Another wild afternoon in Vienna dominated by the Spanish. Although it seems as though Spain have had more matches here in Vienna than other teams, I did get the impression that their fans were the most lively, the most gregarious, and generally the most fun. They took over Kaertnerstrasse, Stephansplatz, and the Graben the whole afternoon with their chanting, singing, and humourously drunken shenanigans, creating a pleasant festival atmosphere. And, perhaps strangely, virtually all the attractive women were either Spanish or Spain fans…

QED.

As on previous occasions there were hundreds of fans on Kaertnerstrasse, drinking, chanting, singing, and kicking a football high up into the air, often ricocheting off the sides of the adjacent buildings. Here’s one chap doing the honors at Stephansplatz; amazingly, it seemed as though virtually no-one was surprised by an unseen incoming football. On its way up a chorus of rising “whoooaaa!” would alert people below, and as it descended half a dozen or so fists would surge up to punch the ball on its way. Here’s another launch on Kaertnerstrasse.

This poor guy was an unfortunate exception: he was standing there, minding his own business, chatting on the phone and sipping his beer, when the ball cannoned into him sending his beer geysering into the sky. He laughed in surprise—but kept talking to his buddy on the phone—while someone next to him grabbed his hand and finished the job of splashing the beer around, while the crowd contributed by rising chants of “Yo soi espanol! Yo soi espanol!”

Even the police were included in the festivities…

The Spaniards seemed to have all the fun… And this guy was enjoying himself too: he was standing on the Pestsaeule, the monument dedicated to the victims of the plague, dressed in nothing but a Spanish flag, making an enthusiastic racket with a plastic coke bottle filled with gravel and singing what looked like mirthfully lewd songs. Even groups of Germans stopped and gazed in a sort of incredulous admiration.

The wear-nothing-but-your-flag fashion caught on pretty quickly. Even my friend was excited. Even those demure Muslim girls were moved to get into the action, if more modestly.

Cond.: Marco Armiliato

Philip II: Rene Pape

Don Carlo: Franco Farina

Rodrigo: Thomas Hampson

Elisabeth: Norma Fantini

Eboli: Janina Baechle

Production: Pier Luigi Pizzi

Went to the last performance of Don Carlo this season last night, which was outstanding. The orchestra under Marco Armiliato was in top form, the singing was consistently excellent, and the sets were effective. I’d never heard Franco Farina before; he seemed to need a little time to warm up, sliding up into his higher notes as though looking for it, and then unleashing his considerable voice once he got there. Not quite as agile or flexible as many quieter tenors, but he makes up for this in richness of tone and auditorium-filling volume. Rene Pape was reliably very good, particularly his brooding aria lamenting the weight of his crown. Thomas Hampson was naturally fantastic. The lovely little duet between Rodrigo and Carlo (“Dio che nell’alma infondere amor”) was a little rushed by Marco Armiliato, edged towards urgency rather than lyricism, but Hampson and Farina still sounded excellent together. Janina Baechle stood in for Luciana D’Intino, who I was looking forward to hearing—everyone says that she was quite remarkable. Baechle was good, as she usually is; a tad on the shrill side, particularly towards the beginning. She doesn’t have much time to warm up before her main aria, and it sounded a bit harsh.

Tonight there’s the original French version, led by Bertrand de Billy, which might be fun…He’s been doing Don Carlos here at the Staatsoper for some time now, and it was a huge success it opened, so it might be worth checking out. The cast looks good too. But it’s a monster five hours long, and yesterday’s three and a half hours at the back of the standing area seemed quite long enough. Perhaps I’ll go for the first act.

