So Pitchfork, or whoever is responsible for this sort of thing, got the indie kids into arty hardcore.  That means that 90-pound 6-foot males with plastic classes and girl’s jeans are being screamed at by fat, smelly, hairy, bearded vocalists, face to face.  That’s right, I’m talking about Fucked Up.  You must see this band if they come to your town though.  No joke.

To put it in dork terms, this guy has a really great angle on it.  Pink Eyes, as he calls himself, has channeled an incredible amount of energy into a harsh sound that is paradoxically warm and uplifting.  It’s perhaps his lyrics that do it, or maybe having seen the guy’s antics in a way that makes it clear that he has a good heart.

Learn the lyrics before you go, because you will be undoubtedly confronted with the opportunity to scream them along with Mr. Eyes, and really regret it if you don’t.  He brings the music and his spirit to your face, inches away.  He is fearless in making contact with the audience, and if someone smiles enough, he’ll push them even further, perhaps by picking them up and swinging them around, unbuttoning their shirt and sticking his head in your belly, screaming forehead to forehead, even tying you up in the microphone cable.

I had few interactions with him, the first, he looked at me and grabbed my chin, shaking it back and forth, as if to mockingly complement me on my cuteness.  Later he put his arm around me and I felt the hairiest back I have ever felt in my life when I reciprocated.  Finally, I got to scream “LET’S GO!” as they played the only song whose words I was sure of, the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop”.

A lot of people could pull off these antics, but what makes this band special is the musical element.  While unrelentingly loud, with three guitars, a melodic component juxtaposes well with his voice, and in general keeps it interesting.  The singer’s act detracts a bit from appreciating this, you can go home and listen by yourself if you feel like scratching your chin over something.  This show is no place for that sort of shit.

My activity as of late has been a whirlwind of silly stories.  I need a replacement roommate, and, unable to find one for November, I decided to rent it out temporarily.  This resulted in my having a total of 3 roommates this month so far.  One of them came from New York but only stayed for two days.  I guess her dog wouldn’t eat.

A legal battle with my landlord over being dicked out of a lot of money has only escalated.  It is extraordinarily complicated, but I think I did the right thing.  The funny observation here is that it seems that legal battles are the pettiest.  Perhaps if we were actually having some childish fight in person, one of us, or both of us, could point out the extremes to which it had gone and stop it, but somehow these legal things grow like cancer when you have two parties not willing to give in.  The nice thing is that on my side, I have to pay nothing.  For some reason, my landlord finds it absolutely imperitive that she wins, even if she pays twice as much money as she will lose to her lawyer to make things complicated.

My papers are slowly going through.  “My” as in the ones I’m on, and oh how I must check my verbage.  I love it.

The band went into crisis before we even got more money back than we spent on it.  Now who knows what will happen with that.

Who knows what will happen with anything?   Great!

So I finally made it out to Spain.  The first stop was Valencia, where I went to hang out in a friend’s home town.  It was lovely, there was relaxing, reading, napping, drinking, partying and eating.  Oh, was there eating.  We made it out to his village, where a Paella was made over wood flame.  And you know, how they say it’s better when you do it the right way, but really the technology has caught up and you can pretty much do it the same at home, so you don’t believe it, but in fact, it is better.  A lot better.

Next I was off to Barcelona.  I fortunately had picked a time when the Fiestas de Gracia were happening.  This is a celebration, we believe the celebration originates from the harvest time, out in Gracia, what used to be a village outside of Barcelona, but is now just a few metro stops away.  The cool thing about it is that there’s a marked difference in the street patterns because the main city and the village were later joined by modern, square-like neighborhoods.

What it amounts to now is a competition among the plazas (squares where the street is quite a bit wider and there’s some clear space) for the best decorations.  This year, and apparently preceding years, everything was made out of re-used stuff.  One plaza was heavily decorated with used Nescafe caps, another, my favorite, with Petri dishes.  There was no form it was supposed to resemble, they simply took advantage of the luminescent effect of pastel colors on clear objects.  It was mystifying.

Then there was partying, eating (very nicely), sight seeing (all what Gaudi is!), drinking, beaching and reading, and so on.  I feel a bit redundant to mention that it’s really worth it to see all the Gaudi stuff in Barcelona, because they tell you that on your way out of the train, while you’re walking on the street, in the bathrooms….but I do recommend the Park Güell, because you really get to enjoy a bigger piece of his, and you don’t need to wait in line, and there are nice people playing music outside.

