Peter Ustinov said that one of the advantages of history is that it's so adaptable. And for those of us who wish boundaries separating fact from fiction to be more flexible, these are words to live by! If you can't monkey with dead people a little, what fun is there?

On that note, I thought I would, just a week or so before I left for the continent, ask Mozart what sort of place Vienna was for him, as he is as much indentified with the city as anybody and therefore ought to know. I hear he's pretty accessible. Well, let's see.

By the way, I'm doing something called "sympathetic channelling," which I've just made up for the sake of this story. In time, there will be better ways to get at people, but this isn't a bad one because if he or she is there, they'll come right to you.

(MOZART comes right into my small, shabby room. He exudes, not a blinding sort of radiance, but certainly a well-burnished sort of grandeur. It is partly the
clothes: knee-breeches, a ruffled shirt, waistcoat and buckled shoes. He carries what may either be a punch-list or note-pad, on which he'll scribble something from time to time, then stuff into a side-pocket. He is a short fellow and moves jerkily about. Not handsome either, though he is appealingly energetic - one might even say neurotically restless.
If you ran into him in the aisle of a grocery store, you'd want to tell him to get the hell out of the way; you wouldn't because he looks like the sort of guy who might go to pieces in front of the Boca burgers.)

ME: Is this Wolfgang Amadeus. . .

MOZART: Who's this?

ME: I'm a citizen of the 21st century and I'd like to get your take on your adopted city.

MOZART: Oh. Well, let me tell you: they didn't like me.

ME: History says otherwise.

MOZART: Are you gonna listen to "history" in the abstract or somebody who IS history?

ME: Go ahead.

MOZART: That's all. I just thought I'd clarify that for you.

ME: Why don't you think Vienna liked you?

MOZART: It didn't pay, for one. Do you realize how much it costs to produce an opera?

ME: Sort of.

MOZART: That was a rhetorical question.

ME: Didn't sound like one.

MOZART: All right. Maybe it wasn't. But I'll tell you how much it costs: it cost gazillions to produce an opera. You've got your sets, you've got your singers - ay yi yi! - and, finally, you've got your musicians whom you can never rehearse enough. And who grumble all the way. If I could have played everything myself, I would have done so. There were never more than a handful of good musicians in all Vienna, and none of them wanted to play my work. "Too fast!" they'd say. When I premiered my beloved 39th, the first violin player refused to play. Absolutely refused. I told him I would play it myself. You know what he said to me?

ME: Can't imagine.

MOZART: He said that if I played the violin like I played the piano, nobody would hear anything else.

ME: A subtle message there?

MOZART: If you consider "subtle" the act of somebody banging you over the head with a blunt instrument.

ME: Now, now. Maybe he couldn't adapt to your style.

MOZART: You have already created a bit of a classic
yourself: a classic understatement! That whiny little pigeon-hearted weasel could never understand my work and this was his way of deflecting attention from it.

ME: I think you're mixing metaphors. Pigeon-hearted weasel?

MOZART: I choose my epithets very carefully. His temperament was a combination of two very disagreeable creatures.

ME: Guess you had to be there.

MOZART: That is, alas, correct.

ME: So who won?

MOZART: We both did. I used somebody else.

ME: How'd it go?

MOZART: I just tuned his part out.

ME: Can you do that?

MOZART: Can I, Mozart, tune out a teeny violin? Why not ask Jove himself whether He can build a mountain, cleave the forest with a laughing stream; make the oceans roar; induce the fertile valleys offer up their ruby grape to thirsty lips?

ME: Forgive me.

MOZART: Look, I'm sorry. I'm just used to people doubting me. You're a good listener.

ME: Thanks.

MOZART: Are you being ironic?

ME: I don't think so.

MOZART: Just promise me to do no irony. They loved irony in Vienna. In Salzburg, there is no irony. A post is a post, a shadow a shadow. There was no "context." In many ways, I prefered my hometown.

ME: But you couldn't work there.

MOZART: Not for money. I could've stood out on any street-corner the livelong day, however. . .perhaps I should have done so.

ME: No. . .may I call you. . .what should I call you?

MOZART: That always depended on people's relationship to me. Creditors called me a sleazebag, which is a very long word even in the German language. If you say that word, you really have a need to say it. What was I saying?

