Playing Hooky or hookey or Hockey?

In my schooldays I was the most proficient in not attending class. Not wanting to boast but I think that I was the best in the whole city of Vienna, in this discipline, then! Instead I often went to some Kaffeehaus. The Hawelka as is depicted here (with the old owner, the old Hawelka) wasn't one of my major hang-outs then, but now and again I paid it a visit, too. Then, in the late 80s the ol guy still used to serve us personally in the morning with a nice warm coffee, a Melange, and Powidltatschgerl (some dough-bakery-intricacy fílled with plum 'marmalade', actually not marmalade but something else that would take me two pages to explain).. Anyway, old Mr. H. has bequeathed his café to his son and grand sons already but he still turns up now and then, I heard...

Nice video, slightly annoying singer (or not? have some love-hate relation to that....ahh, the perpetual agony of choice!):

Via: Les Nouveaux Dandys

Out of the past cometh this New thing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYoJ4fhMlC0

Nice looking loafer

The tongue looks a bit prominent but if worn it ought to be cool and smug. I think that it was some ad in the latest Uomo Vogue fall/winter style-supplement, the only part of that otherwise boring mag. that I am usually giving a closer look.

Barbey d'Aurevilly

“Beloved of Fin-de-siècle decadents, Barbey d'Aurevilly remains an example of the extremes of late romanticism. Barbey d'Aurevilly held extreme Catholic opinions, yet wrote about risqué subjects, a contradiction apparently more disturbing to the English than to the French themselves. Barbey d'Aurevilly was also known as a dandy artisan of his own persona, adopting an aristocratic style and hinting at a mysterious past, though his parentage was provincial bourgeois nobility […]”

For a compassionate and succinct characterization of Barbey d’Aurevilly I’d also recommend the obituary written by Paul Bourget in 1889.

Waterville Jackets

This exclusive North-Italian firm makes nice coats and jackets for late fall and winter. The aesthetic resembles somehow the Barbour-line but with a more elegant cut.

I’d also recommend them to my American (and British) friends both female and male if you can get them over there, or else: it’d be another good reason for visiting the continent.

They are good for storming into a liquor-store before the long weekend and telling the Central-Asian Turk-folk clerk who obstructs your passage and tells you to please take care, Sir that it is he who should take care of the customers. Disgusting if people have no manners, no culture cause then one has to recur to the international language of greed. God, I hate this modern economic primitivism! Anyway, Waterville jackets- buy them!

Paradise Lost!

What has become of the promise that mechanization and industrialization would reduce work and increase man’s leisure?

En Garde!

Beer-duell by Georg Mühlberg: to the left and the right side one can see the opponents (corporated students); the colleague in the middle functions as the judge.

"In der Regel trinken sich die beiden Kontrahenten zu, als Startsignal das Anstoßen oder das in der formellen Austragung das Kommando „Sauft's!!“ des Unparteiischen. Sieger ist, wer sein Gefäß als erster vollends austrinkt und senkrecht abgesetzt hat."
http://de.academic.ru/dic.nsf/dewiki/169856

50 cult-books

A fun article with sometimes intelligently and sometimes funnily written short-reviews of books most of which I knew and some of which I have read; a few I have even enjoyed:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3672915/50-best-cult-books.html

For example:

"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig (1974)
Burnt-out hippy takes son on bike trip. Remembers previous self: lecturer who had nervous breakdown contemplating Eastern and Western philosophy. Very bad course in Ordinary General Philosophy follows. If he’d done Greek at school and knew what "arête" meant, we could have been spared most of the 1970s. AMcK"

"The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield (1993)
Deep in the South American jungle an intrepid explorer is about to stumble on a sequence of ancient prophecies that could change our way of living, even save the world. If only we didn’t have to buy the other novels in that the series to find out what they were! For a similar effect on the cheap, rent an Indiana-Jonesalike film – Tomb Raider, say – and ask a hippy to whisper nonsense in your ear while you're watching it. TM"

The Horseman of the Storm

Every child of the plain knew about the Rider. Some of us had seen Him in the month of august after the harvest when the land was an endless sea of golden stubbles. From time to time and quite sudden a storm would approach and I will never forget the stark contrast of blue sky and dark-grey clouds and the glorious rolling waves of the shorn, sun-coloured land beneath. It was then that some of us saw Him as a black silhouette on the horizon charging headlong towards the oncoming darkness. All kids knew of Him but only I had once seen him closer so to discern some of his features; he had seemed to halt and come toward me before he suddenly reined in his steed and again sped off into oblivion accompanied by the turba ferox of the Wild Hunt.

