OMAR RODRÍGUEZ-LÓPEZ: NO LIFE WITHOUT PAIN Article
Authors
Marc-Stefan Andres
https://www.ag-text.de/
Marc started out in journalism in 1991 as editor of a music fanzine. For the last 20 years he’s been a freelance journalist, writing for magazines like brand eins, Süddeutsche Zeitung, doing conceptual work and storytelling for companies around the world. He fulfils his musical ambitions with his band Brandt.
Aida Baghernejad
https://aidabaghernejad.tumblr.com/about
As an award-winning freelance music and food writer, Aida eats and listens to music for a living. She’s also currently (and forever) working on her PhD on “identity as a commercial project”. She fights for a better world in her free time.
Maren Barton
Maren has been a translator and proofreader for nine years. She lives near London and frequently works for big publishers like Campus Verlag in Germany as well as for a number of universities, translating and proofreading academic publications.
André Boße
https://www.ag-text.de/
André, based in Cologne, was editor-in-chief of interview magazine Galore from 2005 to 2009. Since then he has been a regular writer for magazines and newspapers like Musikexpress, Rolling Stone, Mint, Visions, Spiegel, Süddeutsche and Berliner Zeitung. He also works as a lecturer.
Cameron Cook
http://www.cameronedwardcook.com/
Cameron is an American arts and culture journalist based in Berlin. His empirical opinions on music and film have appeared in Pitchfork, Noisey, High Snobiety, and others. Half of the Noughties he acted as editor of the influential SUP Magazine.
Nick Currie (Momus)
http://imomus.com/
Nick is responsible for over thirty albums of electronic folk music, six novels, and an apparently endless stream of cultural journalism. He believes that “everyone will be famous for fifteen people” and that “every lie creates the parallel world in which it’s true”. He lives in Berlin and is writing a memoir for Farrar, Straus & Giroux in New York.
Bill Drummond
An ex-gardener; ex-milkman; ex-steel worker; ex-lunatic asylum nursing assistant; ex-apprentice trawlerman; ex-chippy; ex-fly poster; and sometime van driver and publisher of printed matter. And full-time serial father.
Adi Englman
https://www.marcel-art-projects.org/team
Adi is an art curator specialising in modern and contemporary art. She was born and remains based in Tel Aviv. Adi is founder and artistic director of Marcel, a nonprofit organisation that initiates and produces special artistic projects and products. She is also co-founder and co-editor of the visual arts periodical Picnic Magazine.
Wolfgang Frömberg
Wolfgang is a freelance writer from Cologne. He was an editor for magazines SPEX and Intro and has published two novels – Spucke and Etwas Besseres als die Freiheit – and a collection of stories, essays and poems called How to Play Fußball. He also hosts readings under the name of “Literatur zur Zeit”.
Peter Gaide
https://www.ag-text.de/
Peter began playing electric home organ at the age of 10. Back then he admired Franz Lambert, who played an impressive white electric organ. Today, Peter listens to recordings of Jimmy and Johnny “Hammond” Smith while he sips booze in the gloomy jazz bars of Tokyo, carrying out research for CHART.
Kerstin Grether
http://www.kerstin-grether.de/
Kerstin is an author (“Zuckerbabys”) and pop culture journalist. Since her early teenage days, she’s been writing for German music magazine SPEX and is known as one of the originators of pop feminism in Germany. She is singer and songwriter of the chanson rock band Doctorella alongside her sister Sandra Grether.
Britta Helm
https://medium.com/britta-helm
Britta writes about pop music. Her work has appeared in Visions, Galore, Die Zeit Online and Missy Magazine, among others. She lives in Berlin.
Olaf Karnik
http://www.olafkarnik.com/
Olaf is a freelance journalist and author for Neue Züricher Zeitung, WDR 3, Spex, Deutschlandfunk and more. He has published articles, radio features and books about Hauntology, Library Music, Reggae in Germany and Afro-American Pop. He has been working as an university lecturer and as curator for club events. Olaf hosts the online radio DJ show “Do The Wrong Thing” on 674FM.
Jan Kedves
Jan is a freelance journalist based in Berlin. He writes on pop culture, fashion, art and anything in between, mostly for Süddeutsche Zeitung and occasionally for magazines like Fantastic Man or Glamour. From 2010 to 2012 he was the editor of German pop culture magazine Spex.
Lydia Lunch
Lydia is closely associated with the No Wave scene of Downtown New York of the late 70s/early 80s, acted in the early movies of Richard Kern alongside Henry Rollins and shared stages with everybody from James White over Glenn Branca to Richard Hell. She is still always on the run for readings and concerts.
Alexander Mayor
Alexander is a writer and musician based in London. He has written for The Independent, Kaput – Magazin für Insolvenz & Pop and Intro, publishes short stories and produces British pop music under the name Alexander’s Festival Hall.
Severin Mevissen
Severin moved from Hamburg to the United States as a correspondent for German magazines in 1992. His work has been published in Geo, Merian, Spiegel, Stern, Musikexpress, Rolling Stone and many others. He currently lives in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, where he spins records at his wife’s vinyl bistro “Bunny” whenever he doesn’t write.
Eric Pfeil
http://xn--dierealitt-y5a.de/
Eric is an author and singer/songwriter based in Cologne. In 2014 he was awarded the Rocco Clein Award for his monthly column „Das Pop-Tagebuch“ for Rolling Stone Magazine. As a musician he has just released his third album 13 Wohnzimmer, a LP entirely recorded in 13 different living rooms.
Eugene Robinson
Eugene is a journalist, author, novelist, actor and singer who has won awards for at least one of those things. He recently published records with his bands Oxbow (“Thin Black Duke”) and Buñuel (“Boys to Man”) and toured pain- and joyfully through the USA and Europe.
Anja Rützel
Anja writes about popular culture, TV, travel and animals (and everything else, really, even about soccer and the secrets of successful marriage dodgers). She just published her third book, an essay in defence of loneliness called “Better to be alone than having no friends at all”.
Johann Scheerer
https://cloudshill.com/
Johann is a music producer from Hamburg. He has worked with artists like Faust, Peter Doherty and At the Drive-In. Since 2005 he has run the analogue recording studio Clouds Hill Recordings and its related indie label, Clouds Hill.
Annett Scheffel
Annett is a freelance journalist who writes about music, film, feminism, contemporary culture, and the political in the personal. She’s based in Berlin and works, among others, for Süddeutsche Zeitung, Musikexpress, Radio Eins and Dummy Magazine.
Thomas Venker
Thomas, based in Cologne, acted from 2000–2014 as editor-in-chief of Intro magazine. He runs the electronic label onitor as well as the art imprint Edition Fieber. Since 2015 he has been publisher and editor-in-chief of Kaput – Magazin für Insolvenz & Pop, he also works as an lecturer and manages DJ and producer Lena Willikens.
Henrik von Holtum
http://www.henrikvonholtum.com/
Henrik is a musician and author. Since 1994 he has been the MC and producer of the german hip hop band Kinderzimmer Productions. He studied classical music, started working as a radio producer and journalist in 2006 and has been teaching at the Folkwang University since 2014.
Patrick Wagner
Patrick is godfather of the band Gewalt, Germany’s most expressive art thing. His back catalogue lists involvement in the labels Kitty Yo and Louisville and the band Surrogat. He is an expert for children’s soccer and visionary producer of Berlins “FuckUp Nights”, a monthly event, where people talk about their business failures.
Klaus Walter
Klaus, born in 1955, lives in Frankfurt a. M. He began working as writer and DJ in the late 1970s. Since 1984 he has been a DJ for public radio in Germany. He also works for the internet radio station ByteFM. He regularly writes for various newspapers and magazines like Süddeutsche Zeitung, die tageszeitung and SPEX.
Illustrators/Artists
Dennis Busch
https://dennisbusch.tumblr.com/
Dennis lives and works as a freelance artist, illustrator, musician and crystal/lightworker in Bremen.
Geoff Grandfield
http://geoffgrandfield.co.uk/
Geoff is an illustrator, having worked on series such as the novels of Patricia Highsmith, Raymond Chandler and Graham Greene. This assignment was a welcome opportunity to illustrate a live conversation. He is currently working on a graphic novel exploring mind control.
Lewis Khan
https://lewiskhan.co.uk/
Lewis is a visual artist from London, working with still and moving images. His portrait-based work is a study of emotion, relationships, and identity. Lewis’ practice has taken him further afield, shooting projects across Europe and the Americas. His project “Theatre” is published by The Lost Light Recordings.
David Markey
David Markey is a self-taught filmmaker and musician. His work is noted as documenting the punk scene in Southern California throughout the 1980s, growing to find a larger audience in the 1990s while continuing to produce work throughout the 2000s and 2010s. Markey has worked with Sonic Youth, Nirvana, The Ramones and more.
Anna Möller
Anna is an artist from Hamburg. She has had several international artistic residencies, including one in Tel Aviv in 2007. Her works were most recently shown at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and Galerie Karin Guenther. She is studying psychology and surrounds herself with a big family to gain a better understanding of total strangers.
Tobias Trost
https://einsdreiundsiebzig.de/
Tobias runs the independent design office Einsdreiundsiebzig in Berlin, a one man dog and pony show set up in 2003. Since then he’s been taking care of the design part of all kinds of printed matters while his drum kit gathers dust in the cellar.
Photographers
Julia Baier
https://www.juliabaier.de/
Julia works as a freelance photo­grapher in Berlin. She likes to travel – one of her favourite adventures as a photographer was a trip around the world with a German orchestra. She’s also very much into diving and underwater photography.
Giulia Bruno
http://www.giuliabruno.com/
Giulia is a Berlin-based artist working with film and photography. Her artistic and photographic research focuses primarily on the interaction between space of identity, space of technology, pragmatical space and contemporary contradictions.
Jonathan Forsythe
http://www.jonathanforsythe.com/
Jonathan is a Canadian photographer living and working in New York. He has published a book called Ngorongoro Smells Delicious with photographs of his cat Ngorongoro.
Stephanie Füssenich
http://www.stephaniefuessenich.de/
Stephanie is based in Paris. She works for magazines like Neon, Nido, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, Der Spiegel, and Die Zeit as well as for big companies like BMW.
Mikael Gregorsky
http://www.mikaelgregorsky.com/
Mikael is a Swedish photographer based in London. Working on commissions and exhibiting, his work is found in various museum collections throughout the world.
Brian Guido
Brian is a Los Angeles based portrait and documentary style photographer.
Matthias Haslauer
https://matthiashaslauer.com/
Matthias is a freelance photographer based in Hamburg. He was born in Emsdetten in Westphalia, now he’s traveling the world. Since 2007 he works for various magazines like Zeit Magazin, Der Spiegel, brand eins, Vice, Neon, 11 Freunde, and DOGS. At the age of 16 he played drums in Uterous Ungerous, officially the worst band in Germany. Since then he’s collecting records of other great bands.
Tanja Kernweiss
http://www.tanjakernweiss.com/
Tanja studied photography in Munich from 2002 to 2007. She visited Arno Fischer’s master class at the Ostkreuzschule in Berlin. Her favourite part of the job is to make portraits of faces. Tanja’s photographs get printed in the Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, Die Zeit, Vice Magazine and Neon. Tanja lives and works in Munich.
Marco Krüger
Marco’s main profession is his work as a sound assistant (“boomoperator”) on movie sets. For Christian Petzold’s movie Transit he also shot the stills. He only shoots on film. He lives in Berlin.
Sannah Kvist
https://sannahkvist.se/
Sannah is a Swedish photographer and artist who collects animal bones and soviet memorabilia when she is not driving big trains across the country. She just bought a small house to live in waiting for the apocalypse.
David Markey
David Markey is a self-taught filmmaker and musician. His work is noted as documenting the punk scene in Southern California throughout the 1980s, growing to find a larger audience in the 1990s while continuing to produce work throughout the 2000s and 2010s. Markey has worked with Sonic Youth, Nirvana, The Ramones and more.
Ye Rin Mok
https://www.yerinmok.com/
Ye Rin is a Los Angeles-based photographer. She has shot portraits and interiors for Apartamento, Dwell, The Telegraph, WSJ among many others.
Anna Möller
Anna is an artist from Hamburg. She has had several international artistic residencies, including one in Tel Aviv in 2007. Her works were most recently shown at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and Galerie Karin Guenther. She is studying psychology and surrounds herself with a big family to gain a better understanding of total strangers.
Jacob Park
http://texturedetroit.com/
Jacob is the lead curator and a resident DJ of “Texture Detroit”, an event series focused on cutting edge house and techno, featuring mind-bending spatial installs. He spends his time travelling, usually with a camera in his hand.
Charles Peterson
Charles is renowned for his documentation of the Seattle grunge scene. As a photographer, he’s gone on to do everything from a book on breakdancing to documenting an art museum. These days his kids are muses for a project titled “Child’s Play” that evokes the universal child in all of us.
Katharina Poblotzki
http://katharinapoblotzki.com/
Katharina is a photographer, restless traveller, native of Cologne, legal alien in New York City, terrible morning person and lover of fall.
Katja Ruge
https://www.katjaruge.de/
Katja is a photographer and Dj based in Hamburg. She loves the music of synthesizers and the work of musicians and other creative people. Her photo exhibition “Ladyflash” at kulturreich gallery Hamburg focused on women in rock and pop.
Armin Smailovic
https://www.arminsmailovic.com/
Armin studied at the “Bayerische Staatslehranstalt für Photographie” in Munich. His documentary work focuses on post-conflict societies and political issues. He is a founding member of the „Fotodoks“ Festival in Munich and was a co-curator until 2017. Since April 2017 he has taught documentary photography at the Fachhochschule Bielefeld.
Kathrin Spirk
https://www.kathrinspirk.de/
Kathrin is a Hamburg-based photographer for newspapers and magazines. However she likes to ride with her bike through the busy streets of London, humming songs from PJ Harvey’s album "Let England Shake".
Matt Veal
https://www.mattvealphotography.co.uk/
Matt is a London-based photographer and videographer. His work includes documentary, portraiture, still life and travel. He is currently working on a project that is documenting the world of female boxers.
Lisa Wassmann
https://www.lisawassmann.com/
Lisa is a photographic and video artist based in Berlin. Her work has led her to collaborations with Dazed & Confused, Zeitmagazin, I-D, Vice, Pitchfork, and Stella McCartney among others. She is currently working on her new book "Don’t you cry".
Erik Weiss
https://www.erikweiss.de/
Erik is one of Germany’s leading ­music photographers. His portraits of artists such as Jared Leto, Kendrick Lamar, Muse, Beastie Boys, Green Day and The Black Keys have been published in Rolling Stone, Q Magazine and NME, amongst others.
Staff
Marc-Stefan Andres [Editor]
https://ag-text.de/
Marc started out in journalism in 1991, as editor of a music fanzine, and has been a freelance journalist for the last 20 years. He writes for magazines like Brand Eins and works on branding and storytelling for companies around the world. He fulfils his musical ambitions with his band Brandt.
Maren Barton [Translator]
Maren has been a translator and proofreader for nine years. She lives near London and frequently works for big publishers like Campus Verlag in Germany as well as for a number of universities.
André Boße [Editor]
https://ag-text.de/
André, based in Cologne, was editor-in-chief of Galore Interview Magazine. Since then he has written for magazines and newspapers like Musik­express, Mint, Visions, Spiegel, Süddeutsche and Berliner Zeitung. He also works as a lecturer.
Alfred Bradford [Translator]
Alfred invented Punk at the tender age of six. Then – by an absolutely unexpected stroke of genius – also invented Post-Punk shortly thereafter. He has now retired to an 18th century windmill in the Westphalian countryside and lives off the royalty payments.
Matthias Haslauer [Photo Editor]
https://matthiashaslauer.com/
Matthias is a freelance photographer based in Hamburg. He was born in Emsdetten in Westphalia, now he’s traveling the world. Since 2007 he works for various magazines like Zeit Magazin, Der Spiegel, brand eins, Vice, Neon, 11 Freunde, and DOGS. At the age of 16 he played drums in Uterous Ungerous, officially the worst band in Germany. Since then he’s collecting records of other great bands.
Joe Kroll [Translator]
Joe is a freelance editor, translator and writer. An intellectual historian by training, he has contributed to publications including Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Times Literary Supplement. His translation of Hans Blumenberg’s “Rigorism of Truth” is forthcoming from Cornell University Press.
Alexander Mayor [Lector]
Alexander is a writer and musician based in London. He has written for The Independent, Kaput – Magazin für Insolvenz & Pop and Intro, publishes short stories and produces British pop music under the name Alexander’s Festival Hall.
Anna Möller [Editorial Consultant]
Anna is an artist from Hamburg. She has had several international artistic residencies, including one in Tel Aviv in 2007. Her works were most recently shown at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and Galerie Karin Guenther. She is studying psychology and surrounds herself with a big family to gain a better understanding of total strangers.
Johann Scheerer [Editor, Publisher, Managing Director]
https://cloudshill.com/
Johann is a music producer from Hamburg. He has worked with artists like Faust, Peter Doherty and At the Drive-In. Since 2005 he has run the analogue recording studio Clouds Hill Recordings and its related indie label, Clouds Hill.
Maria Seidl [Proofreader]
Maria is a translator, editor and proofreader based in Berlin. She proofreads the daily newspaper Berliner Zeitung and translates fiction and non-fiction from English to German. Waiting for George RR Martin’s “The Winds of Winter” occupies much of her spare time.
Tobias Trost [Designer]
https://einsdreiundsiebzig.de/
Tobias runs the independent design office Einsdreiundsiebzig in Berlin, a one man dog and pony show set up in 2003. Since then he’s been taking care of the design part of all kinds of printed matters while his drum kit gathers dust in the cellar.
Thomas Venker [Editor]
Thomas, based in Cologne, was edi­tor-in-chief of Intro Magazine from 2000 to 2014. He runs three electronic labels – onitor, Scheinselbständig and Cereal/Killers – as well as the art imprint Edition Fieber. He is the publisher of Kaput – Magazin für Insolvenz & Pop and works as lecturer at universities.

