On the Town

No matter what crowd launches a club in Vienna, it gradually gets younger. The original patrons retreat to small cocktail bars where the music is moderated and the prospect of conversation still possible. 

I was just thinking what a boring sod I was becoming, girlfriend, work, colleagues, that sort of thing, when “Something spectacular is coming to Vienna” landed in my inbox. It was a “VIP” invitation to the newest club in town. The place was called “Alpha”: the daring candour admirable, I thought at the time, in admitting such a commonplace pretension.

“But we’re on the VIP list,” the girl protested, the black points of her eyes locked accusingly onto the doorman through the night.

When An Inspector Calls premiered in Moscow in 1945, it must have seemed to its Russian audience like an English version of Chekhov, with its feckless upper classes refusing to face facts as their own doom approached. Set in 1912, J.B.

Early music musicians are often far more than mere instrumentalists. They are historians, archivists and sleuths, musicologists, music theorists and improvisers. They are conversant in lost tongues and read illegible scripts. Searching for forgotten musical treasures, they are at home in the storerooms of museums, in the choir lofts of Gothic churches, and in the manuscript vaults of libraries, with their steel doors and humidity-controlled rooms. And when a treasure is found, they find a way to play it. Such musicians are fanatical in a way others are not.

In Thomas Vintenberg’s 1998 film The Celebration, his hand-held camera peeked at a pater familias’ birthday bash as casually as any clueless guest.  But when the movie’s actual “moment of truth” came – when dad’s grown son stands up to describe the sexual abuse the

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

Charity work is a choice to give personal time for the benefit of others. But for the members of the United Nations Women’s Guild, helping the needy is just one positive factor.  Through the organization, members learn language and practical skills that help them to adapt to life in a foreign country.  

Sometimes the truth about national character is easier for a foreigner to see than a local.  It was with this in mind that, years ago, I put some hours of careful study into a little book called the Xenophobes Guide to the Austrians, by one Louis James, part of an engaging series of revelatory tomes intended as cultural “user’s manuals” for the bewildered traveller. 

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. 

The perennial “high fog” of Vienna’s winter weather calls for a powerful antidote! So here are some shops in cheerful colours offering a wide selection of tempting goods from the luxurious to the sensuous for all ages and all pocketbooks.