In the neighborhood, cont'd

Flach?gau-Wanderung

The Alpine foreland mostly north of Salzburg city has a traditional name: Flachgau.

The flat county. During that recent spring interlude in the middle of winter we hiked one of the highest peaks of those flat lands; Große Plaike, 1,033 meters above sea leave, from our starting point a relative altitude of some 500 meters. A beautiful hike in warm weather, only just that little bit of mud on the way …

Near the peak some of the spring storms of recent years seem to have devastated big stretches of forest; I guess clever foresters seem to be waiting for natural regrowth.

A room with a view

The observation tower of prize winning Salzburg shopping mall Europark as seen from a friendly restaurant that will pass any Elk Test.

New job, more time for oneself; time to shop for new Billy shelves at Ikea.

Slowly by slowly wemo is recovering from his 'overwork' at the former limo service company and enjoying his new job as a 'simple' Funktaxi-driver in a one-car company with one of his best friends as his boss, and a connection with the biggest taxi switchboard in Salzburg city.

Funky taxi, funky town for the for the cabbie out of passion!

Hello to the funky ladies of Lipps Inc!

On the waterfront

Theater & hotel

There's a moon over St. Julien street

Grinding sparks

Hard work for Salzburg main train station.

Graffiti-Gate

Winter returning

Residenzplatz, before

... and after

John Tires disappearing

Dairy Queen, 434 East Wooster Street, Bowling Green, OH (419) 352-8042 ‎

Taken from Google Street View:

http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=de&q=bowling+green+oh+317+1/2+north+main&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hq=&hnear=317+N+Main+St,+Bowling+Green,+OH+43402&ei=YdUyTaOfC4qugQePxZTSCw&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&ct=image&resnum=1&ved=0CBoQ8gEwAA&iwloc=undefined

"Best Dairy Queen ever. This is a family owned place and it really shows ..." (quote from a user review at Google)

Some things never change, it seems.

This was one of wemo's favorite hang-outs way back in the early 1980s … and boy, did he love to count the carriages of those endless freight trains on the tracks! –– What an eager student.

Ernst Jandl, 1925 – 2000

Ernst Jandl at the Wholly Communion poetry slam at Royal Albert Hall, London, 1965

Images from: SILO Academie 23 Blog

Official Jandl website by Random House publishers

Ernst Jandl was not just a musician as a performer of his poetry, also his collaborations with mostly jazz musicians are countless. And he was a great collector of jazz records.

ORF Radio Ö1 presented me with a sleepless night last night – with their presentation of Jandl collection jazz tunes at Ö1 Jazznacht. What a great selection from Chico Hamilton to (Austrian) Spontan Musik Trio, with classics by Albert Ayler, Ghosts, or Michel Petrucciani.

Moving ancedotes by pianist Uli Scherer who frequently went on tour with Jandl: why wouldn't Jandl do more than 5 gigs per year with his 'band', even though they could have been sold out a lot more often? – Well, growing old, he wanted to make sure he would die in his home town Vienna …

A complete playlist of the program will be online later via the link above.

"You're so vain …"

"… you probably think this blog is about you, don't you?"

Soundtrack by Carly Simon,

with background vocals by Mick Jagger

wemo & the blogwart have strictly refused to accept any association with this post,

image or text.

So be it!

Pha***c Mönchsberg

Now, what the f*x!!

Mister Mister, blogwart

Künstlerhaus – Artists' Red

"when it's dark, it ain't half bad really, but by day: what a horrible red of that 'artists' house'! Them oughta have learnt a decent job! – We gotta move those refrigerators, we gotta move them color TVs!"

Local lore from Salzburg city, Austria,

brought to you by foreign correspondent Mr. Dr. Hammerhead,

for World At Large News, worldwide

Soundtrack recommendation, by Dr. Mr. Hammerhead:

Dire Straits

Money for nothing, and the chicks for free

Once again, the blog team is split:

wemo's going for pt. I, the back office crew for pt. II, and the blogwart is apalled.

Festival Halls

"Back there you see them festival halls, no idea what's goin'on in there; is for all them rich folk …

and front it's the pedestrian zone – rilly dangerous every morning, a man might'a be run over by a delivery van there …"

Order, order!!!

This the blogwart speaking!

This is a blog by an academic from Salzburg city!

What's going on, and where's that language coming from?!

