Friday, May 26, 2017

DAY 252: Extra, extra, nothing to say...

Hello readers!

I'm sorry to report that since my last post, not much has actually happened. The weather's started to get warmer, the sun's not going down until 9 pm--I've mainly just been sending a lot of emails and writing up a storm. You can check out the published page of my main site, as always, but since my last post I've published a review of Tramps at BUST Magazine, a piece on David Sedaris' newest book Theft By Finding at PopMatters, a review of Camille Henrot: If Wishes Were Horses for this is tomorrow, and my fancy edited conference paper was published at The Learned Fangirl.  I also went to the Kunsthaus Wien this weekend for another review for the Humble Arts Foundation's blog of a cool photography show, so those should be published within the next few weeks. Exciting times!
Gotta soak up that sun in the yard of the Graphische.
So while I've been doing great on the writing front, it doesn't really translate to lots of exciting photos and stories. I also had strep throat, so I've been in my apartment drinking tea and getting over that, while watching Master of None on Netflix (late, I know), and catching up on my screeners of The Handmaid's Tale. I also got listed on Pajiba's Women/Nonbinary Critics of Film Twitter master list of a few hundred awesome ladies writing about movies. I'm in the company of Emily Nussabaum, Linda Holmes, and Mahnola Dargis--I just tweeted at the article's author at the right time and suddenly voila! (Hint: CTRL+F: "deborah")
On the way to I dreamed we were alive...
... in the bowels of the museum...
Sorry for such a brief, light post--I'll be going to Venice in a little over a week and that should be incredible--I've got my ticket to the Biennale and am stopping for no one!

David Sedaris' publisher tweeted my piece on his book!

... and LittleKuriboh retweeted my essay on Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged!
I haven't had a salad in so long, so I felt the need to document this one from Le Burger.

Monday, May 15, 2017

Day 241: Pulling a Johann Strauss at the Beautiful Blue Danube

Hello readers! I'm back with many photos and not so much news. Clearly the boom-bust cycle of the Deborah Krieger News is a weekly one.

The main event of the past week was the USTA going-away party, which was held at a pub-restaurant in the 16th district called a Heuriger (hoy-ree-gurr). As a Fulbrighter, I have a little over a month left in the country, but the people who are only teaching assistants leave at the end of May. Still, though, many of the Fulbright combined grantees went if only to spend a little time with the American teaching assistants before they left and to get our very official certificates of completion from the Austrian Educational Ministry. I had not gotten the memo that people would be wearing dirndls (deern-dull), or those traditional Austrian dresses that people wear when singing about lonely goatherds and the like, so I came in a normal dress. I also haven't bought a dirndl and I'm not sure if I will--they seem a little expensive, and I'm fairly certain my Austrian ancestors wouldn't have been permitted to wear them back in the day, so buying one feels a little weird to me. Still, some of them have very pretty patterns, and I figure I can always wear my dirndl back in States...to go grocery shopping, or something? Where does one wear a dirndl in Los Angeles, California?
Very cute restaurant and the grape juice (and wine) was free! 
Here I am, all certified and honored for my incredible teaching.
Last week, my teaching was pretty unremarkable aside from the baseball lesson I prepared and taught several times. Yep, you read that right: I prepared a primer on American baseball for my first-year students (14-15 years old), where I provided them with a basic written and verbal summary of the rules, talked about such classic baseball movies as Moneyball and A League of Their Own, told them about Jackie Robinson, and then showed them a clip of funny baseball bloopers. Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not really the sportiest of people, but I realized at Swarthmore that I probably have fairly decent average knowledge through osmosis, since my family loves sports with enthusiasm bordering on mania. I cannot count the number of times my mother screaming at her football team has given me mini heart palpitations, because I thought she was screaming because something was actually wrong, like she'd dropped glass or something. Baseball I am actually pretty familiar with, since I have seen a bunch of games and baseball movies, so I was able to explain the basic rules without having to do a lot of preparation. Below, a photo of the diagrams I drew on the chalkboard for my students, where I explain basic "moneyball," the layout of a baseball diamond, the significance of Jackie's number 42, and why it's called the "pitcher's mound."
I'd like to see my brother teach a lesson on ballet or the Renaissance now. THE GAUNTLET HAS BEEN THROWN, KRIEGER!
On Saturday, I ducked into an arts and crafts fair on Neubaugasse (noy-bow-gah-suh), then headed over to the Burgtheater (bourg-tay-ah-tur) for a lecture by the artist William Kentridge. I was actually really excited for the lecture, because my favorite piece at the new Broad Museum in Los Angeles was actually an animation video by Kentridge, which I've embedded below. I just really liked how he used the sketchy quality of drawing in the transitions, and so more than the Hirst or Koons, this work at the Broad really has stuck with me since I saw it in March 2016. The lecture was pretty entertaining, and was about his process of creating and coming up with concepts, featuring several recent videos he's done.
The Burgtheater is very fancy and ornate and classically Austrian.
A brief shot of the crafts fair, where I did not buy anything (but I did consider getting one of those dirndls).
During the week I also went to visit the Donauinsel (doh-now-in-zul) for the first time. The Donauinsel is basically a little island in the Danube river where people can frolic and play (or jog, or bike, or swim), and it's easily accessible by the U1. A bunch of Fulbrighters and British teaching assistants went to have a picnic, since one of my roommates is actually going home this month to start an internship program back in the states. Being at the Donauinsel on a beautiful sunny day was one of those moments where Vienna didn't feel quite real, and where I almost felt an irrational anger at having to leave it so soon. It's a city that's clean, easy to navigate, well-maintained, and cared-for in terms of infrastructure, and so thinking about the myriad problems of livability when it comes to cities I love in the US makes me wonder why we can't care for our cities on an institutional like the Austrians do for Vienna.
The train lets you off on this bridge, and I went the wrong way the first time to get to the island proper.
On a nerdy note: the Donauinsel is right by the UN building, so I went to check it out because it was used in Captain America: Civil War (for the record, Team Tony even though I love Cap and Falcon).
Lastly, this past weekend I went back to the Brotfabrik to review a photography show for the Humble Arts Foundation's blog, so that should be published fairly soon. I always love going to the Brotfabrik, and having a mission in mind made walking the several miles there all the easier, though I did cheat and take the train back home. 
It was a really great show--about cults and esoteric groups and pseudoscientific rituals!
On the writing front, I've had a lot of pieces in the pipeline for a few days now, so keep an eye on the published section of my main site: I wrote about Sense8's second season premiere and Riverdale's finale for PopMatters and the movie Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging for BitchFlicks (which have been published already), and I have an artist profile, a writeup on gaucho pants (not kidding), and several book reviews also waiting to be published for various outlets. Exciting times!

