Rene

After the last two slightly depressing ones, it's high time for a fun post again. But how do I get back to the routine of fun posting without showing off again? I'm just having a great time down here, filled with work which I enjoy, evenings full of music, and surfing in between...

So here's the solution: feature someone else for a change. Rene deserves a post. He's one of my best friends, and a lot of the fun I'm having down here is due to him. I would like to thank him for:

* Sharing his great music with me and letting me join him on stage on a couple of occasions. Check out his new Youtube video! The one major thing that's still on our todo list is to go busking...

* Convincing me to go see Underworld instead of a more serious movie. What a good choice!

(forget the Oscar - I'm herewith giving the "sexiest vampire of the year" award to Kate Beckinsale, very well deserved. Congratulations Kate!)

* Introducing me to Drawn Together. How could I have missed this?

* Introducing me to a couple of cool mates down here - Turin, Geoff, Oedi, ...

Thanks for everything, mate! To end this post, here's a picture of brave Rene singing as a frontman (!) jazz singer at Dizzy... he was scared as hell but did a great job in my opinion.

Louie Bellson died

Sad, sad sad. Check his webpage if you don't know him (which means that you're not a drummer). A lot of greats have recently passed... e.g. Max Roach, also not very long ago.

A somewhat more personal post...

Hi everyone out there!

Looking at my blog, I'm getting the impression that all I do is show off - look what a cool drummer I am, look how I'm travelling around the world, look, I go surfing...

I don't want to show off. I document things that make me happy and mean something to me, that's all. Anyhow I believe that this might be the overall impression that gets across, and with this post I'd like to change this a bit, by writing something serious for a change.

I herewith publicly announce that I'll "bury" the last year. It's actually a bit more than a year (but I'll keep calling it a year here), and it wasn't the greatest time for various reasons. Some bad things happened, not so much to me, more to others, but bad nevertheless. I think that, as a person, this last year changed me quite a bit, and hopefully for the better. I learned various things, one of them being that we all don't live forever, and therefore we have to live now, look ahead, and be careful to avoid wasting the time that we were given. I did waste a lot of time during this last year. I thought and did things which were just stupid, and feel sorry about it now (because it wasn't always cool for everybody involved), but I cannot change that anymore. That's a part of what I now understand; I've been thinking too much - about things which happened, AFTER they happened, which means that I've been thinking too much about the past. We shouldn't do that.

There are several BIG changes ahead - 2009 will surely end as the "year of change" in my personal history. I wanted it this way, and I'm happy about it. Now is the time to concentrate on the future.

Phew...

The next posting will probably be about fun again - drumming, surfing, whatever :)

The first Melbourne post

I guess that, with a bit more than a week now passed, it's about time for a first blog post.

Except for work (of course :) ), the week was music oriented. I went to see Rene play at the Espy on the day of arrival, we played a jam session at Dizzy's, an open stage at a place whose name I keep forgetting, and another open stage at the Spleen bar (where I accompanied Rene on a cardboard box and a beer barrel).

On the weekend, there was the big ending of the St. Kilda festival, with all kinds of stuff happening in the street; a guy set up quite a big drumkit to make money playing (I guess?), and for a dollar you could play on it. So I did :)

Here's me, looking forward to playing, and him, happy with the money:


Here's him, telling me not to break his precious cymbals:


And here's a couple of people watching me. In fact he told me not to stop when I wanted to, because people started putting coins in hix box ... so now I know that I have an alternative career possibility if I ever decide to quit computer science :)


Finally, a video of me having some fun with polyrhythms. Thanks to Mattia for taking these pics and shooting the video!


Check out the guy paying for my "art" at 0:55 :-)