Fortress in the mist

"Well, you know, in them days of old, there were those prince archbishops and them built that castle up there in the mist and it was meant to keep us humble town folks way down, kinda low-life, ya see?"

One more gripping statement from Salzburg town folk

Winter's Day in Salzburg

Remember Frank Zappa? – "… but I got a crystal ball …!!"?

"Well, this is Salzburg city, and us locals we got golden balls. Some call it art, for us regular folks it's just basics: what's a man gonna stand on if a man's gonna do what a man's gotta do?"

Thanks for that deep insight into human nature!

This is Mr. Dr. Hammerhead coming to you live from Salzburg, Austria, Europe, on a warm, rainy day in January 2011

Bike – arte povera

To me this weird, bronze cyclist always had one meaning only:

it was a symbol for the non-connectedness of the Salzburg city bike paths; the wheels not connected like the bike routes. By now Salzburg has one of the best bike path systems imaginable. – So, isn't it about time to remove this symbol of lack and maybe have a new work of art here to symbolize plenty?

Serbian kitty

November sky

Elvis, Elvis!

As everybody on the blog team seems to just love Elvis Costello,

and wemo's getting sentimental about his academic year abroad in Bowling Green OH, USA,

1982, the very same year when 'Imperial Bedrooms' was released and available at Finders Records, B. G. where

'The Best' were burning down the house at the best-liked rock club in town

(many nice Harleys parked outside every night) …

so let there be an homage to great Elvis Costello and his unique glasses; here as a charming young man – and ain't he lovely … if anyone of us was, say, like … smashin' Dolly Parton, we'd just know what a woman's gotta do … well ever since, Elvis met a nice lady, and seems to have moved in with her, so even smashin' Dolly would've kept her fingas off.

Let them be happy ever after!

** xx !! – blogwart's just tryin' to get some 'Order!' into those crazy,

loveable weirdo fans

Bring on the night, once more

By day it was labelled 'pink sun screens', by night it's colored 'concrete poetry'.

Train station blues, remembered

Well, wemo's not been able to record the progress of Salzburg's biggest construction site, the main train station rebuilding. One view still looks just the same: the exterior of the main hall (while inside everything is changing), and the light column in front of it.

Still a beautiful sight.

Remembering summer

… and one of my favorite hang-outs, with original pre-1989 East Berlin charms, and a garden bar that looks like a steel container but really is poly… poly… something synthetic, from a ship-builder's, anyway,

… which has reminded the sound technician of Elvis Costello's old song Shipbuilding, which everybody in the blog team seems to like and remember. Hello to old Elvis! Gotta send some sturdy spex round to his villa, some day …

Remember bag-man

I was wrong when I thought I saw a bag lady's possessions under the bridge head of Staatsbrücke. It's a gentleman and he's fighting darkness in his unique way: he started gardening last summer saving the little donations of passers-by for new plants and seeds.

Hopefully he has a warm place to stay in cold winter nights!

Loop-di-doo

"Infinity in a finite object" …?

Now, with the blog theorist gone on a sabbatical,

the blogwart still trying to link (Lacan's) jouissance to Candle in the wind,

while trying to disperse any far-fetched associations to "Life is hard and then you die" (see below on the blog),

while holding back the the tears 'cause for reasons unknown The Righteous Brothers' "You've lost that loving feeling" came to his inner ear,

with the sound technician working on a re-loop of some of Neil Young's greatest guitar feedback (Arc / Weld, and more) tracks – and somewhere, in the back of his head, someone in an unknown audience is screaming 'Tar Babies', strange, but true,

and the back office crew once again in a meeting or gone fishing (one in a synthetic fur coat, one took an ice-pick along to the frozen lake),

wemo practicing his tractor skills as a 4-year old,

gaffers, riggers a.s.f. applied, but were never called back,

sadly, there's no-one around to comment this incredible screen-shot except for the blogger's knee, but, alas once more, that never has been very outspoken …

The photograph on this post is best looped – correction: viewed! – on a Mac with Mac OS X 10.4

in brushed aluminum design.

As so very often, nobody will accept any responsibility for the external links on this post.

Letzte Meldung:

Während wir die Ausdünnung unseres Blogteams bedauern, hat sich ein junger, vorwiegend deutschsprachiger Praktikant bei uns gemeldet, dzt möchte er noch anonym bleiben.

