phone, gone

In case anyone reading this knows me and has given me their phone number before: My phone got stolen, so I no longer have it. I'm hoping to get a new phone with the same number soon, but I need your number - please email it to me (not the brown address, but my first period last name at the google mail service). Thanks.

There presumably will be a post about what happened eventually but this week is not the time to do it. Nomadism isn't always as fun as it looks.

7 Train

Tweaked out white guy swings himself into the seat across from mine, where I'm sitting with my backpack and bags. I avoid eye contact but he makes conversation: "Going on vacation?" um..no. "Business?" No, I'm coming back. "Oh, welcome home. You do look jetlagged." oh yes I do. so tired.
Welcome Home. It's not strictly true, not yet - but by virtue of saying it it might have become true. A strange city, this.

packing

Once again, it's late (early) and I'm (not) packing. Whittling down my stuff to a backpack's worth isn't fun - on one hand I feel like I shouldn't have so many darn possessions, on the other I hate leaving so much behind, especially my books. I dream of the day where I'll be settled enough to bring all my books together in one place, though it'll probably never happen, shipping is too expensive.

fm4 is broadcasting a reading from "twelve", a novel about kids in New York City. It's in German translation, but they leave the street names as is: "Mike ging die second avenue hinauf und machte links bei der eightysecond street." The story itself seems a lot like "Kids" in novel form - everyone's after drugs and sex and about fifteen. Kids these days.

Tomorrow - today now - I'll be there myself, New York City. I've reached a point where I can't think about it anymore, it just has to happen and it'll all work out. I hope.

Of course, I got a phone call today from the people at the place here that I applied to - they had a project they thought I'd be interested in, I should come in, etc. Ehm...sorry. But it's a year-long project, so if this New York thing doesn't work out... the living is easy in Vienna, as my dad never tires of pointing out. Lonesome, I counter, but he's right.

I went to the Burgtheater tonight, saw "König Ottokar's Glück und Ende". If I knew Shakespeare's histories better I could make a pertinent comparison. It's basically the story of the founding of the Austrian/Hapsburg Empire, as written in the 19th century, and now with a modern dramaturgy on top. Nothing I can say about it will make sense to most readers and besides I fell asleep in the fourth act (it was so warm... I woke up when people started shooting). It was lovely, everyone got dirty, and my seat cost all of 2 euros. See last sentence of above paragraph.

Five Things To Miss About Vienna:
1, Naschmarkt
2, Flex
3, Cafe Kafka/Hawelka/Prückel
4, Medias: fm4, Falter. The new Fleisch looks good too.
5...... too many things that just aren't quite the best thing ever the way the others are. Besides now I want to go to sleep.

Wiener Kaffeehaeuser

I've been working on my dad's book - proofreading, correcting some English, being nitpicky and finding exceptions to all his examples. In order to make it more interesting I've been doing it all in different Kaffeehauser (cafes) - first I tried to visit every one exactly once, but then it got sunny and I went to Do-An a couple of times, and so on. I've missed many, but a complete list would be impossible in this city.

Category 1:
Sacher, Central, Griensteidl - These are all cafes with long honorable histories, but unfortunately this means that they're also included in all the tourist guides. I've never actually been in Sacher or known anyone who went there - Demel makes the better (and more authentic) Sachertorte anyway. (Demel isn't on this list because, while it has the best cakes in the city, it's not a place to sit with a Grosser Brauner for two hours and work.) Cafe Central is architecturally very distinct and impressive and thus is probably worth a visit, but neither it nor the Griensteidl have much in common with the "Literatencafes" they were at the fin de siecle.

Category 2:
Traditional nice cafes, a bit fancy (at least in comparison with 3, though the line between the two is completely arbitrary). These are where locals go (and they still go often, despite Starbucks' arrival).
Diglas, Tirolerhof, Prueckel - All in the first district and pretty and authentic and all that. I don't have much of a connection with any of them, though I like Prueckel the best - it's very large and has huge windows, so it gets much more sunshine than most cafes. It's also celebrating its 100th birthday this year.
Sperl - This is where I used to meet my dad after school on Saturdays, and then (after reading newspapers for hours) we'd go down to the Nashmarkt and go grocery shopping. Best when it's blistering cold outside and all warm and golden inside.
Museum - recently renovated according to Loos' original Art Deco design. I wasn't too impressed, too minty green.
Dommeyer - this one's way out in Hitzing, but close to Schoenbrun so potential tourists may yet find it. Very pretty Jugendstil.

