Euro Like Me

a christmas story

2011-12-16T13:27:00.004+01:00

When I was seven or eight years old, me and all my friends wanted G.I. Joes for Christmas. Joe was a toy soldier doll—the one I wanted was black with black fuzz on his head that was supposed to be hair. And on Christmas morning, when we opened our presents, there he was—my new G.I. Joe.

But the real Christmas day toy soldier action was up the street. My friend Keith was probably the loudest boy in the neighborhood. Whenever he opened his mouth, a shout came out. And Keith had a peculiar way of playing with his G.I. Joes. He would pour gasoline on them, set them on fire and then throw them into the air as high as he could.

One Christmas, his parents gave Keith an entire battalion of G.I Joes: not just the dolls, but also G.I. Joe jeeps and tanks and ships. This was a mistake. And by noon on the 25th, Keith had burned, exploded, melted or otherwise destroyed his entire G.I. Joe army. What a show.

I haven’t spoken to Keith in years, but I’ve heard that when he grew up, he joined the navy.

Baby It's You (part 2)

2011-08-10T13:12:00.002+01:00

(The second part of my latest piece for the Sueddeutsche Zeitung)

Lady Gaga and company exhibit a particularly American perspective: each of them assures their listeners that they are all superstars, gangstas, or in Perry’s case, explosions. Many Americans go through life certain that one day, they will be rich, or famous, or both. For us, being “okay” means being “super.” Normal, unremarkable self-esteem is-- like leaving Afghanistan-- not an option. Put another way, American self-worth is worth more.

Speaking of money, might it be that all of these pop odes to empowerment have something to do with the fact that the US economy is in the toilet, and Americans are feeling, well, a little weak? In desperate times, pop culture often morphs into something more escapist or consoling—think about The Wizard of Oz (1939), or Star Wars (1977). As if in response to the mere suggestion that the dollar is down, Pink’s “Raise Your Glass” practically pole-vaults out of radios, televisions and computer screens, and roars, “We will never be, never be, anything but loud.” To underscore the idea that the USA is back and better than ever, the video clip for the song features images of both Uncle Sam and Rosie the Riveter, the WWII American factory heroine. At times, “Raise Your Glass” seems to be addressed to some sort of outcast “you,” a rebellious, marginalized “nitty, gritty, dirty little freak,” but then Pink, like Ke$ha, switches to the royal “we.” So this, at last, is what truly underlies empowerment pop: Narcissus.

Last April, Dr. Nathan DeWall, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky, published the results of a computer analysis of pop music lyrics from 1980 to 2007 which claims to show that the narcissism (and anger) of the form has significantly increased in the last thirty years. Two of the study’s co-authors had already beat him to the punch by publishing the 2009 book, The Narcissism Epidemic. Is it foolhardy to draw generational conclusions from a study of the wit and wisdom of Beyonce, Eminem and the Pussycat Dolls? Yes. Yes, it is. But do take a look at Pink’s video for her second (!) recent empowerment anthem, “Fucking Perfect.” In the last scene, a once-troubled woman tucks her younger self into bed, and gives her a tender kiss on the forehead. The singer intends this to be a song to oneself, a kind of message from the future, when everything will be Okay, Pink pretty, pretty promises.

In one of the few essays to explore why Pink et. al. seem to be hitting the same note, Pitchfork pop critic Tom Ewing made a surprising connection to the recent rise of social media. While search engines like Google can make you feel overwhelmed and lost in a universe of information, Facebook and Twitter make you feel special, unique, even Important. These days, he writes, “We are all born superstars: permanently consulted, endlessly special, but perpetually vanishing into the datamass too.”

This is not a particularly American quandary, but imagine what must run through a poor little pop singer’s head these days when she sits down to write, or in Ke$ha’s case, to text her next song. “How can I please my audience, please myself, and continue to make tons of money?” Which brings us back to that US flag dress she wears in the video for “We R Who We R.” As my Austrian wife is fond of reminding me, Americans are some of the only people in the world who signal their national identity with the word “we.” We Americans do love a good flag dress. In fact, it may be that for us, the only thing more empowering than empowerment is patriotism.

This year, the insightful US journalist and computer programmer Paul Ford published an essay entitled The Web Is a Customer Service Medium. Empowerment pop may only be a sign that popular music is no longer a medium of guitars, slick production and catchy lyrics, but instead, simply a matter of customer satisfaction.

By the way, thank you for your attention. You’ve all been absolutely perfect readers.

Baby, It’s You

2011-08-04T07:22:00.004+01:00

(I'm posting the first half of my latest assemblage of potshots and half-baked notions for the Sueddeutsche Zeitung. As a subject, especially for US readers who have had to suffer through many, many playbacks of Katy Perry's "Firework," it may seem late. But they say that the best place to watch a parade is from the front and from the rear.)

The American pop star Ke$ha has been called many things, but “smart” is not one of them. Nevertheless, one of her recent videos features a revealing scene, wherein the singer, a fabulous disaster of glittery rags and mis-applied mascara, stops dancing long enough to change into a flimsy US flag “dress.” She then bleats the title lyric to “We R Who We R,” and … jumps off a tall building. It may be the most idiotic fusion of self-affirmation and self-destruction in a music video, ever. Or it may be something else.

Upon first listen, Ke$ha’s song appears to be a hymn to unashamed individuality, to the joy of being young, dumb and quite pleased with yourself. Despite her use of the first person plural, “We R Who We R” is just one in a remarkable string of recent US hit singles which all seem to say to the listener, “You are a beautiful, perfect superstar, everyday, in every way.” From Pink’s “Raise Your Glass” to Lady Gaga’s “Born this Way,” US artists have been injecting so much empowerment into the airwaves, it’s a wonder the whole planet isn’t hugging each other. This isn’t entirely unprecedented—who could forget Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All?”--but why is American pop music so decidedly encouraging at this moment in time?

For an answer, we should start with the songs and the singers themselves. And I have to admit that, although I like the way she looks in a cupcake bikini, Katy Perry’s “Firework” is easily the most annoying song in this wave of feel-good schmaltz. Her stut-ut-uttering delivery of the lyric, which builds to a bellow as the synthetic strings soar into the Fourth-of-July sky, is slightly more pleasant than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. Ms. Perry has explained the song by saying that, “Everybody can be a firework, it’s just all about you igniting the spark inside of you.” Fine. Why does this sound so much like a cheerleader stooping to reassure all of the unpopular kids that they can, one day, be just like her?

“Firework” is fascinating musically, too, if only because it’s so difficult to discern exactly what is making the sounds we’re hearing—was there an actual guitar, piano or snare drum involved in the production? This is both typical and ironic: almost all of these pop songs about being yourself are—texturally—quite synthetic. The message is, ‘You are a unique human.’ The medium is uniquely inhuman.

Within the micro-genre of empowerment pop, as she does elsewhere, Lady Gaga tries to top everyone. “Born This Way” not only plagiarizes Madonna, it super-sizes her. The song isn’t just unapologetically disco, it’s indestructible-motivational-gay-pride-rainbow super-disco. It could be interpreted as a response to a recent wave of tragic suicides by gay Americans. But although it instructs the listener to “love yourself,” Ms. Gaga has never sounded more like someone else. Which doesn’t mean “Born This Way” isn’t a great song.

Okay I’ve Become That Parent

2011-06-28T21:13:00.003+01:00

(Last Thursday, before Anette came home from the hospital, Adinah and V. got into another World War 4. After I waded in and disarmed the insurgents, we sat at the breakfast table and I brokered a treaty. I asked the two of ‘em, “What rules can we have in this house to make things better?” Then I wrote down what they said, and made them both sign it. I signed the damn thing as well. V. decorated the rules with little stickers of panda bears and surfing lizards. Adinah translated the document into German, then made a big sign that reads “Unser Regeln (Our Rules).” We taped the entire declaration up on the refrigerator door. Here are our Rules.)

1) We can be more quiet when Mom is asleep.

2) We can ask Mom what she wants (to do, to eat, etc.)

3) We can clean our room when Mom or Papa asks us to.

4) We will not be screaming at Mom (or Papa) (at bedtime or any other time.)

5) We can disagree, but we can solve our problems by talking about them.

6) We need to be gentle with each other.

7) We will listen to each other better.

Another Exotic Saturday

2011-06-20T19:54:00.005+01:00

I dropped by Prosi, Vienna's best international grocery, to buy some taco shells and refried beans on Saturday. The street outside had been blocked off and a stage set up for the Prosi Strassenfest Exotic Festival. I scanned the stands selling food from Zambia and Ecuador, coffee and tea from Ethiopia, and cookies from, um, Poland. I had formed my plan for the day.

I took the subway home, picked the kids up, and got back there as fast as I could.

Just as we arrived, a tiny Indian dancer swept onstage, twirling around in a classical style mixed with a few Bollywood moves and yoga poses. "Watch her hands," I said as I squatted next to Adinah and V. She spun and fluttered them like she was letting loose magic birds.

In short order, we saw a demonstration of a homegrown fusion of African and Shri Lankan dance, then a Viennese Samba troupe, and then a batch of belly dancers with huge, Theda Bara-style capes. V. loved all this boogie. Soon she was swiveling her hips, grabbing her crotch, and giving the world her best Johnny Rotten sneer. This is how V. rocks out. One day, she will be onstage with Justin Timberlake or Lady Gaga, whichever lasts longer.

For about the fortieth time, I asked the girls if they were hungry yet. Adinah gave me a barely enthusiastic, 'Yeah,' and we were off! I steered the posse to the nearest stall, which turned out to be Tanzanian. Adinah is usually a pasta-bread-rice gal, but she surprised me by asking for a spicy beef turnover. I snapped up a roasted chicken drumstick. V. just wanted the sweet vanilla fritters. Uh uh, real food first, I insisted.

We spun over to the Indian booth, and Adinah got her (curried) rice with chapati, which V. also nibbled. I got the spicy chicken and lemon pickles. Ouch. Then V. got those fritters at last.

Then it was henna tattoo time. At that stand, the girl in the sari, who looked like a member of the Upper Austria caste, explained that if she put a design on the girls' hands, they'd have to keep their hands still for two hours. HA HA HA! Also, she only had a dark brown henna, which didn't look like it would be visible on Adinah's chocolate skin. We did it anyway. And just as Ms. Sari finished up with them, it started raining.

We were afraid the rain would wash off the dye, so both girls covered their tattoos as we ran for the subway. Two hours later, Adinah and I scratched the henna off her hand. Underneath was a pretty brown rose.

Then we giggled as we climbed into V.'s bed, where she was already sawing zzzzz's. We scratched off her henna--somehow she'd kept it basically intact--and now she had a nice new rose, too.

It was a nice day.

Top Ten Cures for What Ails ye

2011-06-16T11:33:00.003+01:00

(in no particular order)

1) Tenderness

2) Chocolate ice cream, preferably something of comparable potency with Ben and Jerry's New York Super Fudge Chunk or Chocolate Fudge Brownie.

3) A good comedy (I'm partial to Austin Powers I, Midnight Run and anything by Charlie Chaplin.)

4) Sea air

5) A walk around the block (or over to the barn, depending on your circumstances.)

6) Talking to a friend (with or without alcohol.)

7) Writing it all down in your journal

8) Music (sad, happy, loud, floatey, whatever you got)

9) Making something: a photograph, a cookie, a baby

10) Understanding

No Guilt Allmans

2011-06-08T13:52:00.003+01:00

(This is a guest cross-post I wrote for Vampire Blues, a blog which my friend Steve also sometimes writes for. Thank you very much.)

I was a teenage stoner metalhead, and I was a Texas country punk devotee. I’d even listened to a Willie Nelson record or two, but I was never an Allman Brothers fan. No. Hippies with muttonchops “jamming” with the blues was a bridge too far.

Then I met Her. She was a Marxist history major with a bitchin’ bod. When she strapped on more than one gin martini, she was trouble. But before she left me to become a lesbian, she hipped me to the wonder and beauty of the Allman’s “Blue Skies.”

“Blue Skies” is basically two long guitar solos pasted together, with a Walt Disney-damaged lyrical chaser. Duane Allman’s playing would pierce the heart of a goddamn Republican. It is a gorgeous, utterly perfect piece of music.

And for many years after Her, I had no interest in hearing anything else by the Brothers.

Last summer, I was stealing some music from an old Austin punk rock friend, and some Allmans ended up on my iPod. My friend swore it wasn’t his, and blamed a mutual acquaintance who is a New York journalist and jam rock apologist. (I have heard that upstate New Yorkers love Southern rock in general, and the Allmans in particular.) Nevertheless, I vowed to give the muttonchops one more chance.

First I listened to Eat a Peach. I liked it! (Except for the nearly forty-minute “Mountain Jam.” ) I had always heard that this album was the Allman’s masterpiece. I had heard wrong. Peach was actually a stopgap odds and sods collection, released just after Duane Allman was killed in a motorcycle accident as the rest of the band was still reeling from the loss. But it has “Blue Skies,” and it has “Ain’t Wasting Time No More,” one of the best songs ever about not feeling sorry for yourself. Also, Gregg Allman seems to be singing around a mouthful of chewing tobaccey. Somehow this pleases me.

I wanted more, so I got Beginnings, which is notable for being a repackage of two albums with really terrible cover art. The cover of Beginnings is even worse. But the music!

It’s a surprising set, if only in the way the songs shift between breezy and boozy. What really gets me are the headbanging moments, especially two spots where the Band seems to be literally nailing the groove to the inside of your brain pan. The first comes at the climax of “It’s not my Cross to Bear,” and the second, even more nailingly, at the climax of “Whipping Post.” These climaxes build and build until they overwhelm—two piercing, fuck-you-up guitars, two drummers wailing, the notes getting higher and higher. It’s no less slamming than certain Daft Punk tracks—the Allmans just kill with different tools.

As a matter of fact, you’ll probably find the sounds at the end of “Whipping Post”—and that feeling of something that is spiraling ever upward—in plenty of other, very different kinds of music. But I also like the fact that these are songs with a real End. “Whipping Post” climaxes like a Hitchcock film. Sure, non-narrative, ultra-abstract contemporary music with guitars, or electronics, can be good. But in these less-than-narrative times, the climax of “Whipping Post” is deeply satisfying.

“Dreams” is also really, really nice. Like a very hot summer afternoon. Put it on. Grow your own muttonchops.

weekend in steiermark

2011-06-06T10:15:00.004+01:00

I Want to Rock and Roll All Night and Part of Every Day

2011-05-31T11:48:00.003+01:00

An old Austin music scene friend updated her status on Facebook the other day by saying that her eight-year-old son is driving her crazy. He’s playing a KISS CD. A lot.

My first reaction was, “So what’s the problem?’

Then she added that she’s giving him all of her old “hard rock CDs” including some by Soundgarden, the Clash and the Foo Fighters, to try to get him to listen to something ”better.”

So my second reaction, logical for a rock critic, was, ‘Those groups are not hard rock.’

She wound up by saying her kid is not going for her music.

Really?

Everybody knows it’s a kid’s job to drive their parents bananas. It’s been that way since at least the nineteenth century, when young Bavarians started telling their folks, ‘Yo, Beethoven is dope.’ What’s more surprising is that my friend may have thought her family would be different.

Years ago, another musician friend of mine proudly announced to me that his sixteen-year-old son was listening to exactly the same music that he did. My friend had a noise band—they built their own instruments, which included electrified drainpipes and two-by-fours with guitar strings. So his teenage son was listening to the Pixies, and telling all his high school friends that hip hop and Christina Aguilera sucked. He was just like his dad. It was one of the creepiest father-son things I ever saw.

Besides, it’s all relative. My kids, Adinah and Ms. V., they love the Kiddie Contest CDs. These feature the music from an Austrian TV show in which a group of irritating rugrats and Celine Dion-damaged teens perform clever remakes of pop hits. One contestant turned Barry Manilow’s “Mandy” into “Handy,” a song about her relationship with her cel phone. Listening to that these last hundred times or so has been better than drinking Drano. But not much.

So I’d love it if my girls discovered “Detroit Rock City.” Or even “Calling Doctor Love.”

But do you see me complaining about Kiddie Contest?

No, you do not.

the nightlife era

2011-05-26T10:27:00.003+01:00

Steve Shelley was in Vienna last night. He’s taking time off from Sonic Youth to play the drums for a band called Disappears . They’re good—a real straight-ahead railroad charge of spiky and spacy guitars—and it was great to see Steve bashing hell out of his kit in a hammerblow sort of way.

I’ve known Steve for about 25 years, so it was fun to visit with him and exchange sightings of some of our more loony rocker friends. He is also an unabashed Classic rock head, so I could (relatively) shamelessly confess to him that I’ve only recently “discovered” the Allman Brothers and well, James Brown. He gave me a few tips about both, then promised he’d send me some MP3s. Oh boy!

