I've just come back from meeting Mum in Vienna. It was truly a lovely break - intellectually refreshing and stimulating. Concerts and theatre (a very provocative if flawed Jelinek play about the western reception and fetishisation of the Iraq war), cafes and novels, op shops and modern art (the Museumsquartier - MUMOK!).


When I first went to Vienna, my german was a shambling mess, the city was bereft of student life but there was the excitement of a dormant, waiting metropolis there.

I felt that this time, I was able to engage with a living city tense in its own contradictions. The dizzy pomp and elegance of its past head on with a vital student, artistic community. In contrast to Berlin, Vienna appears a city where the hip and modern, is no buried underground thing to be sifted out, but rather institutionalised and woven into the very fabric of the place.

The weather here has been bizarre of late. The other night I went out in a sixties mini-frock and jacket, today it snows.


Just filling you in.



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I'm also rediscovering the joy of vinyl in contrast to the frenetic, disposable character of the giddy mp3 whirl. Taking the thing out of its many sleeves, gently blowing the motes of dust away, the implicit promise to be there still in the 20 or so minutes it takes on one side. Holding music as a concrete object once more. My flatmate's lent me his tweecore record player in a suitcase and I've managed to acquire some very pleasant ditties to enliven my sunday morning sloth.

Australians in Europe X 6
Never ever breathe
Australians in Europe
Get a whiff of that antipodean breeze
Australians in Europe X 2
Higher! Australians in Europe X 3

THINK.
Why did the Great Grandad leave?
Australians in Europe never see.
He was consigned to a boat, after using a huge great cleaver.

Australians in Europe X 4 Never ever.......................
B.R.E.A.T.H.E.
Australians your biggest things rejected,
I have ever seen.
Because the boys use a map and they live in Berlin.
You're like a pair of dogs loose in McGregor's kiln,
you know shit.
Australians in Europe X 5
Wake up and suss the scene.
You'd better leave them parents, and try Hamburg to Berlin.
You're just a bloody Twister, so who do you think your fooling.
Australians in Europe




Yes, aren't I? And in splendid style too (where ever is that cleaver o' mine?). Hamburg to Berlin is a priority, but Leipzig is apparently the new underground in the face of the over-inflated Berlin scene -this is, at any rate, the opinion widely professed by those who would gladly shift to Berlin if the uni there wasn't so beaten about and impoverished.

There is a Leipzig zine/diy fair in May and my Swedish twee-pop friend has Swedish zinester contacts on tap there!

But enough of that, I'm to write long, excruciating Hausarbeiten (20 page essays)and the internet is a wily seductress.

Some highlights from Italy not as yet mentioned: (for purposes of personal nostalgia, if lists are your abhorrence then peruse no further!)


Bologna:

The Dr Dixie Jazz band performing their 30 year long staples in a bricked-in cellar.

The red tower with its panoramas of a ceramic city, then the 'if these walls could talk' moment of archway discourse.

Rome:
Dinners with Jack's great aunt, her view of the Vatican and her apartment a capsule of old Sydney in the midst of the Roman artistic community.

My 21st birthday revisited. Biting into a bitter, stolen orange in an Edenic garden atop Rome only to peer through a keyhole portal to a vengeful St Peters. A tour of the city, its churches, the Pantheon.


Watching gypsy kids while the night away in Carnevale dance and circus performance.

Art upon art reaching its zenith in the Vatican.

A prolonged encounter with an American tour group on a pilgrimage to thank the pope for their home's only partial destruction in hurrican Katrina. Congratulated for my mastery of English despite all handicaps presented by being an Australian.

Our abandoned yet disconcertingly noisy hostel. Two days in Rome on the house, so to speak.

Venice:

The Church de Franti and its superb Titian.

Peggy's house followed by a Bach concert in the domed Basilica on the grand canal.

Our last, glowing sunny day in Venice - no asiatic cholera to be spoken of. The Palazzo Ducale with its memories of entrapped Doges, splendid water views, Tintorettos, Carpaccios and Boschs - marvellous.

Padua:

The 15 dazzling minutes we had booked with Giotto.

Chancing upon a Mantegna fresco cycle, Donatello's rejoinder to THAT mammoth equestrian statue in Rome and De Chirico.

Learning to draw in charcoal and the glow of red wine.
Ravenna:
Padding the deserted streets alone, tracking down gorgeous roman mosaics, such remarkable composites of classical representation and christian iconography.


The train back through the alps.