Unexpectedly, the most blog-worthy events came during my layover in Zürich.  The stories will come out of order, since I guess the clincher is in the first one.  I decided to spend the few Euros it takes to get to the city and try and get something out of my 3 hours I had to spend there.  On my way back to the airport from the city, I went through another way to the train through the train station, and it was packed with people playing chess games.  It turned out that somehow they got some chess grandmasters to come to Zürich to play normal earthlings.  Each grandmaster was surrounded by 20 chess boards, and each seemed to be managing all of these games quite well.  I went to the front to see if there was anyone there I would know, and indeed, there was GARY FUCKING KASPAROV.  It was quite amazing to see the guy work so nonchalantly, kicking asses like he was picking up groceries from the story.  I took a video you can see by clicking here.   He’s breezing through 5 boards inside of a minute, folks.

When I first arrived to the city, I picked the first suitable coffee shop I saw, and was suddenly in the middle of a wedding, which was attended by people of African descent, speaking a language I did not understand.  The event was one that radiated glee in a way that couldn’t be denied, in a way that would also portend the scowl of grumpier central Europeans.  In fact, though, there were several local onlookers who soaked in the joy.  (The drivers of the post trucks that tried to pass through as they loaded the limousine were quite irritated, however.)  After Spain, a lovely integrated community, this helped me realize that Austria is one of the least damned integrated countries of western Europe, and maybe also one of the grumpiest.

I still love it, and look forward to more living in Vienna.

I took some pictures of signs.  I like them sometimes.

This first one illustrates quite a bit about Austrian language and culture.  It’s an ad for Ottakringer Beer.  The word “Krise” is the only German word in the sign.  The sign is intended to read “Mein Bier hat keine Krise”, meaning “My beer doesn’t have a crisis”.  As harsh as the Austrian dialect can seem at first, it has become endearing to me.  To me, many Germans speaking (very) high German really don’t have much in the way of feeling in their voices.  Instead they seem to be attempting to speak with a proper accent and voice.  Many Austrians reclaim the words by adhering to their regional dialect, and furthermore express themselves furtively, in contrast.  Mind you, there is a high degree of variation in Germany among affected German dialects, and I cannot claim to have made a good survey of this.

I don’t think the second sign needs any further description.

Official German is really different from the way people speak it, and reading these signs usually requires me to look something up.  This was awful to learn. The sign already looked menacing, but its meaning was worse: my water was indefinitely shut off.  I then realized why there had been a crew of people in a gigantic hole 50 meters from my building.
We saw another one recently that was quite a good example of “Sign German” (but I didn’t get a picture).  I was in an old-fashioned elevator with my drummer loading some equipment for the show to a Taxi.  It had no door guard, and it suddenly stopped and made a very annoying nasal alarm sound.  My drummer read the sign, which said something like “Beim Lauten des akustischen Signals und Fahrtunterbrechen des Aufzugs, steigen Sie bitte zurueck und erneuen Sie ihre Etageauswahl!”  I think it was longer, but I can’t think of much more to say (they really manage to fill space).  This basically means, “if the elevator stops, step back and hit the button again.”  Standing in a stuck elevator with an annoying alarm constantly ringing does not make me want to read a loquacious sign in any language.

A considerably major force in my recent life in Vienna has been our band.  I will eschew discussion of the band’s name by not mentioning the name of the band.

The thing about it is that we’re pretty good, in the sense that it is a band that I actually feel like spending time on, despite the fact that I’m Too Old for This Shit (see also: Murtaugh List), and believe is doing something that wouldn’t otherwise be done.  Well, at least we have the potential to.  The other crazy thing about it is that we don’t really have a leader or “deciding” member of the band.  This has never happened for me.

There’s not a lot of stories to relate here.  I’ll direct you to our myspace page: http://www.myspace.com/thechansmusic.  We had two shows so far, the first of which went very well albeit shaky.  It was a second-string type of venue in a first-string area, and we later determined that the owner probably is doing some other things with his business besides providing a bar.  Nevertheless it included a backstage, a cheering crowd, an encore and a general ascent in the interest level of the crowd as we went along (this is usually the opposite).

