20181031-1101: JFK | Gatwick

Sutphin Blvd-Archer Ave-Jamaica station is the collision site of suitcase-wielding global travelers and hyperlocal homeless folks who are begging for unused metro cards, spare change and delivering threats to anyone who touches them. The travelers, who are mostly white, try to ignore the vagrants, who are mostly black, although it’s clear that not only does everyone see and flinch for a moment in fear, but they take a final note on their way out of New York; the former treat this area like a purgatory through which to pass before reaching a promised land; the latter treat the area as an fishing hole to try to lure those sympathetic tourists one last time.

The station architecture must be the identical twin of the Port Authority, separated at birth: similarly it houses the visual repository of every suburban mothers’ worst dreams, Time Square circa 1980. Jockeying through the crowd and defunct escalator, one gasps for air outside the station entrance, where one sees Europa Bar, a gentleman’s club which may or may not be open for business, but still has a 2.5-star rating on Google maps. Options.

Norwegian air is considered an economy airline but I made amends with my overweight luggage costs by considering the costs simply part of my flight fee, which, although would not have been the cheapest, it would have still been cheaper than some airlines and with the luggage costs would have been part of other airlines’ fees also. The flight was on a 787 Boeing Dreamliner. Gorgeous plane; this was the first time I've ridden one. They didn't overlook any opportunity to remind the passengers of the features of the plane, which include blue LED lighting to be more relaxing, improved air circulation to reduce jet lag, and nine toilets, asymmetrically distributed through the cabin. The nearest to me was adjacent to the mast of the central seating row, on the starboard side. The most expedient way to get to the bathroom was to pass in front of the central row, between a wall and three passengers' feet. A British couple seated there had been complaining about another couple who sat in my row–who appeared to be a mid-50s gym-junky and his busty, exotic wife 15 years his junior. The gym-junkies kept accessing their luggage, which was stowed above the Brits. I had overheard the gym-junky apologizing at one point, and earlier I had suggested the husband go to the bathroom across the aisle when I saw him waiting to pass someone in my aisle who was waiting for the bathroom. About an hour into the flight I went to the bathroom, also passing in front of them. On my return, I found the woman slouching down, almost lying in her seat, with her toe against the wall, in what I would learn as an attempt to inhibit my passage. When I excused myself to pass, her husband said, "I'm sorry but you're not supposed to pass through here," and extended his foot also. Without pausing I simply stepped over both to of them and then asked of him, "Oh really?"

Being over international waters, and neither of them wearing a Norwegian airlines uniform, I wondered about their expectations in dictating my behavior, or expressing their disfavor in having people passing in front of them. I wonder if their tickets were more expensive and advertised greater leg room.

The notion that there is some set of international etiquette as best understood by the British is a lingering sentiment from the Age of the British empire. The sense that one is entitled firstly to free space in a (pseudo) public forum and second that one has the right to try to enforce it is a disposition that has a specific point in the matrices of self-value and self-righteousness. Another, different point, is feeling that one doesn't want to impede, doesn't belong, or prefers to accommodate. The element of assertion and attraction to confrontation is unique. Of course, the disposition to face opposition, look it in the face and step over it, is unique also.

I’ve been anticipating this trip for over a year and what I recall of the positive excitement has evaporated. Now I’m just tired and stressed, trying to recall how to get back to creativity. Is creativity the way to positivity or the other way around?

The mental image of this trip has shifted from being solo to Vanesa accompanying me to being single but her being in Spain to a few couple trips while in residence. Mental images–creating them, befriending them, carrying them, spending time with them takes energy; recreating one, or aborting one is exhausting. Most recently, I've been looking at this trip as a chance to escape the daily horror that is the United States since Trump has taken office. The last week was particularly intense. It began with my patron-saint, George Soros, receiving a bomb in the mail. On Wednesday, CNN, located two blocks from my office received a bomb. The whole week was tense. When the finally caught the guy and some repose was in order, a psychopath attacked and killed 11 people worshipping in a Pittsburgh synagogue, in the neighborhood of a coworker. So my escape to Graz is a much-needed pause from the calamity that is the United States.

In the last months, my preparations have shifted from familiarizing myself with basic A1.1 German to reading about colonial era waste management. Most of the literature is academic and dry, with the exception of Daniel DeFoe’s Journal of a Plague Year. What’s remarkable about DeFoe is that his book is both about the utopian idea of a city and the description of calamity. In addition to being a proponent of the narrative form, DeFoe’s work is distinct from the canon of European plague literature that is ripe with existential and religious skepticism.

Technically my preparation has included buying more filming equipment, as I'm imagining two forms of production: studio interviews and ambulatory footage. It seems a shame to travel across the world and not walk around a city. But certainly, I've overpacked, or perhaps I should have brought a bigger crew.

The last time I was in London Gatwick was following the inside advice of Bob Limbocker who told me it would be cheaper to get to Barcelona by first laying over in London and then taking a cheaper regional airline. That was my introduction to Ryanair and easyjet. I had not recalled any details from that leg of that journey but visiting it now, I recall the place.

London Gatwick doesn't seem to have a distinctly planned shape but rather extensions that mutated off of various passageways as a necessity arose. Labyrinthian would describe it if there were only one possible exit or entrance, instead all passages seem to egress.

The area for special needs–blind, aged, or immobile–is especially humane and impressive. Immediately upon seeing it I noticed how many people were in the airport who were coming from or going to the area, or who were relying on the signage and symbols that emanated from it. It was awe-inspiring and beautiful to see some types of persons that my city doesn't accommodate traveling internationally.

I will say only this of JFK airport: TSA is a terrorist disorganization. Pure chaos. Pure stress, served with an appetizer of boredom. Ocasio-Cortez talks about ICE needing to be abolished, but I vote for abolishing TSA first. Since 2002, this theater has been diligently seeking out the rudest, least friendly, least intelligent members of American society and given them a position of encumbrance. The systematic security passage and friendliness of London Gatwick makes JFK look like FEMA in an emergency situation. In the 17 years since 9/11, the English have created rolling, hand-powered conveyor belts that carry empty trays below a doubled-wide table that allows six people to undress or unpack their bags while a person waits behind them. Whichever person finishes first, can pass his tray behind the tray of the anterior person via a second rolling table, through the x-ray screening. I would estimate that are 20 of such stations, which are fed by a complex web of stanchion paths, which are administered by a team of five individuals, one who sends travelers down a pathway of 1 of 5 pathways, which terminate at a junction of four possible paths which are administered by another individual.

Vueling didn't charge me extra for my overweight luggage. Nor did they weigh my carry-on bag. The flight itself was about 10% occupied, although my row was fully occupied by two medium-sized, rotund Austrians. Of the 11 rows in front of me, four people were seated. But the two men who sat next to me were very courteous and well mannered, as one expects from Austrians.

Arriving to Vienna I picked up my luggage and noticed the City Express train selling tickets throughout the airport. Many airports offer this sort of privately operated transportation services targeted at tourists. They remind me of the children who beg for money from tourists in many city centers of poorer countries. Local travelers and those familiar with the city prefer to take the local transport; in Vienna that's OBB. I bought my ticket to Graz at the same time, for 39 euros.

We passed a cemetery with high, rock walls. I wondered if they are walling people in or out. A group of military men were getting into their cars, parked outside the cemetery gates.

There is a lot of graffiti along the train line corridors.

I got off at Rennweg and rolled my suitcase to my airbnb on Landstraßer Hauptstraße. My host sent me the combination for the key outside the door and I entered into the darkening passageway, not thinking to look for a light switch. The instructions were for apartment 10 on the first floor, but I forgot that the ground floor is zero in Europe, until a neighbor pointed me up to the first floor. The apartment is palatial but sparse. Every door hinge cried for oil. The toilet, a typical German style, ventilated to the hallway entrance to the apartment. I presume if one forgets his keys he could wiggle through this window. There are three bedrooms in the apartment, each with a number over the door. There are three hundred reviews for this place, and I presume that all three rooms appear like mine: two single beds with red sheets, and lumpy pillow, a gray comforter, folded to fit, a green recliner with matching footrest, table and two chairs. Curtains.

I dropped my things, showered and walked out to see the neighborhood. I learned that there was an U Bahn station only three blocks from the apartment, while my OBB station was almost 15 minutes walking. I found a T Mobile store, which was closed prior to termination of business hours, at which point I learned today was a holiday, All Saints Day.

The streets were quiet. No business was playing music. Only restaurants and bars were open. People whispered on the sidewalk. No honking. It was tranquil. A horse and carriage passed down the street; above it were Christmas lights hanging, waiting to turned on. My hunger hadn't caught up to the new schedule, so I decided to go to bed at 8 pm.

20181102: Wein | Schaumbad

I woke at 6 am and texted Vanesa, who was still awake partying with the Telenovela that was sleeping on our couch. With only the morning in Vienna, I made haste into the crisp air, before the businesses opened, before the workers started their commute, before crowds formed.

