Unreliable Narrator #3 the Worldhood of the World (As Such)

Vienna Calling The Nordessey, Part 1

Unreliable Narrator #3 The Worldhood of The World (as such)

In the run-up to Loncon, Christina and I published an issue of Head! on the spur of the moment. The articles and artwork had been sitting around in our computers for a while, we just hadn’t the time to pull them together into one place and publish them. Picking up the zine from the printers felt good, it felt right. I wanted to do more of this sort of thing.

The last issue of this zine appeared for Corfu XXX in Portland. So much has happened since that sunny Spring weekend that’s taken me away from fanzine writing. I’ve been through a re-structure at work, become a manager, been on sabbatical, taken up cycling, attended Worldcon in London, and been on the committees for both Novacon and Corﬂu.

It’s become obvious to me that if I want to do more fanzines I need to clear some of the other things from my life. My career I can’t jettison, unless someone out there wants to pay me to do fanzines. And I’m deﬁnitely not going to give up my obsession with cycling, not only is it my only form of exercise, but it’s one of the few things on TV that I actually enjoy watching.

Other areas of my life need a bit of a sort out. One is convention running. Working on publications and programmes is something that doesn’t come easily to me, and having worked on an Eastercon, a Corflu and a Novacon I can definitely say con-running is something I don’t want to do any more. It’s not only con-running I need to cut out, there’s other stuff too. I play too much video games, watch too much crap TV and spend too long online or answering emails in the evenings.

This zine is based around three days in Vienna that I had at the start of my sabbatical. It’s my intention to serialise the rest of the trip in future issues of Unreliable Narrator alongside all the other things I want to write about. My reason for doing this is because I don’t want to lose momentum post-Tynecon, I need something to keep my publishing otherwise I will slump back on the sofa, job done for another couple of years, and that’s something I don’t want to do.

- Doug

Unreliable Narrator #3: Vienna Calling is brought to you by the letters P and Q, the number 23…and the smell of fresh herring. Unreliable Narrator is a Bigfoot Viking Production, and (c) Doug Bell 2015.

To counteract the large amount of dead European classical composers mentioned in my trip report, this zine was produced to a soundtrack supplied by Goat, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, The Phantom Band, Wilco and King Creosote.

Locs, fanzines in trade, Imperial Black Saisons, retro Belgian cycling memorabilia and bootlegs of modern psychedelic bands to:

[email protected] or [email protected]

This zine was published for and launched at Tynecon III: The Corﬂu in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, March 2015.

- 2 - The Nordyssey, Part 1: Vienna Calling I’ve struggled to write this intro; this is the umpteenth version I’ve written over the last week. I’ve slowly come to the conclusion that no matter how ﬂawed, no matter how it doesn’t say what I need it to say, that I just have to put the words down on paper and move on. So here goes - just over two years ago I was an absolute fucking wreck.

My life started going oﬀ the rails when my mother died of lung cancer. The way the illness quickly progressed was a shock, and after the funeral was done I should have taken a couple of weeks to come to terms with everything that happened. Instead I avoided facing up to the situation, and did what felt natural by diving straight back to work and getting on with life.

On top of my own usual workload of producing statistics, writing reports and managing a small team of staff, I also became a key member of a small team designing and launching a university- wide reporting system. It was stimulating and challenging work, and kept my mind suitably diverted. The workload was heavy and the pressure to deliver high, and by not having allowed myself the space to come to terms with what had happened by the time I was flying out to Portland for Corflu I realised I was in trouble. I felt physically, emotionally and intellectually wrung out. That holiday was the first time I’d stood still for a long time, and despite being shattered I found that I just could not switch my mind off.

On the last night in North America, Andy Hooper and Carrie Root hosted a select party for the small number of Brits passing through town. It was a relaxed aﬀair, with a nice dead dog post- convention vibe. I have a vivid memory of chatting to Andy over a beer about baseball and realising how much I really didn’t want this holiday to end – not only because of the great friends I’d miss, but due to a deep primal fear I had about returning to the status quo once home. I knew that if I didn’t do something drastic soon that I would be setting myself up for big fall.

Back at work I shocked my colleagues by immediately asking my boss for a three month sabbatical. I wanted to get away and do some travelling, as well as have a month visiting my family in Scotland, and spending some time relaxing in Cornwall before returning to work. Employers get a lot of stick for the way they treat their staﬀ, but I found both my manager and the senior management team at the university nothing but supportive, for which I am extremely grateful.

With a letter in my hand from HR confirming my official absence from September to December, I could begin planning my trip through Northern Europe. I wanted to travel by train through Norway to the Arctic Circle, then cut across the top of Sweden to Finland. Over the border I’d travel down to Helsinki, cross the Baltic by ferry, and then push on to the Baltic states, Poland, Germany and Denmark, before flying home from Stockholm. It was all do-able, just the cost of staying Norway threatened to bankrupt me.

So it was back to the drawing board. I still wanted to travel through some of the Nordic countries, but where else? Well, one of the cities I’ve been desperate to visit for a long time was Vienna. Just like most places I’ve never been, my impressions of the city were formed by what I knew of it from music, ﬁlm and literature – mostly Schoenberg, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, John Irving’s books, The Third Man and Falco have a lot of the blame too.