I haven’t been in a rock club watching a live band in about a million years, so that in itself was cause for rumination. Everything looked the same: the fanboys bumming cigarettes from each other in the front row, the blond bartendress built like a fireplug, the looks of surprise and pleasure on the guitarist’s faces. The sweat. It’s a great world. I wonder how much longer it will last.

I just don’t know how bands can tour anymore—gotta be so expensive, and to what actual financial or public relations gain? Matter of fact, even local bands must be going extinct. It’s always been a young person’s game, and always financially iffy, but right now? Sheesh, how long can one put off earning a living, just to bring the heavy riffage to a niteklub?

As I watched Steve wacking the toms with the same boyish half-grin he’s always grinned, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to show this world to my daughters?’ But I don’t know if the rock club will still exist by the time they become old enough to enter one.

the house on Liechtensteinstrasse

2011-05-23T12:21:00.003+01:00

um, hello again....

2011-05-18T11:07:00.001+01:00

I started this blog with the admittedly ridiculous notion of documenting my transformation into a "European." In the last few months, I slowed down then finally stopped posting to it, but not because I've finally, irrevocably, become a Euro-like me. Instead, it's just that, to paraphrase Big Daddy Kane, bloggin' ain't easy.

For instant gratification and quip exchanging, Facebook is better, more zipperless. Maybe Twitter is better still, but I'll never know--I just can't stomach the idea of joining a revolution which could elect Ashton Kutcher king. Magazines are so old hat (so why do I still drop everything else when I have a chance to contribute words or pictures to them?) And having a website is just dopey. (So why am I building another one?)

In short, I am mediacentrically mixed up. If this is an Attention Economy, I've confused my paper money with my small change.

I've also been really fucking busy.

Anyway, I definitely am more Euro-like now. I believe, for example, that lo-cost, hi-quality childcare is a right. I don't drive. I appreciate good bread and smelly cheeses.

But my friend Rich will be glad to know I also still shower or bathe regularly. (He must have had a traumatic encounter with a French person.) And I think about the USA a lot. I miss my homeland terribly. I just don't miss the bullshit....

Speaking of the Tea Party, I was thinking of them the other day as I read The Downfall of Fascism in Black Ankle County. That is a short chapter in the most excellent Up in the old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell. It was writen in 1939, as Americans were really coming to grips with the nature and implications of Nazi Germany. Mitchell documents the very short career of the Ku Klux Klan in his small North Carolina hometown. In just a few pages, he paints a picture of the KKK as hilariously inept and almost pitiable douche-lords, and he goes a long ways towards draining them of all of the fearsomeness they so clearly desire. This is a lesson I hold close to my heart: humor is the Death Star for assholes.

I'll try to remember that when I see pictures of Rand Paul and Governor Rick Perry.

Classical for Dudes, part Zwei

2011-02-14T19:26:00.003+01:00

(Here is the second part of my latest outrage. I got hate mail from a conductor in Munich. Mein Gott!)

On the other hand, some of this "classical" music is totally exhausting. For example, I checked out Schostakowitsch at the Wiener Konzerthaus. The Orchester des Mariinski Theaters St. Petersberg, conducted by Valery Gergiev, was playing his Seventh and Twelfth Symphonies. I thought, ’Jesus, there sure are a lot of sounds to be heard at a concert hall.’ It was amazing to be in this big-ass hall—all gold-trim and funky chandeliers—and to be able to hear every little squeak the musicians made. You could hear a tiny drum roll, or a little ripple of strings on somebody’s fiddle--you could even hear if some guy across the room rustled his program. Because everyone was totally silent and listening super carefully to the music! It’s amazing that in the time it took me to write one sentence, the orchestra could go from way-quiet to full-on wailing. It was also amazing how much better people smelled there than they do at a Machine Head concert.

After they started playing “the Leningrad”--which is called that because Schostakowitsch wrote it when there was a war or something going on-- watching the orchestra was like watching a really weird fungus grow. They sort of evolved and shifted, then they boiled and bubbled. The symphony started out sounding like a nice day in Lenin-town, but then it got really agitated, totally ballistic! When a melody from the Allegretto came back at the end of the Moderato, it was all lame and fucked up. Maybe it had a Fatal Accidentato.

Anyway, after awhile, I felt kinda pummeled. I had really enjoyed this concert, but I couldn’t handle anymore crescendos. I thought, ‘That guy with the cymbals needs to stop!’

Finally he did, so I went home. But I had to listen to Iron Butterfly for awhile just so I could fall asleep.

I went back to the Konzerthaus to hear the singer Georg Nigl and pianist Gérard Wyss rock some songs by Mahler, Berg and Pascal Dusapin, who is a guy who is still alive. It was awesome. Nigl can go from honey-sweet to raging bull in about four seconds, and when he bellows, his face gets really red, way redder than Henry Rollins. Wyss was also pretty smoking—it seemed like entire carnival and calvary charges were coming out of his piano. Whenever the two of them paused, the whole audience would exhale.

Sometimes classical music is like a one night stand, because you might not remember any of it in the morning. I thought, ‘No way am I going to be able to whistle any of these songs after the show.’ But I guess that’s okay. Pop music plants hooks in you, but classical is more like art. I’ve gotten used to music that’s like a sledgehammer, but some music is more like a ghost. It bothers you for a while, then it comes back later to bug you some more. And that’s pretty cool.

I’ve noticed that men at the opera houses here like to walk around with their hands clasped behind their backs, like extremely serious monks. It must be contagious, because now I’m thinking I’ve been over-thinking this whole Classical versus Pop deal. Opera and ballet and twelve tone music isn’t more important to Europeans than to Americans. Stravinsky isn’t less important in the twenty-first century than he was in the twentieth. You don’t have to choose between Bela Bartok and Cradle of Filth. That would be like making a movie called King Kong Versus Godzilla. And who would do that?

At the very beginning of his book, which by the way is called The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross relates this scene where George Gershwin came here to Vienna to visit that old sourpuss Alban Berg. Gershwin started to play Berg some of his jams, but then he got all nervous because he was afraid Bergie wouldn’t think his songs were heavy enough. So Berg looks at him and says, “Mr. Gershwin, music is music.” In other words, it’s all good, G.

Classical for Dudes

2011-02-10T20:03:00.004+01:00

(Yours truly just published his second article in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung [South German Newspaper]. here is the first part, second part soon to come....)

Some people say that Americans have no classical music tradition. This is not true. We all listen to classical music—classic Beatles, classic Springsteen, classic Clapton. We cherish the meisterworks of the Eagles. “Highway to Hell” is one of our most sacred texts. We love Dance too: the Moonwalk, the Hippy Hippy Shake, the Rock Lobster.
But when Europeans talk about classical music and dance, they mean something else, as I discovered when I arrived in Austria few years ago. They mean strange old sounds. Without electricity. Violins, tutus and mezzo sopranos. Fantastic contraptions, like the Triangle, which I find particularly unnerving. I have always preferred the dulcet tones of a nicely distorted wah-wah pedal.
Nevertheless, I’ve tried to have an open mind about operas and such. My wife took me to the Bregenzer Festspiele—it was a lot like Professional Wrestling. I took in a minor Verdi at the Staatsoper in Wien: at the end of the show, everyone gets stabbed. Just like a Scorsese film. On a lark, I paid for a ticket to the Ballet. I liked it! I liked watching them stand on their pointy little feet. A few days later, one of the ballerinas was fired when naked photos of her appeared in the local papers, but I thought, ‘Wow, now she’s a real star.’
It occurred to me that my American pals who love LaRoux and 50 Cent and Cradle of Filth might be missing out on something over here in Vienna. After a friend asked me to explain the plot of the Tschaikowsky-Pushkin collaboration Onegin, and I broke it down for her (Bookish Hottie meet Gloomy Gus--Gus does a diva act—blood is shed—Hottie says, ‘Later for this’), my friend said, “You ought to write ‘Classical for Dudes.’ “ So that is the title of the article which you are reading.

According to Alex Ross’ book, The Rest is Noise, which is a book that I have actually read, classical music blew up in the twentieth century. It got super noisy and weird. Then jazz and blues and the Beatles and hip hop happened, and people kind of forgot about der Mahler. Alex Ross says that symphonies and operas still matter though, because music is a “continuum.” This may be why I’ve always thought Eric Satie sounded like Brian Eno unplugged, and Krzysztof Penderecki like Sonic Youth with cellos.
But in Austria, on my journey of E-Musik discovery, I have found that there is one key difference between Bela Bartok and Deicide. You can’t do the dishes to Bartok—you really have to listen to every little ‘Kerrang!’ A few years ago, I saw a French orchestra performing in Bregenz. They did a little Beethoven, and I took a nap, but then they knocked out Igor Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” and it pinned me to the wall. The violin players leaned forward like downhill skiers. I didn’t even know why I liked it so much. Later, I found out that Stravinsky himself said, ‘My music is best understood by children and animals.” That explains it.

A standing room ticket at the Wiener Staatsoper only costs three or four Euro, so it’s a pretty good entertainment value. And operas are often more interesting than Kate Hudson movies, even though she does have a nice rack. After I found out that it caused a big flap about a hundred years ago, I went to see a Staatsoper performance of Richard Strauss’ Salome. The program said it was conducted by Peter Schneider, and that Catherine Naglestad played Salome. Wow. I thought my family was twisted. The music always sounded like it was sliding downhill. Naglestad killed it—I felt pretty sorry for her, even though she told the King to chop off that other guy’s head. And when she did her dance, it made me think of that scene in Metropolis where the evil robot hottie dances for all those rich perverts. Seeing operas really puts a lot of things in perspective.

something to think about

2011-01-24T09:47:00.003+01:00

Yeah, that’s me. The guy in the long gray pimp coat hanging onto a pole in the U1 to Reumannplatz. The one with Southern rock –Georgia’s finest—blasting out of his pink iPod and spilling out all over a subway car full of down-gazing gray Viennese, Muslim moms with shopping bags that say Strawberry Shortcake, and maybe even some folks from the other Georgia. That’s me in the middle of that.

The other day I was pondering how much bad luck some people have, and also marveling at my inability to cherish my own good fortune. But this morning I did it. The cat woke us up with kisses @ 5:45, then the alarm clock woke us up again @ 6:20, with the floatey, dreamy music of Manuel Göttsching's e2-e4.

The kids tumbled out of the bunk bed on their own and in a sunny mood. I sprinkled extra granulated maple syrup on my hot cereal, and it tasted ‘Grrrrr-eeaat!’ The kids got dressed for school, even helping each other out—no screaming or biting at all! Anette threw a few extra things in her suitcase and said good-bye—easy, simple, no fuss. She’s off to teach in Belgium again this week. Then at kindergarten, V. said, ‘Geh weg!’ (meaning ‘You don’t have to help me take off my boots, Papa. Take off, you hoser. Go to work. I’ll be fine.’)

And I just thought, ‘What a nice family I have.’

Walking to the subway, I pulled out the headphones and stuck the Allman Brothers in my ears. I’ve never been a fan, but suddenly, as I listened to Gregg Allman’s words, I understood something. Though I scribble furiously and mope meaningfully, these guys really said it better a long time ago. Life’s too short. So I ain’t wasting time no more.

...and now a word from the management of this theater

2011-01-18T09:21:00.004+01:00

Something is definitely wrong with me. Last night, I watched The Horror of Party Beach, a 1964 black and white, zero-budget boogie-man and babes "film," and I found myself thinking, "This is a cinema-verite, lowdown, quasi-avante-garde classic!!"

But maybe that was the cold medicine talking....

black days

2011-01-14T09:27:00.002+01:00

Whoa. Stop. I can’t take any more bad news.

Trouble has come to friends and family in the US, other countries, and here in our building, right up to our doorstep. I hear such sorrowful stories. The shootings in Arizona (and Sarah Palin’s hideous response) are terrible enough. But people I love are struggling with divorce, depression, sudden and not-so-sudden unemployment, medical traumas, and suicide.

Fuck.

Paranoids imagine that the world is conspiring against them. I put a Vegas twist on that: I worry that with such black times descended upon my friends, odds are that I’m next.

Then I swing to an equally instinctive, and selfish, gesture. I realize that some people have Real problems and life can be very, very hard. I think, ‘I should be thankful everyone in my house is okay, is healthy, and, if not always happy, then relatively able to make themselves happier.’

I think, ‘What have I done to deserve my stay of execution?’ I feel guilty. And I decide, ‘I’ll never complain about anything, ever, again until the end of Time.’

Then, an hour later, I find a fly in my soup. ‘Waiter!!’

What is that? Is that a human thing—are we genetically incapable of thanking our lucky stars? Is it a question of brain mass? I’ve always thought that most of us have trouble reconciling different or conflicting ideas. Maybe, as a species, we don’t have enough gray matter to stay grateful for more than five minutes. Because we so quickly start thinking again about all the stuff we don’t have, all the experiences we’ve missed, all the money Bill Gates has, and all the fun those young folks are having on all those reality tv shows. It could be that human beings have always been this way, or it’s possible that those ten percent of us who are blessed enough to have fast Internet connections and no net censorship, and live in middle class houses in Western Europe and the US, are mostly just big fat spoiled 21st century babies.

Ahem. Yeah, that’s possible.

Well, okay, maybe I’ll have to overcome vast societal, economic and technological forces, but Today I’m gonna try to live right and be thankful and have a satisfied mind. I can do this. I will do this.

48 Hours with my Best Girl

2011-01-08T20:36:00.001+01:00

1) That long walk through the vineyards and over to the next town.

2) The long walk back to our hotel alongside the reed marshes.

3) Making out like thirteen year olds.

4) Reading, reading, then reading some more.

5) The steam bath.

6) Listening to AOR love song radio last night, while she sat in bed reading Paul Auster, and I sorted a small bundle of stamps from Denmark.

7) Long conversations about her life and mine.

8) No conversations with or about our kids.

9) Trading smiles.

10) Sleeping till 8:30 am this morning.

A(nother) Night at the Opera

2010-12-08T20:58:00.001+01:00

I'd Rather be Swimming

2010-12-03T08:48:00.004+01:00

For two weekends in a row now, we've all bundled up and trudged over to the Briggitenau Hallenbad--that's German for big-ass public indoor pool and sauna complex. Sunday is warm water day, so the pool is not actually freezing. Last Sunday it was snowing outside--today, there's a blizzard--but in the Hallenbad, V. shrieks with laughter as she leaps over and over again into the kiddy pool.

It's somehow magical--the rippling blue-green water and the bright white spotlights that shine from under the waves. I never learned to swim, but I've always loved swimming pools. I love their scale, the stretch, the emptieness of the space (even when the place is crowded), and especially the deep relaxation and langour that comes from the experience, even if you, like me, just splash around like a blind seal pup.

But a warm indoor pool, on a cold winter day--this is even more perversely enjoyable. When I look out from the great glass walls of the Briggitenau Hallenbad and see the city covered in snow, I think, 'Suckers! What are all you idiots doing out in the cold? Come on in--the water's fine!'

Meanwhile, Adinah's doing underwater somersaults and trying to pull down my trunks. Anette--who knows how to swim--is over at the big people pool, doing 60 or 70 laps. And V.'s having a blast, splashing around in her water wings and Olympic goggles.

Afterwards, we all camp out underneath the hot showers. And I have discovered that it's really delicious to stand shirtless underneath a huge wall-mounted hair dryer. At home, I just towel-dry, but at the Hallenbad, I indulge--the hot air feels excellent on my skin....

Then we all bundle up again and slosh back over the Spittelau bridge. It's still cold and snowy outside, but I feel lighter on my feet. Quite pleasantly dazed and exhausted. Tonight, everyone will sleep like a stone.

Ops Meeting Notes, November 24

2010-11-25T20:28:00.003+01:00

The Deputy Assistant for Hair Whipping and Dairy Product Consumption begins the meeting by noting that she will require disbursement of additional funds (€ 1) for the upcoming Charismatic Transportation project (A.K.A the Field Trip.)

The Managing Director and Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee thanks the Deputy Assistant for her feedback and affirms that an R & D team will look into the matter. She then asks for updates from each unit.

The Vice Chair for Fried Foods and Belated Laundry Folding begins by noting some extant confusion in his department regarding use of the Cast Iron Pans. Is it the smaller one which is only for roasting, and if so, will the Managing Director please define "roasting"?
He also reports that Bed Sheet Replacement and Sanitation was completed at approximately 17:20 Sunday evening.

The Junior President in Charge of Kitty Litter and Chortling notes that, as the Deputy Assistant has yet to return her balloon, the Deputy Assistant will henceforth be referred to as "caca." Or possibly "lulu."

The Deputy Assistant registers an objection to this comment.

The Junior President continues, noting that the Second Undersecretary for Rodent Removal has been bathing in the toilet again.

The Second Undersecretary affirms this last, and adds that any and all household entities resembling mice--including shoestrings, wet sponges and the feet of the Junior President--have been warned to get out of town or face immediate Mexican drug cartel-style retribution.

