Going to Vienna on these sudden trips is always a ride, ein Ritt, never a moment to stop and think about the entirely surreal situations you are casually pirouetted into. The unnerving waltz playing on loop on the Austrian Airlines flight gives you a first indication of the sugary madness to come, and I instantly fall back into the assimilated Viennese drawl that at times has provoked fellow Westfalians and Austrians alike to take me for a Wienerin.
The excitement of the reunion with everyone there: all the new pregnancies, new shoes, new shows, pipe dreams, hugs, troubles, news, nostalgia, all new, all different as usual, and all of this in the midst of the exhibition opening, the team consequently overworked, wide-eyed, hell-bent and reckless. We end up in a bar called New Bar. Newness and oldness is important in Vienna. A patina of nicotine and coffee stains is the foundation of the city. Anything truly new is greeted with an endless stream of mockery, bad-mouthing, doggedness, but eventually absorbed (imbibed) into the Erwin Wurm-like bulges of Vienna’s microcosm (the way that protozoa absorb other protozoa).
I smoke out of solidarity with everyone else, get drunk on Weißer Spritzer, talk about the perks of living in a high rise with Phil and Sinisa, about monogamy with Mel, about playing gigs on rooftops in Berlin with Zemmoa (pronounced c’est moi), and stumble into a cab to Radetzkystraße at 5am. Flora picks me up for Georgian breakfast the next day and saves me (Khachapuri: best hangover food ever).
At some point during the two days in Vienna, I find myself at a poker table with Amar and the Habsburgs. Two tomboyish croupiers (croupières?) in ties and vests are explaining the rules and I count my chips while I try not to spill the champagne on the poker table’s felt. Thank god we didn’t play for money. Of course I lose every single round, underestimating my hand, sabotaging my bluffs by blushing wildly, and I joke with Amar about the possible reasons for our bad poker karma. We must have done something pretty low to deserve this.
But the concept of Karma and Felix Austria somehow don’t go together, and neither does the idea of reincarnation resonate in a city that is so happily morbid as Vienna.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRA01Fg0WF0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U-NHTW2-Ps
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHFf7NIwOHQ