Irrational Man

Is existential despair the reason for Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix), the title character of Woody Allen’s Irrational Man’s impotence, or is impotence the cause for his despair? Remember Allen’s famous standup quip in Annie Hall, “I was thrown out of N.Y.U my freshman year for cheating on a metaphysics exam, you know. I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me.” In Irrational Man Allen goes a little further and the précis of modern philosophy he offers through the voice of the flask guzzling philosophy professor that Phoenix portrays is a little like one of those audio guides to masterpieces at the Louvre.  In discussing Kant Abe says “in a totally moral world there is no room for lying,” about Kierkegaard, “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” Though he argues that “much of philosophy is verbal masturbation,” and that philosophy and life occupy two separate worlds, he seems to confuse these realms in the conduct of his own life. Even a dose of Cialis and the loving ministrations of the lubricious and unhappy wife of a colleague (Parker Posey) fail to solve either his physical or existential crisis. At one point he declaims, “I couldn’t remember the reason for living and when I did it wasn’t convincing.” Post hoc ergo propter hoc? Perhaps not. What precedes is not necessarily the cause. But Abe is spared by the notion of the perfect crime, the murder of a disreputable judge. And the murder works better than any drug to restore his zest for life and in particular his ability to fuck. “I feel I’ve accomplished something wonderful and that my life has meaning,” he says. The philosophical loophole, of course, lies in the fact that the perfect crime has little to do with making the world a better place, and a lot into shoring up Abe’s waning life force. Emma Stone playing, Jill, the student who is smitten with Abe, begins to get an idea of what is happening when she discovers a copy of Crime and Punishment and realizes soon after (when an innocent man is charged with the crime) that the existential act “opens the door to murder.” The philosophy however pithy is inexorable and drives the movie to its perhaps overly neatly packaged conclusion. One thing seems to be certain, from the director’s point of view murder is more effective than Cialis. The poster shot which shows a silhouette of Gabe standing on a rock over looking water and bathed in a wedge of blinding sunlight brilliantly captures the helplessness and solitude of the human creature.

The Stranger

Baby boomers will recall the desert beige colored Leo Lionni cover of the Vintage edition of Camus’ The Stranger which became an iconic representation of a French import called existentialism in the later 50’s and early 60’s--and which Steve Heller recently wrote about on his design blog, The Daily Heller. Other books like Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha and Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet would achieve a similar cultish status--verging on being a mass market phenomenon if such a thing can be said about items whose basic appeal is to intellectuals. But Siddhartha and The Prophet, along with Andre Malraux’s Man’s Fate and Sartre’s  Nausea are now literary footnotes, while The Stranger seems to maintain its philosophic and commercial credibility which is to say that people continue to read and admire The Stranger in such a way, as to make one suspect that it might achieve the status of immortal works which remain pertinent while also being read differently by future generations. Hamlet is the major example of such a phenomenon. Only recently Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation, a novel based on the brother of one of the main characters of The Stranger (the murdered Arab) garnered France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman. But what makes L’Etranger live on? Dusty streets, a random act of violence that recalls in some way another set piece of proto-existentialism, Raskolnikov’s murder of the old woman in Crime and Punishment are the palette from which Camus worked. Existence precedes essence is what you learn about existentialism in philosophy 101. Humans are defined by the actions and choices they make. However, what makes the novel perennially relevant is not a philosophical aphorism but the conjunction of an idea and a world. Camus was born in the North African culture which he describes and it’s as if the philosophical novel he created seamlessly evolved from a milieu, he knew--essentially a colonialist society, in which the punishment for being a lower order of the food chain was objectification. The Stranger is the other. Martin Buber talked of I and Thou (Ich und Du), I and It. The other is the It, the person who has been denied his humanity. Perhaps the novel has maintained its hold on our imaginations because it’s fundamentally about empathy or the loss thereof—a phenomenon that allows for what Clausewitz termed “the continuation of politics by other means,” a state we know only too well, as war.

