Friday, March 29, 2019

Fellow Creatures



In his review essay of Christine M. Korsgaard’s Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to Other Animals (“What We Owe a Rabbit,” The New York Review of Books, 3/21/19), Thomas Nagel offers the following précis of the author’s philosophy: “Humans, with their capacity for language, historical record-keeping, long-term memory, and panning for the future, have a strong consciousness of their lives as extended in time. But because the other animals are capable of learning and remembering, we know that they also have temporally extended conscious lives, not just successions of momentary experiences; what happens to an animal at one time changes its point of view at later times, so that it acquires an ‘ongoing character that makes it a more unified self over time.’” The occasion of the piece is attempt to discuss Korsgaard’s Kantian argument that's being offered to supplant the utilitarian view famously postulated by Peter Singer in his landmark l975 Animal LiberationParenthetically this poses an interesting epistemological question in and of itself. Can one maintain two separate but equal philosophical arguments that yield the same conclusion? Indeed the English philosopher Derek Parfit has attempted to unite consequentialism (of which utilitarianism is a subset) with Kantian deontology. That conclusion, however, will hit you right between the eyes at the end of this brilliant essay when Nagel remarks “when cultured meat (also called clean meat synthetic meat, or in vitro meat) becomes less expensive to produce…I suspect that our present practices, being no longer gastronomically necessary, will suddenly become morally unimaginable.” The experience of reading Nagel’s essay might remind some readers of the feeling they had emerging from the expose Food, Inc. back in 2006. Few viewers were likely to go for a hamburger after witnessing the horrific abuses perpetrated on animals in that movie.

Thursday, March 28, 2019

Social Capital

photo of  Via Monte Napoleoni in Milan: MaryG90
New York, Paris and maybe Milan (during fashion season) may be the social capitals of the world, but then there's social capital, an asset that an individual can possess literally everywhere.The term is used in social sciences. However, it's literal meaning can be usefully applied in everyday circumstances. What constitutes this form of wealth? Is it merely the ability to be lionized the moment that one walks into a room? Is it the result of the “aphrodisiac” nature of power that Henry Kissinger once referred to? If it derived merely from wealth, then all-important considerations of class would have to be cast aside? A very wealthy Russian Oligarch who has made his money from potash like Dimitry Rybolovlev and has paid record breaking money for his daughter’s Manhattan penthouse will find that his currency is not fungible to the extent that it doesn’t translate into the kind of respectability that’s earned in a meritocracy. A poet like the recently deceased John Ashbery will have much more social capital than an industrialist or manufacturer especially if their wealth derives from carbon-based fuels which add to the greenhouse effect. Felix Frankfurter, a Supreme Court justice, who had so little money that his widow was left destitute would have had more social capital than robber barons of another era like John D. Rockefeller, Vincent Astor or Henry Clay Frick, even though he was Jew at a time when the establishment was still anti-Semitic. Americans sometimes worship the qualities that produce affluence, like knowledge, more than they reward its attainment—which often fails to level the playing field.

Wednesday, March 27, 2019

The Big Fix



Depression is an affect and many people treat depression with medications—which helps. It’s a little like treating a fever with Tylenol or Advil. The fever may be reduced, but if the cause is a severe infection, other treatments might be necessary. The same is true of sexual dysfunction. Lots of people have problems with sex, but treating the symptom can be difficult due to repressed fantasies. Viagra may produce erections, but a requisite is sexual excitation. There are physical impediments in men and women that prevent sex and which drugs like Viagra help, but when a drug doesn’t work you essentially have to treat the fantasies, just the way you would a systemic malady. Easier said than done, of course. Patients dig for years on the psychoanalytic couch, trying to make their unconscious wishes conscious—sometimes with little success. Many people take Benzodiazepines like Xanax and Klonopin for another symptom, anxiety, but such drugs can be addictive. This is the culture of hooking up and the quick fix. Shortcutting nature is the name of the game. In addition, many regimens are reflective of a technocratic society in which information is found and dispensed at increasingly expeditious rates with patience being tantamount to something like cursive writing—an ability whose pleasures have been lost by attrition due to the prevalence of the keyboard. Allen Ginsberg's words in "Howl" (1954-5) were prophetic, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix..." The title of the latest novel by the always prescient Michel Houellebecq is, by the way, Serotonine, en francais bien sur. 

