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Dong Open Air 2010: In Dong We Trust

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 - 02:19 pm

As announced in the previous post, I went to the 10th Dong Open Air Festival under the official motto “In Dong We Trust” last weekend. It was my fourth Dong Open Air, and I can full-heartedly say that the Dong is my favorite festival.

The Dong began as a bit of a garden party with a tiny stage and has grown into a local phenomenon. With it’s location on a coal mining waste mountain, it only allows a limited number of visitors, so for the last couple of years Dong tickets have been limited to 2000 – and this year they were sold out in less than 30 minutes (after their server crashed due to high demand).

Altogether, it was a great festival. The weather was great – not to hot, a bit windy, but not too cold (except maybe a little at night). As the Dong 2008 and the Party.San 2006 has taught me, weather is the most important thing on a festival and can be a real mood killer.

This year my boyfriend and I helped at the Rockzoom booth again to sell the festival’s official merchandise – mens and women’s shirts and hoodies. We did so great that we were almost out of our job by noon on the second day, because all the usual sizes of the shirts were sold out. The only leftover sizes we had were women’s shirts in M and L, men’s in S and most hoodies. My bf was probably the reason for at least half the sales with his unbridled enthusiasm reminding of a carnival barker.

The bands were a compilation of the Dong’s past 10 years, usually there are not that many ‘big’ names like Dark Tranquillity, Rotting Christ, Skyclad and Die Apokalyptischen Reiter on this festival. To be honest I didn’t find ANY of the bands interesting enough to watch for more than 10 minutes. I would probably have watched more of The Excrementory Grindfuckers if the sound hadn’t been so atrocious. For most bands I just went into the photo pit for a song, took pictures for Rockzoom (having been the only photographer in attendance) and left. Unfortunately my camera battery died during Grailknights, so there are no band photos of Skyclad and Die Apokalyptischen Reiter. But who cares about band photos anyway?

My respect goes to the singer of Rotting Christ, who performed despite a broken and obviously painful leg. He did not seem to remember me from the party we invited him too in my parent’s garden in 2002 though. Same for the Reiters… but it’s better that way. (My parents live in a village where a popular recording studio for this kind of music is located).

What keeps me attending the Dong is the people I meet there. It’s like a small family that reunites every year (in some cases I wouldn’t mind seeing the folks more often) and has a ton of fun. I know so many people there and even so many of the helpers and organizers… thus I had huge amount of fun watching this video about the Dong from German TV. Unfortunately you won’t understand it or find it funny if you don’t know the people, but I have to share it anyway:

Wer zum Teufel ist dieser Colamann?

This year’s Dong did have a few downsides too – mainly the incredibly disgusting port-a-loo’s. It was impossible to find a usuable one on Saturday morning, as they all had huge piles in them in places where those piles definitely don’t belong. Also quite sad was the amount of garbage on the mountain Sunday morning. Everybody left their trash (including old chairs and tents) lying around instead of collecting it into garbage bags and throwing it into the container. But the Pfandpiraten probably also played a role in that, because they emptied garbage bags to collect refund bottles.

If nothing prevents me, I’ll naturally attend next year’s Dong again. That will be my fifth Dong, and even though I have unfortunately missed some of the more legendary Dongs (the Armageddong in 2004 where a heavy storm blew half the festival away or the very hot Dong where even candles melted from the heat), I love being part of this community. Next festival stop before that will be Wacken though…

Naturally there are also photos of the people and photos of the bands and surroundings of this year’s Dong. Enjoy!

The Summer of Festivals Continues…

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010 - 09:09 am

This year is the first year in eight years where I’m going to more than one festival per year. Back in 2002, when I was young and reckless and trying to escape from home to find myself, I spent most of my free time on noisy music festivals – Wacken, M’Era Luna, Summerbreeze and some other small ones of which I forgot the name. I repeated that process in 2003 (with the exception of M’Era Luna), but then I fell in a bit of a festival (or rather bad ex-boyfriend) hole and didn’t go to any festivals until Party.San 2006, which I didn’t enjoy that much due to bad weather, bad alcohol and some bad campground people.

Then in 2007, I finally went to a festival again which I immensely enjoyed: the Dong Open Air. It’s got nothing to do with Penises, it’s just the name of the mountain it’s located on, which is, in fact, an artificial mountain made from coal mining waste (not far from the Ruhr area mentioned in the previous post). The Dong Open Air 2007 was really great because I met so many old friends and acquaintances there who I hadn’t seen since Wacken 2002 and 2003 – including the guy who is now my boyfriend. The weather was also great and the festival is so small that you pretty much know half the people who are there. I even know half the people who organize it.

Despite enjoying the next Dong in 2008 not so much (the grim weather really put me off) and temporarily swearing never to go to a festival again, I of course went there again in 2009, and guess what: I had a great time. Well, that time I had a boyfriend to do stuff with, which increased the fun a lot.

This weekend the Dong Open Air 2010, also the ten-year anniversary of the Dong Open Air, will take place. Naturally I’ll be there again, and I hope to repeat last year’s success, which will probably entirely depend on the weather. The weather has been pretty good throughout the last few weeks except for the occasional thunderstorm, and I hope it’ll stay that way.

But the Dong Open Air is not my first festival in 2010. Something I have completely forgotten to blog about due to having been in the US right after, was the Rock Hard Festival 2010 in May. That’s a medium-sized festival in Gelsenkirchen (also in the Ruhr area) with lots of pretty mainstream metal bands. There weren’t really any bands there I was genuinely interested in, but that’s something hard to come by for me anyway. The times were I listened to every metal band around are long over.