Duly noted.

The Managing Director and Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee reports that the Holiday Celebration (i.e. Thanksgiving) will be downsized due to the absence of most of the usual suspects in the greater Vienna area.
She adds that "roasting" shall consist of, but not be limited to, preparation of onions, Grieskoch and pasta re-heats. She further notes all use of said pan is predicated on a mandatory and subsequent hydration process (i.e. "soaking.)
In addition, The Managing Director reports that immediate action is required on the Kitchen and Bathroom Sink Washer Replacement project, the Cellar Clearance and Moldy Furniture Destruction Initiative and the immanent Prague Visitation.

The Vice Chair inquires as to whether immediate action may be postponed until tonight after the Simpsons?

Meeting adjourns.

Needs versus Wants

2010-11-22T16:18:00.003+01:00

Need: Chips and salsa
Want: Nachos

Need: Motorhead-Ace of Spades
Want: Deep Purple-Who Do We Think We Are

Need: Bic Medium Ball Point pens (black or blue)
Want: a laptop

Need: my family
Want: my family in good spirits

Need: Robert De Niro
Want: George Clooney

Need: a hot bath every once in a while
Want: Sauna Night with Anette

Need: a public library
Want: Facebook, Pirate Bay, Demonoid, all blogs

Need: long underwear
Want: my fuzzy gray pimp coat

Need: coffee
Mindless Self-Indulgence: ginger tea

Need: Barack Obama
Want: a hero

My First Therapist

2010-11-15T12:54:00.001+01:00

Ouch.

That hurt a little.

* * *

So Anette and I decided to go see a family therapist. We thought it might help ease the chaos in our house, maybe help us avoid some of those special Shouting moments.

So we get to the place on the appointed day, and we meet the good doctor. She talks to the kids for six or seven minutes, and talks to Anette and I for more than an hour. At the end of it, she says, “The kids are fine.” Then she looks at me and says, “But you, I want to talk to.”

Eeep.

I flashed on a close-up of Anthony Hopkins, wearing that cute mask, in The Silence of the Lambs. I never actually thought of myself as a fruitcake, but what the hey, everyday’s a journey, right?

But the doctor, who I’ll call Frau M., said some sensible things. She actually said some of the same things I’ve been saying about our family dynamic for awhile now. Anette smirked a couple of times and said to me, “You like her, don’t you?”

Still, the idea of seeing a shrink was a bit, um, daunting. Scary. I said as much. The doc put on her best quizzical face and said, “Why scary?”

“Well, you want me to talk about some personal stuff,” I replied, “And I don’t even know you, do I?”

I agreed to try it. I mean, back in the day when I interviewed that French performance artist who broadcasts her own plastic surgery operations, and she asked me to eat foie gras with her, I did it, didn’t I? Would this really be any different, any more scary, any more icky-squishy? No.

I went back to her office, alone, the other night. We had a very expensive 85-minute conversation. It was sort of exhausting.

But I think it was also…good.

We started off talking about some of the challenges of parenthood, then she took me back, back, farther back to my own childhood, and some of my challenges in those days. As we talked, she found something that happened to me—a little thing, honestly—and she started turning it over in her hands. Or, really, asking me to turn it over in my head. She asked me to go back in time and talk to my seven-year old self, to help him. That was cool. Because I could do that, you know? It was easy for me to be a dad, big brother, hero--whatever—to that kid, because I’m all grown up now. I’m a man.

Then she brought it all back around to me trying to deal with V. in a better way. Now I think I can do that too.

And it made me think about my Dad and my Mom and Adinah and my life in a different way too.

Today, I went back to work, and met the usual mix of good, bad and ugly. But I felt like Mr. Clint Eastwood—cool, glacially chilled, unmoved by both nonsense and aggression.

No. That was a cheap movie metaphor. Here’s a better one. I actually felt more like that guy in Office Space, who gets stuck in a psychiatrist-induced trance, and goes to work not giving a fuck. And everything is just No Big Deal, my friend. No problem, hey that’s okay, sure, that sounds…fine.

My Halloween and All Saints (Holi)Day 2010 Top Ten

2010-11-03T20:17:00.004+01:00

(not necessarily in order of enjoyamability)

1) Giggling hysterically as me and four little girls made two videos at Jib Jab.com: one with V. as a rappin' Dracula and me as a very green Frankenstein; the other with me and the little girls as, uh, Chippendales dancers. (Is that wrong?)

2) Walking through the enormous Zentral Friedhof (Central Cemetary), past other tourists and mourning Serbian families, on a brilliant autumn morning.

3) Walking down from Leopoldsberg to Nussdorf, looking through crimson and golden leaves, across rolling hills and vineyards, at Vienna laid out below us, nice and cozy-like.

4) An apparently limitless stream of bad-good and bad-bad Drive-In Sci Fi flicks uploaded at Demonoid by a mysterious schmaltz hound named Bippy Dog. It has included amazing stuff, like The Navy Versus the Night Monsters, Daughter of Horror and The Brainiac.

5) Laughing, holding hands with and just watching V., as she comes into her own. She is more confident, articulate (with actual words), and well, happier, I think.

6) Donning the Monkey costume (full-body fuzz, with an enormous cartoonish head) for the first party I've been to in a long, long time.

7) Reveling in Hot Blood's classic 1976 album Disco Dracula, which includes both "Soul Dracula" and "Baby Frankie Stein," which sound like Barry White with fangs, in a soft-core porno film.

8) Noticing that Adinah is still wearing her costume: sweat pants and a shirt printed with the image of a skeleton. Now it's her pajamas.

9) "Arguing" with Jan about whether or not zombies are monsters. (Of course they are, just like Sharon Angle and British Petroleum.)

10) Fondly remembering Booberry and Chocula.

All Saints Day

2010-11-01T21:07:00.001+01:00

Halloween in Wien

2010-10-31T16:46:00.004+01:00

2010-10-28T14:56:00.000+01:00

Here's the second half of my Sueddeutsche Zeitung article on underground culture and Austin Texas. It was published on Saturday, Oktober 16.

Searching for that Lost Cool Something

One of our greatest living philosophers, Grandpa Simpson, once said, "I used to be 'with it', but then they changed what 'it' was. Now what I'm with isn't 'it', and what's 'it' seems weird and scary." Maybe only the jugendlich understand ‘it.’ So back in Vienna, which is where I call ‘home’ these days, I asked a fifteen-year-old friend how he finds out about new music. His words were 2010, but his method: classic. “Usually my friends give me a link.”

I asked the same of a colleague’s fourteen-year-old son, who has recently discovered punk rock in the recordings of Green Day. He told her that he finds out about bands from concert posters and handbills, and from the opening bands at those concerts. Sounds a lot like my methods of thirty years ago.

On the other hand, my Austin friends, being older Texans and therefore contrary, roundly dispute the notion that the underground is dead. “Bullshit!” says Davy Jones, guitarist for the Hickoids, Austin’s oldest country punk band. “Hickoids are known by a tiny group of folks, but sales and the nature of the material make it Underground, Cult, Counterculture, whatever you wanna call it today. It's not successful in any normal business sense of the word- it’s so niche.”

Another friend, who I once knew as Control Rat X, drops some very old school science on me. “What has been done will be done again,” he says. “There is nothing new under the sun." Then he tells me he’s quoting from Ecclesiastes 1:9-14. Gee, I always thought it was a record critic who had said that.

On a late summer afternoon, downtown Austin is like the Velvet Underground—all white light and white heat. Unlike the centers of some US cities, this part of town has never been successfully rehabilitated, and the lower blocks of Congress Avenue are a bit shabby. But one afternoon, as I stumble along the Avenue in the blinding, skin-searing heat, I remember to tip my hat when I pass number 316. This is the former site of the Vulcan Gas Company, a legendary sixties club which may be the true birthplace of psychedelic music, since it was the preferred haunt of the notorious Texas acid rock group, the Thirteenth Floor Elevators. Back then, everyone played at The Vulcan when they passed through Austin, from John Lee Hooker and Moby Grape to, well, the Velvet Underground. Today, 316 Congress Avenue is a Patagonia sporting goods and outdoor apparel super store.

The Armadillo World Headquarters is now a parking lot, and for the week that I’m in Austin, I involuntarily turn my head towards it every time I pass, searching for some trace of the first rock club I ever entered. The Armadillo was an ugly hangar with bad acoustics, great nachos and a crowd that ranged from cosmic cowboys and pink-haired punks to state politicians and off-duty policemen. I remember seeing Devo there in 1980, and goggling at one of the club’s murals, which depicted an armadillo bursting out of the chest of BB King. Then and now, the Armadillo would meet almost any standard definition of an underground club, and that’s how I remember it. But it wasn’t underground at all—Time magazine and Rolling Stone both wrote it up at the time. In fact, Frank Zappa recorded a live album called Bongo Fury there. This 1975 document of what I thought was an underground scene was distributed to the world by…Warner Bros. Records. When I look at that parking lot today, I think it may be time to revise our definitions of underground.

My host in Austin is my old friend Rich, who was also once the drummer for the Kamikaze Refrigerators. A few hours before I leave town, I am puttering around in Rich’s immaculately renovated, slightly kitschy nineteen-fifties house. Rich is in the next room working. Then I hear music. It has the unhinged tone of the Pixies, and all the leather mask perversity of Lubricated Goat. With a dash of Devo. I like this music. “What is this?” I ask Rich.

“Oh, it’s Adult Rodeo,” he shrugs. “Little local band who was playing around here a few years ago.”

Adult Rodeo aren’t the new Radiohead, but they sound weird and fresh. I believe I have made a discovery.

I guess I can leave Austin now.

2010-10-26T12:38:00.003+01:00

I recently published my first piece in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, a well-respected newspaper out of Munich. It ran in Deutsch, after having been translated by one of their best people. This is the first half of the story in English. It's about my last trip to Austin, my hometown. I'll post the second half on Thursday. I hope you like it.

Searching for that Lost Cool Something

The morning after I land in Austin, Texas, I borrow a bike and set off in search of Krautrock. I’ve read that Amon Düül II made some interesting disco jams in the mid-nineteen-seventies, and if there’s one place in the continental US where one can find obscure, thirty-year-old, semi-funky German rock, it’s at Waterloo Records.

And of course, I do find some Amon Düül II, though it’s not the CD I wanted. But then a funny thing happens. I’m looking at a huge wall of CDs by Austin singers and bands. Legendary Texas concert posters hang in various other corners of the store. Suddenly I feel like I’m in a museum. Austin has become a theme park of Cool. It’s Disneyland with tattoos and a wallet chain, a cultural amusement zone. It’s a brand—it’s Underground Town.

I grew up in Austin, one of the most notorious crucibles of cool in the USA. By fifteen, I was acting world-weary because I was listening to Roxy Music. By nineteen, I had discovered punk rock and new wave in Austin clubs. In local record stores, I mined progressively lesser known music, and the cults surrounding bands like Big Star. I learned you have to do some work to find the best music and art. None of this is true today. If anything interesting happens in a music club anywhere in the world tonight, it will be on YouTube tomorrow. MP3 blogs, file-sharing sites like Demonoid, Facebook and MySpace--these are only the best-known ways in which people find out about the latest, coolest thing. These days, unusual, obscure or bizarre music is just a mouse click away. There is no longer any such thing as a local ‘scene’ or underground music.

Or is there? As it happens, neither live music clubs nor independent record stores have disappeared from the planet, though they do all have websites now. Nearly fifty years ago, an inveterate weirdo named Frank Zappa suggested that the “mainstream comes to you, but you have to go to the underground.” So I have returned to Austin to test this perfectly reasonable definition of ‘underground’ (I also want a decent plate of nachos.) I have found a flea market for locally-made electronic instruments like the Autonomous Bassline Generator, and a fourteen piece, orchestral pop group called Mother Falcon, playing at a club called Mohawk.

I’m not looking for the next Nirvana in Austin. Underground scenes are exciting because they shock, then energize you with the thrill of discovery, the feeling that you have come upon something astonishing and utterly unprecedented. Something you can call your own. It’s this sense of discovery I mean to investigate. Even if cool underground stuff “comes” to you from an MP3 blog like Mutant Sounds or Illegal Smoking Robot, is it still possible to discover something fantastic on your own, maybe even in your own home town?

Torchy’s Tacos may be the coolest breakfast taco stand in town. The counter help—whether they are African American, Caucasian, male or female—are uniformly covered with tattoos and swathed in black. The food is innovative, though I’m initially hesitant to try the Dirty Sanchez, or the Fried Avocado Taco.

Handbills and stickers for various species of loud music are strewn around Torchy’s, and I find myself wondering if the girl taking our order knows that the friend I’m here with was once in a local band that did a mean folk-punk Kiss cover. What sort of subterranean streams does she swim in after the sun goes down? It doesn’t matter.

A little more than a year ago, the English artist and amateur sociologist Matt Stokes arrived in Austin to create a conceptual art piece and exhibition about underground music communities. I know because I wrote one of the essays about Austin punk which appeared in the exhibition catalog. His project was called These are the Days, and among other things, Stokes juxtaposed the Austin hardcore punk scene of the early nineteen-eighties with the gutter punk scene here in the present day. The catalog for the show blended photographs from then and now, and it’s hard to tell the difference between the two. In 1983 and in 2008, punks in Austin were tough, cool, sweaty, and committed to an idea, a scene. Perhaps the Texas punk bands of 2008 have more beards. They look like the counter help at Torchy’s. And they look one hundred percent, for real, straight-up underground.

Just above the hole which was once known as Voltaire’s Basement, sits a new coffee shop. The new place is called Halcyon. It’s clean and brightly lit. It has a walk-in humidor. Something about it rings a bell, so I stop there. Voltaire’s was a legendary firetrap, as well as the site of very crazy and wonderful shows by bands like the Dicks and the Butthole Surfers. Halcyon was the name of the shaggy commune where I lived during college. Now one obscure name is transposed onto the site of a dead underground scene. It’s as if all the old words and dreams are still in circulation, only perched at different locations.

As I sip my Thai iced coffee there at Halcyon, I ask the bartender if he knows his basement was once a great punk rock club.

“Oh yeah,” he lies. “I heard about that. What was our Basement like back then?”

“It was fucked up,” I laugh.

“It still is!” he says.

one night at the book store

2010-10-25T15:51:00.002+01:00

“Open 24 hours” is not a phrase uttered lightly in Vienna. In fact, it’s not uttered at all. Most of the stores, boutiques, and trading posts here shut down by 6 or 7. But as a patriotic American, I still have the right to confuse shopping for entertainment. So last night at 7:30 pm, I really only had one choice: the Thalia.at superstore at Landstrasse. It’s Borders for Wieners.

Does anyone go to bookstores anymore? I can now report that yes, they do, especially when there isn’t anything else to do. Last night I was just another clod who was shuffling around, gathering up a bunch of books I had no intention of buying, just so I could indulge in a little “late-night” libro-philia. The tables, chairs and banquettes were mostly occupied, largely by people who were awake.

I plopped down with six items: Sebastiao Salgado’s Africa (beautiful, astonishing but ultimately clichéd black and white photographs of the Continent); a coffee-table book about cathedrals (did I not mention I am addicted to big picture books?); a smaller book about a Viennese movie poster artist who was working in the forties and fifties (nice local color); a black and white graphic novel about Stu Sutcliffe (who was he again? A fifth Beatle, right? Wait, this is in German!); a gargantuan new Taschen book of vintage funk and soul album covers (uh-oh, there goes thirty Euros!); and another graphic novel called The Night Bookmobile.

After a few pages of the Taschen book of funk and soul art, I knew I would have to possess it. The Night Bookmobile, on the other hand, looked sort of amateurish, and the author’s name--Audrey Niffenegger—meant nothing to me. The title is what put the hook in me. ‘Bookmobile?’ I thought. ‘That’s a phrase I haven’t heard in—oh--forty-five years.’

CAUTION: Middle-Aged Jaunt down Memory Lane to Follow! When I was seven, the Bookmobile kicked ass! The Public Library in my town had lots of branches, but it also had a book-filled Winnebago that drove around then laid anchor in various supermarket parking lots. It didn’t really have a lot of stuff in it, and looking back, I’m sure it was the same things I could have gotten at the smaller libraries. But there was something so cool about climbing up into a big recreational vehicle full of copies of Charlottes’ Web, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and those Alfred Hitchcock mystery stories for boys. Anyway….

So, The Night Bookmobile turned out to be a great, though slightly macabre, sorta sad book. A very nice story actually. I won’t ruin it for you. But it’s about a woman who loves to read. And after reading it, as I left the superstore and started back down the stairs to the subway trains, I felt all gooey inside. I’m really too young to feel nostalgic, but I miss books a little.

Now I live in Screen World. I’m looking at screens all day: my computer at work, my computer at home, my other computer at home, my wife’s computer, the tv screen, the screen in the u-Bahn station, the screen in the U-Bahn train. In New York, of course, one may watch tv in the back of a taxi now. Whoo-hoo. And the thing is, Screen World is sort of cold.

