Ladies of All Colors

Granted, it's usually someone else who has to point out that I should take a picture of this person or that, and it's usually those who are trained to recognize splotches of color in an otherwise dull atmosphere.

Take, for example, the lady sitting by the Neubaugasse metro stop, dressed in green, next to a green sign, reading a green book (!!) -- Andreas and I were sitting down having an ice cream while cars fumed behind us and shoppers squeezed by each other with their shopping bags on the ever crowded Mariahilfer Straße.

Or Dorothy in her red shoes, whom Karsten pointed out on a quiet side street in an utterly unaffordable and somewhat life-less part of the first district, who was waiting for someone to open the gate and let her in.

Then our lady in black underneath the unicorn statue on the corner of this concrete-slab apartment building: a delight of the mundane for those of us who look with amused condescension upon the industrial/working-class/decayed shadow of a city where bobos like myself visit as tourists and feel momentary relief from being surrounded by the pressures of the pristine. There are no unicorns in my parents' neighborhood.

Wienerbrød -- Viennese Delights

I've discovered a new way to make friends and discover new views of a city I'm traumatically familiar with: couchsurfing.com.

Couchsurfing is really an online community for travelers, but I've found it works locally, too. Together with my new couchsurfing friends, Andreas and Karsten, I went on tours through streets I'd never seen in Vienna, uncovered a Swedish elk-graffiti wrapped in silver foil, romped around industrial railroad depositories, picked a stutue's butt, and discovered ladies of all colors (see next post).

If there's something I've learned about this pristine city, it is that what captures an artist's interest here is any representation of decay, of counter-culture, of the mundane. East block nostalgia gains big aesthetic points here, as does the dandy, sexually-rebellious-turned-ornately-mesmorizing bling bling of fin-de-siècle sculpture and architecture, where aesthetic surfaces and history's moral caverns are only diffusely related. We live in a culture here where any contemporary artistic expression becomes a reactionary stance against a set of moral/artistic values that have permeated almost all aspects of cultural life in Vienna and are seemingly impossible to disengage from, no matter how ordinary, forgiving, cosmopolitan, transcending, and uninvolved with the royal past you try to be.

Even butt-scratching a muscular iron-cast bod at the gayest fountain in Vienna contains an encyclopedia of meaning. Or I should say, especially.