Once Vienna was locked down, the rest of the planning came easy – I’d just journey north until I reached Finland. Along the way there would be culture, sport, trains, boats and a convention thrown in for good measure. It’d be the biggest trip of my life so far, a journey into the heart of Northern Europe – a Nordessey, if you will.

So I left work on the Tuesday, packed Wednesday and travelled up to London on the Thursday to meet Mark Plummer and Claire Brialey and a whole bunch of London SF fans at the First Thursday for a pre-trip night of drinking and fannish gossip. The next morning, slightly hung-over, Christina waved me oﬀ to Gatwick airport from a train platform somewhere deep in darkest Croydon.

- 3 - Welcome To Wiener-Schnitzel, Can I Take You're Order?

Friday 4, October 2013 It's a bright autumnal afternoon as the bus pulls out of Vienna airport. For the last ﬁfteen minutes I’ve been standing in the cold sunlight, freezing my balls oﬀ; it reminds me of a summer’s day in Aberdeen. Now safely tucked away in the warm bus, feelings are slowly returning to my hands and feet. It’s an odd sensation, as currently my body doesn’t know what it wants to do as I am also caked in sweat. I don’t feel like I’m ill, and it can’t be from lugging a backpack around as I’ve only recently picked it up from baggage reclaim. All I know is that since arriving at Gatwick Airport my body has been overheating drastically. How on earth can you be roasting and freezing at the same time?

The journey into the city is uninspiring, mostly consisting of grey, efficient Teutonic autobahn. On the outskirts of the city, buildings appear. None hint at Vienna’s much rhapsodised architectural splendours or of the capital’s place in the history of western culture, although maybe the enormous oil/gas refinery with miles of steaming interconnected pipe-work might make the ghost of Freud moderately excited. As the last of the refinery whizzes by I think I catch sight of an abandoned water-park nestled right next door to the vast industrial complex. Maybe I dreamt it.

The bus dumps me in Schwedenplatz, and though I had carefully pre-planned my metro route to the hostel before leaving the airport I hadn’t ﬁgured it’d be hard to ﬁnd the entrance to the underground. After ten minutes of wandering aimlessly around the square I eventually spot the large obvious blue U marking the stairs down below. It was right beside where the bus stopped.

Coins rammed into a ticket machine, I've got my 72-hour pass, and I’m soon on my way to the hostel crammed in a busy late-afternoon carriage. As the train lurches around corners I’m continually thrown oﬀ balance into the back of a tall blond-haired athletic looking chap in front of me by my backpack’s weight. I don’t think he notices, or at least doesn’t acknowledge my unstable intrusions into his body space. As we’re rammed in tight I can’t see much up and down the carriage but though the one gap I can see a shapely pair of legs, female I presume, clad in bright orange tights. On her lap sits a wicker shopping-basket ﬁlled to the brim with beetroot straight from the ground. The beets are larger and more vibrant coloured than anything I’ve seen in the UK. They could almost be giant bull testicles, giant bruised-purple bull testicles. I change line at Karlsplatz onto a quieter train, for the short journey to Kettenbruckengasse. The Wombat's Naschmarkt Hostel, my home for the weekend, is just down the road.

All the bottom bunks in the 4-person dorm are taken so I mark my territory by claiming one of the two vacant top bunks by making the bed and putting my earplugs on the bedside shelf. Sitting abandoned on the table by the window is a bewildering array of oriental salad ingredients and cooking sauces, no doubt purchased from the Chinese supermarket on the same block. I dump my pack in my locker before finally getting the Gatwick sweat off me with a steaming hot shower. Clean, refreshed and with my body temperature finally stabilised I step out to discover Vienna.

I decide to travel light this evening, taking nothing more than my iPhone, wallet and coat; I relish the lack of weight on my back after a couple of days of lugging the pack from Cornwall to mainland Europe. Although I’ve read my guide book from cover to cover and have lots of plans for the next couple of days, tonight I’ve not ﬁxed on anything – I’m just going to see where my feet take me.

Taking the S-Bahn back into town, I quickly ﬁnd my way from Schwedenplatz into the Innere Stadt. The city is buzzing with smartly dressed Austrians out after work for relaxy-vous drinks, with loud gangs of school-kids eating ice creams from the roadside gelaterias, tourists with cameras at the ready, couples doing some early evening shopping, buskers and ticket touts dressed as Mozart. Here in the Innere Stadt there are no trams to knock down an unwary tourist, but you do run the gauntlet of the horse-drawn tourist carriage tours.

Not yet hungry, I explore the streets aimlessly. Try as I might, I ﬁnd it hard to escape the event horizon of the main shopping street – no matter what diversion I take, I always end back there. Even with its unique sights such as the towering cathedral of Stephansdom or the Baroque grandeur of Michaelerplatz, you can’t escape the fact that it is all too similar to many shopping - 4 - streets in Northern Europe, albeit with a lot more Mozart-themed souvenir shops than elsewhere. You can hardly turn a corner in central Vienna without coming across another branch of Mostly Mozart. I start to wonder if every city I’m visiting will have its own composer themed retail chain, whether it’s Basically Bach in Leipzig, Naturally Neilsen in Copenhagen, Wonderfully Weill in Berlin and Simply Sibelius in Helsinki.