When we got older we of course found rational explanations for such childish fancies. There was a castle in the village that a Habsburg-emperor (the dynasty from ‘outside the land’, as it was still referred to in my family) had built for one of his maîtresses, and annexed to it was a modern horse-riding school, so that the Rider must have been one of its patrons. Yet I still never believed in such explanations, maybe because of my qualified encounter, maybe due to my otherness or due to the fact that one day he had sent me his envoy, a large black butterfly that only I had seemed to notice: it had flown straight at my face and then had miraculously vanished.

I had forgotten all about it until I was 17 years old and dying on a bathroom floor in Hong Kong, laying there poisoned by a girl for revenge of a murder that I had committed in innocence. There, He threatened to come through the wall, half-visibly looking down on my squirming form and that was when I saw Him even closer and I also saw his flesh-dripping horse. Maybe I made a promise there and maybe I did not care to remember it thereafter, anymore.

Tonight, I saw Him again for the first time in dream. I just woke up: 2:45 a.m., the room is very cold and the town unusually quiet.

The Laphroaig-time of the year!

It is quite healthy, I heard, to leave open the window even in the cooler months of the year to let in some fresh air. With the help of single malt whisky and good knitwear you will be able to achieve this objective, even when the temperature drops below 10°C. Thus you may harden your constitution for your next expedition to Central Asia and eventually- in combination with other longevity-exercises- prolong your life!

Some Knitwear for the cooler season:

From bottom to top by maker: Alan Paine, Loro Piana, Pringle, Knize, Peter Scott, A. Paine for Harrods, Boss Orange, Pringle, N.N. (cut out the label long ago), Barbour, Dalkeith, N.N., RL., most are Lambswool some cashmere...I also have or had a very heavy one from China that a friend from the province of Gansu once gave me but it is nearly unwearable in Europe; you could go outside wearing it when there are minus -10°C and wouldn't need a jacket..

Drinking Wine by Tao Yuanming

Tao Yuanming drinking in the shade of a willow-tree.

Drinking Wine
Tao Qian

I made my home amidst this human bustle,
Yet I hear no clamour from the carts and horses.
My friend, you ask me how this can be so?
A distant heart will tend towards like places.
From the eastern hedge, I pluck chrysanthemum flowers,
And idly look towards the southern hills.
The mountain air is beautiful day and night,
The birds fly back to roost with one another.
I know that this must have some deeper meaning,
I try to explain, but cannot find the words.

Poems Written While Drinking Wine (Chapter V)

In the introduction to his 'Poems Written While Drinking Wine', Tao Yuanming tells us: I am leading a simple and secluded life without many pleasures. Now, that the nights are growing longer, if I have some wine no evening passes without drinking. Alone, only with my shadow to keep me company, I empty a bottle and suddenly feel intoxicated. Thus inebriated, I scrawl some lines of poetry here and there for my amusements sake. Paper filled with verse already piles up high around me but there is no order in it so I asked a friend to copy some of it out […]

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Already as a child, Lampedusa had 'preferred the company of objects to that of human beings'. He spent his afternoons reading or writing in his library. Twice a month princess Alexandra, his wife, received friends of her husband, mostly intellectuals and a few aristocratic relatives.
Source

Following a book-recommendation from this BLOG, which is actually putting me in touch with my long-neglected conservative roots again- I got reminded that I also wanted to read the 'gattopardo' for some time. Judging from the reviews that I read, it could either be a bit boring and long-winded or written in a beautiful lyrical language that poetically dwells in the moment and melancholically laments the inevitable loss of the old world. Let's see...