Tuesday, March 26, 2019

The Final Solution: Sound and Fury



CNN has been promoting their Nixon documentary with the following quote from the 37th President, “Others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself." It’s a locution that might be more expected from Kierkegaard than the disgraced politician who’d resigned in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. Nixon had no monopoly on unscrupulousness, but this was venality of an almost Shakespearean proportion and sounds like something more likely to be described by a poetic construction like Iago than a real person. They don’t make villains the way they used to. The recent Twitter storms from Trump just don’t hack it. Here is what the President had to say at 8:23AM on March 17. “Report: Christopher Steele backed up his Democrat & Crooked Hillary paid for Fake & Unverified Dossier with information he got from 'send in watchers' of low rating CNN. This is the info that got us the Witch Hunt!” Of course Twitter only allows 280 characters. Perhaps it’s unfair to be harsh on these flourishes. Imagine Jaques famed “Seven Ages” speech from As You Like It formatted for social media: “World’s a stage, men women players, exits entrances, last scene oblivion, no eyes, teeth, etc.” What’s missing of course is the eloquence. It’s venom and vitriol without soul. Imagine Macbeth’s “it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing,” in Trump’s hands. Can’t you just hear him saying about the Democrats, “they’re all idiots who make no sense.”


Monday, March 25, 2019

Never Look Away


It’s extremely difficult to create movies about artists or their sensibilities. The grisled persona of William Dafoe has been used for instance to play both Pasolini and Van Gogh and let’s not forget Kirk Douglas portrayal of the artist in Lust for Life (1956). The tendency to romanticize and/or resort to oversimplifications of an outsized artistic personality and the era out of which his or her art evolved are the pitfalls. Florian Henckel von Donnersmark’s Never Look Away based up on the life of Gerhard Richter falls into both these traps. The degenerate art exhibits of the Nazi era become facilely conflated Communist era socialist realism. The advent of abstraction in a liberated Germany fares no better, becoming a parody of itself under a curiously similar socialist realist lens. The result in the case of Never Look Away is that a film about a major modernist artist ends up looking like the one-dimensional party line art it initially takes to task. Donnersmark directed The Lives of Others (2006), a complex study of voyeurism and spying under the East German regime and the lack of nuance in respect to creative process in his latest outing is disconcerting. This along with the fact that the film appears to offer autobiographical interpretations of an artist who claimed a certain degree of impersonality (at least as he is portrayed in the film) may explain the estrangement that has occurred between the director and the artist (who had initially cooperated with the project). For instance Kurt Barnert (Tom Schilling), the Richter character is depicted as having an early childhood attachment to an aunt (Saskia Rosendahl) who brazenly exhibits herself to him. The film’s title derives from these early experiences. But it’s all a bit contrived with the trauma of a child’s overstimulation becoming overlaid with that of war under the rubric “everything that is true holds beauty in it.” Ironically a film marquee advertising Hitchcock’s Psycho does more to establish time and place and a body of concerns than all the psychohistory the film strains to assert.

Friday, March 22, 2019

Concerning the Inexplicable in Art


Understanding what people like is an art. Market researchers create focus groups in order to gain insights into what's going to pass muster with the public and what’ll flop. Of course this is where Facebook went afoul. They were letting Cambridge Analytica get the dope on millions of members ("Facebook and Cambridge Analytica: What You Need to Know as Fallout Widens,"NYT, 3/19/18).Taking the reverse tact, art requires a certain degree understanding to find an audience. Yet the waters can become murky. Is an artist, a pied piper, leading his potential viewer or reader to something new or is he or she actually touching on a vein or pre-existing inclination? Few lovers of art, could probably have imagined the advent of The New York School, which produced images, in the work of Rothko, Pollock, and de Kooning that questioned the very nature of what image-making entailed. No advertising firm was going to be able to offer the kind of market research which would have guided the purchaser of American paintings in the early l950’s. It was uncharted territory. Critics like Clement Greenberg argued for a certain necessity in the evolution of art, but that's like post hoc ergo propter hoc--because something follows it's the cause. Yes Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, a primer on abstraction, came out in l910, but few non-artists were likely to have seen the writing on the wall as it were. Neither Duchamp, Picasso, Braque, or Matisse were a prediction of the radical changes that would emanate on American soil decades later. Nathaniel Kahn’s documentary The Price of Everything attempts to look at art as a tangible asset that has become monetized. It gives the illusion that one could assess a work of art much like one does the spreadsheet of a company manufacturing product, but it’s a little like phone tag. You may think you'e looking for an answer when you’re just waiting to reject the call. 

