Pitch Where You Live

[Jay Vaughan]

> I hope to meet Jay in Vienna this year. 


Vienna is a great place to live, its very comfortable, you can walk everywhere.  I lived for most of my time here so far, outside the city - which was also great, to be honest, as Austrian countryside is beautiful in a way that many other places aren’t.  I bought an electric motorbike for the countryside, but have hardly used it since I moved into the city, as I walk/bicycle everywhere and find that really fine.  Public transportation is superlative - you can literally get anywhere you need to go in the city, easily enough, with the trains and street cars and so on.

Art and culture - well, its not without its calcification (one can only hear a Mozart re-interpretation so many times per year), but I fully enjoy my sojourns throughout the city being soundtrack’ed by the street musicians which the city promotes in various of the most popular public spaces.  Of course, my employer opens many doors in this regard that Vienna has to offer.  There is a strong and vibrant electro-accoustic scene here (MicZac could probably elucidate) but I have found that the music scene generally is not as interesting as say, Berlin or Köln - just because operators of these entertainment businesses have to cater to the local tastes, which are fundamentally socialist of the deleterious variety and thus quite banal.  There are very few risk taking scenes here in Vienna, and even the so-called punks are of the conservative Austrian type if you scratch the surface.  There is much cultural appropriation and fakery here which would be distasteful to you if you weaned your pop culture eyeballs on the streets of, for example, London - which has its own variant of the same theme, of course, leading to sensitivity perhaps.

And this is true also of food - sure, you can find great Asian food in Vienna, but it will be slightly modified to appeal more to the tastebuds of folks who grew up with the bland routine of grandma’s schnitzel, more than those who value variety and surprises in their lives.  

To get to the real good stuff, you have to be willing to pierce the cultural veil that presents itself in the architecture of the city.  The districts really are laid out according to class structure, which any dyed-in-the-wool Marxist will recognize immediately as a persistent source of strife even in the modern era.  This city is a giant snail shell of class warfare, encoded in the streets and architecture of the imperialist era in which Austria once reigned.  The architecture of the city can be very, very oppressive - you have city blocks of people who don’t know their neighbors, even though they live right on top of each other, and who would never even bother to leave the boxes of their lives to meet strangers.  That can be a limiting factor for someone wanting to move to a city to relieve themselves of the same kinds of burdens experienced elsewhere.

But, it is a delightful place to live, I have to say.  I regularly enjoy the fruits of the city, its nightlife and museums and artistic culture, but I had to work hard to pierce what I perceived at first to be a repressive conservatism that blankets the culture, even today.  I think this is true of any city in which a person arrives as a stranger.

I’m looking forward to showing you around some time Niall, and given your new horizons, it would be great to see you move here - it should also be noted that Vienna is the gateway to so many wonderful other cultures and peoples - I’ve thoroughly enjoyed exploring the Balkans since I moved here, with Vienna’s geography and superlative train systems providing easy regular visits from Prague to Belgrad, Llubljane and Zagreb and Pula and Split, and beyond (Pristina, Kosovo!).  Keep that in mind: Vienna is a gateway away from the west, which is probably what you are really looking for in life right about now ..  

j.
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Jay Vaughan
ibisum at gmail.com