6/28/2009

The Graffiti Artist: Cy Twombly



The American artist Edwin Parker (Cy) Twombly Jr (born April 25, 1928) has an exhibit in Vienna's Mumok.


Twombly is known for his gestural, calligraphic-style graffiti paintings with letter-like signs, his scribbling and doodling, his symbols of ancient mythology on monumental canvases.

I have the feeling it will need some time to get closer to Twombly's work, some of the pictures have impressed me very much, because of their radiant colours, their vibrancy and irony. For example, I was very attracted by the "Wilder Shores of Love"(see above).

Here's an interview with the artist and below a video from the Tate where the Tate's Director Nicholas Serota gives a behind the scenes tour of the Cy Twombly exhibition as he makes the final adjustments to the hang just before opening. Serota talks about Twombly's technique, his relationship to Turner, and how the artist, now in his eighties, is still producing some of the most vital work of his career.

6/17/2009

Was Leopold Bloom Austrian?

I promised to blog about Bloomsday 2009 in Vienna.

It was a hot Bloomsday, and the small art lounge in the basement of the Café Korb which takes pride in a lot of famous former guests like Arthur Miller or Andy Warhol was like a sauna. The readings were transmitted to the bigger room on the first floor where it was much cooler – but I wanted authenticity, and this meant sweating and drinking lots of water and some wine. Additionally, more than half of the audience of about 40 people smoked as if there was no tomorrow, which meant a slight feeling of anoxia and poor visibility.

The reading was non-stop. One advertising canvasser (or of a similar occupation) after the other was called by name and company, got the text and started reading, each one about 10 minutes. I have never read the German translation of Ulysses, although I own one, and was astonished how different some passages come across in another language. I hadn’t been at a reading for a long time, but found it very stimulating to listen for once and concentrate on the voices and the puns. And it was fun, too. By 11.30 we had seen and heard 32 people from newspapers, radios and TV-stations.

There was one contribution in English, read by Dardis McNamee from the Vienna Review, an English-language newspaper in Vienna. It was great to hear at least several pages of the original.

The readings were framed by the talks of three Joyce connoisseurs: Kurt Palm, director and author (of, amongst others, a James Joyce-ABC), Meinhard Rauchensteiner, advisor to the Federal President and Otto Brusatti, radio presenter and musicologist.

The people over here like connections to their own country, so Kurt Palm recounted that the first lines of „Ulysses“ were written in Trieste, which, at that time was Austrian.

Mr Rauchensteiner asked „Was Leopold Bloom Austrian?“ and presented references to Austria found in Ulysses. There are quite a few. For example the following passage from episode 7, Aeolus: „Emperor’s horses. Habsburg. An Irishman saved his life on the ramparts of Vienna. Don’t you forget! Maximilian Karl O’Donnell, graf von Tirconnell in Ireland. Sent his heir over to make the king an Austrian fieldmarshal now. Going to be trouble there one day. Wild geese. O yes, every time. Don’t you forget that!“

The background to this: Maximilian Karl Lamoral Count O’Donnell, Austrian born son of an Irish expatriate served as aide-de-camp to Emperor Francis Joseph. One day, he attended the emperor on his daily walk around Vienna.When the Emperor was attacked and wounded by a Hungarian tailor, O’Donnell knocked the man down. The Emperor subsequently asserted that he owed his life to O’Donnell.

The „Wild Geese“ refers to the large groups of people who left Ireland between 1600 and 1789, most of them to serve in the huge continental armies of Russia, Spain, Poland, France and Austria. One of them was the Irishman Maximilian Ulysses Browne, but we can’t be sure if his second name had any influence on the title of the book.

The question „Was Leopold Bloom Austrian“? was finally answered with „Yes, but only in his nightmares“.

I did not stay for the talk „Joyce and Music“ which is a pity but it was around midnight and I had to get up at 5. I’m sure the readings went on till the wee hours of the morning.

An evening well spent.

6/15/2009

Bloomsday 2009 in Vienna



There are several events to celebrate Bloomsday here in Vienna, but one of them sounds very interesting and promising.