Thursday, March 21, 2019

Calling All Podiatrists and Ornithologists


Are you by chance a lay podiatrist? Are you the kind of person who is constantly putting your foot in your mouth? Or an ornithologist who’s always giving someone the bird? The two may be intertwined. Have you been fickle in your swearing and then ended up getting a comeuppance? It’s always fun to yell at Uber drivers who will stop anywhere for a ride or at the slow moving biker on a narrow path, but then one day you suddenly find that you’re not so impregnable and that the object of your justifiable outrage doesn’t just smile stupidly and take it. You may even find someone powerfully determined and built grabbing you by the scruff of your neck. You may have spent years, even decades studying submissions and releases, punches and kicks in your martial arts class at the Y, but you might as well be back in the elementary school yard where the local bully has you in a headlock or simply refuses to let you go on your merry way until you bow in obedience and admit him as the winner. No adult wants to start crying in the shadows of darkness under a Hopper street lamp, pleading to be let go because their wife will be worried. However, that's where you may very well end up, if you're not careful. If you’ve never been street smart, it’s probably not in the cards no matter how many boxing classes and jujitsu classes you take. There's a huge difference between theory and practice, between a controlled environment and the call of the wild. There are some people who nobody is going to run over and others who are accidents waiting to happen.

Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Pornosophy: What's It Like to Be a Slut?


What’s it like to be a slut? It's probably an easier question to answer than that asked by the philosopher Thomas Nagel in his famous essay, "What It Like to Be a Bat?"A slut used to be defined as a promiscuous girl or woman, but anyone who knows anything about human sexuality or life realizes that the word "slut" observes no gender lines. A while back there was even a site for book lovers called “Bookslut.” In general everyone are sluts to the extent that they're caught in the grip of obsessions. Warmongering nations could easily be called war sluts. The real qualifier and what separates "the men from the boys" when it comes to slutdom however is shame. The thrill of the transgression is accompanied by a delicious feeling of embarrassment. Back in the 60’s in the age of sexual freedom, free love was trumpeted. At Woodstock it looked like mud wrestling, but many people who partook in successions of couplings in which the idea of attachment or feeling played second fiddle to an interest in sexual synecdoche, or body parts, started to feel something was missing. If you, for instance, enjoyed sex with lots of people and felt that it didn’t involve some sort of use and abuse you were probably not a real slut. Today the same rituals pertain in the world of “hooking up” where people make arrangements on dating sites which are sometimes just limited to specific forms of physical gratification. A porn slut is someone for whom the use of certain sex sites is a compulsive act that's no longer freely chosen. Thus it’s actually not hard to get into the head of the old-fashioned slut who sleeps with anyone, when you’re someone who's routinely gangbanged by ice cream parlors--which are a tormenting temptation to sugar addicts.

Tuesday, March 19, 2019

Pornosophy: What's the Difference Between Marriage and an Orgy?



When you think about it, what’s the difference between marriage and an orgy? Not much is the answer. First of all you’re naked with another person almost all of the time. Most people are so inured to the presence of their significant other, that they're like sleepwalkers who don’t realize how nasty and wild being married really can be. It makes the Spring Break movies seem like Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Married people should realize that to use Hemingway’s words, they’re partaking of A Moveable Feast. You are seeing your husband or wife or whatever in all their states of undress. You’ve literally caught them with their pants down and that refers to bathroom matters too. Of course there are people who are squeamish, but when you inhabit the same bedroom, it’s unavoidable to see your John on the John or to see your John’s Johnson for that matter. And getting into bed at night is a form of licensed groping. In this day and age, it could be argued that unwanted kisses and embraces even in a marital context constitute a form of abuse, but most married couples either tacitly or expressly practice "affirmative consent" and hence allow themselves liberties they would never be granted in any other social situation. Wake up folks, marriage can be a cocktail between a wet dream and the best fantasy, a romance novelist ever invented. Just because there's no knight or princess in shining armor, sweeping you off your feet and taking possession of your soul, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t thrill with excitement when you hear the magic words for the umpteenth time, “honey I’m home and ready to rock.”

