postus interruptus: 3. vienna lingers.

9.7.06: vienna lingers.

a few things to get to. here we go.

game. as a rare follow-up to an earlier post, i must record that andre agassi lost on monday, sept. 3, to benjamin becker of germany, 7-5, 6-7(4), 6-4, 7-5, thus ending his ridiculously long and triumphant tennis career. farewell, sweet prince.





set. yesterday, i read in the times that the first fully implantable artificial heart, a device that can let patients move about freely for up to two hours at a time, has been granted fda approval for sale. (you can also read about this bionic heart here, as the times link is bound to expire so the grey lady can make a gratuitous two cents by burying the article in the times select vault.)

anyhoo, d read the article too, and last night we talked about the seemingly inevitable phenomenon of technology being able to replace all of a person's organs and limbs and general 'parts.' we both agreed science's prosthetics would never be able to provide a quality of life equal to that which a typical person enjoys from his natural 'stuff' - but for different chief reasons.

d wisely brought up the fact that there are too many natural intagibles to be made up for. as an example, he spoke of how the heart is a muscle, which gets stronger from exercise. how could a machine adjust like that? i propose that a super-advanced artificial ticker could monitor the body's changes and regulate its size and other features accordingly, but this would surely be an asymptotic continuum of adjustment, with the pseudo-heart never reaching the perfect evolution of the real one.

however, my main apprehension regarding synthetic insides (one which d agrees with, i should say) is that im a firm subscriber to the powerful connection of the body & mind, and that the body must be at its best-its natural best-for the mind to be at its best. so i truly believe a person with robot parts would lose a portion of human thought and feeling, and those gifts are irreplaceable. (find empirical evidence of the mind-body connection here.)

match. today i had an epiphany. and it came from reading page six, so anyone who considers that daily feature to be only so much tripe can kiss my fair putoot.

first some background. one of my fave billy joel songs has long been vienna, off the stranger (great effing album). a key sampling of the lyrics:

Slow down you crazy child
Take the phone off the hook
And disappeaar for a while
It's alright you can afford to lose a day or two
When will you realize
Vienna waits for you.

i have always wondered what the song was specifically about - aside from the generic musings that typically comprise a song. ive thought about that friggin song so much that i even once used it in an essay about a kafka short story, before the law, claiming that the meaning of the story was analogous to said song.

then this morning i read this on page six:

September 7, 2006 -- OUR condolences to Billy Joel. Sources in the Hamptons say Joel's dad, Howard Joel, who lives in Vienna, is "not doing well" and will pass away soon. Howard, who escaped the Nazis as a child, left the Piano Man's mom in the 1960s and moved back to his native Austria to remarry and have another son, composer Alexander Joel. Billy and Howard were reunited some years ago but, as he told the Villager.com in 2003, "It was strained . . . [But] I have great respect for him."

now, im sure there are at least a few prevalent theories as to the meaning of vienna. i dont much care, because now i have mine. anyone who knows me knows im also a firm believer in the insight of psychoanalysis. accordingly, i think vienna is joel's letter to his father, forgiving him for not being a part of his life. and if anyone doubts me, just think of where psychoanalysis was founded. tha's right: vienna.