The Arts

With his dark clothes, black teased big hair, eyeliner and shocking red lipstick, 50 year old Cheyenne (Sean Penn), with his reading glasses on a chain around his neck, looks like a sad clown, a relic of the 1980s glam rock look inspired by Robert Smith, lead singer of The Cure. Cheyenne speaks slowly with the quiet, high-pitched voice of a child. He suffers from sciatica and moves with stiffness – it is immediately apparent he may be suffering from more than depression, affected by drugs and drink from wilder days.

Joe Garcia, operatic bass, has lived for a dozen years in this town, but his bio isn’t exactly a tale from the Vienna woods. He is far from any of the usual opera stereotype; a hard worker, but Vienna has grown on him. “The living here is easy,” he maintained when I asked him why he’s stayed so long.

The days are growing shorter. It is already getting dark as I leave the office; the air stings my face and I wrap up my woolly scarf tighter as I head down the street toward my tram stop on the Ringstrasse. It’s almost winter; what did I expect?

The grainy black and white image flickers uncertainly on the screen. It shows an elderly man in a three-piece tweed suit, settled comfortably into a garden chair, his head resting on a heavy, ornamented

Slaven Tolj is a former-Yugoslav with a face reminiscent of iron. He is also an artist and the director of Lazareti in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

With its latest exhibition, “No Fashion, Please! – Photography Between Gender and Lifestyle”, the Kunsthalle Wien boldly ventures where established fashion fears to tread. Tossing convention aside, artists explore brazen alternatives while questioning the relationship between body and clothing.

They create “radical” design, without ever seeming radical. Their youth may just be the necessary prerequisite for their special insight into the material world. They are quiet.

f you need some contemporary music, you can go down to Flex on the Vienna Canal any day and get a thumping dose. Drum and bass, jungle, trance, house, electro. My surrogate daughter recently introduced me to dubstep. It’s dark and slow, with an awesome bass. 

Recently, Michael Maertens has essayed so many leading roles at the Burg/Akademietheater that you’d think they would replace the hinged stage door with a revolving one.  But as Judge Adam in Heinrich Kleist’s Der Zerbrochne Krug, currently at the Akademietheater, he literally outdoes himself – seeming to

The stage juts out into the audience; as the curtains open we see a tableau vivant of a sculpting studio in motion. The orchestra fills the deep back of the theatre, with the audience both around and between. This was just the first of several successful staging decisions of the evening.