A few pics from last night’s semi-final build-up in Vienna. The Spaniards were out in force again yesterday, with a sprinkling of Russians here and there. Like last Sunday the largest group of people congregated on the Kaertnerstrasse, chanting, dancing, and kicking a football high into the air, sending it bouncing off the buildings. The usual friendly antagonism between rival fans; the Spaniards cheerfully out-singing the Russians, chanting taunts and taking pictures with one another. Or, as here on the left, earnestly wishing one another luck with a sort of may-the-best-man-win camaraderie. It was reported on the news that so many private jets had arrived at the Vienna airport, carrying the new class of Russian oligarchs, that they didn’t know where to park them. Unfortunately the weather wasn’t great; humid, hot, and overcast, and the heavens opened like last night around 7 and poured all night. To the left are three Spanish fans dressed as oranges, perhaps hoping to gather attention but really looking rather self-conscious. Not that many attempts at creative costumes, though there were one or two—the oranges there and a few elaborate flamenco head-gear: not a flamenco hat, if there be such a thing, but a miniature dancer perched on a square head-set. I saw a few of those. Lots of police out too: as the fans were celebrating, several vans zoomed into the vicinity, and about 20 riot police got out, helmets, shields, and all. Most of them were solemn and stern-looking; others, particularly the younger ones, looked rather amused, and looked as though they wanted to join in the fun. On one or two occasions the football that the fans were kicking around landed on one of the police vans, bouncing back high into the air, and recovered by some fan who promptly booted it back into the crowd. Despite the foul weather last night—constant rain from around 7 late into the night—I heard the fans singing until the wee hours. So. Calm until Sunday.

Here’s the finished product: Shiratama, anko, and macha ice cream. My friend actually made the ice cream, which impressed me a good deal. We also added some vanilla ice cream from the Gelateria Hoher Markt (the best in Vienna, in my opinion). She also sprinkled a tan sort of powder over the whole thing, though I don’t know what that is…Delicious.

One more picture: around a week ago I was lounging on the terrace, watching the sunset, and it was so lovely that I was inspired to take a picture. Sunsets in Vienna usually aren’t that impressive, so this one was something special. The sun had already gone down, but it created an incredible glow of reds, oranges and yellows on the masses of clouds over the city. It’s been extremely hot the past few days, with a dense, humid heat most of the morning and afternoon, with clouds rolling in towards evening delivering intense but brief thunderstorms. The shorter spire in the middle of the picture is the tower of the Rathaus, the center of the Euro 2008 Fanzone. Last night’s broadcast of the semi-final between Germany and Turkey was interrupted during the crucial final minutes apparently because of the wild weather here in Vienna—a real King-Lear-on-the-heath, “Pour on, I will endure!” sort of storm, which apparently cut the power to the station from which the signal is broadcast worldwide.

My brother came down with his family, which was nice—they’re moving away from Berlin to the US soon, so it was a nice chance to all get back together again. Here he is with il mostro Lidia, taking out the old Fiat 500 for a brief spin. Here she is again, dancing in the living room. There was a little plastic snow-man toy that would sing Christmas songs when a button on his back was pushed, and she would dance and keep pressing the button until we all had Jingle Bells running through our heads. She’s also starting saying a few words—”juice” refers to her drinking cup; “chu-chu” refers to her ciuccio, or pacifier; she also says “Nein!” a good deal, which is odd since, although they live in Berlin, her exposure to German is rather limited. The next picture is one of the glories of my grandmother’s kitchen: polenta e cunel with contorni—polenta and rabbit with various other side dishes: peperonata, cheese, ham, salad etc. There were several things that my nonna always used to make when we visited as a family when I was younger: polenta with rabbit; gnocchi verdi (gnocchi made with spinach and bread instead of potatoes); pasta al forno (in case you didn’t know, “lasagna” actually simply refers to the sheets of pasta used to make pasta al forno, like “tagliatelle” or “fusilli”); aside from the usual variety of pastas and soups. When my brother went to college and got his first car, he had custom plates made with “POLENTA” on them. I wonder what the Iowans made of that (he went to college in Iowa). The table wine, by the way, is nonna’s standard Spagnolli merlot; the Spagnolli vinyards surround the village, and the bottling plant is just off the main square. Enrico Spagnolli, the man who now runs it, is a vigorous elderly chap with an enormous red nose and an inexhaustible enthusiasm for wines: it’s impossible to drop by there without being offered several glasses of his wines with a rather forceful affability, at any time of day. His speech is intensely Trentino, and I have trouble following him most of the time. But the wine is good, and I keep thinking that some enterprising wine merchant could run a brisk trade importing it to England or the States; even hiking up the cost five-fold it would still be quite inexpensive, and it’s certainly a lot better than much of the stuff sold in off-licenses in the UK.

