Michaelerkirche goes back to the 1200’s and looks it. Being from a country whose ancient history – as far as English-speaking people go – stretches back to Plymouth Rock, I have no local frame of reference. What is the 13th-century supposed to look like? Ancient and forbidding, I would think. Dark I would hope since, God only knows, the 18th-century is dark enough! Austere. That’s it exactly! Though I’d not hit upon this word, I seemed to understand these fusty old 1200’s with their unpainted stonework, their dankly disarranged furniture, their pointy architecture Baroque people re-shaped into effeminate s’s and chatty loop-de-loops. I would even say I got fairly comfortable in them, though it was nice to know that, waiting outside the door, was a tabloid newspaper with Paris Hilton’s picture on it. There were also distinctly Twenty-first century people milling about, in their Nikes, their Gucci bags, their ever-expanding sense of the old stuff you can’t see for love or money over in Lansing, Charlottesville, or Cambridge.
The crowning marvel of old-style statecraft (again, in the English-speaking world) was signed in 1215. When I thought of that, I had my context: I was walking in a place once occupied by folk for whom the Magna Carta was soundbite-new. That’s certainly as old a space, as conceived by European white men, as I’ve ever set foot in.
On a more “contemporary” note, it was in Michaelerkirche that Mozart’s as-yet unfinished Requiem was first performed. I’d heard it at Strathmore Hall just last year; by then, the score had been completed and it sounded pretty good.

