Goodbyes In Vienna

dear erik,

i can't believe it's almost over!  megan just left a few minutes ago for her week-long sojourn in istanbul, and i have the rest of today here, then off to the airport tomorrow morning (i have to be at the metro stop when it opens at 5am.  really looking forward to that.)  it seems so crazy that it's been a month and a half already!

it will definitely be strange to be back in regular old life where i need to have a job and pay my bills and grocery shop (theoretically) and clean up after the cat and have more than three options for what to wear each day.  i know everyone says that they just couldn't BEAR to not have anything to do, and even if they won the lottery they'd get a job, etc.  i'm pretty sure i'd be okay living a life of leisure, as long as there were interesting things to see and do, beautiful parks to sit in, friends to talk to, art museums to visit...

still, it will be nice to be back in my life.  i'm just feeling sad at the moment because it's been such an incredible experience and goodbyes are hard.  megan was a fantastic co-tripper on this trip of a lifetime.  it was wonderful to have someone to experience all this with who was equally excited and interested and who is such a kindred spirit in so many ways.  i was really lucky to have her with me!

so.  that's how things are feeling right this second.  i should really get up and go to a museum or something, but at the moment that's just not happening.  it's been pretty gray and cold here, with sleet and snow the night we arrived and yesterday.  neither of us brought winter jackets, since mostly we were in warm climates and didn't want to have to carry them around with us, but i gotta say it's pretty chilly to be walking around in a sweater or a sweatshirt when it's sleeting.  even though we both have scarves.  strange.

we spent the first day here at schonbrunn (sp?) palace, which is where the hapsburgs used to hang out.  that was pretty interesting, and made me definitely want to learn more about them.  then we went to a museum that was doing special exhibits on klimt (it's his 150th birthday year, and he's from vienna, so he's kinda everywhere at the moment, which is fun) and schiele, who we both like.  happily, the security guards here in vienna didn't get the memo from the munich folks, so we were able to examine the art unmolested.

then yesterday we spent the day going to the mozarthaus and to the sigmund freud museum, which is in his old offices.  i'm sad to say that both were really disappointing.  this trip has been a wonderful education in how to design a museum.  it's something i never thought about before, but you can have exactly the same objects in a museum and have it be interesting, or have it be deadly dull.  (fine art museums have their own issues, but in their case it's a little less important how the information is presented.) 

the freud museum was interesting because they had some of his furniture, and a lot of his objects and things he had on the walls, but mostly it was just pictures of things.  the audio guide gave some info on some of it, but you didn't get much of a sense of him in the space itself.  i apologize for my bias, but it definitely felt like a museum created by psychoanalysts.  don't get me wrong - i've met many amazing people who are analysts, but everything needs to be so Intellectual.  nothing can ever just frickin' be What It Is. 

for example the audio tour starts off with a loooong explanation about why the space hasn't been set up to look like it did when freud had his offices there.  partly it's that they just don't have enough stuff, since most of his things (including the magical couch) are at other museums.  anna freud donated some things to them, which is how they were able to set up the furniture in his waiting room (for example).  however, on the audio guide there's this long speech about why they Chose not to recreate the rooms.  to be honest, i didn't really listen to it, so i don't remember what the rest of the explanation was. 

i feel like, if you're going to set up a museum, then have someone help you who knows how to set up a museum.  don't have all the members of the freud analytical society (or whatever) set the thing up, since the majority of people coming are not gonna be analysts, and are gonna want much more pedestrian information.  we wanna know about what kind of person he was.  his family, his life, his cocaine use, his friends, etc.  we want to look at a picture and have someone tell us "this is a picture of his friend joe.  joe thought psychoanalysis was bogus, until he met freud in person.  then he became a true believer and the two were lifelong friends." or whatever. 

all right.  i'm not explaining myself well at all.  i'll skip the rest of my thoughts on the matter, but we'll have to discuss at some point.

as far as the mozarthaus, it made the freud museum look like a goldmine.  again, we mostly went because it's located in his old apartment, so i was hoping to see what his home looked like, and to get some idea of how he lived.  the museum is on three floors, and the apartment section is the last part you visit.  here's the great part.  they have no idea what the apartment looked like, and there's nothing in there.  when you first walk in, they tell you "we have no idea what the apartment looked like.  when mozart died, there was an inventory of furniture, and this is what he had.  try to imagine how that furniture would have looked in these rooms.  where would they have put it?  what was each room used for?  we don't know." 