Monday, March 18, 2019

Transit



Christian Petzold’s Transit is a cubist narrative, but the difference between it and say “Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon” is that the Picasso masterpiece is about a whorehouse. Here the experience of watching the movie is a little like pickup sticks. There are strands of narrative which center around refugees and exile and in particular the question of who forgets, the person being left or the person who leaves? However, the real subject is veiled in a series of dead ends. The air of mystery is aided and abetted by the fact that the movie inhabits an alternate universe in which the Nazi occupation of France is taking place in the present time (the movie is actually based on novel by Anna Seghers written in l942). In this sense it’s a little like Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle or Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. There are four deaths in Transit and each of them is someone that the film’s protagonist Georg (Franz Rogowski) tries or in fact succeeds coming into contact with. The message might be stay away from this guy. Add to this that the fact that one of the deceased is a writer named Weidel whose identity is fungible and becomes the source of a hard to come by exit visa. The confusion is increased by the fact that much of the plot is farmed out to yet another voice, that of the bartender who apparently has witnessed much of the action and is writing about it in retrospect. Weidel’s writing also plays a cameo role as part of the evidence which Georg uses in establishing his identity before his interlocutor at the American consulate. Talk about unreliable narrators. Nothing seems to be consummated in the film, not escape, nor even a sexual act with the dead writer’s vampish wife, Marie (Paula Beer). 

Friday, March 15, 2019

M et Mme. Ovary


Let’s face this fact. Chances are things probably won't change. Aspiration is  nice. People, especially those who read too many magazines, jump through hoops to be happy. They drag each other into marriage counseling, they attend ashrams, they take cooking courses, they question their sexual orientation and maybe do something about it like transition (or not). They become like dervishes, trying free love or paying for it (or not). They decide to move to another city (or not). They decide to go it on their own (or not). They become vegetarians. They only eat farm fed beef or poultry. They meditate (that’s a big one and on the basis of the anecdotal evidence one would wish them good luck since they’ll need it). They do dangerous things like ascend Everest (or not). Climb cliffs without ropes (or not) and endeavor to shake things up by exhausting exercise regimens like running a marathon, riding a century or doing both in an Iron Man (or not). They attempt to become spiritual and commune with God (or not) or with the nature or the universe a la pantheists like Spinoza (or not) or they gain solace in philately or numismatics (or not). A lot of people spend considerable amounts of time and energy to supposedly achieve a modicum of happiness and once they've gotten all their pieces on the board and moved them into the appropriate positions ie made their bed, then they have to sleep in it. Some people will find that after all the time, trouble and expense that they have attained a state of karma that's close to satori and some are just going to find themselves scowling about life being “a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing." The latter is undeniably true! No two ways about it.Was the Duke of Windsor really all that happy once he abdicated and had Wallis Warfield all to himself? Some people may kill themselves when they realize it’s all a charade, but there are others who are content to just go along for the ride and when you come down to it, that’s an approach that makes a helluva lot of sense. Everybody ends up in a room staring either at the reflection of their own face in the mirror or that of some other on whom they confer a host of not always complimentary feelings.

Thursday, March 14, 2019

The Final Solution: Separate But Equal


Here is a brilliant aside from de Tocqueville quoted by Louis Menand in his New Yorker piece on Plessy v. Fergusson (“In the Eye of the Law,” 2/4/19) where Menand also cites C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow. “The prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists, and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known.” For example, minorities facing similar forms of discrimination often find themselves at war against each other--a propensity which is often hidden under the veneer of good intentions. On the other side of the fence, the old South was feudal. Repression was a form of definition. A slave was going to be less a threat to a plantation owner than someone from the underclass, who had rights and privileges, along with a certain ingenuity or entrepreneurial talent that would challenge the status quo. Racism and prejudice are multidimensional, but in some ways economic inequality plays a central role in the perpetuation of these forms of discrimination. A wealthy liberal is less threatened by a minority than another worker struggling to make ends meet, who's competing for the same job, for which say and immigrant might be willing to take less pay. It's like children in one of those large families who fight with each other over two scarce commodities: love and scraps. Trump appeals to his base with this very message. It’s not that caravans from Central America are murderers and drug lords, it’s that they will undercut the market and accept a lower wage.