It was, as I mentioned, by cousin’s wedding, so perhaps I should include a picture or two of that. The ceremony took place in a little chapel connected with what looked like an old aristocratic house up on hill overlooking Rovereto in the valley. Apparently, the groom’s parents had been married in the same chapel about thirty years ago. Lovely place. My cousin had asked me to take pictures for her, so I spent the ceremony, about an hour and twenty minutes, shuffling about the place and trying to look inconspicuous as the priest did his thing and I took pictures. There were about 80-85 people, a percentage of whom were relatives of one kind or another, some of which I’d never met before, others I hadn’t seen for years. Often when I’m visiting my grandmother and walking through the town I’ll pass a pair of elderly ladies chatting to each other on the doorsteps, or returning from the small supermarket on the main square, and they’ll exclaim “Ah, you must be the grandson of Rita!” (Rita being my nonna), and remark on the similarity between myself and my father. This happened a couple of times as I was being introduced to various relatives at the wedding. To the right is the couple. He’s a friendly guy, a builder, who lives in a small town on the same side of the valley, perhaps twenty minutes away. Here’s another picture of Arianna, my cousin, which I rather like. There’s something engagingly Pre-Raphealite about it. And this is the the two of us at the reception later in the afternoon. So there we are. I stayed in Italy for another week after the wedding, cycling and eating and sleeping, and then finally came back to Vienna. I’ll probably head back there in late July.

Rather reprehensibly, I’ve started lusting after a new bike.  At the moment I’m still riding my old Colnago Master Olympic with Shimano 600 parts and Mavic wheels (which I bought second hand around 7 years ago), and I get along very well.  But the occasional “steel is real” comment from self-styled aficionados is sounding less and less convincing.  To tell the truth I suppose I don’t really need it; as I say, I get along fairly well with my old work-horse, and god knows I don’t have the funds for such an investment.  But it is a thing of beauty…I feel my legs twitching just looking at it, and the reviews online (“It flies up hills by itself!”) excite me rather unhealthily.  I was in Italy a few weeks ago, for about two weeks, and went riding most days; there are a lot more cyclists there than here in Vienna, and the range of covetable bikes on display was most distressing.  It is, of course, probably entirely psychological—when reviewers enthuse that they immediately feel the response when they get out of the saddle going uphill, I seem to remember that my old Colnago drags me back like a child clutching onto its father’s leg…Anyway, if anyone out there feels like donating towards its acquisition, feel free to do so.

