I would appreciate some of DU's good vibes or

[highplainsdem]

45. There's an article on George in the Dutch magazine Oor (Dutch for Ear), the oldest

music magazine in the Netherlands. It's out in their special summer issue, and I have no idea what sort of lead time they had for that issue, for the main stories, so the interview it's based on could well have been done before the 6/18 phone interview for Dutch radio that I posted about in the OP. I'm not sure -- have seen some quotes from the Oor article, but none giving the date of the phone interview they did with him.

The magazine's Twitter account posted this on the 30th, shortly after the issue went on sale -- and this is the English translation from Google Translate:

The muscle disease ALS took the guitar out of his life, but George Kooymans remains combative. He even has a new album out. In the summer edition of OOR he tells us about his life now.

Combative is a good thing, when you're fighting a chronic illness, especially if you're continuing to work, to create new music.

The description of that part of the summer issue, Google Translated from Oor's website, says this:

Mirage is the name of the record that George Kooymans made with brother-in-arms Frank Carillo. And it's anything but a mirage, full of gangsters, guns and adventure. Yet the boys' book that the Earring guitarist always lived has taken a turn: the muscle disease ALS marked the end of the guitar in his existence. George Kooymans himself provides text and explanation.

Photos I've seen of the magazine pages show part of the interview is about Henny Vrienten, one of George's bandmates in the Dutch supergroup Vreemde Kostgangers. Henny died in April.

Other quotes have George talking about how slowly he gets things done now, when he used to be able to do things quickly. And about trying to maintain a fairly normal life, including going from his home in rural Belgium near the Dutch border to The Hague, his and his wife's home town (they grew up on the same block, and her brother is Golden Earring's bass player), so she can go to her favorite hairdresser and they can eat at a favorite seafood restaurant there.

If there are any more specific details on how he's coping with ALS, I haven't run across them in tweets from people posting about the article. And again, the interview for Oor might've been done before June 18th.

I'd've happily subscribed to Oor to be able to get to the full text of the article, but their website allows subscriptions only using Dutch bank account numbers, not credit cards. I could use VISA to order that special issue of the magazine, but not only was there no info on how long that issue would take to reach me (probably at least a couple of weeks, maybe much longer), but I would then have a LOT of text, in Dutch, to type into Google Translate (I could just copy and paste if I could subscribe and get to the premium pages that way). I hate transcribing. I can type about 80 wpm just typing my own thoughts, but I probably type about 20 wpm, if that, copying from a book or article, and that's in English. It's a small fraction of that if I try to copy Dutch text, typing instead of copying and pasting. And then I have to catch Google Translate's errors. (For the lastest example, when I copied those few sentences of text from Oor's website to Google Translate, the Dutch word for brother-in-arms was translated as brother-in-law (which I knew was wrong), both times I copied the entire quote -- but when I copied only the single word, Google Translate got it right. Not the first time I've run into that problem with online translations, and chasing down the right translation of foreign slang can get really time-consuming.)

I am curious about the article, though, especially with the reference to boys adventure books in that quote from the Oor website, and with the caption on one photo of George there: De Aller Laatste Cowboy. The Very Last Cowboy. I can't recall anything I read about George that referred to a fascination with cowboys, with Old West type adventures, but I found out just recently that the lead singer of Die Toten Hosen loved novels about the Wild West when he was a kid, and I've heard it isn't an odd fascination for Europeans. I was surprised when I first heard that, though my own maternal grandfather worked as a cowboy for a while after emigrating from Germany.

At least it doesn't sound as if George is planning to ride off into the sunset any time soon. One quote I saw from the article was him saying, "You haven't got rid of me yet."

Great attitude.