I walk for hours in the twisty maze of streets, passing along cobbled lanes, around equestrian statues, through covered archways where crowds of tourists gawp at something I can't make out, I ogle ornate fountains, skirt impressive squares and amble through the market stalls being torn down after a hard days commerce completed. I discover the pretty art nouveau Freyung Passage shopping arcade. I feel out of place in my shabby tourist clothes as I pass sharply dressed couples sharing expensive looking bottles of wine outside the posh bars.

Everywhere I go, I pass sausage stalls, kebab sellers, noodle stands...sometimes all rolled up into the same fast food kiosk. The smells wafting from these street vendors make me aware of how hungry I am. It's now pushing 8pm, and I know what I want – good honest pub food with a frothy beer. I turn back towards the main drag and start working my way up the side streets looking for a suitable bar. I'm still looking half an hour later. There are restaurants and city centre bars but they look over-priced and more importantly don’t seem to be oﬀering what my body needs. Things are not looking good and I make up my mind to try only a couple more side streets before giving up and having a bratwurst from a roadside stall. I turn a corner and there it is - the1516 Brew Pub. Even if they’ve stopped serving food at least I'll get a beer.

The bar is smoky and packed; Austria is one of the last hold-outs on non-smoking bars. A couple of big screens show football live from somewhere random, uninteresting and central European. I find a space on a stool at the bar and soon the barman, Irish of course, gives me a menu. I choose Wiener schnitzel for food. Well, you kinda have to, don't you? Turning to the beer menu I'm overjoyed to find that 1516 is a craft brewery. I need something first quenching so settle for their Victory Hop Double IPA. It hits the spot – hop filled, refreshing and despite its US-craft brewery inspiration has enough of a touch of weiss bier about it to remind you that you are in a Germanic country.

The be-suited man on the stool next to me asks if I'm enjoying the drink; his broad American accent marks him out instantly as not a local. He's a lot younger than me; clean cut and fresh faced, and looks like he'd be dating Rory Gilmore from late-period Gilmore Girls. However he's downing large beers in a smoky bar which makes him seem more like a junior account holder from Mad Men than anything out of a family friendly TV show. Joe, as he introduces himself, is from Detroit and was in town for four days to close a deal for his firm who do something involving composite materials for aircraft wings. The deal was done and dusted on his first morning in town without the protracted negotiations his firm was expecting. Since then, he's been to the Munich Oktoberfest for a day, scored cheap tickets for the ballet and spent much time drinking in the various craft beer bars around town, all done in his business suits as that was all he had packed. Joe gives me a couple of tips on where good bars are in Vienna, while I try to explain cricket and specifically the Ashes to him as on an earlier business trip to England he’d struggled to understand why the country was obsessed with playing Australia for such a tiny trophy. Somewhere in all this the schnitzel arrives, as does a replacement beer Schlinger's Smoked Double Bock. I presume it was smoky but to tell the truth that could have been down to the nicotine-heavy atmosphere.

Schnitzel and beer finished, fatigue overtakes me, so I say bye to Joe and take the S-bahn back to the hostel. It’s only 11pm but I’m done in. I've just finished brushing my teeth when the other roommates start trickling in, two younger guys and a girl. I read some of Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum until the last of my roommates has finished getting ready for bed. Switching my reading - 5 - light off plunges the room into darkness. I drift off to sleep quickly...only to be woken an hour later by the girl getting up, switching lights on and making a salad from the ingredients on the table. I reach for the earplugs and I’m soon back in the sleep zone.

- X -

Emancipation of the Dissonance

Saturday 5, October 2013 My sleep doesn't last long. The salad-eater is up at 5am packing, crashing about, eating more salad. As much as I try to get back to sleep I can’t, even when the room descends back to silence after her ﬁnal door slamming departure. For a moment I contemplate reading more Grass or watching Deadwood on my iPad, but I’m too excited to see what Vienna will bring today, so I rise, hastily wash and pack my day-bag.

My first port of call is to Westbahnhof to pick up my international train reservations. I've been slightly worried about this as I only have a reservation number to show for my 15-minute telephone call to a Central European call centre. In the end, everything works out fine and I celebrate with a Bismarck Baguette for breakfast at the Nordsee concession at the station. I first discovered Nordsee about five years ago while in Berlin. Christina and I had been sightseeing all morning and were looking for a something quick and easy for lunch. The fish-themed fast food chain looked the biz, with the Bismarck Baguette and its fresh sharp fishy combination of herring, raw onion and gherkin was to die for. The downside is the vinegary aftertaste can stay with you all day, but for me personally no trip to northern Europe is complete without some form of herring being inhaled.

My two days in Vienna were one of the only parts of the trip I’d planned in advance, but early in the day my itinerary hits the skids. With the taste of herring still fresh in my mouth I take the S- bahn across town to Praterstern to ride the Wiener Riesenrad a.k.a. the big Ferris wheel famously seen in both The Third Man and Before Sunrise. Course, the one thing I hadn't reckoned on was waking up so ridiculously early that the wheel wasn’t due to open for another 90 minutes. Not to worry I can be ﬂexible. After consulting my guidebook I decide that rather than moping around a deserted theme-park, I’d re-arrange my plans and visit the Arnold Schoenberg Centre for a poke around the museum and archives of one of the 20th centuries most revolutionary composers.

