Mephisto Waltz

I could not say no to hazelnuts drenched in dark chocolate.

Would be interested to know why you believe it was shot with a Leica.  Leica's were very popular with real camera aficionados back in the day. My first 35mm SLR was a Honeywell Pentax. It was stolen from my house in Singapore.  

I don't know what film is popular these days in Austria, but when I studied there, Agfa and Kodak were probably the most popular. Fuju had not penetrated the market to any great degree. I had one friend who was an avid amateur photographer in Hong Kong in the late 1980s/early 1990s and he much preferred Fuji to Kodak. I believe he said the Kodak overdid reds and some other colors. 

This is neither here nor there. But the mention of Agfa reminded me that we used to use tons (quite literally, if you added it up over a ten year period) of photostat film.



I still have some of the boxes which I use for storage. The most common use for this film (although mostly we used non-film "positive" material) was to reduce or enlarge black-and-white images (when creating an advertisement, brochure, catalog, etc.). We would also create halftones of photos using various types of screens. Coarse (85 lpi) screens for photos meant for a newspaper and finer (120, 133) for brochures and printed materials. I spent a lot of time in a darkroom and I'm sure Dr. Liebermann would tell me that I had some unconscious need for that. Actually, I generally like the darkroom work.

We used a vertical state camera. When we scrapped it, I saved the lens as a memento.



These two lenses had different focal lengths. That is, you'd use one if you needed really big enlargements. The bellows of the camera moved up and down as well for adjusting the amount of enlargement or reduction. You would have an image projected on a semi-transparent ground-glass plate that would allow you to see if the image was centered. You could measure it accurately as well by putting a ruler on the ground-glass image.

I think Tallis' writing is at its best in Death and the Maiden. He paints in lovely scenes, each you can easily see being expressed in a live-action series. Many novels tend to be marathons where you eventually hit the-big-grey-sludge. It all tends to run together. You're just waiting for the end.

Tallis has been excellent at breaking his stories into bite-size pieces. One scene might induce horror. The next comedy. The next reverence. It's a nice approach. I consider this the best book so far although the ending hasn't been reached (I'm about 90% into it). There's just been a nice scene where Liebermann plays at the piano with Mahler...which has induced me to listen to his 5th symphony. But I'm very sure it won't live up to the wonderful descriptions of it in the book.

I have had the original Sacher-Torte at the Hotel Sacher, which is behind the Opera in Vienna. As I have said before, I am not a nut for chocolate, but the cake was still good. With whipped cream and an excellent cup of coffee, it's hard to beat. Without the whipped cream, the chocolate is just too overpowering. 


Sacher Torte

I am, generally speaking, not a big cake fan, but I must admit that I love these little cakelets.  These are popular across Austria and Germany. I wonder if Tallis will get to these in one of his books?


Petit fours   

Perfect with a cup of coffee. 

With Director Mahler, we get into the issue of the claque. I'd never heard of such a thing outside of the rent-a-laugher that many comedy shows use. Anyway, Mahler means to eradicate the practice. He eventually fires a singer who regularly employed claqueurs.

I  would have passed by this Cafe very often on the tram. That said, the front is not facing the Ringstrasse, but a small parking area and the side of the Burgtheater, which is the State Theater in which classical German plays are performed. This being the case, I took little notice of the place and never set foot in it. Too bad. It looks very nice, but don't forget, I was there 48-49 years back.  Those beautiful buildings you see today, did not look nearly so nice back then. Much of Vienna was still gray due to the effects of WWII. They were also building the subway, which meant that large parts of Vienna were work sites. I recall some area in the town center being walled off for safety reasons.