The idea of “CHART – Notes to consider” is to publish a magazine totally outside of the conventional business circle. The high-class roundabout 200 pages magazine won’t be sold at stores. And it won’t be given away thoughtless. We have established a distribution model based on partners: Every partner of CHART will get up to ten copies. The person is then requested to give away these copies to ten people she or he identifies as readers. This model guarantees that chart won’t be a waste of paper, won’t be a magazine in the dirt or in the shelves. It really will wander from hand to hand. With a circulation of 2,000 copies. Published in English. Given away by partners from all over the world.

 

The first issue of CHART came out 2017 and dealt with “silence”. It was followed by the 2018 edition about “pain”. The newest issue of 2019 deals with “money”.

 

For CHART, our writers and photographers met with people like Little Simz and Jenny Wilson, Japandroids and Holly Herndon, Omar Rodríguez-López and Dieter Meier, The Mekons and Robert Forster. Other artists like Momus, Lydia Lunch or Bill Drummond of KLF wrote for us.

 

Please enjoy selected CHART stories on this homepage. If you are interested in getting the newest or the next issues, please contact us: editors@notestoconsider.com. But please be aware that the printed issues are strictly limited.

 

 

Imprint

CHART
Notes to consider
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Germany
https://chart.cloudshill.com

 

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g) Controller or controller responsible for the processingController or controller responsible for the processing is the natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body which, alone or jointly with others, determines the purposes and means of the processing of personal data; where the purposes and means of such processing are determined by Union or Member State law, the controller or the specific criteria for its nomination may be provided for by Union or Member State law.

h) ProcessorProcessor is a natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body which processes personal data on behalf of the controller.

i) RecipientRecipient is a natural or legal person, public authority, agency or another body, to which the personal data are disclosed, whether a third party or not. However, public authorities which may receive personal data in the framework of a particular inquiry in accordance with Union or Member State law shall not be regarded as recipients; the processing of those data by those public authorities shall be in compliance with the applicable data protection rules according to the purposes of the processing.

j) Third partyThird party is a natural or legal person, public authority, agency or body other than the data subject, controller, processor and persons who, under the direct authority of the controller or processor, are authorised to process personal data.

k) ConsentConsent of the data subject is any freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous indication of the data subject’s wishes by which he or she, by a statement or by a clear affirmative action, signifies agreement to the processing of personal data relating to him or her.