I went to the Michaelerkirche for an art show that took place in a spacious, sub-basement gallery, accessible by stairs you don’t ever want to climb without somebody near you. The theme of the show was Death, and death has had its dominion in the sub-chambers of Michaelerkirche since the 1400’s, when well-to-do people could pay for a slot in the Michaelergruft, or “Main Crypt”, or have themselves buried underneath a slab in the church itself. (The practice of crypt burials was abolished in 1784 by Joseph II, who introduced the sensible notion that people decayed a helluva lot quicker if you put them in a sack and buried ‘em, sans coffin, in a plot of good, old-fashioned terra firma. People raised such a stink about it, however, that Joseph had to pull back and allow an optional coffin for those who were repelled at the thought of body-sack and old earth mingling.) My artist-friend, Stefan and three other colleagues had chosen to paint the dead in this particular place, not necessarily because they’re morbid people. On the contrary! These Michaelergruft dead have not completely deteriorated the way people do in an ordinary plot. Many have even have retained humanlike features that are uncomfortably close to ours. After all these years, they still looked like us.
The Michaelergruft is not the clammy place one might think it is, but, rather, a posthumous drying-kiln where you can put a dead body one century and know it will be fairly well-desiccated by the next. (Because of its slow-drying nature, this is a process the living has to take on faith – which is what one does around there.) In the numerous centuries that have elapsed since the bodies were encrypted, as it were, a satisfactory mummification has occurred, in which these bodies have retained their shape and features – but don’t stink! (Caution: if you’re a must-hater, you’ll probably consider them stinky.) Some of the bodies have popped out of their coffins and sit in the open contemplating eternity. If you’re of a mind, you can go up and touch their half-ripped waistcoats and bizarrely time-resistant hair. The livelier-looking corpses appear to smirk or grimace as they effortlessly hold their poses for you.
The art I would see was based on a keenly dispassionate analysis of the surface textures and, possibly, existential meaning of these bodies’ presence in the crypt. I think the iron-nerved men and women who thought nothing of confronting the dead in their work directly should be commended. They probably knew they were doing something that wouldn’t “play” in the marketplace, but like curious people everywhere, they didn’t give a damn about that and went for the experience itself. Stefan had invited me to come without providing me with a whole lot of background. He just talked about the place itself: how it had become a user-friendly place to both the living – who could go see the dead if they wanted to; and the dead – who were kept there for that purpose. He may have been concerned that my queasy American sensibilities would be offended and sought to appease them by means of pleasant obfuscations. If he was worried about that, he needn’t have been; they were absolutely fascinated.
I had not been to an exhibit of this type before. Art exhibits in the States are generally about the people who attend them rather than artist, artwork, or even the free food. (People who come to eat are interested in all the other people who have come to eat and wage little toothpick wars only among themselves; otherwise, they have nothing to offer and are hardly noticed.) High-profile galleries have a certain celebrity, of course, but in the Hierarchy of Celebrity Worship, art dealers are way, way down on the totem pole, next to famous anglers perhaps. What you go to see at an American art exhibit are The People, particularly those glittering sorts who might deign to brush by for a little culture. Should they choose to buy a little culture, they enter the rarefied world of art patronage and are idolized by just about everyone who either can’t afford to buy art or just can’t get enough of Other People – particularly Celebrity People - for trying.
The type of Serious Art Exhibit you see at colleges or among non-profit galleries is perfunctorily attended, mostly by artists, their spouses, their friends, and one newspaper critic who probably feels he or she is getting cheated all to hell. So they don’t count.
As I said, however, this exhibit was unique in that the people who had come way, way down to the church’s sub-basement seemed to want to see the artwork. This is a simple concept, but I’m not used to it being practiced. I think I must have experienced the culture shock that followed on a deeply physical plane. After the worst was over, I had to sit down for a moment and pull myself together. I felt fine in a few minutes – though I would never shake a sense of disconnectedness and didn’t try.
The serious people at this art exhibit may, in fact, not have been as serious as I thought because they were all speaking in German, a regrettable lapse I could not possibly, as the sole American, make up for by myself. They could have been talking about the sorts of things I always hear at American openings: what trips might be left before the New Year, minor ailments easily fixed by “tucking”; Mel Gibson’s latest foul-mouthed tirade. Perhaps everybody was just talking about Mel Gibson’s drinking problem as I stood there idealizing their chatter and elevating their shallow turn of mind.
But I don’t think so. After more serious milling, a casually dressed young lady motioned for us all to sit down. Those of us who had chairs obliged her. Everybody else tried to stand as inconspicuously as possible, as the Viennese are a people who don’t care to be seen as socially disobedient. I was one of these people myself and felt the dawning embarrassment around me.
She talked for a while about coming attractions: a film, a little “artist’s” talk, and browsing among the paintings afterwards. She then talked for a while longer about all sorts of things that drew an appreciative titter now and then, so it appeared that people were actually listening as they shifted in their chairs and sipped surreptitiously from the plastic cups they’d filled earlier on. Then she pointed to a screen and turned down the lights. A projector was flipped on and The Film – possibly a feature of every such event here in Vienna – began.
The Film showed some of the project members rooting about an artificially lighted dungeon that was coffin-strewn and arch-heavy. It was a low-ceilinged sort of place that had most of the people in The Film bending and ducking as they did things. In the first segment, a shaggy-bearded fellow drew skulls and other deathly appurtenances on a plain wooden coffin. He was one of the people who had been sitting up front with a tormented look about him. You don’t see a lot of artists like him in the U. S. anymore. They’ve cleaned up their act and gone into Marketing.
When The Film began, somebody patted this guy on the back. The person sitting next to him jabbed his ribcage. Another whispered something that was obviously intended to be funny directly into his ear. I thought the guy was going to hit the nearest person for a moment, but he couldn’t because he was still drawing his bones and skulls on the coffin and was completely full of the moment and himself. It was my first touch of Ego a la Wien. I’ll remember it always.
Another guy wanted to paint the bodies themselves. His chef d’oeuvre was a huge allegory that paired a corpse whose deeply-rutted skin recalled the surface of a dried lake-bed with a lithely beautiful young woman, who was presumably there to comfort it. The film showed the corpses only. The young woman was perhaps too shy to come out, damnit.
My friend Stefan was in The Film too, but he was too busy cutting up with the camera-man – and anybody else who happened to come by. His little dungeon was a jolly place where people might pass around the bottle and not get any work done that day. (In his work, Stefan was prolific and had done the dead up real proud.) It was in front of his painting of a death-disfigured lady that another lady said something I know I would have heard in America: “I like this as art, but I would never hang it on my wall!”
Some things just don’t play no matter where you are.
When The Film was over, the shaggy-headed artist was joined by one of his cleaner-cut colleagues and they half-read, half-enacted a terrible script somebody had written about art and something else; art and this other thing; art and your car; art and the shop around the corner; art and the postal service; art and the gross national income of Turkmenistan. (Stefan would relinquish his standing position to come over and ask me whether I was getting any of what they said; I said “Nada” without any profound sense of regret.) As they droned on, I noticed something else about the Viennese character that is tragically underdeveloped in America: intellectual stamina. These guys could talk a blue streak and hardly miss a breath! Yet as I looked at the audience, I saw it reflected right back. They were listening! This just doesn’t happen where I come from. I can make someone glassy-eyed by just intimating that I might start to get serious about some artistic nuance that might need glossing-up. And when I do, I can tell the moment at which this person ceases to follow me and just nods her raggedy doll-head until she can find an opportunity to excuse herself. These people were being subjugated and they were enjoying it – or giving every appearance of enjoyment without the benefit of a second glass.
When the symposium was finally over, people did what they generally do at the movies: they stretched like experienced yogis and headed for the wine-bar. But until that moment they were a drolly captive audience who got whatever humor there was to be had in all the art-jokes; paused respectfully as Major Points were being made; bent forward in their seats at obvious climaxes. They were not necessarily the old tweedy crowd you see at the non-profits. They were, in fact, an almost slovenly, and most definitely heterogeneous, crew.
The pictures were hung along two rows that ran the length of the room. Somebody had come up with the idea of suspending them by means of tiny filaments. So they dangled in front of us, part bauble and part image, displacing the notion that pictures have to be hanging flat against a wall. I rather liked the suspension effect. It shows the three-dimensional nature of a painting, which doesn’t get a lot of play in museums and galleries. If you’d wanted to, you could have pushed the paintings back and forth, like mobiles. I didn’t see anybody try that. An Interactive Painting would strike the Viennese as disrespectful.
During this final phase of the event, people filed solemnly past each painting. Intentionally or not, they imitated the funereal practice of filing past a dead body. Thus was the central metaphor “internalized” by a group of people who were quick to adapt their collective mood to the work itself. Glory be! These people are really staying with this thing!
Each artist had written a statement – and, in some cases, captions designed to shed light on either this particular body of work or the creative process generally. These, along with the paintings themselves, were respectfully considered and discussed with an invigorating sense of what they meant and how they organically connected to the artist’s imagination.
Granted, everybody might have all been saying “Eeeuuuuuwww!” very politely, but it was their fierce and fighting concentration that distinguished them from the type of American audiences I was accustomed to. These people were really trying. In Richmond, all but the diehards and toothpick warriors would have been outta there. The next day everybody would be on the phone with their friends telling them to stay away from that awful place, it’ll get you down so much you won’t know what to do with yourself. I swear, I don’t know what gets into people sometime. I guess they just want to be different.
A student of Odd Nerdrum’s had participated in the show. If there was any buzz, it was probably on account of him. His two highly creditable paintings certainly drew the most people. You could stretch matters and even say they were mobbed – though I wouldn’t know because I’ve never seen people get rowdy in front of any painting before. Not even when it’s textbook-famous and been made into ashtray bottoms. Taken all and all, paintings just aren’t sexy. And these particular paintings were dead in the water as sex magnets from the git-go
The crowd started heading back upstairs at a signal I failed to notice. Stefan, I and a girlfriend of his decided we wanted to stick around for a while and were escorted to an after-hours cell by the same young woman who’d been our Thoughtful Guide to the proceedings down below. We traipsed down ancient corridors hung with mediocre paintings of unhappy clerics and undignified saints. As one corridor dissolved into another, I had an Ah-ha! Experience I didn’t share: it was in places like this that a church put its B-stuff.
Once among the large and boisterous crowd, we all talked for a while about the same sort of things those over-eager artists were going on and on about onstage. The shaggy-headed guy played the hurdy-gurdy – a perfect instrument for him. Everybody else was still talking up a storm when I left.
It was a perfect evening in a perfect city. I would be on my way home the very next day.

Epilogue (Because I Want One)
You get accustomed to being in an old place with an almost disappointing ease of adjustment. After an hour or two at Michealerkirche, I could have been in a basement at an arts center in Northern Virginia. Well, not really. There were all those German gutturals flying around. And, of course, a whole roomful of death-centered paintings, which, if hung anywhere near Richmond, would cause a huge arts-funding exodus in the State of Virginia.
I must, however, defend the open-mindedness of a great old city in hosting an exhibit that would gripe the guts of most of us here. We live in a “life-affirming” culture that just happens to kill lots of people accidentally.
Of course, the Viennese are used to things being very old, in which case they’re not particularly bothered by the notion that everybody who is presently alive won’t be someday. In America, a keener sense or mortality wouldn’t hurt us even as we kill ourselves in all sorts of ways without knowing it. It might also lead to a certain history-conscious perspective that is long overdue. The typical Viennese crinkles his lips into a smile so drenched in irony that most of us could hardly look at it. This is the death-sense talking. It says: “We understand these things now.” It also makes allowances: “But don’t worry if you can’t.” But it insists on an eventual loss of innocence: “But you will. God willing, you will someday be as old as we are and you will know that death isn’t the worst thing that can happen to people.” Then a pause, as the crinkle refreshes itself: “Because death is everywhere here. It’s everywhere you are and look.” Then it gives a ghastly chortle: “And the strangest thing is, we like it. We really do. Ta-ta now.”

