So I’ve just added a photo I took of the Workers’ Museum on the last post. It’s a bit of a workaround as I try and sort out how best to put up photos by not using Flickr. Word Press is all sexy and stuff, but the last upgrade forgot one tiny bit of code, and that was crucial to using Flickr. Any tips appreciated.

Quiet day today, as I recover from a seriously bad cold, so no music. More soon.

Actually, that’s a lie. Here’s something to make you smile and wince. It’s Danni and Armi, who did a number of duets together, both on and offstage by all accounts. She died quite young but left us a nice Finnish version of “Video Killed the Radio Star,” which I’ll post soon enough. Spike Jonz eat your heart out (and yes I’ve seen the Finnish disco video, too). Don’t blink or you’ll miss the show’s host. Thanks to Antti P for this one.

Iso G.

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Arrived relatively unscathed into Stockholm late afternoon on Tuesday. Busily trying to wrap my head around a new transit system. I always figure if you can deal with public transit in a city, the rest falls into place. It seems remarkably efficient, but a bit run down and dirty, which distinguishes it from Helsinki, which seems so much tidier all round.

Within hours of my arrival, Johan and Hillevi, along with myself and Helene, a graduate student at Norrköping, were busy reproducing the opening paragraph from Simon Frith’s Performing Rites, listening to the latest in Swedish pop, rock and hip-hop. Sure you can re-enact your favourite scene from a novel, but an academic text? (Not really my favourite scene from Rites, but you get the point.) Bizarre but very pleasant. Already in love with the Swedish cheesecake, and the cloudberry sauce (I think the Finns want to claim this as theirs, but I’m not taking sides. It’s amazing in either place).

Did some record shopping, thought about museums and found the Academic Bookstore. I’ve been battling a serious cold, which hit its stride yesterday, just in time for me to move my very heavy and awkward bags around the Stockholm public transit system. Getting to Norrköping was a sniffling pain in the ass, all the time me very conscious of my very big red nose and my constant hacking and sneezing, all the way to Norrköping. Oh, the glares I got.

I’ve been told by some (and a guidebook) Norrköping is Sweden’s “Manchester,” and they’re not far off. The Advanced Cultural Studies Institute of Sweden, where I’ll be a visiting researcher for the next two months, is on a small island (I mean small at about 20 metres across, if that), right next to the Workers’ Museum. I like what I’ve seen of the city so far (haven’t yet been to my new home, but apparently it’s in the old hospital). Nice red brick buildings, plenty of slow flowing rivers and just the right temperature. Can’t wait until I’m properly healthy and can do a little sightseeing.

I’ve been to Finland’s “Manchester,” Tampere, which actually has stores which bear this title. Thankfully the people are a lot prettier in Tampere than they are in their borrowed namesake. It’s an old textile town which has undergone the same sort of urban regeneration process as Manchester, whereby its old, disused factories have been turned into galleries, cafés and lofts. The city celebrates itself as a working-class town and has wonderful statues dedicated to the workers (I’ve been told that my Institute in Norrköping is connected to the Workers’ Museum). Not unlike Manchester, it is also home to a number of Finland’s best known bands and is known for its particular “sound.” Not so much in the way of club culture there; rather, more straight ahead rock.

Our rock’n'roll moment in Tampere: while leaving our hotel one day I noticed someone wearing a brand new Uriah Heep t-shirt (a bit odd I thought, but then, the Finnish predilection for hard rock is a deep one). Then two stocky guys wearing Uriah Heep ski vests followed. Taking them for roadies, I asked if Uriah Heep was in town, to which he replied “Yes we are.” Seems they were on their Finnish tour. Next stop Oulu! He told us to come by later that night “if you don’t have anything better to do.” We did, thankfully. We ended our night at a place run by Markku Peltola (Man Without a Past). We head there and it was a night of dreadful Finnish rock and blues, with a band made up of a bunch of very weary-looking journeymen, saved only by dancing lesbians and one very drunk character who was dancing with a chair. We saddle up the bar and get our drinks. A man well into his pints is eyeing Sirpa and he makes his move. It turns out it’s Markku Peltola and Sirpa and he are old friends. They knew each other back in the eighties, when they both lived in the same city (Joensuu). A friendly enough guy, if perhaps a bit deep into the sauce at this point.

I’ve been trying to upload pictures, but it appears that Word Press is not Flickr friendly. Will try to sort that out soon.