The Rock Hard Festival had it’s pros and cons. The pros were the fantastic location in an amphitheater and the amount of people I know from the old days. The cons were the mostly boring bands and the bad campground people (not all of them, but a lot). But it was more or less enjoyable. There are pictures.

The Dong Open Air will also not be my last festival in 2010. After seven years of lack of interest, I will revisit the historical grounds of the Wacken Open Air up in Northern Germany. To be honest, I’m still not really interested in going there, but we received an offer we just couldn’t decline: A friend and his wife will pick us up and drive with us to Wacken in a luxurious caravan, and we’ll be staying on the campground for caravans which has water and electricity supply. So in a way, we’ll have it as comfortable as in a hotel, with showers, our own toilet, a small kitchen and real beds (as opposed to no shower for half a week, stinky overflowing port-a-loo’s, snacks only and a hard air-mattress in a tent). That definitely sounds like a comfortable way to enjoy the biggest freaking metal festival in the world!

I’m really not fond of big festivals, but nevertheless I’m very curious to find out how much Wacken has changed in my seven years of absence. The last time I was there, the organization was somewhat chaotic and me and the friends I went there with swore to never go there again. But I’ve heard from other people that the organization has became much more professional in the last years and that it’s well coordinated to satisfy the needs of 50.000 metalheads.

Naturally it’s also become way more commercial. These days there’s nothing you can’t buy with Wacken logo on it – towels, tents, sleeping bags, chairs, shoes, door mats, credit cards, … you name it. Inspired by the Wave Gotik Treffen in Leipzig (where I never was, but I’ve heard a lot about it), Wacken also has a couple of more venues and even a Viking Village, which will definitely be interesting to see. I’m just wondering how I’ll manage to see the bands I want to see without missing out on some of them. But it’s not like there are any bands there I really want to see (with the small exceptions (but not even there a total conviction) of Die Apokalyptischen Reiter, Orphaned Land, Rotting Christ, Tiamat and Victims of Madness. When the time comes, I will report, but first I’m off to the Dong Open Air 2010 tomorrow! ;)

concerts and festivals 3 Comments

A stroll on the highway – A40 “Still Life” Ruhr 2010

Monday, July 19th, 2010 - 10:09 am

Not far from Düsseldorf (where I live) is the Ruhr Area of Germany, the biggest urban area in the country. Though it doesn’t include the biggest city, it consists of many bigger cities that over time have grown into each other. Those cities include Duisburg, Oberhausen, Mülheim, Bottrop, Essen, Gelsenkirchen, Bochum and Dortmund, all of which have experiences a boom during the industrial revolution because of it’s coal mining business. In fact, my father’s mother came from a coal mining family in Essen and I still have relatives there.

The Ruhr area is one of the European Capitals of Culture in 2010, with Essen representing it’s center. In that context, the probably biggest event of “Ruhr 2010” happened yesterday: 60 kilometers of highway (Autobahn) right through the middle through the Ruhr area from Duisburg to Dortmund was closed off for a “folk fair”. Or a picnic. Or a family excursion. Maybe a company excursion? To be honest, the true meaning of the event escapes me.

The A40 Autobahn was closed off to give way to bikers and inline skaters on one lane, and tables and pedestrians on the other. My boyfriend (who is also from the Ruhr area) and I had nothing better to do anyway (if you don’t count playing Diablo II), so we took a tram to Duisburg and walked onto the highway. Right at the entrance we saw the first glimpse of how jam-packed it was – traffic jam even without cars! There were so many bikers and skaters trying to get onto the “mobility lane”, that the lines were pretty long.

Pedestrians were a bit better off and despite it being very packed, it was more or less easy getting through. Mostly. The bad thing about Germany is that people just can’t form a line. They just squeeze together in a huge knot, everyone trying to get there first, blocking the way for everyone else. So in some areas of the highway it was freaking impossible to continue. Occasionally we had to climb over to the bike lane to keep moving forward.

Other areas of the highway were deserted – there weren’t even people at the tables. The idea of the event was to book a table and then do whatever you wanted with it – except commercial gain. It was forbidden to sell stuff beyond factory costs, because the “culture” was supposed to be the highlight of the event. In my opinion, that’s what made the event a huge fail. There might have been three million people out there on the highway, but why exactly? Just to take a stroll on the highway and tell your grandkids about it someday?

In my opinion the event was a huge load of wasted potential. They had three million people out there, but hardly anything interesting to see or do. And even if there had been something interesting to see or do, it would have caused a lot of “traffic jams”. Occasionally there were musicians, dress up people or artists, but there still was nothing that would have made me stop even for a minute. If you didn’t book a table to have a picnic or something, you were lost.

Probably the funniest thing I’ve seen on the part we walked from Duisburg to Oberhausen, was this haiku explanation in the fine Lingua Ruhrpottensia, the local dialect of the Ruhr area:

Unfortunately the food supply was a catastrophe. There was no real food to be found anywhere – the only thing you could get where butter biscuits, potatoe rings, apples and nectarines (among water and some juices). I’m dead sure I wasn’t the only one who was hungry for something “real” to eat, even if it just would have been some french fries or crepes or whatever you can get at a real folk fair or even a flea market.

Truth be told, I would much rather have gone to a flea market. There, at least I would have known why I was there – to look around at old stuff, maybe see something I liked, but probably not have bought anything anyway. The A40 “Still life”, what the official name of the event was, didn’t have a real purpose to me. A folk fair is something different – something way more interactive. This was something where some people got drunk and others got sunburned. I really don’t understand what the event planners where thinking when they came up with this esoteric idea. It might have sounded good on paper, but I’m sure that the three million people expected something more… satisfying.