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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.

Utopia GESAMTKUNSTWERK at the re-opened 21er Haus, is the first exhibition to be staged in this remarkable building – rusty red frame outside, white girders inside, a big, industrial-chic place with vast windows letting in the Schweizer Garten view and whatever light can be conjured out of a V

It was perhaps the Austrian broadcasting corporation’s (ORF) biggest hit: Launched before Christmas, the reality TV show “Who Wants To Be A Media Exec?” kept audiences in Austria – and even Germany – under a spell until 18 Jan., when their favourite candidate, the dashing and dastardly Nikolaus Pelinka, quit the

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

It’s dangling from a hook in my hall wardrobe: 155x25 cm of fluffy burgundy, pink and turquoise, with specks of orange, a knitted comforter that will keep me cosy in the cold months. This labour of love is the result of some 12 hours of needlework, accomplished one dull rainy weekend at my mother’s in the Styrian countryside. 

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. 

It is a scientifically proven fact that  people who spend too much time in shopping malls in November and December start to exhibit signs of psychosis, particularly when additionally exposed to Christmas carols.

In the midst of particularly difficult times for Iran, Farid Erdisian, the founder of Candoo music, a not-for-profit organization for the promotion of musicians in Vienna, is focusing on another face of the Islamic Republic: it’s long established and infinitely rich tradition of art and music; a tradition that is sometimes overlooked in all the drama surrounding the potentiality of a nuclear Iran.