In his Vienna days, Hitler lived for a time at 31 Stumpergasse (and not "29", as it's often asserted.) Hitlerites by the dozen (surely there can't be any more of them) have been taking snapshots of this other place for years and swearing that the place in the picture is where the evil maniac-to-be lived in his earlier days.

Well, it's more the myth than the reality that counts anyway. Or, rather say: close enough!

Hitler was a sort of remittance man, living on a small inheritance from his mother, who passed away at forty-seven from something that would be easily treatable today, though it doesn't sound like much fun. He came to Vienna with a letter of introduction to a famous opera designer, one Alfred Roller, whom he did not meet until he, Hitler, was somewhat more advanced in rank and more important to Rollen's career than Rollen could have ever been to his. But Hitler seemed to have shied away from the meeting, as if to ensure the harsh and unforgiving climate that would motivate him to quit painting and start making somewhat irresponsible accusations against the Jews - though slanderous sentiments of this sort were hardly rare in Europe at this time. But for a great while, Hitler - sans introduction - stuck to painting, or at least the IDEA of painting while he dressed up for the opera or read every newspaper he could get his mitts on. As his fortunes declined, he enlisted the help of Jews to see that his artwork got sold so that he, Adolph, might scrape up enough money for rent and opera tickets.

Eventually, of course, Hitler wound up, not on the streets, but in a home for the indigent, developed by far-seeing planners and funded by at least one Jew.
It was an interesting place to be, particularly for a proud young man who scorned the idea of taking a regular job because he was, after all, more educated than the average worker. It was here that he began to evolve into the lovable newsreel chap who exhorted an entire people to stay the course, as it were, and be unified as one nation under Wagner, with not a whole lot of liberty - but lots of kitschy rallies - for all. He was assisted in his development, so to say, by the example of Mayor Lueger, who didn't mind stooping to the sort of anti-Semitic attacks that must have made Jewish intellectuals both shrug their shoulders and wet their pants. It took almost thirty years from the time Hitler found himself in such dire straits till the moment the Reich chancellor strode into the Heldenplatz in triumph. It must've been worth the wait; Hitler was so happy about it he found it in his heart to welcome his adopted city - which had spurned his talent - into the National Socialist fold.

Hitler was not a particularly happy young man - which, to the psychologically-oriented, should come as no surprise. His amours were affairs of the imagination only. In his small hometown, he conceived of an epic attraction for a beautiful girl who was possibly above his station, but theoretically available. Did he tell her about it? Nein! He just sat around, moped, and watched her move about in beauty. He was dead set on marrying her, but, once again, thought and action failed to coalesce, and she, of course, took the hand of somebody else without ever knowing that he, Hitler, yearned passionately to offer his own. Yet in dreaming grandiosely of her, he set himself up for his future metier: dreaming grandiosely for millions. His dream-life was, in fact, his strongest suit, being something that was not only indelibly his, but a thing that was self-enlarging at a time when he probably felt very small indeed.

Hitler was very good at vicarious affections. I doubt whether a real person would have actually measured up to his ideals.

While he was at 31 Stumpergasse, he reveled in dreams of himself as a great artist, though he failed his exams at the art academy not once, but twice. He was told, point-blank, that his skills didn't cut the mustard and not to come back. That must've hurt. The tremendous pride and overweening pretensions of the young man were thus thwarted, not just in life, but in a sphere he thought he'd eventually conquer - and to which he felt he most indubitably belonged. Yes, a very, very bad thing to happen, this. It's one of those turning points in world history that make the study and analysis of men and events so horribly
captivating.

Hitler is said to have worked jobs now and then, but apparently this is not true. He never thought of taking a job, even as his money dwindled and, finally, ran out completely. He even took to begging - at which he was not particularly successful. Begging is something for which proud and arrogant people are not eminently qualified.

But he always managed to have well-wishing friends who saw something salvageable in him and offered to help him. Such a man stepped forward at the house in Meidling, Hitler's final tour of duty before he enlisted - ecstatically - in the Bavarian Army at the outbreak of WWI.

His name was Reinhold Hanisch and he made himself go-between for the shy, but irascible young man who couldn't bear to be contradicted, and whose thumping monologues were not merely annoying, but had a somewhat mesmerizing quality about them. If you liked to listen to a good rant, Hitler was definitely your man. But you didn't want to send him to a frame-shop with a portfolio under his arm!

Hitler's subjects were almost invariably architectural, as befits a young man who strolled in awe along the Ringstrasse, marvelling at the Royal Opera House (now the "Statsoper"), the Kuntshistorisches Museums, not to mention the majestic sweep of the great avenue itself, which began in splendor and kept right on going. He'd not seen much of that in his little old hometown and he was more than hooked: he was crazy about the place. He astonished his Nazi colleagues in later years by his accurate recall of the Ring and its various architectural properties, which he could draw from memory. One might, however, agree with his professors in condemning many of his efforts, which are awkward, but painstaking. Yet from time to time Hitler manages to nail his subject and it has a brooding majesty, a palpable presence. Hitler was a bad artist most of the time, but he had his moments. His picture of the Royal Opera House is decent enough, but he outdid himself with a painting of an old waterworks, done apparently in gouache, which run parallel across the foreground in front of a streetscape they effectively cut off from the viewer. It is a stirring piece of work and holds up very well. If I had just seen the
picture somewhere, I would asked who'd done it.

Yet his erratic production in art would, of course, haunt him later in life, when he made the disastrous military decisions that would eventually cost him and his Thousand Year Reich the war. A damned good thing for us, of course. Unfortunately, Hitler had his good days too.

It would, obviously, have been better for almost everybody had Hitler the artist kept at it. Apart from its obvious effect on world affairs, it might have also given us a Vienna we have never seen: one in which the visual potency of a great imperial city might have been at glorious odds with a deeply manic-depressive, not to say hysterical, personality.
Shiele was active at the time, as was Klimt. They were obviously innocent of the young Hitler living in his doss-house over in Meidling, and had they seen his worst stuff - and of this there is no dearth - they wouldn't have been impressed. Hitler was, in fact, lucky to have Hanisch looking out for him because a lot of the crap he did was hardly even worthy of the venues chosen for it. Yet, given time, Hitler might have actually turned into a creditable, if uneven, talent whom the academy might have ultimately embraced.