Staged by a town magazine (Wien live) lots of people will read non-stop from James Joyce's "Ulysses" in one of Vienna's most famous coffeehouses, the "Café Korb" - "until exhaustion". And very special people, too: advertising canvassers, people who have the same job as the fictitious Leopold Bloom, protagonist and anti-hero in "Ulysses". They will do so with the express permission of James Joyce's grandson, Stephen James Joyce.

The canvassers will be coming from all of Vienna's daily newspapers, and they will additionally be boosted by editors and publishers who have been forced to ask companies for support in exchange for an - advert.

Gorgonzola sandwiches with mustard and burgundy will be served, the snack Leopold Bloom ate in Davy Byrne's on Grafton Street in Dublin.

6/07/2009

Election Day in Europe!

It's the final day of the Elections for the European Parliament.

Final results will be found here as well as in Wikipedia, by 22:00 CET, the estimates will be available by 21:00.

According to CNN a "Euro barometer" poll conducted last month found that only a third of potential voters intended to use their mandate, suggesting that participation could be even lower than the 45 percent turnout in 2004.

European Parliament President Hans-Gert Pottering considers urged all citizens to use their vote to "support those parties that are in favour of European integration and that are committed to our European values."

For a better understanding, the names of the parties are:

- the EPP, the European People's Party (conservative)
- PES, the Party of European Socialists
- ALDE, Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe
- the GREENS-EFA, (European Free Alliance)
- EUL-NGL, European United Left–Nordic Green Left
- ID, the Indepence Democracy Group
- the UEN, the Union for a Europe of Nations
- a range of smaller parties.


There's a time-machine covering the years from 1979 to 2009
.

5/30/2009

27 Views of Europe

The European Parliamentary Elections will be held in the 27 member states of the European Union between 4 and 7 June 2009. 736 Members of the European Parliament will be elected to represent some 500,000,000 Europeans, making these the biggest trans-national elections in history.

Reporters at the magazine Spiegel online in Germany, NRC Handelsblad in the Netherlands and Politiken in Denmark have worked together on profiling attitudes about the election and the EU in each of the member states. You can read them by clicking on the respective country.


View 27 Views of Europe in a larger map

5/29/2009

Meme-Tagged

I was meme-tagged by Lydia.

Ok, the rules are:

- respond and rework
- answer questions on your blog
- replace one question
- and, on Lydia’s suggestion, tag three other blogs,

which are:

Elligreat
Friko
Stevie


1. If one song were to describe your life, what song would it be?

I Feel A Change Coming On.

2. Which item of clothing do you wear most?


Blue track pants.

3. When did you get up today?


5.20, as usual.

4. Last thing you bought?


A mobile phone – the old one was coming apart.

5. What are you listening to?

The rhythm of the rain. It’s actually raining outside, therefore I remembered the old Cascades song.



6. If you were a God or a Goddess, who would you be?

Concordia, the goddess of harmony. But I’m not the goddess type, I’d be a pixie.

7. Favourite holiday spots?


Belle & Sebastian will tell you:




8.Reading right now?


A thriller, The Carnival Master, by Craig Russell.

9.Favourite film?

Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders.

11. First spring thing?


Put away the winter coat (only to fetch it again a few days later). This happens from February till April.

12. Funniest thing you saw in your life?


A photo of myself, sitting on a tree surrounded by bulls.

13. Who's your hero/heroine?


Yitzhak Frankenthal, an Israeli and Orthodox Jew, whose 19-year old son, Arik, was killed by the Hamas. He established the Arik Institute and is still working for peace and mutual understanding.

14. Share some wisdom?


Just do it.

15. If you were a tree, what tree would you be and why?

A larch. They love it cool and mountainous.

16. Fictitious characters who made a lasting impression on you?

Leopold Bloom in „Ulysses“

17. 4 words to describe you?


This woman is crazy.

5/25/2009

Big Night for Austria in Cannes

Michael Haneke, Austrian director, won the top prize, the Palme d'Or, at the Cannes Film Festival with his film, The White Ribbon, a drama about a children's choir in a village in northern Germany just before World War I.

According to Haneke, the film is about "the origin of every type of terrorism, be it of political or religious nature."

Austrian actor Christoph Waltz received the Best Actor Award for portraying Colonel Hans Landa, the "Jew Hunter" in Quentin Tarantino's World War II epic "Inglourious Basterds."

Here's a list of all the awards.