2. Name and Address of the controller

Controller for the purposes of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), other data protection laws applicable in Member states of the European Union and other provisions related to data protection is:

Clouds Hill GmbH & Co. KG
Billwerder Neuer Deich 72
20539 Hamburg
Germany
Phone: +49(0)40 98260501
Email: US@cloudshill.com
Website: https://cloudshill.com

3. Cookies

The Internet pages of the Clouds Hill GmbH & Co. KG use cookies. Cookies are text files that are stored in a computer system via an Internet browser.

Many Internet sites and servers use cookies. Many cookies contain a so-called cookie ID. A cookie ID is a unique identifier of the cookie. It consists of a character string through which Internet pages and servers can be assigned to the specific Internet browser in which the cookie was stored. This allows visited Internet sites and servers to differentiate the individual browser of the dats subject from other Internet browsers that contain other cookies. A specific Internet browser can be recognized and identified using the unique cookie ID.

Through the use of cookies, the Clouds Hill GmbH & Co. KG can provide the users of this website with more user-friendly services that would not be possible without the cookie setting.

By means of a cookie, the information and offers on our website can be optimized with the user in mind. Cookies allow us, as previously mentioned, to recognize our website users. The purpose of this recognition is to make it easier for users to utilize our website. The website user that uses cookies, e.g. does not have to enter access data each time the website is accessed, because this is taken over by the website, and the cookie is thus stored on the user’s computer system. Another example is the cookie of a shopping cart in an online shop. The online store remembers the articles that a customer has placed in the virtual shopping cart via a cookie.

The data subject may, at any time, prevent the setting of cookies through our website by means of a corresponding setting of the Internet browser used, and may thus permanently deny the setting of cookies. Furthermore, already set cookies may be deleted at any time via an Internet browser or other software programs. This is possible in all popular Internet browsers. If the data subject deactivates the setting of cookies in the Internet browser used, not all functions of our website may be entirely usable.

4. Collection of general data and information

The website of the Clouds Hill GmbH & Co. KG collects a series of general data and information when a data subject or automated system calls up the website. This general data and information are stored in the server log files. Collected may be (1) the browser types and versions used, (2) the operating system used by the accessing system, (3) the website from which an accessing system reaches our website (so-called referrers), (4) the sub-websites, (5) the date and time of access to the Internet site, (6) an Internet protocol address (IP address), (7) the Internet service provider of the accessing system, and (8) any other similar data and information that may be used in the event of attacks on our information technology systems.

When using these general data and information, the Clouds Hill GmbH & Co. KG does not draw any conclusions about the data subject. Rather, this information is needed to (1) deliver the content of our website correctly, (2) optimize the content of our website as well as its advertisement, (3) ensure the long-term viability of our information technology systems and website technology, and (4) provide law enforcement authorities with the information necessary for criminal prosecution in case of a cyber-attack. Therefore, the Clouds Hill GmbH & Co. KG analyzes anonymously collected data and information statistically, with the aim of increasing the data protection and data security of our enterprise, and to ensure an optimal level of protection for the personal data we process. The anonymous data of the server log files are stored separately from all personal data provided by a data subject.

5. Subscription to our newsletters

On the website of the Clouds Hill GmbH & Co. KG, users are given the opportunity to subscribe to our enterprise’s newsletter. The input mask used for this purpose determines what personal data are transmitted, as well as when the newsletter is ordered from the controller.

The Clouds Hill GmbH & Co. KG informs its customers and business partners regularly by means of a newsletter about enterprise offers. The enterprise’s newsletter may only be received by the data subject if (1) the data subject has a valid e-mail address and (2) the data subject registers for the newsletter shipping. A confirmation e-mail will be sent to the e-mail address registered by a data subject for the first time for newsletter shipping, for legal reasons, in the double opt-in procedure. This confirmation e-mail is used to prove whether the owner of the e-mail address as the data subject is authorized to receive the newsletter.

During the registration for the newsletter, we also store the IP address of the computer system assigned by the Internet service provider (ISP) and used by the data subject at the time of the registration, as well as the date and time of the registration. The collection of this data is necessary in order to understand the (possible) misuse of the e-mail address of a data subject at a later date, and it therefore serves the aim of the legal protection of the controller.

The personal data collected as part of a registration for the newsletter will only be used to send our newsletter. In addition, subscribers to the newsletter may be informed by e-mail, as long as this is necessary for the operation of the newsletter service or a registration in question, as this could be the case in the event of modifications to the newsletter offer, or in the event of a change in technical circumstances. There will be no transfer of personal data collected by the newsletter service to third parties. The subscription to our newsletter may be terminated by the data subject at any time. The consent to the storage of personal data, which the data subject has given for shipping the newsletter, may be revoked at any time. For the purpose of revocation of consent, a corresponding link is found in each newsletter. It is also possible to unsubscribe from the newsletter at any time directly on the website of the controller, or to communicate this to the controller in a different way.

6. Newsletter-Tracking

The newsletter of the Clouds Hill GmbH & Co. KG contains so-called tracking pixels. A tracking pixel is a miniature graphic embedded in such e-mails, which are sent in HTML format to enable log file recording and analysis. This allows a statistical analysis of the success or failure of online marketing campaigns. Based on the embedded tracking pixel, the Clouds Hill GmbH & Co. KG may see if and when an e-mail was opened by a data subject, and which links in the e-mail were called up by data subjects.

Such personal data collected in the tracking pixels contained in the newsletters are stored and analyzed by the controller in order to optimize the shipping of the newsletter, as well as to adapt the content of future newsletters even better to the interests of the data subject. These personal data will not be passed on to third parties. Data subjects are at any time entitled to revoke the respective separate declaration of consent issued by means of the double-opt-in procedure. After a revocation, these personal data will be deleted by the controller. The Clouds Hill GmbH & Co. KG automatically regards a withdrawal from the receipt of the newsletter as a revocation.

7. Contact possibility via the website

The website of the Clouds Hill GmbH & Co. KG contains information that enables a quick electronic contact to our enterprise, as well as direct communication with us, which also includes a general address of the so-called electronic mail (e-mail address). If a data subject contacts the controller by e-mail or via a contact form, the personal data transmitted by the data subject are automatically stored. Such personal data transmitted on a voluntary basis by a data subject to the data controller are stored for the purpose of processing or contacting the data subject. There is no transfer of this personal data to third parties.

8. Routine erasure and blocking of personal data

The data controller shall process and store the personal data of the data subject only for the period necessary to achieve the purpose of storage, or as far as this is granted by the European legislator or other legislators in laws or regulations to which the controller is subject to.

If the storage purpose is not applicable, or if a storage period prescribed by the European legislator or another competent legislator expires, the personal data are routinely blocked or erased in accordance with legal requirements.

9. Rights of the data subject

    • a) Right of confirmationEach data subject shall have the right granted by the European legislator to obtain from the controller the confirmation as to whether or not personal data concerning him or her are being processed. If a data subject wishes to avail himself of this right of confirmation, he or she may, at any time, contact any employee of the controller.

 

    • b) Right of accessEach data subject shall have the right granted by the European legislator to obtain from the controller free information about his or her personal data stored at any time and a copy of this information. Furthermore, the European directives and regulations grant the data subject access to the following information:
      • the purposes of the processing;
      • the categories of personal data concerned;
      • the recipients or categories of recipients to whom the personal data have been or will be disclosed, in particular recipients in third countries or international organisations;
      • where possible, the envisaged period for which the personal data will be stored, or, if not possible, the criteria used to determine that period;
      • the existence of the right to request from the controller rectification or erasure of personal data, or restriction of processing of personal data concerning the data subject, or to object to such processing;
      • the existence of the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority;
      • where the personal data are not collected from the data subject, any available information as to their source;
      • the existence of automated decision-making, including profiling, referred to in Article 22(1) and (4) of the GDPR and, at least in those cases, meaningful information about the logic involved, as well as the significance and envisaged consequences of such processing for the data subject.

      Furthermore, the data subject shall have a right to obtain information as to whether personal data are transferred to a third country or to an international organisation. Where this is the case, the data subject shall have the right to be informed of the appropriate safeguards relating to the transfer.

      If a data subject wishes to avail himself of this right of access, he or she may, at any time, contact any employee of the controller.

 

    • c) Right to rectificationEach data subject shall have the right granted by the European legislator to obtain from the controller without undue delay the rectification of inaccurate personal data concerning him or her. Taking into account the purposes of the processing, the data subject shall have the right to have incomplete personal data completed, including by means of providing a supplementary statement.If a data subject wishes to exercise this right to rectification, he or she may, at any time, contact any employee of the controller.d) Right to erasure (Right to be forgotten)Each data subject shall have the right granted by the European legislator to obtain from the controller the erasure of personal data concerning him or her without undue delay, and the controller shall have the obligation to erase personal data without undue delay where one of the following grounds applies, as long as the processing is not necessary:
      • The personal data are no longer necessary in relation to the purposes for which they were collected or otherwise processed.
      • The data subject withdraws consent to which the processing is based according to point (a) of Article 6(1) of the GDPR, or point (a) of Article 9(2) of the GDPR, and where there is no other legal ground for the processing.
      • The data subject objects to the processing pursuant to Article 21(1) of the GDPR and there are no overriding legitimate grounds for the processing, or the data subject objects to the processing pursuant to Article 21(2) of the GDPR.
      • The personal data have been unlawfully processed.
      • The personal data must be erased for compliance with a legal obligation in Union or Member State law to which the controller is subject.
      • The personal data have been collected in relation to the offer of information society services referred to in Article 8(1) of the GDPR.