I soon find out that my guidebook is wrong, the Schoenberg Centre doesn’t open on Saturdays. Of course to discover this I had to ride the S-Bahn to Statspark. I’m seriously gutted as Schoenberg’s music was one of the first times I discovered music that sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before, either rock or classical. My first encounter was at Penicuik High School while studying Higher Music. The teacher put on a piece of music for us to comment on and analyse - it was Pierrot Lunaire, an atonal piece for a small collection of instruments and a vocalist who spoke-sang (or Sprechstimme) the melody-less lyrics of the mini-song cycle. It was haunting fever-dream stuff, both instantly familiar and also utterly alien at the same time, disconcertingly dark and sinister but also oddly naive. Later in that class I learnt of Schoenberg’s 12-note serial technique which was designed to free music from the tyranny of a rigid tonal system through strict adherence to ensuring equality between all 12-semitones of the standard Western musical notation. That evening at home, I experimented with making marks on music manuscript trying to write my own serial compositions. Not having much idea and the only instrument I had to hand being a trombone I soon gave up following in the maestro’s footsteps.

I didn’t know it then but my faltering attempts at modernist composition were repeated through not only Schoenberg’s pupils Berg and Webern, but were carried to their logical conclusion by the Darmstadt School of composers in the period after World War 2. The modernist revolutionaries of Boulez, Stochhausen and other fellow travellers were in direct opposition against ‘traditional’ composers like Stravinsky. It is a rift that to some extent still exists between repertoire concert music and new music. Schoenberg wasn’t the ﬁrst innovator in modern composition to dabble with dissonance (I had tickets for another pioneer’s opera the following night) but by throwing out the entire notion of tonality, he paved the way for others to challenge the fundamental concepts of - 6 - musical composition in diﬀerent ways such as electronically or through the introduction of chance into both composition and performance.

By this time, I deﬁnitely know the Wiener Riesenrad will be open for business, so it’s back to Praterstern. I’m getting to know the underground quite well by this point, but this journey is diﬀerent – the carriage is full of lederhosen-wearing men and women in dirndl. Again I feel inappropriately dressed.

The ticket queue is enormous; I’m quite shocked at how many people have turned up early to ride the big wheel. Still, the line is fast-moving, and after my barcode ticket is scanned I’m let into the ﬁrst dingy room where various moth-eaten dioramas depict the history of Vienna with badly painted toy soldiers. The worn displays were enlivened by a miscalculation of scale between the ﬁgures and the buildings. I couldn’t understand why the giant Turkish army bothered laying siege to Vienna when their warriors could have easily stepped across the city walls and stomped on the Lilliputian occupants.

As the hordes of tourists thronged around the poorly-scaled historical displays, I pushed through the room making my way toward the front of the queue. Now outside I could really appreciate the engineering that went into the construction of the giant wheel. The sheer volume of ironwork alone was impressive, not to mention the mechanics that kept the thing smoothly running. The cabin interiors showed a level of care and craftsmanship in their design and construction you rarely see in modern structures, even if they were now defaced with graﬃti. Sadly none said “Orson Welles was here”.

Slowly, the cabin rose up into the heavens and the whole theme-park gradually revealed itself. Below I could now see a section of the park where a lot of brass bands were massing followed by the hordes of lederhosen and dirndl wearing Austrians from the underground. It looked like there was a beer festival going on down there. I took the odd photo before moving to the other end of the cabin to look back across the Danube towards the city centre, just as everyone else in the booth wanted to look in depth at the funfair. While my fellow cabin-mates stood laughing at the screaming coming from the roller- coaster meters below us, I had a perfect uninterrupted view over the treetops back to the Vienna skyline. In the distance I could pick up the dome of Stephansdom, the grandly imposing imperial Hofburg Palace and more than a couple of those European-style TV tower.

By the time we descended, hunger was kicking in. I wandered amongst the Austrian cultural celebrations (i.e. the beer festival and brass concert) and took in a couple of songs, but I’ve had an aversion to brass bands ever since playing trombone in one at school.

Siebenstern, or 7Stern, a bar recommended by my friend from last night, was back in town just beyond the Volkstheatre and near the olde-worlde cobbled streets of Spittelberg. I entered through the front doors, past the bottled-beer vending machine in the lobby, and descended into the basement bar. Above the enormous brew-tanks that lurked behind the bar, was an enormous glass dome flooding what would have been a rather dark area with lots of light. The coppery tanks gleamed invitingly, so I just had to sample the beer on offer. I ordered a Wiener Helles and some Nuremberg Style sausages (very herbal, and short, thin and tasty). I sat back content that I had managed to salvage something from a morning that started out on the wrong foot. - 7 - The Museum Quarter was down the hill, and tonight was the Long Night of the Museums where a €13 ticket would get you into any number of late opening museums and galleries. With that in mind I went to investigate what was on offer at the main attractions. Nearby was the dark modernist looming mumok (modern contemporary art gallery), the Design Museum, the Filmmuseum and the Albertina, which I discovered was showing a high profile Matisse exhibition. All looked distinct possibilities for the evening.

