One truckload

All Rammstein haul-along stages were designed by Ha except the one for the Mutter Tour. PK1 received a crash course on designing for Rammstein from her and took over most of the Rammstein folio, filling in for Shoegazer and Jason and pulling PK2 with him. Ha initially designed with J+sg in 1993, then in 2009 with rgoDark and two dozen commissioned professionals who were chief executives of their companies. Hmm, about the rank job of a colonel for building equipment. Except the safety features by the three RammyTeens were three colonels put together for the appliances and concierge fulfillment and band performance, one star — culture, state, citizenry and volunteers, water and fire safety, air and breathing safety, environmental and crowd safety, footpath and orientation map safety, band safety, human senses and stamina safety, materials durability, packing and transporting, taste the aluminium, everything. The art gradually gained merit up to two stars, equal to ho hum change of command ceremony at your nearest army fort. Did we get to see parkour? No, so there. So tame.
    Once the safety was established by RammyTeens, the three-headed pukers of Fort Bragg barely equaled one star together when it came to Rammstein. By the time Ha got to work on Stadia, she was a two-star.
    Trans and quartermasters are mundane army chores. How Rammstein became punctual and had a top quality accountant who was never late on paying the petrol bill, they had to select talented people. No drawing pictures, no computer drafting, a stack of 5 sheets of paper total across 16 years to keep organized the designs, anticipating the last assembly for 2019 Stadia 26 years after RammyTeens started working on Rammstein.
    Obelisk was the only design that was rejected. Designed in 1993, it was for teamwork. She was going to give the crew strongman muscular exercise like going to Gold's Gym. Free six pack abs, free agility. It is not an easy body-oriented schedule to work for. It exists in many places in the United States. Three places, for example. One is graffiti hints in the French Quarters in New Orleans down the block from the cathedral at the grammar school across from the coffee café. That challenge is brains and brawn, but the coffee will set you back. You have to use your bare hands to remove the wrought iron gate and fence by tapping on the cement with a rock. You might be able to create spark fire if you know what you are doing. You can sharpen a knife many different ways. Then you can move the small obelisks.
    Squat obelisks and some heavy rusty chains are across the street from the rail depot at an unused parking lot of lawn. You have to use slotted poles sliding on water that bubbles up from the street grate. It is the only place in New Orleans to live under a tree, do pushups on the lawn and garden over your own poop, run around the block and get the optical illusions of the graffiti aligned, and do the laundry from the water bubbling. Even if you bicylce for petrol to move around on the weekends, you can sleep but you will lose muscles, losing to noise and LED lights. If you leave the lawn and walk the pier and rail station across 48 hours, just to get away from people and be by yourself, even with sleep and food, even if you jog, you will lose muscles. All you need is fresh water and fresh air, everything surplus you can work, barter, or be given surplus. Two squads can move the squat obelisks only if they live there together. Their reward is the abandoned warehouse they can redocrate any way they want.
    The biggest obelisk in the USA is the Washington National Memorial in Washington, D.C. You might as well stay in military uniform. You will not move the obelisk, but you can gain experience moving on your own throughout the city. Free-range children are scarce in modern countries. Free-range adults are going to rely on public service for awhile, like the transportation system. And all those services compete to distract and dissuade your metabolism, your stamina, your hygiene. There are more area attractions and all kinds of people than one person can manage oneself. If you can stand at a triangular park for three hours in D.C., every day five days a week, you are an accomplished adult. A sentry job of self-control.
    Then there are the obelisks in front of Little Caesar's Pizza in the old county section of Austin, Texas. That challenge is not brains and brawns to figure anything out. It is monotous routine requiring the Adonis discus thrower level of Greek Olympian perfection. You have to swivel your torso like a brawling wrestler to move the obelisks. They are tricked out on the insides with iron rebar, iron sheath, pebbles cement Setcrete quickcrete, ceramic, a bunch of layers. Direct impact with a hammer does less deconstructuon by damaging a small part of an obelisk. Only your bare hands and a strong torque in your back, abs, shoulders, everything — to move it without damaging it. Like waddling the statues on Easter Island. There are about a dozen of them to move, and at least one of them have been done for you. You get free pizza that you cannot digest. You get more disgusted by loutering in the area than boggling your noggins on how to technically accomplish dislodging even one of the obelisks. It is not the case of doing one and moving on to the next one by repeating the same tactics. You will have spent down the resources for your strategy, so you cannot be heroically greedy. If you want to haul away a second obelisk, only as high as a grown man's midsection, you have to get creative and seasonly adjusted all over again. You will find out you need to garden bare-handed or use sticks found on the ground before you will even need a factory-manufactured tool.
