Joe Cillo

BE GOOD TO YOUR PARENTS….OR ELSE!

Appreciating your parents is the only hope for civilization.
The Chinese Government & Lynn Ruth

China has decided it is a punishable crime for adult children to neglect their parents and I think that is a very wise decision. Wouldn’t it be wonderful for us all, if every nation followed suit?

It is about time someone took steps to stop the shameless way grown progeny are treating their parents these days. Elderly parents sit at home in their wheel chairs or on the sofa, counting the moments ‘til one of their offspring remembers that they are too weak and tired to get to Tesco’s; the hours tick by, their tummies gurgle, their heads ache and they stare at the door, praying it will open and the heir to their estate will appear bearing bubble and squeak and even a bit of pudding.

After all, parents have every right to expect their children to be there for them. Didn’t they clean up Junior when he got a bloody nose?  Didn’t they give their little princess dancing lessons so she could express her inner feelings? They let her get that disgusting tattoo of Frankenstein chewing a bunny and they never said a word when she appeared at the breakfast table, her hair dyed purple and three rings in her nose.

And that was before they became teen-agers.

They looked the other way, when their little darlings sold pot to the neighborhood grade-school kids, and the countless times they threw up on the couch from an overdose or got too affectionate with one another.  Remember that?

Didn’t they sacrifice that extra cruise, and the trip to see penguins copulate on an iceberg just so their son could go to university and their daughter could afford that abortion?  Of course they did.

And that is why the Chinese Government decided to step up to the plate and remind us that we owe Mummy and Daddy big time.  They were the ones who kept us alive through the bullying, the bike accidents, the shattered limbs and broken hearts.  Now, it is the children’s turn to keep their parents comfy and warm ‘til they breathe their last.  After all, there is always time to change the will, if they feel unloved.

Not that it will be easy if the law becomes universal. Take Mary Louise:  There she is galloping though her day, getting the kids to school, packing their lunches, rushing off to the office, picking up her darlings, and taking them to tap dancing and soccer, driving home, giving the house a quick dust, fixing dinner, greeting the father of her gang with a drink, serving food, cleaning the kitchen and collapsing in front of the telly.  At midnight, she and her hubby stagger up to bed, too exhausted to do what they used to do before they tied the knot. Suddenly, she sits bolt upright, snaps her fingers and says, “OH MY GOD!!!  I forgot to visit Daddy.  Now, we’ll never pay off this mortgage.”

And if her partner is a good sort, he says, “Don’t worry darling. I will visit you every Tuesday and bring chocolate.”

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

The Magic Theatre, which was once home to playwright-in-residence Sam Shepard, is presently staging a “Legacy Revival” of what is arguably his greatest opus: BURIED CHILD.

If you can temporarily transcend your sensitive understanding, liberal guilt and human compassion for a wacked-out dysfunction family, then you can laugh until to reopen your liposuction scars watching this superbly crafted comedy.

This is a hyperbolic parody of a dysfunctional family: a total shipwreck of a family: beyond therapy, possibly beyond industrial strength psycho-therapeutic drugs and beyond shock treatments from even a Van de Graaff Generator.

It is a stygian comedy about five people who are only identified as a family because they happen to share similar DNA strands.

The patriarch, Dodge, is addicted to prescription drugs, cheap whiskey and television; he has abandoned the battlefield, or cornfield, of life and now reclines on a moldering living room couch.

The matriarch, Halie, still has a functioning endocrine system—although winding down from the warp drive of earlier years—and she is making the most of it with the pastor of her church: Father Dewis.

Tilden has retreated from the jarring realities of the outer world in lives deeply submerged beneath the sutures of his sagittal crest; rarely is he cognizant of such external stimuli as people; he is bereft of both audio processing and cognitions.

Brother Bradley, who shortened his leg with a Homelite, is weak but vicious; however, take away his prosthetic and he is a lamb chop: as weak as Samson after a coif.

Grandson Vince is the canopic jar: the living vessel of the toasted family’s ashes; genetically predisposed to settle-in to the family paradigm of booze, television and the couch; self-determination is merely an abstraction to Vince.