My first stop was Stephensplatz. I wanted to film the Graben public bathrooms, which claim to be the oldest functioning public toilets in the world. Outside of the Herren bathroom were men working PVC piping into the ground. They were part of the many municipal workers out today; everyone awake at 7 am drove trucks or vans. The garbage men work in teams of four. One driver, one man hanging the garbage bings onto hooks at the rear of the truck and flipping the bins empty into the truck, one man bringing bins from the sidewalk to the truck, and one man bringing bins from businesses to the curb. The whole endeavor is fast and almost without litter. The garbage trucks are much smaller than in New York, having to fit into more narrow passageways and make tighter turns.

The toilets’ operating hours are 8 am to 8 pm. One descends into a marble-lined Art Nouveau room with antique urinals encased in glass display, opposing modern, low-flow urinals. One passes through a door to enter the room for toilets where the sliding doors are locked open until one pays the attendant, who removes the lock. The stall has a fogged glass doors that slide on wooden frames. A sink fits in one corner, and the toilet in another, with a wooden seat and wood back–where I presume the pipes or water tank is hidden inside; it stands about five feet tall. At the top is a brass knob that one pulls up to activate the flush. All of this is within a four foot-square area.

I ate breakfast at Anker, a chain of bakeries founded in 1891. I watched the steady flow of people come in and order and their manner of placing an order. Afterward I headed to T-mobile to get a European sim card with faster data. I stumbled over my bad German at the store, and the employee switched to fluent English and quickly sold me a an 8GB plan for 20€ and handed me the SIM card, but didn't give me a paperclip to pop out my old sim, so I spent the next few hours passively glancing everywhere I was going to spy something small. I finally ended up nicking a sliver of a chopstick off, which I saved in my phone case for any future sim swap.

I seemed to have lost my sense of direction in Vienna. I blame this in part due to the winding streets, the German names, which I tend to forget easily, the frequency of paths to change names, and the existence of smaller, sort of entrances (hof?) that look like driveways but area actually streets. In the course of trying to find my bearing, I noticed the strange reoccurrence of the word 'Vienna' inscribed in some buildings. Not signs, but inscriptions, or bas reliefs. Why would the English name for this city be here? In other places, sure enough, 'Wien' can be found. There didn't seem to be an order of age or style or function of building that carried the English name of this city.

I’m not convinced that people are paying for the Vienna U Bahn. I saw couples pass through the open gates at the entrance to the station, holding hands, and raised them in glee over the ticket validation station, without breaking hold. Only tourists from Spain, whom I saw trying to figure out the automated machine, paid, as I had. On the trains I have not seen anyone enforcing the tickets.

Entering from the U Bahn into the Hauptbahnhof is strangely similar to the Jamaica station and JFK airport in New York. At first, there's a sense that the architecture is functional but outdated. A long corridor opens into atriums with narrow stairways leaning against the wall, extending up to train terminals. A series of monitors states the departing and arriving train destinations, time and platform above a series of printed daily schedules of routes. The brick interior could be an old exterior, and feels like a child of the 1970s. And, like the vagrancy of Jamaica station, a young man asked me for a Euro at Hauptbahnhof! But very soon, the old caste of transit centers as a machine for movement dissolves aways and the contemporary transit center as a place to shop, eat, drink and hang out unfolds.

I bought a pair of Nike shoes for the gym at a sports equipment store in Hauptbahnhof for 49 euros. Black. The public bathrooms are turnstile operated with a small fee, which seemed out of place, given the socialist tendency and advocation of the public sphere. Though this is in keeping with the old toilets at Graber. Going up to the platform is impressive. The diamond-shaped apertures in the roof accentuate the waving undulations overhead. The platforms are only one story off the ground, but the designer, Swiss architect, Theo Hotz, made the space feel incredibly expansive and elevated.

In good Austrian manner, the train arrived and left precisely on time.

The train ride from Wien to Graz is gorgeous. After a few stops in Vienna, the train begins passing small villages with farming plots in rotation. Dairy cows grazing the hills. In almost every village we pass I saw someone jogging. The land becomes more mountainous and the patchwork of alpine trees becomes visible. By Payerbauch-Reichenou the full gamut of autumn colors had painted the hills. The train hugs one mountainside until finally shoring up the courage to cross a bridge over a canyon, the view opens up through a valley until the train can hug another hillside. Yellows. Burnt Sienna. The green fir trees. Lime undergrowth.

The silence of the Austrians is a national treasure. The trains are so well engineered and maintained that it’s hard to tell that they’re moving. Even in the winding hills, the rails barely growl. I thought of the trains in the US–Amtrak, MetroNorth, and of course the MTA subways. At one point, we passed over a bridge and a light whir sound began. I waited until we were no longer on the bridge and when the whir didn’t stop, I realized it was actually the sound of forced air inside the train car.

No one is on the phone. I realized I was in the Quiet car when someone started to softly snore.

Breitenfeld metal recycling.

Mürzverbrand water treatment.

The train finally arrived to Graz and I stepped off, looked in both directions for which of the two exits made the most sense to try locate Franz, the receptionist from Schaumbad who was tasked to pick me up. On the third glance right I saw him emerge from the crowd and casually walked toward me as if I had seen him before and we exited together. Franz's English was minimal, perhaps as little as my German. We drove in silence, with the exception of his pointing out the Schlossberg.

Iris met us at 2 Bürgergasse, Priesterseminar in front of the Dom. Franz helped unload my things and Iris showed me to my room, #339. The marble floors in the hallway recall the ancient past of this building, which has been well preserved, encased in modern windows and glass partitions that control movement, temperature and health. It was built in the 16th Century for priests. One can best see the eons past while descending the stairs, noting the worn porous stones, sloping in the center, which darkly contrast light gray marble in the hallway. On the ground floor an entire different stonework is present. Rough, aged, waxed.

Opposite my room was the town cathedral. I looked directly into a vertical stained-glass window protected by an aftermarket metal mesh. A pattern of three columns of circles, about the size of the bottom of beer bottles, run vertically down three columns of glass, which tapers at the top into three triangles divided by three leaf-shapes created by the sandstone framing. The translucent trinity.

My room was a one-bedroom with private bathroom. One enters through a solid wood door with an overlapping lip that seals the door frame. The entrance has wood panels and a low ceiling, so it feels like entering a ship. Two closets in the entrance and two bookcases inside the room, a single mattress, nightstand with lamp, two wooden Ikea chairs and matching coffee table, and a third white Ikea chair. All appeared new or close to new. A large writing desk sat in the corner near the double-pane windows, drapes and electric heater. The room colors were yellow birch wood, pale blue and white. I had a little anxiety about this living space; New Yorkers always do. We're so accustomed to being shafted and jammed into sardine cans that our trauma becomes part of our quirky outlook on life; that dignity may be independent of how one feels at home, or that adapting to an extreme isn't really adapting at all, but compromising with your own financial limitations. This room could be a luxury apartment in Manhattan. The bathroom has an English style toilet, with water in the rear, no platform. The shower has magnetic strips that seal the doors shut, perfectly flush.

Iris showed me the building's administrative office on our way out, instructing me to introduce myself on Monday when it opened. We headed down Bürgergasse to Jakominiplatz to take the 5 tram to the studio on Puchstraße. On the way, Iris pointed out the construction site of the city's combined sewage overflow system, which iss what had attracted me to Graz in the first place. In comparison to New York’s perpetually failing system, the Austrian claim that all overflow of untreated sewage during heavy precipitation can be diverted, stored and treated, was impressive. As part of the Illinois River Project, the conjecture of doing a project about a sewage system had seemed fitting, but I had imagined little more than a thematic outline. The need to renovate CSOs, including New York's, comes from the increased levels of concentrated precipitation due to climate change. Transitions between seasons are shorter but the amount of precipitation is the same or greater, but during that shortened period. The result is flooding, and rainwater flooding sewer systems, causing untreated brown water to escape into the waterways, causing infection and disease or algae blooms.[1]

How does one visualize a city-wide system? Sewage has been represented as messy mass, tubes, shown either in cross section or from within looking out, or bulky jointed pipes. But how can this be better understood? Intestines? Through the video of a colonoscopy?

We arrived to Schaumbad and Iris introduced me to Eva Ursprung, a founder of Schaumbad. She was exhibiting her work in the gallery space. Her collaboration with Doris Jauk-Hinz traced the water in the Mür and the Drava river. The project looks at the water quality, sensitive sites of the two rivers, and the appearance around the rivers.

The Schaumbad is an artist studio, cooperative, exhibition space and video production organization. It's about ten years old. The space reminds me of my graduate school studios, only with more developed people and interiors, and more wealth of resources–a cyc wall, green screen studio, audio recording studio, wood shop, risograph, gallery, two kitchens, and a friendly cat named Baba. The program includes artists in residence, Sunday artist discussions, exhibitions and performances.

Returning to my room, I plugged in my power adapter and a surge protector, plugged in my computer and phone for charging, then saw the charge indicator wasn't working; I flicked the switch on the surge protector and killed the power; wifi, lamps, everything but overhead lights, out. It was Saturday night, and the maintenance guy wouldn't be back until Monday.

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[1] Climate change impact on infection risks during bathing downstream of sewage emissions from CSOs or WWTPs, Ankie Sterk, Heleen de Man, Jack. F Schijven, Ton de Nijs, Ana Maria de Roda Husman, Water Research, August 2016

20181105: Afro-Asiatische | Mur

Monday meant the building administration could fix my room's electricity.

