Modern Times

Sex and the City 2 opens in European cinemas on Friday, May 29. I, as the ultimate S&C fan should be ecstatic. Well, I’m not. I passed by a cinema with a jumbo poster above the door featuring Carrie, Charlotte, Samantha and Miranda (in a desert?!) and I had a very strange feeling – it was a bit like looking at a corpse – a mixture of curiosity, disgust and sadness.

It is Thursday, Apr. 8, 2010. Tomorrow is the beginning of the campaign suspension before the election, required by law. Today they are really opening up all the throttles on the banks of the Danube in Budapest.

“Who supplies our government the water tankers that spray you down from the street when you are demonstrating?” shouts the speaker into the crowd. “Israel!” he answers himself. “Who is buying up our Hungarian land? Israel!”

The applause of the large audience echoed in the Camineum of the National Library, Mar. 24, as award-winning Austrian actor and director Klaus Maria Brandauer and Vienna’s Archbishop Cardinal Christoph Schönborn made their way to the brightly lit podium at the front of the hall.

A little over a century after its founding, the Vienna Secession is again scandalizing the city with exhibitions that run against public propriety. Founded in 1897 by Gustav Klimt, this union of artists now presents Christoph Büchel’s sexually deviant club themed exhibition at the base of the Element6 building.

For the next two months all sexual taboos will be broken. For 18 and up, the museum includes a dress code of no t-shirts or jeans, including many DJ’s, strippers and dancers. Bondage, mask-mystery, body painting, red walls and black velvet, benches and beds, sculptures in erotic poses and women and men of different ages making out and having their fun was all part of this sexual experience.

I started my day with a cup of coffee and the morning paper, when a quote by Pat Robertson jumped off the page:

“Feminism is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” All that said in support of work segregation and elimination of women from competing for what are thought of as men’s jobs. This might be “old news” for some, but it’s a scandal nonetheless, at least to the eyes of women in Austria.

Shopping can be fun in Vienna. With affordable catwalk-inspired pieces, and thousands of new styles churned through the stores every year, a trip to high street shops such as Zara and H&M can mean a good time without the guilt trip. While it might be nice to have that original studded Balmain skirt or Christian Louboutin snakeskin shoes, or to strut down the street with an exquisite crocodile PS1 dangling eloquently on our arms, affordability is usually what decides the day.

From 5 to 122… This is your window of opportunity! Your chance to find the perfect mate! Unless it takes the whole 122… In some cases, people have actually spent a lifetime looking. Many tell happy tales of success, but others… well, when it was their turn, let’s just say fortune was looking in the other direction.

Why start at five? Well, this is the age when children begin to develop social affections, when the identification with the mother is broken and a child can build focused friendships. It is also the time of the first puppy-love... Oh, those simple and exquisite romances of early age!

And why 122? Simply because this is the longest anyone has ever lived. Still, it may not be enough. Fortunately, there is a scientific formula that can ease the way!

Less than 25 years ago you could leave your car unlocked overnight in Vienna and nothing would happen. The car would be right where you had left it, and whatever you had had inside would remain untouched. People say “Vienna is a village,” and in terms of personal safety and the security of property, it truly was.

Austria’s Roman Catholic Church is in trouble again. And, once more, the issue is sex. But while past scandals have sprung from allegations of carrying on among priests and priests-to-be – including the revelations in the mid 1990s that the Vienna Archbishop Cardinal Hans Hermann Groër himself may have been a pedophile – the focus this time is on heterosexual love and marriage. And all the mixed messages.

Taking its cue from the conservative leadership of German Pope Benedikt, the Austrian Church continues to insist on celibacy for the priesthood, and forbids birth control and abortion.