English
Français
Deutsch
Italiano
Español
Amsterdam by bicycle
The traveller who arrives in Amsterdam for the first time cannot help be surprised by a series of characteristics of the city that tell its open, respectful and civilized spirit.
Sinéad O’Connor in Amsterdam
The Irish pop star Sinead O´Connor will perform a concert at the Amsterdam Paradiso On 17th of April. The artist returns to the stage after a long voluntary gap, to sing his classic songs, as written by Prince Nothing Compares 2 U and other less known of his latest album How About I Be (And You Be You). Sinéad Marie Bernadette O´Connor was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1966. She was the daughter of a dysfunctional family where abuse and violence were part of her daily routine, transforming it into a rebel and complicated teenager. When she was 15, she was interned to a reformatory of Catholic nuns. There she met a volunteer who was the sister of the drummer of the band In Tua Nua, Paul Byrne, who connected her with the group. Although she recorded the album Take My Hand with this band, she did not continue with them, because they felt she was too young. She became famous in the early 90´s for her wonderful voice, her polemics, her antics on stage and her shaved head. In 1983 her father sent her to the exclusive Newton School in Waterford, where she met the Irish language teacher Falvy Joseph, who encouraged her to record a demo with four songs, two written by her. In 1984 she joined the Ton Ton Macute band and performed in Dublin and the audience just loved her. A year after that her mother dies in a car accident, she left the band Sinéad and moved to London. Ton Ton Macoute band opened to her its doors to the music industry by signing...
Origin and history of the Dreamcatcher
The tale tells us that Iktomi, the joking master of knowledge, appeared in front of Lakota, the old spiritual leader, in the shape of a spider, and then he began talking about weaving a web, a spider web, on a willow hoop with feathers and horse hair. Once he´d finished he gave it to old Lakota and told him: “The spider web is a perfect circle, but in the middle there´s a hole, use to to help yourself and your people. If you believe in the Great Spirit, the spider web will trap your ideas and the bad ones will disappear through the hole”. Old Lakota showed it to his people, the Sioux indians, and these began to use it as a net for their life. They believe that the dreamcatcher held their future destiny and they hung it over their beds. The nightmares escaped through the hole in the middle of the net, not being part of their dreams anymore, while the good dreams remained in the web of life. Etymologically, the word ´dreamcatcher´ comes from native American culture, ihá?bla gmunka in Lakota language, which is the Siouan language that was spoken by Lakota´s people in the Sioux tribes. Meanwhile, in Ojibwe, the indian language that belonged to the Algonquian languages, asabikeshiinh is the inanimate form of the word spider and bawaajige nagwaagan means trap for dreams. It´s an object generally made by hand with a willow hoop in which they knit a big web. It´s decorated with sacred and personal objects, such as feathers and other items. The dreamcatchers are one of the most fascinating traditions of native American indians. Its origin goes back...
Brooke Fraser in Barcelona
The New Zealander folk-rock singer Brooke Fraser will perform a concert on the 16th of April at Bikini concert hall in Barcelona. This new tour is aimed to promote her new album Flags, which that has been a total success by obtaining five awards at the Vodafone Music Award 2011 in New Zealand. Along with Flags, Fraser also promote some social actions to help Africa. Brooke Gabrielle Fraser, Brooke Fraser´s real name, was born in a traditional New Zealand family in Wellington in 1983. When she was 7, she started to take some piano lessons. At age 12, she became interested in writing lyrics and took the guitar to accompany them, learning to get the tones that her lyrics required. While she never took singing lessons, she learned to train her voice and make the most of it, which led her to sing at the Parachute Festival 2000. Before becoming a professional musician, she became interested in media and wrote articles for the Soul Purpose magazine since she was 15. She was then editor and hosted a cable television program, before moving to Auckland to start his musical career. Just after her arrival in Auckland, she met the elemento P drummer, Scotty Pearson, who helped her get an interview with producer Matty J. This was an excellent meeting to the point that he immediately became her manager, while he positioned her in several record labels. Finally she decided to stay at Sony Music Entertainment New Zealand. Her first album What to do with Daylight was released in 2003. In just one week it reached No. 1 in sales and...
Hackers in Amsterdam
With the great impact of the hacktivist group Anonymou, many people started wondering about the true value of being hacker, and how this movement is taking a twist in our understanding of the condition of hackers in the Western society. The media publicity that is generated with each of the operations carried out by Anonymous, is transforming the way of protesting, defend our rights and politics in the real and virtual world. It is because of these reasons that the image of the hackers should stop being demonized. Hackers are making a change by giving the pattern of how to speak out against corporate fascism. Since the outbreak of the Internet phenomenon worldwide, we are accustomed to hearing about hackers and their various illegal activities. While it is true that some have been arrested for bank fraud and theft, not all of them work the same way. Similarly the image of the hacker has been mythologized, a few years ago, the movie Matrix fascinated us with its leather-clad characters within the virtual reality to which they were condemned to live, but in which they were righteous, seeking a way out of the machine control. All those who were freed from the Matrix, proved to be just hackers, people with a mastery of computers out of the ordinary and with the ability to develop new forms of network communication. Nowadays, the tools at our disposal, with both operating systems PCs and Mac are much more “user friendly” than before. One need not be a programming expert to install and uninstall programs and applications, format memory disks, etc.. While companies seek...
