um, hello again....

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.

black days

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.

Weird World

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?

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

A Hunkpapa in Vienna

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....

Pictures of Home

Back at work today, though I probably shouldn't be. My chest still makes that ooey-gooey sound when I cough or laugh. Actually, I'm leaving early so I can go to the doctor. Maybe she can give me something to make my boo-boo all better.

I got a nice piece of news this morning though: I may be going back to the US again in the spring! On someone else's dime! I'm excited!!

In these times of financial calamity and associated disasters, maybe this is the best way for me to go back home: as a tourist. A business-traveler, frequent flyer zombie. The truth is, the longer I live in Vienna, the more a trip to the US will begin to feel like a trip to Pluto. But nobody has mentioned this to my heart.

So I'm happy. Working in DC for a week would mean eating amazing Ethiopian food, picking up some good books, and swimming in English, the sweet, profane jarbled-up and slanged out language of my life. And that would be okay.

I do think of Vienna as home, in a way. But in another, less laugh-out-loud sort of way, I think of the US as home. And always will.

But where bexactly in the US is "home" for me? Austin, where I grew up, ate jalapenos as a rite of passage, and got my heart good and broke for the first time? NYC, where I got slick, ate rock CD's as a rite of professionalism, and got my heart broke in a less laugh-out-loud sort of way? Seattle, where I discovered the most ironic pinball arcade in the country? Los Angeles, where I "hung out" with punk and hip hop stars, and otherwise lived like an expense account king? South Dakota, where we buried my father? Or was home for me truly the back of an Econo-line van, wedged in between the drum kit and the guitars, where I lay, furiously scribbling too many adjectives into a notebook just like the one I'm writing in today?

Home is all of those places and none of those places. In other words, home is just an idea. Home is old times, good times, a lost world. I can't go back there.

I am sure I'd like to go shopping, stuff my face and even maybe see some old friends in the USA. That would be so fucking...fun.

Beantown

35 hours in new york city

red-eye

So Los Angeles was Los Angeles. Looked dusty and dry as hell. I squeezed in one long afternoon and evening with my old friend and editor, David. He took me out for some amazing spicy tuna sushi at Geisha House, a cool and very red place on (the otherwise gritty) Hollywood Boulevard. We did some shopping too, walking around in some of that blinding, late afternoon, long-shadow LA light that you see in some Gary Winogrand photographs.

Otherwise, I didn't sit down much: I was interviewing immigrants, nurses and welfare experts; taking pictures of street signs and middle schools; and getting cross-examined by angry non-profit wonks with an ax to grind. Wuff.

I'm a little beat.

And I've just boarded Virgin Atlantic 418 to JFK-NYC. The 10 pm red-eye. I'm set to touch down in New York at about 6:30 am.

Shit, I just remembered I haven't arranged my bus to Boston. That's the next leg of the trip--about forty hours from now. I must make these preparations. Yes.

First, I think I'll sleep for a few hours or 48.

The International

i've never been a fan of Washington d.C. Too many people who believe in the government, I used to say. I mostly went to D.C. to protest stupid shit the government was doing or not doing enough to stop. So I didn't exactly have a positive perception of it--and all those white, white monuments and federal buildings on the Mall seemed even more fascistic when I thought about all the segregation and poverty in some of the surrounding neighborhoods.

But in the last few days, I really liked the District of Columbia. Maybe I've changed. Or just admitted to myself that I am one of those people who believes in the government.

Of course, I could also just be so tickled to be back in the USA that any place here would have felt like a warm, wet kiss.

My stay didn't start off so well. My hotel was in Bethesda, and when I got in Sunday night, it looked like a long, lifeless stretch of bad retail architecture. Wisconsin Avenue--empty. At 10:05 p.m., I struck out to find a bar--nothing. Even the chain joints like Uno Pizzeria had already locked down. I grumbled a lot, went back to my room, fired up the flat screen, and watched...a lot of infomercials.

But the next morning, as soon as I stepped onto the Metro, I was back in the company of actual human life again, and what a lovely color it was. Black and brown and gimme caps and head wraps and doughy white tourists and lots and lots of Ethiopians. After living in Vienna for four years, I have forgotten how it feels to be elbow-to-elbow with so many different kinds of people. It was like a fist-bump to my soul.