      If one of the aforementioned reasons applies, and a data subject wishes to request the erasure of personal data stored by the Clouds Hill GmbH & Co. KG, he or she may, at any time, contact any employee of the controller. An employee of Clouds Hill GmbH & Co. KG shall promptly ensure that the erasure request is complied with immediately.

      Where the controller has made personal data public and is obliged pursuant to Article 17(1) to erase the personal data, the controller, taking account of available technology and the cost of implementation, shall take reasonable steps, including technical measures, to inform other controllers processing the personal data that the data subject has requested erasure by such controllers of any links to, or copy or replication of, those personal data, as far as processing is not required. An employees of the Clouds Hill GmbH & Co. KG will arrange the necessary measures in individual cases.

 

  • e) Right of restriction of processingEach data subject shall have the right granted by the European legislator to obtain from the controller restriction of processing where one of the following applies:
    • The accuracy of the personal data is contested by the data subject, for a period enabling the controller to verify the accuracy of the personal data.
    • The processing is unlawful and the data subject opposes the erasure of the personal data and requests instead the restriction of their use instead.
    • The controller no longer needs the personal data for the purposes of the processing, but they are required by the data subject for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims.
    • The data subject has objected to processing pursuant to Article 21(1) of the GDPR pending the verification whether the legitimate grounds of the controller override those of the data subject.

    If one of the aforementioned conditions is met, and a data subject wishes to request the restriction of the processing of personal data stored by the Clouds Hill GmbH & Co. KG, he or she may at any time contact any employee of the controller. The employee of the Clouds Hill GmbH & Co. KG will arrange the restriction of the processing.

    f) Right to data portability

    Each data subject shall have the right granted by the European legislator, to receive the personal data concerning him or her, which was provided to a controller, in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format. He or she shall have the right to transmit those data to another controller without hindrance from the controller to which the personal data have been provided, as long as the processing is based on consent pursuant to point (a) of Article 6(1) of the GDPR or point (a) of Article 9(2) of the GDPR, or on a contract pursuant to point (b) of Article 6(1) of the GDPR, and the processing is carried out by automated means, as long as the processing is not necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller.

    Furthermore, in exercising his or her right to data portability pursuant to Article 20(1) of the GDPR, the data subject shall have the right to have personal data transmitted directly from one controller to another, where technically feasible and when doing so does not adversely affect the rights and freedoms of others.

    In order to assert the right to data portability, the data subject may at any time contact any employee of the Clouds Hill GmbH & Co. KG.

  • g) Right to objectEach data subject shall have the right granted by the European legislator to object, on grounds relating to his or her particular situation, at any time, to processing of personal data concerning him or her, which is based on point (e) or (f) of Article 6(1) of the GDPR. This also applies to profiling based on these provisions.The Clouds Hill GmbH & Co. KG shall no longer process the personal data in the event of the objection, unless we can demonstrate compelling legitimate grounds for the processing which override the interests, rights and freedoms of the data subject, or for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims.If the Clouds Hill GmbH & Co. KG processes personal data for direct marketing purposes, the data subject shall have the right to object at any time to processing of personal data concerning him or her for such marketing. This applies to profiling to the extent that it is related to such direct marketing. If the data subject objects to the Clouds Hill GmbH & Co. KG to the processing for direct marketing purposes, the Clouds Hill GmbH & Co. KG will no longer process the personal data for these purposes.In addition, the data subject has the right, on grounds relating to his or her particular situation, to object to processing of personal data concerning him or her by the Clouds Hill GmbH & Co. KG for scientific or historical research purposes, or for statistical purposes pursuant to Article 89(1) of the GDPR, unless the processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out for reasons of public interest.In order to exercise the right to object, the data subject may contact any employee of the Clouds Hill GmbH & Co. KG. In addition, the data subject is free in the context of the use of information society services, and notwithstanding Directive 2002/58/EC, to use his or her right to object by automated means using technical specifications.
  • h) Automated individual decision-making, including profilingEach data subject shall have the right granted by the European legislator not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her, or similarly significantly affects him or her, as long as the decision (1) is not is necessary for entering into, or the performance of, a contract between the data subject and a data controller, or (2) is not authorised by Union or Member State law to which the controller is subject and which also lays down suitable measures to safeguard the data subject’s rights and freedoms and legitimate interests, or (3) is not based on the data subject’s explicit consent.If the decision (1) is necessary for entering into, or the performance of, a contract between the data subject and a data controller, or (2) it is based on the data subject’s explicit consent, the Clouds Hill GmbH & Co. KG shall implement suitable measures to safeguard the data subject’s rights and freedoms and legitimate interests, at least the right to obtain human intervention on the part of the controller, to express his or her point of view and contest the decision.
    If the data subject wishes to exercise the rights concerning automated individual decision-making, he or she may, at any time, contact any employee of the Clouds Hill GmbH & Co. KG.
  • i) Right to withdraw data protection consentEach data subject shall have the right granted by the European legislator to withdraw his or her consent to processing of his or her personal data at any time.If the data subject wishes to exercise the right to withdraw the consent, he or she may, at any time, contact any employee of the Clouds Hill GmbH & Co. KG.

10. Data protection provisions about the application and use of Facebook

On this website, the controller has integrated components of the enterprise Facebook. Facebook is a social network.

A social network is a place for social meetings on the Internet, an online community, which usually allows users to communicate with each other and interact in a virtual space. A social network may serve as a platform for the exchange of opinions and experiences, or enable the Internet community to provide personal or business-related information. Facebook allows social network users to include the creation of private profiles, upload photos, and network through friend requests.

The operating company of Facebook is Facebook, Inc., 1 Hacker Way, Menlo Park, CA 94025, United States. If a person lives outside of the United States or Canada, the controller is the Facebook Ireland Ltd., 4 Grand Canal Square, Grand Canal Harbour, Dublin 2, Ireland.

With each call-up to one of the individual pages of this Internet website, which is operated by the controller and into which a Facebook component (Facebook plug-ins) was integrated, the web browser on the information technology system of the data subject is automatically prompted to download display of the corresponding Facebook component from Facebook through the Facebook component. An overview of all the Facebook Plug-ins may be accessed under https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/. During the course of this technical procedure, Facebook is made aware of what specific sub-site of our website was visited by the data subject.

If the data subject is logged in at the same time on Facebook, Facebook detects with every call-up to our website by the data subject—and for the entire duration of their stay on our Internet site—which specific sub-site of our Internet page was visited by the data subject. This information is collected through the Facebook component and associated with the respective Facebook account of the data subject. If the data subject clicks on one of the Facebook buttons integrated into our website, e.g. the “Like” button, or if the data subject submits a comment, then Facebook matches this information with the personal Facebook user account of the data subject and stores the personal data.

Facebook always receives, through the Facebook component, information about a visit to our website by the data subject, whenever the data subject is logged in at the same time on Facebook during the time of the call-up to our website. This occurs regardless of whether the data subject clicks on the Facebook component or not. If such a transmission of information to Facebook is not desirable for the data subject, then he or she may prevent this by logging off from their Facebook account before a call-up to our website is made.

The data protection guideline published by Facebook, which is available at https://facebook.com/about/privacy/, provides information about the collection, processing and use of personal data by Facebook. In addition, it is explained there what setting options Facebook offers to protect the privacy of the data subject. In addition, different configuration options are made available to allow the elimination of data transmission to Facebook. These applications may be used by the data subject to eliminate a data transmission to Facebook.

11. Data protection provisions about the application and use of Google AdSense

On this website, the controller has integrated Google AdSense. Google AdSense is an online service which allows the placement of advertising on third-party sites. Google AdSense is based on an algorithm that selects advertisements displayed on third-party sites to match with the content of the respective third-party site. Google AdSense allows an interest-based targeting of the Internet user, which is implemented by means of generating individual user profiles.

The operating company of Google’s AdSense component is Alphabet Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Mountain View, CA 94043-1351, United States.

The purpose of Google’s AdSense component is the integration of advertisements on our website. Google AdSense places a cookie on the information technology system of the data subject. The definition of cookies is explained above. With the setting of the cookie, Alphabet Inc. is enabled to analyze the use of our website. With each call-up to one of the individual pages of this Internet site, which is operated by the controller and into which a Google AdSense component is integrated, the Internet browser on the information technology system of the data subject will automatically submit data through the Google AdSense component for the purpose of online advertising and the settlement of commissions to Alphabet Inc. During the course of this technical procedure, the enterprise Alphabet Inc. gains knowledge of personal data, such as the IP address of the data subject, which serves Alphabet Inc., inter alia, to understand the origin of visitors and clicks and subsequently create commission settlements.

The data subject may, as stated above, prevent the setting of cookies through our website at any time by means of a corresponding adjustment of the web browser used and thus permanently deny the setting of cookies. Such an adjustment to the Internet browser used would also prevent Alphabet Inc. from setting a cookie on the information technology system of the data subject. Additionally, cookies already in use by Alphabet Inc. may be deleted at any time via a web browser or other software programs.

Furthermore, Google AdSense also uses so-called tracking pixels. A tracking pixel is a miniature graphic that is embedded in web pages to enable a log file recording and a log file analysis through which a statistical analysis may be performed. Based on the embedded tracking pixels, Alphabet Inc. is able to determine if and when a website was opened by a data subject, and which links were clicked on by the data subject. Tracking pixels serve, inter alia, to analyze the flow of visitors on a website.

Through Google AdSense, personal data and information—which also includes the IP address, and is necessary for the collection and accounting of the displayed advertisements—is transmitted to Alphabet Inc. in the United States of America. These personal data will be stored and processed in the United States of America. The Alphabet Inc. may disclose the collected personal data through this technical procedure to third parties.

Google AdSense is further explained under the following link https://www.google.com/intl/en/adsense/start/.