But a good book? Whoa, that is hot stuff. It’s really delicious to luxuriate in a long, totally fascinating history book (or novel or biography) by a writer who not only has style but really knows her or his shit. Books don’t have emoticons. Books have complete sentences. Many of them avoid slang! No one ever writes ROFL in a book.

I’m going to read one now. After I finish this post. And check Facebook. And send that e-mail.

Top Nine Signs that you are Watching an Inferior Rock Documentary

2010-10-21T15:40:00.003+01:00

1) Neither the difficult singer nor the brilliant but deranged bass player are interviewed for the film.

2) A doughy white guy in his thirties, identified only as an "expert" is interviewed in the film.

3) The film includes an archival clip you have seen in another rock documentary.

4) As the narrator begins mumbling, in a British accent, about a pivotal album, the director cuts to close-up shots of hands loading a reel-to-reel tape machine, and the tape moving through the gates.

5) A majority of people interviewed for the film are music critics.

6) Men are interviewed in offices, women in kitchens.

7) Or, women aren't interviewed for the film at all.

8) The music featured in the documentary is not by the band featured in the documentary. Because the producers didn't pay mechanical royalties to use the music. (Check out a few Beatles or Elvis documentaries or this one, and you'll see what I mean.)

9) The band featured in the film is Pearl Jam or the Smashing Pumpkins.

Boogie Fever

2010-10-18T15:32:00.006+01:00

The ballet they were dancing at the Staatsoper tonight was called Onegin. I went in on a lark. Based on Puschkin, music by Tchaikovsky, okay, whatever. One standing room ticket: € 4.

Here’s the plot: A bookish Hottie gets her bloomers in a rustle over this gloomy Gus who thinks he is all of that and a turkey sandwich. He also wears a cape like Dr. Acula, and comes out of her mirror one evening so they can do the Hustle. Then the babe and Gus and her sister and the sister’s boyfriend go to a big ball and Gus reverts to form. Stuff gets said, jealousies inflamed, then suddenly—Duel time. Long story short: Gus is a real prick (plus now a killer) and even though the Hottie meets a nice Rear Admiral (or something), she still wants to kiss him one more time. Which she does. Then she tells him to get the hell out of her boudoir. Curtain.

I liked it a lot.

Really, what have I been doing, paying good folding money to see garbage movies when I could have been spending a night at the Oper for a few Euros?

Watching Onegin, I got all choked up about the cruelty of passion, and the, uhhh, futility of bad love. I thought I'd just stay for an hour then leave. But I stayed for the whole damn show because I wanted to see that Hottie take the trash out.

I thought I didn't like ballet. Of course, I'd never seen one, but I was positive this wasn't my bag. It turns out I like the way they stand on their pointy little toes! I like the soft "clack!" sound of twenty feet hitting the stage at the same time! And that orchestra, sawing away in the pit, that's okay too!

What a dope I've been. This means I'll never have to see another Kate Hudson movie.

victory!

2010-10-18T07:56:00.002+01:00

Here's one weasely excuse for not writing Euro Like Me often enough lately: my first German language newspaper story! Sort of. I wrote this article in English and the nice people at the South German translated it for me. Maybe I will get to do it again, we'll see.

Anyway it's about being cool and underground, neither of which I know much about, but it's also about Austin, Texas, my hometown. I'll try to post the English text a bit later.

Hosencheißer

2010-10-11T14:05:00.005+01:00

Well, the Viennese voted yesterday. The Mayor gets to keep his job, but that's the only good news. The real winner was Hans Christian Strache and the anti-immigration, Nazi-apologist Freedom Party (FPO). They ran a campaign of hate, insisting, among other lies, that the other parties would institute mandatory headscarves for women (!) The FPO gained ground in the last election largely because Austria has given 16-year-olds the right to vote, and lots of these little pantshitters cast their ballots for Strache. Yesterday the FPO again made frightening gains, especially with "lesser-educated" male Wieners.

Assholes.

A Real Ring-Tail-Tooter

2010-10-08T19:41:00.004+01:00

Gawd, that was a tough month. Or as by brother in Montana would say, 'a hard pull.'

The last four weeks have been so crazy-exhausting-exciting-exhausting. But you wouldn't know about that, would you? Because I've been neglecting this blog again, haven't I?

Well, it started with a complete technological mutiny. Both of my computers stopped speaking to the Internet. Both my computers: kaput! My watch stopped. My phone quit. For one night, even the DVD player went on strike.

This lasted for a little more than three weeks. The turning point was the night I spilled beer on (and in) my laptop. After that, everything started working better. Honestly.

Then I got an assignment from a pretty respected German newspaper, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, which was great! but I wasn't entirely prepared for it. I had to scribble and circle around the subject for a bit, then write it one or two paragraphs at a time, on the subway to work, or in moments stolen from my real job: Father. So I was barely able to write anything else--not even Facebook updates.

Then Adinah did an end run around us and joined the Girl Scouts! And V. got a new kindergarten teacher (who is great, but isn't it always stressful to get to know someone new?) And I had a birthday--my forty-ninth. And even more important, preparations began for V.'s birthday. Then everyone in my department at work got sick just as my boss dumped several new projects in my lap. I had to teach, do all the administrative stuff that normally consumes my days, plus quite a few things that other people usually do, plus create and do a presentation for a Webinar, whatever that is.

Then we got a kitten. A small black and white love cat named Ada. She was rescued from a garbage can in Romania, and brought to a shelter in Vienna, which is where we met her, the little darling. She's the kind of cat who gets her motor running--like, purr city--then melts in your lap.

But when we brought Ada home we got a horrible surprise. Both Adinah and V. were terrified of her. Neither of them has ever lived with a cat (actually Deanie has, back in NYC, but she doesn't remember The Little Guy.) So the kids looked at Ada and saw, not a cuddly, fluffy little Hello Kitty! but a strange, stalking furry Creature, with claws!! On Morning Two, Ada sprung at Deanie's face to play with her hair extension. Adinah shrieked to break glass, fled to her room and hid in her bed.

Meals in the kitchen were impossible--neither girl would dangle their feet from their chairs, because they could see Ada down there, purring. We had to set V. on the breakfast table whenever the kitten said 'Mraow.'

We've always known that V. both loves and fears animals (monkeys, cows, dogs, pretty much everything except caterpillars, whom she does not fear.) But we had no idea Adinah would be so traumatized by a fuzzball from Romania.

So began the long and painful era in our history known as the Katzenintegrationsprojekt, or The Great Coming Together. Many tears were shed, many screams rang out, and several gasps were gasped.

But today, we can look back and say that we have made great strides. Both girls let Ada sit in their laps now. Yelping, hollering and hissy fits are down by 50%.

And it's been a week already.

Ada aus Romanien

2010-10-01T20:47:00.002+01:00

so long, so long

2010-09-07T15:06:00.001+01:00

It’s official: we’re losing Rosa, our beloved first babysitter.

Okay, maybe she wasn’t the first-first. A few other folks have guest-starred as babysitters for our girls. But Rosa is the best.

I wasn’t sure what to think of her at first. She was soft-spoken and she was a radikal feminist grad student. On one of the first days she had Adinah, she asked if she could take our baby to a squat that was about to be raided by the police. I said, um, No. But I guess the important thing was that she asked.

Suffice to say, over the years, Adinah and V. have not been angels nor princesses every day they were with Miss Rosa. Adinah can bring the psychic pain, and V. has a pretty wicked backswing. Rosa has been super patient with them. She’s the polar opposite of Gloria, the heroine of that underappreciated Cassavettes film: she really likes kids, especially ours.

I don’t know what we’re gonna do without her. She has recommended a friend, and that’s a start. It’s such a precarious, maddening idea: leaving your children with another person, especially someone you don’t know so well. So many things, big and small, can go wrong. I’m sure we’ll find someone who’s okay. But I’m really going to miss talking medieval history and diapers with Rosa.

Vacation in Vorarlberg Top Ten

2010-08-23T19:46:00.003+01:00

(in no particular order)

1) After a week without her, waking up with Adinah and walking out of our cabin to see a fleet of hot-air balloons spread across the sky.

2) An actual conversation, two large goblets of red wine and some smooching with Anette on our hotel room terrace under a big bright moon.

3) Watching V swim by herself for the first time.

4) That juicy roast ox I ate last night.

5) All of us in one bed watching the Teletubbies dubbed in Dutch tonight before we put the kids to bed.

6) Listening to Adinah reading a book called Unicorn Wings in English.

7) Watching Roger Corman's Not of this Earth, for the very first time, on the train out here the other night. It must have cost forty-three dollars to make, and it's go great, and even sort of creepy.

8) Did I already mention that big goblet of red wine?

9) The view from on top of today's mountain.

10) Eight minutes alone in the sauna today.

Home Alone Sunday Listening

2010-08-15T17:20:00.003+01:00

(pretty much in this order)

Alexei Rybnikov & Dmitry Rybnikov-Through The Thorns To Stars (Bootleg)(soundtrack to Humanoid Woman)

Ron Geesin - Electrosound

Buddy Holly - Not Fade Away (The Complete Studio Recordings and More)

Mike Oldfield-Tubular Bells

The Jimi Hendrix Experience-Axis Bold as Love

Joni Mitchell-Court and Spark

Various Artists-Hotel Costes Volume 4

Pentangle-Basket of Light

Sol Kaplan, Gerald Fried and Alexander Courage- Star Trek Original Television Soundtrack Volume Two: “The Doomsday Machine” and “Amok Time”

Grace Jones-Warm Leatherette

Captain Beefheart-Doc at the Radar Station

Elton John-Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

Giggling in the Dark

2010-08-13T10:17:00.002+01:00

My mind doesn’t always move in a straight line, so bear with me for a few paragraphs here.

As some of you may have guessed, I’ve been going to some Kino Unter den Sternen (cinema under the stars) nights lately. Vienna summers being what they are (i.e. colder than San Francisco and rainy as hell), the weather hasn’t permitted it every night, but so far this year I’ve seen The Damned, In a Lonely Place, In the Heat of the Night and just the other night, Goldfinger.

Okay, I’ve seen Goldfinger about a million times, but I had the night off, and I thought, ‘It’s spectacular, gotta be nice on a big screen, and really, how many warm nights do we have left this summer?’

Of course, I laffed my ass off at stuff I’d never noticed, and I got caught up in the sheer velocity of the sequences all over again. Halfway through my second large cold beer, I had what appeared to be a thought. Goldfinger should be a key text for me. The whole thing is besotted with gadgets—the laser, the super Aston Martin, the junkyard auto compactor, etc. It’s pure techno-filia, drenched with the belief that fancy machines will save your ass. (Or kill it.) But @t the end, Bond himself cannot defuse the Bomb—he’s baffled, and he even panics a bit. It’s a marvelous joke, because in the end, one realizes that even though the superspy likes all this hi-end junk, he’s actually pretty lo-tech. Bond is all fast fists and Martinis. Like me.

No. What I mean is I really identify with this teetering between techno-filia and techno-phobia. I love my computer. I just don’t understand it.

Anyway, this beer-battered epiphany of mine wasn’t the best thing that happened that night.

During the climactic Fort Knox sequence of the film, as everything is accelerating and it’s all pretty ridiculous but you don’t care because it’s so fun, I noticed two teenage girls sitting behind me. They were giggling in the dark, and talking non-stop, apparently about the movie. They were tickled pink. Maybe it was the first time they’d seen Goldfinger. Or any James Bond besides Daniel Craig. Or any film older than Lord of the Rings.

After the movie, I saw them spill out onto the path that leads to the street. They were still giggling as they ran over to pick up the schedule for the rest of this film festival. Then they scampered, chasing each other out, altogether in a tizzy about this crazy, corny, really ancient movie they just saw, yeah!

How great to witness such teen gaga discovery, such a rush of thrill and spritzing enthusiasm!

I smiled to myself. My daughters will have moments like this, years from now. Giggly discoveries with each other or with friends. By that time, I won’t be hanging out with them as much as I do now, so maybe I won’t see them capering around exactly like this. That’s okay. But it’s sweet to think they may laugh and hoot at stuff which I’m too over to care about, at things I’ve long taken for granted.

Youth isn’t always wasted on the young. When you’re fifteen, everything’s an adventure, especially if you’re out with your friends. At fifteen, there are so many things left to discover. When you see Goldfinger for the first time, it seems like the most outrageous artifact of a prehistoric time. You can’t even believe someone actually made such a zany film. Without CGI!

Dear reader, please do not cynically judge me. I do not miss that joy of discovery. I experience that joy every time I Google. It’s just nice to catch a glimpse of things to come for Adinah and V.

It makes me happy.

If I had a Hammer

2010-08-05T15:23:00.000+01:00

I’ve been watching too many movies.

I’ve been eating too much salt. I’ve been writing too little. I’ve not been practicing yoga. I’ve been preaching to the converted.

I want a cold beer. I want to be better at conflict resolution. I want to be less sarcastic with my kids. I want another good HP Lovecraft book. I want a decent plate of nachos. I want a date with my wife.

I need to see that eye doctor (but I can’t!) I need to straighten out some business affairs, and pay the dentist bill. I need to make a memory box and start a Life Book for V. Jesus Christ, I need a break. I need to interrupt less and listen more.

I wish I had more hair on my head. I wish I had a stronger chin and actual eyebrows. I wish I had more money. I’d love it if I had more friends of my own (but friendships require time and care.) I wish I could read an uplifting newspaper article about politics and the economy in the USA. I wish I could vaporize Al Quaeda, the Taliban and the drug cartels in my beloved Mexico. I wish I had Kung Fu superpowers.

But today I’ve got to teach my class. I’ve got to pick up my kids at 3, then pick up the new closet shelves at the carpenter’s shop. I gotta read that paragraph that Anette wrote for Harvard. I gotta get a line on you.

I’ve got to tell them, ‘I love you.’

La Palma, Porto Paulo, Sicily

2010-08-03T20:58:00.001+01:00

Back to Sicily, Part 2

2010-07-29T15:16:00.002+01:00

After discovering three jellyfish in the first twenty feet of my first walk on this beach, I passed through the Twelve Stages of vacation recovery. Denial: “This isn’t happening to us!” Disbelief: “I can’t believe we’re stuck for two weeks on a beautiful beach full of quasi-lethal invertebrates!” Evasion: “How long can I keep this news from my wife?”

V. is too young to understand the exquisite discomfort of a jellyfish kiss, so I didn’t bother explaining the off-purple blobs on the sand to her. I just steered her away, and she burbled along happily enough.

When Adinah woke up, I didn’t have the heart to tell her. I was afraid she would be afraid to go in the water. I was afraid to go in the water. I was even more afraid Anette would immediately insist that we pack up and go searching for another beach in Sicily. And after our missed flight, lost luggage and that €120 cab ride, moving to another spot just sounded like a lot of damn work.

But when I got her to myself, I told my gal about the jellyfish, which the Italians call ‘medusa.’ She said, ‘Then let’s just go to another campsite.’ I said, ‘Let’s just go to the beach and see how it goes.’

A few hours later, after chocolate cornettos and cappuccino, we strode bravely out onto the beach—a lovely stretch of sand, a long, shallow shelf with sand bars so kids can walk way way out, not too many people…in other words, perfect.

I screwed up my courage and told my oldest daughter there might be medusa. Adinah didn’t care, she said—she was ready to jump in the ocean. We asked the people on the beach: one burnt brown German couple said they’d been here two weeks and had only seen a couple of jellyfish. And despite all the splats in the sand I’d seen earlier in the day, I could only find one blob there now. So I showed it to V. I thought, ‘She has to know about them so she won’t pick one up.’ V. never wants to swim in the ocean anyway, and I was afraid that now she’s just have one more reason to stay out of the drink. Instead, she got a stick and tried to poke the thing. Jellyfish really do look like little piles of marmalade.

This was not the first time I realized that, as a parent, you have to be careful you don’t give your kid all of your own fears. They usually don’t need them.

Still, on that first day, Adinah walked into the waves slowly. Anette waded in a few inches at a time. I screamed ‘Banzai!’ and threw myself into the water faux-hysterically. V. laughed at me, then declined to get wet at all.

We stayed there for twelve days. By the end of it, V. was splashing around and swimming as fearlessly as the rest of us.

One day, a whole army of medusa did invade our beach. As soon as we saw them, Adinah said, “Let’s go get a net!’ We spent the rest of that morning hunting jellyfish. They really are beautiful little creatures….

our place in the sun

2010-07-28T20:19:00.002+01:00

Back to Sicily

2010-07-25T19:12:00.003+01:00

One of the themes of our return to the beaches of the Corleone family was facing our fears. Or put another way, we learned that when life gives you jellyfish, make jellyfish salad.

We started off on the wrong foot. Packed and prepared early, got to the airport with plenty of time to make our flight to Rome, only to be told we were a day late. I hadn't looked at our itinerary very carefully.

