Sunday, January 29, 2017

Day 135: More like UnesWHOA

Hello faithful readers! This week was less eventful than the last, excepting the TU Ball on Thursday and a day trip to Halstatt (hahl-shtat) on Saturday. I finally finished my university course--on Thursday afternoon, I took the final exam, which was quite the hand-workout. I used to be able to write essays for hours at a time in high school, thanks to the AP courses I took, but college, with its term papers and laptops, has made me soft, and so it was actually pretty painful to write the four short answer responses and two essays the exam required. Luckily, I passed the exam and the class with a "1," which translates to the highest grade, so that was a nice bonus to finally being done with that portion of my workload. Now I get to pick a new course for the summer semester, as it's called here, which runs roughly from March until the end of June.
I am officially ready to go out in the bright sun of my native Los Angeles and receive strange looks from people who can't handle a bright pink hat with the word FEMINIST on it in all caps. At least the beliefs about women's equality I've held dearly since I was 17 are fashionable nowadays...
The highlight of my teaching week was playing modified makeshift Apples-to-Apples with a first-year class to help them think quickly on their feet in English and also have a little fun. Since there were roughly twenty students, the usual method of playing in a circle wasn't going to work, so what I did was take some orange and blue construction paper and give each kid seven scraps of the orange paper to simulate the seven red noun cards. Each round, I would write an adjective on the blue paper, and the kids would have a short period of time to come up with a noun to write on an orange paper, which they would then place on the table in front of me face-down. I would then mix up the orange cards and read each of their answers in turn, and pick the noun that best fit my adjective. 
Adjectives included "annoying," "beautiful," and "brave."
The TU Ball was fun, but unfortunately I had teaching at 8 the following morning, so I missed most of the actual festivities, including all that dancing I had learned last week. The best part, though, is getting dressed and looking snazzy, naturally, so I did get to do that, and managed to be in bed by 11pm, because I require sleep to be a functional person, let alone an effective teacher. It is a little sad that I won't get an opportunity to wear my dress for a while--I guess I need to wait for people I know to start having black-tie weddings, or something, or for someone to invite me to an awards show.
You can put me in a ball gown, but I will always make a weird face. Guaranteed.
The ball was at the Hofburg palace complex, and was extremely fancy. So fancy, in fact, that the staff wouldn't let me sit down during the opening dance performance because every chair was apparently accounted for by people fancier than I.
Red light, violet light... it was so cold walking to the subway from the palace. I'm not sure I'll ever feel warmth again.
On Saturday, some Fulbrighters and British Council teaching assistants took a Erasmus bus, run by the international student organization of the same name, about four hours away to Halstatt, a tiny town on a lake that is apparently a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The town itself was reminiscent of a ski town, with snow covering the ground and rooftops of the historic houses and small buildings, and it was all very charming (and cold). Halstatt is built into salt-mine mountains, as the tour guide let us know many, many times over the course of our ninety-minute walking tour, during which I was positive I was going to lose my toes to frostbite. The view was certainly beautiful, even if we lost the sun at around one pm behind the mountains--it was like a town in a snowglobe, and another example of a place in Austria that felt too picturesque to be real.
There are only two roads from one side of the town to the other--one for cars at the bottom, and one for pedestrians higher up the hill.
It's a small world after all?
I'm smiling in this picture because I'd just gotten off the bus and could still feel my feet.
Spotted at the rest stop we paused at on the way to Hallstatt. For a brief second I entertained the idea that it would be a regular CD with songs about chocolate, but...
... calorie information instead of a track listing confirmed that, yes, this was a chocolate CD. I should have bought it.
Miscellany of the week:
  • In other news, the sun is finally setting around the all-new late time of five pm! Imagine that!!
  • I've got a few pieces in the pipeline, as usual: I reviewed the pilot of Riverdale on the CW, which is... interesting... to say the least; I'm working my way through Paul Auster's 4321 on my Kindle app; I'm planning my review of the Dream Theater concert I'm going to see in Prague in a little over a week, and more. You'll probably be able to see those write-ups on my site by the end of February.
  • Picture time!
This store sells clothes. I would have thought this store would be selling something a little more PG-13.
Oh man. Wow. I can go see the Superbowl here in Austria. I'm so excited. Wow.
Do I have room in my brain to try and learn Esperanto? Probably not. 
Walking back home at sunset and caught a very pretty view. Hashbrown, no filter.
I like that this pastry is spelled with "blech(hhhhh)" even though it probably tastes better than that.
(As always, if you want to express your love for me with material goods, my Amazon wishlist is here, my main site is here, and if you want to see many, many photographs of me and of Vienna, my Instagram is here. Also please send me good vibes so I get into graduate school with a good stipend! (Please, please, please--the wait is extremely unpleasant!!!))