Of course, if you look at most of the stuff he was doing, you'd have to share the verdict of the old professors who gave him the boot and started him off in his other, more infamous direction. I'm sure the moral of this story has been discussed at tremendous length among Hitler Studies' enthusiasts, but it seems that whenever an artist is lost to the world, he or she does something a helluva lot worse - as if to be an artist scorned is one of the most wicked human scourges imaginable. Could be. I can't stand having my pictures misunderstood, disliked, or (needless to
say) rejected. I always understand the context within which these things happen. I know that this person simply can't "relate" to the work at hand. This other person might be highly emotional and can't help but reacting, not only to my work, but to everything in this way. And this juror. . .well, this juror is so completely captivated, not to say smothered, by his or her prejudices that it is simply impossible for him or her to step out and away from them. If I'm a victim of these prejudices, I should simply acknowledge that they can do harm now and then and try to find a more receptive audience. And I do. I do every single one of these things.

And yet I still want to kill the juror.

Max Steiner. Billy Wilder. Gustav Mahler. What do these people have in common besides being still reasonably well-known? I wouldn't have known myself before I went to Vienna, but there I learned, while just walking around, not only about these overachievers' early whereabouts, but that their whereabouts were here in Vienna.

I will give the city high marks for courage, in that Vienna actually chased a few of these people, by both act and inference, out. If I'm not mistaken, Steiner was a Jew. Vienna was a rather warm place for a Jew after Hitler's Anchluss, whose implacable anti-Semitism would deport, and eventually kill off, sixty thousand of them. A drop in the bucket, considering the astronomical death-toll of the war itself. But those sixty thousand lost were enough to significantly drain the city of its intellectual autonomy. It was Jews like Freud around whom the intellectual life of the city revolved, and which raised its international reputation during the pre-WWII area to heights it will likely never achieve again.

At any rate, a city that could do such a thing to its intelligentsia has cohones for acknowledging its not-so-very-favorite sons. I came across Steiner's name in the Prater, while in the company of my dear friend Linda Tabor, a Richmond expatriate who is fond of saying that it took her forty years to come back to Vienna. What she says also happens to be true; she'd been married here in the Sixties and had fallen in love with the place - which is not a hard thing to do.

Steiner had apparently come of age in the neighborhood
- a fact the city fathers wished to acknowledge some years ago in the form of a handsome little gewgaw with his name and some significant career milestones on it.
He became a very successful Hollywood composer, working on such films as Gone With the Wind, accentuating its majestic sweep with a score that might be seen today as somewhat over the top. But who hasn't been stirred by its great melodic heart, culminating in everybody's favorite moment in the film, when The Great Kiss happens?

Steiner was a somewhat traditional composer and kept whatever avant-garde tendencies he may have had to himself. Like most refugees from Europe, he settled into the American zeitgeist without any apparent adjustment woes. As did Billy Wilder, whose "funny"
accent gives one pause because his films are so quintessentially American. He said to Jack Lemmon that they couldn't go wrong if they could make films about the rich screwing.

Perhaps the old, and war-extinguished, Viennese irreverance was resurrected by him via American movies. It is a pleasant thought.

Vienna is a city of plaques and reverences to a often glorious, but also creepily blood-stained, past. I think that's why much of its art and literature is seen as so mordibly self-flagellating. Something called "Actionism" flourished here back in the Eighties, I think - and has obvious scions, if art galleries are any indication of the city's darker creative impulses. Actionism was an attempt to reduce
art to a gross and earthy - not to mention degrading
- substance: shit, for one. In the States, such playacting might be regarded as infantile (which
doesn't mean it can't be successful. Remember "Piss
Christ"?) In Vienna, the precis of Actionism might be seen as an spasm of revulsion against its past, a rejection of all order and standards, a grim salute to the chaos and cruelty that underlies all human interaction on this earth.

Could be. I don't, however, think anybody could argue with the need for atonement. Nor should one demur at its many possible manifestations, from plaque-posting to art forms in which feces and not, say, cadmium yellow, provide the material strength.

There are other plaques around the city as well: these state in no uncertain terms the toll taken by Allied bombings. Most occurred later in the war, but the plaques lump them all into the 1939-1945 years - the entire extent of WWII. I like that as well. It seems to acknowledge that Vienna was in the thick of things (which it was) from the git-go, when Hitler rallied two hundred thousand strong and got a very, very clear signal. Of course, Vienna was Hitler's adopted city and who in his right mind wouldn't want to welcome a conquering hero who might someday deport him if he didn't?

One place that isn't so well marked, but carefully acknowledged, is the - by Vienna standards - vast unused expanse of still-undeveloped real estate in Southeast Vienna, bordered by Aspangasse, in the Renwegg District. I walked there a number of times looking for some obvious and perhaps heart-wrenching sign that so many human lives were essentially lost there. But the railroad tracks were gone, and only a few functional-looking buildings were there to suggest that the area had had any purpose at all. Along Aspangasse were a number of picturesque buildings I, an architecture enthusaist, couldn't quite orient to the place itself. They had a sort of neutral charm, suggesting not horrific loss but historic continuity.
In such places people carried on their lives as their fellow citizens were being shunted off into cattle cars and taken away. I had a vision of a nice old lady sweeping the sidewalk, as many nice old ladies do here. Vienna must be one of the cleanest large cities on earth.

Much of Vienna appears to have been shelled and rebuilt. But this street had at least its share of the very old things for which people come to Vienna.
They were the kinds of very old things that had attracted Hitler, a very spotty painter of the conventionally picturesque, during his 8-year sojourn to the city. It is perhaps a cliche to notice the mundane, life-goes-on quality that surrounds hallowed sites, particular if these hallowed sites have not yet been officially hallowed. But there was nothing else around except a U-Bahn stop. Kids had sprayed a little graffiti there, but for the most part the place was eerily and resoundingly empty. I saw a provisional mockup for an one-site monument to the place somewhere. It's minimal, in the tradition of the Vietnam Memorial here in DC, but it seems less eloquent of unspeakable tragedy than the place itself.
Perhaps that's why nothing has been done with it. It just sits here, year after year, so that people might, each in their turn, reflect on it or forget about it completely.

The war museum isn't far away. I didn't make time to see it. Perhaps next visit.

People bitterly complain at how Mozart - who has his share of plaques and monuments - was treated here.
Actually, he was more his own worse enemy and simply overspent his money. His income was excellent. He just enjoyed giving a lot of it away. Not so Beethoven, who's probably responsible for more plaques and mini-shrines than any other notable person in all of Vienna. Seems he moved around a lot. Had to.
Debt collectors have good legs.

I think Mahler was one of the few people who actually left because he wanted to. Apparently he got sick of the political infighting and petty bickering of his colleagues at the Opera and moved to the States, where was received kindly and treated well. He died, a free man, at fifty.

What does all this mean?