Between the Museum Quarter and the centre of town lay the Hofburg Palace. Walking across the wide square towards the imposing building up from nowhere sprang a perky young Austrian girl in a bright red hoodie. She asked me something in German. I mumbled in English that the only German I knew was Fernsehturm (TV Tower). She giggled, looked thoughtful for a moment and then switched languages. At this point she started giving me the sales pitch for the Long Night of the Museums. Looking up the list of participating museums I noticed the Schoenberg Centre was listed – result! When she mentioned the free shuttle busses between venues I was sold, and was then pointed towards some portacabins to purchase my ticket.

€13 lighter I continued through the Hofburg taking photos, and stopping to listen to a gypsy ﬁddler/singer sitting at the base of a huge statue. I must have looked like a native as while enjoying the street music, three separate groups of people approached me for directions. I managed to point one couple towards the Museum Quarter, but the other two I couldn’t help so set them onto a nearby ticket seller dressed up predictably as Mozart. I presumed Wolfgang Amadeus as a long-time resident of the city would be able to assist.

Civic duty done, I continued through the Palace grounds looking for the spot where Harry Lime "died ". This was in a small courtyard with an equestrian statue in it. Nearby I found the tunnel from last night where I passed crowds of people staring at something gloomily in the distance. In the daylight I could now see horses heads poking out from stable doors, so this was obviously where the famous Viennese Spanish Riding School was based. The sun was setting now, and the temperature was falling. It was time to retire to a café for a coﬀee and Sacher-Torte before returning home to both chill and thaw out before the evening.

Take Two. I'm walking towards the Arnold Schoenberg Centre only this time it’s all lit up. Lange Nacht posters are plastered around the entranceway. I take the lift up to the correct ﬂoor and am greeted with a loud “Hello”. It seems I am one of the ﬁrst visitors tonight. I guess museums

- 8 - dedicated to avant-garde composers aren’t the most obvious choice on the late-night museum circuit. I do hope they are turning visitors away at Endoscopy Museum this evening.

A quick ﬂash of my ticket and I'm inside in a long corridor lined with display boards on Schoenberg's life and naturally they are all in German. I curse my lack of language, but at least I can look at the photos of Arnold, his family, and his star pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Further on though there is a real treat around the corner - Schoenberg's last studio in Los Angeles has been transported here in full. I can see his piano that he seldom played, the butchers paper he used for writing large print music on when teaching, and his home made pencil-extensions he used when he had sharpened his pencils down to a tiny stub. A ﬁlm narrated by his daughter explains his writing habits and his constant need to invent things to make his life easier. One of these was one of the earliest known Sellotape dispenser, which looked remarkably like your modern device – Arnie could have made a mint if he had just gotten around to patenting it.

Stuck in a cabinet nearby was Schoenberg’s attempt to improve chess. His thought the game needed four players so added two minor sides and altered the winning conditions so you could only achieve victory by allying yourself with another player. Arnold also added a whole host of new pieces such as the Submarine and the Tank, which made his chess sound like something Sheldon would invent in The Big Bang Theory.

From there it’s onto the main part of the museum, full of interactive displays (thankfully you could choose English) with headphones describing his composition techniques before and after the invention of 12-tone music. There are scores of scores to leaf through, facsimile programme notes and correspondence lying around to pick up and read. I spend a good 20 minutes listening to Pierrot Lunaire on headphones while following the score, before moving onto sections of Variations for Orchestra. I end up spending a lot of time watching an extended section of a live performance of Chamber Concerto No 1 recorded in the Centre with an aged Pierre Boulez conducting...awesome!

I seriously wondered when I ﬁrst arrived how long I'd stay in the Centre as it didn't appear that big, but I was hooked once I got inside the music. I was sitting on a bench entranced by a ﬁlm of Simon Rattle conducting the epic orchestral and choral piece Guerre Lieder when I was tapped on the shoulder by a museum volunteer. Did I want to attend a special Long Night live rendition of some of Arnold’s piano pieces? The performance was starting in 5 minutes if I was interested.

It’s after 10 pm by the time I exit. I clutch the small white plastic bag containing the Pierre Boulez conducting Schoenberg CD box set I’ve purchased from the gift shop as I make my way through Vienna’s chilly boulevards back to the Museum Quarter. People are everywhere, jostling, laughing, scowling…and queuing up to get into all the big attractions. Fatigue and hunger hit me and I’m dead on my feet. I want to sit down for a long, long time. 1516 is just as rammed as the museums I’ve now abandoned, so much so the doorman isn’t letting anyone in. It’s while I’m standing at a sausage stall munching on a consolation bratwurst that I ﬁnd my hostel’s free introductory drink token at the bottom of my pocket. I ﬁnish the night on a comfy seat in a warm bar watching Deadwood on my iPad drinking free local lager. After a long day on my feet this is heaven. My bed is just one lift ride and 50 minutes of quality TV away.

- X -

The Rest Is Noise

Sunday 6, October 2013 A wet day, more disappointingly drizzly than punishingly pouring. Breakfast is a coﬀee and an enormous pastry from a bakery concession at Schottentor S-Bahn station. It’s good, fucking good. We have something that purports to be a café at Truro Railway Station that sells over-priced Ginsters sandwiches and piss-poor headache inducing buckets of something that has allegedly been near coﬀee. Europe is great, even the grubbiest railway station has astonishingly good food - where did the UK go wrong?

