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.

Artist's lives tend to follow a rather even tenor - in spite of the mythic magnificence cooked up by Hollywood and, before that, chroniclers of the bohemian lifestyle. Henri Rousseau is a case in point. In fact, he didn't live the artist's life - a la La Boheme - at all. When he moved to Paris from a country village at the age of twenty-eight, he got himself, through timely connections, a job as a customs agent, where he remained until his retirement at forty-nine. At that moment in his life, he'd been painting on his own for some years and was fully ready to join the ranks of the full-time, well-remunerated, and absurdly decorated artists whose coyly pornographic and extravagantly triumphalist concoctions were the toast of the official art world at the time. Problem was, Henri really didn't know what he was doing in this regard and was quickly dismissed from these ranks. This must've hurt, but the plodding Henri bounced back - as he always did - and found another outlet for himself. He was, in fact, welcomed into the independent fold and exhibited at its own salon for years. Here he began to garner a reputation as a man who could take a bit of foliage from the Jardin des Plantes, dress it up with a monkey, a lion, or some other recognizably fiercesome thing, and create a world of strange and peculiar harmony; a world in which it was possible to be an animal, but have the manners of the petit bourgeosie;
a world that was wild - but welcoming.
I imagine Henri, known to all of his friends as "Le Douanier", or "The Customs Agent", walking as a young man in the Bois de Boulogne dreaming of his civilized jungle running riot with wild beasts who are unaccountably fond of each other and eat just now and then. (The pictures he actually did, however, often had that element of cruelty, without which wild Nature could not survive.) He hallucinates a palm-fronded place where gentle creatures congregate and, incidentally, pose for him. He's just been to the great World's Fair and he can't get enough of the exotic people - tamed for a strictly Parisian audience; the bloodthirsty animals - lunging at one another as taxidermy specimens; the astounding natural marvels - permitted to flourish in gigantic fin de siecle greenhouses. His solitary ruminations would, however, become the basis of his most memorable work.
And it was this work that would garner him the fame and recognition this man of the people most sincerely craved.
Rousseau's odds-beating career is sort of a marvel.
Yet like another outsider artist, Maurice Utrillo, he did get just about everything he cared to have during his own lifetime, which spanned a couple of minor European wars, but stopped short of the first really big one. I would even hazard to say that some of his paintings, The Dream in particular, are among the most recognizable images in the Western World. Even the Simpsons poked fun of another landmark painting, in which a lion nudges a different dreamer, who sleeps on a coat of many colors, and does not - being dedicated to his inner vision - awaken. Not bad for an indifferently educated fellow with no ostensible training and a complete blank in that part of his brain where artistic theorizing generally occurs.
Which, in my opinion, ain't a bad thing in the least.
After Rousseau left his job, he did little paintings of the Parisian suburbs - paintings that lacked the spatial integrity of the impressionists while also losing out a bit to the academics in the way of form.
Yet today they charm us; they are a lonely man's loving portrait of a real place he knew extremely well. And they were purchased, for modest prices, by people who knew, and loved, these scenes in pretty much the same way old Henri did. In these paintings, Henri explored the "real" world - whatever that is.
He would return to it, over the years, as a sports enthusiast, a super-patriot (no intentional maverick, he), and as a collector of postcards and other ephemera that would occasionally find their way into his quirky masterpieces.
But for the most part Henri stayed in his private world. And it is with this aspect of his work that scholars and even dopeheads have been enthusiastic from the git-go.
In 1907, Pablo Picasso threw a big party - which he called a "banquet" - for Henri at his Montparnasse studio, Le Bateau Lavoir. The place was thronged by the Parisian avant-garde, which by that time had embraced the naive, but captivating inner life of the former customs agent. Picasso even owned some of Rousseau's work. Two little portraits of Rousseau's mother and father were among the emerging modernist's prized possessions. Three years later, Henri would paint The Dreamer and then pass out of this earthly existence.
And so a modern fable has been told. You start out with nothing but the dreams in your head and by dint of hard work and solid connections AND persistent dreaming, you rise to the very top of your profession, get in the textbooks, and have irony-drenched, but eminently respectful, cartoons made from your work.
"Jungles in Paris", which runs at the East Wing of the National Gallery through October 16th, shows the evolution of a humble, but recognition-craving bourgeois gentleman, who was both untutored and intelligent; lockstep conformist and supreme individual; little man and larger-than-life visionary.
If anybody painted from his heart, it was Henri Rousseau and we need such people now and then. We need them to remind us of our own lost innocence as well as our unassigned and uncontrollable. .
.possibility.