IVIED

Yesterday the Tag des Denkmals 2008 took place in various locations all over Austria. This year also Fürstenfeld took part in this event offering guided tours around the town’s historic fortification buildings. I decided to join the afternoon tour which started at the Pfeilburg which houses the city museum as well as a tobacco museum. After this we made our way via Ertlberg to the Kinderfreunde sports field and to Ungarbastei which is right next to the Eurospar supermarket and can be seen on the photo blow.

After having visited a private backyard we walked over to the former tobacco factory that was closed down in 2005 and has been deserted ever since. I had never been in there before and it’s really a fascinating and quite big area with beautiful buildings. I hope they will manage to renovate that in the near future and find a new purpose for it.

After having visited another private garden by the northern part of the former town wall we reached our last stop at the Mühlbastei where a bomb shelter form World War II can be found. It’s also only accessible through a private garden.

So this was a really interesting afternoon. Thanks a lot to Mr. Amtmann of the Museumsverein Fürstenfeld for the tour, which actually took almost double the time that was originally planned. But it was a unique chance to visit some places in the town that are normally closed to the public. You can see more photos in this set on Flickr.

I watched TTT – Titel Thesen Temperamente on Sunday night and there was a really interesting report about a wonderful place in Switzerland. In a forest in the village of Kaufdorf in the Gürbetal valley near the capitol Bern a historic collegtion of cars from the 50s, 60s and 70s can be found rusting away and being overgrown by nature. You can read all about the history of this place here. It eventually came to being in the 1930s when Walter Messerli started trading with car parts and left the remains where they still are today. As the company of the current owner will be no more very soon, the local authorities want to get rid of this dump, which is what they consider it, by the end of this year.

But in 2007 a committee was founded by artists and other people who want to save this amazing place for the future. The premises can be visted and there is currently (until 12th October) an exhibition going on. For more information go to www.autofriedhof.ch.

A few month ago I was sitting at Tribeka in Graz, having a bagel and a coffee and reading one of the arts magazines lying around there. You know one of the kind that has 200 pages and costs around 10€. So I flicked through it. Most of it was about interior design and not that interesting. But one article towards the end caught my attention. It was about a guy called Robert Bruno who built (or better say welded) a full house out of steel. See the images below and go to Robert Bruno’s website at www.robertbruno.com to get more information.

Well, I actually think this is a really great project, but to be honest I wouldn’t want to live in a house that’s made all out of steel.

PS: This is the second post now in a new series in which I want to introduce some interesting arts projects or atists I like. There are more to follow…

Several weeks ago my brother told me about the artist/botanist Patrick Blanc who designs so-called Vertical Gardens, which are – as the name already indicates – gardens that grow vertically on walls. And I immediately remembered that I had already seen one of them myself. It was at the outside wall of the CaixaForum museum in Madrid last New Year’s Eve (to be seen on the photo below).

By now there are dozens of these interesting and spectacular – however only decorative – gardens all over the world. You can get more information and pictures on Patrick Blanc’s website at www.verticalgardenpatrickblanc.com.

So now another time it’s been quite a while (over a month) since I last posted on this blog. And maybe you have asked yourself what I did in that time.

Well actually the end of June also was the end of the EURO 2008 European football championships. And for that event I went to Vienna, to the Fanzone. I stayed in the city for a few days again. Thanks once again to E. for allowing me to stay at your flat.

The on the 10^th of this month I was at the Riegersburg for the Abschlusslesung of the Schreibzeit Midnight Oil. I hadn’t been there for a while and it was nice going up there with the funicular (and down again in complete darkness…). More photos of this event in this Flickr set.

The biggest event recently was the opening of the Dirtpark in Fürstenfeld last Saturday. It was a great event. Matthias Engel came with a Red Bull truck (free Red Bull for some of us) and the guys had a lot of fun riding the dirts that afternoon. Also a trials rider had come over from Graz and did a little show on some pallets. Right on time when most of the riding was over heavy rain set in and this was the end of the event. More photos of this event in this Flickr set.
So now that we have this dirtpark (thanks to our mayor and the local section of the Rotary Club) I think I have to go there regularly to get some practice…

By the way, I’ve been working in my holiday job for two weeks now, with two more to go. It’s quite hard and exhausting work sometimes but it’s OK.