Zihua and I went to the Afro-Asiatische Institut to collect our 850€ monthly stipend, transportation pass and cultural passes. The residency demonstrates the exceptional intra-institutional cooperation. A jury from das Land Steiermark chooses the artists and then institutions within Graz–Schaumbad, or a film, music or literary organization–bid for the selected artists. The selected artists are then given a plethora of resources and support from multiple organizations. The housing is offered within Priesterseminar owned by the Katholische Kirche, includes a museum on the ground floor, and residences for priests and seminary students but also engineering students; the financial stipend comes from the Afro-Asiatische (because both Zihua and I are both Asian?), which is an organization that started in the 1960s following the Austria's decolonization period of Africa; and the cultural passes and transport were given to us by the Katholische Hochschulegemeinde Graz located across the lobby from the Afro-Asiatische. Upon receipt of our last paperwork, we were instructed to register our presence with the city government, which was obligatory for anyone living in Graz for more than a tourist duration.

The process of registration included writing one’s name, educational title, religion, home address, nationality, residential address and whether we were immigrating or not, on a form and submit it to the authorities. Who lives where and what is their status–socially and geographically–is expected, though little corroboration is required: No return plane ticket, no license with address, no bank statement–only a signature from our host and a passport.

Reading the form, I wondered how many steps into extreme politics–right or left–would be necessary to activate this seemingly objective information to become an instruments of horrific ends. Maybe that's my American distrust for government, though I realized how a similar process exists in the U.S.: transferring one's residency is legally obligated within 30 days of moving to a state, but there is an element of class and conformity explicit in this Austrian process, a conformity that is both impressive and frightening. The utility to the notion of state, inside and outside is clear. This is for non-citizens; in terms of migration, I am a tourist, not a permanent resident or citizen.

This paperwork was submitted to the Servicestelle der Stadt Graz, which itself was a journey into the administration of administration. The address of the office on the paper is actually police headquarters, wherein an officer directs people around the corner to a door–one of many municipal offices–where one takes a number in a waiting room. Was the direction toward the police intentional? If so, for what? The correct office is situated behind a waiting room that is walled with brochures of city initiatives, more brochures than I have ever seen in my life.

Programs for recycling, electronic waste, registering your pets, senior programs, health, parking, cycling, et al. Implicit in the presence of these brochures are the jobs of graphic designers, who produce the informatics; printers; proof-readers; legislators and many others. This is an important way that the government communicates with its citizens. The information infrastructure and the expectations that people will take these brochures and read them, even keep them for reference, ultimately dispose of them; the infrastructure of recycling waste of material.

When my number came up, I met with a functionary who translated the data on the form to a computer. Almost no conversation took place, simply a "Hallo" and then he started pecking away at the keyboard. Zihua was served by the functionary beside me. He was given a welcome swag bag, I was not.

Outside of the bureau, we ran into Keyvin, an artist from Schaumbad, who runs an exhibition space on Schmiedgasse. This gave me the feeling of living in a small town where everyone knew everyone. He invited us to an upcoming exhibition opening.

In the evening I had to remind myself that one of the advantages of being in Graz is the level of public safety. Even areas that Iris felt obligated to mention were considered "bad areas" at night–the Stadtpark–I had already walked through alone and it felt very safe, quiet but with pedestrian traffic. I went down to the Mur to photograph the river at night. The Mur is an existential resource for the city of Graz. It forms the two sides of the city–the "good" and the "bad"–and a source of water for drinking, mills, and hydropower. Vito Acconci's Murinsel is the dominant visual element on the river, with changing LEDs like a UFO fishing; an outsider to whom the citizens have become accustomed.

20181109: Stone Age | Water Age Travel

Cities are a technology of the Stone Age.

The management of rainwater runoff is becoming a central concern for many cities; climate change is shortening the duration of transitional seasons, but increasing the amount of precipitation. In one sense, stone material in cities are central to this problem, since they prevent both percolation and soil hydration. Coincidentally, they are chosen, in part, for these characteristics, in effort to secure other urban value assets–infrastructure like transportation, piping, electricity, et al. But stones are also chosen because when exposed to moisture, they erode more slowly than human life or a government. If our life span wer only 24 hours, leaves would suffice as a city floor.

While homes may be made of wood or steel, cities are made of stone. Some places have dirt or sand roads, and structures made of sticks, or just a roof, but they are limited in dimension. They may be inhabited, they may be massive conglomerations of tin roofs, or mud huts, but are they cities? (Some countries have different legal taxonomy for village, town, or city, but does the legal status change the experience or activity of the place?) And does the weather, and subsequently the materials we lay in response to the environmental conditions, change our experience or activity? If we become a globe of water, and our cities are floating consortia of boats, will they be our cities?

Austria is considered a water-rich country with mountain springs, run off, rivers and lakes. It is also stone rich. The streets of Graz show evidence of the ongoing relationship to the hallowed ground on which the city sits. Different stones connote different eras of construction–spanning centuries–for different uses and different masonry technologies. Currently, we are in the asphalt era. A black, impermeable sheet shaped to the geolocation's demands: curved, flat, roughed, smoothed. (Some new forms of concrete facilitate percolation.)

In a city the pedestrian, cyclist, and motorist all require a solid surface. In Graz, these superficies are wrought in different stone. Some stones connote a bike lane. Some a path for the blind. The Belgian blocks of the entrances to many hofs, including into the center of Priesterseminar, connote an interior public space that borders on private; the stones are laid in intersecting arcs, connoting strength. The sidewalks, streets, and curbs are all different stones.

At the first Soil Symposium, I learned that almost 80% of the city of New York is covered in an impermeable material, concrete or roofing. Looking at the aerial map of Graz, I see the pattern of terra cotta bordered blocks with a green center in the old city. Outside the old city, where smaller structures become the norm, greenery blends with concrete and homes to average a gray area. In the surrounding hills, forest green dominates. I would estimate that 50% of the surface of Graz is impermeable.

20181111: Puntigamer | Dom im Berg

I went out to explore the city. Exploring an area that is already inhabited is essentially getting lost and locating oneself. Seeing things that many people have seen before, but vibrate with novelty to your eyes.

The southeast side of the city of Graz becomes Euro-suburban very fast: houses, some farm plots, automotive-dependent with islands of megastructures, inconsistent sidewalks, fences and driveways. It's quaint in size and aesthetic. It's tidy. It's sparsely populated by structures and I saw just enough people to not notice that it was abandoned.

I visited the Puch Museum, which is essentially a large garage of the myriad of the Puch products–mopeds, trucks, cars, bicycles–jammed into the center of the space, with little narrative consideration of how visitors actually see the works. This was a collector's museum, not a curator's museum. When Hitler annexed Austria, industry such as Puch was his primary target. That may explain the absence of the pedagogic narrative in this garage. Just imagine the third wall sign: "And here is when we made Nazi trucks." Not exactly a heart warmer. I was the only visitor, so maybe I was over-thinking the institution's rationale to obscure their past. The sole attendant occupied himself by spray painting something at the far north end of the garage. The fumes made their way to the middle of the garage around the time I decided to leave.

I stopped by Schaumbad to look at Eva's studio as a possible site for interviewing Steve Weiss or Martin Regelsberger and Romana Ull. The studio was filled with epochs of art projects, research, production and life. It was hard to believe that Eva had been there less than a decade. A large light fixture with the word "over" sat perfectly in the corner. From what I'd gathered about the protest against the Murkraftwerk, "over" continued to bitterly loom over Romana and Martin. The space would do.

I made haste to another art event. The event in the Schlossberg was described to me as an artist who was going to bring together a descendant of the Archduke Ferdinand and the descendant of the Archduke's assassin, Gavrilo Princip, for a handshake. The location was a room in the Dom im Berg, a space that was hollowed out of the hill; it had to served as a bomb shelter during World War II. It was too fitting, too perfect to not attend.

The event began with a trio playing Serbian music followed by other musicians playing a royal Habsburg melody.The stage was set with the Austrian musicians stage left and the Serbian musicians stage right. In the center were two black leather, Scandi-chic couches. Igor F. Petković, the artist, sat in the center. After the music conclude he gave a long, contextualizing speech, of which I could only understand him mentioning the two songs, and made several references to "Kultur." It felt almost like he was giving a benediction for the music. He then invited two interlocutors on stage to discuss Kultur, immigration and how Central Europe is a mixing pot of cultures. By the time the third person had answered a question, it began to feel like a talk show. There was so much talking and lecturing that I wondered how this would be different as an "art event" in the U.S., or even if this was billed as an art event. Was this the performance? What introduction did such a symbolically-loaded gesture need? Austrian art events, I would learn, are usually predicated with a long, verbal introductions.

Part of the event included the ceremonial recognition of winners of the Alfred Fried Photography Award 2018, which had a theme of "What does peace look like?" The presenter, Lois Lammherhuber expounded on the topic of photography and peace at length, before a ceremonial lecturer, spot lit, reading from a clear acrylic podium, announced the winner with pomp. The ceremony went on and on and I was running out of abstract footage to film; I had thought the event may be visually interesting so I had brought my camera, but nothing visually interesting was happening on stage. I was shooting the ceiling lights, the wall, hands of people. Ultimately, I couldn't take it anymore. I had to leave before seeing what I thought would be money shot–the descendants shaking hands.