    The Rammstein stage edition was not going to be that challenging. They get to keep the stage parts, the obelisk, and own real estate like a 20-room army barracks. Oh well. The Egypt-inspired design was merged into Pyramidoid, a two tier stack stage with triangular slopes like the bottom of a very casual ziggurat (step pyramid) temple. Putting Schneider (drummer) on the mezzanine is a thing. Shoegazer liked that one and approved. Ha thought it was the safest design for beginners. Shoegazer voted for Latticeworks as the top design for beginners: modular and configurable, less expensive, a core skill for the road crew to get used to. Adapting to venues develops technical know-how, coherent assembly, and artistic judgment.
    Ha stipulated that the crew would be responsible for one truckload. That includes the stage and all the sound and light equipment for the patrons, not for Rammstein. The microphones go with the crew, not the singers. Rammstein have their instruments and practice equipment. Practice amps and speakers are small-scale for a honky tonk of thirty guests, about the amount of decibel output as what is built-in on Flake's synthesizer. Acoustic instruments are necessary to have on hand. Like sombreros, the head protection outerwear. In a smaller space such as inside the tour bus, Till ought to be louder than Flake on keys. Schneider and Olli should measure the length of his notes, the guitarists should measure the forward projection, the amplitude, of his notes. He ought to be pitched by voice and snalog 8nsteuments, with the windows down while the bus is moving. It lurches, he has to be firm. It comes to an inconvenient stop at a traffic light, he is a singer, not a machine operator following rules flashed at him by electric lights. Then resistance training with Flake, so the Rammstein sound is not Flake with jumbled fingers but nice and elegant. As far as she knows, the keyboardist of Duran Duran is as good as it gets. Trapped behind a console, they tend to be skinnier than the lead singer, who can move around the stage.

Six of Rammstein, one of Madonna

    Vertical depth is necessary for the sound. If you cannot get the audience into stadium seating, do it to the band. That means more industrial and electric wiring for six lonely bodies spread out to scale to fill an auditorium with sound. Ha spoke about old theatre houses with catwalks, part of the industrial movement tucked out of the way of plush carpeting and crystal chandeliers. To minimize the amount of confusion caused by turning a theatre venue inside-out, flashy, colorful opera has to make way for dull, worn-down, simplicity. There are no roles to play. There can be colorful clothing but no roles. Mimicking outdoor scenery is forbidden. No videos on a screen of a helicopter-mounted camera showing a city skyline. No pictures of other bodies, no people walking on sidewalks, no artificial moons and stars dangling from the ceiling. Everything much more serious than Ha in second grade in the cast of Wind in the Willow, about animal characters like Mr Toad. No playing a fantastical creature, an oompa loompa that snuck into Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Storytime is over. The animals on stage are who the people get. Who are they? Jason and Shoegazer were planning for the hype. Rammstein! What do those bodies on stage do, what do they provide for the people? Music!
    Ha had to tighten the pop quiz. Do they tell a story? No. Do they act out a fight, like Shakespeare? Well, that depends on the song. If they want to express the lyrics or the idea of the song, they can do that, it is similar to thespians acting, taking on a role or alternative persona to present a thesis. No! Nein! They emote is what they do. They do not fight, they do not express a fictionalization of a fight, they do not roleplay into a fight, they do not act. They get to sing and dance, they move the music that moves their butts. Or headbanging. Jason asserted, Yes they do have alternative personae. Be good to me, I'm good. Be bad to me, I'm bad. Hey, Ha responded, If I had two pole dancers, scantily dressed but you cannot smell them, you're going to be stereophonically wishing the dynamic motions on the stage is Rammstein, not the nudey parlor's two top T-and-A's (tits and arse). Oh, you would lose that bet, he claimed. But you cannot smell them, Jason, so how do I kick your tarts off the stage? Do I have to bring Madonna and let her reinvent herself, a new persona every Pop frame album? She's Material Girl, she's like a virgin, she's leatherclad True Blue until the gentlemen prefer her blonde in pink taffetta dripping with diamonds. She's competition, Shoegazer said. Six of Rammstein, one of Madonna. Even performing live, she's got dancers, she's got Harry Winston jewelry. What do we have? Nordic Clavia and Macy's? I can go down to the mall, hit the Bossa Nova button, and make two hundred bucks before the weekend is over., Ha whined again. Why am I doing this? Shoegazer came to the rescue, Nord Clavia, but you've got the German drum makers Sonor now.