How Are You Is Not Fine

Thomas Paine by Auguste Milliere

Thank God for the Russians. Russia produced The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, War and Peace and Pussy Riot. OK Sochi might not be the best choice for the Winter Olympics, but you can’t say the Russians are running away from the challenge. Now in a Times Op- Ed piece “The ‘How Are You?’ Culture Clash,” (NYT, 1/20/14), Alina Simone points out that Russians don’t simply take “fine" as an answer. When you ask a Russia “how are you,” you might get Chekhov’s wonderful short story, “The Lady With the Dog,” Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time or Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Your average Russian is going to tell it like it is. Simone writes, “Ask a        Russian, ‘How are you?’ and you will hear, for better or worse, the truth. A blunt pronouncement of dissatisfaction punctuated by, say, the details of any recent digestive troubles. I have endured many painful minutes of elevator silence after my grandmother (who lived in the Soviet Union until moving to the United States in the 60’s) delivered her stock response: ‘Terrible,' to which she might add, 'Why? Because being old is terrible.’ Beat. ‘And I am very old’" What’s ironic is that Russia is still not a free society. Russian citizens are routinely persecuted for their beliefs and there are many egregious examples like the case of the Sergei Magnitsky, the 37 year old tax lawyer who died in jail after refusing to testify for the authorities (“Lawyer Held in Tax Case in Russia Dies in Jail,” NYT 11/17/13). The Yukos billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky who spoke out against Putin was recently released and deported after spending l0 years in prison (“Russian Tycoon Is Free, but His Money Is Still Tied Up,”  NYT, 12/20/13). Perhaps it’s a little like samizdat, the uncensored poetry that was so prized during the most repressive period of Soviet history. Maybe the private exchange is even more prized since public expressions of truth were and are so limited. Commenting on the theory of a prominent Russian cultural historian, Anya von Bremzen, Simone says, “As a citizen of a Communist utopia, you were pretty much supposed to feel fine all the time.” Americans seem to be attending a perpetual small talk convention in which “how are you” and “fine” are the lingua franca, but they won’t go to jail because of a negative Twitter feed about the President Obama. Nothing, of course, is worse than those Americans who abuse the privilege of living in a free society by responding to “how are you? with “I can’t complain.” If Tom Paine could hear such drivel, he'd roll in his grave.

Top Guns

“A State Backs Guns in Class For Teachers,” was the headline on the left side of the front page of the Times last Saturday (NYT, 3/8/13). The article describes how "South Dakota became the first state in the nation to enact a law explicitly authorizing school employees to carry guns on the job.” The idea is pregnant with possibilities for Americans. Imagine your self as a teacher carrying an M-16, an AK 47 or a Kalishnikov. Remember Harry Callahan’s famous quote, “I know what you're thinking. ‘Did he fire six shots or only five?’ Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?” Can you imagine someone walking into your classroom with one of those babies in your holster? But let’s forget about intruders. Most schools will be turned into the equivalent of maximum security prisons by the end of the decade. They’ll be as hard to get in as they are to get out. Let’s say you have a promising student, who has bad work habits. Put a gun to his or her head and let’s see which way the grade point average goes. Harvard, here we come. Dostoevsky was put before a mock firing squad on suspicion that he was a revolutionary and he went on to write Crime and Punishment. Or let’s say you have one of those cliques of cool kids, bright young men and women who could be our future leaders, if they would give up the pursuit of pleasure. Blindfold them and line them up and you’ll find that the partying will come to a quick end. Top guns lead to top grades. Let’s not beat around the bush, America’s children are its future.

The Daughter Rybolovlev

Alexei Barrionuevo's epic story on the front page of Wednesday’s Times, “Time to Sell Penthouse. The Russians Have Cash.” NYT, 4/3/12) is a seemingly superficial tale that has the breadth though not the depth of War and Peace or Anna Karenina. Or perhaps The Brothers Karamazov more effectively nails the idea. Remember Dimitri Karamazov? Well we have a new Dimitry surnamed Rybolovlev whose daughter Ekaterina, a competitive horse racer (Catherine the Great also liked horses but not for their racing capabilities), and who Barrionuevo reports is completing a degree at Harvard University’s Extension School and who shares an apartment with her dad in Monaco, which apparently is closer to her phillies, acquired Sandy Weill’s penthouse at 15 Central Park West for $88 million, a record. Barrionuevo also reported that Vladislav Doronin, whose name may be used by some future writer of a long Russian novel (in English), purchased Shaq’s Star Island manse for a cool 16M. According to Barrionuevo, these wealthy Russians keep the cash registers ringing at Nobu and the Standard  and “Some of them roll about town in customized Rolls Royces where the doors open at the opposite hinge to allow women to step out easier in heels.” Would Pasternak or David Lean who filmed Zhivago have even been able to imagine such an elegant fate for Lara (Julie Christie in the movie)? Perhaps Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead is the model for Mr. Rybolovlev’s CV, but her Ubermensch was no Russian. In any case Ekaterina’s big acquisition has had consequences far beyond the confines of her stable. “Extell Development company has increased its listing prices percent to 15 percent at 157 West 57^th Street, which will be New York’s tallest residential building,” Barrionuevo commented. “The two-floor penthouse is now selling for $115 million, up from the original asking price of $98 million.” Meanwhile in the same issue of the paper a piece with the byline “Fire Kills 17 in Moscow Workers’ Dormitory,” (NYT, 4/3/12) underlined “Russia’s worsening problem with the enforcement of basic safety standards.”  “Respect for the law is minimal even when human lives are at stake,” the Times reported about a country whose new rich are such a positive force in the market for high-end Manhattan residences. “Boats sink, planes crash and buildings burn with startling frequency, leading to protests but little apparent change.”