It seems that anyplace that has a past can either acknowledge it gracefully or hide strategically from it. Richmond, Virginia, where I lived for some years, struggles not very manfully with its past because it hasn't entirely acknowledged it. There are plaques, but they mostly celebrate old victories and/or romantic exploits. The slave trade has its tour and its most wretched citizens, both past and present, have been given lip service. There is even a sort of backlash among black people that is as openly racist (against whites) as white racism ever was. But Richmond can't deal with that either because there are just things people don't talk about.

So Vienna's open and even self-hating acknowledgement of its own past is, by comparison, not a bad thing.
It will always have its indigenous charm. It will also be a magnet for tourists. And it will always have its secret, erotically complicated inner life.
But it has at least tried to come to terms for the sins of its fathers and I think that's a very good thing. I don't care much for Actionism and feel its practitioners have, as it were, thrown the baby out with the bathwater in identifying realism, for example, with the Nazis. Academic realism was indeed a propoganda tool, but the artists who celebrated Aryan trimphalism were docile creatures who merely wanted to work. The avant-garde, or "degenerate"
artists caught a great deal of flak for it and had no life to speak of once they decided to go with the "the other side." Most people anywhere don't have a great deal of courage. Even the most talented among us can bet on the wrong horse and follow it much, much too far. One of those artists was the idealistic and infinitely talented Carl Moll, who saw the error of his ways to the extent that he could no longer live with them and committed suicide. He'd, however, been one of those artists who'd been interested in equality and experimentation and departed from the academy.
Then he made a very bad mistake and backed Hitler. I did not find any plaques celebrating his existence.

Well, we always pay for our loyalties in one way or another and Vienna reminds us of that very thing implicitly, fiercely, resoundingly. Even if it didn't have the sort of imperial-era charm it most indubitably does, that would justify its existence for that reason alone.

Long live you, Wien!

I have not eaten a Vienna Sausage since the age of ten, though I remember it as having a delightfully porous and water-soaked texture. Unlike a hot-dog, which had to be eaten in sections, and generally inside of a bun, the Vienna Sausage appealed to one's impulsive streak; you just popped one in your mouth and ate it whole.

Even at the time, however, I was repelled by the gelatinous substance which caked a multi-sausage bundle together. After opening a small can, I'd take this bundle to the kitchen faucet immediately and run hot water over it so as to dispel and disengage the offending gelatin. I would not, in fact, begin to eat until the sausages were a hundred percent gelatin-free. I was a fussy little kid, no doubt.

If you'e a thinking person, the question of what's in a hot dog or sausage arises, with inevitably disconcerting results. Uncouth speculations run into private parts and unspeakable orifices. I remember being drunk with somebody with an obscenely inventive mind and having a wild old time with forbidden anatomies and freakish emissions. When my fellow drunk proposed an unforgettably gruesome possibility I will not repeat here - or anywhere - we found ourselves rolling around on the floor as pigs never would. If anything, our little colloquy proved the innate superiority of animals. But that's another story.

This question of content cannot be settled here; nor perhaps will it ever - until some factory worker steps forward with a tale to tell.

The question of origin, however, seems even murkier - but perhaps easier (at least in the short run) to unravel.

I wish to deal with it now because I will presently travel to the eponymous city and will want to be able to grapple with this question with some degree of rigor, within a sort of logical framework no reasonable person might reject - at least not until he or she gets home and thinks about it. It does no good to come to a place half-cocked, with half-baked ideas and hand-held assumptions - even if I'm not quite sure what these are. I would also like to clinch an historic enigma that has defied elucidation for so many years.

My feeling is that the Vienna Sausage is not Viennese at all, but a provincial wannabe that seeped into the somewhat tuberous cuisine of that city over a long period of time while seeming to just "show up"
overnight. For me, the Vienna Sausage is as permanent a thing as Jericho, the Rock of Gilbraltar, Superman.
It is as impossible to displace it in my imagination as any of these other things; it is, in effect, a cultural icon whose reach and influence one can only begin to guess at.

Yet for being so well-established on the world's stage, the Vienna Sausage is a tiny thing, and easily overshadowed by the parade of great wursts that are a staple of German cuisine, and perhaps the reason the place lost its stride over the years. A city with hardened arteries is a city that not only sleeps, but dies in its bed. Perhaps the Viennna Sausage was developed as a sort of dainty alternative to a sausage-proud diet, a bite-sized bastard of the sausage trade with long-life-inducing intentions.
That is also why it may have been seen as export-worthy, whereas your more overstuffed fare has stayed in the deli. Americans have for the most part embraced the smallish Vienna Sausage while rejecting the more powerful and penile bratwurst. You'll see a bratwurst now and then, but you can't buy it in the can.

Of course, the Viennese are an elegant people who love pastry dishes more than anybody else in the world.
They love to dawdle over coffee and cigarettes in a way Americans would find distastefully indulgent.
They love the good things in life undisguisedly, though they try not to be ostentatious about it. It is, then, possible that the Vienna Sausage was developed as an appetizer that would tease the palate and set the stage for the more imposing and heavy-tasting stuffs to come. Perhaps the Vienna Sausage is a proud city's hedge against grossness.
This seems pscyhologically appropriate. The Viennese are a subtle, even withdrawn, sort of people who might, in their heart of hearts, be repulsed at the thought of a stogie-sized wurst, seething with the heat of the kitchen, and dripping literally with a pig's eyes, ears, mouth and God knows what else.
Perhaps it is a concession to a kind of tribal guilt everyone in Vienna must feel at the slaughter of innocents - which it maligns by trotting them out every night in the guise of a meal! Freud must have examined this subject, albeit privately; he must have rightly considered it too daring for the time.

Yet these are idle speculations. Is it not possible to get to the physical origin of the Vienna Sausage without doing a shit-load, as one might say, of research and relying, as I must, on prejudice, hearsay, and intellectual caprice? I should say it IS possible and I'm going to prove it here and now!

My theory is that the Vienna Sausage was indeed co-opted by the Viennese whose anti-Semitism forced them, after expelling the Jews umpteen times, to call them back because, frankly, the Jews made everything better except for the Catholics and Protestants who were maddened by their intellectual and technical superiority. I would posit that it was a Jew who invented the so-called "Vienna Sausage", bringing it to the city in a small cart or wagon, and selling it on the street to wealthy burgers who'd missed their wurst that day, or just needed a little snack to tide them over. I would posit that it was Jew who slaved over the recipe in some little-bitty town, with one synagogue and the most rudimentary supply of pig-meat which this industrious fellow, using not just the might but ingenuity of His People, extended it with other parts as yet unknown to create a sort of teensy hybrid that was neither flesh or fish - nor even a sausage exactly, but bearing such a family resemblance that its inventor was forced to denominate it accordingly. Perhaps he never wanted it to be a sausage at all and was interested in a cuisine that would not just feed a bunch of big-city people who might think about shedding a few pounds, but provide sustenance to his own village. Perhaps it got to the city by accident and was adopted by a population whose proclivity for the dynamic shapeliness of the wannabe sausage rationalized a compulsion that dare not speak its name. That is to say, because the Vienna Sausage was small, it was also acceptable. You could accuse no hungry Viennese of grossness if you caught him with a plateful of these savories.