Sunday, January 22, 2017

Day 128: We gotta fight for our right(s)--no partying involved

Hello readers! Not a super eventful week, again, but this weekend was a bit more exciting (and emotionally taxing, if I'm being honest). 

On Sunday I went to the Kunstforum Wien (koonst-forum ween) to see Georgia O'Keeffe, which is precisely what it sounds like: a show on Georgia O'Keeffe. What was interesting to me, going to a show of this American artist in Austria, was learning that O'Keeffe isn't well-known in Europe, and that this show was actually the first show of hers in Austria at all. I grew up learning about art and artists, which naturally included O'Keeffe, so I was put into this position of being an outsider in Austria suddenly becoming an insider in the context of this exhibition. It was quite interesting for me to see how the European institutions who organized this show decided to present this quintessentially American artist without reducing her to solely her American-ness or her giant flower paintings, and overall I think the curators were quite successful. (You can check out the review here.)
The show was organized both thematically and chronologically depending on the room. It was a pretty substantial number of her works, even if they weren't necessarily all super-famous ones.
The best works had me either practically drooling, giving into Stendhal Syndrome, or a mixture of both. This is one of those works.
This painting made my brain do the equivalent of a keyboard smash but in a good way.
I just really liked this flower painting, and I'm not usually the biggest fan of flower paintings in general.
On Monday afternoon I went to a Fulbright-sponsored ballroom dancing lesson (seriously) so that we hopefully will not embarrass ourselves at the TU Ball later this week. We learned a bit of the English waltz, the Viennese waltz, and a few more basic steps of other forms of ballroom dancing. I felt like I was in Strictly Ballroom or something. Naturally, because I was one of the taller people in the room, I had to lead, but since I'm confident with simple ballroom steps, it was actually nice to be able to boss my partner around in a way approved by the relevant authorities. After the lesson, some Fulbrighters and I went to Tunnel for dinner, where I had fajitas in a slightly sad attempt to stop missing Los Angeles' Mexican food so much. (The fajitas were competent if not great.)
Someday I will learn the kind of swing dance where the boy throws the girl in the air and I will be the girl and it will be fun.
Tuesday and Wednesday were pretty similar in that not much happened outside of the usual-- I had teaching, naturally, and then in the afternoon I relaxed and/or slept. However, teaching on Wednesday was a pretty eye-opening experience because in half my classes, I was assigned to talk about the "American Dream." The lesson format was as follows: we did some brainstorming as a class about what the American Dream means so I could see what they knew about it, and compared various aspects of the dream to American reality as well as Austrian reality. Then I had the students read an article I had found from the New York Times from 2009 about the American dream, and we discussed it a bit. Then I split the class into groups and gave each group a different article from the Times. Each article discussed the American Dream, but they were all from different time periods: one was from the 1950s, one was from the 1970s, one was from June 2001, and one was from 2005. So the idea was that each time period had its own challenges and specific historical contexts, and I wanted the students to reflect on that while reading the articles in order to see what was emphasized, and why the articles were written the way they were: as a pro-America Cold War missive; a reflection on the Vietnam-era attitudes towards the United States; a story of immigrant success in the world before 9/11; and an article about the obsession with getting rich amidst the housing bubble that eventually would burst a few years later. 