5/23/2009

In memory of Paul Parin



Paul Parin, Swiss born psychoanalyst, author, writer of critical essays in politics and culture, and one of the founders of Ethnopsychoanalysis died in Zurich on May, 18 at the age of 92.

He was a truly remarkable man. I had the privilege to meet him several times in person. He was a lively man, affectionate and sincere, and, above all, a gifted story-teller.

Born in 1916, Paul Parin grew up in a Slovenian manor as the son of a Jewish bourgeois family. He finished medical school in Zurich. During World War II he was a committed anti-fascist, actively involved in refugee-aid and a doctor with the Yugoslavian Liberation army. From 1946 until 1952, he specialized in neurology and trained in psychoanalysis in Zurich. In 1958, he was a founding member of the Psychoanalytical Seminary in Zurich.

I loved his memories "Untruegliche Zeichen von Veränderungen" (Unmistakable signs of change) where he - among other things - describes the emotional narrowness of his childhood and contrasts it with the vastness of the forests and the landscape. One of the pedagodical benefits he concedes to his rather despotic father is that he allowed the 13-year-old to set up a real library in one of the 40 rooms of the estate.

Together with his wife Goldy he undertook several scientific journeys to West-Africa, where they explored the question: Is psychoanalysis possible in societies different from the Western-European ones? Together with the psychoanalyst Fritz Morgenthaler, they combined psychoanalysis and anthropology, and applied the Freudian method and technique to ethnological research. As a result, several books were published.

One of the books from this era that impressed me most was "Die Weißen denken zu viel", (together with Fritz Morgenthaler and Goldy Parin-Matthey, in 1963) "White people think too much", which is, in essence the first documentation of a scientific method which has influenced the thinking and the research of a generation of psychoanalysts and ethnologists.

The title of this meanwhile legendary book stems from a quote by Dommo, a chief from Mali. He says: "The white people think too much, and then they do a lot of things; and the more they do, the more they think. And then they earn a lot of money, and when they have a lot of money, they are worried that the money might get lost. Then they think even more and make more money and they never have enough money. Then they're not settled any longer. That's why they're not happy".

Paul Parin was awarded the "Erich-Fried-Preis" in 1992; in 1997 he claimed the "Sigmund-Freud-Preis" for scientific prose of the "Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung", and in 1999 he received the "Sigmund Freud-Award of the City of Vienna". Paul Parin is an honorary doctor of Klagenfurt University in Austria.

Paul's wife (of 58 years) Goldy, died 12 years ago. They called each other fox and cat.

His notice of death says:
The fox has followed the cat for the big journey.

Thanks to krusenstern for the photo.

5/22/2009

Oh My Deer!














In one of Austria's largest public outdoor swimming pools with access to a branch of the Danube (capacity 30,000 visitors) a group of Canada geese have settled down (which is not without conflicts). Ironically, the name of the lido is "Gaensehaeufel" which means a hoard of geese and a small pile ...

In the same area, one pair of beavers felled 40 trees within one year.

A Viennese school often has to cancel Physical Education because of about 40 wild hamsters living on their sports field and making so many holes that there's acute danger for the kids of wrenching their ankles.

We have hundreds of foxes, kestrels, badgers, bats in hospitals or office towers, boars and wild sows, ring-necked parakeets from Africa, Chinese mandarin ducks and many more within city borders.

According to experts, cities are very attractive for wild animals, because there's plenty of food. Additionally, the design of the parks is more and more near-natural with lots of hiding places and scrubs.

The fellow in the picture above doesn't live in Vienna, but in my home-village. He seems to like the vicinity of houses as he's sitting about 1 metre from my backdoor.

5/17/2009

Maria Lassnig - The Ninth Decade



Today is the last day of the Maria Lassnig exhibit "The Ninth Decade" in Vienna's Mumok.

Throughout her life she has made it clear that the only thing she knows for sure are the feelings that evolve inside the shell of her body. She coined the term "body-awareness painting" in the 1940s.

"Once I wearied of depicting nature analytically, I began looking for a reality which would be more quintessentially mine than what the outside world, and found the body that I inhibit to be by far the most real of all realities; I had only to become aware of it to be able to project its impression in fixed centres of gravity onto the image plane".

