Die Hard Without a Vengeance

What if you were told you had 24 hours to live? You could have swallowed a poison capsule by accident or perhaps you had recondite knowledge of Armageddon. What would you do? Empty the bank account and go on a hedonistic odyssey in which you gratify all your as yet unfulfilled fetishes and desires? Would you purchase the high priced hooker (s) or gigolo(s)? Would you fly to Thailand and have the soapy massage or massage sandwich with two lovelies? Probably not, it’s too long a flight and if there were delays, you could be DOA. Under the theory that money can buy anything, you’d probably decide you can find what you are looking for closer to home. What if food rather than sex was the ultimate pleasure as far as you were concerned? Would you construct an elaborate Last Supper composed of foie gras, chateaubriand, cold lobster, naturally caviar and say no holds bar the world’s greatest dessert? Would you finally fork out for those Teuscher champagne truffles that had previously seemed wastefully expensive. This is the theme of Kurosawa’s Ikiru. In that case Kurosawa’s character, Watanabe, learns he has a year to live. He embarks on a Walpurgisnacht in which he attempts to gratify his desires in the seedy side of town, but materialistic pleasures soon prove wanting and he finally devotes himself to helping children by creating a playground. There’s a wonderful scene at the end of the film when with little time left, Watanabe sits on a swing, in the playground he has built, as the snow begins to fall.

It’s Not a Rehearsal

Edwin Booth’s Hamlet

“It’s not a rehearsal” has become a common saw, the laymen’s carpe diem, a term that’s become as popular as a piece of argot as “sounds like a plan.” We’re all familiar with the expression which is a barely disguised jeremiad urging us to live in the now, to live “a day at a time,” so as not to hold back from acting in the present, in the name of some unsung destiny. But actually the expression is a spiritual black hole. The underlying idea is if you’re going to die, you’d better live it up. The Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa understood the ambiguity of intention in his movie Ikiru which translates as “to live.” Learning that he is dying of incurable cancer, his main character Watanabe, at first has his Faustian Walpurgisnacht in which he indulges the pleasures he’s deprived himself          of during his life as a bureaucrat. But indulgence is ultimately unfulfilling and the only way he can find happiness turns out to be through helping others (in his case through the creation of a park). Even Epicurus, a philosopher, whose name is associated with the senses, argued for the golden mean. So looking a life under the aspect of impending death, which is, according to Heidegger the only way to have an “authentic existence,” the individual is actually faced with a choice. If he or she is to live every day as his last, then he has to decide if his or her last day on earth, his or her last supper, as it were, will be an occasion to grab for as much as much material pleasure as he or she can get or an occasion to do something for others. What will characterize the final act of our lives? Gluttony, generosity or something in between?

Diasporic Dining: Episode IX (Art House)

Photos by Hallie Cohen

Not that all cinema isn’t art, but the true art cinema, redolent with the smell of espresso and Gauloise cigarettes—or Italian Nationali, which are no longer made—is a relic of the past. In those halcyon days, brilliance was purchased at a price. Artists set themselves on fire like Buddhist monks. Pasolini was murdered on a dangerous prowl, and Pollock’s intoxication spread from art to alcohol, leading to his untimely demise in a drunk-driving incident. There was no innocence in the art cinemas, which breathed not only the fumes of strong cigarette smoke, but of the Cedar Bar, Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus and Bazin’s Cinematheque, the archetypal art house.

Across America, there were little covens of European Cinema that also played the films of Ozu, Mizoguchi and Teshigahara. The Brattle in Boston, The Bleecker Street and New Yorker in Manhattan, and the Uptown, which still proudly reigns over Minneapolis, with its worn neon sign reaching towards the heavens. With the din of the marching band and the cacophony of invading armies in the background, The Battleship Potemkin survived, along with Ikiru and Persona, Ashes and Diamonds and L'eclisse.

Lovers of Antonioni, Bergman and Kurosawa worshipped by themselves in these temples of celluloid.  Women wore black stockings when they went to see Room at the Top. The self enforced solitude was disquieting, but was also, like the smoke, what made the experience.