The nearest brush anyone in the personae dramatis has with sanity is Shelly: Vince’s girlfriend; and even she finds herself temporarily drawn into the family flame although she has the sense to pull the chocks when the action cranks up.

Rod Gnapp, is no stranger the Magic Theatre (Remember Cintra Wilson’s TRIPLE X LOVE ACT? That was Rod playing Artie Jay Mitchell).

Rod Gnapp plays Dodge as if he were Dodge.

Having seen Rod on Bay Area Stages for the last 25 years, one could easily say that this is his finest hour; this is an award winning performance.

You may have missed Led Zepplin at Knebworth or Hendrix at Monterey; but don’t miss Rod Gnapp at the Magic.

Denise Balthrop Cassidy, as Halie, is simply a riot; she gives her character a determined air: still trying to wrangle dignity and sensual enjoyment from the smoldering ruins of her life; she is both dauntless and deluded.

Elaina Garrity, as Shelly, is able to do some amazing but convincing transitions.

Arriving at the farm, she has well founded trepidations but within a few hours she is tormenting Bradley as if she were one of the family; her primal release and gleeful unleashing of her shadow self is both credible and remarkably affected.

Just as deftly, she puts the Genie back in the bottle and makes a timely exit to the world of light and the living.

James Wagner, as Tilden, is fried—maybe deep fried or stir fried—hard to tell.

Picture a direct high altitude lightning strike to your iPad; what 70,000 volts can do to your semi-conductor collection, is what life at the farm has done to Tilden’s neurons and James plays it to its zombie best.

The whole show is simply the best of the best—from the Klieg lights down to the set design.

For a delightful, safe excursion into the netherworld of rural, corn-fed and carrot-fueled insanity, you want to see BURIED CHILD.

For tickets call the box office at 415 441-8822 or visit the Magic Theatre website.

Salinger

Directed by Shane Salerno

 

 

This is an outstanding documentary about the life of J. D. Salinger.  I was impressed with how comprehensive it is.  They packed a lot into two hours.  Having said that, there was only scanty information about Salinger’s own childhood, family background, and years growing up.  They did point out that Salinger’s family was well to do, that he grew up in Manhattan, that he was kicked out of numerous prep schools, that he went to a military school, and so forth, but his relationships with his immediate family members are not explored in great depth, particularly his sister, Doris, who is barely mentioned, although they did remark that his mother approved of everything he did, which I think was an important antecedent of the indefatigable self confidence he had in himself and in his writing.  The significance of this lack of exploration of his childhood and developmental years within his birth family is that the film emphasizes his experience in the military during World War 2 as being a crucial influence on his later writing, and perhaps on his character as well.  I was surprised at how extensive and significant his military experience was.  He landed in France on D-Day.  That was his initiation into combat.  He was one of the first to enter the concentration camp at Dachau.  He was an intelligence officer who interrogated prisoners and ex-Nazis after the war.  He was hospitalized for PTSD.  The film does make a compelling case that the war experience strongly influenced the stories A Perfect Day for Bananafish and For Esmé — with Love and Squalor.  It also documents that Salinger was working on The Catcher in the Rye during the campaign against the Germans.  I am not so convinced that The Catcher in the Rye has as strong a relationship to his war experience, nor his subsequent writing about the Glass family.  I think one has to look into his childhood and his experience growing up in the upper middle class American society that he came from for this.  I was surprised to hear about his first marriage to a young Nazi woman, Sylvia Welter, whom he interrogated after the war — very contrary to military rules at the time.  The marriage did not last long.  He brought her back to the United States, introduced her to his family, and shortly thereafter broke up with her.  Whatever became of her?

I was glad they included the interviews with his daughter, Margaret, and with Joyce Maynard.  However, there is not a word from his son, Matthew, who differs markedly with his sister Margaret’s account of their family and of their father.  Salinger’s asceticism in only obliquely alluded to, but the film does indicate that this was manifest in his character from an early age.  (See my article in the Journal of Homosexuality for a more extensive analysis of the sexual aspects of The Catcher in the Rye.¹)

The film offers extensive interviews with people who knew Salinger, who worked with him, who were interested in him and wanted to know him.  The film tends to be honorific in its approach, which is OK, I guess.  Countless people of his own generation, and still today, resonate with his characters and their sense of alienation and loneliness.  Personally, my view of Salinger has evolved over the years.  I do not regard his as favorably as I once did.  I think I understand him better now, and I see his limitations as a human being much more clearly — and they bear a relationship to his writing and the messages it communicates.

