Ana was born in Zagreb in 1974 to a Croatian arts world power couple - actress / painter Jagoda Kaloper and architect Radovan Tajder. She grew up in Zagreb, ballet dancing, acting in movies, painting (first on the walls of her parents’ apartment, later at the School of Fine Arts) and going to rockabilly parties.
In 1991, she moved to Vienna where she has lived ever since. She studied at Webster University, first graduating with a BA in Marketing Management and then an MBA. During her MBA studies, Ana started working at the Croatian Mission to the UN where she spent four years learning about the art of diplomacy. Armed with her MBA diploma, she moved to Mobilkom Austria, the region’s largest mobile network operator, to pursue a career in international business. In the next six years she worked her way up from project manager to international marketing specialist. Then the urge to explore new fields took her to Ogilvy & Mather, one of the world’s largest advertising agencies, where she worked as key account manager.
At work, Ana shook hands with presidents and ministers, managed large-scale events and projects, coordinated marketing activities in five different markets, devised international strategic market plans, launched websites, and oversaw online campaigns. And to keep sane through all of this, she danced, practised tai-chi, travelled, read countless books, visited exhibitions, concerts and operas. And partied. A lot.
In 2004, Ana put pen to paper and started to write short stories based on her varied work, travel and romantic adventures. “From Barbie to Vibrator”, a collection of these fascinating accounts - sometimes funny, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes poignant but always enlightening - was published in May 2008 by Profil, Zagreb.
Ana is currently working on her second book and writing for The Vienna Review and Zaposlena (a Croatian magazine for business and professional women). She is about to start her PhD at the University of Vienna.
Some names sound destined for legend. Like Leopold Hawelka. And Josefine Hawelka. But no, they weren’t characters in a play by Arthur Schnitzler. They were two of Vienna’s most admired Kaffeesieder, coffee house proprietors.
Josefstadt is where old Vienna is hiding. While the 1st District is filling up with tourism, shopping, dining and expensive apartments only diplomats and Eastern European millionaires can afford, old Vienna is retreating into its 8th District.
In a sense, Los Angeles can be said to be a surprisingly quiet city. This is because it is so suburban – a patchwork of quiet neighborhoods with a shopping mall or a collection of restaurants and shops splashed every now and there.
The City of Angles sleeps a lot. It goes to sleep early and gets up late. Bars and restaurants will empty around nine or ten and so will the streets. The hum of an 18-million-person city will turn into mysterious peace just occasionally disturbed by a stranded helicopter. Nights are quiet and long – the hum will reappear long after the birds are awake, around eight.
But the reality is, Los Angeles is louder than life.
OK, so three weeks ago, I officially moved to Los Angeles. It is not that I wanted to live in Los Angeles. Or work in movies. I fell in love. With a man who wants to live in Los Angeles. And works in movies. Life has its own plans.
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.
Finally it is my time to brag about Facebook! Our love relationship has turned into a love-hate relationship. I like(d) social networks: I am home in two different countries. I went to an international school and then an international university. Later, I worked in international business, so my friends are scattered all around the world. For people like me, the social networks are the easiest way to keep in touch.
Gerda Lerner is living proof that it is never too late. Her life is a story of contradictory realities: of being a housewife and a celebrated scholar, a victim of anti-Semitism and a powerful women’s rights advocate, at times prosperous and at times poor.
It was “Bloomsday” evening, Jun. 16 at Café Korb. Yet another book reading, I feared – the intoning of Literature with a capital “L” – but instead, it was a colorful café-fairground of contrasting scenes and people. James Joyce would have loved it.
Students of the University of Vienna are used to many things – like having to arrive at lectures an hour early to get a place to sit! Otherwise it’s the floor. But what they are definitely not used to are TV-crews, mics, flashes and cameras taking over their lecture halls.
For Alice Schwarzer’s visit, however, that’s just what they got.
Vienna Review book review editor Ana Tajder’s first novel From Barbie to Vibrator is a female coming-of-age story set in Vienna’s 8th district. Already published in her home country of Croatia, the book will be published this month in German by Czernin Verlag.
There is a new listing on the protocol of endangered species: Fashion. Don’t laugh. This is a serious crisis. Not only financial, but also a crisis of creativity and general mood.
Seriously, fashion is dying out. While holding a new issue of Vogue used to be an (expensive), “I want this and I need that!” experience, now it has turned into a (cheap), “I already have this and I can’t be bothered with that” one.
Fashion was last seen alive in the nineties. In the early nineties, Dolce & Gabbana and Jean Paul Gaultier created the über-sexy geometrical corsets and sharp dresses – they were something new. And then came the all black and simple minimalism by Helmut Lang and Jil Sander. This was also something new.
Last month, Frederic Morton was again in Vienna, the city of his birth that has long been his muse and continues to be the focus of his work. On this particular visit, he attended the opening night of the musical Rudolph, playing at the Raimundtheater, the story of the Crown Prince’s last eight months leading up to the presumed double suicide with his lover at Mayerling, his hunting lodge in the Vienna Woods.
Reading the blurb on the back of Hollywood to Vienna: a Trip and a Half, you might expect a book about cultural differences between sunny California and fog-bound Middle Europe. Instead, you find a Bildungsroman of the sixties counter-culture told in flash-back by one of its own. Jesse is a middle-class Jewish boy who grew up in LA and while nobody special, he goes to school with the children of Hollywood stars. A teenage hippie, his search for love and peace ultimately take him to Vienna where he meets Anna, the young Austrian woman he will later marry.
As of Jan. 7, 680 people have been killed in the Israeli attack on Palestine, CNN tells us. This number make me angry. Not because it is high, but because it means… well, nothing.
Numbers do not describe suffering. What do you do with this information? What does 680 tell you? Does this mean the conflict is bad? Or not so bad? We are constantly bombarded with so many numbers that they already made us numb…. Tens of Millions died in WWII, 110,000 in Bosnia and Croatia; 2,974 in the World Trade Center. And now there is 680…
When it comes to living parallel lives, few have outdone attorney and novelist Louis Begley.
Begley was a partner at Debevoise & Plimpton, a distinguished New York Law firm, when he surprised the literary world with his first novel, Wartime Lies, about a young Polish Jew caught up in the inferno of the Holocaust.
The pace of events surrounding the agonies of the British Bookshop last autumn was worthy of a Hollywood thriller. On Nov. 17 2008, Vienna’s book lovers were shocked to learn that The British Bookshop, the city’s largest and oldest English-language bookstore, had filed for bankruptcy. And then, just as the ink was drying on the “end of an era” eulogies for a beloved literary institution, they heard the breaking news:
After 16 years, the Vienna Life Ball has turned into the biggest AIDS charity event in Europe, collecting more than €12 Million for the fight against the disease. It has also developed into one of the region's biggest society events, becoming the only party where you can live out two of the top fantasies of our time: Meeting celebrities (this year Sharon Stone, Kim Catrall, Debbie Harry and Linda Evangelista), and Walking down a red carpet wearing an opulent costume or much MUCH less. And all of it in the name of charity
Art history is crowded with images of women, pictured, painted, sculptured. Remember Venus of Willendorf? The Egyptian Queen Nefertiti? The Greek Goddess Nike? Da Vinci's Mona Lisa? Delacroix's Freedom Guiding the People? Klimt's Judith?
Sometimes, they were glorified for their beauty, power or status. Sometimes, they symbolise larger ideas such as freedom or love or glory. And sometimes, they were adored simply for what they were - women. Naked women, beautiful women, average women, powerful women, struggling women. Mothers, daughters, lovers, wives. Flattering, isn't it?