12. Data protection provisions about the application and use of Google Analytics (with anonymization function)

On this website, the controller has integrated the component of Google Analytics (with the anonymizer function). Google Analytics is a web analytics service. Web analytics is the collection, gathering, and analysis of data about the behavior of visitors to websites. A web analysis service collects, inter alia, data about the website from which a person has come (the so-called referrer), which sub-pages were visited, or how often and for what duration a sub-page was viewed. Web analytics are mainly used for the optimization of a website and in order to carry out a cost-benefit analysis of Internet advertising.

The operator of the Google Analytics component is Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Mountain View, CA 94043-1351, United States.

For the web analytics through Google Analytics the controller uses the application “_gat. _anonymizeIp”. By means of this application the IP address of the Internet connection of the data subject is abridged by Google and anonymised when accessing our websites from a Member State of the European Union or another Contracting State to the Agreement on the European Economic Area.

The purpose of the Google Analytics component is to analyze the traffic on our website. Google uses the collected data and information, inter alia, to evaluate the use of our website and to provide online reports, which show the activities on our websites, and to provide other services concerning the use of our Internet site for us.

Google Analytics places a cookie on the information technology system of the data subject. The definition of cookies is explained above. With the setting of the cookie, Google is enabled to analyze the use of our website. With each call-up to one of the individual pages of this Internet site, which is operated by the controller and into which a Google Analytics component was integrated, the Internet browser on the information technology system of the data subject will automatically submit data through the Google Analytics component for the purpose of online advertising and the settlement of commissions to Google. During the course of this technical procedure, the enterprise Google gains knowledge of personal information, such as the IP address of the data subject, which serves Google, inter alia, to understand the origin of visitors and clicks, and subsequently create commission settlements.

The cookie is used to store personal information, such as the access time, the location from which the access was made, and the frequency of visits of our website by the data subject. With each visit to our Internet site, such personal data, including the IP address of the Internet access used by the data subject, will be transmitted to Google in the United States of America. These personal data are stored by Google in the United States of America. Google may pass these personal data collected through the technical procedure to third parties.

The data subject may, as stated above, prevent the setting of cookies through our website at any time by means of a corresponding adjustment of the web browser used and thus permanently deny the setting of cookies. Such an adjustment to the Internet browser used would also prevent Google Analytics from setting a cookie on the information technology system of the data subject. In addition, cookies already in use by Google Analytics may be deleted at any time via a web browser or other software programs.

In addition, the data subject has the possibility of objecting to a collection of data that are generated by Google Analytics, which is related to the use of this website, as well as the processing of this data by Google and the chance to preclude any such. For this purpose, the data subject must download a browser add-on under the link https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout and install it. This browser add-on tells Google Analytics through a JavaScript, that any data and information about the visits of Internet pages may not be transmitted to Google Analytics. The installation of the browser add-ons is considered an objection by Google. If the information technology system of the data subject is later deleted, formatted, or newly installed, then the data subject must reinstall the browser add-ons to disable Google Analytics. If the browser add-on was uninstalled by the data subject or any other person who is attributable to their sphere of competence, or is disabled, it is possible to execute the reinstallation or reactivation of the browser add-ons.

Further information and the applicable data protection provisions of Google may be retrieved under https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/ and under http://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html. Google Analytics is further explained under the following Link https://www.google.com/analytics/.

13. Data protection provisions about the application and use of Google-AdWords
On this website, the controller has integrated Google AdWords. Google AdWords is a service for Internet advertising that allows the advertiser to place ads in Google search engine results and the Google advertising network. Google AdWords allows an advertiser to pre-define specific keywords with the help of which an ad on Google’s search results only then displayed, when the user utilizes the search engine to retrieve a keyword-relevant search result. In the Google Advertising Network, the ads are distributed on relevant web pages using an automatic algorithm, taking into account the previously defined keywords.

The operating company of Google AdWords is Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Mountain View, CA 94043-1351, UNITED STATES.

The purpose of Google AdWords is the promotion of our website by the inclusion of relevant advertising on the websites of third parties and in the search engine results of the search engine Google and an insertion of third-party advertising on our website.

If a data subject reaches our website via a Google ad, a conversion cookie is filed on the information technology system of the data subject through Google. The definition of cookies is explained above. A conversion cookie loses its validity after 30 days and is not used to identify the data subject. If the cookie has not expired, the conversion cookie is used to check whether certain sub-pages, e.g, the shopping cart from an online shop system, were called up on our website. Through the conversion cookie, both Google and the controller can understand whether a person who reached an AdWords ad on our website generated sales, that is, executed or canceled a sale of goods.

The data and information collected through the use of the conversion cookie is used by Google to create visit statistics for our website. These visit statistics are used in order to determine the total number of users who have been served through AdWords ads to ascertain the success or failure of each AdWords ad and to optimize our AdWords ads in the future. Neither our company nor other Google AdWords advertisers receive information from Google that could identify the data subject.

The conversion cookie stores personal information, e.g. the Internet pages visited by the data subject. Each time we visit our Internet pages, personal data, including the IP address of the Internet access used by the data subject, is transmitted to Google in the United States of America. These personal data are stored by Google in the United States of America. Google may pass these personal data collected through the technical procedure to third parties.

The data subject may, at any time, prevent the setting of cookies by our website, as stated above, by means of a corresponding setting of the Internet browser used and thus permanently deny the setting of cookies. Such a setting of the Internet browser used would also prevent Google from placing a conversion cookie on the information technology system of the data subject. In addition, a cookie set by Google AdWords may be deleted at any time via the Internet browser or other software programs.

The data subject has a possibility of objecting to the interest based advertisement of Google. Therefore, the data subject must access from each of the browsers in use the link www.google.de/settings/ads and set the desired settings.

Further information and the applicable data protection provisions of Google may be retrieved under https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/.

14. Data protection provisions about the application and use of Instagram

On this website, the controller has integrated components of the service Instagram. Instagram is a service that may be qualified as an audiovisual platform, which allows users to share photos and videos, as well as disseminate such data in other social networks.

The operating company of the services offered by Instagram is Instagram LLC, 1 Hacker Way, Building 14 First Floor, Menlo Park, CA, UNITED STATES.

With each call-up to one of the individual pages of this Internet site, which is operated by the controller and on which an Instagram component (Insta button) was integrated, the Internet browser on the information technology system of the data subject is automatically prompted to the download of a display of the corresponding Instagram component of Instagram. During the course of this technical procedure, Instagram becomes aware of what specific sub-page of our website was visited by the data subject.

If the data subject is logged in at the same time on Instagram, Instagram detects with every call-up to our website by the data subject—and for the entire duration of their stay on our Internet site—which specific sub-page of our Internet page was visited by the data subject. This information is collected through the Instagram component and is associated with the respective Instagram account of the data subject. If the data subject clicks on one of the Instagram buttons integrated on our website, then Instagram matches this information with the personal Instagram user account of the data subject and stores the personal data.

Instagram receives information via the Instagram component that the data subject has visited our website provided that the data subject is logged in at Instagram at the time of the call to our website. This occurs regardless of whether the person clicks on the Instagram button or not. If such a transmission of information to Instagram is not desirable for the data subject, then he or she can prevent this by logging off from their Instagram account before a call-up to our website is made.

Further information and the applicable data protection provisions of Instagram may be retrieved under https://help.instagram.com/155833707900388 and https://www.instagram.com/about/legal/privacy/.

15. Data protection provisions about the application and use of Twitter

On this website, the controller has integrated components of Twitter. Twitter is a multilingual, publicly-accessible microblogging service on which users may publish and spread so-called ‘tweets,’ e.g. short messages, which are limited to 280 characters. These short messages are available for everyone, including those who are not logged on to Twitter. The tweets are also displayed to so-called followers of the respective user. Followers are other Twitter users who follow a user’s tweets. Furthermore, Twitter allows you to address a wide audience via hashtags, links or retweets.

The operating company of Twitter is Twitter, Inc., 1355 Market Street, Suite 900, San Francisco, CA 94103, UNITED STATES.

With each call-up to one of the individual pages of this Internet site, which is operated by the controller and on which a Twitter component (Twitter button) was integrated, the Internet browser on the information technology system of the data subject is automatically prompted to download a display of the corresponding Twitter component of Twitter. Further information about the Twitter buttons is available under https://about.twitter.com/de/resources/buttons. During the course of this technical procedure, Twitter gains knowledge of what specific sub-page of our website was visited by the data subject. The purpose of the integration of the Twitter component is a retransmission of the contents of this website to allow our users to introduce this web page to the digital world and increase our visitor numbers.

If the data subject is logged in at the same time on Twitter, Twitter detects with every call-up to our website by the data subject and for the entire duration of their stay on our Internet site which specific sub-page of our Internet page was visited by the data subject. This information is collected through the Twitter component and associated with the respective Twitter account of the data subject. If the data subject clicks on one of the Twitter buttons integrated on our website, then Twitter assigns this information to the personal Twitter user account of the data subject and stores the personal data.

Twitter receives information via the Twitter component that the data subject has visited our website, provided that the data subject is logged in on Twitter at the time of the call-up to our website. This occurs regardless of whether the person clicks on the Twitter component or not. If such a transmission of information to Twitter is not desirable for the data subject, then he or she may prevent this by logging off from their Twitter account before a call-up to our website is made.

The applicable data protection provisions of Twitter may be accessed under https://twitter.com/privacy?lang=en.

16. Payment Method: Data protection provisions about the use of PayPal as a payment processor

On this website, the controller has integrated components of PayPal. PayPal is an online payment service provider. Payments are processed via so-called PayPal accounts, which represent virtual private or business accounts. PayPal is also able to process virtual payments through credit cards when a user does not have a PayPal account. A PayPal account is managed via an e-mail address, which is why there are no classic account numbers. PayPal makes it possible to trigger online payments to third parties or to receive payments. PayPal also accepts trustee functions and offers buyer protection services.

The European operating company of PayPal is PayPal (Europe) S.à.r.l. & Cie. S.C.A., 22-24 Boulevard Royal, 2449 Luxembourg, Luxembourg.