What really got my attention was the list of forthcoming publications at the very end of the film.  They are due to start appearing beginning in 2015 through 2020.  The titles and subject matter look fascinating.  Salinger was indeed writing during all those years of seclusion in New Hampshire, and the books are due to be opened and the contents proclaimed on the housetops.  When they are you’ll be seeing more reviews here.  This film is an excellent overview of Salinger’s life, full of interesting interviews, well documented, highly informative, and offering a positive, almost deferential attitude toward Salinger and his work.  While it does not do everything, it does more than I expected about a person whom it has been very hard to find out anything concrete for nearly half a century.

 

 

 

1.  Ferguson, Michael (2010)  Book Review of The Catcher in the Rye.  Journal of Homosexuality 57: 810-818.

Mephistopheles

San Francisco Opera Performance

September 14, 2013

 

 

The title of this opera is Mephistopheles.  Mephistopheles is supposed to be the Devil.   But this is not about Mephistopheles or the nature of evil.   Mephistopheles becomes little more than a tour guide in this opera.  It seems to be about Faust more than it is about anything, the aging scholar who trades his soul to the Devil.  But it is not clear what he traded it for or what either of them got in the bargain.  This opera is a series of disconnected, incomplete vignettes that do not form a coherent narrative or portray any characters with clarity, or depth.     

It is a mediocre work by a mediocre mind.  I don’t understand why they even staged this.   The person who wrote this, Arrigo Bioto, does not understand evil.  This opera reflects a typical religious ascetic mentality that associates evil with the body, sex, and especially women, who are the inspirers and the objects of lust.  It is a celebration of conservatism, pessimism, asceticism, and archaic religious nonsense.   This man is not a deep thinker, not insightful, has no interesting ideas or perspective, and no psychological sophistication.  I have an extremely low opinion of him as an intellect. 

I wouldn’t say a word against the performance, however.  The imaginative staging, the singers, the chorus, the dancers, the costumes, the lighting and sets, create a brilliant spectacle that saves this lumbering monstrosity from becoming a total quagmire.  Unfortunately, all of this splendid display is in the service of an insipid concept.  If you can just sit there and watch it for its visual brilliance, without thinking too much about what it means or asking yourself what it is all about, you might like it.  The nudity, the strip tease, the simulated sex, the dangling penises, are all interesting to watch.  If you don’t get much chance to see naked human bodies you might be titillated, but this lurid sensuality does not save the story line, and it is done with a lightheartedness that underlines the shallowness of the whole performance.  It is cartoonish.  These are caricatures rather than characters.  It is not interesting, and it becomes increasingly ridiculous and repulsive as it goes along. 

The ending is extremely confusing and idiotic.  Faust, after making a bargain to sell his soul to the Devil, ends up going to heaven.  Margherita, his lover, whose mother he poisons and whose child is drowned in the ocean is executed (ascetics always blame women for sexual misadventures and punish them severely).   Mephistopheles is just a footnote to all of this.  He is a kind of master of ceremonies, but is never a principal in the action. 

The nature of evil could be an interesting subject and the Devil could be a fascinating character for dramatic portrayal.   This opera does not do justice to either of these topics.  Someone should write a different opera on this subject.  This one should fall into deserved oblivion.  It is quite long and slow moving.  There are two long intermissions.  There is not enough substance to make it worth sitting through.  This art form needs an upgrade.    

AROUSAL and THE LOVER

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

What? Bohemians living in Alameda? And, Thespians? Right here in River City?

Alameda’s own Laura Lundy-Paine is currently starring in a double-header at the Phoenix Theatre on Mason Street in San Francisco.

MS Lundy-Paine, a first class actress, has formally studied acting at Pomona College and has classically trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.