ME: People called you things according to their relationship. . .

MOZART: How could I forget? My landlady, well, she was with the creditors, mostly. Cosima called me "little Mozart", after a little thing I. . .never mind. What was your question again?

ME: What should I call you? Do you have a title you would prefer me to use?

MOZART: I WISH! Hell, I'm just a commoner. I couldn't piss in any royal chamber-pot for love or money. Though I did it anyway - and for both! (With a surge of merriment that is somewhat startling.) I really am a character. If nothing else, I am indeed that. Shall we drink some wine?

ME: How's your health?

MOZART: Could be better. But what can you do? With my schedule, I was bound to pop off when I did. But do you know something? If I had it to do over again, I'd get more exercise.

ME: Really?

MOZART: Yes, I really would. I've begun to think that sitting around is the very cornerstone of our ills.
And, boy, did I do that! You don't compose standing on your head. I did that, actually. But it's really not good for the noggin. Put a wig on first.

ME: Good idea.

MOZART: I think I really was a genius, but you know the problem? The problem was that it came too easily for me. Yep. I never struggled. I'd sit down and the music came so fast, my hands flew across the score-sheet just getting it all down. And when I'd look, it came out just as it should. Oh, I'd change a note now and then, but it was for the most part ready-made. I think that's why I didn't make a lot of money with it because it came so easily to me. Hey, why don't I write something now?

ME: Really?

MOZART: Sure. I get bored here easily.

ME: How wonderful. Do you need a theme or something?

MOZART: Me? A theme? How perfectly absurd! All I need is a sheet of paper and a little wine. Got any?

ME: Uh. . .no. To either.

MOZART: Oh, that's too bad because I think I could really do something. Why don't I just hum it for you?

ME: Mozart. Humming. An original creation.

MOZART: It is magnificent, isn't it?

ME: Yes.

MOZART: You say all the right things. Oh, but. . .

ME: What?

MOZART: We've GOT to write it down. I write everything down. My father drummed that into me from an early age. He said, "If you take no other lesson from your father, you will take this." And then he'd force a big pencil into my hand and make me write something. He was always standing over me, whether he was there or not. A mixed blessing, fathers. Dads.
Kings. Popes. God. The Devil. That's the great patriarchal ladder and one's father is always on it somewhere. Some occupy several places, depending on their psychological complexity, though I'm not quite sure what psychology is. But I hear it was developed in Vienna

ME: Psychiatry, actually, but what the hell.

MOZART: I try to keep up.

ME: I'm sorry he. . .

MOZART: No need to be sorry. Because of him, I have an enormmous catalogue of posthumous works. Enormous!
Compared to what I did down there, it's like the city of Rome to an ant-hill.

ME: Really? You have all that stuff?

MOZART: Stuff, eh?

ME: Sorry.

MOZART: No, I'm sorry. You're being very good to me.
I like you. I shouldn't. . .can you tell what I'm thinking?

ME: I'm not that good.

MOZART: I'm thinking that we should change outfits.
You wear mine and I'll wear yours. Come on. It'll be fun. And then I'll compose something. That'll be my theme. Cross-dressing.

ME: Uh. Cross-dressing, in later years, became something different.

MOZART: But it isn't now. So let's cross-dress!

ME: Are you sure?

MOZART: I've never been surer!

(We undress and hand one another our respective outfits. He gets into mine quickly and struts around for a moment, ulimately deciding that he doesn't like it much. I struggle from the git-go. In this regard, Mozart is an excellent sport, a team player par
excellence.)

MOZART: Here. Let me help you with that. Now hold up your arms. Put them down. Now the leg. Now the other one. Turn around.

(He kicks me.)

ME: What was that for?

MOZART: My initiation fee. You don't get Mozart to dress you for nothing, you know.

ME: Could you, uh, finish?

MOZART: Oh, yes. Now just relax. I think it's a wrap. Ha-ha! I've made a pun. I know what a wrap is because we have movies and they have these little segments in which movie people talk about the business. And when they're finished with something, they say: "It's a wrap!" Don't they?

ME: I think so, yes.

MOZART: These clothes only look uncomfortable, when in reality they fit like an old shoe. Yours, however, don't offer much either in the way of style or comfort.

ME: I come from a more casual age.