Short internal note for a political campaign- that is how I want to see Mr. Kirschner presented!

Happy Meditrinalia, Everyone!

In Roman religion, Meditrinalia was an obscure festival celebrated on October 11 in honor of the new vintage, which was offered in libations to the gods for the first time each year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditrinalia

The fascinating world of Auberon Waugh

"The world of Auberon Waugh is a coterie of reactionary fogeys centred on the Spectator and the Telegraph who affect an imaginary style of 1930's gent - Evelyn was the icon. Battered brown trilby, chalk-stripes, sit-up-and-beg bike with a basket full of books from the London Library are the accoutrements. The mind-set is all Evelyn Waugh too - the smells and bells of aristocracy and old Catholicism (recusant priest-holers only - God forbid any happy clappy stuff). Effete, drunken, snobbish, sneering, racist and sexist, [...]"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/jan/19/news.comment

Addendum: of course this article is overly polemic but not only is it -for this very reason- extremely fun to read the author also makes some good points about herself and people in general who are only able to think politically, and in no other way (mainly the off-spring of the Enlightenment). They cannot abide of ‘stupid things’ like aristocracy or religion, things that would help them to look at the world in love or not to take it overly serious or to simply enjoy life. They are modern so all they have is their ah-so-precious selves and anyone who has honestly and philosophically looked at oneself knows what a sad sight that can be- about as sad as some modern art…

Knowledge and Wisdom

To know much but to never think of it!

'For learning you gain daily; for the Way you lose daily.
Losing and losing, thus you reach noncontrivance; be uncontrived, and nothing is not done. Taking the world is always done by not making anything of it.
For when something is made of it, that is not enough to take the world.'
(Daodejing, Chapter 48 [transl. Cleary])

Autumnal Stroll: Zentralfriedhof- Central Cemetery Vienna.

'Opened in 1874, then still lying outside of Vienna's city borders, the cemetery spans 2.4 square kilometres with 3.3 million interred here. It is also second largest cemetery, after Hamburg's Ohlsdorf Cemetery (more than 4 km²), by area and largest by number of interred in Europe.'

Irish Tweed-

Magee of Donegal

Archaikon: Eine Neue Mythische Poetik (Exzerpt)

Audiatur et altera pars.

Tore auf! Und lasst prächtig aufmarschieren
Thelemische Magier, wirkende Hexen und Stregas
mit stolzen Stachelschweinen an Ihren Leinen
aus willenlosen Schopenhauerschen Komplexen;
Sowie Aufguss alter Mysterienschulen von falschen,
Verstandenen Weisen in langen, smaragdenen Roben,
Mit Lapislazuli gesäumte Garderoben
bewacht von jungen Geparden und Globen mit Flügeln
und hermetischen Anachoreten auf Säulen oben…

Als ich vor einigen Tagen hierher an die Südküste der Britischen Inseln kam um Spazieren zu gehen und zu schreiben, dachte ich, ich könnte Frieden finden- doch ich fand nur Langeweile und Horror- !
Es regnete schon seit zwei Wochen. Die Pubs waren mit stinkenden Fischern und dummen Urlaubern überfüllt, die Strandpromenaden waren nicht zu gebrauchen, da sie verschlammt und vermurt waren- Lös und Erde hatten sich mit dem schlickigen Sand vermischt und wurden vom stürmischen Meer weiter verschäumt und vergischtet.
Eines Nachmittages saß ich in der Schankstube über mein Pint gebeugt und dachte über Dämonenbeschwörung und ihre Sinnlosigkeit nach. Vor dem Fenster türmten sich als Kontrast realitätsnahe, dunkelbleifarbene Wolkengebilde während ich jahrhundertealte Kratzspuren auf der schwärzlichen Oberfläche des Holztisches studierte.
Baron Bollocks- ein unverbesserlicher Kretin, den ich zufällig kannte, kam vom Tresen zu mir herüber und erzählte mir in seinen englischen Offiziersoberlippenbart nuschelnd von banalen Jet-Set Abenteuern, die höchstens das Interesse von frustrierten Provinzbewohnern weckten. Er sagte, er habe in Rom mit einem deutschen Schauspieler und einer italienischen Gräfin die Nacht durchgemacht und sei dann gleich gestern am Morgen her geflogen, weil er so große Lust auf ein Ale gehabt hätte: Solche und noch schlimmere Perversionen tischte er mir auf, bis ich gar nicht mehr zuhörte.