More music, this time with a Swedish bent, and some Finnish new wave (bet you thought you’d never hear that). First off, a power pop number from Sky Mining, En Ëngel. Not much known about this group, but, at points, it reminds me of The Other Ones. The next one is a little lo-fi synthpop from Mikko Saarela, “Kärpästen Juhlat.” Music of this sort has been difficult to find in Finland. I dug this out from a compilation of “Rock Disco” which came with a couple of other Finnish songs, but it was mainly OMD, Human League and BEF, with the Finnish content seeming somewhat cursory. They’re in good company here with Mikko’s tribute to the mosquito.

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A shortie today, as I write from the gleaming Munich airport, trying to kill some time before I hit Stockholm. More soon, but I’m one of those people who can’t sleep when they know they’ve got an early flight, so I’m knackered. Thought you should hear what will be my theme song for Stockholm until I find something else (Secret Service anyone? And Swedish music is more than a four-letter word, just so you know. And it’s better than The Hives as well). A little 80s intrigue with Virna Lindt and her esponiage-tinged groover, “Attention Stockholm.”

Iso G.

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Some days have passed and I’ve been pondering the rather informal formality of the Berlin’s cultural life. For those not familiar with the Berlin scene, there are currently three different species of bars here: legal, illegal, and semi-legal. As the post-Wall dust has settled, the number of illegal bars has shrunk dramatically from their early nineties ubiquity. Once a cultural frontier town with its own logic of unfolding, the chaos of the post-Wall Berlin scene has precipitated out into an established network of bars which are various shades of these three types: first, legal bars, of course, are the ones we’re most familiar with and escape the watchful eye of the polizei; second, illegal bars are those that happen off the radar, usually in some space left abandoned, neglected, forgotten, or just run-down enough to give off the right kind of aura; and semi-legal bars, which are the more interesting kind, for they remain a sort of netherworld of in-between-ness which provides the social and aesthetic context for so much of what happens in the city’s current scene. Think of the semi-legal bar as a place much like a social club: all one has to do is become a member, either by signing a guest book (like at the Hotel Arkonia on Arkonaplatz) or by gaining a special pass or key (such as those found at Bassy Bar - pictured above - or White Trash). In each case, what this means is that if the police come, for whatever reason (typically a place is too noisy - which is not unexpected as many of these places are in residential areas), the owner of said bar can simply claim that these people are members (who themselves might be asked to provide proof that they’re members). The police retreat on their merry way.

What strikes me about these places, or rather, what is so unremarkable about them, is that the city tolerates them. City administrators understand what these bars and clubs do for Berlin’s cultural economy: creating and maintaining a circulatory system which keeps it alive (pardon the body metaphor; it’s the only one I had, ahem, at hand). The result is that for the most part they’re left alone, allowed to furtively do their work in the city’s underground (and this can be meant literally). It remains an irrepressible, vibrant infrastructure that keeps things relatively fresh here in Berlin.

Socially, these semi-legal bars have the air of exclusivity about them, but as Maffesoli reminds us, “exclusivity does not mean exclusion.” Instead, this is the stylized response salvaged out of the wreckage that was Berlin’s past and present, and as such, various mechanisms of social inclusivity/exclusivity have become the norm here, not out of some desire to create social divisiveness, but as a way to reconstitute a city out of fragments, through a piecemeal web of networks and nodes made up of bars, galleries, clubs, etc., in order to make the city matter and matter city again. Berlin remains an open city in this sense, playful and hardly serious. Simmel’s comments on turn-of-the-last-century Berlin are worth recalling again, but their ring carries a different tone today: “A terrible seriousness will… replace this gleaming intoxication.” He said this just prior to WWI, seeing in pre-War Berlin a kind of irreverence that anticipated what would happen fifteen years hence. The city is serious business he suggests, and we should treat it as such. But then the ur-moment of quashing frivolity in Berlin would soon enough assert itself.

So where does that leave us? Where is the soothsayer now? We’re on the other side of that historical moment and so much has happened which is burdened with its own inexorable weight. In the city of fragments, the fragmented city (newly reconstituted as a city of bits, one might say), there is a sense of levity which does and doesn’t contend with these problems, let alone allow their easy resolution. In part, that has to do with the fact that so many people have descended on Berlin from elsewhere, so their image of the city and their lived experience often don’t jive with the past, or jive in ways which make life in Berlin a complex series of symbolic and existential encounters which are often marked by a kind of lightness by virtue of they’re not being “from here.” They deal with the contradiction as part of what makes Berlin meaningful. Stephen Barber:

The European city has never possessed unity, and now the multiplicity of voices passing between the transforming city and the transforming individual creates an utter fragmentation. This aggravated sense of dissolution in upheaval is a source of anxiety, an upending of visual identity: but it also incites the exhilaration that is integral to a moment of reconstitution from zero, to a new way of working a sensation into the matter of the city.