More interesting than the symbolic act was the intentional production of history-making, as opposed to placemaking, or (thing)making, which may be indicative of the kulturzeitgeist. There is so much talk about "Europe" here, which I'd taken as a juxtaposition or affront to what is "Austrian," given the Chancellor Kurz's politicking. Compounded with Brexit, Hungary, Poland, the perpetual and near concern of Russia, Crimea, and the Ukraine, striving for a critical distance, a point from which this whole mess–in its wholeness and messiness–can be seen, was comforting. As the liberal left–artists–contend against the populist (mostly non-creatives)–the importance of holding onto the production of history increases. The creation or recreation of historical events, the mode of producing history–texts, online archives, photos, video and social media can be a strategy to not only moralize about a historical past, but situate a historical present and predict a historic future. History is written by hands trembling to be shaken by the infirm memory of an Alzheimer future.

2018117: Graz | Vienna

On the bus ride from Murpark, Graz Ostbahnhof, a commercial shopping center to Flughaven Wein, the hub of local, regional and international transportation, I reviewed the video of Steven Weiss and Martin and Romana. Of the three interviewees, Romana was the most open, vulnerable and honest about her knowledge, experience in protest and proximity of emotional consequences. The topic of the film is ultra-specific: the ZSK. Between the workflow of logging talking points on the timeline, I realized that, topically, the content was only interesting when an emotion came onto a face, when the camera sat in that moment and when I stopped talking or asking questions. I had been too busy managing the crass logistics of focus, lighting, sound and intelligent questions in response to Martin and Romana's intelligent answers that I had tread over these nascent emotions as they related to the information they were disclosing; I had rushed and by doing so erased what could have been very fascinating footage. The connection between an event and viewer is an expression.

At the Vienna airport I tried to study my Deutsch als fremdsprache grammar book but mostly just imagined the series of facial expressions that Vanesa would give me when she came out of the arrivals gate. Annoyance by Norwegian air; a huff through a few disheveled hairs; rolling eyes at the weight of her luggage; tossing hands up as another exiting passenger loses his way in front of her; a mouth forced ajar by the fatigue of an international red-eye flight. But she just melted with happiness when we found each other in the crowd. The Triple V began.

The OBB to Mitte then to the airbnb in Neubaugasse.

We didn’t care that the host was 15 minutes late to meet us. Or the cold. The apartment had a German toilet, complete with a fecal platform. High ceilings, modernist furniture and malfunctioning thermostat that had been set to "night" during the day and essentially off because of that. Scandi-chic decor and hints of culture.

We went to Backerstrasse to try to see Russell Maltz's exhibition during the opening hours, but the gallery was closed. Next door was the tourist trap restaurant advertised all over the Internet as the best place for Austrian schnitzel: Figlmüller. We had schnitzel, tafelspitz and bier; all of the portions which were too large for a normal person to consume. The horseradish was mild; the schnitzel was dry but we were too happy to see each other to really notice the cuisine was actually the worst in Austria.

Although Vienna has amazing public transportation, we walked home, past Saint Stephen's Cathedral.

20181121: Wien | Venice

The brick texture of the walls of the buildings was exposed. The constant erosion from saline air and water revealed the materials of the buildings. The capillary rise followed by evaporation of saltwater in the bricks leave a dusty crystalline color. Plasterwork was chipping off, like a fresco. Those large bricks which I had mistaken for sandstone in New York, were, here, denounced as mere brick that had been cut away into oversized blocks and then plastered over.

The little municipal or civic activity that one sees on the island of Venice are workers repairing the surfaces of buildings. Repainting, replastering, or digging up the streets to access the electrical or telephone lines buried beneath. Occasionally one sees boats with supplies delivering goods, or picking up waste, emptying a building’s septic system, but primarily one sees the reconstruction of the building surfaces; it must be constant. A perpetual renovation.

The infrastructure built in response to this unique condition includes slightly arched calle that divert flood and rain water to the edges of the passageways where slitted trachyte permit water to sink into underground channels. Roof tiles repel water down into gutters that drain down several stories. At the base of entrances to homes that are vacant for long periods one finds wooden barricades to forestall high tide. And of course the gondolas and vaporettos for transportation.

It was November and the presence of the canals were three fold: a putrid smell of the canals into which gatoli empty waste; a physical obstacle that made pedestrian tourist entering a ramo, turn around, and seek out foot bridges; and the solid, light-green color. The smell was overwhelming during the first day, and then basically unexceptional. The bridges form familiar paths through the city. And I was surprised I didn’t bored of the beautiful, picturesque view down each canal as I crossed a bridge.

The color of the water was jarring. It appeared synthetic, yet it was organic – the thorough presence of algae that were flourishing due to organic compounds in the water, sunlight, and shallow, stagnant water that empties twice a day. Venice is a laboratory of engineering innovation but also a paradise for this microorganism.

Vienna felt like a classic city that has made an effort to modernize in every way, but only on a modest scale. There wasn't a towering downtown, but there were only a few high rises. It wasn’t a smart city, but there are plans to build a smart city area. People live and work there, and it was apparent. There are centralized tourist areas around Museumsquartier and the old center. But Venice felt like one giant Time Square in which it was unclear as to whether anyone actually lived and worked there, and if they did, whether they worked outside of the tourist economy. The city is frozen in a simplification of its own tourist attractions. Restaurants with white and red checkered tablecloths, pizzerias, masks, Murano glass works, and cafes. Even the city itself, which includes mainland Mestre-Carpenedo, Marghera, Favaro Veneto, Chirignago, Zelarino, Tessera, is reduced to the historic Venetian island when referenced as "Venice." But it's an amazing human construction, and it's historic importance is indisputable. The fact of its physical erosion, is even more prescient in the era of a global climate catastrophe.

If a city is a Stone Age material, the stone was believed to endure through water.

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[1] "Venice Backstage: How does Venice work?" Insula spa, Venice Municipality, 2011

https://vimeo.com/21688538

20181122: Venezia | Mestre

Marco told me that there was an ugly, industrial area on the mainland near Venice. The implication was that I shouldn't visit there. So of course I had to see it for myself.

Every 5 minutes a train runs between Venezia Santa Lucia and Mestre train station. It was 1.30€ and took about 15 minutes to arrive. The view of la laguna, its use by rowing teams and kayakers reminded me how locals adapt a tourist attraction to personal interests. Mestre has the feeling of a suburb, or really an anywhere–European city. The visible difference is that the people on the streets didn't look like tourists and and didn't look like the stuffy Venetian locals: Asians, Africans, Caucasians; the periphery of diversity. The buildings were larger and looked from the 1960s or 1970s – occupying between 30 and 50 percent of a modern city block; they were taller than the Venetian structures by three or four stories. The roads were wider. And there were basically no canals; I saw only one channelized river, the Riviera Magellano, in the historic center. The prices of everything were several euros less. A caffe, 1€. There were school children, motorcycles, and many shopkeepers didn't speak English. For 1,30€ one could arrive to Italy for Venice.

We walked up via Piave to Via Giudosue Carducci and then over the historic center. I realized that this was the equivalent of the suburbs; I felt the air of possibility there, which was suffocatingly absent in Venezia. The latter is the Time Square of Italy; the former, Cornellà de Llobregat. Venice is determined, dense, and layered in history. It's been a tourist destination for centuries. It's the playground of the rich and cultured, the nouveau riche and uncultured, those who have traveled the world, and those who have avoided it. Mestre is land: fertile, potent.

I fantasized about starting a small, early to mid-career arts colony here; a Lower East Side or Bushwick, a potentiality to the achieved and the supported; a proximity to the arrived. An industrial zone where the young and curious and dig and the shins of the grayed and bored. Where imagination can fabricate during the two years between the Bienniale; a haven where the prices of the Island can be avoided and where the issues that concern real artists today–gentrification, urbanism, environmentalism, social justice, grass roots movements, the virtual, the verge–can be taken off the shelf of the Giardini or Arsenale and lived, tried and experimented with in situ. And of course, by doing so, the world and the community would be changed.

The one element that makes Venice seem "inauthentic"–the corporate chains, like Gucci, H&M, and McDonald's–makes Piazza Erminio Ferretto feel authentic. We spotted a Lupo Negro off the square where blue-collar workers were leaving, which is always a good sign of decent food in Europe. Inside Lupo Nero we sat near a monochrome watercolor of a large wolf, staring at me. One of the many wolf-themed works in the restaurant. I order the lunch menu: spaghetti aglio e olio and vegetables, zucchini, carrots and potatoes. Vanessa had scallops and spaghetti with mussels. I realized that the service, which is stereotypically classified as "bad" is actually just oriented to delivering food to customers over closing a customer's bill.