And so it is eminently possible that the so-called "Vienna Sausage" belongs to the Austrian People at large and ought to be seen as such. Furthermore, if a Jewish man or woman is likely to have invented it, I think it's high time that a guilt-ridden Europe aired out this dirty secret and hand the invention back to its rightful owner. It's high time some sort of reparation was made. YOU wouldn't want to be satisfying your hunger with a thing misappropriated and misnamed. I think a gluttonous and uncaring world must be made to face this ignominy head-on after so many centuries of partisan noshing. Speeches and monuments are well and good, but when does penance ever have repercussions, as it were, at the dinner table? It is high time this internationally significant food-item be restored to its rightful station and be honored for the thing it is, rather
than the thing "people want it to be."

I propose then that the "Vienna Sausage" be re-named.
One international referendum would do it. And, if
not, it's a damned good start.

There is perhaps nothing more bracing than going to a place that is familiar to you in a bookish sense only.
For one, you'll have to make sense of it as a new place other than the one that occupies your imagination. There is some trepidation here: what if it doesn't measure up? The imagination often trafficks in the ideal and doesn't like things to be mucked up with a sudden and inconvenient breath of reality. However, I don't remember being disappointed in my first glimpse of New York City - or New Orleans.
The lure of the mythic city stepped aside just a little as the real place flooded in. I found that both realities, if you will, could be accomodated.

In middle age, however, the imagination may exert an even more powerful grip than that of the senses.
Direct experience appears increasingly mundane, a matter of rote and repitition - so many ruts to get in and out of, so much bleak, but strangely familiar, territory to get through before day is done. I worry a little bit that my somewhat dulled appetites will be easily satisfied. David Sedaris said he went to the movies as the City of Light beckoned all the young and impressionable around him. Hemingway sat in bars and restaurants getting tanked while Tout Paris teemed with seductive energies. As Atget stalked his targets in the grey light of dawn, a thousand bohemians slept.
Monet's sun-drenched gardens passed into the night unseen; Pisarro's outstretched boulevards. . .well, you get the picture. To be jaded is to stay inside.

I doubt if Vienna will fail to move me, however. A friend just wrote me to tell me it was "weird". I'm so glad he said that. From what I've been reading, it has seemed the opposite: a well-ordered place that appears to rely on the outmoded etiquettes and elaborate courtesies of the past - even if that past may offer more than just a bit of good, practical human sense. If a place is "weird", it means that there are possible aberrations and displacements that might put a crack in these well-weathered things. If a place is "weird", it has possibilities the well-ordered person might shun; the inveterate law-abider will want to crush; the householder and citizen can't abide. Weird is very good. I'm holding onto that weirdness and will look for it always.

And come to think of it, it was the city's "weirdness"
that drove "The Third Man" even as it made Joseph Cotten a very tired fellow. Amidst the city's grave and monstrous presence, bureaucracies wove tiny, but inextricable webs; people said little - and kept to the shadows whenever possible. Relationships ran afoul of a black market that swooped down and corrupted everything and everybody. Secrets were bought and sold - just as people were. It wasn't merely Postwar Angst that had gripped the place; it was fear. People were afraid.

Of course, the worst had already happened. The Jews were gone: deported, killed, or "made" to disappear.
Firebombings had wiped out baroque cities that have been paintstakingly, after the German fashion, reconstructed in places and louvered into the Twentieth Century by means of apartment blocks so anti-old world that almost any alienated person anywhere would be comfortable in them. Vienna's coffee-house scene was not the same, alas, having lost its pre-eminence as THE milieu in which to while away the time irresponsibly. The world could no longer be irresponsible. A war had come. And nothing COULD be the same.

Another friend of mine said he used to see, in the Sixties, remnants of the Hapsburg era, when older gentlemen sat around telling lies about the great pre-Sarajevo days. As they sat their stroking their long moustaches, they could see all the trappings of a great imperial city strutting about them, and were well-satisifed. They could lament the untimely end of Franz Joseph with creditable sincerity and not seem sentimental. The shot mad Gavrilo Princeps fired did represent an abrupt end to their era - though, as cultivated Viennese, they hardly had the worst of it.
They should have talked to a Frenchman - if they could have found one. French and English manhood was at a premium after WWI; it had choked on gas, been slaughtered nineteen to the dozen in No Man's Land, or given up the ghost in a field hospital behind the trenches.

The memories of old gentlemen are, however, necessarily long, having been short-circuited by so many other catatrophes, like the inconceivably brutal interval of the second great war, in which their well-ordered lives suffered another wallop. Yet the imagination graps after such fellows in an agreeable way. I wish they were still there taking their coffee and licorice.

Gunter Grass was asked to state the single greatest German weakness. He said: obedience. I wonder how obedient the Viennese were, when Hitler started expanding his might and territory; when Sudetenlanders strewed city squares with flowers as the Nazi brass rolled in; as Kristillnacht shattered the sinister stillness of so many dark nights. I suppose I am as fascinated by these questions as any - though I doubt if I will ask any of them outright. When you come to a place - no matter what its history - you should be respectful.

It's not as if my own adopted city lacks history of a somewhat similar sort. The Shaw area went up in flames during the riots that broke out all over the country in the late Sixties. On nearby H Street, are whole blocks are just now being filled in, having achieved a rosy ripeness for developers who see the area as, at long last, desirable. There may well be people here in my neighborhood who started the fires, driving good businesses forever out of the area - or just sat mutely watching. One day, as I was painting, a guy came up to me and said he had a girlfriend who lived in the building right behind me - a yawning vacancy now. Thought they'd get married, said he.
Thought everything was gonna stay just as it was.
Thought. . .but it was not meant to be. He didn't say what he did during the riots. Nobody else I've talked to has either. When some sort of explosive community event occurs, it seems that guilt is passed around in very small dollops. Each person digests just a little bit of it and takes no more than he can stand. I've always thought that the torching of our own cities was not only insanely impuslive, but self-destructive in a way I'm at a loss to even understand. Perhaps that is the lot of all impulsive acts that start off as one independent show of defiance or principle and gather force as others pile on their grievances and outrages; the exponential increase of the violence, the reach of the fires, ultimately astonish everyone, having had a sort of private genesis: as a rock thrown or a passion gone out of control. How can any one man take responsibility? Impossible - though it seems that, to live, we are all responsible for every goddamned
thing.

