A Happy New Year!

The Liechtenstein Museum in Vienna

...sadly closes its portals but the gardens will still be open to the public. You can still visit on the 30th and get some free catalogues of past exhibitions. The collection is very ideosyncratic with a strong focus on the Baroque including not only paintings but also furniture and statues. The palais itself is also great with frescoes by Rottmayr on the ceilings...many concerts have been held there in the past, both lucrative for the artists and the audience.

Heiner

Merry Christmas!

I'll be away over the next few weeks and wish you all a blessèd Christmas. I'm off to some skiing, Alpine boozing with spiritual exercises and visting friends and family in Liechtenstein, Switzerland and elsewhere. All the best to all of you and yours and let's get together for a new round of internet craziness soon!

The Family Palais:

Romanticism

'To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.' (Novalis)

K.& k. Perfumer:

Over 200 years old, this shop has always been on the same address. Eau de Lavande, originally created in 1892 could make a good (last minute?) Christmas present.

The Lost Weekend by Charles Jackson

"Adulthood came through with none of the pledges you'd been led somehow to believe in; the future still remained the future-illusion; a non-existent period of constantly-receding promise, hinting fulfillment, yet forever withholding the rewards. All the things that had never happened yet were never going to happen after all. It was a mug's game and there ought to be a law. But there wasn't any law, there was no rhyme or reason; and with the sour-grapes attitude of “Why the hell should there be”- which is as near as you ever came to sophistication- you retired within yourself and compensated for the disappointment by drink, by subsisting on daydreams, by living in a private world of your own making (hell or heaven, what did it matter?), by accomplishing or becoming in fancy what you could never bring about in fact."

 Especially in the last two years it was one of my past-times to enjoy books about drinking. I've read through Bukowski, Fallada and many others but compared to most this one was very good with a succinct and subtle psychology to it. I can recommend it; this could also very well mark an erstwhile end to my Sturm und Drang hard-liquored drinking career since recently and surprisingly even to myself it tends to bore me. From now on I want to read more philosophy again and today made this resolve: I will- as far as I can- drink half a bottle of red wine every day of my remaining life. Red wine is always a good investment be your future luck up or down, it will always satisfy you but only if you will drink it and never speculate with it.

Josef Weinheber

It was my grandmother who first introduced me to the poetry of Josef Weinheber. Then, in my early teens, I found it a bit too provincial and soppy but upon reviewing it recently I came to realize and appreciate its intrinsic quality. It surely sometimes has a pronounced local Viennese note to it, often charmingly so, at other times it is decisively anti-modernistic even classicistic, evoking old eternal truths. Oskar Werner reading a few of Weinheber’s poems.

Some Scarves for Winter:

 From the top: Boss, Barbour, Royal Country Sport (some obscure local- company), Gant, Daks (the cashmere version of course! I bought that over twenty years ago), N.N. (I cut out the label long ago), Mila Schön Cashmere, Franco Ferrari, Paul & Shark, Alpaca from Peru, Burberry. This post was inspired by M. Lacroix who posted some of his scarves the other year.

A Village Called Christkindl

No Trachten in Town!

This doesn't pertain to Japanese or American tourists who want to wear funny Tyrolean hats or buy traditional clothes and wear them in the city or to provincials who happen to visit the capital for a few days or participate in folkloristic musical performances on national holidays here in Vienna but to persons from the provinces who either work or study here for a longer time. I am aware that this rule is already some sort of an atavism though; it is a bit ridiculous to admonish those who say wear their Steireranzug to church on Sunday instead of a normal suit or jacket trouser combination (since hardly anyone wears either) but still: traditions have to be remembered by somebody!

Edward VIII

Not only paradigmatic for the whole of the 20th century in his style, Edward was also very popular with his subjects but Churchill and certain politicians as well as parts of the FBI opposed him. One wonders what would have happened had he not abdicated. Maybe there would have been no war between Germany and Britain (and the U.S.)...