“Aaa-aaaaahrgh, we fade to grey” – dresden, missy

“Feel the rain like an English summer
Hear the notes from a distant song
Stepping out from a back shop poster
Wishing life wouldn’t be so long
Aaah-aaah, we fade to grey”
Visage

I’m fine with fluffy light grey days but these dark lead-grey days all covered in dirty melting snow are killing me.

Last week an EU commission gave us new but hardly surprising numbers: In Europe women still earn 17% less than men for doing the same jobs. In Germany it’s even 23%. No big outcry. Business as usual. ‘Equality’ as usual.

I’ve enjoyed my little excursion to Dresden’s AZ Conni last Friday. I was late, partly because I have a reputation to defend, partly (and that was the bigger part) because it was a horrible ride. Darkness and rain is fine with me but I hate driving through fog and it was awfully foggy. I was still in time though for a little soundcheck and to sit down and shake off the driving drowsiness before the show started. It felt rather karaoke to sing along to my laptop set but it was fun. I even played a few old ones, “Some story being told” and for the first time live: my “Reprovisional” Fugazi cover. There even were a few people there. I couldn’t see anyone in the audience because of the dazzling spotlights but I could swear between the songs there was some clapping and woohoo-ing from somewhere in the dark. 😉

Shooting Spires was great. There’s so many people these days who pile up a heap of analog effects & sampling machines in their bedroom and feel all deep and as if they were making outstanding experimental music. Most of them sadly are wrong and that there are so many of them is seriously spoiling this genre for me. Same as with ambient netaudio bedroom producers six or seven years ago. Lots of boring average soundalikes. Shooting Spires wouldn’t be wrong. He has a great feeling for sounds and timing and of course melodies. Sound-conscious lo-fi goodness. And he has a great voice. But I’ve said that before when I wrote about Parts&Labor. And his solo work isn’t just saddo slow songs but also noisy kicking punk smashers. Lovurrrly.

All in all it was a kind of short evening compared to all those long dj nights I’ve gotten used to but a nice one. It was good to meet Marcel of Altin Village and BJ and his girlfriend, and, hey, to have a whole dormitory to myself.

The drive back again led me through shitty weather but I enjoyed the long drive. Hours spent with a humming motor and a plastic cup of coffee in my hand and listening to an audiobook. ‘At peace with oneself’. This time it was Tess Gerritsen’s ‘Bone Garden’, not her best novel as reviews have it, but it has a nice dual storyline: In the present a woman unburies a skeleton when breaking up her new house’s garden and she tries to trace back the origin when she hears it’s the skeleton of a woman that was murdered back in the 1830s. The other line is the story of medical students and a seamstress back in 1830, the time of a serial killer, the Boston reaper. Gerritsen almost bites off more than she can chew with packing so much material into this novel, it’s historical / mystery / medical crime / romance novel all in one. You can feel that she had to concentrate so much on keeping all those strings and informations in check that the writing suffers a bit but with an audiobook it doesn’t matter so much and the story is so entertaining that it makes up for that.

I’ve read that Missy Magazin #02 has Tine Plesch on their next feminist trading card. I guess their intentions are good. But it feels wrong. Oh so wrong. I mean, it’s good that Missy Mag exists. I guess. I mean, I like to imagine there’s a target group of women out there who’ve never been in touch with feminism before and haven’t heard that there are creative active successful women out there and then they read Missy mag and suddenly feel like feminism lost its stale stench and can be all cool and hip too and suddenly they get all feminist too. I don’t feel like the target group. It’s a bit like the argument that an antifa friend of mine used years ago to defend Rage Against The Machine as a political band: For kids who’ve never been in touch with politics before they could be the mainstream starter drug that gets them thinking and into activism.
Me, I still don’t like Rage Against The Machine nor can I take them politically serious. Missy, the german Rage Against Bono Coldplay of feminism. I don’t know. Maybe I’m unfair. Maybe I just don’t get that pop feminism thing. Maybe it’s personal because even if they repeat for the hundredst time that they are not about beauty ideals Missy makes me feel like these days I don’t even look good enough for feminism any more. Which is quite an achievement because no non-feminist women’s mag has ever managed to make me feel unfit. 😉
I miss Tine. She always knew the best and most gruesome new crime novels by female writers.

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