After some tears and fears ("The airline won't refund, the campsite has surely given our trailer away, and every hotel on every beach within five hundred miles has got to be sold out!"), we convinced the nice butch lady at AlItalia to help us. She got us on a flight the next day.

The next day started out well enough. The other employees of AlItalia honored our quasi-legitimate rebooking, and we made it from Vienna to Rome, then on to Palermo. Then: 'Oops, sorry, one of your bags was put on a later flight to Palermo. Or maybe it was Milan.'

Eventually our other backpack arrived. But we had missed the last bus to our destination, a tiny village two hours away from Palermo. Anette talked a taxi driver into taking us to Menfi for 100 Euro. By the time we arrived some ninety minutes later, this fee had been adjusted for inflation to 120 Euro. I didn't mind the fare hike so much because I was busy looking around our camping village. It was dark already, but I didn't see or smell any trace of ocean anywhere nearby. Anette had booked it online. Had we committed two weeks to a hot little shack two kilometers from the sea?

No. A nice young man showed us to a roomy trailer with a refrigerator and a stove. We got the kids into bed, drank one large, very cold Morretti apiece, then Anette crawled under the covers, too. The campground seemed peaceful but strangely empty. It was a beautiful, cool summer night. I took a walk...and a hundred meters down a paved path, I stumbled into the Mediterranean.

Everything seemed peachy until the next morning. V woke up early, so I took her down to the beach.

Jellyfish everywhere. And not the cute, zoologically-interesting ones, but the ones that make you go "OWWWW!! Something is burning through my upper thigh!"

My vacation flashed before my eyes.

Gone Fishin' (in Sicily)

2010-07-03T21:27:00.002+01:00

(barring Internet access on the beach, Euro Like Me will return in two weeks!)

Black and White

2010-06-30T22:27:00.004+01:00

Brand New, You're Ancient

2010-06-29T15:04:00.002+01:00

The annual Donau Insel Fest is a sprawling, drunken, fried food and bad music party along the Danube. Six hundred thousand people attended this year—that’s about one third of the population of Vienna. It’s not a party which generally inspires life-affirming epiphanies. But that’s what I got at the Donau Insel Fest this weekend.

We got there just as the Masibambane Marimba Band was walking onstage. They are seven young women and three young men, and they look to be between the ages of 13 and 17. They wear matching shift dresses and shirts. They play four big marimbas and a couple of drums. Sometimes a couple of the young women sing. They are awesome.

At the front, stage right, is the Angus Young chair, where several of the older girls knock out the scorching, knarly leads. Sometimes they smile, or jive a little bit, but they always add scattering spluttering super-funky solos on top of everything else. But as with AC/DC, it’s almost more fun to watch the back line-the steady-on, never faltering rhythm monster, the real melody maker. The MMB’s Malcolm Young is a younger, very serious girl who pokes her tongue into her cheek as she lays down unshakeable, beautifully melodic lines. I don’t think she’d stop even if an earthquake hit Vienna.

I cycled through the band, picking a new favorite musician every few minutes. Each of them, especially the young women, had their own style and charm: one smiled so reflexively, a born performer; another, with smaller eyes, swept around the stage with such quiet authority, yet barely called attention to herself. It was also like the Beatles: all of them great, but each with their own ‘thing.’ Then they broke into ‘Amazing Grace.’

I think I would have been moved even if I wasn’t already in love with two young brown girls.

And even as I was having such a blast watching the band, and loving the idea of my Ethiopian-Austrian and Nigerian-Austrian daughters watching them too, I was struck by something else. I realized I’ve always loved the sound that comes out of a marimba—it’s a very lovable thing, so full and round and colorful.

The Masibambane Marimba Band made me think of the classic techno track “Voodoo Ray” by A Guy Called Gerald. In that old (1988) ditty, woven between the drum machine beats and the acid synthesizers is a melody line that rings clear and round, and sounds a bit like a marimba. It’s actually another synth, I think, but it doesn’t matter: a great deal of the beauty and funkadelicism of “Voodoo Ray” derives from that mellifluous, bell-like tune. In other words, the motor of this electronic music masterpiece is actually a sound that could have been made on wooden instruments in South Africa and Zimbabwe hundreds of years ago.

It made me think that there are no new sounds, only new ways to make them.

The genius of that, and the deep, historical continuity too, made me smile for the rest of that sunny Saturday.

It's Personal

2010-06-24T15:27:00.004+01:00

Well, I tried out the new line yesterday. It didn't go so well.

V and Adinah and I were walking down our street, in no particular hurry. I felt good.

About twenty-five feet behind me, V. had just decided she did not feel good, and was launching a mini-tantrum. Also behind us, a little old lady with shopping bags had just passed V. and Adinah, and was approaching me with that little smile people get when they want to make contact. She looked harmless enough.

When she got to me, she looked back at the girls, who were now assaulting a coin-operated rocking horse. The lady asked, in German, 'Where is their mother from?'

So I smiled a friendly but pointed smile back, like I was about to be frank with a good pal, and I said, "That's a very personal question."

The little old lady went off. Blustering, frowning, huffing.

"That's not a personal question," she cried. "That's a normal question!"

"Do we know each other?" I asked her.

"No, I saw the children and I thought they looked like they were from Africa!"

I started to ask her why she would ask me something like that, but she didn't let me finish. Tried to ask her to be more polite, but she didn't hear me. Blustering. And mad.

So I put up my hand and walked back to my kids. And Adinah, seeing the lady making a commotion, asked, "What's she saying, Papa?"

That's when I thought I might have been wrong. I'm so tired of people asking us about us, when it's just none of their business. It's probably harmless, she's probably a nice person, but really, I'm sure she would never ask any other total stranger the same question. And I wanted her to check herself. Maybe I thought, 'Now she'll think twice before asking another family a damn fool question.'

But maybe I was only thinking of myself, and that stranger, and not of my girls. Adinah could see something had happened, could see the lady was mad at me, and that may have frightened her, or made her feel bad. That's not right, either.

It's so hard to know what to do sometimes.

Blow Your Whistle

2010-06-21T22:13:00.005+01:00

I ♥ the public library. Doesn't matter which city-the library is the bees knees. I loved the branch libraries and the Bookmobile when I was a kid in Austin, Texas. I adored the gigantic reading rooms of the New York Public. And now I dig the Stadt Bucherei--you know, the one with the dizzy facade, at the Burgasse stop of the U6 U-Bahn. The library has always been where I go to get new ideas for absolutely fucking free.

Something caught my eye when I was there a few weeks ago. A shiny silver glitter ball in the shape of a Big Apple. And the word "Disco" in the title. I picked it up casually, gave it a glance, then put it back--I was on a different mission that day. But I noticed that it was written by Vince Aletti, who I've always been intrigued by: he wrote about photography and pop culture for the Village Voice, now he's at the New Yorker. He's smart. But I didn't know he was also the inside man journalist at Ground Zero Disco Manhattan nineteen-seventy-five baby!

A week or two later, I went back, checked it out, and brought that book home with me. It's called The Disco Files 1973-78, and it collects all of the columns Aletti wrote about dance music for a trade magazine in the middle 70's. This is a great book. It came out (!) in 2009, but I must have missed it. Aletti writes about music with a ton of passion, but he balances that with the perspective of a DJ, who has to also think of music as a functional thing. A surgeon thinks a heart is just another kind of pump, and a DJ thinks of a piece of music as a people mover. Or a sedative. Music as a firestarter or a fire dowser. This perspective makes The Disco Files a nice mix of infectious music criticism and epic shopping list.

So now I'm obsessed with finding a copy of Hot Blood's "Soul Dracula." And I'll also be needing a copy of "7-6-5-4-3-2-1 Blow Your Whistle" by Gary Toms Empire. Yes! Did you know the Ventures did a (allegedly great) disco tune? It's called "Superstar Revue"! One, please!

Don’t Believe the Hype

2010-06-18T09:33:00.004+01:00

1) the Brazil team

2) the Tea Party

3) the next big Flu

4) neo-liberalism

5) Robin Hood

6) Power Point

7) LCD Sound System

8) Viennese ice cream

9) Automobiles

10) Los Angeles

Seven Years Later

2010-06-15T19:33:00.003+01:00

My favorite news source, besides Facebook of course, is the New Yorker. It's the best magazine. It regularly blows my brains out. And sometimes other pieces in it are just 'Meh.' I'm not sure what I think about this one, about an international adoption from Haiti.

The writer, John Seabrook, began an adoption before the horrible recent earthquakes there, then he scrambled down to the island as soon as he could to meet his daughter in the wake of the disaster. He writes that he and his wife just wanted a kid, but then it turned into a rescue mission.

I guess I'm ambivalent about this because it's a lot like our story. Our adoption of Adinah began with a lot of paperwork, a slow build of excitement, then a sudden, unexpectedly early trip to Addis Ababa to meet her. It became an emergency in our last days there, when Adinah caught pneumonia. Then just before we got on the plane home, she broke out in a rash, which we thought was maybe an allergic reaction to the anti-biotics. A few hours later we landed in London with a very sick baby. What was supposed to be a four-hour layover turned into an four day hospital stay. When one of the doctors made a "casual" remark about the unreliability of AIDS testing in Africa, we were worried sick for 24 hours as we awaited a new round of test results.

But we were all heroes, and we got through it, got home, and then we started to become a regular family. That was seven years ago.

Maybe every international adoption is an emergency. Or seems like one at the time.

These days, I forget some of what we have experienced. I think we're normal and special, but special in a regular family way. When I look at Adinah, I don't think about all the stuff in John Seabrook's article: the problems of transracial relationships, the wealth gap between Ethiopia and the US, the disasters she may have witnessed in the time Before Us. I look at her and I see my daughter. My most precious A'd.

I don't see a damsel in distress, I don't see a victim. I don't see what a stranger once told us we'd taken on--a superproject. She's not an errand of mercy. She's a little girl, and she's getting bigger all the time. I see that she has darker skin than I do, and I notice that sometimes people stare at us. But I don't repeat 'We're a normal family,' as a mantra. I don't think,'That's racist,' every time someone is mean to us.

I do grimace a little when I read an article like this about adoption, though. Journalists--even those who are adoptive parents themselves--often play up the drama and trauma and ambivalence of the experience. I know I did. But I think that what we share with all families is a lot of uncertainty. As any sort of parent, you can never be certain that your kids will be healthy, or kind, or upstanding, respectable Deep Purple fans. Nobody gets guarantees. Perhaps adoptive parents are exposed to one or two more variables, like what the NAACP or the National Social Workers guild will think about interracial adoptions five years from now when all the hubbub over Brangelina and Madonna has died down. But...who...cares?

Parenting is always a tightrope act. Look down, and you're done. Keep your eyes front--commit--and you might just be okay.

my watch

2010-06-10T11:21:00.003+01:00

I like the scene in Terminator 2, where Arnold, now the good Terminator, is playing with John Connor, the boy who will grow up to save the world, while the boy’s mother watches them. She muses, in voiceover,’ Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The terminator wouldn't stop, it would never leave him. It would never hurt him or shout at him or get drunk and hit him or say it was too busy to spend time with him. And it would die to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers that came over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only thing that measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.’

I could say this scene is a foundational principle of my dadhood, but it’s closer to the truth to say that it sticks in my head like a broken record. Something about this ridiculous science fiction feels true. That is what a dad must do, I think. At least, that’s what he should try to do: protect the kid. Eliminate cyber-bots and/or bullies, defuse plasma bombs and/or common colds, but be sure you maintain a secure perimeter around that child.

Aspiring to be a metallic, super-bodyguard-bot seems like a reasonable goal.

But I think, somehow, I’ve let my intention to be like Arnold slip a little bit. Especially as regards V. When she came into our lives, she was a chubby, strong kid who seemed fearless. She didn’t look like she needed protection. But we were wrong about her. Maybe I can try to be Atticus Finch for Adinah, but V. needs more Terminator 2 from me.

She tries to do everything her big sister and the other 7-year-olds do. But she’s 3. She hollers a blue streak when I say, ‘No.’ And she’s been known to shout down playground bullies several years older than her. But she’s also afraid of loud noises and almost every animal besides caterpillars.

Sometimes V. falls down, scrapes her knee, and doesn’t even blink. But she’s still a princess, a sensitive flower. She looks so pretty in a summer dress, even though she’s gonna be covered with chocolate and glue and mud in twenty minutes.

And she needs more looking out from me.

After the Weekend I Need a Holiday

2010-05-31T07:13:00.003+01:00

A wedding. An art opening and book launch party. Auditioning a new babysitter. Three trips across Vienna and back home again by U-Bahn in one day. A pretty intense visit with a healer from Jeruselem. Drinks with my New Yorker friends Larry and Klaudia. A Skype call plus blowjob revelations from my old high school friend Ralph (last contact: maybe, oh, thirty years ago.) Scouting the river town of Kritzendorf for a summer Danube shack we can call our own.

Playing cards and laffing hysterically with Adinah. Asking V. for the fourth time to put on her pants, and then laughing despite ourselves as she defied us by trotting around doing a butt-naked turkey dance. Holding and kissing my wife when she came back from five days in Belgium.

Fighting with Adinah, fighting with V., and fighting with Anette too.

So I straggle into the office Monday at 8 a.m., happy to be in place with Standard Operating Procedures, a chain of command and immutable rules. My real life has none of these things.

There's no employee handbook for adult life.

at the playground again

2010-05-26T13:52:00.002+01:00

A sunny holiday afternoon, the playground fresh and green from yesterday’s rain. Adinah and V. and I are playing on the line swing, along with a few other kids, plus a trio of older ones. The oldest of these last are a boy and girl, about thirteen.

The teenagers are taking extra turns, cutting in line, telling the little kids to wait. Adinah notices and tells me. I mumble something like, “Yeah, I see, I got it.’

Then two of the older kids walk away, leaving just the teenage girl. V. is up next. The teenage girl grabs for the swing to go again.

“It’s her turn,” I say in my halting German, and I take the swing.

“Bitte? (Excuse me?)” the teenager says with a sharp grimace.

The rest of our exchange is rapidfire, with lots of overlapping dialogue, and very little listening.

"It's her turn," I say, pointing at my three-year-old daughter.

"This ride isn't for little ones," the teenager snaps.

"This park is for everyone," I say.

"Why are you shouting at me?" she says.

"I'm not shouting at you," I answer. "Can you be a little more polite?"

The teenage girl doesn't hear me because she's saying something I don't hear because I'm already saying, again, "Can you be a little more polite?"

"You're not my father," she spits.

That's when I stop. I turn away and try to help V. with the swing. But I'm useless because I'm shaking.

Eight Reasons Why Mahler and his Sixth Symphony are the Bomb

2010-05-21T07:44:00.003+01:00

1) The first thirty-six seconds of the symphony sounds like a storm warning of the biggest trouble you have ever seen, bearing down on you Right Now.

2) The Sixth was immediatley labeled "satanic." Just like Cradle of Filth.

3) After the premier performance, Mahler was found pacing the floor in the dressing room, weeping from the intensity of hearing what he himself had created.

4) Mahler was Anette's mother's favorite. Knowing Mahler is like knowing a little more about Resi.

5) The strange little cow bells which shimmer, almost beyond (my) hearing range, in both the first movement and the Finale. But maybe I'm just imagining them.

6) The fact that with the Sixth, which was first performed in 1906, Mahler expressed something of the mindset of the Austrians and Germans who would, eight years later, declare Total War on the World. (Credit for this insight, as well as info in 2 and 3, goes to Alex Ross, and his awesome book The Rest is Noise.)

7)Here was a man who understood the phrase "terrible beauty."

8) Cool glasses.

rainy day

2010-05-18T15:41:00.005+01:00

Did I mention that the Austrians observe eight hundred Christian holidays a year? Not quite as many as the Ethiopians (who actually do celebrate more than a hundred per year) but close. Last Thursday was Himmelfahrt, which means "unpleasant odor in Heaven," (though I don't know why they celebrate that.) So Friday was a "window day"--stuck between a holiday and a weekend--and many of the not-so-hard-working Austrians took that off as well.

The streets were rainy and empty when I walked the kids to school. The halls of the place were half-dark. It made me remember something: when I was a kid, if I knew a place as busy and bustling, then it was really uncanny to see it quiet and deserted. Quiet hallways, different echoes, everyone missing.

Now I'm older, more sentimental, more egotistical. So my first impulse was to wonder if V. and Adinah think of these quiet days as somehow magical. Or maybe they think big empty buildings are scary.