With everything that is going on the United States today, especially in the wake of the election, I have to say talking about the American Dream was a bit sobering. People come to the United States to chase this dream of potential success, but then see themselves as having failed if they don't achieve these goals, because our culture ignores larger social contexts in the name of individualism. So we have people who are massively wealthy and people who are just as good and hardworking but who are in dire poverty. Meanwhile, people move to Austria or to many European countries because the baseline quality of life is better thanks to public funding of healthcare, schools, transportation, et cetera, and there's also a much larger focus on the idea of success as less individualized and more about general welfare and a functioning society. Maybe I'm being a bit essentialist about American versus European attitudes, but when it comes to countries with "socialized" healthcare and stronger welfare systems, I have to say I'm kind of jealous as an American, where you're largely on your own in a lot of ways if you don't succeed at supporting yourself. Unfortunately, this situation is likely going to get worse for many Americans over the next four years, and it makes me feel often like things back home are hopeless and endlessly regressing.
Some cheeky student, no doubt, put a hanging figure on the sign and I like it. It kind of reminded me of the Jonathan Borofsky installation (pictured below) at the Boston MFA but in a much more low-budget way.
(http://www.mfa.org/collections/object/i-dreamed-i-could-fly-314217)
The rest of the week passed pretty uneventfully, and then came Saturday: the day of the Women's Marches all over the world. Vienna was no exception--and apparently over 2,500 people showed up (which is a lot in a country of 8 million)! I hadn't been sure if I was going to go to the March because to be honest, I was worrying a lot about potential violence at the Marches in general (though mainly the ones back home). I was worried that people would try to enter the crowds and attack others to undermine the message and the movement, and to try and intimidate the people fighting against what's coming in the next four years. My mom was planning on going to the Los Angeles March, and I confessed to her how scared I was that something was going to happen to her at the March--even in solidly-blue, liberal, diverse Los Angeles--because one consequence of being so far away from home is that this election has made me question if I even have a home to come back to in July. The country I thought I understood in some way is now a place where 62 million of my fellow Americans voted for a president whose every action and word could harm the people I know and love, and as a result I wasn't sure my mom would be okay even in Los Angeles. I'm very privileged to have been able to feel at home in the United States my whole life, and I cannot imagine the weariness people feel when they've been fighting like this their whole lives. Fortunately, at the Vienna March, the Los Angeles March, and all the other marches around the world (based on what I've read), things seemed to be pretty safe.

So my fellow marchers and I actually missed the actual march part in Vienna because we got a late start on making our signs, so when we caught up with the crowd things had become more of a general rally. There were lots of people taking photos, news crews running around with fuzzy microphones, a guy playing "The Times They Are A'Changing," even a dance number. Since I don't have a ton of experience with marches/protests, I wasn't sure if it was appropriate to smile when people wanted to take photos of me with my sign, but I smiled anyway except when one photographer told me to look more serious. 

On a shallow level, I actually liked making my sign for a few reasons. First, it saved me the trouble of trying to think of a pithy/funny/punny slogan that didn't make the mistake of equating "woman" to "has a uterus" or anything exclusionary like that. So when I remembered that I'd seen some cool images on "The Unquotable Trump," namely one of Wonder Woman, I figured I could incorporate the awesome defender of women into my sign. Instead of worrying all about text, I could just focus on the visual impact of my concept.

Secondly, even though I didn't make much art in college, it actually used to be a big part of my life. I took art classes all throughout elementary, middle, and high school, and even passed AP Studio 2-D Design in my senior year. I hadn't really done much drawing since sophomore or junior year of college, though, because I started using my laptop for notes and thus didn't have pencils and paper handy for doodling all the time, so even though drawing in particular had been a big part of my life, it had been quite awhile. Drawing (or dancing, or choreographing) has always been a really great outlet for me to channel negative feelings--if not to resolve them, but to at least confront and reconcile myself with them, and to allow both the negativity and me to exist, rather than the negativity wielding too much influence. So I guess in that way, drawing this sign allowed me to harness the more creative side of myself that hasn't had much time to shine in the last few years.
It doesn't look like many people, but that's more due to the angle I had to take this picture at.
Miscellaneous photos of the week:
Enjoy a photo of my Halloween costume from 2014. I got it from Hot Topic at the Westside Pavilion Mall with my mom, because of course I did.
I'm so (not) excited for this obscenely expensive movie based on the ideas of a four-year-old (who, frankly, could have been a little more creative. When I was four, I could have come up with a better movie idea than trucks that are also monsters.)
My roommates and I are considering taking photos of all the weird statues in Vienna, because some of them are really really odd and disturbing, like this one.
(As always, if you want to express your love for me with material goods, my Amazon wishlist is here, my main site is here, and if you want to see many, many photographs of me and of Vienna, my Instagram is here. Also please send me good vibes so I get into graduate school with a good stipend! (Please, please, please--the wait is extremely unpleasant!!!))

Sunday, January 15, 2017

Day 121: Let's have a ball at Blumenball!

Hello readers! A few days late, but here's the newest edition of I On the Arts: European Edition! 