MOZART. No doubt. Well, let's look at one another in the mirror.

(They go over to a large mirror and gaze into it. I start to giggle.)

MOZART: What's so funny?

ME: Nothing. . .everything.

MOZART: Well, pardon ME then!

ME: There's nothing wrong with funny. Funny's good.
Funny's. . .funny. I thought you were a mirthful spirit, a guardian imp.

MOZART: Not when the joke's on me.

ME: Frankly, I don't know who the joke's on. These clothes just sort of crack me up. I wonder what Sally would think.

MOZART: And who is Sally?

ME: My girlfriend. Sally. I really wish she could see me in these. She wouldn't believe it. Nor would she believe that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is my haberdasher.

MOZART: Don't let it go to your head. I just thought.
. .maybe we should change back.

ME: I see a mood-swing coming on.

MOZART: A mood-swing? I don't like the sound of that.

ME: A mood-swing is a rapid and mercurial shift in overall affect.

MOZART: Say that again, please. Slowly.

ME: It's when you suddenly feel grumpy after a bout of hilarity, say. It's when you find yourself laughing at nothing at all, or crying for no good reason.

MOZART: Oh. What did you call it?

ME: A mood-swing.

MOZART: A mood-swing. (A song is born.) "I'm on a mood-swing and I'm out on a limb with a mood that is dim. . ."

ME: You're out Sondheiming-Sondheim.

MOZART: Who's that, pray tell?

ME: A lesser composer.

MOZART: If he writes like that, I should say so.
Hmmm.

ME: What?

MOZART: I feel better now.

ME: Another mood-swing.

MOZART: So mood-swings guide us from state to state.

ME: Yes. Unless you're on Prozac or something.

MOZART: Prozac?

ME: Just something we take for the blues. And the jollies.

MOZART: You know, there is too much of a cultural abyss between us. I'm afraid I don't understand you.

ME: You don't have to. In fact, all I wanted to know is how you got along in Vienna, and I think I got that.

MOZART: You know, I never really noticed the place. I was so damned busy composing, courting, or traveling, I hardly looked up. I'll bet you I couldn't even find the street I lived on today. It was just a place like so many others.

ME: You didn't notice. . .the architecture.

MOZART: Most architecture is mere window-dressing, a projection of the power and influence of the person who builds - or renovates - it. I got sick of architecture playing all those palaces. Give me a bare room with a piano and I'm on a heaven-kissing hill irradiated with sunlight.

ME: It's not where you are, but who you are.

MOZART: How pithy.

ME: Didn't say I was Shakespeare.

MOZART: I'm sorry. I can be a bit of a snob.

ME: We forgive the great their weaknesses and make up for it by oppressing the meek.

MOZART: Who said that?

ME: Got lucky.

MOZART: You know, I'm suddenly tired? I don't really get out much. People play my music, but they seldom want to talk to me. How do you say it? I don't get all that many hits.

ME: That's surprising.

MOZART: Just as well. If I had to choose between me and my music, it'd most definitely be the music.

ME: We are seldom as great as creations. If they're any good, that is.

MOZART: That does get you off the hook, doesn't it?
If I'd've known how much future generations would revere me, I would have misbehaved a lot more. I'm not even sure if I would have married Cosima. It just happened, you know? Not a bad girl, but she really didn't get the music. Good in bed, though. I'd say passing excellent, if you know what I mean. I'd even say the girl had a sort of genius in that way.

ME: That's nice.

MOZART: You are both more open and more hypocritical than we were. We didn't flaunt ourselves the way you do, but I'll bet you we did just as much. I'd even propose that the less flaunting there is, the more exciting the exchange. I mean, I didn't know what she looked like out of those clothes until I had the time to get her out of them. A woman in my day not only had to be conquered, she had to be uncorseted and unwrapped. With clothes like these, seduction is a sorry affair, isn't it? A aria sung at the top of the voice in quick time. A sort of on-the-spot, ready-to-go, easy-to-make-do activity. In my day, there was planning. (An inspiration.) You know, THAT was something Vienna was good for: seduction. Plenty of well-appointed rooms for that - if you could get into them. Casanova would have loved it here. So many little, out-of-the-way places when one could rendez-vous and savor the slow and complicated reality of courtship. Courtship, my friend, is everything.
Once the chase is over, the conquest is slight, and leads to melancholia. The desire to posses is overpowering, but the possession itself. . .that's why I loved music so much. You were always possessing it and throwing it off and possessing it again. Much more satisfying than any human relationship. More much satisfying than just about anything. Oh, my. I think time's up. I can only do about an half an hour, then I get scatter-brained. I hope I've helped.