But I like these days. It seems like I could take a nap on a street corner and no one would mind. Or notice. Schedules forgotten, everyday frenzies AWOL, all peevishness and stress evaporated. The city becomes dreamy. I drift off....

sunday afternoon at the conceptual video show

2010-05-16T18:49:00.003+01:00

Men in Tights

2010-05-13T09:42:00.004+01:00

I'm a little obsessed with Kick-Ass, the new (to Vienna) film about teen super-heroes and ultra-violence. It's funny and sweet and then someone gets shot in the face. That's a little confusing, and the parent in me squirmed a bit when the teens were suddenly having the kind of hot porno sex that only happens in Hollywood movies. But otherwise, it's a pretty great film.

And the soundtrack's great, too. Liam Prodigy put it together, and contributes a really fantastic Stax soul-meats-Bristol-Big Beat instrumental theme. It also includes the cartoon punk classic recording of the "Banana Splits Theme" by the Dickies, which plays under the scene when the film suddenly turns super-gory.

anyway. My theory is that underneath the music and mayhem that I'm crushing on, I like this idea of heroes. Maybe everyone loves a hero. But one man's hero is another man's working father. I may not be wearing purple tights (at least, not at the moment), or leaping over tall gothic churches. But sometimes just getting our girls fed and out the door to school feels like a heroic act.

Of course, sometimes I get grumpy and impatient with them. Then I'm more like a super villain. I become Black Cloud. Or Red Face.

This morning I was both. V. woke up at 5:15, a full ninety minutes before any of us needed to be conscious. She insisted on coming into our bed, where she squirmed and whined and yelled at us until I got up and went somewhere else to not sleep. But not before I yelled back at her.

Even as I lay on the couch not sleeping, I thought, 'Adinah used to wake up in the middle of the night, and I just got up and played with her. Somehow I'm not so patient with V....'

A little later, as I was helping Adinah get ready for her day, I saw that she hadn't eaten the snack I put in her school bag yesterday. "Deanie, why didn't you eat your snack from yesterday?" She heard me, but gave no answer. I looked at her. "You don't have an answer for me?" Uh huh, she nodded. It was clear to me that she simply thought it was better for her to give no reply.

And what do you do with that?

Well, you go and stare out the window for a second. Count to 10,000. Try to be the adult in the room.

All this angst, and I hadn't even made 'em breakfast.

Somehow, I made like Black Flag, and rose above. Got them out the door and over to Deanie's school, where I helped her take fotos of twenty-two of her twenty-three classmates (special secret class project--don't ask.) Then we reversed and went to our neighborhood cafe, the Blue/Orange, where we got bagels with cream cheese. V. had a lot of fun getting cream cheese all over her face, then wiping it off again.

The morning slowed for a long moment. A moment I really enjoyed having with my precious daughters.

That's when I felt like a super hero. Or maybe I just felt super good.

Reasons to Stay Alive

2010-05-07T19:00:00.004+01:00

1) Ben and Jerry's Heath Bar Crunch.

2) Children.

3) You need to stay alive because someone out there loves you.

4) The Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland.

5) If you stay up all night, sunrise is even more beautiful.

6) Because even waking up with a hangover or getting you heart broken is better than eternal sleep.

7) You need to help a friend.

8) If you are a man, you need to try wearing lipstick. Just once.

9) If you are a woman, you must know the joy of assembling a Glow-in-the-Dark Wolfman model kit.

10) Watching the leaves on an aspen tree shimmer in the Rocky Mountain breeze, and finding out that this is why they are sometimes called "quakies."

11 ) One day, you won't be scared anymore.

the score

2010-05-05T21:07:00.003+01:00

Last night, as soon as I walked into my first parent-teacher conference, I sat down at my kid's school desk. I thought that was where I was supposed to sit. The teacher just looked down and laughed.

I had prepared a list of questions and lines of attack, thinking back to my journalist days. Only instead of asking a rock singer, 'Did you really show that former TV star your penis?', I was getting ready to ask, 'Is it okay if I read Dr. Suess to her at night while she's learning proper German by day?'

And unlike some of the interviews I used to do when I was a cub reporter, there was no deep mystery to unravel, no puzzle to solve. Deanie's teacher told me she's a very good student, very articulate and verbal, good social skills etc. Teacher said Adinah tells lots of stories, and sometimes on Mondays, she reports very specific bits, the smallest details of her weekend. (Cool.) She said Adinah is kind.

I was especially proud of that last thing.

The teacher gave me another report card for Deanie, her second, and as in the first, she had graded my girl with a scale of Happy Faces and Stars. Stars are Super, Happy Faces are Good/Normal. Adinah got mostly Stars, and about 5 Happy Faces. The teacher said I should look the report over and talk about it with Anette, then show it to Adinah.

This morning Adinah was beside herself. "Can I see it now, can I see it now, can I see it now?"

Why I Work

2010-04-30T07:03:00.002+01:00

Some of our friends here don't work because their partner has a job which brings in enough money for the house. Other friends are working in low-paying jobs which they love, but that means they also need "state subsidies"--government benefits--to help pay all the bills.

Back in the States, some of our friends are out of work, and don't want to be, but they don't want to take that Walmart job yet. I can understand that. So they start eating into their savings, if they're lucky enough to have any.

But, speaking as one who's currently lucky enough to have a job, I know that at times I have worked all day, for little or no money, to create something or solve a problem which ultimately seems sorta minor. Sometimes I look back at my day and wonder, 'Is that all I got done?'

That's why I'm wondering 'why?' this morning. Why do we do it? Obviously, most of us big people have to work to pay the bills. But besides that?

I think my parents taught me that one should try to find something one likes to do, then try to get someone to pay you to do that. That is still what I believe, what I tell young people who ask me, 'What should I do?' This idea is underneath my only answer to the work question. We work because we want to. We like it.

I work because I get a kick out of doing something well. When I'm teaching or taking pictures or writing, and it's going well, it's like I'm pushing beyond myself, like a kind of transcendence. I forget time, my body, most everything and I'm just...doing my thing.

Sometimes I go farther. The other night I had to get out of the house. I didn't want to go to the movies, or to the Prater to play pinball. I got out onto the street, started taking pictures, felt the spring air on my skin, and two hours later, I was standing at a train station, staring up at the moon. I had been making photographs, and loving it, but now I just gawped at that moon like a little kid. I felt the pure pleasure of just looking at something sort of mysterious. I was beyond beyond myself. Just being. I wasn't taking pictures and I wasn't working. I was just acutely aware of the beauty of a moment. I was just alive.

It only lasted for a minute. But it was really something.

date night

2010-04-25T20:11:00.003+01:00

One of the central ironies of our marriage is that I'm a fellow who'll go see just about any Hollywood piece of junk at the multiplex as long as I can order a giant tub of popcorn, too, but my wife prefers serious films. Like documentaries about photosynthesis. Real edge of your seat type stuff.

We don't really go to the movies together lot. But we're on a bit of a run now--on three of our very infrequent movie date nights, we've gone to see films about Ethiopia, Somalia or adoption. These have not been feel-good movies. At the first, about a boy who gets adopted from Ethiopia by an Israeli family, we pretty much both cried through the whole fucking flick.

Last night wasn't too different. We saw a film about a doctor trying to survive the end of the Mengistu Communist regime in Ethiopia in the early nineties. I've read a little bit about these years there, and it sounds like they were a horrible time for a country that had already suffered too much under Haile Selassie. So it was interesting to see a film depicting the time. But the movie was badly acted and edited and conceived like something low budget from the sixties. Which is pretty much what I said when Anette asked me what I thought of it afterwards.

She took a more forgiving position, and said she was glad to see a movie about historical events that aren't known to many people outside of East Africa.

I got feisty about it. There were declarations about aesthetics versus content, supporting African cinema and the difficulties of overcoming racism in one's work and personal life. I drank two small beers and made many proclamations. By the time we got home, I was ready to start fighting about the treatment of women in Iran.

I get the Devil in me sometimes. Don't know why.

But maybe I ought to do some thinking about that one of these days. Before our next date.

Honey and Vinegar

2010-04-21T19:39:00.003+01:00

Something has changed again in V. She's more self-possessed, more sure of herself. I'd like to think she's more confident, and that she likes herself more, but that's a bit presumptuous. Because all I see is something in her smile.

Her smile is more understanding now. She smiles like she is aware of more of the dynamics and complications in the room around her. She smiles now like someone who is starting to be able to see things on two different levels. Her smile is sometimes that of someone who is able to step outside of the action-and of herself-and reconsider the situation.

Of course, I could just be nuts. But....let's just say she still has other tools in her toolkit.

Yesterday, just after returning from the States and still jet-lagged, Anette took both our girls to the playground. They met up with all of their friends. While they were all congregating around the Korbschaukel (basket swing), some older boys started bothering them, telling them, 'Go away, we want to play here.' Adinah and her other friends just looked down and didn't say anything back to the boys. But V. walked right up to the interlopers, planted both feet and screamed at the top of her lungs, 'NO, You go away!!"

The boys went away.

Pretty cool, huh?

Some Questions I Can't Answer Tonight

2010-04-19T18:54:00.004+01:00

1) "Papa, why does a volcano break twice?"

2) "Papa, when comes Mommy?"

3) "Papa, why are some people so dumb?"

4) "Why do you have to go to work, Poppy?"

5) "Why can't I have mashed potatoes after I've brushed my teeth?"

6) "Will we go to live in America, Papa?"

7) "What film do you like better, Papa--'Paparazzi' by Lady Gaga, or 'Beat It' by Michael Jackson?"

8) "What was the worst thing that ever happened to you, Papa?"

Weird World

2010-04-12T07:44:00.007+01:00

I signed into Facebook for the first time three years ago, mostly because I was writing an article about social networking sites. Thinking back about it, my piece was a complete misread of how Facebook would really impact my generation. Most of my first Friends were students of mine--half my age--at the university where I as teaching. So I didn't network with them much. (I do sometimes think before I click.)

Now, like a lot of people, I find that Facebook is trying to eat my life. I have nearly three hundred Friends, many of whom I actually know, and I look at my goddamn page, like, eight times a day. And I have a job.

One thing that Facebook and My Space et.al. have given us is the freedom to enjoy a new variation of Drunken Dialling. Instead of getting blotto and calling up ex-girlfriends, now we can all locate, text and then Skype with people we haven't spoken to in thirty years! With whom we probably have nothing left in common!!

One such figure who has emerged out of my dubious, blood-soaked past is my old high school friend, Noel. Back in the day, Noel was a young man of many interests--these included pinball, photography, Drama club girls, and the collected works of Rush. So we were a good match, Noel and I. When I learned how to use a 35 mm camera, Noel was one of my first subjects. he posed playing his electric guitar, sans electricity, in my back yard. In the first series, he wore a kimono, then he took off his shirt, and put on a Navy Admiral's hat, just like Jimmy Page would have done. That was Noel, and I as in thrall enough to photograph the whole thing sans embarrassment.

Thirty years later, just after he found and Friended me, Noel started leaving comments on this blog, and he tried to instant message me a couple of times. But I wasn't ready to get into the way-back machine.

I did read some of his Status Updates, and did look at his flickR page and some of his beautiful night photography of abandoned gas stations and factories.

A couple of weeks ago, after the House passed the health care bill, Noel posted several links to articles about it, including a now infamous piece by the conservative writer David Frum. It was an interesting piece, and Noel's Facebook comments on it were interesting too: smart, measured, funny. Then another acquaintance of his, guy who would probably call himself a "fiscal conservative," jumped into the thread and ranted for many paragraphs about how health care reform was going to turn us all into Stalin-hugging Martians, etc. etc. And Noel just went off on the guy--told him 'Your ideas suck, you're not my friend, and I barely remember you from Lanier Senior High School.'

It was a pretty raw Facebook moment.

So the other night when I got home from work, somehow I felt like reaching out to my old friend. A few minutes later, there we were, face-to-face again after thirty years. Same nose, same face, older of course, but I sensed that with a little prodding, he might be ready to make a Monty Python joke. Or at least laugh if I made one. And he was wearing a t-shirt that read, 'The Man The Myth The Legend.'

He was sitting in a study or a home office with shelving behind him, but other than that, I don't know where he was. Guess that's the nature of the Skype cold call.

And what do you say to a metalhead you haven't seen since high school?

Actually we didn't talk about Zeppelin or Uriah Heep at all. We tried to catch up. Having read Euro Like Me, and also looked at my flickR page, Noel knew a little bit of my story. He said something like, 'So you've had an interesting life...?' But from everything he told me, his life has been pretty lively too. Suffice to say, he's had triumphs and tragedies, and he's survived with an ability to reflect upon both.

It was really great to see him again. He's the same guy I always liked, way back when.

I feel like a wide-eyed farmboy saying this but, by golly, the world is an amazing place these days. Amazing and weird. It’s bizarre to try to telescope your life to someone else, to summarize thirty years--the adventures and the tears—into a short, um, video-graphic(?) conversation. But we did it, sort of.

Maybe Facebook and Skype and this sort of virtual contact really just confirms that one never really loses friends. They’re always with you—in your mind or on your screen.

Now I want to do it with someone else. Is that wrong?

What I Learned on my Easter Holiday

2010-04-06T22:48:00.003+01:00

1) Paying attention to a kid is a good way to get to know them, but it also distracts the Devil in him. Or her.

2) My wife really does have the patience of a saint.

3) Adinah is a world class Memory player, and is quite capable of humiliating players who are even three (!) years older than her. (Now I don't feel so stupid.)

4) If you want to coax a kid up (or down) a mountain, tell her a story. (Even if that means dressing up the Big Bad Wolf in a leather jacket.)

5) V. doesn’t start by assembling the outer edge of the puzzle; she puts it together by color cluster.

6) Even though she’s not a rock chick, and she complains about whiney white boys with guitars, Anette knows and derives pleasure from “Death Of A Clown” by the Kinks. For now, this is all the proof I need that I am a lucky fellow.

7) If V. is screaming a lot, calling me a stupid cow or otherwise ausgeflipping out, she needs food or sleep or both. Immediately.

8) Left to her own devices, Adinah would be perfectly content with a breakfast of a roll with butter, cake, buttered toast, and Melba toast.

9) I quite enjoy eating Osso Bucco or vegetables in a perfect red pepper sauce but sooner or later I’m gonna need to eat some french fries or I’ll get a little difficult.

10) We may be the loudest and sloppiest family in the hotel restaurant, but that doesn’t mean we’re bad people.

Südtirol by Train and Boot

2010-04-03T20:43:00.002+01:00

Hotel Panorama, SudTirol, “Italy”

2010-03-30T20:54:00.001+01:00

We’re in a super comfortable lodge perched just above the northern Italian town of Tschars, just below two stupendous, snowy ridges of the Alps. It’s more Austrian then it is Italian, the whole of this region having been part of Austria until the end of the first World War. So that means that the hotel restaurant plays alpine schlager hits and the female hotel staff wears Dirndls. Yesterday, we took a cable car way-the-fuck-up these steep mountain walls, then hiked back down. For six hours. We have mountain goats for daughters.

It helps that we’re here with our favorite other Ethiopian-Austrian family. Adinah and V. probably never would have hiked like they did without their pals Teresa and Emily. But still: V. is just 3 ½ years old. And even though she cried and whined at times, she walked almost the whole way down by herself. For a kiddo who probably sees no point at all in clambering down a near-vertical slab of rock and scrub brush, that’s six hours of heroic effort.

Last night at the dinner table, in an effort to summarize her day, V. took a skewer and jabbed it into a giant chunk of her schnitzel, turned it upside down and started flying it around the room. “Look,” she laffed, “I’m a cable car.”

2010-03-27T20:02:00.000+01:00

Top Ten Ill-Advised Facebook Status Updates

2010-03-24T20:48:00.004+01:00

1) I think I'm getting a raise!

2) Initiating launch sequence in 5...4...3...2...1-.

3) Joey's wife is hot!

4) Joey's brother is a douche lord!

5) What *is* the difference between irony and sarcasm, anyway?

6) Music sounds so great when you're high.

7) Underneath my clothes, I'm naked.

8) Look, tracheotomies are easy and fun. You just cut through this stuff here and-oh. Wait.

9) That's it, I'm quitting this stupid job.

10) These people are fools! They'll never suspect it was I, Colonel Mustard, in the Ballroom, with a Candlestick!

dead again

2010-03-23T07:36:00.006+01:00

I'm all about zombies lately. And that is not just because I'm reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, or because the folks in Wienertown shuffle down the street like the walking dead. I’ve come to realize that I quite like zombies. Or: I quite like zombie movies. Or, at least, I like one zombie movie: Dawn of the Dead.

The best horror movie about consumerism ever. Plus, it’s got a really great exploding head scene.

So I finally got around to seeing the 2004 remake of Dawn. Until now, I’ve avoided it, along with the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, and The Pink Panther. But then I succumbed to this zombie fever of mine, and I found out that the remake stars Sarah Polley, and Ving Rhames. They have talent, right?

Anyway, I watched the damn thing.

It’s got its moments, like the bit where the heroine stumbles out into her front yard to discover that, overnight, the planet has descended into mayhem. Or the spot where the redneck mall security cop takes a break from wasting manky dreadfuls to bob his head along with the mall Muzak version of “All Lost in Love” and he says, “I like this song.”