She has graced west coast stages from the Portland Shakespeare Festival, to the Oregon Stage Company, Stinson Shakespeare and our own Rhythmix Cultural Works.

Presently at the Phoenix, the accomplished MS Lundy-Paine shares the Klieg Lights with John Steen; they open with George Pfirrmann’s AROUSAL followed by Harold Pinter’s THE LOVER.

In AROUSAL MS Lundy-Paine plays the sintering Albena: an exotic therapist of sorts; she is severed from her native Ukraine and for a small fee, she is willing to help Clifford, via very unconventional therapies, to overcome the isolating social handicaps associated Asperger’s Syndrome.

Albena proves that you don’t have be handicapped, to have a handicap; a turbulent history in a ruthless, lawless, post-Soviet wasteland and a family swine circus is more than sufficient.

At the end of her rope—okay extension cord—Albena finds that a human connection, rather than on-line Scrabble, might provide her a reason to go on living.

In THE LOVER, Lundy-Paine ratchets up her intensity, nearly setting off the smoke alarm with sangfroid sensuality.

She plays Sarah: a married woman trying to infuse a ten-year marriage with the brio, élan and endocrinal rush that it had back in the early days.

Sarah and Richard, mired in the doldrums of middleclass suburban London, fantasize the way most people do, only they share their fantasies to spool up marital intimacies and save on their heating bills.

This is high-intensity theatre in an intimate setting; no one is more than three rows from the end of the stage; you can almost smell Albena’s rot-gut vodka and cheap perfume.

MS Lundy-Paine is a resident member of the award winning Virago Theatre; the company includes Robert Lundy-Paine and Eileen Meredith, also from Alameda.

For a tantalizing and provocative evening visit www.ViragoTheatre.ORG.

The Phoenix Theater is on the 6th floor of 414 Mason Street in San Francisc

Blue Jasmine

Directed by Woody Allen

 

This film is outstanding.  It is the best Woody Allen film since Annie Hall.  In fact, it may be his best ever.  These are iconic characters whose struggles and disintegration capture the spirit of our own time.  This will become an American classic in the tradition of Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Godfather, The Great Gatsby, Long Day’s Journey into Night.  The story is complex with many strands and subplots.  But it does not become a jungle.  Like a well written symphony, it is balanced, properly paced, and modulated.  The focus is maintained on the two lead characters, Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) and her adopted sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins).  Jasmine recalls Blanch in A Streetcar Named Desire, an extremely vulnerable woman whose comfortable affluent life is disintegrating and taking her down with it.

But the film goes beyond being a psychological study of one woman, however representative of her time and class she may be.  This film makes a statement about the vacuousness and bankruptcy of the American money culture, which has come to dominate our increasingly beleaguered middle classes, who anxiously strive for success and status as defined by the accumulation of wealth and its accoutrements.  Jasmine’s husband, Hal, (Alec Baldwin) serves as an allusion to Bernie Madoff and the rapaciousness of the Wall Street bankers and executives that brought about the recent financial malaise that is still afflicting much of the country.  His crimes and dishonesty destroyed not only himself and his wife, Jasmine, but also took away the hopes and dreams and opportunities of numerous of lower class people with whom he came in contact, such as, Ginger and Augie (Andrew Dice Clay).  This illustrates the impact that the crimes of the banks and finance world have had on everyday working people across America: dimming their prospects and creating difficulties and obstacles and burdens on their lives that will weigh them down for many years.

The central theme of the film is the arduousness of the descent that many Americans are now experiencing in their lifestyle, standard of living, and sense of well being: the emotional toll this is taking on individuals, personal relationships, and families.  A wide swath of the American population knows that life used to be better in America — much better — not only as a statistical abstraction, but in their own particular circumstances.  And there is a connection between that general degradation in the quality of life in America and the unfettered pursuit of wealth without bound by this class of voracious, unscrupulous hustlers in the finance world who effect a superficial garb of legitimacy.