- 9 - Five minutes later I’m sheltering in a doorway, completely soaked to the skin. It’s not any old Viennese doorway but you know that one where Orson Welles makes his big entrance in The Third Man. I’m missing a cat at my feet, but in my head I can hear the iconic zither theme playing.

Photos taken, I spend the morning in an unlikely combination of museums, which if I’d been more astute last night I could have visited then, rather than trying to get into the big popular ones. This morning’s cultural highlights include The Esperanto and Planned Languages Museum, followed by The Globe Museum. In all honesty I’m not bothered about seeing rooms and rooms of antique globes, but it’s upstairs in the same building, and the entrance to one museum gets you into the other for free. If nothing else, it’ll keep me out of the rain a bit longer.

I had a brief flirtation with Esperanto at Uni, trying a free correspondence course but I didn’t really follow it through. Nowadays I have only a minor interest in the language, but I am a major fan of off-beat museums. Ticket paid I was disappointed to find the museum was essentially one long corridor, but as I read the displays I was drawn into the story of the language. Esperanto originated out of perceived necessity for a universal language as its creator L. L. Zamenhof grew up in Białystok, Poland where German, Czech, Polish, Yiddish and Slovakian were spoken by different linguistic and ethnic groups. Esperanto became relatively successful in pre-World War 2 Europe, with its growth suddenly halted by both Stalin and Hitler’s brutal purges as utopian linguists were included alongside Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals and Intellectuals as ‘Undesirables’.

One thing I learnt was the language wasn’t even originally called Esperanto originally but Lingvo Internacia, and only became known as such due to Zamenhof publishing the original leaﬂets under the pseudonym Dr Esperanto.

Dr Esperanto. Worst. X-Men. Villain. Ever.

My favourite section of the museum was dedicated to other planned languages, such as Klingon and Interlingua. My favourite, though was François Sudre’s Solresol which was based around the doh, ray, me musical notation system made popular by the Von Trapp family. Although "Dore dosolia dosifare" means I drink beer, it only drew me blank stares in many bars throughout northern Europe on my trip.

Although far larger than the downstairs oﬀering and although I am a trained geographer, I found myself bored by the Antique Globe Museum. Once you've seen ten large globes of the world you've seen a representative sample, and this hall had tonnes of the bastards, all hidden away in giant glass cabinets. I decided to skip out early, determined to eat properly at lunchtime as my evening was due to be taken up with a classic opera full of necrophilia overtones. So I returned to Siebenstern for a large plate of thick warm goulash and dumplings and a not very convincing IPA. Lunch done, I ﬁnally visited an art gallery – the Museum of Fantastic Art, located right beside where Harry Lime "died". I had my money ready to pay as I entered the museum, but no-one was around to collect it. I rang the bell, stood around, rang the bell again. Nothing happened. Then I noticed through a crack in the curtains the owner was soundly sleeping. The Long Night of The Museums must have taken its toll.

- 10 - Leaving the snoring Austrian behind, I climbed up the stairs of the Palais Palffy to find the top- floor gallery. A life-size, fully bipedal HR Giger Alien guarded its entrance. The museum told the story of the post-War Leipzig Surrealist School or Art and their friends and fellow-travellers. I'd no previous knowledge of this group but was soon lost in the artwork of Richard Heyder and Zademack. My favourite paintings included a one where the Stephensdom was completely surrounded by a Dune-like alien sand-world landscape, another where some fishermen have caught and are hauling home an unfeasibly large whale. My favourite though was Krassimir Kolev’s Amanda from Borås visiting Venus from Urbino. The picture featured a busty semi-naked lady recumbent in a classic Renaissance pose, while off in the distance maids were doing something or other. It took a moment to realise that the Renaissance woman was wearing big black boots, a pair of denim shorts and had some modern looking tattoos. Its use of surrealism was far more subtle than some of the more fantastical paintings in the gallery.

Having now done my museum quota for the day, and with time to spare it was time to visit the Danube. I was underwhelmed – it wasn’t blue and didn’t waltz. It’s more brown and sluggish.

A couple of hours later, I'm standing confused outside the closed Volkstheater. It should be open as I have tickets this evening for Richard Strauss’s Salome at the Volksopera. I look at my ticket. Something’s wrong, and my brain struggles to work out what. This is the right place, the Volksopera. I stare at the poster of up coming shows and can see no Salome or any opera on at the Volkstheater. Then it dawns on me The-Volks-Theatre. Right now I should be at a diﬀerent but similarly named concert hall two metro lines and ten stops away. I have a little bit of time at hand, but getting there for the curtain is going require some really fortunate metro connections. Things go well, very well and although I arrive late I've missed only the ﬁrst minute of the show.

Salome according to Alex Ross (the music critic not the comics artist) is one of the most important works of 20th Century composition. It draws heavily on Oscar Wilde's version of the biblical story of Salome dancing for Herod, and when asked what she’d like as payment, demands the head of John the Baptist. Strauss's opera scandalised its original audiences with its - 11 - sensuous and almost necrophiliac tone, and its dense searing musical score that flirts with atonality. In the dying moments of the third act, as the tension ratchets up, the music bursts open with a final brutally complex piece of harmony described by one commentator as “the most sickening chord in all opera”. I’ve personally found this passage beautiful as the dissonance quickly resolves back to normal tonality, before giving way briefly to Salome’s sensuous main theme played out on high lush strings one last time, before Herod orders the dancer’s death and the opera ends abruptly.