Perhaps this seems like a rather nasty conservative rant, and I admit that I write all this in a grim mood, but I think, aside from a bit of polemicism, the main point stands. I’m not dogmatic about any of this; it’s just a series of impressions I’ve derived from perusing books and galleries and the local library’s cd collection; I’d quite like to hear an intelligent person’s take on this, should his perspective differ from mine, but alas, I’ve found very few of these. Feel free to leave a comment should you feel moved to do so. I also don’t think this series of impressions is particularly conservative—I think it’s Robert Hughes (a great fan of much modernist art) who said that great art doesn’t yield to the new, it yields to the better. Or something like that. One gets the feeling that many artists, with more energy than understanding, identify in canonical works of the past something novel, something innovative—or better, something revolutionary—and through a perverse logic conclude that what makes an art-work great is its innovativeness, its novelty, in short, its revolutionary qualities. Novelty therefore becomes the benchmark of greatness, and in its name countless aesthetic disasters are created with great confidence. This kind of reactionary thinking reaches its apogee in figures like Pierre Boulez, John Cage and Xenakis in music and at least half (a conservative estimate) of the philosophers/cultural critics to have emerged from France in the past half-century. There’s a resentful dissociation with man, with nature, with, as it were, the pullulating organicism of life in an attempt to achieve some sort of formal perfection. Le Corbusier versus Frank Loyd Wright in architecture; John Cage versus Sofia Gubaidulina in music; Gilles Deleuze versus Alain Badiou in philosophy; Robert Musil versus James Joyce in literature. The same sort of thing operates with performing artists: the styles of, say, Alfred Brendel versus Yevgeny Kissin (or Glenn Gould’s Beethoven). A very instructive contrast is between Brendel’s two books—The Veil Of Order and Alfred Brendel On Music—and the correspondence between John Cage and Pierre Boulez; or between Furtwangler’s Notebooks and any of a dozen or so ‘manifestos’: for Minimalism, Expressionism, Serialism, etc. In all these cases, the self-conscious ‘modernists’ seem to be flying from any sort of artistic responsibility, trying to escape the need to delve inside oneself for insight which is then translated into art. Blank canvases, obsessive word games, aleatory music—John Cage again, flipping coins to determine his compositions. Le Corb, too: his iconic house looks like a set from a low budget 1960′s sci-fi B movie, while Wright’s Falling Water (although I hear it’s falling apart…) has real majesty, integrated with its landscape and thoroughly beautiful. Yet another example, one of my bete noirs: modern opera adaptations. Again, I’m not dogmatic about this; there are modern adaptations that work very well: Hockney’s Zauberflote, for example, or last year’s production of La Fille Du Regiment here in Vienna (which I think went on to Covent Garden and then The Met), by Laurent Pelly (production), Chantal Thomas (set), and Laurent Pelly (costume) was excellent—imaginative, visually interesting, contributing to the drama without being ostentatiously gimmicky. Or the new (-ish) production of La Sonnambula by Marco Arturo Marelli, who sets the action in Thomas Mann’s Berghof, the setting for The Magic Mountain. It works brilliantly, setting the whole thing in a sanatorium; indeed, it works a good deal better than just about any ‘traditional’ setting can because it manages, playfully, intelligently, and relevantly to provide some sort of explanation for Amina’s bizarre behaviour. But for every inspired production there are a score of utterly woeful ones, pretentious, ugly, self-conscious, tedious, distracting, self-important…The first one that comes to mind is the ghastly Parsifal here in Vienna by Christine Mielitz (have I mentioned this before?), especially the first act set. People seem to confuse the controversial with the interesting, with the controversial winning in almost every case. Indeed, sadly the controversial seems to garner the most attention, which is already a positive thing in the eyes of opera companies. Sigh. I once spent an afternoon in a cafe in Paris with Peter Sellars (Sellars with an ‘a’, the director, not Dr. Strangelove, whose name is spelled with an ‘e’), who encouraged my studies of Deleuze but told me that Spinoza, one of the other central figures of my studies at the time (the final one being Whitehead), was dead, his time was like, SO over, and that one should look forward to new things, to our own time, rather than searching for answers in the dust of the past. I rather wanted to ask him, if this were the case, why he spent his career revamping (usually in a rather facile though attention-grabbing manner) old classics: Wagner, Mozart, Bach. He also talked at great length about what I think is one of the keys to this whole issue of innovation-mad modernism: politics. If a psychological factor in such tendencies lies in a resentment of the creative, of the inherently elitist notions of genius and superior aesthetic value—usually because the majority of artists in any given generation are incapable of such creativity—the parallel social factor is in the supposed value of democracy in art. People like Elias Cannetti go on about how classical music is inherently fascistic because it represents a three-fold domination: of the score over the conductor or performer, of the conductor over the musicians, and the product of this music-making over the audience. Similar tendencies can be found in literary studies (New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, etc) and philosophy (most of it springing from the leftist intellectual impetus of the post-war period).

Anyway, that’s all I have time for today.

Oddly there were thousands of friendly and rambunctious Spaniards hanging around downtown, but relatively few Italians. A large group of perhaps 300 fans, mostly dressed in red and yellow, had congregated on Kaertnerstrasse where it intersects with Weihburggasse, chanting and singing and even kicking a semi-deflated football high into the air, letting it land where it may. A group of 20 or so Italians were playfully taunting the Spaniards, whose overwhelming numbers, and inherent boisterousness, made for an amusing confrontation. Here one Spaniard was deriding the Italian performances in the group stage, to which the Italian responded with the old double-handed what-are-you-talking-about gesture.