Osteria Lupo Negro is located off of Piazza Erminio Ferretto, named after the anti-fascist insurgent who fought against Franco and later undermined the industrial production for materials headed from Italy to Nazi-Germany. His nom de guerre was "The Venetian." [1]

In the evening we returned to Santa Lucia and walked over the island back to the hotel to wait for dinner. We walked down Piazza San Marco to Harry’s, the alleged birthplace of the Martini. Inside, a man was holding the entire bar for his colleagues, who were arriving. The waiter rudely tossed us the menu and said the entire place was booked. I glanced around and saw only single woman, advanced in age, seated at the tables, alone, watching the group of young men cluster inside to their friend, and us. 24€ for a martini? We turned around and walked out, catching a grimace from the bartender. Wandering around on the northern shore of the island, we unsuccessfully found a place for a night cap, before making our way back to the hotel.

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[1] Storia della Resistenzia veneziana
http://resistenzaveneziana.blogspot.com/

20181123: Dorsoduro | Murano

A day pass to the Vaporetto is 17€ and if you don’t wake up early, it’s hard to get your money’s worth because just a ride from Dorsoduro to Murano can take an hour and a half. If you’re not in a hurry and just want to see Venice but don’t want to walk or pay the extortionary 85€/hour of a gondola, the vaporetto is wonderful. The first thing you notice is the immense distance around the perimeters of each island. While a straight line, even made crooked by canal bridges, is the shortest distance between two points, with the addition of the z-axis over which the vaporettos traverse on the crashing waves, the distance around the island is even longer. While the vaporettos traverse the busy Grand Canal they do not enter the extensive inner canal networks. In other words, traveling by Vaporetto is a route of approximation, both in time and space.

Murano was a severe disappointment. I had really expected some thriving cultural activity and museums due to this island being the origins of contemporary glass art. I wanted to see glass blowers handling a molten yellow orb, maybe losing an eye or doing something moderately dangerous. Instead it was just an empty version of Venezia with shops of the same glass trinkets and animals, most of which were cheaper on Venezia. We went into a cafe immediately after getting off the boat and got up and left after looking at the menu. We ventured further into the island and saw a group of workers smoking outside of modest looking establishment. Inside it was packed.

We ordered a liter of the house wine, which was twice as much as we needed or wanted. The server was friendly and every table seemed to just order more and more wine and food. Even the kids were drunk. Seriously, the waiter had to cut the whole family off.

On the ride back we made a last minute decision to disembark on Cimiteri San Michel and see the grave of Stravinsky and Ezra Pound. We found Stravinsky, which was covered in flowers but it was trying to rain and Vanesa was too impatient to dedicate time to finding the headstone of a fascist, regardless his metric prowess. Pound was a Mussolini supporter who fell on the wrong side of history; poorly measured gamble.

20181124: Hotel Belle Arti | Leonardo da Vinci in Chiesa Santa Barnaba

The alarm sounded at breakfast. All of the guests in the dining area looked at each other, breaking the myopic gaze of anonymity that we self-impose in shared public spaces.

"It's the flooding. What else can it be?" a young man said directly to me, as if we had got to know each other each morning in our adjacent tables. The woman who guarded the cappuccino machine, ensuring no guest pushed the single button that made a cappuccino, didn’t flinch at the sound. She knew her post would extend as visitors stayed inside.

The deciding factor for Vanesa was the rain. She didn’t want to repeat the puddles and water drops on her glasses from yesterday, so she ascended to our room to wait out the forecasted afternoon sunlight. I felt adversely. In the weeks before our flight here, Venice had been under a historically unusual high water. All of the newspapers were showing tourists wading up to their wastes through water. Vanesa had wondered if we shouldn’t cancel our trip; but for me, with my interest in urban design interfacing with climate, this was a perfect opportunity to capture footage of the slow erosion of normality on dry land.

FIrst, I ventured out and see if I could collect some algae from the canals, using a dirty pillowcase I sequestered from housekeeping and weighted with a brick that I had found some days before. A rubber band from a tree to bound my pole to my net.

The water looked solidly blue-green, and the acqua alta had brought the water onto the ruga of Dorsoduro up to about 3 inches in most places. In searching for a dry path off the island, I was playing a little memorization game of where I could go and how to return. I navigated to a relatively unpopulated ramo and attempted my contraption. A few tourists watched me with confusion and horror: Is that guy collecting wastewater from the canals?But the blue-green liquid was elusive. A wet-dry vac filter would have been perfect. A project for another time.

I returned for my camera and shot a few static scenes of the water, tourist negotiating the tide and waves crashing onto the island. If you look closely at the edge of fondamenta, you can see the layers of the marble, sometimes only a few centimeters thick, to lift the city against the rising tide.

By 10 another alarm sounded and the water had retreated. The masengo still looked and were wet, and the arch in the center appeared more exaggerated, elevated. We left the hotel and meandered through the streets with a tentative idea of having a coffee and/or finding more/better gifts.

At Caffe Brasilia I overheard a couple talking with a recent expat, assuring her that she would be speaking Italian within two months, and then coached her on a few expressions to accompany her anecdote about dancing with a gentleman the evening before. As people passed the table, the couple greeted them. Had we found a local cafe where actual Venetians came?

I sketched the street while Vanesa had a glass of wine. In the seeing I found the ages and ages that had layered story after story of the casa fondaco’s architectural "improvement." Television antennae; informal roof-decks. The notion of history, in reference to place, is the ambiguous allusion to this layering. In buildings you can read the shift of aesthetics paradigms, but also the change in municipal codes (or absence of them!), the appreciation of neighborhood identity, when areas are collectively or simultaneously created, and even the intention of individuals to respond to everyday conditions of light, rain, wind, decoration, luxury, or poverty–everything we as living humans compromise in the utterance of "life." At times even death is visible. The architecture is a material manifestation of history. A man-made geological formation. "History" is not just architectural, of course, but having an entrance into the historical is useful if one wants to transcend the "10 Places to Visit in Insert City" list.

I visited the “Machines of da Vinci” exhibition at Chiesa di Santa Barnaba. After paying the 8€ and being directed through the shoddily hung black curtain that was the entrance, I already knew that I had been had. The exhibition was essentially wooden maquettes of the drawings of the machines of Leonardo with an explanation of the importance of the technology, accompanied with a pixelated image of the page of his notebook in which one could see the drawing. What was disappointing was that no actual works were shown. Being in Italy, I had expected more, at least antiquated models! It was an educational rather than cultural exhibition, and the production of the exhibition (excluding the models which were pretty well produced) looked cheap, as if the church was trying to raise money for its physical repair.

Aside from the presentation of the works, the exhibition emphasized the military application of his designs and the centrality of the problems of friction and gravity he sought to solve. The most interesting work was Leonardo's bicycle. Unlike the rest of the miniature models that fit on a plinth, the bicycle was the size. The explanatory text described how two sheets of paper that had been glued together for centuries were recently separated and the restorers had found the design of a gear-chain bicycle. Since several other models in the exhibition have chains or gears, it didn't seem completely unlikely. Still, how come I had never heard Leonardo invented the bicycle?

The story of the Leonardo bicycle is more complicated than just the engineering. According to several source, this drawing was a forgery, created by Italian monks who were restoring Leonardo's Atlanticus Codex in the 1970s. But the drawing was not the only fraudulent construction. Two narratives hinge on this drawing: The first is the ongoing dispute of which country can claim one of its citizens as the inventor of the bicycle. If Leonardo had produced these drawings, the Italians would claim credit for one of the greatest human transportation devices. Most historians believe that prize goes to Germany, whose civil servant, Karl von Drais, at the University of Heidelberg made a crude drawing of a man on a bicycle with no pedals in 1818.[1] This fits since bicycles were not in use until the 19th Century.

The other narrative at stake in veracity of the drawing is Leonardo’s status as genius, or more subtly, what a genius does and doesn't draw. According to a historian who had examined the Atlanticus Codex prior to its restoration, there was no bicycle on those glued together pages, only a primitive drawings of penes. The supposition had been that the penes were drawn by a disciple of Leonardo, since no serious genius would doodle a penis, moreover multiple penes. But when the monks were restoring the papers and found the penes, they made the testicles into bicycle wheels, and the shafts into the bike frame.[2]

The battle for the bicycle and the status of Leonardo doesn't end with this exhibition, or academic disputes of authenticity. 2019 would be the 500 year anniversary of his death in France, and the Louvre was planning a large exhibition, which included many works borrowed from around the world, including Uffizi. The right-leaning Italian government detests the idea that the French exhibition will not only overshadow their own, but make any competing exhibition impossible. The fact that the Louvre possesses more paintings by Leonardo than any other museum in the world, seems to nullify the nationalist frustration of Italy. [3] But had the restorers not erased the penes, the Italians could have really competed with a show called, “Leonardo’s Hard Ons.” That would have been a crowd pleaser. And why stop at Leonardo? How about, “500 Years of Genius Penes,” and get Picasso in there?

In the evening we continued our tour for food and drinks around Venice, stopping at several bars with varying quantities of tourists, pretension, and youth. All Arco, which closed at 14, was the busiest and probably the best food. At Chet Bar, I directly asked the bartender if Venice is thought to have the worst food in Italy. He agreed without hesitation. As a city populated by students, 50,000 inhabitants, and perpetual tourists, he framed the culinary achievement as inconsequential for the survival of a business. We closed the evening with a drink at Corner Bar, laden with Wake Forest stickers. It had a better Negroni than Chet Bar, and it was twice the size. An unleashed dogs begged for our basket of chips, and I happily fed him while I drew penes in my notebook.

