Kraftwerk (was Re: Shocking news reaches Museum HQ)

[Eric Siegerman]

On Thu, Apr 01, 2004 at 07:21:46PM -0500, Doug Pearson wrote:
> Didn't Kraftwerk already to this 25 years ago ... ? ;^)

My thought exactly!  As I recall reading, they tried, but it
didn't work too well.  I guess the tech's a bit better now :-)

So there I am, driving home late one night last week, along the
Gardiner Expressway, an elevated highway that's a couple of miles
of lakefront-to-horizon pixelboards [*] that I usually tune out
without even thinking about it.  But then one impinges on my
consciousness.  I do a double-take, and yes, it really does say
what I think it says:
                        KRAFTWERK

Now there's a word I never *ever* dreamed I'd see in such, uh,
mainstream circumstances.

Then it goes on to give the date for the Toronto gig.  Ok, so
it's the venue's pixelboard, but still...  Big smile at that --
nice reminder that in a few weeks I'll be seeing them for the
first time.  This I have been waiting for for 30 years.  Woo hoo!

(I'm sure it'll be mostly Computer World and TEE -- by far my two
least favourite KW albums -- but with luck they'll do The Model
or something else from Man Machine.  And if I'm really lucky
they'll play Autobahn and I'll be one happy camper!  Any more of
the stuff I like, i.e. from Radioactivity or before, is way too
much to hope for ... so if it does happen it'll be sheer bonus.)

[*] When I was a kid in the 60s, that strip of the Gardiner was
all neon -- endless nifty neon animations, all different.  Gaudy
as hell, I'm sure my folks thought it, but being 8, I thought the
drive along there after dark, as we were setting out for home,
was one of the best parts of a trip to Toronto (we lived about 70
miles away, and such a trip was a Big Event in any case).
Pixelboards are very samey in comparison -- sometimes technology
is not an improvement.  (Like, a couple of years later we had a
big fat book called "The Way Things Work", that told about the
inner secrets of everything from washing machines to jukeboxes to
ballpoint pens.  If there were a 2004 edition, most of the
entries would be a single sentence: "It has a microprocessor in
it."  How much fun is that?)

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        erics at telepres.com
|  |  /
It must be said that they would have sounded better if the singer
wouldn't throw his fellow band members to the ground and toss the
drum kit around during songs.
        - Patrick Lenneau