This Italian guy was the most vocal for the Azzurri fans, shouting himself hoarse with taunts. Here he’s showing off the four stars of the four World Cup victories on the Italy badge to an unimpressed Spaniard. He also led a chant of “I Campioni del Mondo siamo noi!” to the tune of what sounded like He’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain When He Comes. But it was hard to tell.

He was so vocal, in fact, that eventually some Spaniards playfully tried to gag him by wrapping a Spanish flag around his mouth. It was all very chummy in a latin sort of way, the Italians speaking Italian and the Spaniards speaking Spanish, and everyone getting along splendidly.

Spaniards, Spaniards as far as the eye could see…I’m more or less in the middle of the throng, with Weihburggasse just off to my right. Down at the end one can see the round glass facade of the Haas Haus where Kaertnerstrasse opens up onto Stephansplatz.

More Spaniards…

Hedging his bets..

Another typical scene: the big-mouthed leader of the Italians chanting in front of a big Italian flag, while the Spaniards did the usual bull-fighting Ole! with their flags. The repertoire of football fans is rather limited, with both sides chanting the same tunes, and frequently the same words (“Ole, Ole Ole Ole, Ooole, Ooole…”), with the occasional variation. Chants of “Espana! Espana! Espana!” became indistinguishable from rival chants of “Italia! Italia! Italia!”. There were several groups of Spaniards with drums and trombones, however, which livened things up, while the Italians seemed only to have those loud fog-horn things that sound like the QE2 coming into port.

But there are a good number of excellent courses. The best sites I’ve found thus far are UC Berkeley, Stanford, and MIT, each of which offer a substantial number of high-quality lecture series. The introductory courses on astronomy and physics, in particular, from Berkeley are fantastic, and I hope they update the series. Some of the lectures from MIT assume a bit more math than I ever managed to learn, so it’s occasionally difficult to follow, but they come with video, which makes things both a bit easier and more enjoyable. I regret that Alex Filippenko’s lectures—an outstanding series on introductory astronomy at Berkeley—lack this video, since often he uses slides and short films as illustrations, and when he does this it’s not always easy to follow his commentary. But nevertheless it’s been fun to listen to; I’ve been listening to them so much, in fact, that the other day I dreamed I was in one of his classes, on the day that one of the labs was due. I looked into my lab book and found it mostly empty aside from some tepid prose, and the comparison with the neat rows of formulae and calculations in the books of my class-mates nearly made me panic. I remember nervously wanting to blurt out that I nevertheless knew that the heavy elements came from the stars.

