• One of the rooms we visited in the Schoenbrunn in Vienna was the room used by Franz Josef II for his audiences. Any citizen of the empire had the right to an audience with the emperor, even peasants from the provinces. They were instructed to wear formal attire if they had it, or native costume if not. The descriptions from the time talk about farmers and country people wearing their native costumes, and today the waiting room before the audience room has mannequins wearing traditional garb from the various regions: Tirol, Carinthia, Galicia, etc.
• Empress Elizabeth, known as Sisi, the wife of Franz Josef II, was fanatical about her weight. She dieted and excersized for hours every day. One of the rooms in the palace still has exercise rings hanging in one doorway.
• One of the popular drinks at this time of year in Austria is Sturm — “young wine” — barely alcoholic grape juice.
• When we visited the Alte Pinakothek in Munich to see Breughel, etc., we bought t-shirts in the museum shop by Sean Scully, with the words “Starr/McCarthy: Two Great Americans”.
• I forgot to mention this, and it was important. The Melk exhibit on the town during the Nazi period which I mentioned earlier specifically mentioned homosexuals in the list of people sent to concentration camps. A lot of exhibits only talk about Jews, and maybe political prisoners, failing to mention homosexuals or gypsies.
• I highly recommend Hotel Austria, where we stayed in Vienna.
• When we visited the Wieskirche, there were areas of the church where people had left gifts of thanks, or votive offerings in hope of some holy intervention. There was card for a fireman named Tommy, lost on 9/11. There was also a letter of thanks from a man who had prayed there for God to send him a man, and he was thanking the church for his happiness after finding a wonderful mate. I guess the Church really is often better on a local level than at the archbishop-on-up level.
• I felt bombarded by news about Iraq while we were there. Every paper — German, Austrian, French, etc. — had Bush and Iraq on the front page every day except 9/11.

We went to the NYC premiere of Philip Glass’s new opera “Galileo Galilei” at BAM last night. It was very disappointing. The music wasn’t that interesting, the libretto wasn’t so hot, and the directing was terrible. It seemed like a good idea: Galileo, Philip Glass, and director/co-librettist Mary Zimmerman (Metamorphoses).

As James said, it was more like a masque than an opera, but it just didn’t work. The direction at times drove me crazy. At one point several people are moving in a gondola. It moves because a person at the front pulls it, but there is a gondolier there making the motions. That’s fine, but once they get to the middle of the stage and the boat isn’t actually moving, both the gondolier and the person with the rope at the front continue to move as if it is. I get the idea, but I was so distracted by the fake motion of the guy pulling the boat I couldn’t listen to the music. At another point in the opera, Galileo refuses a drink from a servant when invited to share some wine with an important cardinal in the garden of his villa. I don’t think so. Even if he didn’t drink, there’s no way he would have refused the glass.

Bad art is so depressing.

—

Followup on Thurday: The NYT review. It’s one of the most non-committal things I have ever read. One good quote though:

But without wishing to disparage either Mr. Glass or “Galileo” — which is notably fresher than Mr. Glass’s last few operas — can it really be that, 20 years on, Mr. Glass is still the standard-bearer for what’s “next” in music? Isn’t the festival now an entrenched orthodoxy with a postmodernist accent?

Recriminations Among the Ruins — from Slate.

I hate the gym. Hate it hate it hate it! I hate the blank-eyed pretty boys with bed-head who go over and lift their shirts to look at their abs after doing work on their arms. I hate the ones who wear clothes more appropriate for the Roxy. I hate looking around and feeling like I’m the only one in sight who has read something more challenging than HX in the last year.

So of course you’re asking, “why go?” I started going about a year ago, after attending the funeral of a cousin. We shared the same immune system condition — X-linked Agammaglobulinemia. He was about 10 years older than me, which was enough of a difference in terms of medical advances for his life to be much more fucked-up by it than mine is. I also think he fought having to be treated for it more than I did. His last few years weren’t pretty, and if being in better shape meant it was less likely to happen for me that way, I thought I should try it.

I’m adding David Ehernstein to my blogs in the right column. Check out HIV or SUV, and Loose Cannons.

Jay Bookman, one of the editors of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a very good column from a couple of days ago about the real goal of war on Iraq. It’s to further the goal of people like Cheney and Rumsfeld to finally assemble a global American empire.

The official story on Iraq has never made sense. The connection that the Bush administration has tried to draw between Iraq and al-Qaida has always seemed contrived and artificial. In fact, it was hard to believe that smart people in the Bush administration would start a major war based on such flimsy evidence.