The film does offer a ray of hope in the straightforward honesty and simple workaday lifestyle of Ginger and Chili (Bobby Cannavale).  Although they are both flawed people, their flaws turn out not to be fatal to their human bonds and their psychological balance.  There is a vibrance and vitality in their sharing of simple pleasures and daily concerns that leaves one with a feeling that they might be able to go on and create a workable life together.  But they are clearly vulnerable and the stability and the hopes that they share today could easily be derailed by the intrusion of the collapsing lives of those in the upper tiers of society represented by Jasmine.  The film is a dismal tragedy, but there are many comic aspects to it that provide a lighthearted feel that allays the overall grimness and prevents it from becoming dreary or oppressive to watch.  It ends on a note of ambiguity in a minor key.   Go see it.  It is a classic portrayal of key trends in contemporary American life.

Hannah Arendt

Directed by Margarethe von Trotta

 

 

This is my kind of film.  It is a film about ideas, about the big picture, about the ambiguities and contradictions in human nature, about broad philosophical implications of ordinary events.  If you have never had a serious thought in your life, if you like to go to the movies to be entertained, to escape from your humdrum existence, to have your fundamental preconceptions, your basic world view and moral outlook on life confirmed and validated by some contrived story line and stereotypic, one-dimensional characters, then don’t go see this.  It’s not for you.  The friend I went with was yawning.

In contrast to the previous film I reviewed about Wilhelm Reich, this film, also a dramatization, is much better conceived and much better executed.  It is altogether a superior effort.  The character of Hannah Arendt is effectively and convincingly created by Barbara Sukowa.   I also liked Julia Jentsch, who played Lotte.   The nature of her relationship to Hannah Arendt wasn’t exactly clear.  She was not a relative.  She served as a kind of secretary and all purpose assistant, but the relationship seemed to have a marked personal quality as well.

Although the film effectively draws the character of Hannah Arendt and summarizes many of the major aspects of her life, the central concern of this film is her coverage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in the early 1960s for the New Yorker magazine, and the aftermath of its publication.  Eichmann had been a top level S.S. officer in the Third Reich, who was responsible for the transport of millions of Jews to death camps.  He had been renditioned by the Israeli Secret Service from Argentina and brought back to Israel to face trial for war crimes.  Hannah Arendt, a Jew who was briefly held in a Nazi detention camp in France before escaping with her family to New York, volunteered to cover the Eichmann trial for the New Yorker, and the New Yorker accepted her offer.

She did more than cover the trial.  Hannah Arendt was a trained philosopher who studied with Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers.  She had published several major philosophical works before covering the Eichmann trial including The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and The Human Condition (1958).  She brought her philosophical acumen and formidable erudition to bear on her reporting of this trial.  It was entirely fitting and appropriate.  We have to congratulate the New Yorker for choosing her to report on this trial.  No one could have covered it like she did, and no one could have raised the issues implied in this trial with such clarity and force and intellectual depth as she brought to them.  The outcome was six long articles that appeared in the New Yorker in 1963 followed by a book, Eichmann in Jerusalem:  A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), which is still in print.

I read the opening article from the February 16, 1963 issue of the New Yorker.  From the outset, Arendt not only reports on the trial vis-a-vis Eichmann, but she analyzes the trial and sets it in its political and historical context, which she has the knowledge and capability to do.  Her understanding of Jewish history and culture and the contemporary political context is especially rich.  It would be hard to imagine someone doing a comparable job in terms of quality and depth of understanding.  She seems uniquely qualified for this assignment and the New Yorker  did itself and the world a great favor by choosing her for this task and providing her with a venue to put her singular perspective before the public.

Arendt saw the trial as not being about Eichmann and what he did during the Third Reich, as much as it was about a political agenda of Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.

this case was built on what the Jews had suffered, not on what Eichmann had done. (New Yorker, Feb. 16, 1963, p. 41)

It was history that, as far as the prosecution was concerned, stood at the center of the trial.  “It is not an individual that is in the dock at this historic trial, and not the Nazi regime alone,” Ben-Gurion said, “but anti-Semitism throughout history.” (New Yorker, February 16, 1963, p. 54)

The logic of the Eichmann trial, as Ben Gurion conceived of it — a trial stressing general issues, to the detriment of legal niceties — would have demanded exposure of the complicity of all German bureaus and authorities in the so-called Final Solution of the Jewish question; of all civil servants in the state ministries; of the regular armed forces, with their General Staff; of the judiciary; and of the business world.  . . . the prosecution . . . carefully avoided touching on this highly explosive matter — upon the almost ubiquitous complicity, stretching far beyond the ranks of Party membership. (New Yorker, February 16, 1963, p. 52)

So from the outset Arendt sees the trial as going far beyond Eichmann.  And indeed, as the trial goes on Eichmann’s significance diminishes in relation to this broad  historical drama.

Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a ‘monster,’ but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.  (New Yorker, February 16, 1963, p. 113)

Half a dozen psychiatrists examined Eichmann and found that “his whole psychological outlook, including his relationship with his wife and children, his mother and father, his brothers and sisters and friends, was “not only normal but most desirable.” (New Yorker, February 16, 1963, p. 67)

Eichmann, the Nazi S.S. officer who presided over the transport of millions of people to their deaths, was a perfectly good guy.

He went to considerable lengths to prove that he had never harbored any ill feelings toward his victims, and, what is more, had never made any secret of that fact. (New Yorker, February 16, 1963, p. 76)

Arendt goes on to explain that he had a Jewish mistress during his service in the S.S., a rarity among S.S. officers.

His enlistment in the S.S. was not motivated by ideological fervor or even political conviction.  He said, “it was like being swallowed up by the Party against all expectations and without previous decision.  It happened so quickly and suddenly.”  He had no time and less desire to be properly informed; and he did not even know the Party program, and he had not read (as he never did read) Mein Kampf.  Kaltenbrenner had said to him, Why not join the S.S.? and he had replied, Why not?  That was how it happened, and that was about all there was to it. (New Yorker, Feb. 16, 1963, p. 80)

What disturbed people about Arendt’s take on the Eichmann case is that Arendt saw that the face of Evil is not a monster, not demonic, not a raging lunatic, but a mediocre bureaucrat, an ordinary man, with a wife and a healthy family, who would never have done what he did had he not been caught up in large historical currents which he did not create and had very little personal interest in.  Somehow it didn’t sit well with people that such an inconsequential person could be responsible for the deaths of millions of people, whom he did not hate, and actually did not seem to have any strong feelings about.  He was just doing his job to the best of his ability and trying to survive and get by.  He understood what he was doing, to be sure.  He didn’t pretend to be ignorant of what was going on.  But he said he would have shot his own father if the Führer had ordered him to do so.  For Eichmann the overarching value in his life and his outlook was to follow the program, to do what he was told, and to execute his assigned tasks faithfully and effectively.  And that is exactly what he did.  He was the quintessential bureaucrat.

Arendt argued that making Eichmann the public face of the Holocaust was a historical and cultural cop out.  It was an evasion.  It is not that Eichmann was not responsible and should not be held accountable.  Arendt agreed with his sentence and was glad to see him hanged, but she also saw that Eichmann was being given too much credit.  He was being made into a false symbol: a personification of something that was much bigger and deeper than any one person could represent or be responsible for.  I think her assessment of the trial and of Eichmann is absolutely correct.  The film does a very good job of presenting the philosophical issues as well as the personalities involved.  It is an excellent achievement, although heavy to watch.

What interested me about this film and about the Eichmann case was its relevance to contemporary events in the United States.  If you think about the contrast between Adolf Eichmann and Edward Snowden or Bradley Manning, you notice something significant.  Snowden and Manning are both rather inconsequential individuals, of unimpressive backgrounds and credentials, very much like Eichmann, who found themselves cogs in a huge bureaucratic machine that they realized was monstrous.  But what distinguishes them from Eichmann is that they were not content to just continue in their jobs, carrying out their assigned tasks, oblivious to the dire consequences that they knew would ensue from their work.  They threw a monkey wrench into the machine, at great cost to themselves, rather than let the Beast continue on its ruinous rampage.

In 1934 Eichmann applied for work in the Security Service of the S.S (the S.D.).  The S.D. had been founded by Himmler to serve as an intelligence service to the Nazi party.