The fifth anniversary of 9/11 has come and gone. The stunned silence and national numbness was put back into circulation and everybody was, once again, reminded of how much the world has changed - for us in the US at any rate. Old Europe is used to being invaded. Only happened here for a very short period of time during the colonial uprising, otherwise known as the Revolutionary War; and during the War of 1812 - a sort of carryover from the earlier conflict. But Europe is a well-trampled and exhaustively looted place where every possible engine of war has been tried and exploited; countless populations decimated or held hostage; arrogant monarchs, having given themselves carte blanche, ranged as far as their ambitions would take them - people and places, of course, be damned. That sort of thing is relatively new to us here and we really can't handle it. 9/11 was a sort of a test-case as to how a large and vocal population can begin to sort out its own sudden, and possibly increasing, vulnerability. We're not very good at it yet; we just haven't had the practice.
Europeans are about as good as you can get at such a thing, having had plagues and wars in their midst for centuries. I would imagine that the average person in Nineteenth Century Europe was just glad to be alive.
At the same time in the United States, "we" were pushing our boundaries past the old "aborigines" to the shining Pacific, slaughtering men and beasts along the way, of course; labeling new things as we found them; and crowing with delight at each new territorial conquest. We weren't just glad to be alive - we couldn't wait for the next day to start! Europe was already quite ancient - and even slightly ridiculous - to us. Mark Twain went over there and made fun of it, as fussy Henry James stayed in its drawing rooms observing good manners (and the messy motivations behind them.) Proust was writing decadent stuff about sense memory while people in this country were sniffing at the prairie grass for the first time and wanting to put a plough to it.

Horrific as it was, 9/11 was a sort of wake-up call, not for us to get off our butts and nail terrorists to the wall of our righteous indignation, but in an historical sense. It said: why not us? We have good things (the labor we get for virtually nothing; the incredible natural wealth that's been ours for the taking; our system of laws that often do protect the innocent), but we are not perceived as "good" by everyone; nor is the good we have guaranteed forever, or without certain built-in inequalities. Those who have didn't get "it" by doing the laundry. For the self-made man or woman to even exist, countless armies of "helpers" must put shoulder to the wheel (as their collective backs are very often against the wall.) We talk talk so much about the machinery of our success as its glittering potency, its astonishing reach.
Part of the outside world doesn't like us. It has nurtured a sense of envy, disbelief and outrage at the great gangling colossus of our labor force, our inconceivable wealth, and our exemplary, but self-absorbed, democracy. For us to believe that we are well-liked because we like ourselves is to have a dangerously infinite capacity for self-delusion.
People is diff'runt, as much separated by culture and economic circumstances as they are united by common beliefs and prejudices and economic strivings.

In a word or two: we can be innocent no longer.

And, in this, Europe is an excellent model. It lost its innocence in about 1077 and has kept on losing it.
It's safe to say that all of its innocence has been used up. And a good thing too. The only thing innocence is really good for is to help define guilt.
Innocence is overrated and should be yielded happily, once its limited usefulness has had its day. We should have innocent children; indeed we should.
Children are the only humans among us who might be presumed innocent by reasonable persons. But that doesn't mean that they get a free ride either. A six-year old kid tried to stab me with a pair of scissors once. (I mean, when I was six as well.) He wouldn't have tried that on me now; I have the power to take away his video capabilities.

Indeed: why not us? I am not making the argument that we "deserve" to be attacked: merely that it is more likely to happen now than ever. It is no longer possible to be an isolated cosmos of law and custom; of permissible wealth and unpardonable ignorance; of good people and bad people and everybody else in between. What has always merely happened to "them"
has now happened to us. And we've reacted exactly like the great gangling colossus we are, and not as a responsible power trying to figure out what in hell has happened and how we might adjust to it in the future among a community of other nations.

It is germane that I'll be visiting a place that is now a center for international negotiation. The old world city - mostly famous for its pastries and Mozart
- has now found a role on the international stage. It is also germane that I will be visiting it now, so close to the anniversary of an event that surprised the hell out of nobody but us. I will ask questions about that. I'm sure every Viennese person I meet (who is willing and able to speak English) will be as eager to chime in on that question as anybody else on earth. Because everybody HAS to have an opinion.
We're all close now and that's one thing that's not likely to change.

When you go to a place you "know" only secondhand, you should try to bone up on it a bit - particularly if you don't intend for it to be the sort of whistle-stop experience that passes, for overacheiving types who can't wait to get back to their laptops, for travel.
Not being that sort of person, I'm gladly immersing myself in the culture and folkways of Vienna, to which I will hie me in the Fall.

The most striking thing about Vienna, from the vast remove of our nation's capitol, is the fact that it exists at all. One of my guidebooks tells me that there are no bad neighborhoods.

How's that?

Thinking that I had come across some sort of obscure Viennese humor, I looked again. But, sure enough, there it was: there are no bad neighborhoods in all of Vienna, Austria. Up and down it. East and West.
North and South. Zilch. Zero. Bupkiss.

Let me ask another question: how can that be? In the natural course of human events, there is action and reaction, cause and effect, ugly and beautiful, and - of course! - Paris Hilton and the cleaning lady who wears a smelly sack dress and chain-smokes Marlboros right out of the red pack that killed the Marlboro cowboy! You can't have good unless there's a little bad. But Vienna is apparently defying this self-correcting karmic system whereby everybody suffers a little for extra cup of coffee; the lucky gamble; the nature preserve amidst rampaging development. It's just what is, baby!

But Vienna says no: there are no bad neighborhoods and that's that!

I'm thinking that, without the murkier stuff, the good stuff is going to lack flavor. Ever find yourself wandering through a big, gorgeous house and get a sudden urge to look for the broom-closet? I have.
When I find the broom-closet and study it for a moment, I can go back to appreciating the big, gorgeous house. But maybe that's just me. And, to be honest, you really need to know where a broom is wherever you go.

There are apparently twenty-two sectors in Vienna, which stands at about a million souls. In none of these sectors is a funky barbershop, a fish-stand that reeks of hydrogenated oil, or an abandoned building that is spawning the cats that will roam the neighborhood and suck the breath out of small children. That's a shame. In the interest of staving off culture shock, the city of Vienna really ought to be build a slum so that homesick Americans can rush over there from time to time, see the Sports section blowing around, smell the garbage a service-strapped economy will not pick up, hear a few bullets ping off of unrehabilitated facades, and become grounded again.
I'm afraid that I'll go over there and feel so disoriented, I'll have to up and find me some nice old-fashioned poverty so that I can keep my sense of proportion. How dare people live in just a nice place! They NEED a taste of the Other Side, or the Unsavory and Unwashed, of Real Life as everybody in the States who doesn't live in a gated community knows it.