But the ways of reviving the hulking, moribund mass which was post-War/Wand/Wende Berlin have been complex, arcane and terribly fraught. A city economically depressed, socially and ideologically divided, its uneven halves yoked together even more unevenly, it has become the locus of some of the most exciting music and culture in Europe at the moment. It is a artistic Weldtstadt for a number of creative and entrepreneurial types. They’ve made the most of pallid Berlin over the past fifteen years and it is almost giddy with activity, musical and otherwise, the city sensate.

Shift your sensory register for a moment, from the image of a city full of fun and exhilaration to something which exudes a bit more menace, a reminder that Berlin has no “zero,” the awareness that nullifying the past remains an impossible project. A brief story: The other night I paused as I heard laughter echoing off the walls of Prenzlauerberg’s pastel-hued façades. I thought briefly of R. Murray Schafer and his anti-urban take on the city’s soundscape: we’ve become alienated from our own bodies now, he said, where we hardly hear our one own footsteps in the city. On the contrary: I would argue that this is far from being the case. Besides being an obvious cinematic trope, the sound of a single pair of footsteps remains one of the most evocative sounds of the city for me. I heard it many times, late at night, on some of Helsinki’s streets, where you might be the only person on a dark street (the streets of Helsinki, and more so Berlin, seem so much darker than those in North America), or someone else may be telegraphing their approach a hundred metres down the road. In either case, the sound remains forever urban for me, both haunting and deeply comforting. It puts the scale of the city, the ratio of body to building, into (audible) perspective. By contrast, this echoing laughter caught me off guard and called to mind another kind of scale and perspective. There was something particularly creepy about its tone, a hint of mania that rose above and beyond the sidewalk, and for a moment I was transported back to another time and reminded that this same sort of sound was part of another, more horrific, soundscape in Berlin’s past.

It was only a moment, but one hardly forgets that Berlin remains a city of ghosts and angels.

I should note that I’m writing this during Bread and Butter, Berlin’s premier fashion week, when areas like Mitte (and the newly hot Wedding) are overrun with pretty boys and girls. What sounds would best suit this mood? Well, I’ve found yet another trashy bit of Berlin-flavoured music, this time in the form of a somewhat tepid number by R&D (from Birmingham, England, from what I can tell). “Berlin,” from 1984, is an utterly frivolous take on East/West relations and with lyrics like “In Berlin/Only the birds fly free” and “But if only I could reach/Over this wall and shake hands” had as little to do with the coming down of the wall as that Americanische Engel, Herr Hasselhof. It’s got a bit of a low-fi ELO feel, which is somewhat disarming and manages to almost salvage the song’s sentiment. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Listen and then delete.

And for a taste of Helsinki’s mean streets, I also give you Helena Siltala and “Ranskalaiset Korot,” a nice light jazzy number, which conjures up images of a slinky Finnish city. I saw a moving karaoke version of this while en route to Stockholm from Finland last year. Moving because it was a cruise ship; the original stands, or rather, walks alone.

Iso G

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I’ve been spending the last few days just informally chatting with people about their life in Berlin, doing my bits of research as I go along. The start/stop tempo has much to do with my gearing up for the trip North, to Norrköping, in Sweden. More about that later.

A requisite bit of reading one must do while in Berlin, if sociologically inclined, is to wander through the work of Georg Simmel. Of course, he enjoys a bit of cache nowadays (the lustre may have worn off somewhat as of late), but there is so much of his work that informs my understanding of Berlin and its social life. Granted he was writing a century ago, but his writing still resonates with contemporary Berlin. In part, I think has much to do with the rapid kind of transformations that the city has undergone since the Wende.