then you walk through the mostly empty rooms, and they tell you what they think maybe that room was used for, and give you some boring information about something, and then there is an object in each room that has Nothing To Do with Mozart, but is from the same (economic) status household around the same time in vienna.  so basically it's saying "here's a fruitbowl that other upper-middle class people in vienna had that decade.  imagine: maybe mozart's household had a fruitbasket like it!" 

the majority of the museum (95%) was bad art and art installations having something to do with mozart (like a ceramic mozart head with music coming out of it.  for real.) and then reproductions of pictures of people from the era (mostly his patrons or other composers), maps of vienna, pictures of places he went to once, stuff like that.  then there are copies of his music scattered about.  seriously - in the mozart museum, they don't have the originals.  they're photocopies.

there were two rooms with actual objects in them, and they were things from the freemasons that again, as far as i could tell, had nothing to do with mozart, except that he was a freemason and would have used objects like them.  still, by that point it was so exciting to have actual objects to look at. 

now, don't get me wrong.  i love places that try to recreate a time or place.  if they had filled up his apartment with objects that were probably similar to objects his family would have used, that would have been totally fine and interesting.  however, that's not what they did.  they gave you a single object that had nothing to do with anything.

again.  i'll skip the rest of the rant, but it really was a kind of cap on the lesson that museums are amazing institutions.  and i love that it really made me think about why we go to them; what we're hoping to get out of it; what kind of people go; are we all looking for the same thing or are some audiences so specific that you should just gear the info toward them and not worry about the rest of us in the hoi polloi?

still, as usual, i was happy we had gone, even if it didn't turn out to be quite what i hoped.

the good news is that we ended our day at the vienna state opera house, watching a night of music (brahms, tchaikovsky, chopin, stravinsky) with ballet pieces choreographed by balanchine, neumeier, and jerome robbins.  then we went out for a fancy italian dinner.  it was a fabulous night. 

the opera house was amazing.  we sat in a box (pretty high up and close to the stage.  i mean, we're not Rockefellers or anything, but we were in the front row, so the view was still good.)  the opera house itself is striking - it was inaugurated in 1869 with don giovanni, and then a good part of it was destroyed by fire (maybe during the war?  i may have made that up.) and then it reopened in the 50s.  anyhoo - we felt Very Grown-Up and Cultured to be sitting there in our box at the opera/ballet.  some of the dancing was wonderful, and when the performers are talented, even the pieces i don't like are still interesting to watch.

i have to admit, while we were watching we both had the exact same thought:  does ballet have to be So Gay?  i mean, for real.  it's really, really Gay.  i feel like you have all these beautiful people up on stage with these amazing bodies in practically no clothes, and everyone looks sort of weirdly androgynous, since the woman have no boobs and the men are all tossing their heads and running around with 'delicate fingers' or whatever.  it just seems like what they're doing up there is so Intimate.  not that it has to be coarse or crude or whatever, but both megan and i felt a little thrill whenever anyone on stage actually Looked at anyone else. 

now, i really enjoy ballet, and i realize that there are lots of conventions of the art that people love.  i think in general i tend to like a tiny bit more modern dance thrown in with my ballet.  there were two pas de deux in the neumeier piece where you felt like there was a story being told, and like the two dancers' characters had some kind of relationship to each other.  it made it much more poignant, rather than just a kind of beautiful display of ability.

just after the intermission (excuse me, the pause.  i am a world-traveller now) a guy came out and made some announcement.  it was in german, so of course we had no idea what he was saying, but it seemed to be a little upsetting to the audience, and it ended with a man's name, so our guess was that someone had been injured and would be replaced with an understudy.  there was a pas de deux a few movements later, and i was sure that it must be the understudy.  i actually really liked it, and thought both dancers did a really good job, but the guy definitely had a brief flash across his face in moments that he was in the middle of a nightmare.  happily, he did a great job, and i could hear some of the dancers backstage applauding as he ran off. 

it got me thinking, though, of how scary that must be.  i've been an understudy for a play before, and i spent my nights just praying the woman would be able to perform, since the idea of going out and doing a play that i had never even done a run-through for was terrifying.  can you imagine if you're the guy who has to go out and do a performance you've never done before, and there's another person counting on you to physically support them through the whole thing?  that if you miss a moment and aren't in the right place at the right time, some woman might be flying through the air waiting for you to catch her and you don't and she breaks her leg?  lordy.  too much stress. (yes, i imagine that ballet understudies rehearse more than actor understudies, but you take my point.)

all right.  i gave megan my converter to take to turkey with her, since i wouldn't be needing it.  i think i should probably shut the computer down, since i'll have to check my email a few times before i go and i need it to have a little juice left.  i hope you are having a great week!  what are the girls going to be for halloween?  send me a picture if you get a chance.

love you,
murph