I think that’s why I like places like Sweden that much. Even in mid-August, there’s nothing wrong with wearing hooded sweaters and long trousers. And hell, the people are friendly too. Returning to Vienna after spending some time in Sweden is like returning to the place where people go after they’ve used up all their compassion, optimism and good humour. The best you can do in Vienna is getting a waiter who realizes how fucked up his performance of being a grumpy old asshole is and has to grin in the course of it.

Anyway, my intention is not to make you feel all gloomy so here’s another breathtaking picture to marvel at. Enjoy.

I’m not yet in the physical condition to write long blog-posts, mainly due to what some of you might refer to as a cold, others as a reason to make people feel sorry for me. Any which way, I still want to update this very blog, only to prove that Twitter has not yet turned every blog into a wasteland of old musings longer than 140 characters.

So there, I’ll just post one of the numerous pictures I took, so you can admire my ability of using nice filters for my cell-phone camera while also wondering where that unlimited source of cockiness lies of which I make so ample use. Enjoy!

But here’s the thing. Horst, mastermind of that last project, has just released a new book. It’s called “Dinge, die ich vom Nachtfernsehen gelernt habe: Things I learned from watching TV after midnight” and features an assortment of images taken off of after-midnight TV, accompanied by texts. And apart from the fact that the images are quite captivating, there’s also a text of mine written especially for this volume. It features my ability to fall asleep during TV and is great fun to read. And it’s in German, proving that my German is almost as much fun to read as my English.

So please, do check it out and don’t hesitate to buy and spread the word to whomever you might know. I assure you, the more people have this book at home, the better this wretched world we live in will turn out to be.

I’m a lucky bastard. I really am. I do, for example, have friends who think of me when they have spare tickets to events. Like a couple of weeks ago when I was treated to a concert of Them Crooked Vultures. Or, well, yesterday, when a good friend of mine had a spare ticket for the Vienna Lifeball. And not just a simple ticket (which still goes for 150€) but a VIP ticket with free food, drink and an actual table to sit at and watch people.

In case you’re not familiar with the Lifeball, it’s a charity event that started out as a small AIDS awareness party and today is probably the one party in Vienna, or Austria really, that most people who are into parties would love to attend. Well, here’s the official website, they do a much better job explaining what it’s all about.

Anyway, I got that ticket and I must admit, I’m probably the least deserving person to do so. First of all, lots of people dress up for this event. And I don’t mean dress up by wearing a suit. I mean dress up by thinking up a bizarre, fantastically outrageous costume, working on it for weeks and then spending hours to get it to sit perfectly. Me? I don’t like dress-up.

Second, I’m not one for huge parties. I like sitting down, sipping on my beer, smoking a cigarette and being my misanthropic self.

The good thing is, I’m also a fantastic freeloader. If it’s free, I’ll take it. You should see all the crap I got at home, only because someone told me it’s free. Ok, so that’s not entirely true. Most of the crap I own I actually bought. But that’s for another time.

Well, so I went there, and yes, it was actually quite fun. Unfortunately, the opening ceremony, which is always quite impressive, had to be discontinued due to a massive rainstorm. Fortunately, there was still time enough for me to get exceptionally wet.

The rest of the evening and night was filled with delicious food, loads and loads of crazily creative costumes, even more photographers taking pictures of said costumes and the feeling that this was the party of a lifetime. Well, not really. But there was music and there were people gyrating to that, so I guess it was quite alright.

All in all, it was a memorable night, not least because I’ve never seen so many virtually naked people in Vienna’s city hall.

By the way, there are always people lamenting how the Lifeball has deteriorated to a mere large-scale party, isn’t about the fight against AIDS anymore and is selling out by having ads all over the place, yadda, yadda, yadda. Well, if you’re one of those, fuck off. I’m pretty sure AIDS won’t be cured by your bitching either.

For all the others, here’s a link to the slideshow of the rest of the pictures I took.

And for fuck’s sake, use rubbers.

Watching this clip, I wonder how Lux Interior made it even to 62 before dying of aortic dissection. I’m glad he managed to have a singing role on Sponge Bob before he died, though. Which I present to you now. Enjoy:

Which is actually not true at all but seems like a fun first sentence when thinking it up. Reading it at the top of a blog post: not so much. However, I do want to tell you about my stay in London. Now, the ones who know my itineraries will be most nonplussed, considering that this stay I want to tell you about happened not a week, not four weeks but rather six weeks ago. That’s right, I went to London and only now I am going to tell you about it. Which would have been a rather cool opening sentence as well, come to think of it. But enough with the rambling. Let’s loosen this whole thing up with one of numerous potentially award-winning pictures I took:

Letting you figure out by yourself what this image depicts, I will go on with my jumbled narrative. I spent a long weekend at my sister’s in London in mid-March. Not only was she gracious enough to take me in, she even took a whole chunk of time out of her busy schedule to explore that fair city she calls home.

To top that off, she also managed to get me into a concert which took place in a chapel in Westminster Hall. Not only that, the whole thing was preceded by drinks with rich people, among them Ruth Rendell of crime-fiction fame, that were had in a hall which to my ears sounded something like “Chumley Hall”, but which upon closer scrutiny turned out to be named something else. Something very else. So very else that I was unable to remember, nor find the name online. But hey, we got a good laugh out of it and now that I’ve shared this with you, you did as well!

