Two things:
Went into the studio to day to record and we laid down the basic tracks for 5 songs. 3 of them I really like and I think they will turn out well. The other two I’m not so sure about. Its going to need some overdubs and creative mixing. The drums and bass are really good and tight so the overdubs should be easy. It’s interesting how when we are in the rehearsal space and on stage the songs sound totally different than when they come out of two speakers.
When I left my apartment to day I opened up the door and stepped out onto my stoop. I looked up accross the street and saw 5 or 6 neo-nazis standing there in all their glatzköpfige glory with their black bomber jackets, jack boots, flags and banners. Now keep in mind, I don’t live in Illinois. These were the German kind. Me being a foreigner, my first thought was “oh shit, did they find my blog?” but then I remembered that today in Lüneburg, the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD – super rightwing party in Germany, kinda like Republicans without a sense of humor. Oh, wait…:) was having a march for some bullshit about foreigners, education and jobs only for Germans blah, blah, blah. I gave em an evil stare and walked to my car and left. On the way out of town I noticed there were cops all over the place not unlike two weeks ago when the Castor rolled through Lüneburg. In the last couple of weeks there was all kinds of publicity about the NPD march and an anti-NPD march was organized to take place on the same day, today. M. said there were helicopters and polizei all over town on every street and corner keepin the peace. The city council tried to forbid the march but because the party itself is not verboten, they couldn’t deny them the right to assembly and protest. All they, the NPD, had to do was get a permit for their demonstration. The march started in a part of town called Kaltenmoor. I guess you could call it the bad part of town because it is on the wrong side of the tracks and the people that live there are mostly foreigners from Eastern Europe and Turkey. So if they wanted to provoke people and cause trouble they couldn’t have picked a better place to do it. Because of the history here a lot of Germans are flabbergasted that the NPD should be allowed to march and believe they should be forbidden. As an American I see it a little differently. I was brought up with the concept of free speech. They can march up and down the street carrying signs and yelling rascist garbage until they are blue in the face. I don’t care. To me it is like putting idiots on display as an example of how not to be. If enough people confront them and shout them down then they will see that hardly anybody agrees with them and their political views. And that is exactly what happened. The total number of NPD supporters was about 150. The number of people demonstrating against the NPD was about 1500. Click here for a report from the Lüneburg website. In German but with lots of pictures.