Category 3:
The distinguishing characteristic here is that most haven't been renovated or really cleaned since they opened. If they ever did people would probably never forgive them.
Hawelka - The prototypical shabby smoky comforable cave. It used to be my favorite cafe by far, but it's in too many guidebooks now (though if you don't speak German: you're not just imagining it, the waiters are making snide remarks about you). They're open late, until 2am, and after 10 they have Buchteln which are yummy and I'm not going to explain. RIP Josephine Hawelka, who used to make them, but she died this spring. Her husband Leopold is still around most evenings.
Braeunerhof - around the corner from the Hawelka, definitely less touristy and less cavelike. Also has a longer history - I think it closed during WWII and reopened only a while afterwards.
Korb - I'm not sure whether the Cafe Korb was founded in the early sixties or just renovated last then, but it's definitely got that vibe. The lady in charge has a crazy hair up-and-forwards roll going on that fits in well. They have good Kaesetoasts.
Das Kleine Cafe - it's a very small cafe where they often play bad rock (think Bon Jovi). But it's so cute you forgive them.
Stein - close to the University and thus full of students. Plays with a bar aesthetic - the mirrors in the toilet stalls (wtf?) - but comfy.
Kafka - my new favorite cafe - i hadn't ever been there until this project, unlike most of the others, but I bent the rules and went there a couple times since then. It's approximately between Sperl and a Starbucks, geographically, which goes to show the density of cafes Vienna can support. I like Kafka because it's small and cozy and the last time I was there they were playing Cuban songs about Che Guevara. Most cafes don't play music, which I think is a very good thing, but Kafka has great taste and gets away with it.

Category 4: Miscellaneous cool places
Palmenhaus - A huge classical wroughtiron greenhouse, renovated and turned into a huge bar/cafe. Lovely when it's sunny, a bit full of sleazy beautiful people at night. The bathrooms are popular with the gymnasiasten who hang out (read: drink) in the park surrounding it (ah, the memories...)
Do-AN - the cafe am Naschmarkt where the hip beautiful people sit when it's sunny. They serve cafe latte in bowls, which is about all I need to love a place.
phil - cafe/bar/book/cd/dvd/furniturestore across from Sperl. They're the only place in Vienna that I know of that has Premium Cola, which is the old Africola, resurrected by some Germans. It has fewer ingredients and more caffeine than Coke and is absurdly hip of course, as is phil.


There you go - a long irrelevant list with no adresses or any redeeming useful features. Enjoy.

Ruan Lingyu - silent china

The Viennale has a special program showing the films of Ruan Lingyu, the Chinese silent-film actress, this year. I saw her film Shen Nu (The Goddess) tonight - the story of a prostitute of a heart of gold, unable to redeem her position or improve that of her child. Nothing too surprising there.

But it was silent - not "silent" like Metropolis or Phantom of the Opera, where there's an orchestra score, but silent as in "everyone in the audience has to cough every five minutes" silent. It was strangely uncomfortable in the beginning, and then as I got drawn into the story it mattered less, I started imagining sounds (the UBahn going by every ten minutes helped). But I finally understood those cinema scenes in Fellini movies (Amacord? Roma?) where the whole town is loudly supplying the soundtrack to the movie.

Sometimes I did miss the dialogue, though the missing or late subtitles in this case were even more annoying. It's kind of amazing though how much they assumed of their audience - an entire argument is all gestures and context and maybe one line written out, and yet there's little ambiguity as to what's going on. Granted the plot may be a liiittle bit constrained to the unsurprising, but it's more than that. It links back to the questions of communication and redundancy and sociality - I missed the dialogue because I felt there was a layer of (mostly cultural) information I wasn't getting, despite the fact I definitely understood the goal of the dialogues, i.e. the furthering of the plot. I probably wouldn't have been as interested in more complete dialogue if it had been set in my culture, where I would have understood (or been able to fill in) that information on my own, probably automatically, as the intended, original audiences did.