With Simmel’s words forming the background noise of my recent conversations, it’s been a pleasure to listen to a number of “cultural entrepreneurs” described their relationship to the city. As one quickly finds out, and in a not-so-odd parallel with Montreal, many of the people who live in Berlin currently are not originally from here. One such person is my temporary roommate, who came from West Germany and settled in West Berlin just prior to the Wall coming down. Moving into the former East, post-Wall, he recounted tales of squats and battles with neo-Nazis in the streets. The former East had the look and feel of a real frontier town back then, and it retains some vestigial sense of this even today (though one often hears more laments about how great it was in 1991 versus now. A standard lament, not indigenous to Berlin, and one which applies to any city worth its scenic salt). Amidst all the chaos of the newly-united Berlin, he told me, he recalls trying to make a simple phone call from Mitte (which was once the city’s economic/financial heart, but lost that status once the Communists closed it off, as they wanted to expel any of those kinds of capitalist connotations from the place. It was easy enough to do, as Mitte had been pretty much obliterated during WWII). Communication systems, including public transit, were completely redone in order to accommodate the physical and ideological divide. Hence, making a phone call from the former East to the former West was a tricky task, as amenities were still very sketchy, even a few years after the Wall came down. One place which did have a connection was the Village Voice café, yes, named after that illustrious New York weekly (although when I went there, you couldn’t find a copy of said paper). From here, one would line up and try to make that all important phone call to friends or families. This of course, was pre-mobile, so it was all very lo-fi, and touch-and-go, and to my ears, a little charming.

The current Berlin scene is full of people who can tell you similar kinds of stories, and it’s become part of the lingering mythology of post-1989 Berlin. As his girlfriend reminded us, though, we’re now fifteen years away from the Wall coming down and the Wall itself was only up for twenty-eight years. The problem, again a bit of a cliche about Berlin, is the Mauer in den Köpfen (Wall in the head). There is some truth to this, but even a kind of cursory tour of the former West, suggests that it is in fact also an infrastructural and material fact, too. The East was where the money went after the Wall came down and the West looks like something that should be in a glass case, gathering dust. It’s a strange testament to the difficulties the Allies had in maintaining it as a showcase for democracy and capitalism. But that too is now part of its charm, as people who’ve settled in Prenzlauerberg and Mitte have begun to entertain the idea of “going out” there for clubs and parties. The neglected West is better than the gentrified East for some.

For those that choose to stay in the East, I’m inclined to think also that the propensity to anchor one’s self to a particular Kiez, or neighbourhood, has much to do with age, as the people I’m talking to are all in their early-to-mid 30s and have been here for an average of ten years or more. Getting older gracefully, using the cultural capital acquired over the past decade to find a bit more security and stability, has become more important for them. That’s not to say that life is all rosy, but it maintains its uneven charm. Many of them still work on the assumption that something is good for three years and that’s good enough. Time to move on, they say. The rhythm of life in Berlin is relentess, yet this very social fact persists in being part of what makes the city so appealing.

What struck me about this tale, and those told to me by others, is what brings us back to Simmel. These sorts of stories and experiences link the new Berlin to the old, as the number of creative types who populate neighbourhoods like Mitte, Prenzlauerberg, Friedrichshain or Kreuzberg, as they readily articulate, in words and experiences, the narratives that form the backbone of the “communal ambience” that Maffesoli is on about. This is in part a culture of what Simmel called the Erlebnisgesellschaft, that is a society oriented towards the enrichment of personal experience. That’s not meant to overstate Berlin’s narcissism (although its fetish for fashion, and in particular, shoes, taken alongside people’s inclination to archive and document every aspect of the Berlin scene in an encyclopedic, um, fashion says much as well), but what has happened is that a particular class fragment, an informally organized but highly visible creative class, has consciously and unconsciously eked out their existence in accordance with Berlin’s past as a place where novelty and fun are found have historically been found in abundance, and they’ve done so according to their own visions of what is exciting and new. Everybody wants to make something happen (but as an ex-pat from New Zealand suggested to me in an aside: Berlin is a place where everything happens and nothing happens).

As Walter Rathenau suggested decades ago, “Berlin is the parvenu city but also the city of parvenus.” In this, the largest construction site in Europe, Rathenau’s comment rings true.

So in a tribute to the glory of the West, and as part of my continuing series of semi-obscure tunes, here’s a little flexi-disc found at a fleamarket here in Berlin, a tribute to that jewel of (West)Berlin (boasting a food shop larger than Harrod’s),KaDeWe.

Iso G.

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The inevitable blog fatigue sets in, now. I’m watching friends’ blogs slowly gather cyberdust, as they seek inspiration. Or perhaps they’re still digesting their Xmas meals. Or perhaps they’re too aware that they were just having a life so they could blog it. Reminds me of what Sting once said (I’m paraphrasing here): “I started having relationships just so I could write songs about them” (which reminds of what Robert Forster of the Go-Betweens said/sang in “Man O’Sand to Girl O’Sea”: “Feel so sure of our love/I’ll write a song about us breaking up.” And then they break up). Regardless, let’s try to keep things happening. You hold up your end of the deal and I’ll hold up mine.