Sinéad O’Connor in Amsterdam
This April 17 Sinéad O´Connor will be on stage at the Paradiso in Amsterdam and many fans will be surprised when they see the obese and decrepit Irish rock star, especially because in the memories of all she still remains as a fragile on stage figure in sympathy with some noble cause or challenging the powerful. 45 years old Sinéad has re-emerged in the pages of the papers for her scandals and her repeated attempts of suicide, due to her bipolar depression, product of overdosing on pills. In January this year she attempted to commit suicide in Los Angeles after a disastrous marriage in Las Vegas that lasted only 18 days. A few days later she returned to Dublin and repeated the suicide attempt. Probably the violence she lived in her home as a child has been chasing her for many years. She acknowledged that her mother forced her to steal in her adolescence, so she spent time in a reformatory. Today her case is extreme and she has been forced to use Twitter to ask for help in her times of distress. This has been effective so far, because it has saved her twice in her suicide attempts. But it may not be the best way to control the bipolar disorder that leads from a state of euphoria to deep depressions. This mental disorder has risk behaviors in the two stages, as in moments of euphoria she seeks for husbands on Twitter, overflowing with positivism and out of control, to then a totally unpredictable erratic behavior. This has impacted on her unkempt, fat and radical changes in styles....
Baseball, The New York Yankees
On the 13th of April the baseball season will start with a classic game: The New York Yankees vs. Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim at the Yankee Stadium in New York. Tickets are on sale now, and their prices rage between $ 77 and $ 91 depending of the selected seat. The expected game is part of the sporting traditions New Yorkers have, which is an interesting activity that could help you to understand the culture behind American sporting events. We must take into account that for New Yorkers, baseball is the most popular sport and its season generates huge expectations. New York is one of the metropolitan areas of the United States that have two baseball teams; others are Los Angeles, Washington and Chicago. The two city teams are the Yankees and the Mets, both of them have a huge rivalry that makes their games something really memorable, because it unleashes a veritable war of opinions and forecasts that generates a highly confrontational environment. The Yankees have won 26 titles and the Mets have done so only twice. Not only the games capture the attention of supporters, there are also cultural activities that create a cheerful environment before the games start; people like eating whatever is on sale while watching the guest artists. The Yankee Stadium in New York is located in a huge area of the Bronx. The name of the New York Yankees dates from 1913, before that the team had had the name of the franchise purchased by Frank Farrell and Bill Devery, the Baltimore Orioles. In 1903 it was renamed as the Highlanders, and...
Killing Joke in Barcelona
On the 17th of April, the Music Hall concert venue in Barcelona will stage the live gig of the British post-punk band Killing Joke, who will be playing techno rock. The support bands will be The Crying Spell and The Icarus Line, who Killing Joke are touring with as the original members of the band will be playing, in Barcelona, the only concert in Spain. Killing Joke were formed in 1978 in Notting Hill, London, by the guitarist Kevin ´Geordie´ Walter, the keyboardist and singer Jaz Coleman and then they added Martin ´Youth´ Glover and the drummer Paul Ferguson. This band began trying to smash the scene as a reply to the materialist, conservative and tremendously unfair world, using music as their method. Their vision and their capacity to evolve inspired Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Nine Inch Nails, Godflesh, Soundgarden and various other bands. Their reputation for being an innovative and influential band in the world of music is due to their huge experience that has set a trend for many bands of today who consider them a reference in the industrial music scene, mainly for the sounds of their first two albums. Their tracks have the hypnotic and metal-harmonic sound thanks to the guitars. On a rhythmic level, their tone registers are heavy, as is the background sound, which has a gothic twist to it given by the keyboards. To that, they add the warm voice of Coleman, who manages solos of brutal intensity. In their musical beginnings, they started mixing post-punk and dub-reggae. Then, in the 80s, they moved to a tribal phase with post-punk metal and proto-industrial which...
Steve Aoki in Amsterdam
On April 8, the event center Paradiso in Amsterdam will present American DJ Steve Aoki. The concert is part of a promotional tour for his latest album of electro house music, Wonderland, which is now for sale and available for download and as ringtones on iTunes. Steve Aoki Hiroyuki was born in Miami in 1977 but grew up in California and graduated with a degree in sociology and women’s studies from the University of California Santa Barbara, a city which was the cradle of rock movement, the hippie movement and progressive attitudes of the 1960s. Of course, he missed all of these revolutionary periods of time, but Aoki got involved with music during the pragmatic 90s. At this time, California still had a halo effect from the hippie movement, and many musical groups influenced the students who were forming their bands and developing an underground movement. His first musical productions were for the university, specifically for the Santa Barbara Student Housing Cooperative, where the underground movement of the anti-system students and musicians held their first concerts. At 19, he spearheaded his own record label, which he called Dim Mak Records after the actor and martial arts expert Bruce Lee, who had been his childhood hero. With this label he released music by many electro house artists, including The Bloody Beetroots, Klaxons, MSTRKRFT, and others. Together with the record label he released a clothing line which has over time become very popular with youthful fans of electro house. Even the green headphones he designed have become a must-have among aficionados of his music. While Aoki has shown a great capacity...
