2017 Vienna, Munich, Hiking the Alps

The usual shot of the gear laid out and ready to pack up. (Only about half my clothes appear to be here, though.)

Discovered it was cheaper to park at the brand new covered park-and-ride lot and take light rail to the airport.

Not an infinity-spanning rift in spacetime - this was the hallway outside my hotel room. The long hallway would have been disorienting enough without the striped carpet emphasizing the perspective, I think. But emphasize it it emphatically did.

As an engineer, these angled concrete columns made me cringe. And cross the street.

The car in which Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were assassinated, triggering WWI.

The car in which Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were assassinated, triggering WWI.

The uniform the Archduke was wearing at the time of the assassination, and the couch he died on.

It's hard to look at this thing close-up and not think of the Space Jockey from the original "Alien" movie. In fact, it's a portable heavy artillery piece from WWI, in remarkably good condition.

This is more like what I expected to see at the Secession - the knight from Klimt's "Beethoven Frieze". Which, unlike the garbage on prominent display, is tucked away in a sub-basement with the building's other scanty display of Secessionist work.

The attached description claimed it was the artist's expression in tangible form of her reaction to Donald Trump's election as President, done with found materials from her studio. In other words, she pitched a tantrum and destroyed her living room because her candidate lost. I first went to Vienna in 1995, and completely missed the Secession museum. Kicked myself for it for years. That meant it was on the top of my list for this visit. Imagine my disappointment when I find inside not a museum dedicated to the Secession, or to Art Nouveau more broadly, but the usual "modernist" tripe by no-talent grifters whose work is closer to the crude figures and fingerpainting of a kindergarten art show than to anything the real Secessionists put out. This is not art. This is garbage posed randomly and affixed with a pretentious and nonsensical "statement" explaining its faux-profundity. (More here: www.secession.at/en/exhibition/nicole-eisenman/)

One wonders whether "Mister Lady" has a companion store, "Mistress Gentleman".

Not that I object to Lovecraft-inspired art, but I'm not sure a subway platform is quite the right venue for displaying an asylum-inmate's terror-maddened pencil sketches of night gaunts and bayakhees.

St. Stephan

Bachelor party Instagrams, Renaissance-style.

Until you get close, it passes for a young woman looking out of an upstairs window.

Upsides: takes up little floor space; augments the rowing motion with gravity. Downside: having to learn to clench your cheeks around the seat to compensate for the lack of a seatbelt.

Intriguing nature study up-close. From across the room it looked like a black contortionist doing a headstand.

An oddly appropriate find, as I was on my way to visit friends who'd been married on this lake.