    Ha leveraged the three-way tie, Madonna is such a tease! She makes the money of a diva. I do not get to smell that money, do I? Fine, I am not allowed to smell Madonna. I am going to borrow her Cartier from Paris and her Winston from London, and I cannot tell anyone else but you two that there are six blokes in the tour bus who need a hotel next to a strip club, preferrably equipped with more than one dance pole. One less hardware to haul around. They hop off the tour bus and start doing jumping jacks. The crew hauls out Schneider's kit, he may have one metal Sabian cymbal, just an alibi. Anybody asks, he can say, We are a metal band, see? Doesn't look suspicious. Clank clank, they have to do stretches. Paul protests. That's Paul the soldier protesting. He doesn't hear Schneider on the snares, he's not wiggling his butt up in the air. How do you know he's a soldier, Ha? Shoegazer asked. I volunteer him and he protests, he's the Rhythm guitarist. If I were there, they would be doing PT and stretches before they go into a nudey bar. I would have bongos instead of snares, just an excuse to not scare the people.
    Flake is into yoga, he needs it. Warrior One, Warrior Two, Downward Dog, Child's Pose, Sun Salutation. No rhythm! Who was that? Shoegazer asked. Oh, it's the bassist Olli. He complains, Yoga is not a groove. He hears Schneider's clanking and says, Quit that now, Flake! Is there a time outdoors, just the six of them, that Olli's thoughts are not sucked out to his senses observing variations of a robot guessing randomly? The breeze observes Till. Till reacts the only way he knows how. He starts wrestling Olli. Poor Till, he is not as animal as he thought. He went out and got both nipples pierced last week. He's showing his age, it has to count for something. He wants to be the dominant animal, except he likes pain and Punks out. Olli knows and is winning the wrestling match. Peacemaker Richard is out of ideas and out of Olli's way. He politely steps around the wrestlers like a ballsy lead at the ballet company and takes Flake's hands and drapes them on himself and they start dancing together. Stride wide, step step. Half turn, step, turn half. Olli's getting better already. Paul is satisfied there is some progress. He does extreme burpies. He flops to the ground, does pushups, jumps up, and dick airs guitar, just to satisfy the low slung fingers are still clean. Olli's groove is not climaxing with the cymbal clashes. What is the point of riding Till? No, it ends in drawing two droplets of blood on one side of Till's t-shirt. That's it, he has to get civilized, so of course he loses to Olli in a one-on-one. Regimented Schneider is not getting results. He wants to get even more regimented, he goes over to Paul and crashes as loud as he can as close as he can to Paul's ear.
    Poor Paul wants to pick a fight on Schneider, the officer. Results! Schneider hollers. Put your hand away for some results! That was so threatening, he starts sprinting to the crew's truck. Your guess is as good as mine. Is he looking for Schneider's snares? Does he want the big 26-inch Chinese splasher? Soft mallets, not Schneider's. Black nylon drumsticks, not Schneider's. Controllers and mics with EQ slide toggles right on the holder. Where is Till's mic hip holster, why isn't it done? Foot triggers. How?! Shoegazer said, The Fly rig. Where did the crew put the— A-ha! He grabs the stuff, clackity splat, his stuff, hops off the truck. Sombrero and soccer ball. Gouching back in a trot, he announces, Field time, everyone! Okay, Schneider has to work for Paul for results. Slinky Punkhead Till, frustrated and not bleeding enough, has already pulled out his nipple hoops and is squeezing his manboobs for evidence a vampire still loves him. Half a drop and he licks it off his finger, a half drop at a time.
    Richard tells him to clean up. The nudey bar is that way, the hotel swimming pool is in the opposite direction behind him. Till instinctively wants to go forward. Richard beckons Flake over so Flake can have a look. Flake exaggerates like a woman and blocks Till from heading to the bar. Dance with me, shall we? he politely applies his progress. Swish swish, hands off the chest, on my shoulders. Richard is satisfied. Right, I am saying, Richard not Ha, I'll get naked with Till in the swimming pool. You and Olli play with Paul's ball. Schneider and Paul, go around the corner and jerk off together without being spotted by the crew. Richard tells Paul, Don't drop the hat.