I am going to add this up to Philipp’s litany concerning the increasing number of panhandlers in the city of Vienna.
The first time I was here and that was in 2000 beggars were not that conspicuous, especially in the inner district, or even in the trains.
There are reports that these people are part of the syndicate originating in Eastern Europe. Everyone is pointing his/her fingers to Romania, where its citizens can stay up until three months without any visa.
This practice of sending fake beggars to the streets is the same tactic that is used in the Philippines and some other parts of Asia.
If you happen to use the train U4 before or after noon the chance of seeing panhandlers is very common. I don’t have anything against them. Though honestly, I earnestly do mind why they hell they continuously exist everywhere in the world.
Fo some people encountering them is like an omen. They curse these poor people to death until they understand that they are not at all wanted there.
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The Caritas organisation recently opened a free home for young people who cant find a place to stay. They can sleep there, eat, drink, no matter what.
Kids between the age of 14 and 18 years can stay there. Without telling their name or any other personal things that they might not want to tell someone else (such as being sexworkers, drug addicts etc.).
I read about in a newspaper, dont ask me which one, or somebody told me about it. Unfortunately i cant find out WHERE exactly those places are (yes, i googled.) Westbahnhof maybe?
Anyways. I think its a good idea.

Edit: young people. not kids.
and its at the Westbahnhof. i am obviously blind.
thanks, Nex!

Tomorrow we’ll stage “Die Lesungsplage”, an open mic reading at our monochrom space, Museumsquartier.
The event will start at 8 PM.
Anyone is invited to join us… to listen and read.

Max. of 10 minutes per person.
It doesn’t matter if you want to read your own stuff or stuff written by somebody else… but please: no acrobatics, clowns and juggling!

You probably know the feeling when you go past certain objects in public spaces, that are neither explained nor do they make any obvious sense.

After I got stared at twice by an 50-60ish man, with the interruption of me asking him if anything is wrong (answer: “No, everything’s fine”) I came across one of them at the U4 station of the Landstrasse. Since I live in this city I wonder what this might be:

It seems to involve a camera, pointing from the ceiling to the floor. You can see people going by and the white dots move independently. As far as I can remember, there are a few of them placed at different stations. There’s no label or any kind of note explaining what it is. I asked people living here for their entire life, and they just shook their heads. Do I really have to ask Wiener Linien? What is it? Art? Fart? What is it?

Oh my x!
We got a new surface, looks absolutely prol!
What do you think?
Shokedyshok!
I just wanted to write about the Clint Eastwood-film Firefow from the year 1981, & now i open the vienna metroblog - & RÖÖÖÖÖÖÖCHL!!!
But I want to come back to the subject:
Do you know the mentioned movie Firefox? Parts of it play in Moscow but these scenes are filmed in good old Vienna. Coooll: you shold imagine Moscow & you recognize Vienna :-) & I tell you: It all looked the same at the beginning of the 80ies here in Vienna, the Donaukanal, the underground, even the small orange cars cleaning the trottoire. The only thing that changed are the signs, it seems they were at this time in cyrillic. Funny. & fun to watch, because I like it to guess where Clint Eastwood & his team shot this or that scene.
Of course it is not really a good film, but I like the soundeffects & the trashy fx & I tell you: You never saw a si stupido first secretary of the USSR. A film right out of the cold war!
& not to forget: You also find the austrian actor Klaus Loewitsch (whom I hated when I was young for his tv-series Peter Strohm. But now I liked to see him, it was like greetings from my youth ;-)) as Vladimirov. Reallyreally funny!

The ATVPlus did a rerun of the “10 Most Important Austrians.” In case you don’t know the “Hi Society” host Dominic Heinzl presents “The ATV Ranking Show“.
If you don’t watch TV, or better yet, you don’t tune in to this kind of fluffy program, in which I cannot blame you, watching it has become a motivation for me to improve my German. Anyway, one cannot declare that this is the ultimate list. It is just a matter of the ATV audience’s opinion.
People can be so mundane and at times contemplating. Just take the list with a grain of salt.
In order of importance. No. 1 being No. 1.

1. Wolfgang A. Mozart–composer, Austria’s official mascot. But hey, he was a prodigy and you like it or not, his music is really catchy (though I still prefer Schubert and Beethoven over him). This year is truly his.

2. Frank Stronach–businessman and the owner of the company Magna and others

3. Dietrich Mateschitz–Honestly, Red Bull disgusts me, especially in the morning (like the smell of Kebab or Leberkäse Semmel in a crowded wagon). But I am amazed with the popularity of this sugary drink. Mr. Mateschitz, the owner, is a marketing genius. Just look at the commercials.

4. Elfriede Jelinek–writer, the only woman on the list. I wonder if she wouldn’t have gotten the Nobel Prize in Literature, would the public dismiss her works?

5. Arnold Schwarzenegger–actor, politician, one ex-colleague asked me then if the significant other resembles Arnold. She thinks every Austrian is. I have to admit that my mother really likes him.

