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#faust

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Der Radiosender #DLF sendet jeden Freitag Nachrichten in leichter Sprache.
Heute habe ich mich über diese Nachricht gefreut:
Das Theaterstück "#Faust" von dem Dichter #Goethe wird am Theater in Mannheim in leichter Sprache aufgeführt.
Ich finde es sehr demokratisch, wenn viele dieses Theaterstück kennen lernen können.

I had to close my bank account. It was a digital-only bank with many security features; one of which was a text service.

I have been trying to change my phone number with them since about August. "Well, what's the problem? Go into the app, change the number, confirm with a password. S'not hard, Book."

Oh, the audacity of ignorance. Yeah, I tried that, frendos. Nada. I tried speaking to support. Bots and games of telephone tag later, I finally get to someone who explained to me in detail how to change a phone number in the app. Which I recorded/videoed because they won't believe me.

Uploaded to a throwaway YouTube account, I sent the vid and a complaint to the bank. Two months later, I get a reply. "We apologise, here's £30 for your trouble," yadda yadda. Still not phone number change. It's becoming Faustian.

So, I switched from a digital bank to a legacy bank. Bricks and mortar, all that good stuff. The old account is now closed, and everything is up and running on the new one.

This morning, I get an email with six years of statements from my old bank in a .zip. Okay, cool!

"We texted the password for the .zip to the phone number we have for you on file."

...

Fuckwits extraordinaire.

I just told this story on an internal WFMU email list, but repeating it here because I think it's funny.

When my daughter was little, a video clip of the folksy indie singer called Feist performing on Sesame Street was making the rounds. My wife and I watched it with our daughter a bunch of times, who loved it. (As any two year old kid would.)

My wife has a mental block on band names, or at least she often confuses similarly named bands for one another. (Using "Ween" and "Weezer" interchangeably, for example.)

One day she emailed me at work after having watched a bunch of YouTube videos and said something like "none of the other songs by Faust have the girl singer, but I really like them."

And that's the story of how my wife accidentally got into Krautrock.

Continued thread

And you just know that brewers are serious and passionate about their craft when they let their barley wine made with Franconian wine yeast mature in oak wood barrels from a local whiskey distillery in their century-old mountain cave cellar.

Today I learned that Faust was voted Best German Brewery at the Frankfurt International Beer Trophy. Well-deserved!

#Upcoming The unique and adventurous sounds of German bands like #Can, #Neu!, #AmonDüül, #PopulVuh, #TangerineDream, #Faust, #Kluster or #Kraftwerk, now known as #Krautrock, are considered a blueprint for modern rock music. In “Neu Klang: The Definitive History of Krautrock”, Christoph Dallach interviewed its pioneers. Their answers form an oral history pointing far beyond individual band histories. Translated into English for the first time. Available via Faber, May 3rd. bleep.com/merch/430023-christo

All professions have their accompanying anxiety-dreams, but those suffered by people who work in #radio often have a certain uniformity to them. Typified by a programmer’s eternal battle against DEAD AIR, these dreams almost always revolve around a very particular and urgent need to *get*something*no*make*that*ANYTHING* on the air, only you can’t because all of the records have been replaced by high school science textbooks, the engineer has installed parking meters on all of the equipment and you have no loose change with which to operate them, or someone has dug a moat around the music library that's filled with beasts who will surely attack if you attempt to retrieve a copy of #Faust IV so that your listeners might thrill to all twelve brain-frying minutes of the song #Krautrock. For people in my orbit, all of this is old news. The radio anxiety dream is a tale as old as time itself.

That said, I had one the other night which I think rides in a different class and is worth re-telling here thanks to its more universal themes.

There was a #WPRB staff meeting taking place in the lobby of a very large and busy hospital. Our designated area had been partitioned off by those cheap, rolling barriers which are frequently found in corporate convention centers and university basements. Along one side, there were tables set up for catering, but no food was on them.

This WPRB meeting wasn’t limited to the current staff, but reached across many generations of DJs going all the way back to the 1980s. There were probably around 100 attendees milling about the place.

I was in charge of running the meeting, which of course meant that everyone was coming to me with their problems. Chief among them were technical issues with the wireless headset mics that attendees were supposed to be wearing, and which made everyone look like a 90s telemarketer or the singer of Loverboy. There were dozens of these mics, but only half of them were working. With some effort, I traced the problem back to a piece of equipment that was perched on a table in the back of the room. It resembled a pair of walkie-talkies, half-buried in a hopeless jumble of wires.

As I began untangling the viper’s nest of cables, I became dimly aware of a huge commotion on the other side of the rolling partition walls. DJs at the meeting expressed concern and asked me what was going on, was everything OK, etc., but I just told them to take their seats and chill out because the meeting would begin in five minutes once I got the cables untangled and the microphone problem sorted out.

After a few moments, the lobby commotion had grown into what sounded like a genuine *panic* which I could no longer ignore, so I threw down the walkie talkies and made my way around the partition where I saw hundreds of people all frantically running for the hospital exits.

I went outside and joined the throngs of people who were now massing in the parking lot. There were doctors and nurses, support staff, and patients in hospital gowns who were still lying in rolling beds and hooked up to IVs and echocardiogram machines. I wandered past people babbling frantically into mobile phones, or calling out for friends and loved ones. Pushing through the crowd into a small clearing, I realized that the parking lot looked out upon a gorgeous vista of snow-capped mountains, punctuating a magnificently blue sky in the distance. It looked like a postcard for the French Alps.

As I stood there admiring the natural splendor of the mountain range, there was a sudden series of huge explosions, one right after another from left to right, and giant mushroom clouds began appearing on the horizon. Now the people in the parking lot were screaming and *really* panicking and running all over because the idyllic natural landscape that we’d been stationed at the base of was clearly in the process of being nuked and we were all going die as soon as the shock wave hit us.

I turned around and marched back into the hospital, leaving behind a scene of total carnage in the parking lot. I snuck back around to the side of the partition where the WPRB staff meeting was happening, and stepped up to the podium while gathering my composure and most reassuring demeanor. I observed multiple generations of WPRB DJs who were now all seated quietly and looking at me with expectant gazes. Clearly, the meeting was now about to begin just as I had foretold.

I put on one of the wireless headset mics — all of which were now working perfectly — and said: “Hey everybody, thanks for coming. I’m really sorry but I don’t think the bagels we ordered for today’s meeting are gonna be delivered on time.”