Interest on Your Social Capital?

In the classic capitalist paradigm industrial production produces capital. Capital when deposited in a bank results in interest which is then added to the capital which in turn produces more interest. It’s an ongoing process that makes the rich richer. There's a Darwinian aspect to this scenario that actually has applications even in the dictatorship of the proletariat. Everyone knows that even the most egalitarian of systems is comprised of elites who are rewarded with privileges in the places of actual capital. A member of the Politburo in the old Soviet Union might, for instance, be given a plush dacha in the countryside that was tantamount say to a fortune five hundred executives house in the Hamptons. But one quality that's common to all ideologies is the notion of genius. The talented person establishes a beachhead that produces “interest.” The “interest” then results in “social capital.” Whether you're in Pyongyang, London, Moscow or New York, if you're Baryshnikov you’re going to have one up on a helluva a lot of dancers and your status and power will only increase with each production of your work. Martin Scorsese’s film about Jimmy Hoffa's hitman, The Irishman, is headlining the New York Film Festival. Scorsese's power and influence just keep growing. You see him directing this or producing that. If a classic of the cinema is being re-released Scorsese is likely to be the name behind it. Extremely talented individuals, a Martin Scorsese, a Steven King, a Frank Gehry in architecture, are like Warren Buffet (Berkshire Hathaway),  Richard Branson (Virgin Atlantic and Galactic) and Elon Musk (Tesla). They dominate the marketplace, the way the robber barons cornered the industrial revolution. Further on a de facto basis most creatives cross over. Like Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates is a writer, but she’s also undoubtedly a business. Placido Domingo’s stock is falling but for other reasons.

Shizuoka's Performing Arts Center's Antigone

Arnold Bocklin's "Isle of the Dead," Basel version, (1880)

No spoiler alert is necessary.  In fact, The Shizuoka Performance Arts Center’s production of Antigone at the Park Avenue Armory, spells out the iconic plotline in the first few minutes. Antigone (Maki Honda, Micari) defies the state in attempting to bury her brother Polyneices (Keita Mishima) who has also paid for defying authority. “Don’t go to war against the dead,” warns the prophet Tiresias (Soichiro Yoshiue, Takahiko Watanabe) and soon King Creon (Kuzonori Abe, Kuoichi Ohtaka) pays dearly for his stubbornness. The current production is an opera in the form of a threnody. “Hades was lead to shores of Acheron” is one of the lines. The palette is an enormous dark pool filled with stone protuberances (symbolic tombs?) presided over by the famed oarsman in which the residents of Thebes amble like sleepwalkers with their shrouds projecting enormous shadows in a setting  reminiscent of Noh theater. Talking about water, there’s a touch of watered-down Robert Wilson in these slow-moving figures moving to the sounds of Hiroko Tanakawa’s musical accompaniment, with its thunderous and ominous drumbeats. Diluting theatrical inventions seems to be an unfortunate characteristic of the performance art presented at the Armory. The earlier The Lehman Trilogy could have been criticized for being watered down story theater. If you want the real thing you’ll have to go to BAM. Nevertheless, the Shizuoka’s production does confront an interesting problem, ie what to do when your narrative is a foregone conclusion? There’s something almost admirable about removing all the drama as the director Satoshi Miyagi has done, turning his whole mise en scene into a tableau vivant which envisions the world of the dead (and the inherent spiritual sickness of a cursed city) as a modernist canvas say like Bocklin's "Isle of the Dead"--which ends Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata.

Red Star Over China

There’s something very appealing about being in the presence of a community of people all bound together by shared beliefs. Their faith in god or precepts for living creates an enviable fabric and a shared language which overrules the spirit of individuation which informs let’s say every snowflake in the universe. As you may recall no two snowflakes are alike. Congregations which form around ideas (and obviously they can be created around politics as well as religion) act as a centripetal force countermanding the dark energy which is pulling things apart and creating such a distance between celestial bodies that the universe is actually becoming light challenged. But communities, communes, sects and even families which have strong ties resulting from shared values all come at a price. It’s nice to live in a small town since everyone knows you. It’s also not nice since everyone knows you and you’re not free to exercise your desire or right to be different and to say that you no longer derive pleasure from a prescribed way of life. Strong cohesive systems are like beautiful jewelry, but they’re easily threatened by outsiders and independent thought. Fundamentalist sects and authoritarian regimes never like outsiders and that’s why the internet is strictly limited in China, where Google is blocked by the Great Firewall. There's comfort in ritual, but once the assigned marriage or the pre-ordained place to which you’ve been relegated starts to be untenable then there's an inevitable fall from grace. The new found world of freedom may be exhilarating and then sometimes lonely, isolated and unsatisfying, but once you have seen there are other possibilities there’s seldom any turning back. Red Star Over China was the title of Edgar Snow’s prophetic work about the power of a unifying symbol and idea.