With this week, playtime's officially over! Back to the usual: school, research, writing, and teaching--but this week had a little formal fun thrown in on Friday evening. Getting back into routine is definitely a good thing for me, but I'm still not a fan of waking up before sunrise to get to school, or a fan of the way the sun is just gone again by four in the afternoon. Though, since it's January, the days are apparently going to start getting longer soon, which means that hopefully my sleep cycle won't feel so bizarre.

Teaching this week was pretty normal--I covered a mix of topics depending on which teacher I worked with for any given class period. I talked a little about my own holiday in Berlin, I presented the art scene in Los Angeles and had the students research works in the major L.A. museums, and I also had the kids debate one another about the benefits of vegetarianism versus being an omnivore. (I was assigned to have the kids talk about an environmental topic by the teacher.) Despite the students' reluctance to get up in front of the class to make their points, I think it was good for them to have to argue for a side they didn't necessarily agree with--I didn't ask who was vegetarian among the students until after the debate had concluded. My own debate experience in a formal setting began and ended in seventh grade, where, flustered and unprepared, I stammered out a defense of capital punishment (which I've never been a fan of), much to the consternation of my history teacher (shout out to Bud Pell). But just for the experience of talking in a second or third language in front of the class and having to think quickly to write responses and rebuttals, I think, is good practice for anyone.
Only at art school would the kids be able to build an awesome bench and cushion fort like this in the hallway without it being taken down. It certainly wouldn't have flown at Windward High School, where I recall being scolded for not wearing shoes outside on a nice day and for walking on the "landscape."
On Wednesday night, I surprised exactly no one by going to see Arrival for the third time in theaters. It was just as excellent as the first two times, and it makes me sad that it's not getting much Oscar buzz compared to Gravity or The Martian, because it's definitely better than La La Land (and I love musicals!), which is getting all the love.

On Friday night, the night I had awaited for several weeks arrived: Blumenball (or "flower ball")! A bunch of other Fulbrighters and teaching assistants got all dressed up and made our way over to the Rathaus (raht-howz), or government building, our legs and arms freezing in the cold. As anyone who's known me since infancy can attest, I literally cannot resist an opportunity to put on fancy dresses, so having balls to go to is the perfect enabling mechanism for this wayward behavior. 
Something seems strangely familiar here....
With my three-inch heels I was the tallest by far, even more than I normally am.
This lighting makes the dress look velvety, but it's actually lace over silk. I love this dress because it makes me feel like the princess I already knew I was when I was four.
This is almost too fancy.
Unfortunately, my low tolerance for high heels meant that by the time people were getting out on the dance floor, my feet were going on strike. But it was actually also a lot of fun to just walk around through the ostentatious halls all covered with fresh flowers and see the other ballrooms--there were rooms for waltzing, for salsa, and for other kinds of dance, which was pretty cool. It was another one of those moments where Vienna felt unreal, like a perfectly arranged simulation or dream or Disney locale--because where else would I go to an honest-to-goodness ball? Luckily I get to wear my dress one more time to the TU Ball, which is a formal Fulbright event. And then it shall go in the back of my closet until someone invites me to an awards show or my friends start getting married at black-tie weddings...

Miscellany of the week:
  • Spotted on Viennese sidewalks: tiny rocks and lots of dog poop. The rocks are for traction against snow (but they just get inside my shoes), and the poop is... because the Viennese apparently don't think they need to clean it up. Gotta always look down at the ground to make sure you don't step in it! I've been lucky so far, but who knows?
  • The dermatologist's office I visited on Wednesday was only accessible by walking through the elevator, which was just weird as heck and felt unnecessarily secretive.
  • Of course I binge-watched A Series of Unfortunate Events in less than two days. Reviews are coming out soon, and I already need season 2 yesterday.
  • Much to my surprise and what will undoubtedly shock my family, I actually find cleaning up my side of the room to be soothing and satisfying, especially because there is always so much dust to get rid of. I think choosing to clean up rather than being told to is what makes the difference.
I'm forever holding out for a gyro till the morning light...
I have undertaken a quest to find the best bowl of ramen in Vienna. This one was pretty good, but a little too light on the non-broth elements.
Even in the fancy part of town, there's a vape shop whose mascot appears to be a Bitmoji.
I have to wonder if there's a much better Viennese pizza trattoria around the corner to make this one incredibly jealous!
Sadly, there was no Ewan McGregor here to sweep me off my feet.

(As always, if you want to express your love for me with material goods, my Amazon wishlist is here, my main site is here, and if you want to see many, many photographs of me and of Vienna, my Instagram is here. Also please send me good vibes so I get into graduate school with a good stipend!)