But that’s all it’s got: moments. The suspense and humor of the original are AWOL. It's tense but undramatic. It made me nervous, but it didn't disturb me. Who cares about these characters in a mall? Not me.

Dawn of the Dead 2004 includes a scene where a hillbilly grandma, gun in hand, finishes a cigarette before she goes into a dark room. Extreme Close-Up of the cherry on the tip of the cigarette, sound of the tobacco and paper crinkling with fire. She drops the stogey and steps on it--another Extreme Close-Up. Why are we seeing these filmic flourishes? How do they advance the story or tell us something we don't already know? They don't. These shots are just close-ups, and they only cue us to the fact that something may or may not be about to happen.

It amazes me that young filmakers--in this case, one Zack Snyder, who went on to "direct" 300--can take a story about braineaters in a shopping mall and fashion a movie that is long on style and really short on well, guts.

And it amazes , and delights me even more that this thought leads me back to the greatness of George Romero's 1976 film. Dawn of the Dead is ridiculous, a comic book. I mean the zombies are blue, for gawd's sake. Check these shots of both Dawns for comparison--which look more like real zombies?!

And yet, it's a complete and disturbing artistic statement about life, death, the world, hell, mortality, humanity, disease, and brains. For me, that's genius: a cheesy movie that's really about something, that is funny and horrible and deep and dumb, all at the same time.

For me, that's cinema.

so long, AC

2010-03-18T14:46:00.005+01:00

I'm sad to learn that Alex Chilton has passed. His music changed my life. It was sad and very troubled, but there was also a lot of beauty and joy in it. If you have never heard it, start with the record Sister Lovers/3rd by his band, Big Star.

Chilton played the Continental Club in Austin, Texas, in 1985 or so. He played with Rene somebody and a drummer, and they did songs that were mostly from the albums High Priest and Feudalist Tarts. A lot of us in the audience wanted to hear some Big Star song, any Big Star song, or anything by Chilton's teen Top 40 band, the Box Tops, but we were too "respectful," too aware of that tradition where an artist shouldn't be badgered into playing their great old stuff. But one guy in the back of the club wasn't respectful: this was Dino Lee, the singer, emcee and perpetrator of the White Trash Revue, which was actually considered entertaining by some in Austin in 1985. Dino Lee was standing by the door, bellowing the names of various Box Tops songs. I was a little embarrassed that he was heckling the great Alex Chilton. But Chilton laffed, made a semi-snide remark, and then, to his great credit, played the Box Tops' biggest hit, "The Letter."

Most musicians are proud, but only the really great ones are understanding and forgiving too.

Black History Month Party for Kinder

2010-03-17T19:46:00.003+01:00

it began in Africa

2010-03-14T19:55:00.005+01:00

Currently, V. knows two things about Africa. It is (1) where her biological father comes from, and (2) it's where Barbapapa goes to set free all those animals he rescues from the zoo. Barbapapa being the large pink blob creature who can form himself into any shape, who always helps other creatures out, and who had his own cartoon show here in Europa in the seventies--still beloved by children of all colors.

So we do occasionally try to broaden our girls ideas about the Continent. This afternoon, we took them to a blowout organized by the local African Womens' Coalition today. It was advertised as an event celebrating Black History Month (which was last month, wasn't it?), but actually it was just a party for kids of color. Which was fine, thank you.

There was face-painting and some delicious chicken and rice, but mostly the party consisted of two very sweet (and patient) young men with dreads leading a gaggle of black, brown and caramel-colored kids in a series of games for close to five hours without a break. Including ours, the kids numbered about twenty-five at the height of the party, and ranged in age from two to twelve. Meanwhile, the parents--black, white, adoptive and/or bio--sat on the sidelines as the wild rumpus raged.

It was nice.

I think I've learned to (mostly) check my cynicism when I observe other parents, especially other white adoptive parents of brown and black kids. I try not to play Who's the Most Perfect Parent in the Room (Answer: ME!) I try not to be too over protective, nor too involved in the proceedings. I try to remember that even when the kids are dancing, nobody in the room wants to see me get funky. That would be wrong.

But still, parties like this are pretty intense. You can't make any assumptions about which language anyone does or does not speak, and it's always dicey trying to figure out which kid belongs to which big person. If you see, as I did today, a tomboyish ten year old girl who's slightly heavy, and seems to want to disappear inside her baggy clothes, and her mom, a tiny, nervous, slightly pinched and blonde woman who doesn't seem to be paying much attention to her daughter, you can't think, 'Oh, yeah, I know what's going on in their house.' But obviously, I still do.

And I have to try to set aside all sorts of self-loathing and racist poison in my brain. It's still there. Maybe it's inside of most people. All I know is I'm still working on it.

And that's nice work if you can get it.

The English Cinema Haydn

2010-03-12T08:42:00.003+01:00

A subterranean theatre in the basement of what is probably a pretty shabby hotel. Two of the three screens are small compared to US multiplex screens, but hey, the concession stand sells beer.

Last night, I got there early, sat down, opened my computer, and continued trying to figure out how to add my own artwork to songs on my iPod. Around me, other English speakers (not all American) discussed their current projects at their various NGOs and IGOs, or tried to convince the ticket seller that they know the theatre owner.

A tv monitor in one corner is perpetually tuned to CNN--last night it was blabbering on about the three richest men in the world. Fascinating.

I shut the computer a few minutes before my movie was set to start, and got in line up at the snack bar. I usually order the Haydn Menu 2, which is the second hugest popcorn and a "large" drink. But, hey, caveat emptor, this large drink is barely a thimblefull compared to US multiplex drinks. And to add insult to injury, the snack bar staff never even fill the cup to the top! I'm wanting for cola, here! I see them over there, futzing around with my drink, as if they were topping it off, but no. When they slide it across the counter to me, without even taking off the lid, I can see it's, you know, only about two thirds full!!

Before entering the auditorium, I loiter around the place, deriding the posters and advertising materials for the upcoming atrocities, most of which I will eventually pay to see. "Is Sandra Bullock blind now? Wha-?" "Oh my god, another Shrek?!"To think some Hollywood imbecile was paid--highly--to 'develop' this retread of a remake of a film version of an old tv show?!"

Sometimes the movie is good.

And around 11 pm, I scuttle out and down the street to my awaiting subway train. Clutching half a bag of movie theatre popcorn.

bar talk

2010-03-09T13:06:00.002+01:00

Stopped in at our former neighborhood bar last night. Stephan was working, though he told me he only works there on Monday nights these days. He’s a big handsome gym queen, and he always asks about Adinah. First he always asks, ‘What’s your daughter’s name again?’ Last night, when I walked in, he stopped talking to the young man sitting at the bar, immediately switched to English, and pumped me with so many questions about our family that I had to remind him that I had also come for a drink.

Stephan has always wanted to have a kid. Or at least, whenever he sees me, he likes to think and talk about having a kid. He seems like a sweet man. It’s probably been two years since I’ve seen him.

So last night he had lots of questions about V. ‘So she’s your foster kid?’ ‘How is that different from an adopted kid?’ ‘Is it expensive?’ ‘Is there a lot of paperwork to do?’ ‘How long did it take to get her?’ And so forth. Culminating with the last question, the one he always returns to when I return to his bar, ‘Do you think I could have a foster kid, even though I don’t have a partner?’

I told him, ‘Yes, I think you could. We know a lesbian couple who have two foster kids.’

His young friend at the bar disagreed. ‘Surely not, Stephan,” he said in German. “No way.” He said a single gay man could never become a foster father in this super Catholic country. But I began to doubt this character’s judgement over the next hour plus as I listened to him see-saw between complaining about Austrian provincialism and exhibiting it.

Mostly I was struck again by the fact that some people just want to have kids, whether or not it’s practical or even possible. Even without a boyfriend or a husband, some men think, ‘I want to be a papa.’ Women too: our friend K was like this—she was determined to adopt or become a foster parent, and when she met her girlfriend, she said, ‘Think twice before you get involved with me—I’m pregnant.’

I know this is accepted, or explained away as a ‘parenting urge’ or some such, but still I find it remarkable. In Stephan’s case, maybe it’s just a fantasy, nothing serious, not something he will ever make happen. Still, isn’t it amazing that even in these completely crazy times, some folks just want to step up to the plate and take on all this work and joy and heartbreak and other stuff?

I’m muttering again, I know, but I think that’s amazing.

Stockerau

2010-03-07T20:51:00.005+01:00

Subjects for Further Research: the Top Ten Community College Degrees I would attain If I were Stinking Rich

2010-03-04T22:59:00.002+01:00

History
Research Question:
Why do we keep fucking up?

Film
Research Question:
Is it still possible to make a good film with both subtexts and blowjobs?

Economics
Research Question:
How do we stop the hurting?

Education
Research Question:
Why are teachers who can't listen to students allowed into the classroom?

International Relations
Research Question:
How can democracy defeat capitalism and save the world?

Graphic Design
Research Question:
In the age of iTunes and Pirate Bay, what will replace triple gatefold record album art?

Sociology
Research Question:
After Facebook, does anyone under 30 understand the concept of privacy?

Cultural Criticism
Research Question:
The Inuit have sixty words for snow-why do rock critics only know one way to say "knarly guitar solo"?

Social Work
Research Question:
In a world of rootless cosmopolitans, how can any of us remember who we are or where we came from?

Music Theory
Research Question:
What is the most ecstatic chord in existence?

Springtime for Österreich

2010-03-02T20:46:00.004+01:00

Ahh, the snowbells are in bloom, and if you listen carefully, you can hear the snapping and cracking of half a million Viennese frowns, floating away like ice on the Danube.

It's not that the winters here are so cold, just long, and gray. It's meant a bit of adjusting for me. In Texas, winter comes on a Wednesday (though I hear they've had a few snowflakes this year.) And the skies above Manhattan can be the deepest blue, even on a blisteringly cold February afternoon.

In Vienna, Anette and I will be out for a walk in September, and when she sees her first brown leave of fall, she casts her eyes downward and groans, 'It has begun.'

Fall is nice, but this year we got snow in November. Winter sometimes lasts into April. And while we're at it, June is rainy as hell--hardly a summer month at all. I want a refund! This is very Euro of Me: winter is a great conversational placeholder here, and even the most frozen Austrians come alive when they complain about the weather.

But this year really has been schön okay. Here it is, the dawn of March, and we just had a full weekend of sun. Well, almost a full weekend. It's almost light in the morning when the kids crawl into bed with us, and it's still light when I leave the office in the evening.

I'm getting old and easy to please. Throw me a little light and spring air and I think, 'Maybe my life is really alright for now.'

the Fury

2010-02-27T16:44:00.000+01:00

Yesterday was the second time in a week that I wasted a perfectly good opportunity to lose my temper. But I had to do something. A fellow can only be in a crowded public place, listening to his sweetest little precious scream, ‘You are shit!” so many times….

V. is at that delicate stage of life when one gives up one’s afternoon nap because Emily and Katarina and Doo Doo don’t take one anymore. Even though one is not really physically strong enough to go without that sleep. So one is a tad irritable when a papa picks one up from kindergarten.

She shrieked at me in school, at the U-Bahn station, on the train, and also when we got stuck in the elevator, after V. punched all the buttons, including the red one that says, ‘STOP.’ She called me caca, and stupid, then she added that she would not be giving me any presents. That really hurt.

The walk home was nice, though.

A small dose of bubble gum seemed to placate her for awhile.

But the kniptions erupted again after dinner. Violent protestations about my choice of pajamas for her, etc. etc. So I said to her, “V., you’ve been screaming at me for no good reason for three hours now. I don’t like it. I’ve had enough. Will you stop?” And she stopped. For about a minute.

Then she screamed,”Kakao!!”(Translation: Give me my bottle of warm soy milk, NOW!)

“No,” I said. “That’s it. No bottle tonight. And you’re going to bed right now.”

So she lets loose the Fury. Screams of indignity, the ear-piercing howls of the criminally persecuted.

I looked right into her little eyes, and told her, “Honey, if you scream at people, they’re not going to do Anything nice for you. I’ve had it. I know you’re tired. But I asked you if you would stop, you said you would, but you kept screaming at me. Now that’s it.”

The Fury raged on for a while, though it had probably turned to hurt. I gave her some water in her bottle, and sang “Moonshadow” to her, like I always do. But she got no kakao. And I didn’t get mad.

Beastly behavior has consequences. And she won't get to be CEO of Google, or for that matter, play right midfield for Manchester United, until she understands that.

It took her a few minutes longer to fall asleep. The next morning, she was my sweetest little precious again.

Death of a Pinata (and other scenes from the birthday party)

2010-02-26T22:15:00.005+01:00

I'm Here to Kick Ass and Chew Gum, and I Just Ran out of Gum: (my first) Motorvational top ten iPod list

2010-02-22T21:28:00.006+01:00

1) Replacements - "Fuck School" or "God Damn Job"

2) Daft Punk-"Rollin' and Scratchin'"

3) Gang of Four-"Ether"

4) the Rezillos-"Somebody's Gonna Get their Head Kicked in Tonight"

5) Fiona Apple - "Limp"

6) Diamanda Galas-"Let my People Go"

7) Led Zeppelin-"Hots on for Nowhere"

8) Neil Young-"Cinnamon GIrl"

9) AC/DC- "Sin City"

10) Soft Boys - "I Wanna Destroy You"

No Time

2010-02-19T16:30:00.003+01:00

Last night, I got home at six, said goodbye to the babysitter, fixed a quick dinner, then spent 90 minutes driving the girls towards bedtime.

This morning, I got up just after six, had a few moments to myself, then spent an hour and fifteen minutes persuading, asking ‘Please’ and finally pushing them out of the door to school.

And so it goes. During the week, my time with my daughters is tight. And I spend so much of it getting them dressed or begging them to let me brush their teeth, I barely have any time to give them Sugar. To give them the encouragement and support and love they need.

I worry a little that they think their papa is a psycho who bosses them around, occasionally dances with them, then bosses them around some more. I worry more that they will start to think life is just a slog: all personal hygiene, household tasks and no fun.

Actually, they both love playing with their friends. And they like playing with each other a lot too.

What I miss is my playtime with them. I miss getting-to-know-them time. They’re growing up, changing, and learning, and it’s difficult to understand how or why they’re changing when I have so few moments to really see and hear them. I don’t get to talk to my girls enough....

Our Big Fat Faschings Party Top 10

2010-02-15T20:38:00.001+01:00

Best Kids Costume:
Tie: Oskar, who came as a Chemist (white lab coat with periodic table symbols scrawled on it) and Ainoah and her brother Andreas, who came as Ninjas (dressed all in black, with t-shirts that said 'Ninja')

My Daughters' Costumes:
Adinah-Witch, V.-Rockstar Fairy. (But she took the Axl Rose wig off after five minutes, and then she looked like every other pink girl in the place.

Best Adult Costume:
Christiana, who was completely done up in orange, with tights, cape and horn-rimmed glasses--apparently she was some kind of...Librarian Superhero!

Most Overheard Phrase:
"Gummi Bears-YAHHHHHHGHH!"

Bravest Costume:
Lino, who is six, came dressed as a Baby. With a pacifier. That kid was letting himself in for so much abuse from his fellow first graders. But apparently Adinah and her other friends at the party just laffed and said, 'Yeah, that Lino, he's so creative.'

Most Krapfen Eaten by an Individual:
4, consumed by the above mentioned Lino. (BTW, "Krapfen" is German for Jelly Donut.) At the end of the party, he did hurl.

Music on the small Jambox:
Miriam Makeba-"Pata Pata"
Elizabeth Mitchell-"You are My Sunshine"
Slayer-Reign in Blood

Ratio of Children to Meltdowns, Hissy Fits or other Conniptions:
25/8

Most Amazing Revelation:
Hand them a push broom and seven-year-olds love to sweep up streamers, confetti and dirty socks!

Most Dangerous Costume:
Our friend Andy borrowed my colleague Mark's full body Monkey costume, and the children tried to kill him. Last I saw, the Monkey was limping across the gymnasium floor, with a kid in a Tiger costume clamped to his foot.

beloved thing

2010-02-12T17:01:00.004+01:00

I bought an iPod. Now pigs will fly.

A couple of months ago I suddenly noticed one of my colleagues’ ipod Nano. So sleek, so simple and nice to look at. Started salivating with pure design lust. Then I started perculating the idear—I’m always complaining (in my mind, if not out loud) that I can’t listen to music at volume any more. Either I’ll be waking up the girls, or distracting Anette from work or reading. But I still really really like having a Relationship with a piece of music. This is so delicious: giving some sounds—weird, spooky, lush, whatever-- your pure attention, your brain. Listening with all of yourself. And finally I put two and two together, and determined to buy myself a new toy. This I deserve.