Wednesday, March 13, 2019

Take Me To Your Dendrite

Coleridge by Peter Vandyke (1795)
Pleasure is often mentioned in connection with serotonin the neurotransmitter that runs between the synapses of the brain. Serotonin reuptake inhibitors like Prozac work to maintain a certain serotonin level and inhibit its reuptake. This model poses problems, however, since it envisions the brain as a solipsistic device, a chemical engine that may respond to existential stimuli, but which exists as its own psychopharmacological lab. Ultimately with the right mixture of drugs one could live a more pleasure-filled, or at the very least less painful existence. There has been much recent talk about the varieties of animal consciousness, but in the classic view, animals don’t possess the self-reflexive consciousness that allows them to realize they're having a good time. "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" was the title of a famous essay by Thomas Nagel, but it’s hard not to conclude that the average bat is literally in the dark. On the other hand anti-depressants and other psychotropic drugs are only the beginning when it comes to dealing with psyche. The famous Coleridge poem, written under the influence of opium, begins “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure dome decree.” And the hell with drugs. Consciousness separated from the body and running freely through cyberspace may provide the ultimate high.

Tuesday, March 12, 2019

Big Shoes

brogue Oxford shoes (photo: ASuitableWardrobe)
Big shoes to fill is an expression that’s sometimes used when a person is taking over a position that may have been run by someone of authority who had a reputation in a particular field. It may also refer to a son or daughter taking over for his or her father or mother in the family business or just taking on the role of pater or mater familias upon the demise of a parent. Some people literally try on shoes or other elements of attire because they feel it will change them. For instance there was a period back in the 50’s and 60’s where you would dress for success. Getting the right suit and rep tie at Brooks Brothers was almost as important as having an MBA from Harvard and this was the period starting with the Stork Club and ending with the demise of Studio 54 when nightlife with its emphasis on appearance was a convenient metaphor for the stratification of society. While in England, you had to have aristocratic lineage to attend certain clubs or even get a room at the Connaught, in New York it was a matter of wearing black tie or the equivalent that distinguished you from the crowd entreating the pickers behind the velvet ropes. The selection process was primitive. However it catered to a uniquely fetishistic approach to self-definition, in which the part (often the most superficial part, attire), was representative of the whole. As quickly as one conjured the images of the Duke of Windsor or Wallis Warfield, one might change uniforms, feeling the shoes of Jane or John Doe more comfortably fit the foot.

Monday, March 11, 2019

Room at the Top



The mystery behind Jack Clayton’s Room at the Top (1959), currently in revival at Film Forum, is what constitutes the fatal love between Alice Aisgill (Simone Signoret) and Joe Lampton (Laurence Harvey). Alice is an unhappily married French woman living in industrial England and Joe ia an ambitious working class war veteran. Joe is the ultimate arriviste and his ambition is primarily sexual to that extent that his desire is created by the perception of what he thinks he can’t have. “Find a girl of your own…” his boss warns. “Class?” Joe responds, angrily finishing the sentence. “Background” is the reply. Taking off from the title (is there room at the top?) the film is shot in angles. In the first scene Joe sees Susan Brown (Heather Sears), the daughter of a wealthy businessman, getting into a sports car from a second floor window. He’ll eventually follow her into a lingerie shop in which the bra she might wear is tauntingly displayed in a storefront window. Is Joe enthralled by the woman or the world she represents? Is he stalled at the intersection of sex and ambition? Ironically he spots both his lovers looking up at the same stage of the local theater troop and one that he’s significantly laughed off of when he tries to read some lines. Later in the movie Alice and Joe will escape to Sparrow Hill which looks down on their industrial town of Warnley. It’s a scene right out of a Thomas Hardy novel and it may give a clue to the essence of the love which is so uncharacteristic of the bounder Harvey plays. Love freed from social climbing is as foreign to Joe as Signoret’s accent. It’s basically an unnatural act which flourishes in natural settings (besides the room of the title there's actually a lover’s aerie in the countryside which is a respite from the cruel dog eat dog world in which Joe is trying to make his way). The real evolution of the movie revolves around the development of Joe's sensibility. His relationship with Alice changes him (it's something Alice actually remarks on in a scene) and he's ultimately caught in a vice. Room at the Top was one of the first of the angry young man films that included The L-Shaped Room (1962), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and of course Look Back in Anger (1959)..Shot in black in white it captures the gloom and entrapment of the industrial North. The whistle of a teapot segues into the shrill sound of a train’s steam engine as an ongoing leitmotif. Irony is the emotion that accompanies the film’s tragic denouement. “You’ve got everything you wanted,” is the taunt that Joe faces more than once. As he drives away from a wedding that seems like a sentence, his new wife declares, “Now we really belong to each other, til death us do part.” There are artful bits of stage business throughout like one scene in which school kids are coming up a road towards Joe as he descends and one final truly lovely touch. The car carrying Susan and Joe away to their future disappears into the horizon and then just a lone figure crosses the road.

