the BrookfieldLodge blog

Have they come and passed? Are they ahead of me? Or are they now?

I guess we will never know. I do know that some great years have passed, what we shared and remember are fantastic moments and great ideas thrown together in a big mish-mash. (If that is even a word…) And I am sure there are some great moments yet to come, in the big future we will experience things we never dreamt off, and some of them will be together, and that will feel like the best feeling ever when it comes. And now feels good too, it is too bad that I don’t get to see my best friends as often as I would like, and work can be tiring at times, but I find joy in what I do and I take pleasure in the great beauty I surround myself with. (Yes, that is a person specific reference if you are pondering…) Too say it short, life is good. Even though certain things are missing…

I guess we can’t have it all, at least not at the same time. But as long as we wish for things, they may still happen. And christmas and the end of a year isn’t too far away… which brings promise of a great re-union of the musketeers!

I was back on my desk on Saturday. I have been using it for testing and demo stuff in the warehouse but haven’t actually used a blue one live since about Iron Maiden, I have been stuck with grandmother ever since I got back from Scotland in August. And what a sensation. To greet it, say hello as you remove the dust cover, let your fingers stroke the leather armrest and brush the keypad so that it is clean and ready for action. Hold still as the silent hum of the fan tells you it has been powered on, feel the processor crunching numbers faster than you can imagine, see the screens spring to life in a splendor of LED blue and white. It is like a firework like nothing else, a show just for you as you sit there. Your fingers anticipate what is going to happen, they are ready, ready for what they are meant to to. It is like the safety of a weapon has come off, they twitch and stretch and are ready to recieve orders. Like soldiers on a row, one button each, everyone know where they are supposed to be, and like a perfect team they begin the strange ballet of commanding lights around. One touch and a sequence of actions both physical and psychological are put into motion as the flying pig soars high above anything else you have ever touched. And you remember, this is what I do. This is what I do. And life, life, is good.

i Have great exPectations

ps. for those of you who are tired with CAD work and heavy computer tools, try this: http://www.napkincad.com/

I was just sitting here listening to “Run” from Snow Patrol. And it just happened that I flipped through some of the pictures we took over the past few years in Liverpool. “Run” always somehow reminds me of one evening we had at “Ireland” because this song was played there. It was one of the last nights we had together in the Pool. Well, the song finished and another great song came on… and the lyrics seemed to fit in perfectly. So I thought I should share this with you guys…:

Oh when I look back now,
that summer seemed to last forever,
and if I had the choice
ya, I’d always wanna be there
those were the best days of my life.
[...]
Man we were killin’ time
We were young and restless
We needed to unwind
I guess nothin’ can last forever - forever, no

So much for now. Still waiting for Mr. E to come on Skype

I do believe that between us, and between us and other people we have had many discussions about what art is. I may not go as far as saying this is art, but it is alot closer than alot of the crap you see nowadays.

This is a photo I took of a poster on the side of an escalator on the underground.

(Sticker reads “Know Yourself, Be Yourself, Love Yourself, and you will be Loved.”)

Exactly what It says on the tin.

Sometimes it is really strange what your mind does with you:

On Friday night I derigged a show in a hotel in Zürich. When I was back in the warehouse it was 3 o’clock in the morning. And the two guys that run the warehouse were still in there putting things back in the shelves. 38 tons of equipment were used in the show we did last week. And they had to clean up the stuff alone and trough the night. When I asked why they were still there and alone, they said, nobody would help them and the boss isn’t interested in how things get done as long as they get done. The guy said they found a word for this: The forgotten.

Somehow this phrase got stuck in the back of my head. Yesterday I was on a shopping trip for some things I need here in my flat. And when I drove by small family the phrase suddenly popped up in my head again. The daughter of the couple must have been about 16 or 17 years old and she wasn’t the slimmest person I ever saw. And she gave away this impression of someone with a bit low self esteem that a lot of corpulent people have. It was only a second I really noticed this group and especially this girl but I thought, there are a lot of forgotten people in our society. We tend to categorize and look at people through a filter. People that don’t really meet the current expectations when it comes to body size and shape or the general appearance are often filtered away. And we lose a lot of good things this person might be able to do. Everyone has a certain talent, the challenge is finding it. This is something from “Billy Elliot” and I think it is very true. But even more important is to actually look for it and to give everyone the chance to show us their individual talents. And maybe at some point there won’t be as many forgotten around anymore.

Great thoughts on a Sunday again.

This is what I have been doing since the beginning of this week. Somehow I seem to never leave the venue. Tonight I will have to program the show. At least the technical specs are not bad: 109 dimmer channels, 40 movinglights (old Martin stuff) and 3 (I specified 6 but didn’t get them in the end) Atomics. It came out as a big rig… and all this for only 5 minutes to present a new car. And all this runs off a HOG iPC… which is really crap. I really wonder why and who created this desk… I’ll give you an update at the weekend.

I am going to play with lights now…

Welcome to the new WordPress all, readers and authors alike! We have now made a complete upgrade of the platform and the database to offer more stability and more flexibility as well as better support for plugins, media, XHTML, browsers and other stuff that we had problems with in the previous version.

For the readers, not much should have changed, as we have kept the old appearance and only minor aestethical adjustments have been made.

For the writers, it’s a whole new game. You will find the dashboard completely reworked, and that things have been moved around a bit, but hopefully you will be able to familiarise yourself with it quickly! If not, drop me a note and I’ll throw in a crash course in WP2.0+ while we’re at it!

tHe Prefect

The world is always the way we want to see it. This is how I would describe it. There are things we cannot change and there are things we can. But actually we all have to ultimate tool to change everything: Imagination.

It is the key that unlocks every door, the key that gives us the power to do whatever we want and ultimately imagination is what really changes the world in the end. It may well be that two and two will always add up to four. But who says it couldn’t be five? Or twelve? Or maybe … blue? You see, if you want to, you can always believe in something else and there is no real proof that 2 and 2 add up to 4. Why? Because it is only words and numbers, things we as human beings made up long time ago that describes something very abstract. Someone once imagined that one single thing equals the number 1 and the word describing it is called “one”. So here we go. But your imagination can still imagine it to be “blue”… why not? Because who said that “blue” describes a colour…? You see, this is one of the topics I really enjoy talking about. Tearing the system apart and thinking of it from a complete absurd point of view. Turning it upside down. This is what imagination does and this is what gives me my ideas. For everything.

It is important to keep our imagination alive. Because imagination is - as we all know, and I keep saying it over and over again - more important than knowledge… because knowledge is limited.

Enjoy the infinite freedom in your own head! Good night my friends!