…

This war, should it come, is intended to mark the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire, seizing sole responsibility and authority as planetary policeman. It would be the culmination of a plan 10 years or more in the making, carried out by those who believe the United States must seize the opportunity for global domination, even if it means becoming the “American imperialists” that our enemies always claimed we were.

…

Once that is understood, other mysteries solve themselves. For example, why does the administration seem unconcerned about an exit strategy from Iraq once Saddam is toppled?

Because we won’t be leaving. Having conquered Iraq, the United States will create permanent military bases in that country from which to dominate the Middle East, including neighboring Iran.

Bookman refers in the column to a report issued in 2000 called “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”, available for download from New American Century, which is a conservative think tank. Its authors include quite a few people now in charge in the Bush administration:

Paul Wolfowitz is now deputy defense secretary. John Bolton is undersecretary of state. Stephen Cambone is head of the Pentagon’s Office of Program, Analysis and Evaluation. Eliot Cohen and Devon Cross are members of the Defense Policy Board, which advises Rumsfeld. I. Lewis Libby is chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Dov Zakheim is comptroller for the Defense Department.

I would think Israel would be rather concerned about this if they suspect it’s what we’re planning. If Iraq becomes our “aircraft carrier” in the Middle East, Israel’s strategic importance for us will drop sharply.

AlterNet has a War on Iraq newslog page.

I just saw this story, as I was looking through news upon my return.

Director Abbas Kiarostami, one of international cinema’s biggest names, is blocked from attending the New York Film Festival and speaking at Harvard.

This is terrible. We’re sending the message that the only way for countries to communicate with each other is through war. He had visited the U.S. seven times in the last ten years.

New York Film Festival spokeswoman Ines Aslan said that festival organizers, along with the two universities involved, tried “very, very hard” to convince officials at the U.S. Embassy in Paris, where Kiarostami had applied for a visa, to make an exception for the filmmaker. “It wasn’t that they could not make an exception,” Aslan said. “It was that they did not choose to. It is very sad.” Officials at the embassy told the festival that they would require at least 90 days to investigate Kiarostami’s background — which is well known to film scholars and fans, and contains little in the way of political activity — and process the visa paperwork.

I’m trying to stay up until 10pm so that my sleep schedule will be somewhat back to normal. We got back (to home — the plane landed 2 hours before that) around 6 tonight.

I have notes on the last few days, so I’ll put that up soon. One tidbit to tide you over until then: The airport in Vienna has a cafe called Ikarus, complete with a mural of him falling from the sky. Yikes.

Last night we went to see Britten’s “Billy Budd” at the Vienna Staatsoper. The cast and music were great, but the design and production were lousy. Simon Keenlyside was a very attractive (and beautiful-sounding) Billy Budd, James Morris (Wotan in the Met’s Ring) was Claggart, and Michael Roider was an excellent Captain Vere. I think the Captain is the most interesting (and sympathetic) character in a pretty depressing opera. I had heard it on the radio before, but I had never seen it live. I hadn’t realized how blatant the homoerotic aspects of the opera are, and I’m amazed by what Britten got away with. At one point Claggart sings about his “depravity” while musing on the beauty of Billy Budd. The audience was much better-dressed than a Met audience, even the teenagers.

Afterward we went to the Palmenhaus, which is a restaurant in a Jugendstil greenhouse with at least 50’ ceilings. The food was excellent, but it was SO LOUD.

Oops, I forgot to mention that when we were at the Staatsoper to buy our Billy Budd tickets, we went to Arcadia, the opera CD store on the ground floor. I bought Malcom McLaren’s “Fans” album. It seemed appopriate.

We went to see the Vienna Secession building this morning and saw a beautiful work by Gustav Klimt called the Beethoven Frieze. It’s a visual interpretation of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Klimt has never been one of my favorite artists of that era — I’m more partial to Egon Schiele — but this was fabulous. In the shop you could buy a snowglobe with the building in it.

Next we visited the Academy of Fine Arts to see the Bosch Last Judgement Tryptich, and then went on to the Imperial Apartments at the Hofburg. I don’t normally do so much museum stuff on vacation, but there are so many important works here that I would never see in NYC. After lunch we saw the Imperial Apartments in the Hofburg. We had drinks afterward at Halle, a beautiful cafe/restaurant at the Kunsthalle filled with attractive people (including the waiters). We also walked around the new MQ (Museum Quartier), a collection of buildings near the Hofburg being changed into spaces to be used for temporary contemporary art projects.

We had dinner again tonight at Neu Wien — this time for me to have my first Wiener Schitzel in Vienna. It’s a really great restaurant, with slightly nouvelle cuisine, good wines and service, and a really attractive space.

All of the public squares and parks in Vienna have statues of famous artists who spent time in Vienna — composers, writers, poets, etc. New York should really do the same.