Friday, March 8, 2019

The Elementary Particles



In essence man isn’t free. That was the message of determinists like Zola and his latter day incarnation, Michel Houellebecq, whose The Elementary Particles is an essay on the shadow fate (in the form of history) casts, particularly in an atmosphere of seeming freedom. The sexual liberation of the 60’s which is the chrysalis out of which the novel grows, is ultimately rendered as a virus rather than an ideology. This was Freud’s message too, epitomized by the famous “anatomy is destiny” quote. Protestantism and in particular Calvinism lend a totally different etiology to determinism, in the notion of predestination. Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is an attempt to pinpoint the bizarre form such a constraint of liberty take in the formation of the free market. In other words the very idea of freedom can be loaded with contradiction. In his Justice For Hedgehogs the late Ronald Dworkin questions the limits of liberty. If actions have consequences then say pleasure and satiation don’t exist in a vacuum, but have their effects on others. It’s nice to think that humans can exist in a perpetual tabula rasa, but then the price to be paid would be a kind of collective amnesia in which remembrance was the province of rebels like Winston Smith of Orwell's l984.

Thursday, March 7, 2019

Pornosophy: John Wayne Bobbitt at Colonus



"You Know the Lorena Bobbitt Story. But Not All of It," was the title of a piece that recently ran in The Times (1/30/19). The piece anticipated the recently released Amazon Prime documentary LorenaActually it’s rather amazing that the whole tale hadn’t become the subject of a major dramatic work even before this. You would think that a composer like John Adams might have tackled it for an opera. You might say that Sophocles' Oedipus deals with the things every guy is afraid of, killing his dad and sleeping with his mom. But what happened to John Wayne Bobbitt is really the nuts and bolts of what every guy fears—that someone will cut his dick off. Guys often refer to a tough boss or partner as busting their balls, but whatever you think of Bobbitt (who Lorena accused of rape and who would later be convicted of battery against another woman) this is worse.  Given an occasional shot of testosterone you can probably function OK without balls, but without a dick you’re in trouble, unless of course you have any interest in transitioning (though without a penis there isn’t going to be much to work with). Luckily the cops were able to find Bobbitt’s dick and through the wonders of modern medical science, it was reattached. In fact, Bobbitt went on to have a career as a porn star while Lorena became a feminist icon and hero to battered women. However, what if a dog had eaten it? Let's suppose Sophocles had written the play. It might be John Wayne Bobbitt at Colonus or Charlottesville and the subject is certainly worthy of a Greek chorus. Let’s say someone cut your penis off, wouldn’t you, to echo Arthur Miller’s words about Willy Loman cry, “attention must be paid.”

Wednesday, March 6, 2019

The Remembrance of Wild Strawberries Past



Imagine a schema in which you appeared at your present age as someone who's now senior to a mentor or other parental figure who you knew at the prime of your and their lives. In fact, there's nothing new under the sun, but imagination is the most advanced scientific invention ever created; there’s a time machine in your mind which will allow you to enter a room as the senior of someone who you once looked up to. “The Child is father of the Man,” wrote Wordsworth. You’ll want to take advantage of this portal since despite all the reports of parallel universes, string theory and multi-dimensional travel, it’s the closest you’re ever going to come to effectively transmigrating your soul. Here you get a chance to redo things. How you hated that pompous advisor in college or graduate school! How dismissive and self-involved they seemed as they enunciated their perfect locutions, preening themselves with their familiar vocabulary and paying little attention to your sputtering engine! Now you come back and see them from another point of view, as immature personalities suffering from the pains of growing up, even at the late stage of life where they’d already become noted figures in their field. In Wild Strawberries Ingmar Bergman imagined such a character, returning to the scene of his own early years, wizened, but no less pained by the limitations of his own character. The movie may not have been science fiction, but through the wonders of his cinematic genius, Bergman engineered his own prototypic voyage to the past.