There is one rather amusing oddity common to a surprising number of the courses, namely, the disclaimers issued by the lecturers that nothing they will teach conflicts in any way with any religious beliefs the members of the audience may hold. Prof. Filippenko makes this point quite explicitly during one of his lectures, assuring his students that nothing he teaches is intended to undermine religious belief of any kind; indeed, he adds that, after his first year of teaching, he received a number of complaints from offended parents suggesting that he was attacking the faith of his charges. After making his disclaimer, he drops the issue and proceeds to teach his subject—very well, too—in a manner that leaves much Christian doctrine looking pretty feeble, a literal reading of the Bible quite untenable, and, I dare say, rather unimaginative. He makes the eminently valid point that scientific pursuit doesn’t detract from our wonder at the universe (though interestingly he makes his target Wordsworth’s Romantic appeal for an emotional relation to nature, rather than the peculiarities of religious doctrine), but rather increases it; I, at least, was in total agreement, and was left with the feeling that those who are driven to ecstacy at the tears shed by a statue of the Virgin Mary, or those who identify the source of their religious rapture and veneration for Christ precisely in the incomprehensibility of the Resurrection, or the Immaculate Conception, or of Transubstantiation, were somehow limited in their outlooks compared to the kind of wonder expressed by people like Prof. Filippenko. Amusingly, Prof. Thomas Sheehan does something very similar at the beginning of a series of lectures on the historical Jesus (from the Stanford site): he carefully explains that history and theology have their separate spheres which do not overlap, and that none of the methodologies employed or conclusions arrived at need have any influence at all on the personal faith of the members of his audience. This done, he begins his meticulous and scholarly scrutiny of the New Testament, gradually but inexorably dismantling any claim it might have to historical accuracy—or indeed any intention of historical accuracy—like a compassionate dentist who assures a rebellious patient that he wouldn’t dream of meddling with healthy teeth, and solicitously leaves a pair of empty gums. There’s a wonderful irony in this sort of thing; perhaps not the fierce, acid irony of a Strachey or a Gibbon, but an irony nonetheless: mild, eminently sane, almost paternalistic—a kind of confidence based on absolute security, that has no need to resort to ridicule or overt criticism in order to carry its point. I’m reminded of an interesting sort of inverse example of this kind of irony: Pierre Bayle’s Dictionary, in which his vitriolic condemnation of Spinoza’s ostensibly atheistic doctrines was so inept that it was wondered whether it wasn’t actually intentional, whether he hadn’t actually meant to propagate Spinoza’s ideas under the cover of righteous criticism, so as to avoid its being censored by the pious and prickly Dutch burghers (the memory of the grim fate of the Koerbagh brothers perhaps still in his mind) or put on the Index by the more remote but still sinister Catholics. In any case it became, as Stuart Hampshire pointed out, the source-book for all rational and free-thinking men, who in the 18th century collectively brought the Enlightenment to fruition.

And yet this kind of irony, particularly when juxtaposed in this way, does acquire a touch of sadness when one considers that one can still be executed in many parts of the world for blasphemy; and that in one of the freest and most prosperous societies in the world, many of the brightest intellects, sharing their knowledge in institutions of higher learning, still find it advisable to issue disclaimers lest they offend the sensibilities of those who think the Earth is no more than six thousand years old. Of course, I’m not suggesting that it’s their job to confront such issues—let them get on with their work and let the Christopher Hitchens’s of the world take care of polemics. But it does strike me as indicative of at least a slight moral weakness to say that nothing in modern science or scholarship conflicts with religious doctrine, that theology and science (and serious historical scholarship, and philosophy, and the social sciences…) occupy two separate and incommensurable zones of inquiry, however subtly ironic such an admission might be. It is, as I say, perhaps a small concession to make, particularly if the remainder of the 20 or 30 or 40 hours of lectures conclusively demolish the possibility of a literal reading of scripture; but still I would have a greater respect for those who pursue their research, and conduct their teaching, without this concession.

Well, enough for today.

Anyway, I went for a nice bike ride this morning. It’s a lovely day here in Vienna, and the bike paths that run along the Danube provide beautiful vistas on such days. On the outskirts of town there’s Klosterneuburg to the left, a large monastery nobly situated atop a hill surrounded by old trees; a little further there’s what looks like an ancient church perched on another hill, dark and with the appearance of neglect. Here and there the path leads through little towns of small houses with little gardens; the occasional riverside restaurant or little Beisl catering to the cyclists and weekend get-out-of-towners. Much of the path is flanked by trees, and at one point a gentle breeze had dislodged thousands of little clusters of white fluff from the branches, which descended lazily across the path. A beautiful sort of arboreal snowfall through which, in the slanting sunlight and dappled shadows on the path, one zoomed with the particles swooshing all around one. Quite beautiful. On the way back I crossed a bridge connecting the riverbank with the Donau Insel, the long island that stretches for several kilometers in the middle of the river. On the right one can see the motley tower topped with a large golden bell-like structure of the city’s incinerator (I believe), designed by the popular and idiosyncratic Hundertwasser. There are several buildings of his in town, principally the Hundertwasser Haus (in the 2nd district? 3rd?). These flamboyant structures are immediately recognizable: colourful and irregular, as though constructed with globular Legos a child has microwaved out of shape, or multi-coloured bricks borrowed from the landscape of Dali’s The Impermanence of Time. There are a good number of interesting paths around the city, but this one is my favourite at the moment.