Pitch Where You Live

[Niall Munnelly]

Here’s why Pyrenees and Occitanie excite me:

https://daily.bandcamp.com/scene-report/la-novia-french-folk-noise-list


Obsessed with these acts.

Yours,
Niall.


On Sun, Feb 25, 2024 at 2:26 PM Niall Munnelly <niall.munnelly at gmail.com>
wrote:

> You’ve always been one of my favorite writers, Jay.
>
> Vienna, like Köln, has great historical significance for me, musically -
> Kompakt, Kölner Schule in one, the Mego constellation in the other. I
> shouldn’t base my decisions on old labels and bands, but I must say
> Louisville, Kentucky worked out great along those lines!
>
>
> Yours,
> Niall.
>
>
> On Sun, Feb 25, 2024 at 12:12 PM Jay Vaughan <ibisum at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> > 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.
>> —
>> Jay Vaughan
>> ibisum at gmail.com
>>
>>
>>
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