Tuesday, March 5, 2019

Eye

"The False Mirror" by Rene Magritte (1928)
In England the problem is that everyone speaks with an English accent. So it’s more difficult to get the feeling Americans almost always have of being culturally inferior. The same thing applies to France.  Only it has to do with looks and sexuality. There are so many good looking people and especially women with perfect Gallic features, that a set of morphological characteristics that might turn heads on say Jones Beach doesn’t have the same effect in Paris or St. Tropez. It’s reminiscent of an old episode of The Twilight Zone, The Eye of the Beholder. A female patient is told that surgeons will operate one more time in order to remove her deformities. The operation turns out to be a failure, but when the camera pans up from the face of what's obviously a preternaturally beautiful woman, the audiences see the that the faces looking down on the operating table are hideous gargoyles. Now the state of affairs for French and English folk living with their alternating air of cultivation or attributes of beauty is not as dramatic, but the shock for either a patient or observer simply lies in the mundaneness of it all. In a place where lots of people speak the King’s English or have beautiful features, individuals have the burden of finding other ways of distinguishing themselves.

Monday, March 4, 2019

Climax


Gaspar Noe’s Climax is an example of a Dionysiac bacchanalia with the Pentheus myth thrown in for good luck. If The Living Theater gained its notoriety from Paradise Now, this is a kind of filmic Paradise Lost, minus the poetry. Known for classics of violence and eroticism like Irreversible (famous for its 9 minute rape scene), Enter the Void and Love (which provided an insider’s view of penetration), something went terribly wrong in Noe's current production, which features a troop of dancers who lose control when the punch at their after party is laced with LSD. Continuing the analogy with Greek theater, it’s at this point that the Furies take over with a pregnant dancer getting kicked and punched in the stomach and with the child of the company’s manager adding to the chorus of screaming as he piteously cries out from a locked electrical closet. Though there are several light moments including a Tarantino like exchange about the joys and pitfalls of analingus,  what follows is shrill even by the standards of say MedeaThe movie courts comparison to collective forms of drama not only in its themes of ecstasy and destruction, but also due to the fact that it lacks an iota of character development. Anarchy on film and the "derangement des sens” a la Rimbaud are naturally viable themes in any age, but Climax is as hermetic as it is disturbing. If you’re one of those people who has been flirting with taking low doses of LSD as a treatment for depression, you’re likely to have second thoughts after seeing Noe’s latest work.

Friday, March 1, 2019

No U-Turns

Tapco R3-4 High Intensity Prismatic Square Standard Traffic Sign
Life is long enough for most people to accommodate a certain amount of acceptances and rejections. People who are free-lance writers will remember the age of the SASE. The ominous self-addressed stamped envelope rarely if ever brought good news. Today, many magazines use a site called Submittable which allows writers to see the fate of their work on line. For others the experience of acceptance and rejection relates more to early romance and then college. After that they go on to careers in which the playing field is usually more level. But there's a certain thrill akin to gambling that one begins to miss when the old outlets dry up. Unless you're unfaithful in your marriage you're not going to experience the thrill of that first kiss or the disappointment of the slap in the face and ditto once your performance on this or that standardized test is evaluated. Writing is an interesting case actually. Since the literary world has become so moribund, there are less and less magazines in existence and the few that continue on more often than not appear in an on-line format which doesn’t pay much if anything for a writer’s work. The thrill of acceptance, when it does come, brings fewer rewards. In the  face of this some writers have begun to seek other outlets--for instance the emergency rooms of their local hospitals. They may even try to fob their work off as evidence of this or that kind of aberration. You might for instance send a poem with a dark theme to The Journal of Forensic Psychology and Psychology. There is also The Journal of Irreproducible Results that runs parodies of scientific papers; there is even an Ig Nobel prize awarded each year by another satiric magazine The Annals of Improbable Research. Economics changes culture and the dearth of outlets for writers' work has even led some eager beavers to try to make their work perform a dual function. For instance, remember the no U-Turns sign? Who knows but couldn't that have resulted from a poem anonymously submitted to the DOT?