Last night I snuck over to the mall, and lingered over a display case at Saturn for awhile. Like a sign from God, one of the sales clerks paused behind me and asked if I needed any help, which never ever happens at that place. So I asked a couple of guilty, perfunctory questions, and one hundred and fifty Euros later, I had become one of those people who walk around plugged in 24-7. Without even knowing it, I bought the exact color and model I’d seen on my colleague’s desk.

And it’s so fucking cool.

The first thing I listened to on it was a basshead stoner techno masterpiece I only discovered last week: Burial’s Untrue. The second thing I listened to was a record that’s almost forty years older: Fairport Convention’s lesser known electric folk jewel, Full House. They both sounded sooo...good.

I listened to Burial last night as I creeped around my neighborhood taking photos of the snow and brutalist architecture. It was the perfect soundtrack: dark, paranoid, lost, sad and mysterious, with a low-end that I can feel in my chest. It’s amazing how headphone music can re-contextualize the everyday and every-night landscape. Billboards look more poignant or tragic, shadows more sinister, street lights even harsher....

This may become my latest, greatest disease.

the coldest village in Austria

2010-02-11T23:29:00.001+01:00

Male Trouble

2010-02-09T21:53:00.000+01:00

I met a man the other day who told me, 'Well, I've got two kids--one's still in diapers. They won't stay with me. They won't let me take care of them by myself--they only want their mom."

It seemed like something he'd said before, as a way to do three things at once: wriggle out of doing any childcare himself, get his wife to do the extra work, and keep his wife at home. His wife was nowhere to be seen--he was speaking for her.

I told him he should find another shoulder to cry on.

If he had just wanted a little sympathy from me, that might have been okay. Before I was a dad, the thought of changing diapers was ghastly. If he had wanted understanding, I could have just said,'Brother, I don't understand you. Maybe you ought to try spending some time with your children--you might actually like it.' But he also seemed to want some sort of favor from me, though I'm not sure what. And this was too much.

Look, I know every mom and pop make their own Deal. Maybe he makes all the money and she stays home and works with the kids--that's a deal I don't love, but, okay, fine. Even in that situation, though, if you want to call yourself a father, you've got to be able to care for your kids. Period.

BTW, I only know one couple like that, and they're rich. I suspect that's the only way a woman can be a housewife in the US these days: if she or he is a millionaire. But even my (one) rich friend can take his children in a pinch.

And even if you were a rich workaholic, what kind of a man would want trophy kids? Children to show off, pat on the head, then hand off to mommy? Who would want that?

Look, I'm aware of the different choices people make (and don't make) because of differences in class, race and culture. That doesn't mean I have to accept lame male excuses, or behavior I find to be toilet. At many times during the Years of Shit--otherwise known as the Bush Administration era--I thought that he would not have gotten the US (and the world) into half of the trouble he did if W. had not been an absentee father. If he hadn't outsourced his childcare, and had actually spent some time with Jenna and whatever that other one's name was, he might not have fucked up their future (and that of our children) so thoroughly.

But...well, I digress. Back in this dimension, the other day, when I bumped into this man a second time, he had his wife and kids with him.

I looked at his daughter, and asked, 'How old is she?'

'Two,' he said.

'Mine's three,' I said, still not feeling the bon homie. 'And she's a lot louder.'

The wife, in the meantime, looked like she might enjoy handing the kids over to her man every once in a while. Maybe she's the one who needs a break.

Variations on a Mall

2010-02-06T21:59:00.003+01:00

The girls and I are just back from four days in the the snowiest mountain village I have ever seen, and I will post pictures from that soon. But right now I want to tell everyone in Vienna (and anyone else who can see ORF 2) that a film by my brilliant wife will be showing on Austrian TV tomorrow night, the 7th of February, at 23.05. It's called The Gruen Effect, and it's about Victor Gruen, the inventor of the shopping mall. It's a great, smart, groovy movie and if you watch it you might even learn something! Here's a synopsis, and be sure to tune in tomorrow night!

The Gruen Effect (52 min)

Victor Gruen couldn’t possibly have known how much he would change
the world. The world famous Viennese architect is chiefly remembered
as the inventor of the shopping mall. His “green” ideas spawned cities,
which ultimately became shrines to the Gods of consumption and the
free market. This documentary follows Gruen’s dramatic escape from
Nazi controlled Vienna in 1938, his subsequent adventures in booming
post-war America and finally his return to Vienna in the 1960s as a
committed socialist. The life, work and critical humour of this exceptional
architect serve as a starting point for an examination of the cities in
which we live today. A portrait of a man who, in keeping with the motto
“cars buy nothing”, has had a lasting influence on economics, politics
and, above all, consumers.

Director:Katharina Weingartner and Anette Baldauf
Production:co-production: Wailand Filmproduktion and ORF
Language:german | original version
Format:4:3 Letterbox, 16:9, PAL, HDTV
Length:52 min
Available:worldwide

thought for the day

2010-01-30T14:27:00.004+01:00

Do kids in the US play with little plastic colored beads that can be fused together into elaborate shapes with a common household clothes iron? Do you know the German for "common household clothes iron?" It is "bügeleisen." Now you know how I'm spending my Saturday with my girls.

I wonder if Captain Beefheart knew this. Then he could have changed the words to one of his songs every time he played Dusseldorf: "I'm gonna bügeleisen ya, baby!"

in the neighborhood tonight

2010-01-29T20:32:00.001+01:00

Girls and Boys

2010-01-27T08:12:00.003+01:00

What the hell happened to the rock?

So I'm sitting there last night, glazing over in front of GoTV (our MTV), and it's all whiny boys singing within the lines, thinking inside the box. Vampire Weekend (channeling the Feelies), Tocotronic (aping Bryan Ferry, sort of) and Girls (conjuring up the ghost of Evan Dando, for gawd's sake!)--who gives a rat's ass?! It doesn't seem to matter where they're from--Austria, the US or England--a creeping suckieness has attacked all the dudes with guitars.

The only video and song I liked was Florence + the Machine's "You've Got the Love." It's pretty retro too, but at least she's got the voice. A leggy "hottie," hanging off of a giant glittering moon and belting out an old fashioned disco anthem. And I mean, belting it way out. She sings like she can't keep that big voice inside her for one minute more.

There's a trend here. I haven't heard a male band or singer that I cared about in forever. All the new music I've really liked in the last two years is made by women. Cat Power, Amy Winehouse, LaRoux, Lady GaGa, etc. etc.

In short,

Boys with Attitude and Three Chords--0
Women with Guts and Ideas--5

A Hunkpapa in Vienna

2010-01-26T20:19:00.003+01:00

Sitting Bull has been appearing all over town. A late period photograph of him--red eyes burning through the viewer--adorns a poster for a new exhibit at the Museum of Ethnology Vienna. The show is called Sitting Bull and His World. A few weeks ago, we decided we would like to see it. Then our friends Andy and Ursula, who also adopted their daughters, Teresa and Emily, from Ethiopia, decided to join us.

The other day, I mentioned our plan to Rosa, our radical history student babysitter, and she shook her head. "You know that's a bad museum, right?" she asked. She told me that this Museum of Ethnology possesses an Inca headdress which was stolen from its last Peruvian owner. The government of Peru has asked for its return, and the Museum said...Nope.

We went to see the show anyway. Man, that was some squeaky clean American a-history right there. The text placards of the show made frequent mention of the Lakota and the Sioux moving to reservations, and of their "awareness of the need to adapt," but scant mention of the betrayal, germ warfare and murder which forced them to those places. The exhibit named no causes, only effects. White people, if mentioned at all, were portrayed as the ones who gave the Indians horses, as patient negotiators, as brave initiators of "police actions," like the one which killed Sitting Bull at last.

In other words, bullshit.

Many Europeans are ignorant of some of the basic facts of American history; others tend to regard Native Americans as an exotic species. And a museum here is just as unlikely as any in the world to use the word "genocide" in an exhibition, even when it's appropriate. (Part of a near-universal unspoken agreement to avoid that word, lest we mistakenly tell the truth about something.)

I grew up with a different view of the Native American experience. My father was a social worker on a Sioux reservation in North Dakota, and he often told us stories about Woody, a WWII veteran he met there. My father (and mother) told me as much of the truth as they knew about what happened between Native Americans and the Great White Father. But I think they also taught me to be proud of these amazing people who lived in North America so long ago. They made me feel like Sioux people were part of our heritage as Americans, our story. Crazy, right? What a concept!

Once, when my father visited me in New York City, I took him down to the National Museum of the American Indian. After walking through it, my dad couldn't stop talking about the Comanche. He insisted, with no little admiration, that Comanche horsemen were so skilled that nineteenth century European horse soldiers began to study and imitate Comanche strategies and maneuvers.

I wonder if the Lippizaner trainers over at the Spanish Riding School know that....

Disappointment

2010-01-21T22:37:00.002+01:00

Just before the Christmas holidays, I was looking forward to a spring trip to the US and a couple of nice professional opportunities. Now, a month later, the US trip is off, and one of those professional opportunities seems to have been a wash. Plus, I've been thrown an additional, heretofore unseen setback, and Anette got dealt a nasty financial body blow. So I'm, uh, off my heels a bit.

What to do?

I suppose the manly, 30-something answer would be that I should go out and get stinking drunk, howl at the moon and have my knuckles pierced.

Oww.

But I was never very good at getting drunk, even when I was 30-something. It didn't, and doesn't, feel cathartic, or even pleasurable.

I mean, I like beer. And the occasional gin martooni. But...I'm just saying.

I'm a big believer in the healing powers of listening to a really loud rock band. And sticking your head inside their speaker cabinets for at least part of the set. But I'm still a bit of a novice when it comes to nightclubbing in Wien. I don't know where to find a good Kiss tribute band when I need one.

Some people like to scream at them that done 'em wrong. Or engage in sabotage or pranksterism. I recognize the value of such strategies. But again, I've never been very good at actually performing personal smackdowns. I've always enjoyed hearing about the Flaming Doo stunt. You know-- you place a paper bag full of dog poo on the doorstep of your enemy, set it on fire, ring the door bell, then run away. In theory, the victim is meant to come to the door, try to stomp the fire out, and end up with crap all over their loafers. But I'm sure I'd just set myself on fire.

Oh well.

Somehow I think I'm going to steer a middle course tonight. Prolly end up drinking one beer at the Fluc while listening to medium loud techno.

This is exactly the fate described in many of your great punk rock songs. I'm either very boring, or just bad at being bad.

[Late night postscript: I actually ended up going to a museum show about 1989 and the end of the USSR. I really enjoyed it. Sad.]

Tuesday night dinner conversation

2010-01-19T20:56:00.005+01:00

One record that I have only just recently discovered is John Martyn's Solid Air. Astonishing. But I'll save the review for another post. I was listening to it tonight as I fixed dinner for myself and the smaller girls in my life. I must have been feeling chatty (or fragile). Just before Martyn sang the lyric "I don't wanna know about evil, only wanna know about love," Adinah spoke up. V., as usual, mostly let Adinah do the talking.

Adinah: Is this still La Roux?

Me: No, this is a different record. This is a guy named John Martyn.

Me: Do you know what he's singing about?

Adinah: No.

Me: Well, he's singing about good and evil. And love. You know what love is, right?

Adinah: YES. I know what love is. What is e-?

Me: Evil? Well, that's when people do bad things. When they hurt each other.

Adinah: Do you know anyone who did e-vil?

Me: I don't know. I guess I've known people who've done bad things, yes.

Adinah: Did your papa do bad things?

Me: Yes. I mean, my papa made some mistakes. But that's not the same thing as evil. Everyone makes mistakes.

(pause)

Adinah: Good thing my papa is not drunk.

Me: (smiling and starting to tear up) Yes.

(longer pause)

V.: (looking at me with big eyes) Bist du traurig? (Are you sad?)

Me: No, V., I'm not sad, it's...it's just not easy talking about stuff like this. Talking about people you love.

(pause)

Me: But Adinah, even though I've told you that my father got drunk or that he was a drunk, that doesn't mean he was bad. He was a good man. He did the best he could. But he was sick. It was hard work to love him sometimes. Even though love isn't like work. You either love someone or you don't.

Adinah: Yeah, I love you because you're my papa.

Day at the Museum

2010-01-18T19:48:00.004+01:00

Pulp Fiction

2010-01-15T16:38:00.002+01:00

No, I still have not finished that huge book about the history of Europe after WW II. Yes, I intend to finish it, and yes, it did start to get better (after a long sleepy stretch) when we got to Solidarnosc and the fall of the Wall. But, no I don’t feel required to finish it quick.

So instead, I’ve started inhaling my third page turner in a month. First, I burned through Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister. Which confirmed my thing for bookish babes with something to hide, and which changed up so many times in the last fifty pages that I’m still not sure who killed the big brother or the gangster. Then I polished off Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, otherwise known as the first James Bond book. That included a torture scene which was incomprehensible to me beyond the fact that Bond’s private parts took quite a beating. I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Last night, I went to Vienna’s only late night bookstore (it stays open until 9 pm), and had almost decided to leave sans purchase, when I thought I could at least sit down and look at some picture books. I ended up sitting down with my old friend Stephen King. Got sucked (ouch) into Salem’s Lot, most probably because it starts off with a premise which must be very appealing to me: a man on the run with a child. It totally got me a year ago when I snorted Firestarter (which is much better than the movie) (though George C. Scott as a Native American assassin with a pony tail does have to be seen to be believed.) In Salem’s Lot, the prologue focuses on a man and a boy who is not his son, but then it switches to (I think) their back story. We’ll see.

But even though the legions of movies based on his books mostly all suck, I think Stephen King must be the happiest guy on the planet. He rolls over in bed, and presto-chango, he’s written another best-seller. And when you read it, you can tell he had a ball writing it. He reminds me of something Paul Leary of the Butthole Surfers once told me about their music. He said, ‘Well, our music is like Jiffy Pop—it’s a lot more fun to make than it is to eat.”

25 Songs with "Love" in their Title

2010-01-13T20:01:00.003+01:00

1) "Bad Love on the Highway"-Moniker

2) "Love is like Oxygen"-The Sweet

3) "Love Shack"-The B-52's

4) "Love is the Drug"-Roxy Music

5) "Can't Buy Me Love"-the Beatles

6) "Love Me Do"-the Beatles

7) "Love Stinks"-J Geils Band

8) "The Love Bug"-George Jones

9) "Love Goes Down the Drain"-The Monochrome Set

10) "I Love a Man in a Uniform"-Gang of Four

11) "Love to Love You Baby"-Donna Summer

12) "I Never Loved a Man (the Way That I Love You)"-Aretha Franklin

13) "Stoned Love"-The Supremes

14) "Let me Put My Love into You" -AC/DC

15) "True Love Weighs"-Buddy Holly

16) "Love Train"-The O'Jays

17) "Love Comes in Spurts"-Richard Hell and the Voidoids

18) "Love is a Rose"-Neil Young

19) "Love Rollercoaster" -Ohio Players

20) "Endless Love"-Lionel Richie

21) "Love Hurts"-Nazareth

22) "When our Love Passed Out on the Couch"-X

23) "Love Will Tear Us Apart"-Joy Division

24) "Whole Lotta Love"-Led Zeppelin

25) "I'm Not in Love"-10cc

New Sensation

2010-01-08T20:03:00.002+01:00

So anyway, I've got a new thing. And now it's infected the whole family.

Her name is La Roux. And seeing as I'm a bit pop retarded these days, I've only just heard her music in the last few months. I will honor the slick magazine tradition, and also avoid assuming that everyone out there has as much time for pop junk as I do, and explain that La Roux appears to be about 23, styles herself like a new wave cross between K.D. Laing and Tilda Swinton, and sounds like Jimmy Sommerville (as a girl?) singing for Depeche Mode, with a very sight 21st century twist.

Don't know if the same can be said for US radio, but during our ski-town holiday, La Roux could be heard bouncing off of every wall. Particularly her single "Bulletproof," which is snap-crackle-bleep genius.

Now Adinah, V., Anette and I are all singing it as we put on our snow boots, or cook dinner, or do anything else involving locomotion.

A few years from now, my daughters will probably be into Austrian hip hop, or some other god awful thing. So, for now, I enjoy our shared interest in the new wave of new wave.

Dear John

2010-01-07T20:16:00.002+01:00

It's not you, it's me.

No, honestly, the truth is, I was washing my hair. Really.

I certainly would have posted in the last week, except that, well, look, I'd really rather just be friends with you.

I...I think we should see other people.

It's funny but I've imagined this moment for so long and thought of all the things I might say and now that it's here, I just don't know what I think.

I'm so confused.

You're too good for me.

I like blogging with you, really I do, but it's just that lately, you seem so......distant.

(PS: In other words, I really will post something new again soon, but tonight I'm too pooped to pontificate. I'm going to watch some movie I've seen five times, then pass out on the couch.)

New Year's Eve 2009, or Surf and Turf, Austrian Style

2009-12-31T22:55:00.002+01:00