If the data subject chooses “PayPal” as the payment option in the online shop during the ordering process, we automatically transmit the data of the data subject to PayPal. By selecting this payment option, the data subject agrees to the transfer of personal data required for payment processing.

The personal data transmitted to PayPal is usually first name, last name, address, email address, IP address, telephone number, mobile phone number, or other data necessary for payment processing. The processing of the purchase contract also requires such personal data, which are in connection with the respective order.

The transmission of the data is aimed at payment processing and fraud prevention. The controller will transfer personal data to PayPal, in particular, if a legitimate interest in the transmission is given. The personal data exchanged between PayPal and the controller for the processing of the data will be transmitted by PayPal to economic credit agencies. This transmission is intended for identity and creditworthiness checks.

PayPal will, if necessary, pass on personal data to affiliates and service providers or subcontractors to the extent that this is necessary to fulfill contractual obligations or for data to be processed in the order.

The data subject has the possibility to revoke consent for the handling of personal data at any time from PayPal. A revocation shall not have any effect on personal data which must be processed, used or transmitted in accordance with (contractual) payment processing.

The applicable data protection provisions of PayPal may be retrieved under https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/ua/privacy-full.

17. Legal basis for the processing

Art. 6(1) lit. a GDPR serves as the legal basis for processing operations for which we obtain consent for a specific processing purpose. If the processing of personal data is necessary for the performance of a contract to which the data subject is party, as is the case, for example, when processing operations are necessary for the supply of goods or to provide any other service, the processing is based on Article 6(1) lit. b GDPR. The same applies to such processing operations which are necessary for carrying out pre-contractual measures, for example in the case of inquiries concerning our products or services. Is our company subject to a legal obligation by which processing of personal data is required, such as for the fulfillment of tax obligations, the processing is based on Art. 6(1) lit. c GDPR.
In rare cases, the processing of personal data may be necessary to protect the vital interests of the data subject or of another natural person. This would be the case, for example, if a visitor were injured in our company and his name, age, health insurance data or other vital information would have to be passed on to a doctor, hospital or other third party. Then the processing would be based on Art. 6(1) lit. d GDPR.
Finally, processing operations could be based on Article 6(1) lit. f GDPR. This legal basis is used for processing operations which are not covered by any of the abovementioned legal grounds, if processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by our company or by a third party, except where such interests are overridden by the interests or fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject which require protection of personal data. Such processing operations are particularly permissible because they have been specifically mentioned by the European legislator. He considered that a legitimate interest could be assumed if the data subject is a client of the controller (Recital 47 Sentence 2 GDPR).

18. The legitimate interests pursued by the controller or by a third party

Where the processing of personal data is based on Article 6(1) lit. f GDPR our legitimate interest is to carry out our business in favor of the well-being of all our employees and the shareholders.

19. Period for which the personal data will be stored

The criteria used to determine the period of storage of personal data is the respective statutory retention period. After expiration of that period, the corresponding data is routinely deleted, as long as it is no longer necessary for the fulfillment of the contract or the initiation of a contract.

20. Provision of personal data as statutory or contractual requirement; Requirement necessary to enter into a contract; Obligation of the data subject to provide the personal data; possible consequences of failure to provide such data

We clarify that the provision of personal data is partly required by law (e.g. tax regulations) or can also result from contractual provisions (e.g. information on the contractual partner).

Sometimes it may be necessary to conclude a contract that the data subject provides us with personal data, which must subsequently be processed by us. The data subject is, for example, obliged to provide us with personal data when our company signs a contract with him or her. The non-provision of the personal data would have the consequence that the contract with the data subject could not be concluded.

Before personal data is provided by the data subject, the data subject must contact any employee. The employee clarifies to the data subject whether the provision of the personal data is required by law or contract or is necessary for the conclusion of the contract, whether there is an obligation to provide the personal data and the consequences of non-provision of the personal data.

21. Existence of automated decision-making

As a responsible company, we do not use automatic decision-making or profiling.

22. Data protection provisions about the application and use of YouTube

On this website, the controller has integrated components of YouTube. YouTube is an Internet video portal that enables video publishers to set video clips and other users free of charge, which also provides free viewing, review and commenting on them. YouTube allows you to publish all kinds of videos, so you can access both full movies and TV broadcasts, as well as music videos, trailers, and videos made by users via the Internet portal.

The operating company of YouTube is YouTube, LLC, 901 Cherry Ave., San Bruno, CA 94066, UNITED STATES. The YouTube, LLC is a subsidiary of Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Mountain View, CA 94043-1351, UNITED STATES.

With each call-up to one of the individual pages of this Internet site, which is operated by the controller and on which a YouTube component (YouTube video) was integrated, the Internet browser on the information technology system of the data subject is automatically prompted to download a display of the corresponding YouTube component. Further information about YouTube may be obtained under https://www.youtube.com/yt/about/en/. During the course of this technical procedure, YouTube and Google gain knowledge of what specific sub-page of our website was visited by the data subject.

If the data subject is logged in on YouTube, YouTube recognizes with each call-up to a sub-page that contains a YouTube video, which specific sub-page of our Internet site was visited by the data subject. This information is collected by YouTube and Google and assigned to the respective YouTube account of the data subject.

YouTube and Google will receive information through the YouTube component that the data subject has visited our website, if the data subject at the time of the call to our website is logged in on YouTube; this occurs regardless of whether the person clicks on a YouTube video or not. If such a transmission of this information to YouTube and Google is not desirable for the data subject, the delivery may be prevented if the data subject logs off from their own YouTube account before a call-up to our website is made.

YouTube’s data protection provisions, available at https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/, provide information about the collection, processing and use of personal data by YouTube and Google.

23. Use of web fonts from Google™ LLC

This website uses web fonts provided by Google™ LLC 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, USA for graphical representation. When you visit the website, your browser loads the required web fonts into your browser cache to display the corresponding fonts correctly. If your web browser does not support the web fonts, a standard font is used by your computer. Further information about Google™ Web Fonts can be found at https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq and in the privacy policy of Google™ LLC: https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/

24. Use of web fonts from Monotype GmbH

External fonts from fonts.com are used on our website for graphical representation. This is a type service of Monotype GmbH, 61352 Bad Homburg, Werner-Reimers-Straße 2-4. When you request a page of our website, your browser loads the required web fonts into your browser cache so that textscontents and fonts are displayed correctly. The browser you use must therefore connect to the servers of the web font provider (see above). If your browser does not support this feature, your computer will use a default font for display. In the interest of a uniform and informative presentation of our website, the web fonts are used. This represents a special interest within the meaning of Art. 6 para. 1 lit. f DSGVO. More information about Fonts.com can be found at https://www.monotype.com/legal/privacy-policy

This Privacy Policy has been generated by the Privacy Policy Generator of the DGD – Your External DPO that was developed in cooperation with German Lawyers from WILDE BEUGER SOLMECKE, Cologne.

OMAR RODRÍGUEZ-LÓPEZ: NO LIFE WITHOUT PAIN
Text
Marc-Stefan Andres
Photography
Matthias Haslauer

Racism, violence, contempt, derision: Omar Rodríguez-López has suffered enough negativity to last for several lifetimes. The multi-instrumentalist, who has released more than a hundred records as a solo artist and as a member of the bands At The Drive In, The Mars Volta and Bosnian Rainbows, opens up for the first time about pain and all its different aspects – and also explains why there is no life without suffering.

An anonymous meeting room in a hotel in Belfort, a sleepy provincial town in the most remote part of eastern France. The first quarter final match – France vs Uruguay – of the soccer world cup is being shown in the adjacent lobby, the restrained cheers of the business types sunk deep in their armchairs sound strangely subdued. The members of the post-hardcore band At The Drive In have just arrived, tomorrow evening they will headline the Les Eurockéennes festival just outside of town. Composer and film director Omar Rodríguez-López – wearing a close-fitting gray suit and brown shoes – comes into the room, hesitates for a short moment and asks where he should sit. Eventually he takes a seat on a sofa – straight posture, legs crossed – and appraises the interviewer expectantly. The conversation begins, the idea being to start off with an innocuous question. However, when talking about pain there is nothing banal and insipid about the 41 year old audiovisual artists’s answers. Omar Rodríguez-López, transplanted at the age of five together with his family from the tiny backwater town of Narajhito in Puerto Rico to the Mexican city Puebla and another five years later across the US border to El Paso, immediately dives right into the thick of it.

 

Omar, as a young boy, what did you want to be?

What I wanted to be? White! Once I got to America, I wanted to be white. White people were treated better, white people had more opportunities, white people seemed to stick together more. They seemed to hold the power. So when I moved, my way of assimilating was that I cut my hair short, so that they couldn’t tell it was curly. I got contacts, so I got blue eyes. I tried to stay out of the sun, so that my skin would be whiter. I think it’s a common experience for people who come to the US from these countries. We also try to speak white. It is called “code switching”. When I am around white people in America, I speak in a different way because I want to be taken seriously. You start observing white people, you start breaking down exactly how they speak because you want them to know that you are intelligent. And if you are looking for a job, we – my friends and I and everyone that I know – use something that’s called “job-application-English”. You switch on this other personality.

 

So what does the real Omar sound like?

There is your own assimilation of words, like using Spanish and English together. But for the most part it’s incorrect English. When you’re around whites, you are very conscious of what you’re saying. You are trying to use the correct tense, the correct verb, the correct everything all the time. For me, the word “chair” was very difficult to say at first because of the different muscles in your mouth. I spent hours practicing saying “chair”. It sounded hard. For that they use the derogatory term “spic” and it’s because of the wrong pronunciation of “speak”: I don’t spic Engklish.

Talking about this period of his life, he often switches between accents, articulates words differently, enunciates in Spanish, the complete inflection becoming smoother and more melodic – making him sound like an entirely different person.