In the second show, we were supposed to play acoustic.  The owner had met with the other members of the band when they booked it (I wasn’t there), and apparently the guy was really likable and normal-seeming.  We explained clearly what we planned for the show, and he agreed to it.  I didn’t see the owner the night of the show until the police came, who were answering a noise complaint lodged against the bar, which did not have a noise license.  The owner was not so rational at this point.  He was wearing a shirt that said “Trinkteufel” (Drink Devil), which was entirely redundant.  It is very rare for me to see someone at his age (50’s) who is NOT homeless as drunk as he was.  The police gave absolutely no slack, and we were completely shut down.  (This can be seen on the last song on youtube, linked off of the above myspace page.)

There are a lot of reasons to account for the failure of this show, many of them not coming from us.  Nevertheless, the crowd had fun and stuck around (they were mostly our friends), and we played a couple (really) acoustic songs later in the night, after many, many more beers.  The 6 songs we did pull off were well done, and so I am happy with that.

I come to report on the vital elements of this year’s RNA Society meeting held in Madison, WI, that is, the time that we spent fucking around in Chicago before and after the meeting.

The most striking things were the comparisons between the everydays in the US and Austria brought into the context of lab mates I have only ever known in Austria.  In short, beer is cheaper (and often better) in Austria, but pitchers can be a helluva deal, burgers are better and Walgreen’s is evil but useful.

There is the oft-mentioned but never to be overstated lapse in service style at the restaurant table.  Where you would expect to get some wait-staff attention in 20 minutes or so in a relatively fancy restaurant in Austria, you can’t get the waiters off your back in America.  I fail to see any way in which you could categorically prefer the former to the latter, but maybe that’s just me.

Some things that I thought to be universally great are apparently not, or, central Europeans have no taste.  Indeed, Dr. Pepper (not easily available here) was not much of a hit, Root Beer was a disastrous flop, and I had a real hard time extolling the virtues of the Twizzler straw principle.  Nevertheless, I think I managed to convey a lot of the joys of my country that I sometimes miss.

We also did a bit of the touristy things that I never do in Chicago, since I usually go there to visit, not to tour.  This is evidenced by some of the pictures.  Full stop.

I’ll leave you with one story from the actual meeting.  There’s no need to get science-y here.  After one day, many of us (around three) had put down a few, or quite a few, and found ourselves in the elevator with a senior scientist hunched over his Blackberry, who, to our surprise, had put back just as many, or more, as we did.  An operation mistake on our part caused the (faulty) elevator to become stuck.  In our state, we were not really sure what to do, or whether this was actually an emergency.  We finally resolved to hit that ever-so-special fireman button on the elevator and wait for it to ring.  Indeed, we reached 911, but they did not give us the impression that this was an emergency.

The police came and knocked on the elevator, demanding we come out, supporting our running theory that this was not an emergency.  According to them, the elevator could be opened by the maintenance, but the weekend had rolled around, and the maintenance had happily put its feet up on the sofa and cracked open a beer whilst watching some quality television.  During the about 20 minutes of being stuck, the senior scientist tried to convince us to read Nature articles on his Blackberry while we actively ignored him and attempted to convey our disinterest in his Blackberry clear by having our own damn conversation.  This was not working, so I upped the ante by doing some yoga in the elevator, i.e. standing on my shoulders and sticking my legs in the air.  Mr. Blackberry did not like that, and I don’t remember anything else about his Blackberry.

When the firemen arrived, who were necessary only because they were the only ones beside the maintenance having the key to the elevator, they briskly fulfilled their task.  I thought I would carry on the light mood that the police officers had set, as a bit of a thank-you additional to the exorbitant sales tax I was paying to the state of Wisconsin that week.  I paused at the door, looked up, and told the fireman, “Oh, wait, I was getting of on the fourth floor.”

He wasn’t amused.

Maybe one could become a little critical of my lifestyle in the later days, for being an American living in Vienna with hardly any tourist hours logged.  Why, you may ask, has it come to this?  Answer: my apartment is awesome.  I have poured a lot of time into the acquisition, moving and, in the case of subject of this blog, creating furniture.  I managed to get a 270cm 5-door wardrobe for free (but of course, I had to transport it…)  Earlier this year, I constructed a custom shelf to house some of the various (irregularly-sized) accessories associated with my wonderous projector.  This brought me to acquiring tools, which surprisingly felt like a very significant rite of passage into adulthood.