Finally, the opening of the dirtpark in Fürstenfeld will take place on 26/07/2008. Go here for more information and here for directions.
See you all there…

It was some time ago, when I posted a list of books I read. And back then I promised to write another post about books. So here it is now.
First thing I need to say is that I only bought very few of the books in the list mentioned above for the regular price. So now I’d like to tell you where I bought most of those books.

If you are in Vienna, there are some very good places to get cheap books for under 5€. The best is – no doubt – Buchlandung. They have three stores in Vienna and they only sell discounted books, most of them with the stamp on it saying “Mängelexemplar”, which means something like “scarce commodity”. However these books are always normal quality meaning the print and everything is OK. The only thing they often got is one or more scratches on the back cover which however doesn’t affect one’s reading pleasure. The best store of Buchlandung is the one at Columbuscenter in the 10^th district. The other two don’t have that a good selection.
Another shop is Boox, situated at the Museumsquartier station of the metro line U2. The store is very small and packed with books. However I only once managed to find a book to buy there.
So now we got all the cheap-books-only stores. However there are still some other places where you can get good cheap books of you are very lucky. I for example already bought some at Thalia at the W3 center, Leykam at Graz Hauptbahnhof and in various Libro stores. The Libro stores however have only been selling crap on their bargain counters for the last 1-2 years, according to my experience.

So now you know where to get good books (like the ones on my list) for cheap. But please don’t go there to buy all the books I’d like to have

So well last Saturday I was at the Campusrock 2008 at the Stadthalle in Fürstenfeld (the venue had been changed due to the weather conditions). And this year they had great bands again. Well there could have been more people there but well it was OK.
So now I’m really not in the mood now for whriting a lot about this concert so I’m just going to put some photos in below…

The first band that played when I arrived was TNT Jackson from Vienna. I think their show at the Planetarium in Vienna last January was better but I think it was just the audience…

The next band was Chikinki from the UK. Their gig was quite good actually and the singer ever went crowd surfing.

After a very long sound check came Slut from Ingolstadt/Germany. They had all kinds of instruments on stage which was pretty amazing. Everything between an ordinary guitar and an old radiator…

So the last band for the evening was Partyshank from London. These electronics guys who sound like a mix of Test Icicles, Daft Punk and MSTRKRFT played a really crazy 30-minutes set for the few (~70) remaining people…

Thanks a lot to the people who organized the whole thing for making this possible. I hope there will be a Campusrock again next year, in whatever size an form…

This weekend (Fri & Sat) was really great and interesting. Friday evening/night the “Lange Nacht Der Kirchen” took place in various churches all over Vienna (and also in other places in Austria). So I went to the Altlerchenfelderkirche which is quite close to where I currently live in Vienna and I hadn’t been there before. The deacon made an interesting tour through the church explaining all the frescos and other architectural features of the church. In the sacristy he also showed valuable old albs and goblets.

Afterwards I walked over to the Pfarrkirche Schottenfeld in Westbahnstraße where they offered to take part in an ascent of the tower. This was a really adventurous thing because it was dark, narrow and especially dusty up there and the stairs were also quite steep. But it was really interesting and the view over the nightly city was also great.
All in all I think the Lange Nacht Der Kirchen (just as all those other “Lange Nacht Der…”) is a good oportunity to see places that are usually not publicly accessibly or you would at least not consider going to.

So that was the Friday but the following Saturday was also great. I went to the cinema with S. to see the movie 21 staring Kevin Spacey and Laurence Fishburne amonst others. You can watch the trailer here (or the German version here). It’s quite a good movie, the story is a bit predictable in places but never boring.
And after the movie we had the chance to chill out at a special place with a great view. Thanks a lot to M. and E. for making this possible.

So now, a great weekend is over and a great time in Vienna is also nearly over but to be countinued I hope (I really do)…

It is only nine days now until Campusrock 2008 starts (see previous post for details). To mentally “prepare” for it, I uploaded three videos to Flickr last night. There is one video of TNT Jackson who are going to play this year’s festival and videos of The Bishops and Binder Krieglstein who played there last year…

TNT Jackson “All Black”
Recorded at “Konzert für die Hirnlosen”, Zeiss Planetarium Vienna 11.01.2008

The Bishops “Lies And Indictments / Sun’s Going Down”
Recorded at Campusrock 2007, Stadthalle Fürstenfeld

Binder Krieglstein “Spit”
Recorded at Campusrock 2007, Stadthalle Fürstenfeld