Nowadays Salome is part of the standard operatic cannon. With a century of experimentation both in the classical realm and in the pop culture coming after it, the opera can seem tame to modern listeners. In 1905 and the immediate years after the premier its impact was immense. Many composers were present at the ﬁrst show, including Schoenberg, Berg, Mahler and Puccini. (Hitler, then unknown, also claimed to be in attendance but he also later contradicted himself on this too, denouncing this opera as decadent. So far no musicologist or historian has found evidence to either conﬁrm or deny this). Strauss’s complex harmonies cracked open the door on orchestral atonality and pointed the composers of the day in a direction away from the stultifying overblown world composition had become since Wagner rose in popularity.

The production I saw used a minimalist set, a lot of cloth, lighting eﬀects, a few blocks to clamber over and a large white pool in the centre of the stage that also doubled as a trapdoor to the dungeon that John the Baptist emerged from. I'd been listening to Salome in the weeks building up to my trip to better appreciate the opera, and thought I knew it quite well as a result, but there is a palpable diﬀerence between seeing a live performance and listening to a recorded one. Trying to get a sense of the action by reading the libretto or following the score while listening to a CD is tricky, but visually seeing how it works on stage (particularly in the instrumental sections) made the whole thing instantaneously understandable. There's also something primal when an orchestral brass section really opens up that never gets properly captured in recordings, and Salome has some incredibly powerful horn sections.

I left the Volkopera high on Strauss and sausage purchased from a stall right outside the venue. My hours in the city were rapidly running out, so I decided to say farewell to Vienna with a last beer in 1516. Sunday night, and the bar is empty…I can even breathe without swallowing mouthfuls of smoke for once. To compensate I ask the Irish barman for a smoky Eejit Oatmeal Stout. Blankly I stare at the football on the TV screen not taking it all in, my ears still ringing from the opera. I sip my pint slowly, at last savouring not having to think of work or anything in particular. Glass empty, I drift oﬀ into the night wandering aimlessly through the backstreets of Vienna just as Jesse and Celine do in Before Sunrise. I’ve still not looked for a likely location of Garp’s Pension Grillparzer. I decide to leave that task to the ghosts of great composers that haunt this city – Schoenberg, Wolfgang Amadeus, Schubert, various Strausses and of course Falco.

Rock Me Amadeus. - 12 - Various POVs The last issue of Unreliable Narrator was published for Corﬂu XXX in Portland, Oregon.

Randy Byers - Optimus Prime’s R2D2 Butt-Plugs I'm reading your zine on the train to Portland (a city that's getting to be a habit lately) and that bit had me laughing my ass oﬀ while clenching it at the same time. This whole piece is a brilliant use of drunken convention notes. I think you may have invented a new form. (What's that you say? Walt Willis was already doing it in the Thirties? Bollocks!)

That's all I've got, really. Keep after Lennart, and keep your hekto warm.

Walt Willis’s Bollocks? Not sure I want to think about them, although it does sound like a splendid name for a fanzine, almost Michael Ashley-esque. Hardly a moment passed before I also received a follow up email...

Randy Byers - (Slight Return) I don't see a credit for the cartoon on page 2. What kind of neofan are you?! Wait. Does that mean it's one of yours? Are you becoming the new D West now?

While I have been trying my hand at the odd bit of sketching recently, (one of my bad drawing is on the back cover), that is not one of my drawings, although it could almost be a self-portrait of my normal waking-up regime. It was in fact drawn by Rob Jackson, no not that one, but the small- press comics legend, who I referenced in the main body of my text. Sorry if it wasn’t clear enough. Also berating me for my fannish shortcomings was the mighty Steve Green.

Steve Green - Shambling Manse Did you consider Unreliable Narrator #1 might have attracted more feedback had many of your friends being aware of its existence? (Unless my e-copy snagged on those darned spam ﬁlters.)

I have dozens of notebooks around this shambling manse, and most of the material they contain is pure gibberish, other than the occasional story idea - which I'm clearly useless at developing into actual ﬁction - and embarrassing quote from friends such as your good self. That said, my absence from the extracts you've published clearly demonstrates I need to say or do something more memorable next time we're together.

Interesting comment from Chris Garcia. Had things panned out diﬀerently for Ann and myself, I'd have a 26 year-old daughter or son. Some paths you choose not to walk; others are chosen for you.

Correction: that should be 25 year-old. Unless you publish at Novacon, in which case it would be correct.

Wasn’t Shambling Manse a character in Game of Thrones?

One of the pleasures of getting all the way to the West Coast was meeting up with Jerry Kaufman, a man I think if we lived in the same city together for any reasonable length of time would probably help me move a dead body, or at least go to the odd gig together.

- 13 - Jerry Kaufman - Klangers I just sent a note to Christina about Nowhere Fan but forgot the requisite "Great to see you at Corﬂu." This goes for you, too.