To me those were the crucial years. There is high school where you make your friends but long before that you form your ideas of the world. I was in Puerto Rico and Mexico then, and even if they are both “Latino” countries they are both so different. I was constantly between two worlds. Then we were moving to the States and there it was again. I was trying to adapt and assimilate. But the big question is: how much assimilation do you want? How much assimilation is necessary because you are in someone else’s country, and how much of it is wrong because you want to keep your own culture?

Did you carry that heavy weight all day long or only in special situations?

It was all the fucking time! One of the greatest pains a person can experience is when he doesn’t have the ability to express himself. By the way, before moving to El Paso we went to South Carolina first. South Carolina is a Southern state, a very racist state. I came home one day and I asked my dad, because everybody was calling me that: “What is ‘spic’?” And he said to me: “Oh, this means ‘cool guy’.” He protected me from it.

Omar laughs out loud. Then he immediately becomes serious again, says that he got to play in an all-black baseball team because he wasn’t white and therefore was automatically considered to be black. One of his main topics is how he always felt split in between cultures, searching for his own identity. For that reason, at 17, he set out on a road trip across the USA.

It was a very typical thing to say: who am I outside of my household? Because the Latino household is very much, like, eating dinner together all the time, and you gonna do what your father did. And then the sense of moving around all the time, and the sense of being between two worlds. I always had such a great interest in history and I think that all these things combined to form a lot of questions: What’s going on? Who am I? What is this country I live in? What’s happening right now? And I decided that a formal education wasn’t the thing for me.

 

Why was that?

At the time I didn’t realize it, but it was mainly because of the negative ideas that were put in my head. I really thought I was stupid. Now I understand that I am not. Learning English, being in that country – it was a normal thing to be told that you were stupid and that you should give up. When I got back my math test, my teacher said to me: “Stand up and now repeat after me: ‘Hello and welcome to McDonald’s. How may I help you?’ Say that, because this will be the only thing you will ever use in your life.” The message was sort of like: just give up now and find a decent “spic-job”. Go and sell oranges and clean up toilets. Whatever. But don’t hope for more than that. So I dropped out of high school. I went hitchhiking and really got to learn a lot more about this country than I could have learned going to college.

 

So you started traveling around with – of course – no money.

I was homeless for a year basically, yeah. I was eating out of garbage cans, I was meeting really wonderful people, I was meeting homeless kids, people who had no future, really homeless men and women, people who gonna live like this forever. I always had the advantage of knowing I could go home. I had a loving family back home that missed me. But very quickly I was able to exist within the underbelly of society. So I slept on rooftops, I met poets and beautiful artists, stayed with schizophrenic people, met murderers, prostitutes, and pimps. I saw everything you can imagine, every awful thing, every wonderful thing, also every act of kindness. After about a year I was done with it. I ended up in Baltimore where there is just so much poverty. It was a place where heroin was the cheapest thing you can get. So I did that a lot.

 

How did you come back?

After being called “spic” all the time, being robbed a couple of times, always being on drugs, at some point I said: “Enough of that.” I realized that this is going nowhere. I called Cedric [singer and co-founder of At The Drive In and a close friend for years], we talked for a while and he convinced me to come home. I went to an organization called Path and they bought me a Greyhound ticket. It was a three day bus ride. I could write a book just on that one year full of awful and wonderful experiences. But I knew that there should be something else for me.

 

Where did this feeling come from? There are a lot of guys like you, seventeen, who start abusing drugs. And they stay with it.

Yeah, they just stay with it. I think I had – and I still have – the constant feeling of: there is something else and it is just right over that hill. Like I don’t know what it is, but if I just can make it to this fucking hill to have a better look. I feel that way now. In interviews a lot of people ask about my achievements, two successful bands and all the records, blah blah blah. And I always think I should say: “Man, I barely feel that I have already started.”

 

Have you had this kind of feeling for a long time?

Yeah, with music for example. It was always there. I played my first concert when I was twelve, in a punk band. Before that I was in traditional music, latin music. My dad played music, it just seemed like: oh, that’s cool.

 

It’s a big step from latin to punk …

I never did fit in social circles. But with punk it worked. My mother was still dressing me at this time, so I was furthest away from punk. But I fit in with the others, you know, I was the freak. I was very punk. I had gone through a lot of different bands in El Paso and then I met Cedric and my lifelong friends. But after playing with them for a while it happened again: There had to be something else! I always knew that, and I’m mentioning it again because now – thinking back – it also would have been easy to stay there before hitting the road. Because with seventeen I had a sort of reputation there for myself. I wasn’t cool but I was popular. People would come to see my bands! At the same time, the music brought me back to El Paso from my hitchhiking tour and also from this shitty time in Baltimore. I told you that I was on the phone with Cedric and he told me that he just started playing with a bunch of guys and that they are doing a new band and he said I should come back. Like “it needs you right know”. It’s kind of cheesy when I tell you this. But I came back and joined At The Drive In.

 

What’s your own explanation for your drug use?

I was a pothead really early, but I didn’t consider that a drug. I smoked with my dad and my mom. Culturally it’s acceptable, you know. But in El Paso, being right on the border to Mexico, we got really pure cocaine. And crack. It started there. Once I was homeless – and you really don’t have opportunities – the drugs were a good escape. And I seem to have a very addictive personality.

 

Addicted to everything, I assume?

Oh yeah, to everything. I just like to burn through things. A friend of mine once said: whatever it takes most people to get sick of something, you do it in half the time, simply because I am going through that same process so much more quickly by immersing myself intensely.

 

Where does this come from?

I think it is the genes, it’s hereditary, it’s in my DNA. I come from a long line of very compulsive, neurotic, and addictive type of people. My grandfather was a pack rat, someone who keeps everything, never throwing anything away.

 

Do you also see a good side to that?

In a way it is an intellectual blessing. Because I can get to places a lot quicker. I can immerse myself, taking in as much information as possible and then decide whether it is relevant to me or not. I am also very much aware of the fact that time is running out. That we only get to do this for so long. I am very aware of it in a cultural way because to talk about Latin America is to talk about death. You can’t separate these two things. There is a big obsession with death in Latin culture, with honoring our dead, with leaving food and drinks for them. Which also means that you’re much closer to life. So I think it is a really positive thing. Another thing is that since I was very young, I have been very close to death. Most of my close friends are dead by now.

 

Friends of your age?

Yeah, of my high school friends there are only two left. One just got out of jail, the other one lives in El Paso. Everyone else is dead. Sarah and Lord died in a car accident, Jimmy died of cancer, Julio killed himself, Jeremy died of a heroin overdose, Eric died of a very strange “brain tumor thing”. Every reason you can imagine.

 

These are stories usually told by old people.

Yes, but I’ve had a great life. All these things made me appreciate everything. To lose your friend when he is eighteen – to cancer – that makes cancer a very real thing. It’s not just something from some story told by the old guys … You realize that this can happen to anybody at any moment. To live that close to death is to live close to life.

Death and pain are only one side of the coin?

Everything in life needs its counterbalance to exist. A truth is made up of two parts, it’s the law of polarity. Like the positive and the negative, like yin and yang. Everything exists in duality. This law of polarity is a universal law. I touched it really closely when my mother died. We brought her to our house when she was really sick. It was a long, painful death. I came home every day and I had death living in our house. But it keeps you awake, all the time.

 

You are 41 years old now – most people in Western countries experience death in their social environment when they are 50 or 60. Do you think your early experiences with death have made you a different person?

Of course! Once you have an experience, you wake up and you learn all the shit. I can’t imagine not knowing these things. And I think it is a blessing. And it helps me to navigate – for example – success. Fame or whatever you wanna call it has a negative energy, but it’s perceived socially as a positive energy. But to be successful in a career means death to a lot of beautiful things. It means the death of innocence, it means the death of certain parts of you. What people don’t understand is the sacrifice.

 

Do you have an example of this sacrifice?

One time, we had to announce that we had to cancel some shows because our singer Cedric had some medical problems with his voice. There were a lot of reactions on the internet, and instead of being understanding, they were like: “You motherfucker, you should play.”

 

Do you think success always brings a certain amount of that negativity?

Yeah. All this success seems to make some people think that you are not a human being anymore. A normal human reaction is to be understanding, to hope that someone who is ill will be okay. But success causes this other reaction: no, no! You are my band, you have to play now! Like you are not a person, you are a fucking monkey! To know that people who are your fans are thinking on that level is very painful because it makes you think: oh my God, they are so stupid. But soon afterward you think: I don’t wanna feel that way about people.

 

Especially not about people who sing along to your songs and support you.

You are supposed to feel good about them. But that’s the weird dichotomy of it. I experienced that early on. When we weren’t successful there was nobody at our shows. Man, I can’t explain to you how happy we were because we didn’t know that there was another possibility! We didn’t know that there would be catering, your own backstage room, hotels, flights. We were happy just traveling and meeting people. All of a sudden, we became successful and the most intimate things immediately blew apart in a second.

Omar is still sitting up straight, focused, watchful. His eyes, however, are always in motion, his hands illustrating what he says, particularly when the conversation dips into highly emotional subject matters such as the band’s superficial treatment by the critics. For example, his decision to let his hair grow out into a full afro again was seen by the music press as a simple fashion quirk.

The hair is a good example: me going natural was a very conscious decision. After going through the phase of trying to be white I said: I am proud of my roots. I am no longer cutting my hair short or whatever. I will let it be natural. At that time, that was a really painful experience because it was a cultural thing and I realized that people thought it’s just a fucking fashion thing. Of course, there is no law or contract that says that everybody has to know where I come from and what I mean by letting my hair grow or whatever I am doing. But in terms of success and negativity, there was a lot of negative shit. I really had a strong reaction to our success.

 

You played in At The Drive In and in The Mars Volta, and you split up these two bands at the height of your success. Did this negativity associated with your success influence the decision?

I think those things are fucking annoying and heartbreaking. But the break-ups had nothing to do with that. With At The Drive In, we worked for eight years playing to no one and then the last year we got popular. By social standards, that is a success. By personal standards, it is great. I am glad that I can pay for things, but success also means: am I expressing myself the right way, am I getting anything out of art, am I saying something? For whatever reason, at the end of those eight years, I got to the point where I was saying: this ain’t it. And it just was bad timing that it was right at the same time as all the work was finally paying off in a socially successful way. But after eight years I was spiritually unsuccessful.