The design of this shelf is not mine, I took the basic idea from a very nice tutorial I found.  The execution was a little trickier than I thought.  I was obsessed with getting the longest, thickest possible screws.  This was detrimental to the bottom-of-the-line pine i purchased.

This week I finally painted it, a process that took place in my bedroom, next to my bed, with oil-based paints.  I am not sure if I have any brain damage from this, since it seems the subject of brain damage would have trouble knowing his own newfound limitations…but I digress.  I really loved painting it.  Had I known how obsessively I would attend to the edges at which the two colors met, and how much time I would spend on coating, re-coating ant touching up, I might not have started.

But the idea was to accentuate the S-pattern in the front by painting the front trim only orange, and then sort of give a isolated two-tone feel by making each surface hide the other colors from a single glance.  Call it gaudy, over-the-top, ugly or whatever you like, I am past the point of knowing how it fits in the scheme of good taste.

(Remember when you made the mistake of telling someone that I was in Venice, and not Vienna?)

I’m in one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen in the world, Venice, sitting in one of the ugliest rooms of the entire city (pictured).  Getting a hostel here is no cake walk, but it could be worse.

Before Ryan Gosling fell in love with McAdams in that insufferable film The Notebook, he was showing promise to be a consistently good actor.  One example of this was The United States of Leland in which he played a misunderstood child murderer, or something of the sort.  Regardless, he said of Venice, “you can hear the footsteps”.  And this is quite true.  That sound is both pleasant and lonely.  I don’t know if the lonely sense comes from the comfort I’ve come to know from industry, or the overbearing buildings tall enough to eliminate visibility flanking streets narrow enough to give claustrophobia to a non-sufferer.

The city is lovely and amazingly quiet.  The mildness seems to evoke a true relic of the spirit of the city, whether the tourists willingly participate or not.  You see, the town usually has more tourists than residents, and the majority of the economy is based around tourism, so it can be seen almost as a large-scale living museum of itself.  Any “mood” or “scene” is the product of willing participation among these transient visitors and the locals that sustain them.

I arrived to discover that you get around with a “water bus”, which costs 6.50 a ride or 28 for 48 hours (which I purchased).  I found a place near St. Mark’s square where I could sit by the big canal and watch people and eat my sandwich that I packed.  In a really great “me” moment, a Hasid stopped and asked, “Excuse me, but are you by any chance Jewish?”  I was dumbstruck.  I was extremely flattered and very tempted to say “yes” to see where I would be led to, but my respect for the guy kept me from lying.  “Sorry, no,” I said.  “You don’t have to be sorry.  Have a good day.”  I would later become incredibly curious as to why he asked, since he wouldn’t be asking for a handout or trying to lure me into the world of not accepting Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior, but I was too stunned at the time to act.

Speaking of Jews, Venice has the first ghetto ever, the Jewish Ghetto.  In fact, “ghetto” comes from the word for iron foundry in italian, which happened to be in the area of where the Jews were living in Venice.  The name stuck, and it came to mean any sort of racially homogenous area of a city.  The Jewish Ghetto is hardly run down, there are just a lot of jews there.  (Now doesn’t that make YOUR use of the word ghetto pretty damn racist?)

I saw two people from the course at St. Mark’s square, probably the most overstuffed area of Venice.  SOMEHOW, I ran in to some people I knew, from the course I was attending before I came to Venice.  (This course, was, by the way, my reason for being in Italy in the first place.)   They decided they would just spend the 9€ on a ticket, walk across the main island, and go back to the train station.  That sounded to me like a much better idea than I had.

Anyway, if you’re ever in Italy, you should check this place out, if only for a day.  It’s hard to pick the pictures to put here, so I’ll once again redirect you to my flickr page on the link on the right.

Apologies for the short, pictureless post, but I think this is best written in the moment.

So I’m at this ICGEB workshop on RNA structure and function.  The organization is sort of a goodwill to science/research institute sort of thing (I don’t really get it), having many “Member States”.  As they informed me in the beginning of today’s talks, they cover most of the world’s landmass (they’ve got Russia) and most of the world’s population (they’ve got China and India).  But I suppose the United States was sleeping when the application process took place.  Thus I am not one of the privileged members.

Today my friend/co-worker received her vouchers for breakfast and some cash.  In the presence of my co-worker and two friends I asked the secretary why I did not get said vouchers and cash.   She said that it was because I wasn’t supposed to.  “Because I’m an American, right?”