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[1] Bicycle: The History, David Herlihy, Yale University Press, 2004.
https://books.google.it/books?id=VDlaT0KxJfAC&redir_esc=y
[2] "Oh yer bike, Leonardo," Jonathan Knight. New Scientist, October 18, 1997.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15621044-300-on-yer-bike-leonardo/
[3] "Italy livid about deal to loan Leonardo works to Louvre," Frances D'Emilio, Associated Press, November 24, 2018
https://www.apnews.com/44f45977636646fba5abc47b5bf4f4ea

20181125: Venezia | Graz

We didn't visit the Arsenale nor the Giardini exhibition spaces of the Venezia Biennale Architettura but we found several of the participating alternative spaces around Venice. The most remarkable was the Romanian storefront comprised of childhood games that were played during the communist era. A screening room in the back showed interviews with people who were recalling the games they played and suggested that, during that era, the children made use of informal space, essentially making it a public space. The video suggested that this tradition ended because of a concern for child safety in the neighborhood. It wasn’t clear if the participants were inferring that the danger was a direct result of transitioning from communism to capitalism, or a general concern for child safety internationally. [1]

Anti-cruise ship banners hung from some of the apartment buildings in Venice. Leaving la Laguna, I saw the forest of streets and canals in totality and the enormous cruise ships at bay. In Manhattan I actively avoid Time Square, so I can sympathize with the local distaste for the hordes of tourists. But on the other hand, Manhattan and Venice share a history of having been a point of exchange, a massive supermarket of goods brought to these ports for trade, international exchange and the fact that people settled there and made cities, neighborhoods, communities and a life there, can also be thought of as an unfortunate decision of territorializing these chunks of Earth that probably should have not been inhabited. Perhaps "decision" isn't the right word; perhaps "condition" is more accurate. In either phrasing, the work in progress that is Capitalism had the unfortunate dependence on the human organism for movement, production and exchange and the proximity that we have situated our lives to our jobs has never been comfortable nor logical. Why we have adapted a live/work situation with our offices in our pockets is no more or less probable than had the trend gone the other way, that we had decided to live at our work, that we slept under desk counters at shopping malls, or that we abandoned our personal space for our work space, rather than bring our work space into our personal space.

On the Flixbus from Venice to Graz, I sat in the seat near the stairs and bathroom. It was both the best and worst seat, since I had more spacious room and a small desk, but also a view into each passengers' descent into the bathroom and any subsequent smells. Along the way, I saw a hillside with a half-dozen red banners with golden spears; a regional flag? The small towns tucked into these hills made me realize how long I has been in cities; I could only vaguely remember the way of life there; knowing everyone by name; watching television as a conduit to the world, rather than for entertainment or “culture;” seeing people grow up, rather than knowing they too will grow old; the Milky Way at night; tickets from a sheriff with whom you once shared class; the rumors of the motivations of a suicide; garage sales; having no plan, only a way of life.

The bus picked up double the passengers in Trieste. The hilly, seaport city reminded me of parts of Spain. Joyce spent time there. It looked like a lovely city to visit or escape to or from. In Ljubljana more passengers got on, including a young woman from Vienna, named Eva. She saw that I was editing a video and asked if I worked in television. I told her that I was editing an interview for an experimental documentary about activist who were trying to protect trees. She was reading an anthology about the mythology of each tree and was too interested in my work and New York to let me get back to work. She had been visiting her boyfriend, who was a neuroscience graduate student in Ljubljana. She had been in a long-distance relationship with him since he was an undergraduate at Oxford and her tangible yearning for intimacy was as palpable as her comfort with illogically inconvenient human relations. We talked about cities and countries and, like so many Austrians I had met on this trip, she was astonished by the stereotypical shortcomings of the US: the healthcare system; the homeless problem; the shootings that are more frequent than peaceful protest. Like many Europeans with whom I’ve spoken she had absolutely no interest in giving up her privileged life in Europe.

Returning to Graz, it felt like home. The rain at hauptbahnhof, the homeless, the tram to Hauptplatz and then back to my room in the seminary.

We end up visiting cities because that is where the train, planes, buses and boats go, hopefully taking us to where our loves also are.

[1] “The Map: Biennale Arch 2018,” Venezia News, 2018.
Romania /2,” New Gallery of the Romanian Institute for culture and Humanistic Research, Palazzo Correr Campo Santa Fosca, Cannaregio 2214.

20181202: Buschenschank | Perchten

Puntigamer is the local beer. At 5.1%, it tries to distinguish itself from Heineken with a slightly darker shade and beautiful blue insignia that is readily found around the town of Graz. Gösser and Murauer are the other two local favorites; only Murauer has any flavor or body to it. The pilsner version has some hops and flavor. But there is a growing market of craft beers–Forstners for example–that vigilantly fighting against the Reinheitgebot. I had one beer infused with chili that was excellent. The general beer market here is a decade behind North America, in regard to the scenario of walking into a bar and getting exclusively good, flavorful beers on draft. After the first week of trying the local beers here, I realized why Austria is really known for its white wine.

After the interview, Werner Sprung stated that Styria is known for a wine called schilcher, which is best drank with meat in the hills. I first thought the invitation was empty but when he suggested that we drive 40 minutes outside the city, I realized he was serious. Iris excused herself with an ailment, which left me to journey with Werner and his daughter Eva, to a buschenshank near his home in Lannach. Making small talk I learned that Eva studied sociology; similarly Werner's wife worked for the state dispersing social welfare benefits. I wondered how different these factions fighting over the Speicherkanal really were.

Our Buschenshank had a large wine corkscrew sculpture in the driveway. The vineyards were dormant for the winter. Fog held the hills in ransom from the sun. 20 meters away was another Buschenshank. Beyond that was another. The institution was once a farmer’s house that people could visit and eat from whatever was being grown there at that time. It was the original farm to table, or rather person to farm, model of eating. Today, they are mini-hotels where mostly Austrian tourists come to “getaway from it all” and eat food, drink, and buschenshank-crawl to the neighboring building. In the vicinity I counted more than a dozen. The traditional food is a variety meats – salami, sausage, pate – with cheeses and horseradish. Bread. No chlorophyll. Werner ordered me a large board and a half for himself. Eva had only glühwein and schilcher. Our entire bill was around 20 €.

For the following weeks, I related this experience to people I met in Berlin, or Germans in Graz, and each was horrified by my experience. I didn’t get it. They would ask me how I was let in, whether there were women there, or if I saw Nazi flags. I was totally confused and suspecting this was some sort of Germany stereotype of Austria. It wasn’t until my final week in Graz that Iris corrected my experience and distinguished the two words. Whenever I mentioned my trip, my brutal pronunciation of ‘Buschenshank’ was misunderstood as ‘Burschenschaft’ and a conversation about Neo-nazi influence or genealogy of certain fraternities would evolve.

Pre-Christian iconography holds steadfast in Central Europe with the winter tradition of Krampus and Perchten. Krampus is a monster with goat horns that terrorizes children, acting as an anti-Saint Nicholas. Instead of giving gifts he scares young children who have been bad, or warns them of their folly. In the crowd along Herrengasse, Krampus rams toward the metal barricades and then poses for the smartphone pictures. He gives the kids on dad's shoulders a hi-five, then runs to the other side of the parade wall. The parade is supposed to occur every year on December 6, but cities has a weekend for this reason. I was told by Werner that actually Perchten was not celebrated in Graz until more recently. The culture continues to evolve; I saw the devils posing for selfies with the children they were assigned to terrorize.

20181204: Moabit | Neukölln

Square, Triangle, Circle in Moabit

In 2012 I was assembling videos about architectural panopticon prisons. My interest in Foucault's writings took a tangent into the prison reform projects of the 19th Century. The first site I visited was Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary. It was the first penal institution to design and theorize solitary confinement, based on the Quaker belief that one could be redeem through a direct relationship with God if only one were provided the time for study and reflection, rather than co-mingling with debauchery. Isolation toward penal reform manifested in the architecture of solitary confinement, but also the designs to inhibit prisoners from communicating with each other. Silence was mandated. The role of the central prison guard was to observe not only the cell doors but any communication that occurred in any wing of the prison.

The second prison I visited was in Sài Gòn’s Chi Hoa. The prison is still functional and, at the time, it was alleged some prisoners from the “War of American Aggression” were still housed there. I took a ride around the prison on motorbike to understand its size. Its massive but almost feels invisible in the chaos of Sài Gòn. The prison is bordered by a tall concrete wall and apartment buildings.

The third prison I visited was Moabit during the Sound Development City residency in 2012. Still in operation in 2018, just outside the city center, the prison was part of a criminal justice complex that occupied an entire city block, in which someone can be held, prosecuted, and imprisoned without even crossing the street. Three blocks from the complex was a state park dedicated to the closure of the previous Moabit prison, which sat where the park grounds. Across the street from the Hauptbahnhof was the park memorializing a site-specific punishment of a previous period, but the institution had simply moved to a new is larger location, three blocks away.

Returning to re-record Moabit's panopticon because of superior equipment and knowledge, I found that not much had changed on the prison's exterior. The same strange artwork of a man dangling from the Scales of Justice perched above the main gate, where I recorded two police vans exiting–both in 2012 and in 2018 (this year the female officer in the passenger seat flipped me off)–the same barbed wire at the top of the wall, which kept people in as well as out, and the same sculpture of a lion killing a serpent on the west side of the complex grounds.