Ich dachte an das Problem des Nicht-Seins und seine Beziehung zu pseudo-intellektuellen Möchtegernphilosophen, welche dasselbe in popularisierender Weise vermarkteten. Meine Hemmschwelle gegen die Begehrlichkeiten des Narrentums war aufs Äußerste herabgesetzt, und ich fing sofort zu klatschen und zu grölen an, als Bollocks am Tisch einen Hula-Hoop Tanz aufzuführen begann. Nach nur 5 Minuten wurden wir von den antimediterran eingestellten Einheimischen auf die Strasse gesetzt. Da standen wir nun im Sprühregen bis wir dann doch zu seinem alten, weißen, zweisitzigen, teuer gewesenen, verdreckten Alfa-Romeo Sportwagen rannten.
Drinnen- der Regen wusch gegen die Frontscheibe- drehten wir die roten, abgefuckten Ledersitze nach hinten und ich schnorrte mir eine von Bollocks dicken Zimtzigaretten.
„Hast Du eine Idee, wohin wir fahren könnten?“, fragte ich ihn.
„Natürlich“, sagte er und kurbelte sein Fenster ein wenig herunter um den Rauch in den Wind zu blasen, „wir fahren aufs Kap hinaus. Dort können wir das aufgepeitschte Meer beobachten wie es sich brutal gegen die hohen Klippen wirft und wenn einer von uns es möchte, sogar Selbstmord begehen.“
Ich war einverstanden.

Die schmale Strasse führte uns über einige Hügel jenseits der Stadt und danach landauswärts in Richtung der Halbinsel. Wir fuhren in einem Hohlweg zwischen den Wackersteinen und Zäunen und Büschen britannischer Provenienz dahin bis der nun einfallende Nebel so stark wurde, dass er uns die Sicht raubte. Die völlig verschmutzten Scheinwerfer des Autos taten das Übrige. Bollocks raste beinahe blind mit 80, 90 km/h durch die Landschaft. In einer Kurve verlor er die Kontrolle über das Fahrzeug, sodass wir gedreht wurden und anhalten mussten. Er und auch ich brauchten beide einen großen Schluck aus dem Flachmann mit dem Whiskey, den ich in der Frühe heimlich aus der Vorratskammer meiner Pension gestohlen hatte. Danach wollte auch ich einmal fahren. Natürlich war keiner von uns beiden gewillt auszusteigen- der Regen war noch zu stark, und weil mir Bollocks einfach nicht das Steuer überlassen wollte, setzte ich mich eben auf ihn drauf; er stöhnte gekünstelt wie eine Schwuchtel und startete den Motor. Freundlicherweise übernahm er für mich das Gas und ich konnte mich aufs Lenken konzentrieren.

Die Strasse war nur eineinhalbspurig und wir fuhren genau in ihrer Mitte, da dort ob ihrer gar so konvexen Form sich am wenigsten Regen und Nässe angesammelt hatte.
Einige Minuten später hörte es glücklicherweise auf, der dichte Nebel wurde von einer Windböe zur Seite gerissen und wir konnten ein Stück freien, blauen Himmels über uns erkennen; auf der rechten Seite tief unter uns befand sich der gewaltige, schäumende Ozean. Voll Enthusiasmus und Freude jubelten wir zum Himmelszelt aufblickend die Götter an; seit langen Äonen hatten wir keinen Sonnenstrahl mehr erblickt. Meines Kompagnons Übermut war derart groß, dass er mir sogleich die Whiskeybulle aus der Hand riss (ich hatte sie zwischen Lenkrad und eine neue Zigarette geklemmt gehalten). Gerade in diesem Augenblick fiel mein Blick vom Firmament wieder einmal auf die gar so mundane Strasse.