Vom blogwart freundlichst begrüsst, sei er doch ein Student von Klaus Theweleit in Freiburg, mit einem interessanten Diss-Thema:

'Anti-Ödipus verlinkt. Der Blogger und das Internet als Wunschmaschine.' –

Hm, zumindest der blogwart findet das interessant und schickt dem blog theorist gerade ein SMS.

Die back-office-crew fand ihn 'vielversprechend, aber verwirrt', und hat zur Sicherheit eine Flasche Wein aufgemacht.

Der Sound technician wiederum legt etwas Albert Ayler auf, altes Vinyl, was weiß ein Fremder, und das mag er wieder, der Jungspund. Naja, mal sehen. Wir sind da nicht so!

Wer hat das jetzt hingeschrieben – wo doch außerm Knie keiner mehr da ist?

Hard surfaces

"Life is hard and then you die."

Just a quote – from 1980s (?) band It's Immaterial. Nothing to do with anyone round here.

Says the blogwart.

Granter

For a better 2011

Went over my photo archive from last year, and it looks slightly barren, just 1177 photographs, not even a hundred per month? Not the wemo we used to know. And long, long intermissions on the blog. Just too much work on the job, and hardly any restful early mornings driving with time for a sunrise to be shot and enjoyed.

So, here's to a better 2011!

Thanks to a few friends who got worried and helped me get off that workaholic nightmare.

Happy new year, v.2

After seeing those season's greetings below somebody in the blog team got the screaming fits: "What about winter as it used to be, what about my tractor and the little snow plough of the olden, golden days?!"

There we are. Happy new year!

Phew; that was close. It's heartbreaking to see a competent adult turn into a little kid that's so terribly in need, of something so easy to get. It just takes someone to do it. Luckily this is a big multiple personality blog team, there's always somebody helpful around.

Season's greetings once again, from wemo, from the nasty lads of the back office crew,

from the sound technician who's just piping in Over the rainbow,

from the blogwart who's trying to relate Candle in the wind to Lacan's jouissance,

and they're all not a big happy family, but humans in all their need and distress,

and a feel for the needy – and with just a few simple means to help

when it's needed, and the awareness to stand back

when it's due.

"Let's hope it's a good one!" – 2011, c_Human rights, human needs, & human awareness

for all the good-willing

Happy New Year! – and an announcement

With the blog theorist currently on a sabbatical – for his ground-breaking study on Multiple Blog Personality Disorder Syndrome (wonder why he took so many notes round here recently?) – well, for the moment we'll have to miss out on his little lecture that would have been due right here & now: 'Auto-referentiality in post-modernism 2.0 and the doppelganger motif in German Black Romanticism in the light of Jacques Lacan's concept of the 'Real' as opposed to traditional symbolic theories and their concept of the Sublime'.

Once he's back, we'll love to get that slim 2 hour tour package to a theater near you!

Got a sneak preview of his manuscript: barely 200 footnotes there, easy stuff, yet enlightening, especially with his newly developed multi media presentation system.

As a little preparation work you might just brush up your Lacan: still familiar with the concepts of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic – jouissance?

As for the practical applications you might just want to re-read Slavoi Zizek's 5 volumes on Lacanian analysis of Hitchcock movies; then work out your questions for the discussion: it will be mostly on the implications of web 2.0 for the theory of the Imaginary, and why Schubert's 'Doppelgänger' was a predecessor of the discussion of identity and loss in The Matrix.

Sheet music will be available at the doors!

Come to think of it: it might just add that extra something to your enjoyment/jouissance, if you also read wemo's thesis on Matrix beforehand; it's based on an unreleased editor's cut that was destroyed by the production company's law firm shortly afterwards. wemo was slightly injured in the incident, and a doppelganger of the film editor has been haunting some 50.000 copies of Gibson's Neuromancer ever since. The effect is especially gruesome in the e-book versions; watch out before download!

wemo's thesis available at Salzburg University Press, Salzamt division, 500p., € 250.00 or $ 325.00 incl. VAT, postage and packaging not included.

I'll just take it for granted that you're familiar with Kant's three Critiques, those two compact volumes of Deleuze's theory on cinema, and Karl Sierek's theory of the visual paradigm as developed in passing in his analysis of Blade Runner, a lot of basics there in that little essay, not to be missed; – you're with me, aren't you?

There will be handouts in Sanskrit, for reasons to become clear during the lecture (it's got to be about Zen and the perception of 'reality', hasn't it? Just an educated guess there; let's see).

All set? Then: Happy New Year! Signed Mister Mister, blogwart