part of the great debate, to be in search of the great idea, to embrace
the meaningless or sometimes purposeful days of our lives and feel humility as they
interchange, weave and wind, and somehow correct us, put us on our paths and lead us
somewhere. As Herman Hess puts it:

I look upon the gallery of my life and see that it turns not in trifles, but on the stars.

Anyway, for now I am just glad to be a part and to be living here. And to be
angry at the toxic red sludge & all our ineffable human folly...and  to be joyful that for some
reason I live in a time where, for some reason, I am papering my walls with songs.

P.S If anyone is interested to read a great book about what it was like in Berlin
in the 1920´s during the hyper inflation, check out Hans Fallada: Little Man, What Now?
A beautiful book about genuine human hardship in impossible times.

From a Little Corner in Neukolln...

So welcome to this blog from a little corner in Neukolln, Berlin. I am a British songwriter living in Berlin, and this blog is going to document the adventure of being a musician in this wonderful city,
as well as various musings/rants & other apostasies!

A fitting place seemed to be from the bedroom & a quote from Goethe sums up where this blog begins:

Talents are best nurtured in solitude. Character is best formed in the stormy billows of the world

So here is fittingly a little picture of a rehearsal with my band mates towards our next gig. We have an acoustic residency at Holz Kohlen on Weser Strasse in Neukolln beginning on the 5th of November. There are new band mates including Lucas who is a double-bass guru from Vienna, and Philip who is a local sticks-man who will be playing the Cojon.

The songs are usually played as electric rock n roll as anyone who knows the gigs will know, so it should be fun to re-interpret the material & with new people. Weser Strasse is my favourite street in Berlin, and this set is actually designed specifically with the street in mind. It is less a place for the electric guitar, and more a place for the old school - lungs bellowing, fingers bleeding, hips shaking, sweat pouring....dam its good to be alive in these times.

Here is the link for Holz Kohlen:

http://www.holz-kohlen.de/

It is the most wonderful intimate little bar, and you could actually miss it if you didn´t know it was there. It is run by Dirk & Shirin, who have made a wonderful unique atmosphere. Unlike some of the other bars in Neukolln, you can still chill and actually do some thinking / musing - although the secret is getting out and every time I go there there are more people there!

Anyway, the gig will happen in the tiny little room in the back. Come enjoy - here are the dates:

Friday 5th November
Friday 19 November
Friday 10 December

See ya then, and thanks for taking a peep here x