A Viennese in San Francisco

On 29.09.2007, 20:40 mark.pritchard@gmail.com wrote:

Hi guys! Welcome to San Francisco. This Saturday weather is about as good as it gets. Please write something about SF from your alien point of view!

…………..

What’s constituted so, only a pen can penetrate.
I got one here, let’s go!

When I was a little boy, my mother told me one day with tears in her eyes that the strongest man in the world, our national hero Arnold Schwarzenegger had to flee the country from the Russian tanks and went to America to become rich and successful. Left alone without a proper role model, we youngsters got brainwashed by Austria’s totalitarian Soviet puppet regime of Social Democrats, but blessedly – according to Professor Timothy Leary – the CIA provided us with information and sex and drugs and tekkno music, so we were able to liberate ourselves and to pave our way to the electronic frontier.

Despite repeated warnings of Dr. Richard Barbrook – “just like inventing cybernetics without Wiener, inventing Marxism without Marx had now become an ideological priority” – we choose to fully appropriate the Califonian Ideology, which means, according to Victor Pelevin, “establishing a non-contradictory unity of liberal values and revolutionary romanticism within the bounds of a sexually aroused conciousness.” In short terms, we are here not only to make critical art but also to learn from first-hand experience how to become sexy, rich and successful, too – just like our lost father.

Here in San Francisco we stay at a mixed flat share (both cyberpunks and post-cyberpunks) and, not surprisingly, we meet the same weird folks like everywere else in the world, e. g. V. Vale at Blixa Bargeld’s performance at the recombinant media labs yesterday. Later on the day we will join the Lovefest and see the afterparty’s bodypainting show done by our roommates, but first of all we have to get some breakfast and a few things done.

The hospitality of you local people is really amazing, everyone we’ve met within the last three days is so open-minded and helpful and last but not least, California girls are most beautiful groupies in the world – God bless America!

1 Comment so far

  1. Robert Lowell Covington (unregistered) on September 30th, 2007 @ 4:11 pm

    Hey Stefan: Like most Austrians and your mother, you are ill-informed about your own socio/economic history. The Soviets (and their tanks)were gone from Vienna by May,1955. Arnold would be eight years old and living in Graz in 1955. Graz is in Steiermark (Styria), the former British allied occupaton zone. He didn’t emigrate to the USA until September, 1968 at the age of 21, long after the ‘Soviet Totalitarians’ fled the scene. Equating the Social Democrats in Austria with the Soviets is also laughable. Who did your brainwashing, the SVP or the OVP?? Or maybe the FPO/BZO?? You need to take out your brain & play with it. Also, techno and cyberpunk is like flapper music from the 1920s…old & forgotten.



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