ME: Thank you. You have. I'll go to Vienna with a greater appreciation of its nooks and crannies, as it were.

MOZART: Nooks and crannies. Very good. Nooks and crannies. I like it. I like it!

(Mozart leaves. I realize some moments afterwards that I am standing in his clothes. Wonder how I'm going to get out of them. But he was right: they're a lot more comfortable than you think and I think they look pretty good on me. Yep. They look pretty good
indeed.)

It is a fine thing to have a painter in our midst.
The run-of-the-mill Washington exhibit is more about conceptual muscle - the right to hack away at boundaries others have successfully breached (and carted off joyously to other places.) Look at any exhibition calendar; DC is fairly lousy with the stuff.

David FeBland started out not as a painter, but as an illustrator. His technique is gorgeously developed, but, as all technique should be, in perfect tandem with the content it most agreeably serves. Even so, FeBland is a direct descendant of the Boldiniesque tradition which seeks to wow the spectator with painterly moves. Yet FeBland's capacity to impress with bravura alone is held in check by his ability to hang out on a limb and strike at the heart of who we are and how we manage in urban environments that are out of step with human needs, yet irreducibly private.
He has taken a brutally pre-emptive world and populated it, not with grinning lunatics, but people
with urgent needs and obsessive yearnings.

In his earlier paintings, human connection appeared somewhat implausible, as pools of bright tarmac and smouldering red brick sloshed together. The FeBland of this recent show has found, if not love, then a certain amiable lubricity. His women are fully in possession of an earthy, albeit cosmetically enhanced, sexuality - reminiscent of the Venusian babes Reginald Marsh could do without trying. (FeBlands Redhead could be "High Yaller" in a better neighborhood.) His people are often elongated, exuding a wild energy that seems to be slightly ahead of them. Caught in the snags of our alienating infrastructures, they make ecstatic bids for affirmation even as they burrow into their private worlds. The quintessential FeBland figure is on a skateboard - fitting for a guy who'd been a bicycle messenger. But FeBland isn't always running around; he has lately discovered a strain of simple humanity that has been largely absent from his work in the past. His picture vendor (Laws of
Physics) has given up, but is willing to go through the motions. In Path of Escape two Hasidic Jews stand before a high fence puzzling over a post-9/11 scenario. An enraptured luddite has taken "his last cassette" to an open field to admire its wind-borne destruction . FeBland's unflappable technique, however, goes a little haywire at times. In artists with smaller repertoires, it's easy to stick to tried-and-true formulas and keep on doing them at least indifferently. FeBland has to contend with such a well-tempered instrument that he sometimes has trouble reining it in. Subterranean, for all of its superficial graces, is eye-candy. Kaaba is a kind of girly picture surrounded with wink/wink quotation marks. We understand that we might be in somewhere in the Middle East. On its sandy bosom a man prostrates himself as some possible Americans observe or try not to observe him. But the babes the focus of the thing and we have to decide whether we can live with her callous narcissism, which may be a stand-in for All of Us. FeBlands larger narrative paintings lack, as a whole, the intriguing ambiguity that sets his work apart from the illustrative chatter he has, for the most part, eschewed. The exception is Keystone, which shows a robbery in progress, with the thief only a few paces ahead of his well-heeled pursuers: the lady incredulous; her boyfriend hopping mad; the long-coated felon trying his damndest to get away.
You look at it and think somebody has taken that soft-focus picture of a sophisticated couple, fast-forwarded it a frame or two and - voila! - we have a situation! FeBland's claim to our minds and senses consists in his persistent willingness to take the old picture and run with it - run well past our conventional expectations toward a place where the rulebook is held up to ridicule after it has been consulted on a fine point of construction.

collideAscope runs through November 4th at the Fraser Gallery, 7700 Wisconsin Avenue, Ste. E,
Bethesda, MD, (301) 718-9651.

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.