Merry Christmas

One of the decorations on our Christmas tree.

It ain't Christmas until the fat lady has been hung.

I had this thought today: Love is the antidote to any poison.

Merry Christmas to everyone.

Visit to the Essl Museum

Took a ten-minute ride to the Essl Museum, a really beautiful modern art gallery.

B says the guy who founded it is a millionaire art collector who owns the Austrian equivalent of Home Depot.

Visit their website and look at how architecturally striking the space is---I was really impressed with it.

view of the large third floor gallery at the Essl Museum

Three pieces of art caught my eye:

Wall sculpture made of glued-together empty toilet paper rolls.

This piece measures about six feet square. I might make one of these for my house, but I'd want to paint the rolls, maybe run some colorful fabric inside each "pipe" so it would show through the gaps.

The second thing I liked, unfortunately, I failed to get a pic of. But here's what the artist, Alem Korkut, did---he put some kind of vibrating mechanism under a tray, about the size of a cookie sheet. On top of that he put a piece of white paper. Then he started the vibrator and dumped some ball bearings on the paper, each of which had been dipped in black paint.

So as the surface vibrated, the balls jiggled around and lurched here and there and created a kind of random pattern. At any point in the process you could stop the vibrator, remove the ball bearings, and there's your art to hang on the wall. There were video screens showing exactly how the guy did it.

Again, the only thing I would change would be to use different colors on the ball bearings. First black, then the next color, then the next. I might try this at home, too.

Finally, this thing below. It was ingenious, we thought----a bust of David, on which is projected moving eyes and lips, the lips reciting a Hungarian freedom poem, in Chinese, and behind it all a red piece of fabric. When you look at the shadow of the bust on the fabric, you see yellow stars for eyes and a mouth on the shadow "head."

Modern Art at Essl Museum, Austria from John X on Vimeo.

The artist is named David Adamko, and you can check out his website for the full video of the installation.

Thanks to B who helped me find the names and websites here, after I forgot my notes back at the museum!

Hunting for Our Christmas Tree

Here, they don't slap the Christmas tree up on December 1. Nope; the tree goes up a day or two before Christmas (which is celebrated in Austria on the 24th, NOT the 25th), is almost always a REAL tree, almost always ISN'T three stories tall, and is often taken down on January 6 (Epiphany, which I guess is one of the thousands of Catholic-church inspired holidays Austria has; I can't keep track of them all.)

We've passed a number of tree markets here in Vienna but the trees, having been cut days or maybe weeks earlier, aren't always so fresh-looking. So B asked around, called around, and finally we decided to drive an hour or so outside town to a tree dealer she'd discovered.

Found the place, finally, and pulled into the parking lot. Lots of trees there, but for different reasons they weren't right----too tall, too spindly, too thick, too short, no smell, the needles were too pointy. But no problem! One of the employees grabbed the pickup (which they DO drive in the countryside here, if not in Vienna) and off we went, outside the village to the place in the hills where the trees grow.

The road was steep and still filled with snow, so the guy switched to 4WD on the way up. There were the trees, awaiting their premature deaths. We asked the guy how long it takes a tree to grow to a height of 2 meters. "About six years," the guy said.

So we walked around and finally found a specimen we liked. The guy whipped out his chainsaw, cut it down, and threw it into the back of the truck.

Back in the village, I saw how they prepare trees for transport. 1) Stick it in a fiberglass tube about 3 feet long, trunk first. 2) Pull on the trunk and the tree goes through the tube, simultaneously 3) getting wrapped in a thin plastic net which compresses the branches together, so the tree is kind of the shape of an unopened pine cone.

While B supervised all this, I walked over to a little kiosk where I'd noticed customers and staff munching on stuff throughout our time there. "Do you have anything warm to drink?" I asked her. "Glühwein," she said, a warm spiced white wine. "Please deliver it unto me," I said. When I got ready to pay, she wouldn't take my money, so I guess it's a perk for customers. 

We had to do some fancy re-arrangin' to fit the tree into the car, but it fit. Drove home, and stuck the tree out on the balcony until tomorrow when we'll bring it in and decorate it, including with real candles. I'll be sure to post a pic of the tree, decorated with candles blazing, so you'll be able to tell the authorities exactly how our house happened to burn to the ground.

(Just kidding---it's perfectly safe.)