Viennese coffee

There are many good things about being a tourist here. Let's start with the coffee (as with the cups growing up the wall); move on to the juxtaposition of old and new architecture and design (this is Rachel Whiteread's Shoah memorial - all books with their spines turned inwards), and then the fact that it's a city with - well, a still-living enthusiasm for disco ...

Viennese windows

Monday disappeared. We were on airplanes, briefly at Heathrow, and then being driven to our hotel in Vienna, showering, out for an excellent dinner ... and a stroll around very pretty streets. All tourist utter blandness in the above statements can, I hope, be excused by (a) this being the 1st ever time I've used my iPad to blog with and (b) exhaustion ...

facing off

On our briefest of sojourns back in Silver Lake, en route to Europe ... here's a new great bit of wall art - a young shooter ... and look what's opposite her!  Were these placards here before someone decided to add the little girl to the longer-term wall art opposite?  Are they purely a serendipitous juxtaposition?

early morning

The less than good side of going away is how much needs to get done in a very short space of time.  The very good side involves setting my alarm clock early, and then finding this beautiful sky just on the brink of sunset (so beautiful, of course, that it become hard to think through why one's going away at all ...).  But a conference beckons ... after, to be fully admitted, a full nine days true vacation.

excursion

This strange paper bird is on the wall at La Risa - our favorite New Mexican food establishment, in Ribera, NM (a very small incorporated town indeed) - as I think I've pointed out before, it was formerly the Sad Cafe (as in Ballad of the ...) before it started smiling.  Today our own smiles were increased a hundred fold by having our friend Barry with us - wearing a very fetching orange tee shirt from Santa Fe Opera, too.  Taking out of town people out to new (to them) places is one of the very many pleasures of being here ...

reprise (with fluffy white clouds)

When I first saw the wall and sky and awnings over the patio at Cafe Fina, a few weeks ago, I was dismayed that I only had my iPhone with me (which didn't stop it being a good photograph, compositionally, but it lacked a certain finesse ...).  So I've been wanting to go back, on a sunny day, and here was not just sunshine and the requisite curved shadows, but some fluffy white clouds as well ...

another moonlit night ...

Another evening sitting out in the back yard, this time with our neighbors; the moon yet more full.  I'm trying to get my head around next semester's Introduction to Visual Culture syllabus: the new version of Nicholas Mirzoeff's Reader has just arrived in the mail, and its contents make me feel rather too strongly that I am old and grey and that just as I thought I was getting a handle on what's generally understood by Visual Studies, they turn into something else - not just the global (though quite how one teaches that without having a far stronger knowledge of different cultures globally than I do, I don't know), but digital, and the visualization of warfare - contemporary warfare - and violence.   Reading ten pages on UNIX programing is not, I think, going to help me understand how the image above might fit into paradigms of representation.  It fits far better into the lecture that I'm trying to round off for the Neuchatel conference - arguing that photographers, right through the C19th and beyond, still wanted to claim for their art something of the mystique and the grandeur of romantic representation - not just in their images, but in the language in which they use to describe the technology that creates them.

Have I just written the last sentence, the one that's bee alluding me all day?  I'm going to sleep on that happy possibility ...