Miscellany of the week:
  • I always love it when the Vienna public housing buildings have mosaics and murals on them--I wish I could document each one!
Spotted in the 16th.
Spotted in the 16th again!
Love me some bas-reliefs...also in the 16th.
I think this one's in the 10th. I took it on the way to the Brotfabrik...
  • This one very modern clothes shop near Treu Bleiben, my weekend brunch spot, had this on the floor. I'm not quite sure what it means, but it's probably art.
The people in the store were just going about business as usual...

Thursday, May 4, 2017

Day 230: Stories of Strobl (also known as: why is it snowing in late April?!)

Hello dear readers!

This week's post actually has some news in it alongside the usual beautiful photos of me making faces in various European cities. On Thursday April 27, all of the Fulbright grantees--students and scholars alike--traveled to the lovely small town of Strobl (shtroh-bull), which makes Belle's "provincial town" look like a metropolis. It's closer to Salzburg than to Vienna, and was about 3.5 hours by bus, not including the short time we spent at a rest stop stocking up on snacks. The event in question was the Fulbright Seminar in American Studies, a much more intimidating-sounding conference than it ended up being (thank goodness!). Along for the ride with the American Fulbrighters were the new Austrian Fulbrighters--the ones who are going to teach and study in the United States later in 2017. After all, as we learned during our September orientation, the Fulbright Commission is binational, and works both ways: sending people like me to Austria, and Austrian students to the United States. 
Inevitable selfie taken just before the start of the poster session, where my quizzical brow fails to hide my nervousness.
When we arrived at the Strobl conference center, we quickly settled into our rather nice rooms and got to mingling and organized discussions. The little conference center was actually more like El Capitan--isolated, rural, with multiple buildings, although the buildings were not cabins, but rather more like the hostel we previously stayed in for the St. Pölten orientation way back in 2016. Each discussion group, which met several times during the seminar, was made up of both Austrians and Americans, and each discussed various important issues such as racism, social media, cities, the European Union, infrastructure, and more. It was incredibly vital having both Austrian and American perspectives on these issues, because the discussions really highlighted just how different these countries are in terms of how their inhabitants see one another, and how they see the role of government in their lives.
One of the cute little buildings at the conference site. On the day of arrival...
... the spooky lighting and vibe of the first night...
...and here is the campus the following morning, covered in SNOW. WHY. STOP.
Sprinkled amidst the meals and discussion sessions were lectures given by the American Fulbright Scholars on issues related to the discussions the students had taken part in. One of the professors was actually a Swarthmore alumna, and it was extremely statistically unlikely that two Swarthmore grads would end up at the same tiny conference center in the same small town in the same small country at the same time, but I've noticed that Swarthmore seems to pop up in places and in situations where I least expect it to. 

