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.