On the way to lunch I went to the Daimler Collection and saw the exhibition “Evoking Reality.” Primarily photographs of the state of the world. Gorgeous, high production-value images depicted the world in distress. Although not included, it was really Edward Burtynsky’s exhibition.

Jeff Weber made blotwurst, potato and rotkohl. He gave me a copy of his new book, “An Attempt at a Personal Epistemology,” which amassed his photographs that span the documentation of his project, Kunsthalle Leipzig, document his own artwork, more traditional photographs that would qualify as art photography, travel photography and artists with whom he’d worked. 500 pages, beautiful but too big. It's title came from an earlier work of his in which he used a card catalog to "attempt a personal epistemology." More Foucault. Weber’s apartment looked like a photography studio with mixing tanks an enlargers dominating the visual and physical space. Two book shelves hung, fully stacked, from the walls. He’d lived there since moving back to Europe after our residency at the ISCP. He paid 350€ per month but expected the landlord would try to kick him out soon, renovate the space and rent it to some Americans. Outsiders.

Jeff seemed even more preoccupied with politics than Abraham, Eva and I and just as unqualified to talk about it. Equivocating the rise of the populists in Germany with the pervasion of the corporate agenda of Merkel, I had to ask, if a reaction against Merkel were explained or justified, why not a rise of a Green movement? Or of Anarchists? Outside I found a poster of a march against Neo-Nazis. I rolled it up and carried for historical proof that even in Germany people weren’t studying history well enough.

In the evening I returned to another 2012 project I had started and filmed in Berlin: a meditation on the uses of Olympic Stadia. Thinking about the international status of these high-profile games and the massive urban developments that are created in justification of demonstrating a country's membership in the international community is followed by many of these mega projects creating massive sites of disutility. In 2012 I filmed the parking lot of the stadium, as the space was used for driving school practice. In 2018 the parking lot was still used for driving practice.

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[1] Jeff Weber, Berlin Art Link
https://www.berlinartlink.com/2016/09/29/jeff-weber/

20181206: San Francisco | London | Zurich | Berlin

I always wanted to get to know Christian Ebert better. During our overlapping time at San Francisco Art Institute and later during his six months marriage to Stephanie, which was terminated like an unwanted child in the second trimester, we crossed paths only long enough to get a sense that he was a great guy, but never enough time to get into the weeds. Stephanie lived in Berlin with her husband and children; instead, I reached out to Christian.

He suggested we meet at Hamburger Bahnhof. At first I thought he was making a joke about the Hauptbahnhof. I arrived two hours early and decided to see the show without him, once, so I wouldn't feel rushed or distracted. In the central Historic Hall was a four projection installation of Agnieszka Polska entitled, "The Demon's Brain." The screens shows footage of a devastated forest, dialogue between two people that are dressed to medieval period, a horse rider and a strange, hand-drawn animated owl, which I presumed was the demon. Between the projections were piles of foam core mattresses for visitors to sit on. The film follows "a young messenger tasked with delivering these letters on horseback. Along the way, the boy loses his horse and he gets lost in the forest. There he has an unexpected encounter with a demon, whose monologue fuses Christian theological ideas with today’s developments concerning resource consumption, environmental destruction, data capital, and artificial intelligence." [1] Thematically I really enjoyed the work, but I found that animated parts to be visually hard to swallow. The live film was UHD and cinematic while the animated interludes felt like moving clip art or cartoons. The white horse sequences, rendered in 1990s CGI style, were interesting. The audio was really great. I watched other visitors try to make sense of how to engage this, and most looked like I felt: lost. As a narrative in which there is something “to get,” and, by extension, a necessity “to follow” what is going on, the work may have been better suited for a sit and watch black box setting, rather than multi-channel, meandering format. But that’s another position in contemporary art.

I saw “How to talk with birds, trees, fish, shells, snakes, bulls and lions,” as well, but didn’t feel very much from it. Topically, I was very interested in:

“The emphasis on “speaking” or “talking” raises questions as to how meaning is created and conveyed, and for whom. The concept of “meaning” in Western science seems especially human, since most semiotic modes of communication presuppose a human mindset. And yet language is just one mode of expression in the planetary semiosis, and like other meaningful acts, it is rooted in the environment and all those dependent on it.” [2]

Visually, the show was boring maybe because it actually fulfilled the vision of the international artspeak statement. Don’t use ‘semiosis’ on a wall text. We get that you have a PhD. Also due to the disparate styles of the participating artists, in part due to the poor quality of the artworks. Nothing even slowed my meander through the space.

Christian punctually arrived and we took a coffee in the cafe. I shared with him my sense of never really having got to know him; he corroborated the feeling. Christian makes hard line, abstract paintings, most recently with geometric, triangle and parallelograms. The arc of the conversation bowed under the pressures we both felt to produce art but were a loss not only on how to make a financial foundation from it but how to make the next step in our careers. Painting world and the contemporary art world. Identity politics v. 2.0 and the rest. Positions. We talked about the illusion of teaching artist being outside of the gig economy within which most other artists exist, and the difference of New York and Berlin. It was a conversation that seemed to be on repeat with artists I knew, regardless of their level of “success,” i.e. exhibition history, gallery representation, number of sales or relationship with institutions. (Collectively, this could have been the conversation that bridged the emerging career to the mid-career. The illusion, I thought, was that the “emerging” is a gerund–the stage is one of a process, presupposing action and participation. Was mid-career also gerund? Perhaps it was just “exist early” and if you’re still alive later, there’s a chance of afterwards.) We all seemed to feel that there was more than what we had; and we all hoped that if we had more it would be fulfilling financially, artistically, professionally and personally. That is, we wanted our art practice to do everything for us, to be gesamlebenwerk.

I met Katharina during Sound Development City. She introduced herself back then as an urban researcher; six years later she was finishing a PhD in Urban Planning and was quick to admit that she’d tired of academia and her thesis topic, which she refused to share with me. In the last six years, I had gravitated toward her specialty, probably because I’d been stuck in cities and, even when traveling away from New York, I ended up in another city. Her general focus was on immigration, which itself was a curious inclusion within the field of urban planning. Rather than strictly thinking about streets, infrastructure and zoning, the integration of the immigrant, the foreigner whose class and economic status is presupposed, into the urban plan suggested a further–literally transnational–extension of the focus of the biopolitical. That is, no longer were governing bodies concerned exclusively with their sovereign subjects but with the livelihood of those outside their sovereignty.

In a classic “urban” tradition, i.e. urbanization in the original form of which Ildefons Cerda conceived, the extension of the urban plan onto the rural can now include the projection of the immigrant, the foreigner, first into the urban fabric, localized into what is traditionally thought of as the “city limits” but also later into the suburb and the rural, ultimately “urbanizing” these areas ethnologically. I doubted that this exact theater of generations was what was feared in the political current of ruralites, who didn’t experience immigration and immigrants in the same way that urbanites did but fear them nonetheless. I expected that a more simplistic fear was at work, especially from a perspective of juxtaposition between where it was that people were coming. Which sociopolitical systems each country had and how immigration was seen to interface with it. i.e. Europeans that opposed immigration often did so on the grounds that the immigrants were believed to “exploit” existing social welfare systems, which suggested these systems were both definite and required exchange by paying into them before taking out of them.

“The American urban experience, of immigrants reviving aging inner-cities, sharply contrasts with that of Europe, where immigrants often cluster in large cities but remain marginalized economically and socially, imposing many costs and becoming seen as a long-term drag on growth and vitality.” [3]

These systems don’t exist in the same manner in the U.S., though some do and where they do, one could hear similar complaints of the exploitation of these systems. While in the U.S. the primary retort to immigrants was that they “stole jobs,” which suggested these Americans believed they had a right to access jobs, first or in perpetuity. What should have been noted was both of these systems–social benefits and jobs–were resources that may have been mitigated in the urban fabric, but not necessarily. While the vast majority of jobs or productivity occurred in cities and was from there leveraged for social benefits, many jobs still existed outside of the city. Increasingly the jobs were becoming virtual. How immigration to cities, which “it is safe to conclude that without a massive inflow of non-Americans, the biggest and most economically-vibrant American cities – New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, Houston – would surely have stagnated or worse,” will resolve in an age of (potential) placelessness was yet to be seen, particularly when the jobs that required a person to be present (the immigrant?) were replaced by systems of automation. [4] Would we see Cyber Flight, a new version of White Flight, when the physical, cultural and economic infrastructure of cities was outpaced by the digital? I wondered how long people would continue to prefer NYC to LA, after a subway ride was no longer necessary, when remote work was the norm or when local taxation didn’t make sense, when the culture we prefered was online rather than in a museum or on the street. Was this happening already?

I met Jana at a fusion Vietnamese restaurant. It was fitting because I recalled that her father was a diplomat in Southeast Asia and had told me in 2012, also during Sound Development City, that the Vietnamese, i.e. Annam, were essentially Chinese fisherman who moved south down the coast. He was referring to the Lê Dynasty, based in Hà Nội. It made an impression on me, and by 2018, with some tiếng việt lịc sử I realized how contentious what he said really wa. Was referring to the Tang and successive dynasties, which conquered the Cham, or to the North which made a Communist state over the south.