6. Carl Djerassi–inventor of contraceptive pills. Hail, hail to this man! During the Nazi era, he fled to the US of A in order to escape persecution.

7. Niki Lauda–F1 driver and champion.

8. Hans Dichand–media mogul, the owner of the popular tabloid Kronen Zeitung. They said he rules, unconsciously, Austria. He is a media practitioner and he forces (his paper’s) opinions on the people.

9. Helmut Pechlaner–the director of the Schönbrunn Tiergarten. My SO thinks he is sympathisch.

10. Gery Keszler–the promoter of AIDS Live Ball. I only got to hear that his charity parties are sort of the creme de la creme of celebs and fashion icons.

These are the people who didn’t make it on the list: Billy Wilder, Gustav Klimt, Sigmund Freud, etc.

Nudity, I might say, is part of being human.
If you are a woman, you have to strip naked in front of your gynecologist for an internal examination. If you are a man, the same way with your urologist. You turn on the TV and women with bare breasts and or romping couples show up during primetime till midnight. In summertime, showing a lot of skin is just as common as sipping your cold bubbly soda.
As an expat with Asian ethniticity, nudity in the western world is more accepted than, say, Asia and the Middle East. After five years (and counting) of living in Vienna my eyes (and my sanity) has become sensitised seeing naked men and women, or everything that pertains to sex, be it on the street, the magazines, on TV, in films, or in books. They have become normal occurrences. Like seeing smooching couples waiting for the bus.
I still remember the worried face of my former publisher after he noticed Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” on my desk. He asked for my age (I was 24 then) and later told me that the book was “only for adults.” Even my choice of reading habit (still loving Anais Nin and erotica) was questioned by some ex-colleagues. One of them was ecstatic after she saw “Last Tango in Paris” on video.
Three years later imagine my great surprise when I tuned in to Vox and saw Lilo Wanders’ show “Wahre Liebe” for the first time. I know I sound like a prudish loser but lo and behold, it is a fact. And as they say fact is stranger than fiction.
So for those of you who patronise the Öffis and, once in a while, get a hold of and read Heute unconsciously, it is a common scenery that on its page 3 or 5 a naked woman or a man often appears. (Which I heard follows the tradition of Kronen Zeitung.)
So yeah, liberal ideas and open-mindedness versus prudery and hypocrisy.
That’s why people like Mag. Johannes Unosson, the founder and instigator of Weniger Nacker.at: Bitte entfernen Sie die erotischen Bilder, has become “somewhat” a sensation and a novelty.
As a Swedish and now a Viennese by choice, he thinks that these “bilder” pollute the children’s minds just by looking at them accidentally. And Heute, as a gratis tabloid, read by multitudes of people using the public transport system, should be responsible.
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Cause we are such great fans of artists, me and my monsieur went to the Egon Schiele exhibition in the Albertina. It was nice, it was interesting, but when we left we got greeted by a chorus about Mohammed. It kinda sounded like some russian army song, but it was indeed a demo about something. i have no fucking clue what they were demonstrating against, nor who exactly it was. Considering that many of them had the Koran in their hand and kept swinging the books in the air like they were holding a sword, i guess it was about the Mohammed Cartoons again. According to a few people we asked, it was either about the cartoons or the invasion of the USA in Iraq. Funny enough that nobody exactly knew what the hell was going on there. The traffic was of course down, hundreds of people standing there and screaming something. Of course the police, our lovely friends and helpers, were there as well, doing sweet fuck nothing. Somehow i am glad they did nothing, you never know how our beloved police reacts when they think someone is treatening them. Everything was rather calm and controlled.
Any ideas what was going there?

Pictures are here: clickety click.

On the label is written:
Attention, here are bulbs sleeping!

Isn’t that cute?
We really have a sweet municipality in Vienna.
;-)

Found next to S-Station Breitensee

We’ll show the wonderful “La Grande vadrouille” at the monochrom space/MQ on Sunday, February 19, 8 PM.
Franz Ablinger will held a lecture.

During World War II… When their combat aircraft is shot down by the Germans, three English airmen parachute to the comparative safety of Nazi occupied France. One lands on the scaffold of an amiable painter and decorator, Augustin. Another lands on top of a concert hall and is rescued by the irascible but patriotic conductor Stanislas Lefort. The third ends up in the otter enclosure in a Parisian zoo. When they try to help the airmen keep a rendez-vous at the Turkish baths in Paris, Augustin and Stanislas quickly find that they themselves have become targets for the German soldiers. Assisted by the daughter of a puppeteer and an anti-German nun, the two unwilling heroes accompany the three airman on a reckless trek across France towards the neutral zone and safety.

La Grande vadrouille is one of the great comic achievements of French cinema. A magnificent action comedy, it had until very recently the distinction of being the most popular film ever shown in France. Its box office sale of 17 million tickets has only recently been topped by the 1997 American blockbuster Titanic. Even today, its airings on French television attract stupendous audience figures. The phenomenal success of the film is a remarkable achievement given that the film makes light of one of the most unfortunate periods of French history.