This is why the Viennese have no blues. And that's a damned shame, ain't it?

I may, of course, be exaggerating. Theoretically, we humans, while being able to adapt to anything, are not required to do so. If we live in Eden and see nothing else, Eden is our norm, our baseline, our morning bath. There is nothing sissified about living in Eden all your life; it just strikes me as a little one-dimensional. It is worth noting that the original inhabitants got sick of it and wanted to go somewhere else - or at least wanted stuff that wasn't exactly
Edenesque. It's basic human nature to be restless.


But that's my own adaptability talking. Eden could very well be a tolerable place, assuming there are sports pages to be had at least every other Sunday.

Of all of the negatives, I believe this - having so little wrong - is possibly the worst. Everything else
- except for the diet - seems absolutely glorious.

As I understand it, Vienna's architecture is not merely baroque, which is what it's famous for. It's all over the place, starting with the old Hapsburg grandeur; gaining weight and solidity with the Biedermeier period, then, after socialism took hold in the early part of the 20th century, apartment blocks that are reminiscent of lego sets and are chock-full of amenities our working-class didn't get a whole lot of until after WW II.

World War II was fairly kind to Vienna, up until the end, when it was shelled a bit. The old State Opera House, as well as St. Stephen's, was reduced, for the most part, to the rubble that was gloomily familiar throughout Europe at the time. Then the Soviets came in and did to Viennese women for real what black men in the US were supposed to be doing to white women in small communities all over the South. They also took all the cordials and cigarettes, leaving the Viennese with pastries alone. (They were wise enough not to take everything.) A huge and labrynthine black market sprung up to supply the needs of a scrimping postwar city, which was occupied by four countries who drove around in "four-in-ones", or jeeps outfitted with Soviet, American, British and Russian soldiers.
(These guys apparently lived very well. To paraphrase Mel Brooks: "It's good to be the winner!")

But in 1955, Vienna got its independence - which was proclaimed from the Belvedere Palace to a relieved and exhausted city - and the present, three-party era began.

I have no idea what I will do in Vienna, except become befuddled, as Mark Twain was, at the terrible grandeur of compound words. In most languages, it's the verbs that give a non-speaker fits, but, in German, it's the nouns that get you. Some are a sentence-long - and I mean a Faulkner sentence - and don't even think of dividing themselves up till the bitter end. They just gallop, vowel and consonant attempting to outrun the other, to some sort of perverse linguistic finish-line. And laugh at you. As Twain said, whoever tries to learn the German language will have to be dead because nobody else has time for it.

The handy phrases I'll use are, however, without those hair-raising compounds. If I want to ask for a menu, I can do that, provided I bring the phrase-book with me. If I'm trying to buy a subway ticket, I can do that too. Or get a stamp. Or tell somebody that I need the Heimlich (sp?) maneuever. (That one'll be easier. I know the word "Heimlich" already. It's a good German name, which'll make everybody want to know what it's doing in my sentence.)

However, there is the Viennese dialect, which lops off words at the end and loses syllables, the way people in New York of Philadelphia might. Or rural people do, with their almost-ing's. (Where would country music - or rock - be without their cheatin' hearts and all my lovin's? In the concert hall? I don't THINK
so!) I doubt if I will attempt to understand this dialect, but I will listen respectfully. I'm pretty good at that. I did a lot of listening in Brooklyn and was allowed to live there without gratuituous insults to my body or mind. And I got to know the dialect well enough not to get into ANY big black car for any reason.

Vienna is more synonymous with music than with any other art-form, so I'll probably want to listen to Mozart again; risk a Beethoven binge; and finish up with Strauss and Lehar, for some easier listening.
Brahms is buried in Vienna, but didn't live in the
city all that long. Wonder why? Seems like it
would've been just the place for him. Mozart didn't really notice his environment, so when I visit Figaro House, I won't need much Mozartiana to imagine him there in a manic mood spewing out joyous and complicated stuff while pulling a little at his tokay.
Beethoven is more in evidence, as he moved a lot.
The Viennese loathing for loud noise was perhaps activated by Beethoven's mercurial banging, exacerbated by increasing deafness. At least four of his apartments are now mini-shrines. I plan to see at least one - or a couple, if they're in the same nabe.
You have to respect Beethoven. He was his own man - which is why so many people preferred to keep company with somebody else.

Visually, Vienna is such a monotonously beautiful place, with its narrow streets, posh and immaculate shops, its innnumerable kondoterie where a body can apparently linger; its squares, parks, statuary, and palaces; its soft-focus riverine poetry mashed up against cool, trail-accessible forests. Yea, so beautiful it is that I must return to my original
premise: where be 'de bad stuff? When I begin to contemplate existing in such a place day after day, I'm wondering whether this constant and exhilirating beauteousness will become oppressive. Perhaps I will have withdrawal symptoms. "Please. . show me a plastic bag. With a logo. And, yes, wad it up for me and throw it on the floor. Yes, that's good. Now, let me look at it for a while. Let me just imbibe its meaning. That's better. Much better. I'm feeling myself again. Just keep it around, won't you? I may have another one of these, uh, attacks, if you will."
Perhaps I will, on the other hand, learn to love it too much and not want to come back to a place where I can't park; I don't want to ride on the Metro; I'm merely tolerated in my own neighborhood because I'm both a racial and economic minority. Perhaps that's what I fear the most: getting seduced by a place that might well be just the remedy my soul and body has been looking for. A place that recycles fanatically; a place that will not hear of hearing his neighbor crank up the stereo just because he or she wants to party for a while; a place whose civilized customs promote. . .civility and not the sort of snarling competitiveness I'm used to enduring - and more than occasionally practice myself. A place where bicycles stay unlocked and people go around shopping with canvas bags. A place where people dress up a bit lest they look like American tourists. A place steeped in ancient (the Romans settled the place first) history, but willing to accept modern reforms in the interests of comfort and - that word again - civility. A place with no stray animals except us. A place where having "culture" may not necessarily condemn you to sissfication - or, if it does, it doesn't matter because sissies are welcome as long as they don't camp it up too much. A place every citizen cherishes because it knows, through bitter experience, what can happen when civil liberties are restricted, occupying armies run the show, and you can't get a pack of cigarettes for love or money. (Actually, you can.
And for just those things, rendered involuntarily.)

Actually, here's something bad: the typical Viennese diet is wretched, without antioxidants, largely vegetable-free, and meat-centered. A vegetarian like myself orders salads and gets very thin there - or gets his calories in liquid form. But here's something good again: the beer! Did you know that Budweiser is considered state-of-the-art there? But it has about as much to do with our Budweiser as
Beethoven has to do with Britney Spears.