Long Day's Journey Into Night

Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night is so filled with pregnant, over the top imagery that it comes perilously close to parodying its own romantic underpinings. Much of the movie is a voice over recalling the romance between Luo Hongwu (Huang Jue) and the mysterious and elusive Wan Qiwen (Tan Wei), recalling trysts in rain soaked rooms and broken clocks in which an aged photograph resides. The narrative, which incidentally has nothing to do with the O'Neill classic other than being long and culminating at night, is also framed a kind of film noir detective story style culminating in a virtuoso 59 minute one take 3-D sequence in which the hero consummates his search by falling into the arms of a doppleganger. Memory and the past are the leitmotifs. “Whenever I’m about to forget her, I dream of her again,” “It’s living in the past that’s scary, not mudslides” are examples of the lines that are bantered about. The remembrances of Kaili the Chinese village where action takes place recall Resnais, Duras and even Proust. But it’s not clear how seriously the film wants to take itself. Is Long Day's Journey an artfully and lushly conceived genre film or is it subverting popular culture in an attempt to deal with the nature of illusion and reality?  The answer is that it’s probably all of these things. What’s interesting is how inward turning the movie is in a country where dialectical materialism has been the most dominant esthetic. There isn’t an ounce of ideology or politically suggestive iconography in Long Day’s Journey. It's almost disconcerting to find the Cultural Revolution culminating in Last Year in Marienbad. 

Yes I Can!

Is there a wrong and a right? Kant thought so and referred to such statements as categorial imperatives. Those who are followers of deconstruction might argue that moral judgments are culturally bound, that no one has a monopoly on ethical propriety. It’s a vexing problem since both individuals and groups of people have long histories and emotions which can easily attach themselves to ideologies. In chemistry some elements are volatile with their atoms easily forming compounds while for instance an inert or noble gas like argon doesn’t bond with other elements. You don’t have too many molecules of helium dioxide. A categorical imperative is a little like an inert gas to the extent that it stands all alone, disinterested and freed from the existential narrative and issues faced by those who it ultimately affects. In making esthetic judgments the kind of relativism spawned by a multicultural approach can be difficult. How can a person emanating from one culture write or make critical appraisals of those art works produced by “the other?” It’s all a little like the Tower of Babel which, when it fell, left humans no longer understanding each other. Relativism is a comfortable position to take in that it creates a totally insular universe in which most human beings follow the dictum Voltaire averred in Candide to tend your own garden. Would that life were so simple, that people could recuse themselves from thinking and commenting on each other’s creations (and ways of life). Yes I Can (Make Absolute Statements) by Immanuel Kant.

How to Form a Movement

Everybody has a story. Usually it’s part of a Manichean design in which they're the force of  good opposing an evil in the form of a disreputable business partner, a competitive sibling or a domineering parent. Their story is, of course, countermanded by another version of events relayed by the mouthpieces of the opposing party. You’re not going to win unless you have followers and yours become a movement that hordes of people flock to in their search for enlightenment and freedom. In other words the best way to win an argument between the Hatfields and McCoys is for Mr. or Mrs. Hatfield or McCoy to become like Mao and publish a little red book of revolution. Imagine renting out Tiananmen Square during the divorce proceedings. Like a lot of places, China is changing and even ideology will likely become monetized. So you’ll probably be able to hire a hundred thousand protesters who will gladly create a movement to dramatize the oppression you’ve experienced from your husband or wife and justify the settlement you feel you’re entitled to. Thanks to Twitter you’ll piggyback as a  paid advertisement accompanying simultaneous demonstrations around the world for the latest cause du jour which is naturally being presided over by some thirteen year old guru whose dramatic oratory has enraptured the delegates at Davos or the G8. Never fight it out alone, when you can have millions of supporters to back up your tale of woe.

Have You Gotten Your Flu Shot?

Sickness is like science fiction. Stephen King’s The Stand, uses a flu epidemic to create a horror story and Susan Sontag’s famous essay is “Illness As Metaphor.” You’re placed into an alternate universe. Even something minor like a head cold creates at least one degree of separation from the everyday world in which others go about their business in a way that you're not able. It gets worse if you really come down with something and end up looking enviously out your window at passersby who're perfectly capable of going about their business unimpeded by physical handicaps. Those people born with congenital conditions never know what it feels like to live a so-called normal life in which one has full use of one's faculties. The average person takes his or her ability to see, hear or smell for granted but there are those who inhabit an interior universe in which stimulae from the outside world are dramatically limited. If you've never known another life, then in essence you may not feel like you’re missing anything. It’s those who experience the kinds of physical deterioration that results in the inability to ambulate or even cognate who will find they have begun a different kind of a journey. Journalist Jean Dominique-Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly described the locked-in syndrome that derived from a massive stroke. The NYU historian Tony Judt wrote three books after he was diagnosed with ALS while contributing essays about his condition to The New York Review of Books.  Stephen Hawking who also suffered from ALS, wrote books like A Brief History of Time under the most challenging of conditions, in the end using cheek muscle to activate a sensor. He developed a rich inner world that had a correspondingly powerful grasp of the cosmos. Despite being limited he was, at least from the theoretical point of view, a human telescope, his mind allowing him access to perceptions about the nature of the multiverse not available to people who suffered from none of the disabilities he dealt with. In his many books the neurologist Oliver Sacks demonstrated how patients with severe neurological disorders often compensated for their losses—becoming in essence like Spock in Star Trek, brilliant though sometimes robotic-sounding personalities with extrasensory perception.