T. Raumschmiere @ WUK

Sometime not too long ago, DJs realized that rockstars had more fun, about the same time as rock bands figured out that people dance to electro/techno beats. And so were born, amongst others, LCD Soundsystem and Mahi Mahi in the (greater) New York sphere and T. Raumschmiere and isolee and egoexpress around Berlin.

So much for the genesis. T. Raumschmiere, former techno DJ, now tours with a band. He jumps and writhes on stage and throws beer around and sometimes he plays a little guitar or presses buttons. The problem is though that when you're (I'm) watching the performance happening on stage, you (I) don't dance; I watch, and then it's really not good enough, musically - it's just a farce, a performance. Or maybe it was just my mood. But I wasn't impressed, though I think his Monstertruckdriver is one of the best tracks of this year? last year?

The bald intense drummer reminded me of VZO of Mahi Mahi, though T. Raumschmiere is no VVR - he's the scrawny dirty bearded undershirtwearing hipsteropposite of eighties mod. It seems paradoxical that Mahi Mahi's cool intensity can get hipsters to dance while they only nod to T. Raumschmiere's nasty bass and theatricals. But no matter. The set was also ripoffishly short, not even an hour, which despite the fact I wasn't enjoying it much left a bad taste.

copywrongs

apophenia (danah boyd - former BACHer!) has a great article about copyright and media.

The thesis is that copyright issues that arise in remixed, reworked, re-expressed media are issues of communication, not piracy. In a world in which we are constantly inundated with (copyrighted) media, our culture picks up and uses this pervasive media as reference points, as shared commonalities: we quote movie lines, song lyrics, etc. Look at a newspaper's headlines - a fair chunk of them, especially in the "lighter" sections, are puns on cultural references. As our means of communication expand through multimedia tools, we can "quote" using source material.

If Big Media then jumps in and claims copyright infringement, why then We Are Being Silenced. They are the pusher who won't let the user... eh, I don't know where this metaphor is going. But culturally, we have become dependent on the media to express firstly our communal, cultural issues (in The Drama of the Year), but also, later, to express ourselves individually through references to shared experiences, medial experiences. The form of this individual expression (spoken word, mix, video collage) should not make a difference - copyright lawyers think otherwise.

The solution, obviously, being unique, media-independent expression. Cutting yourself off from the dealer, to return to a metaphor that I still don't know how to fix.

Plag Dich Nicht

First Gluehwein (mulled wine) of the season at the Plag-Dich-Nicht label party last night. The setting was fallishly beautiful: Das Kornhaeusl-villa, the oldest (1802) "Landvilla", country villa, in Ottakring, Vienna. (Ottakring used to be a small wine-producing village on the outskirts of Vienna. These days it's better known for the Ottakringer brewery, but still has vineyards.) These days it's in ruins and in the process of being torn down/renovated into senior citizen apartments and whatnot, but the house itself is a historical landmark.
So... at sunset take the J Tram all the way from the Oper out to the last stop, listen for the eerie electronica coming from somewhere, sneak past the fences and the bulldozers, and you find a beautiful wild garden, with tall old chestnut trees throwing down leaves and prickly fruit. The music comes from a mess of electronics and wires and a couple biologicals under a roof with saplings growing on it, all bathed in red light, nearly the only lightsource there, apart from a small light by the Gluehweinstand.
The whole thing reminded me of 39Troy, where not much seems to be happening these days. The audience was considerably older though, and brought along strange flocks of precocious waist-high blond girls. At least there's still hope for coolness after thirty. Or twentyfive, anyway.
The music was pretty various - I came late and saw a disappointingly short and unexciting set by Das Erste Wiener Heimorgelorchester, if it was even them. Also a lovely set by Dorit Chrysler who played a strange instrument I'd never seen before that is apparently called a Theremin - basically, she waves her hands and it makes noise. Crazy. She sings, too, while wearing a gold skirt and being pretty. It rocked - softly, con sentimento.