Variations on a Mall

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

weekend in the mountains

alsergrund doors

Vienna Past/Perfect #2

The Karlsplatz u-bahn station must have been some kinda Jetsons glamour scene back in 1950, when these black and white photos were taken. Maybe the future seemed very sleek and fantastic for people who walked through it then. Today the undulating lines are the same, but the lingering passers-by have been replaced by permanent surveillance cameras, the champagne and cheese shops by tourist souvenir shops, and the bustling cafes by fast-food bakeries. Perhaps the world really is trending towards control and alienation. (And self-medication--though you wouldn't know it from these fotos, the Karlsplatz station is also the home of the most pathetic rummies and tweakers in the city.....)

Gentrification, Vienna Style

A notable corner in our neighborhood, circa 1890 and again this afternoon. I only figured out where the archival photo was taken (and mistakenly labeled) because of the unicorn cornice at the extreme left of the picture.

Sunday Afternoon, 4:40 pm--5:10 pm

Give my Regards to Man Ray

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I wrote my first film script this winter. Well, this morning I stopped by the set to watch my friend Dorit shoot the picture. It's a conceptual film--no car chases, blowjobs or exploding lead actresses--and to be honest, I hadn't quite understood it until now. Dorit is shooting the tables and chairs and knives and forks of some of the famous designers and architects who built the housing complex in Berlin called Interbau. I wrote a script--part fiction, part documentary--that reads like a fifty year oral history of the neighborhood.

But even though we've had lots of conversations about the idea behind the film, none of it really gelled in my head until I saw Dorit directing the cameraman and the props people, and I saw the playback of a lovely dolly shot passing across an arrangement of Josef Albers nesting tables. Somehow, seeing this process, this visualization and construction, made it clear to me. We are making a film about how people have lived in these buildings.

It's strange to think that people can put words and pictures together in a concept without really knowing if it's going to work. But I guess lots of movies (and music and books) come together just like that.

In any case, the penny dropped, the light bulb lit up, and finally I got it. When I left, I told Dorit, "I'm really happy." "Me too," she said.

I walked out into a gorgeous and sunny spring day, got on a streetcar and suddenly realized I am where I've always wanted to be. I'm in Europe making art with friends and fascinating people. Playing with ideas and trying to capture something real about our lives and the lives of others. Trying and maybe even succeeding in an attempt to document something of our time.

Back when I was an dreamy young knucklehead, I fantasized about being part of a salon, about being fabulous and famous and having lunch with Man Ray all the time to talk about, oh, shadows, I guess. Now I know it's not going be like that. But it's still sort of...cool. (It'll be even cooler if I can actually pay my share of the bills while doing all this fascinating interesting stuff.) (But I guess that's another post.)

I had a girlfriend once who spent a lot of time puzzling over how she'd ended up with me, a Texan, and a fairly goofy one at that. She would always just say, "Ehh, you fall in love with who you fall in love with." I've always thought she was right, even when she fell in love with someone else. And I've told myself that I've ended up in Austria because I love Anette, and she loves Vienna. But actually it's more complicated. Or simpler: One makes choices.

I'm sure I'll feel differently tomorrow. But today I think I'm in Vienna because this is where I'm supposed to be.

Yesterday's City of Tomorrow

Your industrious Euro Like Me reporter has been working on a film script (!) The movie is about a housing complex called Interbau, which was built in Berlin in 1957. The architects were pretty much the hot-shit superstars of concrete-and-glass at the time: Gropius, Aalvar Aalto, Oscar Niemeyer, and several others who perhaps should have been famous. In doing the work, I've come across a remarkable document: it's a booklet that was published at the time the buildings were opened for occupation, and it lays out the manifesto of what these builders were trying to achieve for the residents. It's by turns eerie, ridiculous and poignant, and it says a good deal about the European (leftie) intellectual head in the fifties. Some of it sounds totally five minutes ago, other parts sound like they were beamed in from Planet WonderWorld.
Anyway, the booklet is organized into a series of numbered Precepts (like, er, biblical verses). Here's a few of them, interspersed with some pictures I took of Interbau while I was there in January.....


"24 The family used to be a unit of several generations, living, working and spending their leisure time together. Today the large family has been reduced to a small one by the splitting of the old from the younger working generation.
25 Even this small family flies apart today towards its various places of work and interests. The members of the family drift apart."


"6 But none of us would voluntarily go on living in tenements, and each desires healthier dwellings in natural surroundings for his children.
7 All long to relax in the forests, wander among fields, bathe in clear lakes and rivers, and enjoy activity in little gardens."


" 17 Superficial and senseless distractions are on the increase as recreational activities.
18 The celebrity and the star are becoming universally accepted, delusive models.
19 Amidst this transformation the circle of politically and economically responsible persons has not yet achieved the character of a new elite, a genuine governing class.
20 There has arisen the type of professional official whose specialized capacity for thought does not move beyond the scope of devoluted duties.
21 Creative spirits, almost unknown to the masses, have their being in seclusion. But the value of their achievements has not yet been restored to general effectiveness."



" 4 In the city of tomorrow the people will live in urban residential areas with a free view and linked with their neighbors. At the same time each has the opportunity to lead his personal life."

(all quotes from The City of Tomorrow, Interbau GMBH/International Building Exhibition, Berlin 1957 booklet #1)

Coffee and Cake at the Reumannhof

This is Reumannhof, one of the "peoples' palaces" built here in the twenties, during the days of socialist, Red Vienna. It's public housing. That is, it's cheap to live here, even though the building, like many of the hundreds of other Viennese social housing blocs (Gemeindebau), is crazy beautiful. I've always loved the house, and tonight we got invited up to one of the penthouse studio apartments to have cake and coffee with an acquaintance who happens to live there.

See, this is what I'm talking about. This is one of those John Travolta-in-Pulp Fiction-moments. ("You know what's different about Europe? It's the little things.")

Beautiful public housing. What a concept.....

Ich bin kein Berliner

So there I was, in Berlin for the first time, getting all creeped out by history.

I left one of the shopping streets in Mitte--once an east berlin blight zone, now a hip! artists! district with lots of coffee and Asian food!--and within a few steps, I came upon an old wrought-iron fence, surrounding what looked like a hospital. I don't know if it was the iron or the sooty look of it, but I suddenly thought, "They had a pretty shitty century."

My weekend was like that, and also like my first date with my (Austrian) wife: I kept thinking, "Don't bring up the Nazis, don't bring up the Nazis!" and then of course I brought them up right away. Guess all that horrible shit is still very present, in the air in Berlin, and also in the mind of any arriving rookie.

After living in cozy old Vienna for the last year and a half, Berlin felt much more like a real, big, straight-up City. Like New York, it's ugly-beautiful. The weather was everyday awful--gray and rainy and spiteful--so maybe Berlin is actually ugly-ugly, and I just didn't notice.

On the last day, I checked my bag at the new glass Haupbahnhof. It's a vast pomo palace, more of a shopping mall than a train station. After leaving my stuff there, I wandered around the city for the last time, ate some greasy Turkish food and took fotos.

By the time I got back to the station, the wind had kicked up and the sky was making blue-black threats at everyone down here on Earth. Police were blocking the entrance to the Haupbahnhof: they'd already evacuated it and now I had to give one of them my claim check so he could get my bag for me! Several days before, a wicked storm had knocked a huge steel beam loose from the roof of the place, and now they were afraid it was gonna happen again--so they just shut it down. So much for modern architecture.....

Despite the mobs of fellow travelers made manic by the weather, I made it to my plane easy.

When I got back to Vienna, it looked so cute and calm.....