“Yes,” and in some sort of twisted idea of consolation, she added, “but you have many other privileges for being an American.”

I was in the midst of coming up with how I should tell her exactly how ridiculous it is to make such a comment, when she interrupted me, and I simply let it go.  I will avoid a rant about the truthiness of that comment, but I hope you can see some of the ridiculousness yourself.

Sorry again that it’s been so long since I posted.  Between work, an unfortunate and frustrating money situation and finishing the apartment (it’s still not done), I’ve had a bit of a dull time.  Besides that, post-Christmas winter is a rather dull time in Vienna, as it finds most going through the motions as they await the sweet relief of spring.  Oh and will it ever be sweet this year.

SO!
I went to Milan this weekend with the intention of seeing Animal Collective.  Travelling with my South Tyrolean roommate afforded me the opportunity to visit South Tyrol, the region of the Austro-Hungarian empire displaced to Italy after WWI.  After several years of Ital-ification, it received some reparations, and a re-integration of German-speaking and (gasp) Austrian culture.  The region is mixed now in a very lovely way.  Signs now read both languages, Italian mostly on top, and people seem to co-exist without much begrudging.

You’re welcome for the history lesson.  We traveled to Merano through a series of changes between intercity and regional trains, the most interesting of which was at the Italian border.  There, one must purchase a ticket first with a touch-screen machine which spits out a card, which is subsequently validated with a screen-less yellow box containing eleven colored buttons, the numbers 0-9 and a +.  After receiving the card, one inserts the card into the top of the yellow machine, and is commandeered pending the successful entry of the button combination corrisponding to your travel plans.  In none of these steps did I see any instructions as to what you should do, let alone how what you were doing related to your intention of purchase, leaving any tourist completely confused.  I’d like to say that I we handled it flawlessly (although my roommate is quite good at it), or that I gained some intuition for how the system works, but, alas, I cannot.

Our arrival in Merano was greeted with warm weather and a warm family.  We were treated to some lovely Italian pasta, followed by a chat with the grand-folks, culminating in probably the most refreshing night’s sleep of the year.  The next day’s sun revealed the breathtaking view of a mountain seen through the apartmen’s window.  I was again treated to coffee and cake by the Uncle, and birthday joy from the adorable cousin, who offered her cute German and English.

We then drove to Bolzano (or Bolzen, depending on which part of the sign you read), where we missed our first connection to Milan.  This was not a bad thing, as we got to spend some time in the lovely capitol of South Tyrol.  I had my first real Italian cappuccino, and strolled through a lovely town which made me ask, why would anyone leave South Tyrol?

We got to Milan and plopped our stuff down and b-lined to the show.  We met a couple Americans there, some of the types I miss: the aimless opportunist and the self-aware hipster.  It goes without saying that the show was in-fucking-credible if you’ve ever heard this band.

Eschewing another what-I-think-about-a-band scree, let’s move on to our day in Milan.  We began with the Duomo (cathedral), which in these European cities are commonly impressive, however this one was VERY impressive.  The American was right, it looked better in the night, but I failed to take pictures then.  Google it.
We strolled through a super-upscale shopping arcade, then headed for a park, where we saw more than four Asian couples getting married, or just honeymooning it up western style, to show some pictures back home.  Either way, the confetti was enough to wade through and lament, as it was even getting into the ponds.

Before attempting to catch a glimpse of the original da Vinci’s Last Supper (and thus completely my quest to come to a full grasp of the Dan Brown’s wondrous, enchanting epic tale), we stopped in at a real local Italian pizza place.  Let me tell you, I have had a lot of American pizza, and even at its most Italian, it does not compare to this shit.  If you’re ever in Italy you have to try this, man, it’s voll lecker.  You won’t believe your mouth.

Our attempts at the Last Supper were thwarted by the presence of other tourists who (gasp) had the SAME IDEA.  But it was cool: the system works where you make an appointment to come in, and you will only come with 25 other people.  So you avoid the Louvre effect by eliminating the lineup situation, and the dumb museum effect of peering over other impatient shoulders.  Still this means we saw shit except the front of the church, which is, relative to Europe standards, not really much more than shit.

We took a stroll into yet another park and I found a place to perch myself onto a rock and read as my roommate took a nap on a bench.  That was great.  We finally visited the impressive cemetery before missing our next connection to the airport.  We made it back safe, but at least our mishaps made the traveling less boring.

You know the routine, more shit on flickr.