Dort hatte sich plötzlich eine Schafsherde mitsamt keats’schem Homo- Sapiens -Zubehör, vulgo Schäfer mit gewaltbereit wirkendem Hirtenstock, manifestiert. Stehen zu bleiben war bei unserer Geschwindigkeit keine Option, die der Anstand erlaubt hätte- doch Fortuna war uns gesonnen- linksseits der Strasse bog ein schmaler Kiesweg von ihr ab. Wenn ich es schaffte, mich dort hinein zu schleudern, würden wir und die Schafe überleben. Um den Schäfer, der irgendetwas wie „Ja nicht dorthinein! - Dort wohnen Satamagie-Torrtur-Ritualplasmialien Cthulhuidenfanatiker...“, brüllte, sorgten wir uns nicht weiter- sollte jener Tierquäler doch sehen, wo er blieb. Und was wollte er denn? Vielleicht, dass wir uns auf ihn ipsum oder gar die andere Seite hinunter in den Atlantis-Ozean stürzten? Ha, den Gefallen wollte ich ihm nicht tun, und auch der Baron brüllte hinter mir hervor: „Nein, den Gefallen tun wir Dir nicht, Du Bastard!“

Verdammt, hoffentlich hatte er nicht schon den ganzen Whiskey alleine ausgetrunken…
Doch nun hieß es schnell handeln! Die Schafe der Herde waren bereits nahe der rettenden Abzweigung, da bog ich mit aller Gewalt den Knüppel der Handbremse nach oben und schraubte das Lenkrad quer. Unser Wagen schrammte zur Seite, schleuderte auf der nassen Fahrbahn und drehte sich in den Seitenweg. Ein Schaf, ich werde es mir nicht verzeihen, erlitt eine Beinluxation wie mir schien, doch hatten wir es geschafft. […]

Austrian Polo

http://www.poloclub.at/

Nota bene!

"Ein pfiffiger, junger Mann, der sich im Leben eingerichtet hat, bietet einen der erbärmlichsten Anblicke, den man zu sehen bekommen kann." (Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Notas, p.306)

"Der Humanismus ist die Haltung des Betrachtenden und Genießenden, nicht des Schaffenden und noch weniger des Arbeitenden und Tätigen." (ibid., p.163)

"Der Techniker ist ein Landarbeiter, dessen Hacke eine Formel ist." (ibid., p.263)

Legends of the Fall

I once was together with a girl who was a pianist and she played those études by Chopin up and down for hours while I was idly lying on her bed drinking wine or looking past the window at the falling rain or the dancing leaves.

Lohengrin

I just listened to this right now; this version is partly incredibly fast! Very creative take by Furtwängler there.

Indian Drivers…

…at night; driving without their lights on,
Straight, filthy roads with holes and dead cows and men,
Coloured neon-gadgets on their windshields,
Driving with glazed eyes towards Nirvana.

Between the worlds

Ikebukuro: Chinese immigrants playing Mahjong in the next room- shouting. The walls made of thin wood with broad slits at the bottom and the top- the smoke drifting through. I was reading a pulp called: 'Tale of a Bounty Hunter'.In the morning it got crowded in the communal shower-room. I stayed there for two weeks.

The markings of a man

On a recent trip to Sicily I have noted some features on many of those tough, bucolic but honourable people that spoke of the hardships and experiences of their adventuresome lives. They were: tattoos, scars, missing limbs and physical deformities like bent noses or lop-sided mouths that gave their expressions more impact. To those I would add prominent beards that are not typical on that particular island but elsewhere they could also mark the man of experience hardened in various battles and struggles against the forces of nature.
Two of those I happen to have myself already, but the older one gets, the more likely one is to accumulate others in the course of ones journey.