I’m still getting used to life in Berlin. The city is as grey as it’s ever been, but somehow lately it’s seemed more so. Managed to get to the Department of European Ethnology today. They’ve moved from their old place on Schiffbauerdamm, along the Spree, to deepest Mitte, near Unter den Linden. In a bit of a bad judgment (read: German bureaucracy), they’ve been forced to move when the place is about 1/3 done, so that the interior of the place looks like much of the area around Mitte generally: one big construction site. That hoary old cliche comes easily to mind: Berlin is always becoming, never being.

Today I was going over my students’ papers from my course on Canadian cultural studies at the University of Helsinki. I have a general dislike of giving exams and I wasn’t in a position to have them write a paper about Mon Oncle Antoine or Twitch City for that matter, as they’re just not going to get good source material in Finland (although Da Vinci’s Inquest was shown on television apparently). So I gave them the exam questions in advance, which means that most of them were well done. Of course, I have to have some control element, so I also gave them definitions, most of which they got (how many of you know about the Canada First Movement?). However, I was quite fond of one student’s definition of cultural studies: “It studies phenomena of cultures. History without wars and presidents.” In some sideways sense, that’s true, I guess. We just won’t tell Stuart.

I should work on my sleep patterns a bit more as well. I’ve spent the last few nights glued to the TV, watching old noir films and the odd Russian disaster pic from the 80s (found a couple in Helsinki). Last night was particularly amusing, as I tried to sort out why the DVD player would only play three of the five DVDs from that great Noir box set. It kept saying “wrong region code” for two of them. But they’re from the same set, dammit. At about 5 or 6 AM, I’m drifting off, knowing that the Zionkirsche bells are going to wake me up at noon. And I wonder where these chest pains are coming from? Get yourself together my friend.

I’ve also been working on the IASPM website. Don’t visit it for the time being, unless you want to see what it looked like at some point back in November. Ahhh…November. Things were much simpler then. In a fit of pc pique, somehow the old start page has been uploaded, and I can’t find the most recent page. I just wanted to remove an old link and now I’m subject to the caprices of a program which seems to have a mind of its own, one with a keen sense of nostalgia. Damn you BBEdit.

And speaking of nostalgia, what would a post here be without one musical treat from the past. I had recently dug up some Martha and the Muffins albums, trying to get reacquainted with their other singles, in particular “Swimming” and “Danseparc” (although “Swimming” wasn’t really a single proper, it did get played on Toronto radio). In terms of the latter, there’s a story attached.

In about 1988, I sold off all my records to pay my university tuition. Of course, I’ve spent the last sixteen years trying to get much of this music back. I’ve been pretty good at re-collecting most of it. On our little trip back to Montreal during Xmas, Sirpa and I made a pit stop at Primitive Records on St. Denis. After finding a rare 12-inch from the 80s, the clerk asked if I was interested in 80s music. “Yes,” I answered coyly and with a blush of shame. He then said that in the back room there were over 5000 12-inches from the 80s. Most of them sealed. With a pleading look in my eye, I asked Sirpa if I….could….just…..have….a….quick….look. Almost out of pity, I think, she nodded. Which was brave of her, considering it was one of the coldest days of the year and the back room was not heated, save for the cup of coffee that kept her hands warm. Plucking up that part of her not-yet-frozen Finnish stoicism, she watched as I dove in, lost for more than an hour in a sea of musty reminisce. It might have been that sudden change in my breathing, the glazed look in my eye, the occasional grunts of disgust and moans of joy, or my bad posture, but she sat patiently as I indulged my passion, giving me the space I need to revert to that altered state of hunter/hoarder. But perhaps I was an interesting study and she the detached anthropologist. Either way, she sat back and listened politely as I muttered to myself (”Got it,” “Need it,” “Got it”). It is indeed a pathology, but one I bear proudly and one which makes your life that much richer.

So this is where I stumbled upon Martha the Muffins’ “Danseparc,” the extended promo. I’d never heard it before. Bongos, bongos, bongos. Oh those bongos. And the skronky sax. And the David Byrne-esque vocals from Mark Gane (which come across much better on “Swimming,” actually). The band will forever be the sound of arty Queen Street in Toronto for me, and will therefore always redeem a street which has lost much of that new wave charm, subsumed now by the sickly sweet aroma of Lush soaps and teak-toned crap from Caban. And I’ll always remember my geeky adolescent self going off to see Mark Gane give some sort of synthesizer symposium at the CNE, at a time when I entertained ideas of being the next Howard Jones (I know, I should have said John Foxx, but he didn’t have the mime). Be glad I didn’t.