My notes from past conventions tend to be phone numbers, passing thoughts generated for a panel I'm about to moderate, a book name or a URL. Not nearly mystifying enough to generate interest or anything Andy Hooper might want to use as an interlineation.

When I try to ﬁnd your Klangforum, all I ﬁnd through Google are links to a Viennese orchestra called Klangforum Wien. What's your URL? (I tried klangforum.co.uk, but that doesn't appear to be a URL and didn't get me anywhere.)

I am also old enough to be John Coxon's grandfather. Spooky but true.

Suzle got me a subscription to Mojo - I like their free CDs, their big articles on major bands and performers - mostly from yesteryear, but there are big groups like Led Zeppelin that I never followed, and their shorter articles and reviews cover a lot of new or obscure performers. I learned about Efterklang (speaking of "klangs") from their review of a concert. (Almost said "live concert," but realized that would be rather redundant.)

We're oﬀ to Victoria, BC, this afternoon for the weekend - travelling on a small cruise ship called the Victoria Clipper - and I've been updating and adding music to my Sony Walkman - among the classical music is a CD of a new group called The Thermals (I think they are a Portland band). Somewhat garage music with a lead singer who reminds me of David Byrne a bit.

Klangforum never really got oﬀ the ground - too much con running not enough writing as I said at the start of this zine. I think I’ll pull it and re-tool my web space at a later date for some other doomed project. I like that you’re still using a Walkman. Although I have an iPad I remember with fondness my uni days and all those long train journeys with a stack of tapes. Here’s Lloyd…

Lloyd Penney - Assorted Stuﬀ I just got ﬁnished responding to Christina’s Nowhere Fan, and now it’s time to respond to your Unreliable Narrator 2. I think the last time I had anything like aquavit was in Holland 23 years ago at Worldcon.

Cons are fun, and a beast of their own, but fanzines allow you to put more of yourself out there for the average fannish consumer than the chitchat of a convention. Maybe for some people, they need a good ﬁction to be more interesting. But then, how much of what appears in a fanzine is real? Even a news report is subjective, no matter how objective you try to be, and anything that purports to be real could range anywhere from pipedreams to utter bullshit, so the writing you might read in any given fanzine is there to inform at best, and usually impress to some extent.

I remember when fan fiction used to be the bane of the office copier, and I remember Cerlox-bound zines, 600 pages and more. Today, there’s even more of the stuff, but it is hidden well, but in plain sight…of course, the Internet. It’s everywhere there, just choose your favourite show, and there’ll be more fanfic then you’ll ever be able to read.

A random Graham Charnock generator? Perhaps an emergency Graham Charnock hologram? Please state the nature of the emergency? Graham, I think we met in Vegas some years back, and not the most recent one, either, but the one before that.

Agree with Eric Meyer, e-zines have no print run, so everyone can have one, and - 14 - if that could happen, you’d think more people could participate in this fanzine thing, but no such luck.

My loc…that huge anime convention hit nearly 24,000 this year, and we did go, if only to man a table for a few hours for friends. This loc is about a year old, I am all set to turn 54. The evening position at the Globe and Mail went away; they ﬁgured out how to automate it, and it doesn’t look as good as my own work, and that may be my only consolation. I’ve had a couple of short assignments since then, but full-time employment continues to elude me.

Yvonne should be home from work soon, so wrap it up and send it on its way via the Intartoobs. Many thanks, and see you next Head.

I think you’ve hit the nail on the head Lloyd. I think I’m dull, unconfident, inarticulate and boring in person, but when I get to writing up fannish stuff (and especially convention reports) I find that I can’t stop myself from inventing stuff that never happened, or more usually putting my own spin on events that did (hence this zine’s name). After all if I didn’t most of my con reports would be along the lines of “I sat listening awkwardly while Lilian Edwards and the lovely friendly Cambridge fans talked about stuff I didn’t understand. Not following the conversation I went to the bar and had a drink, where I met up with Mark and Claire. It tried to express how much I like Mark/Claire’s piece in the latest Banana Wings but couldn’t remember what I wanted to say and it came out all wrong. It got late and I was tired so went to bed. Next morning there were no mushrooms at breakfast…”

Murray swings awesomely into action with a LOC in the style of my notebook con-report…

Murray Moore - Notes on my Notes Notes made while reading Unreliable Narrator 2. • Stop wasting time writing carefully composed, fact-checked, trip and con reports. • Use a bigger type, maybe 14 point?, in my ANZAPAzine, to make it look bigger to the reader than reality. • Avoid vicinity of ladies toilets at Poth Beach. • Annoy Rob Jackson by insisting that he tell me all about his being a small press comics legend. • Erase from memory connection of 'Optimus Prime' and 'R2D2" and 'butt plugs'. • Seek introduction to Malcolm Hutchison and his enormous (emphasis on enormous) suitcase of chocolate. • Random Graham Charnock; when not? • Stop doing this, go outside, while earth still wet, pound fertilizer spikes around the cedar trees.

Thanks Murray! I’ll leave the last word on Unreliable Narrator #2 to the lovely Pat Charnock…

Pat Charnock - The Random Graham Charnock Generator Just a quick note to say thanks for Unreliable Narrator #2. I liked your interpretations of your random jottings. I'm just desperately hoping you won't be able to get the Random Graham Charnock Generator to work.

Fin.

- 15 -