Week 35/2026

If you believe

Jugendstiltheater, Steinhofgründe, by night. Is it just me seeing different pairs of trousers in a fashion show or an interesting, yet hard to read, font design here?

NSFW (Nikolaus' Song For the Week)

Today's NSFW is from a Swiss musician called Richard Koechli. He's also an author writing, in particular, about Mark Knopfler. It's a very simple, slow blues with nice guitar tracks.

I would recommend not to watch the music video, though, as it's very kitschy.

Retrospect

#arsboni

Whether it's legally and ethically appropriate to publish athletes' names on a website indicating that they had violated anti-doping rules was decided by the CJEU recently (C-474-24).

Dr. Johannes Öhlböck, who is the claimants' attorney, discussed this with me in #arsboni (and photgraphed the #laundry and us for his LinkedIn post).

Prospect

Japan

I'm going to a Japan for a conference later in September. This is part of the ongoing collaboration between UNIVIE and Kyoto University.

Here's the program:

On site participation (presumably) possible, no stream.

Look and Feel

Chamber Music Festival Vienna

I attended the Tuesday Concert of the Chamber Music Festival Vienna 2026. It takes place in the "Jugendstiltheater" on the "Steinhofgründe" - a beautiful venue.

I enjoyed, in particular, to hear Lydia Rathkolb again, soon after her magnificent appearance at the summer discourse in Strobl (see Weekly 32/2026).

Podcasts

Two episodes I want to recommend this week, both of them from Falter Radio:

The first is an interview with Matthias Dusini about the gigantic construction projects for Salzburger Festpiele, planning to dig a hole into Mönchsberg:

The second is about the unbelievable gangster story about a group of lawyers and other well known people trying to compromise the judge who had sentenced former minister of finances to several years of prison.

In combination, these two are a very good and very Austrian genre painting.

Here's a relevant interview on the second matter:

The interviewee is, inter alia, president of Vienna's criminal court, whom I had the pleasure to talk to on a similar topic in #arsboni some time ago.

Let's remind ourselves that Rio Reiser passed away on August 20th 1996, 30 years ago and that one of his most popular songs was published in 1986, 40 years ago.