The centerpiece and main event of the seminar was the Fulbright research presentations. While most of my colleagues had lovely posters made detailing their work on this grant, I realized I had too many images and videos related to my artists to make printing something out feasible. So, naturally, I made another blog, which is now the living archive of my research (and is still currently in progress). It was a little awkward standing next to my laptop while everyone else had a giant poster, but I did get to have some really great conversations with both Austrian and American Fulbrighters, and because it was a poster session format, I didn't have to speak to everyone at once--people walked around the room and asked questions as they saw fit.
Courtesy Fulbright Austria: me explaining things about my project!!
People milling about the poster session. All very fancy and professional.
The morning of our departure, a few Austrian students/scholars and I decided to explore the small town of Strobl, beginning with an idyllic lakeside stroll. The scenery on that last day was fresh and green, and the shoreline looked straight out of a Scandinavian crime drama (just add fog and some dark electronic music).
This is what I get for not being careful with which direction the sun was shining.
See what I mean about the crime drama aspect? I wanted to put on some latex gloves and start pulling stones out of the water for the evidence locker, or something.
Too cold for a swim. But the water sure looked clear!
I just liked that the profile of this bust looked kind of like Frances McDormand.
Maybe? A slight resemblance? Hm.
(http://www1.pictures.zimbio.com/gi/Frances+McDormand+m_Db-3tyI_nm.jpg)
It's just so strange that I have fewer than two months left here. I've been taking walks around Vienna in the evening now that the weather is generally warm-ish and the sun doesn't set so early, and I'm just struck by how much of it I haven't gotten to see yet. I'm pretty sure I haven't been in at least a third of the districts for any substantial amount of time, and yet I'm finding myself reluctant to keep exploring, weirdly enough. It's just that when I leave Vienna, I don't know when or if I'll ever be back, and I don't want to keep finding things that I know I'll miss, because I already have enough that will make me probably cry on the plane ride home. It'll be nice to be back in Los Angeles, and then wherever I end up (depending on the job hunt), but I would have liked to be able to stay a little longer. The more news I get from home, the more I wish I could stay at least a few more months. Sometimes when I go for my walks, I'm just struck by this awful melancholy about going. Part of it is trepidation about the future, but part of it is that I'm never going to have this kind of opportunity to live in Europe with relatively few cares and obligations at any later date in my life.

Teaching ends in late May, which frees up a lot of my time! I've already planned and booked a bus trip to Venice for a few days, because I haven't been in literally ten years, and it's such a magical place that I want to see again before it becomes completely submerged in the waters of the harbor. 

Miscellany of the week:
  • My new favorite weekend brunch place is called Treu Bleiben (troy-blye-bin) which means "Stay True." One of the employees is American, and they serve great fried eggs and American-style crispy bacon, which I have sorely been missing. It's a good place to sit and do work as well--people do smoke there, but they keep the windows open, so it's not too bad. 
Ugh. I missed this so much. Plus their wi-fi is fast and reliable, so this is where I plan to live on Sundays since not much else is open...
The interior of Treu Bleiben. Very cozy. I could see this place existing in Swarthmore, except for the fact that it's a bar on the weekdays. But the vibe is chill, and the prices are pretty good!
  • Walking along some street in Vienna, I spotted a bakery apparently designed for men who are worried that bakeries aren't masculine enough:
MUSCLE BAKERY FOR MANLY MEN!!!
  • I also walk by this really cool building several times a week (since it's near my primo sushi spot), so I thought I'd finally include it!
I think it's both an art gallery and an art supply store?
  • Lastly, please enjoy some photos of the cat I met at the Strobl conference center after dinner on the first night. I am not sure if it was actually enough of a real black cat to be suspicious of, because some parts of its fur looked brownish. We'll see!
"What're you lookin' at?"
"Fine, fine, you win..."
"BLUE STEEL!"