Ben Marcus’ s "The Dark Arts"

Dusseldorf

There is a brilliant moment in Ben Marcus New Yorker short story, “The Dark Arts,”  ( The New Yorker, May 20, 2013). Julien the central character has come to Dusseldorf for treatment for a chronic and unspecified illness. He is staying in a hostel called the Millerhaus and waiting for his volatile girlfriend, Hayley who never seems to be coming. “He even felt sort of healthy, although it made him nervous to think so, and damned if he knew what healthy meant anymore. He’d long ago lost track of how he was suppose to feel…Perhaps he had been fine this whole time. He wasn’t legitimately sick. Perhaps this was just what it felt like to be alive…Did everyone else, he wondered, feel listless, strange, anxious, dull, scared—you could pretty much go shopping from a list of adjectives—and did other people just clench their jaws and endure it, without running to the doctor, as he did, again and again?” Then an etiology is uncovered involving the suspicion of a brain tumor. “If you tell me it’s all in my head now...you won’t be lying,” Julien quips to his German doctor. The ambiguity remains, but one almost wishes that Marcus hadn’t opened up the possibility of the tumor explaining everything. In our culture there is a tendency to take a pill for every ache and then the pill taking goes on even when the ache fades since there’s the aftermath, the wake left by the injustice of the discomfiture itself. People have lost the ability to tell whether they are in physical or mere psychic pain and they’re no longer sure which pain they’re medicating when they seek out painkillers. Both Freud and Heidegger wrote about the word Unheimlichkeit and if you hit the hyperlink you’ll read how one very eloquent Australian blogger writes about the term. The word literally means “not feeling at home,” but refers to the sense of estrangement and dislocation that Freud called the “uncanny” and may be the fate of the wandering cosmopolitan individual, metrosexuals and the like, uprooted from tradition and victims of a pleasure principal that makes the absence of pleasure feel like pain. It’s also a condition that conducive to the making of art. Marcus’s character Julien fits the bill. Another way to put this is that Julien is a latter day Hans Castorp only his Zauberberg is Dusseldorf.

The Master Builder at BAM

If you didn’t know Ibsen’s The Master Builder you might at first think that the character played by John Turturro in the current production at BAM was someone who had an exaggerated sense of his self-importance. In fact, Turturro’s Solness bears an unpleasant resemblance to another architect. Robert Roark, the hero of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, rendered by Gary Cooper in the King Vidor movie. And if we were looking for referents in contemporary culture then the sexualization of Solness’s muse Hilde Wangel (Wrenn Schmidt) and his amanuensis Kaja Fosli (Kelly Hutchinson) could easily recall Fifty Shades of Gray. Of course a helluva lot more is going on in both the play and in Andrei Belgrader’s direction, but there’s something in Ibsen that conduces to the kind of distortion that sees the romantic conception of the uncompromising artist as form of bombast and tyranny, with those surrounding him as submissives. The play can easily be turned into The Masturbator rather than The Master Builder. The very name Solness, the state of “soul ness,” sounds like an iteration from one of the great German idealist philosophers. When you step into late Ibsen, you enter the world of aspiration, in which being is trumped by the notion of becoming, and happiness is the price one pays to create  “castles in the air”—the expression Hilde uses to describe her master builder’s calling. The German word for passion is Leidenschaft and leiden means suffering, a kind of suffering that can lead to the ultimate sacrifice, the famous Liebestod of Tristan and Isolde. The recently released Andre Gregory: Before and After Dinner contains scenes for a work in progress of The Master Builder that has been going on for years. It reveals another approach to the play, based upon conversation and devoid of hyperbole. Freed from the burden of melodrama, Ibsen’s play becomes as complex as say a Bergman movie.