Iso G.

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I’ve returned to Berlin, after 4 months in Helsinki. I will say more about Helsinki soon. For now, I reside on one of Berlin’s newly renovated strips, Kastanienallee. Formerly part of the East, it is now a hipster’s paradise, where the city’s trashiest and trendiest can meet up and continue the Wende revolution. It reminds of that part of the Main, back in Montreal, between Prince Arthur and Pine, except with dogshit. Here you can eat a decent fastfood meal for under 6 Euros. In fact, my favourite Middle Eastern place is Babel, which has an amazing mango sauce they throw in with their falafel or haloumi. Of course, anyone from Montreal would love it as finding a consistently good falafel there is damn near impossible.

My return has also meant that I’ve savoured the tastes of Der Imbiss W, run by an ex-pat Canadian, who moonlights in Fuzzy Love. Tonight I overhead Gordon W describing a friend’s receipt of the Governor-General’s award. He described Adrienne Clarkson’s partner, John Ralston Saul, as the “philosopher-husband.” Almost as bad as being called Mr. Madonna.

I’m fond of Kastanienallee because, much like the Main, I’m within a three block radius of 4 different record shops: Station B, which is mainly new and is one of those shops where they put things aside for you. It’s also one of the places I ran into an old acquaintance, Barthold (who I promise to hang out with); Oye, which is dance music heaven sometimes; Da Capo, which holds a place in my heart because it carries a lot of East German records and the staff are generally pissed on beer and/or wine by 4, which makes their finding your record in the back that much more interesting; and finally, one whose name currently escapes me, packed with NDW (German New Wave) and heaps of disco, electro, and hip hop (alongside plenty of rock). I found L’Trimm there on one trip. Today’s loot includes Die Doraus und die Marinas (Andreas Dorau’s pop incarnation).

And yes, you should have this somewhere where you can listent to it at least thrice daily (for the first at least): “Die Doraus und die Marinas - Fred vom Jupiter.”

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A simple goodbye to Montreal, as Sirpa and I head back to Helsinki today. It’s a mini-epic of a journey (about 13 hours), which stings twice as much because neither of us can sleep on planes and it’s a night flight. (The only moving vehicles I can sleep in are the ones I’m driving.) It’s been a good trip here, seeing friends, having a mellow New Year’s Eve (at Anthony and Michelle’s place, with champagne and crepes suzettes, then over to Sala and then Casa for a closer). We caught up on our movies and ate too much good food.

I’m back in Helsinki for a day, then to Berlin for the next sojourn. I’ll be giving updates on the Transmediale festival/Club Transmediale as they unfold. Much good music to be had, I think.

And without further ado, here’s something to make you wistful for Neue Deutsche Welle (German New Wave). It’s Lili Berlin and “Ost Berlin.” Two guys and a girl, they in tight spandex bodysuits, she done up in platinum blonde dreads and white pancake makeup, sans eyebrows. I’m particularly fond of the “Stasi” bit, near the end. This mixes well with Robert Palmer’s “Johnny and Mary,” if you’re thinking of making your 80s night something special.

There’s more: Because we’re shortly back in Helsinki, I thought I’d post what I think is the best version of “Fever,” by Laila Kinnunen, one of Finland’s great pop singers. Never has the french horn sounded so good. Here it is, “Kuume.”

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Not such a good way to begin the new year, as it’s with some regret that I note Lionel Trains has declared bankruptcy. This comes, in part, as a result of some alleged corporate espionage. This is particularly poignant because, as some of you may not know, my father was a big collector of Lionel trains. I say poignant because yesterday (December 31st) was the anniversary of his death and I just read this story today. I’ll have to get those trains out of my mom’s place and do something proper with them once I get settled in New Zealand, a fitting tribute for both I hope. I did a have a nice loop running up around the old place on St. Laurent, but I’ve not had the space available since.

And for the first time, I really address the theme today, with two songs about trains. The first is some Italo electro from Moonbase with “Waiting for a Train.” Again, not much is known about this group (the vocal treatment reminds me of Flash and the Pan a little bit). The second is a German pop man, Neoangin, with his cover of the Cure’s “Jumping Someone Else’s Train.” From a 7-inch single I found in Berlin last year, it features various lo-fi casio-tuned versions of Cure songs. And it comes with a nice cover of the artist as Herr Smith, looking as flaccid and pallid as Bob does today.

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