Friday, January 6, 2017

Day 112: Calm before the storm? Calm before the... more calm? Who knows?

Hello readers!

Wow, has it really been a week since I last posted? It feels like it was just yesterday. As a result, I don't really have very much to report compared to my photo- and anecdote-palooza.

On New Years' Eve, I met up with some fellow Fulbrighters and we ate some delicious falafel, then went to go drink some hot punch in the freezing cold. There were lots of little stages set up all over town by drink stands, so we enjoyed some fruity deliciousness in cute little toadstool mugs (that we got to keep because when you buy the drink you give the proprietor a deposit for the mug as well). Unfortunately, I wasn't feeling too good, so I spent the countdown tucked into my nice warm bed rather than with other people. Maybe next year...
I love this mug and I will take care to ship it home in many layers of bubble wrap.
I did not know any of the songs.

On Tuesday, another Fulbrighter and I took the local train to Baden, home of the famous Römertherme baths! For around thirty euro we got to spend the day swimming in the various pools, some of which were outside and had some truly mineral-y sulfur water, and lounging in any of over five different kinds of sauna and steam baths. My favorite pool was the hottest pool, which is actually outside, so it provided a very luxurious contrast between the water and the 20-something degrees Fahrenheit of the air. My favorite sauna was the coolest sauna, which wasn't that cool, but which allowed me to sweat and still breathe comfortably. (I lasted about thirty seconds in the eucalyptus steam room because I thought I wouldn't be able to take in that sweet, sweet oxygen.) They also had a beautiful wood-paneled outdoor sauna, but I didn't stay long because there was a rather inquisitive child in the sauna, which was not really conducive to relaxing.
Yes, that is snow-ish on the ground. It was really cold!

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of the bath day for me on a cultural level was the mandatory sauna nudity. I've been in a sauna once or twice, but it was still a little uncomfortable for me to be naked. It felt like the beginning of those nightmares where you realize that you're naked when you're not supposed to be--I kept grabbing my towel, worrying that someone would see me and inform me that I had wandered into a clothing-mandatory section. Luckily, the spa marked the naked versus the clothed sections of the facility very clearly, so this scenario was confined to my brain.
Look at me, relaxing with my extremely sneezy red nose. All the benefits of lying out by the pool with no chance of sunburn!
If you squint, you can see my reflection as I take this photo!

On Wednesday, I woke up and hiked over to a cafe in the first district, where I conducted my last scheduled interview for the initial stage of my research--I talked with the filmmaker Ruth Beckermann over tea, and we talked about the aesthetics and politics of her films, which I hope to see more of if I can continue to borrow my roommate's laptop (I don't have a dvd player in my computer, and her films are only available to me on dvd from the nearby library). But I'm excited to become an expert in her style and form, as well as her approach to the material, which ranges from her own family, to strike workers, to famous poets of times past.

The last highlight of this gentle week was Friday night, when I waited in the cold (sensing a theme here?) at the Gartenbaukino, where I caught Arrival and Certain Women during the Vienna Film Festival, to see La La Land. Unfortunately, La La Land was not my favorite film of 2016--I had already called that for Arrival, but Damien Chazelle's latest didn't change my mind. It was very beautifully done, and some of the dance sequences were marvelous, but I'm still turning it over in my mind, and I think some aspects of the story and plotting were not as strong as they could be. The performances were great, naturally, except for the singing, which was... adequate. 
People kept talking during the movie, especially the girls next to me who looked to be around my age. I was really annoyed at them.

Random observations of the week:
  • I also am finally getting back into yoga, after not doing any since I left LA. I took one class on Friday, which was pretty good, but it's very tough to do yoga in German because your brain is working overtime to listen to the instructor. Although I guess I could just copy the person in front of me, but my ballet training frowns upon that.
  • Walking around is still an adventure, because you never know what you'll see on the streets. 
  • Exhibit A: Time travel!

    Exhibit B: I want this scooter!
  • I love me some good graphic design. The MuseumsQuartier area near-ish where I live has some great posters--I'm not sure if they're picking a new logo, or just playing with the Q....

(As always, if you want to express your love for me with material goods, my Amazon wishlist is here, my main site is here, and if you want to see many, many photographs of me and of Vienna, my Instagram is here. Also please send me good vibes so I get into graduate school with a good stipend!)