Diasporic Dining XXIV: Murder at the Tick Tock

                                           Todd Heisler/The New York Times

“More Bad Stuff on Good Stuff Diner Shooting” read the headline in the Gothamist back in 2010. Aficionados of 24 hour Greek dining will immediately recall the late night shoot out that at least temporarily eliminated the feeling of safety that characterized one of the most prominent examples of 24 hour Greek diner cuisine in downtown Manhattan. Now the equivalent of the internecine gang wars that resulted in the murder of Joe Gallo at Umbertos Clam House back in l972 has occurred at the Tick Tock one of the best known Jersey diners. Well not quite, since we are not talk crime families, but rivalry in one non-crime family. You don’t get stories like this even on a hot TV show like Boardwalk Empire. “A Diner, A Family and a Murder Plot,” (NYT, 5/2/13) was headline of Kate Zernike’s piece in the Times. According to Zernike, Alex Sgourdos “owned the diner with his two brothers-in-law.” Zernicke commented that Sgourdos’ nephew Georgios Spyropoulos," a manager of the diner," located on Route 3, a major thoroughfare in the vicinity of the Meadowlands, “is charged with hiring a man to kill Mr. Sgourdos, with instructions to torture him first until he surrendered the combination to the diner’s safe--and the money his nephew believed Mr. Sgourdos was hoarding.” Apparently Sgourdos had a reputation for frugality. “Neighbors had long whispered that Mr. Sgourdos…was stingy in paying even his relatives,” Zernike went on to say. Diners serve comfort rather than gourmet food. Diners are places to gather and talk. You go to a diner when you don’t want the food to come between you and conversation. That’s why, besides being inexpensive, they’re so popular with people in recovery groups who depend on conversation to keep them sober. What happened at the Good Stuff and now at the Tick Tock doesn't bode well for the 24 hour diner as a respite from the cares of the world. After what’s happened you’re less likely to venture into a diner if you’re seeking serenity.

The Torquemada Fantasy

Tomas de Torquemada

Say some one has Torquemada fantasies and wants to roast infidels over hot coals, can they go to jail for e mailing these thoughts to a friend? Recently the Times ran a follow up to case about Gilberto Valle, the New York City policeman convicted of plotting cannibalism ,“Two More Are Accused of Plotting to Kidnap, Torture and Kill Women,” (NYT, 4/15/13).  One of those accused was apparently a former librarian at Stuyvesant and the Times writers Joseph Goldstein and William K Rashbaum did take the unusual (for the Times) step of remarking “Everything about the case, from the two suspects to the alleged crime, sounded unlikely.” Of course, you never know what runs through a librarian’s head. After years of students asking where's All Quiet on the Western Front, anything is possible. According to the Times piece the two suspects were apprehended after the FBI agents intercepted “the e mail of Michael Vanhise, an auto mechanic who was later charged with conspiring with Officer Valle.” Mr. Vanhise, according to the Times sought out the librarian and the other suspect since he “had been trying to find someone willing to kidnap, rape and kill his wife and other relatives.” The “other relatives” will probably be a sticky point in the prosecution of this “unlikely” case. It’s like Diogenes search for an honest man. The amount of jokes about irritating mother-in-laws suggest that others have shared similar fantasies. Still in all, when is the line crossed? When does sadistic fantasizing become a crime? Prosecuting someone who spells out a fantasy in detail could have chilling effects on expression? When does fantasy become conspiracy? Would you arrest Dostoevsky for "The Grand Inquisitor" chapter of The Brothers Karamazov?

Cialis Now and Then

There’s the famous scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen tells Diane Keaton they have to get the kiss over with so they can get on with the date. So in the same spirit let’s get the Cialis joke off. Contrary to the disclaimer in the television commercials about calling a doctor if you have an erection for more than four hours, wouldn’t it be best to call all your friends?  But there are actually other things wrong with the commercials. In theater circles there used to be a battle between adherents to the Stanislavski, Moscow Art Theater Model, known as “the method” and practiced by the Actor’s Studio in the States and the say Meyerhold creating a mask model of acting. The ferocity of the conflict between the two was tantamount to the struggle between capitalism and communism. The actors in the Cialis commercial seem to be suffering from a conflict between these two kinds of conservatory training. On the one hand they are plainly attempting to create realistic characters by delving into their own psychological histories, in depicting the dilemma of a man who wants to be functional with the woman he loves when the right time comes. But  they are plainly straining under the burden of the realism. In fact as we know all kinds of unconscious drives contribute to sexual performance along with physiological capability and so the actor who taking a Willy Loman approach to his portrait of the slightly over the hill middle-aged man will likely be suppressing his inner Ubu Roi. Naturally commercials are just that—commercial. So they can’t aspire to the highest levels of theatrical art. The technique of Jerzy Grotowski’s Poor Theater will probably never be invoked in the making of a Cialis commercial. But that’s not to say that the commercial wouldn’t have profited if it broke down the putative fourth wall. As Picasso said, “art is the lie that tells the truth.” Directors of commercials for drugs like Cialis might be advised to throw verisimilitude to the winds when they deal with the problem of erectile dysfunction.