Anyway, I also got to have drinks and pizza with the musicians, who turned out to be a very fine lot and who you should be hitting up on their website. And with hitting up I mean having a look at their website and then visiting their concerts. No excuses!

I could go on now about the numerous rides on double-decker buses, the vast amounts of food we consumed, the movies we saw at splendid cinemas (actually, just the one), the countless episodes of “Flight of the Conchords” we watched late at night with my sister and me alternating as the one who would fall asleep first, the extreme number of little vintage shops on trendy brick lanes (where vintage actually means the results of people going through their parents’ 80s clothing and then deciding to sell them for ten times the amount they had cost initially, notwithstanding the fact that they still look exactly as silly as they did back then), the fish & chips we had looking over the river Thames, our stroll through a big park, our trying to spot celebrities at a place called Primrose Hill but failing miserably (even though I heard someone on the street mentioning Johnny Depp), the meeting up with a good friend from school who is now a famous producer for a computer game company, the dinners and lunches we had with the many splendid friends my sister is fortunate enough to call, well, friends, or last but not least my initial confusion with the various privately held train services that cost me an extra nine British Pound Sterling for a ticket which turned out to be useless, but I will instead stop here so as to not turn this posting into a gargantuan piece of sentence and letter mush that nobody reads anyway. And if you’ve made it till here, I will reward you with the rest of the above mentioned award winning pictures. Enjoy, and always remember to buy a ticket for public transportation in London. They’re kinda strict when it comes to that.

Anyway, I thought it prudent to at least quickly write something up, so people know where I stand when it comes to the advent of new and the goodbye to old decades. Well, here I stand: I don’t give a fuck. What I do give a fuck about, though, is the way some people manage to use that man-made concept of time, calendars and new-years bashes to create a sort of sense-inducing narrative for their own lives, something which I have never managed to do and which I truly envy.

Which is yet another reason why I’ll never be writing an autobiography.

To you, on the other hand, my dear and loyal reader, I wish a fantastic new year. May all your plot-lines work out the way you once envisioned them in that head of yours.

So there we go. We’ve all spent weeks collecting presents and honing our social skills to survive the getting together of large quantities of human beings only for it all to be over in a mere two and a half days. That’s Christmas for you.

But, as always, it’s two and a half days that are quite rewarding. Spending time with people you like and/or are related to seldom leaves you in a bad mood, especially if it involves trees adorned with shiny stuff, little sweet things commonly referred to as cookies (biscuits for the Brits among you), obscene amounts of poultry, tiny little nativity scenes you can practice your camera’s macro-mode on and of course brief bursts of thunderstorms on Christmas day.

For graphical representations of above ramblings, click the picture on top. For a brief glimpse of what the rain accompanying a thunderstorm looks and sounds like, watch the gripping feature presentation below. Enjoy.

40 Seconds of Rain from Richard on Vimeo.

I had planned on writing a longish post about the various meanings of Christmas, from people actually believing that there was someone born a couple of thousand years ago to a carpenter whose wife insisted that “no, it wasn’t anyone from your company’s Christmas party who knocked me up, ’twas this mythical creature that sent an angel did the job” to those thinking that Christmas is mainly something to enjoy what the entertainment and dumbing-down industries put on their platters, no matter how awfully insipid it might be, to finally those who just enjoy the free days that allow them to spend time with their dear ones.

I decided against it, simply because I can’t find the time between going to church every two hours, listening to “The Best of Wham” (a wonderful record consisting of just this one song) and playing “do you need to pee or not” which my little Swedish nephew.

So instead I’ll just leave you with a hearty Merry Christmas and all that stuff.

Cheers.

So after more than two years of absence, I returned to Stockholm last weekend to visit my sister, her husband and two unruly but fantastic little Swedish kids. Contrary to my usual ways of taking at least 5000 photos, bugging everyone and their grandma to death, I actually took but a moderate amount of pictures, saving myself from being slaughtered by an angry mob of Swedes and half-Swedes.

As always, my days were dominated by my quest for food and drink, which is nicely reflected in some of the pictures I did take. I also met up with an Austrian friend, whose cousin introduced us to traditional Swedish saturday-night entertainment highlights such as one-room appartment skinhead parties somewhere in the outskirts of Stockholm, complete with pint-glasses of Captain Morgan’s and face-tattoos. One thing I learned that evening is that nights out tend to be so much better when suddenly your only hope is getting out alive. I need to find myself some perilous places in Vienna for jolly good evening entertainment.

Anyway, I did survive the party as I did drinking (another Swedish specialty) at Kvarnen, a pub/club in the heart of Stockholm’s Södermalm. Which reminds me: if you go and smoke a cigarette outside that place, make sure to not sway in any way, because security guys might think you’re too drunk and bar you from going back in. Which in no way happened to me, of course. Oh, and if it happens to you, simply walk away and go back in. Which I heard might work.

And finally, just to prove that I did not spend my days and nights on food and booze only, here’s something for my fellow Stieg Larsson fans. There are tours organized by the city museum called, aptly, Millennium-tours, where you’ll see many of the places featured in Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. They are Sundays only, but you can buy a map of the tour, complete with explanations of the spots’ relevance in the books. Which is what we did, and, yes, I did take a few pictures. I felt like a fanboy, which, I’m unfortunately obliged to say, I guess I am.

Well, that was my rather concise but nonetheless extremely witty, entertaining and as always dramatic recount of my three day weekend in probably the cleanest city of Europe, if not the world. Enjoy the pictures.