Going from HUFs to euros has been the emergency sandbed to my speeding truck of a 8-day-bender/flu. The first 3 days were classic early-stage bender, then a visit to a Budapestian sulphur baths - where I looked for punitive absolution in the kilo-of-lettuce-and-2-litres-juice approach to saunas and cold tubs - brought the absolute motherfucking ruckus. Goodnight nurse.
Noted earlier, Unicum was medicinal through all this, so it's fitting that the finishing of my final bottle last night while pressed against thousands of feverish Wieners also trying to get into the 'fanzone' for the euro cup match against Germany marked the official conclusion of the bender that got me through Hungary.
It seems there's nothing Austrians are more earnest about than giving the impression that they're having a shitload of fun. Last night's game marked the high-point of organised euro cup festivities in Vienna, and this 'fanzone' caper is the focal point of it all; I'll go through the oddness of that in a second.
1) Walking around the city on the day was a 50-odd member 'demonstration' made up entirely of common hookers with less lycra between them than one single Mischa Shubert maternity body-suit. We overheard they were protesting against soccer. Inquiring further, Roger returned with the astonishing revelation that the girls were hired by the Austrian women's soccer league to protest the exclusion of women in the euro cup. The catastrophic irreconcilability of belief and action had almost all passers-by ignoring the march other than for a few short seconds.
2) Earlier that morning, I got to smh.com and after quickly doing my F12 macro [CTRL-F + 'John Carmody'] on the letters page, I glanced at the ten most accessed articles. First amongst them reported that the Austrian topless girls soccer team had beaten the German topless girls 10-5. This in itself isn't surprising, as we all know red body paint goes faster than black and yellow, but what was surprising was that i) I am staying with some of the most chauvinistic men I know and they didn't know anything about it; and ii) that we were in the area of the 'match' most of the day and didn't know shit about it. The pictures in the article tell the same story: there was hardly anyone there.
The 'fanzone' is a huge park in the middle of Vienna; there were 80-90 thousand people there for the Austria-Germany match. Fucking arced-up they were, too. The match didn't start until 20.45 but we'd been seeing plenty of ruckusful dudes - Austrian & German - drinking pretty fucking rigorously from about 11. And I’d been hanging out in only the finest kosher joints! Apparently, this was a huge grudge match as the two countries are fiercely competitive (though mis-matched. I think it'd been 30 years since Austria had even made the competition). Roger showed me a series of newspaper clippings: "What do you hate about Germans, No. 1-14", one for each day of the fortnight leading up to the match. Fools.
After waiting an hour, and finishing the unicum, we got into the ridiculously packed park. It was so crowded, in fact, I didn't have the heart to fight through for brewskies; I was dry until the second half (when Roger's awesome girlfriend magically appeared with brewskies). There was of course pre-match entertainment happening on a stage at the other end of the park, but which we could see on our jumbotron. Let me tell you what the government serves up when given exclusive custody of 90,000 people [quotes mean quotes, i.e. the mc actually said this]: "Austria's number 1 Bon Jovi cover-band"; 'We Will Rock You' featuring first a rastafarian Freddy Mercury, then a maatron-dressed-as-maat Mercury; and the Carlsberg Dancers, the "sloppiest bunch of slack-mutt beatches I ever saw" [Translation certified by 2 of 3 passers-by]. There were also countless pans and zooms of Vienna (with strangely repetitive shots of Mozart's geborenhouse, in Salzburg), as if these cheumps don't know where they live/are. (By the way, the soccer montages were also fucking ridiculous. There was a visual history of both sides' achievements in the euro cup. Austria's best result was 3rd in 1954 - and hadn't made it in for 30 years -, and Germany had won it 3 times. So to make up time in the Austrian bit, they kept showing shots on goal by their top striker, which would've been cool except that without exception, every shot missed goal, and there were countless cut-backs to the striker looking fucking distressed. Very odd.)
The Carlsberg Dancers were totally disagreeable. We, and the rest of the crowd, had a lot of trouble watching, and there was very discernibly a significant drop in energy across the entire park when they were on. They were on twice, too, before the show. And then again at half time. Which leads me to my cumulative observation: The average Austrian seemed utterly un-scintillated by all the raunch, in every manifestation I observed. And in every case, the raunch was the direct responsibility of the ruling classes - in the parlance of the day, there does not appear to be any grass-roots movement for raunch. In fact, it could be seen to be some form of crowd control. Witness half-time.
The game was drawn at half-time, but it had been a pretty rough match - I think fouls ran at 15-11 by then – and both coaches had been sent off. That was fucking ridiculous; Merkel was at the game and tried to hug the hugely fit German coach as he made his way to the VIP section from out of the team section. He brushed her off quick smart. There was so much brewsky thrown at the jumbotron/Merkel, it made me want to be reincarnated as a thirsty jumbotron. RUKIDNAO.
Further, by half-time, there’d been 4 pretty serious brawls within 50 metres of where we were standing. The atmosphere was extremely heavy. Then these Carlsberg molls come back on and in some kind of group anti-hypnosis, everyone turns away from the screen and the mood lifts fucking incredibly. So when a dirty, Havryliv-type foul is committed on a German player from behind, just outside the goal box, and Germany is awarded a hugely plum (and ultimately, rewarding) free kick, the crowd is only able to rouse at most a quarter of the frustration they had going on before half-time. No brawls; a couple of brewskies thrown into German sections of the crowd, then nothing for the rest of the game. If I swear to god on anything, I’ll swear to the ultimate crapiness of the entertainment keeping both sides off each other.
P.S. I’m finishing this up in the most ridiculously crap Jazz bar in Salzburg, ‘Jazz It’. They are massacring ‘So What’ and I’m *this* close to getting on keys. Good Night, Nurse.
P.P.S. Oh my god, they just started playing ‘Footprints’. I’m there, bad boy!
P.P.S. That soccer night ended quite patrician-like: I was scheming to Roger’s bar manager about finding the loophole in the brewski-over-purchase-tax-deduction vs. betting-on-home-team-losing futures market. You could pay your rent with that bad boy!
P.P.P.P.S. I’m at Roger’s girlfriend’s place after bringing total ruckus to the piano in ‘Dolphin Dance’. My huge solo is a little compromised by later mistaking the ‘D’ door for ‘Dudes’...
P.P.P.P.P.S. If you read this far you’re a champ. Madvillain Rocks!