 

Do you think that being successful and the loss of spirituality are linked together? Did success kill the spirit?

It’s an interesting theory. I didn’t think that way at the time. I just thought that death is always present, like if I died right now, would I be happy with where my art is? And the answer was no. Can I make the art I want to make with these people? No. It was nothing against them, I loved them very much and I have known them through all my high school years. For most people, success would have been the end of the road, right? Like: “We made it!” For me it was the beginning.

 

You wanted to step out of your comfort zone.

Completely out of my element and completely beyond my capabilities. Somewhere where I had to really struggle.

 

So you like the fight?

I think most people would take the path of least resistance. I think most people’s brains are wired to keep us out of dangerous situations, just biologically. I don’t think that I am special. But I do think that my parents and my culture put my brain in a certain context that makes us valiant. Because again, in Latin culture we celebrate death so much, we celebrate being valiant. A very common saying is “hasta el muerto”, until death. It’s like keep marching forward until you greet death. That attitude is very different from someone who avoids pain at all costs. For us, it’s like if you see pain, you run into it, you embrace it, you absorb it.

Now Omar speaks even faster than before, the phrases cascading from his lips as if every single word could be replaced by an even better one. Then he takes a sip from his water bottle, wipes his mouth, pauses. A short break in anticipation of the next question.

 

Do you like pain?

I think that is difficult to say, because if you say yes, they can interpret it in a completely different way. I don’t like pain as a masochist or like to hurt myself. A better word would be that I respect pain in the same way that I respect death. It’s intertwining reality into existence, into the universe, into the very fabric of what we are. There is nothing that comes without pain and without violence. I mean, you don’t need it, because it’s there all the time. What you need to do is to be accepting that it is gonna come.

 

Which pain matters most for you?

It’s definitely the experiences that are beyond your control, that really form who you are. I was beat up quite a lot in school. And my older brother tortured me and threw me in the closet for hours. He was jealous of me, because I had a good connection with my dad and because of his own problems with the way he was raised. And I had a cousin who tortured me, who cut the bottom of my feet with a knife, and who told me I was stupid, and who beat me up. All these experiences formed who I am. The question is: what is the deep thing that shapes us into the person we will be? In other words: the same experiences can happen to a different person and he becomes a fucking asshole who tortures others and so on.

And a lot of people do that!

Yes. For whatever reason, my experiences, my upbringing, my mother, my father, the things they were putting deep in my soul made me. The first thing I did at fourteen, when I started to realize all of these things, I said about my cousin: hm, man, poor guy. He must have learned that somewhere – somebody must have done that to him. You know, and I felt really bad for him. I guess I don’t know what it is, but I have a big heart, maybe because of how my mother has raised me or there is a certain intellectual capacity that my father gave me, or the combination of those two things. And I came to the intellectual realization: well, that’s his problem, not mine.

 

But you had to suffer first?

I had to decide what I made of this suffering. And I guess I was very fortunate to be raised in a very typical Latino family, in terms of closeness, of love. Latino families stay together.

 

You experienced all this as a young boy and you never treated others in the same way. Did you just use these experiences for something else?

I think I am generally looking forward. Let me change that, I think I am very much prone to reflecting on my actions and my reactions, but always with an eye to looking forward. A superficial example would be like: once I make a record and it comes out, I never listen to it again. Well, a lot of people I know very much live in their past accomplishments. For me it doesn’t matter how great that moment might have felt. That moment is gone and I can’t relive it. Whatever happened in that moment, it was special and unique.

 

Is it the same with all these bad experiences? For example, if you think about your friend from high school who died from an overdose? Or is it only the good moments that you can’t relive or reimagine?

That’s a good question. [pauses] I think it’s the same thing. You can only experience that profound pain once. After that, of course, it’s still painful. But you relive it in a different way because you’re getting used to it. When Jeremy [Jeremy Michael Ward, sound technician and vocal operator of The Mars Volta] died, it was me who found his body. That pain, this reality switching that he was alive and we were doing everything together and now that’s all changed, that sudden pain is a completely different pain. How could it be the same pain I experience today when I think of him? It is still a very sad, profound pain, but now I have lived with that new reality and now I understand that life is possible without him. Even with the bad stuff, you can never truly relive it. I can’t relive being tied up in the closet. Like that true terror that happened the first time that someone takes control over you is not the same as reliving it in your brain.

 

But when you see, for example, your brother or your cousin now, isn’t there this wish for revenge?

I literally saw my brother the day before we were coming here. We did a trip with my father. It’s a good example how Latin culture works: we laugh about it now. We had already been to the part where we talked about it, where I told him how much it hurt me, where he said he was sorry about that. We had already cried about it, we had hugged about it. And now, when I saw him, he brought his son. He is more of an adult now and I was showing him my house and as a joke my brother said to him: “You know, I am responsible for part of this inspiration too because I locked him up in the closet and that is what made him an artist.” And my whole family was laughing. That’s how we experience pain now.

There are some sweets on the table, some fruit as well. Omar leans forward, takes a strawberry and deftly picks the green parts off. He eats the fruit and leans back into the sofa, more or less for the first time. As soon as the next question is asked, he straightens up again.

 

You talked about your family a lot. There is another story that links your family and death. Shortly before the reunion tour with At The Drive In, your mother died and you had to go on stage. How were you able to make this work? Didn’t you think about canceling the tour?

Whenever I have a tough decision to make in my life, I always think “what would my mother do?”, because she was the most humble, most honest, most righteous person I’ve ever known. And she showed me that in the process of her death. She was rolling around in her wheelchair and she needed food, because she was like only 95 pounds, but she wouldn’t eat until she was sure that everybody in the room ate – and then she would eat. My mother was like the fucking real deal. At that moment with the reunion, I wanted to crawl into a fucking hole and didn’t want to see anyone. I couldn’t imagine life going on. I asked myself “what would my mother do?”, and the answer that I got right away was the fact that I have a responsibility for the other people around me to fulfill this obligation. This wasn’t just about me.

 

The band, the roadies, the fans …

Everyone. Get up there and do the thing and suffer on your own, suffer privately! Of course the guys said that we could cancel it – but it would be my choice. And the thing is that if you make a choice, you have to live with it. You don’t complain about it. So I decided to go through with it. I had no idea at that time what that would mean, and it was a very painful experience, going up on stage and having people fucking yell at you and call you a loser, because you are not jumping around …

 

Because you were grieving.

In a way, yes.

 

You were playing this really energetic, dynamic music and there were thousands of people in front of you, but you – in your head – were somewhere else, with your mother. Can you remember the feelings at the time?

It was like in a movie, where everything is blurry and they drop out the sound, where you just hear breathing maybe. I wasn’t hearing the music. I could technically play it, because we wrote those songs when I was eighteen, but I was not living the music – that’s what I normally do. And then that sound doesn’t mean anything, it is just “brrrrr”. And when I play I don’t wear my glasses, so it is already hard for me to see far away. The shows right before a big gig at the Coachella festival were smaller. There were people right in front of me. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, I could barely see them, but they were going: “Come on, what the fuck …” I am a very passionate person, so I can get angry very easily. All I can remember is I wanted so badly to take my guitar off and like bash their fucking faces.

There were three levels of pain. Relating to the death of your mother, to not being able to feel passionate about your music, and to seeing people come to your show and …

… and treat me like a piece of shit, yeah. And the pain of seeing them not as human. That’s also a painful thing. Because there is nothing I want more than to be a part of something. One thing I loved about music or art in general is that it can connect you to other people. But this connection got lost.

Now Omar is agitated, fired up. He pushes back into the sofa, leans forward again, takes a small sip of his water and adjusts his glasses.

 

Did the death of your mother also keep you from being creative?

Yeah. Even then it was like … [pauses] No. This is a good example. During the death of my mother – it is weird to say that loud – I had to be creative. When she died, I felt so many intense things that words constantly came to me. Like words that I knew but never used. It seemed like the first line in a very beautiful book, and they constantly came to me as if they were a way of expressing the pain. It took a lot of energy for me to go like: I am not gonna write them down. I felt that I could have done some really great writing at that time, but I felt it was more important to honor the moment and to honor my mother.

 

Couldn’t you honor her while you were writing that stuff down?

That’s another argument to be held, right. I think her point would have been like: “Of course, you write it down, man! Get something good out of it!” But at that time, I just wanted to completely worship the pain. I didn’t want to be able to escape the pain through expression. And I thought that that was the right thing to do.

 

How did that feel?

It was obviously very intense. Look, this anecdote is the easiest way to sum it up: I was crying and a friend came to me and said – and this is a normal thing to say: “Don’t worry, this will pass.” Like you won’t feel this pain ten years from now. And I remember just looking up at him and I was saying like: “I feel the opposite. I don’t ever wanna forget this.” Because it cost my mother a great deal of trouble to die.

 

Most people want to remember the mother of their past, when she was fit and healthy.

I don’t feel that way. I remember her then and I remember her how she was at the end. She was a completely different person then. And to me, that person is just as important as the healthy person. At that point, my mother taught me the greatest lesson. I thank her every single day, twice a day: in the morning when I wake up and at night when I go to sleep. If I can have an ounce of her honesty and her faith, I would never have a problem in life.

 

The topic “pain” offers so much to talk about – what would life be without it?

The wonderful thing that separates us from the animal kingdom and the thing that made man capable of removing himself from the food chain is the fact that we can intellectualize everything. And part of the intellectualization is our capability to say something is good and something is bad. The rest of nature doesn’t feel that way. An animal doesn’t feel bad about murdering or raping the other animal. The exploitation and violence is everywhere, and it comes in every form of beauty. I think it is a mistake to think that there is an absolute truth. It is a very limited truth, it is a human truth. I think, the answer to this question, in a life without pain, how could you know beauty? How could you know true happiness? Life would be fucking boring!