Sound Development City was a three-part series of residencies of five days long, each part in a different city: Berlin, London and Zurich. 13 international artists met and explored each city through the framework of sound. At the time, my proposal had been to write a series of critical essays about cities; I had included my essay on the High Line and Ghost Capital as work samples.

The last time I met Jana she was self-identified as working in theater. Like Katharina, she expressed a sense of inferiority to the sound artists of Sound Development City. 2012 slightly predated a trend of institutions taking an interest in sound art; the trend has for the most part subsided, unfortunately, since I personally though it was more interesting in 2018 than before because sound was more widely in the use of sound in cinema (Hans Zimmer’s Blade Runner 2049), which may have been the last reason to see movies in the cinema, since an increasing number of people could afford inexpensive projectors for their home but few had sophisticated sound systems. Jana was writing scripts for television and web series. In 2012 she was just beginning her relationship with a Colombian; today she could appreciate the cultural differences in holidays and familiar relationships between Germans and Colombians. We agreed that the manner in which Latin families stay close was a technology in and of itself.

It was raining, cold and wet. Walking through the district I saw a synagogue with an armed guard, barricaded. It reminded me of the shooting in Pittsburg, the barricade around the Chabad Center for Jewish Discovery on 19th St. In 2010 I picked up a free book there, “Terrorism and Hostage Negotiations.” [5] Coincidences are a matter of time.

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[1] "Agnieszka Polska: The Demon’s Brain," Hamburger Bahnhof: Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, Germany, 27 September 2018 to 3 March 2019
https://www.smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/hamburger-bahnhof/exhibitions/detail/agnieszka-polska-the-demons-brain.html
[2] “How to talk with birds, trees, fish, shells, snakes, bulls and lions,” Hamburger Bahnhof: Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, Germany 16 November 2018 to 12 May 2019
https://www.smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/hamburger-bahnhof/exhibitions/detail/how-to-talk-with-birds-trees-fish-shells-snakes-bulls-and-lions.html
[3] “Immigrants as urban saviors: When Immigrants Revive a City and When They Don’t - Lessons from the United States,” G. Pascal Zachary, Council of Europe, 2006
https://rm.coe.int/16804925d6
[4] Ibid.
[5] “Terrorism and Hostage Negotiations,” Abraham Miller, Westview Press, 1983.
https://www.amazon.com/Terrorism-Negotiations-Westview-National-International/dp/0891588566

20181207: Berlin | Graz

The Dorotheenstädtischen Cemetery houses the graves of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Bertolt Brecht and Herbert Marcuse, among many other not as famous people. Overgrown and modestly tended, the Germany cemetery is the closest thing that Berlin has to Paris’ Père Lachaise. Coincidentally, the French cemetery, the Huguenot, adjacent to Dorotheenstädtischen, is often confused for the Dorotheenstädtischen. The dead of different nationalities can’t cohabite a necropolis. I strolled the grounds for a few hours before my Easyjet flight back to Graz. The cemetery itself was as much of a landmark of what was preserved, as much had been erased. Many headstones and precious metals were stolen from Dorotheenstädtischen and sold during the 1920/30s economic crises, forever gone, blotted out. A monument to a Nazi resistance fighters who attempted to assassinate Hitler in 1944 bears the name Klaus Bonhoeffer, Hans John, Richard Kuenzer, Carl Adolf Marks, Wilhelm zur Nieden, Friedrich Justus Perels, Rüdiger Schleicher and Hans Ludwig Sierks; heroes of a parallel universe in which the tides of history crashed on different shores. On the side of one monument, I saw the patterned destruction of bullet holes or shrapnel, possibly from the second world war. Dead people were not only buried here, some people died there.

I stopped at my favorite bakery in Berlin, Freundliche Bäckerei, on my way to Tegel airport. Easyjet is located in Terminal C, a European interpretation of a FEMA shelter, with enough seating for 20 people and crowds of children and travelers sitting on the floor and passageways. In contrast to Terminal A, which houses all the non-budget airlines, this section is where pride goes to die, where the struggle to be part of the traveling class continues, and where all the corners have been cut so thoroughly that only a circle of self-hatred and pity exists. Personally, this manifested in my lower back, which I aggravated by squatting on the floor too long and almost fell over in pain when I stood up. I was happy to return to Graz, to say the least, which was a culture shock coming from a the city that I had previously highly revered: Berlin was a shithole.

During the last four days, I had stayed in the absolute worst airbnb and likely the worst habitation of any city or country in my life. Located Moabit, just west of the Mitte, this student apartment had never been cleaned since the lease was signed. Staying inside, sleeping there, was something of a culture shock because it made me suspicious of the interior of every apartment building I saw in Berlin. Could these too be the absolute squalor in which I’ve slept? I originally had searched for a private apartment in Berlin, but was surprised by the prices for a city that was allegedly “cheaper” than New York. Then I looked at hotels, but it was difficult to separate youth hostels from hotels from the search results. I went back to airbnb after having mistakenly believed I had found a private apartment in Prenzlauer Berg. In a follow-up email, I learned it was not a private apartment, but a private room. When I conducted a new search for a private room, I found my final room for a third of the price 12€/night. Indeed that was cheap. But the struggle to cancel the original reservation, which I had made a day before, wasn’t so easy and in the end, because I had reserved the first room four days before my trip and a five-day cancellation policy was in place, I wasn’t refunded my entire original reservation price. In the end I was paying 25€/night for an absolute heroin den, which should be demolished as a gift to humanity.

Four students from China inhabited the flat. All had separate rooms, which were relatively clean from my vantage point in the hallway. The room which I inhabited, Bao’s, was the smallest. A mattress on a board on a mattress on the floor occupied precisely half of the floor. Dead plants lined the windowsill. Two ikea bookcases bookended the bed, and the top of a desk that was disconnected and laid against the wall functioned as a small shelf. The rooms weren’t the problem. The shared area was. The floor of the hallway was sticky and an intense smell of cheap cooking oil greeted you at the door. The kitchen was so dirty that I avoided entering it at all, except once, and the bathroom was so dirty that even the cleaning supplies, which were covered in dusty, looked ironically unsanitary. A fraying polyester string held up the shower curtain, the shower head lay in the tub, as the support unit which held it was completely non-functional. During the four days there I developed a liking for seated showers, partially because I feared slipping and touching the floor. The toilet was filth metastasized.

The entire building smelled bad, like the oil one tries to wash off after visiting a 99¢ dumplings restaurant after a night of binging; the entrance was in the courtyard, or hof (?) of the block. Construction within the block made me realize that Berlin could become significantly more dense before getting much taller, simply by constructing in this internal open area within the blocks. They could also densify by mandating that each group of students to house and employ a cleaning crew.

20181221-20190103: Europe | New York City

In the morning I was checked out of my room by Ingrid Klamminger of Priesterseminar and I wheeled my Petrol case of gear and my box of books and junk down to Operncafe, across the street from the Flixbus stop. I had an amazing coffee there with the largely retiree crowd of mid morning. They were gyrating caffeinated conversation.

Flixbus to Vienna International Airport, time kill and Vueling flight to Barcelona.

I spent the 21st to the 2nd in Cornellà with Vanesa’s family. The weather was unusually warm worldwide; even Prado Dorado had only rain. We had Buena Noche dinner with Esther’s mother and friend; Imet with Anabelen, Sara and Artur, and Teofil; we traveled to Zaragoza and met Teresa and Jorge; we went for walks around Cornellaà. The vocabulary word of the year: el cuñado.

I was filled with excitement to get back to NYC during the week in Spain. In part I was tired of the smattery relationship to place that one first finds exciting in travel; equally I was tired of having concluded the filming stage, but wa in limbo before I could properly edit the footage. I was also profoundly tired of superficial things: clothes, coats, shoes, food, mattress, desk, or shower. So for that week in Spain, on holiday (cuando esta cerrado cerrado, sobre todo esto), I was already restless.

My enthusiasm for NYC correlated quite accurately to my altitude: at 30,000 in a Dreamliner, LED rainbow ceilings, even after an 8 hour flight and little or no sleep, circadian midnight, I felt upbeat and positive; in the final descent into Newark I gawked at the high rises that I’ve seen so many times. Still, I felt eager to get back. At sea-level I was waiting through customs, elongated by the new computers to first enter the customs; collecting my physical belongings, waiting through a customs exit line, and compressing my three parcels of 20 kg, 20 kg, 10 kg into one murderously heavy rolling suitcase. In the Meadowlands, waiting for NJT, the train that finally arrived, I saw the dingy, aged sliding door between cars, dysfunctional and ajar. The smell of body odor and the dust that every passenger saw but the cleaning crew had somehow overlooked for a decade. In the subway connection at Penn Station, below sea-level, I found myself utterly depressed, hauling the suitcase up and down stairs, since the MTA and New York State continue to combat the American Disabilities Act and install functional elevators; at the connecting D train, which was exponentially later with each announcement, we finally gave up and took a cab. $28 for a 20 minute drive. Welcome back to New York City. Fuck You.