She developed a "color perception" all her own which she called "vertical or absolute color perception"."I would fix my gaze at a point of color till the 'local color' disappeared and the entire frightening relativity of color gave way to a larger range of options". This enabled her to differentiate between "bodily sensation colors, thought colors, stretching and pressing colors, smell colors, flesh colors, death and decomposition colors" and so on.

I'm thrilled with the colors that emerge - bright green, deep violet, turquoise, and with the playfulness and irony in her pictures.

At almost ninety, Maria Lassnig is still alert, full of life, spirit and creative power.

Here's an interview and some of her pictures.

4/30/2009

Together Through Life

"He not busy being born is busy dying", the master says in "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)". And the master is busy and produces album after album, makes tour after tour.

I’m always happy when I can make connections. Of any kind.

In Bob Dylan’s latest album Together Through Life it’s the reference to James Joyce. (For those who don't know: this blog was created long ago in honour of James Joyce) “I’m listening to Billy Joe Shaver/And I’m reading James Joyce … Some people they tell me I got the blood of the land in my voice” he sings in “ I Feel a Change Comin’ On".

The blood of the land, indeed. For a European person this album is soo American. The texts written by BD himself and none other than the lyricist Robert Hunter as a co-writer cover universal themes like hardship, struggle, love, murder, death in decidedly American settings. The texts are strange, wise, funny, apocalyptic, sentimental, psychedelic, ironic, and sometimes they sound as if they have been sung with a smile on the face of the singer.

But the best is still to come. The music. It has been described as blues pop with Tex/Mex, Latin-American and Creole elements. Very prominent: David Hidalgo on the accordion and Mike Campbell on the guitar. Beautiful arrangements.

Willi Winkler, a renowned German author (of, amongst other books, a Dylan biography), critic and translator (he translated books by Updike, Burgess and Bellow) and who writes for the German daily “The Sueddeutsche” sees “Together Trough Life” as the best, most beautiful and greatest the master has ever delivered to his audience.

Well, let’s listen for ourselves.

The album sure is impressive. Very different from Modern Times.

My favourites? I’ve not decided yet. Maybe” I Feel A Change Comin’ On”, “This Dream of You” (a hell of an almost Viennese type of waltz), or “Beyond Here Lies Nothing”.


There’s a website where you can create an interactive lyrical portrait based on the song “Beyond Here Lies Nothing”.


The video below gives a good overview. It has 30 seconds from each song. The playlist:
1) Beyond Here Lies Nothin 2. Life Is Hard 3. My Wife's Home Town 4. If You Ever Go To Houston 5. Forgetful Heart 6. Jolene 7. This Dream Of You 8. Shake Shake Mama 9. I Feel A Change Comin On 10. Its All Good



"This Dream of You"


4/26/2009

Travel and trade have reshaped our world

The European Commission (together with the World Bank) has developed a map of accessibility which shows the concentration of economic activity and the few areas left that can be called wilderness.

Only 10 percent of the land area is remote - more than 48 hours from a large city.


Read more here ..

Copyright EC

4/22/2009

Earth Day 2009

I take this test every year: How many planets does it take to support your lifestyle?

I still need 4.6 planets! Not good at all, although it was much higher last year. It's the flying that causes the bad results. And the garbage. And all these electrical gadgets. Food is okay (vegetarian), transport, too (mostly public).

4/16/2009

Night Mail

Every now and then (2005 and 2007 I blog about W. H. Auden.

Today I came across "Night Mail", a 1936 documentary film about a London, Midland and Scottish Railway mail train from London to Scotland. For this film W.H. Auden wrote a poem, Benjamin Britten made the music.

There's a Nightmail Video on Youtube that is worth watching and listening as the poem's rhythm imitates that of the train wheels and starts picking up and gaining speed.

The opening starts like this:

This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door....


The poem's full text is here.

4/15/2009

Britain's Got Talent

This video of Susan Boyle's performance circulated all over Austria today.

It cannot be embedded, so you have to follow the link:

Susan Boyle

Read more here:

Britain's got talent ...

Isn't she incredible?

4/11/2009

William Wordsworth Today


daffodils2
Originally uploaded by francessa_Rich
"I wandered lonely as a cloud" as a rap (but only for one minute). The rest is beautiful landscape.


Happy Easter everyone!