Its initial task had been to spy on party members — an activity giving the S.S. an ascendancy over the regular party apparatus.  Then it had taken on some additional duties, becoming the information and research center for the Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police, or Gestapo).  This was the first step toward the merger of the S.S. and the police, which was not carried out until September of 1939 . . . (New Yorker, February 16, 1963, p. 86)

A similar evolution is in progress in the United States, where the intelligence services are being inexorably merged with state and local police departments.  It is an important point to emphasize that in a totalitarian state the intelligence services, protected by the utmost secrecy, and charged with spying on citizens — and indeed, everyone — ultimately become merged with policing functions, so that what results is one monolithic oppressive force within society, intimidating and brutalizing with impunity anyone deemed a threat or subversive.  Edward Snowden has exposed the mountains of data being gathered by our own intelligence services on every American citizen, and indeed, nearly every citizen throughout the world.  The security services claim that they need all this information about who we talk to and associate with in order to protect us — and many people among the citizenry buy this line, or are at least indifferent to it.  But it is only a matter of time before those massive amounts of data will be turned with a most heavy hand and without the possibility of challenge or recourse against the people who now comfort themselves with the thought that this is all benign and innocent.

Eichmann . . . seems to have known nothing even of the nature of the S.D. when he entered it — which was not really strange, since operations of the S.D. were always top secret.  According to what he told Captain Less, he joined the S.D. under a misapprehension . . . (New Yorker, February 16, 1963, p. 86)

Edward Snowden, and many others like him, had no idea of the nature of the work he would be doing for the NSA.  But, unlike Eichmann, he became increasingly shocked and appalled at the nature of the work he was expected to carry out.  In response to Snowden’s revelations, the NSA has vowed to tighten their selection process so that only the Adolf Eichmann’s of the world can work for the intelligence services.

The totalitarian state needs the Adolf Eichmanns of the world.  It despises the Bradley Mannings and Edward Snowdens.  Every conceivable vilification and depredation is being heaped upon them.  At all costs they must be discredited and punished mercilessly.  A totalitarian state, or a state that has pretentions of becoming one, like the United States, cannot allow people like Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning to become heroes.

But it is important to point out:  the difference between Adolf Eichmann, and Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning, is one of values.  Eichmann valued only following orders and being a good soldier, whereas Snowden and Manning had a vision for society that went beyond themselves.  They were capable of evaluating what they were doing and passing judgment on their own professional conduct, because their vision of themselves and their relation to society went beyond simply doing their jobs, understood as carrying out their assigned tasks as they came down from on high.   They actually cared about how people would live in the kind of society being fashioned by the work they were charged with carrying out.  Eichmann did not.  He had no vision of society beyond himself and his immediate circle.  It is very important to understand where these values held by Snowden and Manning come from, and how they become instilled in children.  It is important because it is the best hope of preserving America as a society where individual freedoms and basic civil rights for average citizens are protected and institutionalized in both law and culture, just as it is important for totalitarian states that want to crush such people and snuff out those values in order to enslave everyone.  The Edward Snowdens and Bradley Mannings of the world are an obstacle to totalitarianism.  Eichmann, the quintessential bureaucrat, is the totalitarian hero and ideal.

The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think; that is to think from the standpoint of somebody else.  No communication with him was possible, not because he lied, but because he was surrounded with the most reliable of all safeguards against the words of others, or even the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.  (New Yorker, February 16, 1963, p. 106)

This film and its theme, the banality of evil, is highly relevant to our own time as   America moves increasingly toward a totalitarian police state.  This can be seen in the erosion and often complete disregard of the Constitution and its protections of citizens rights against the prerogatives of government.  The current President, who is supposedly an expert on the Constitution, has shown more disrespect for the Constitution than any President in recent times.  The indifference of average citizens in allowing this to happen, the narcissism of simply focusing on one’s own job, one’s own living, one’s own problems, one’s own success and promotion, without regard to one’s connection to the whole; the failure to perceive that the quality of life within the whole society matters to one’s fate as an individual; this lack of perception, this narcissism of unrelatedness is the greatest danger to America as a free society.  The biggest threat to the United States is not terrorists blowing up buildings.  This is what the Security State wants people to believe, and this phantom is promoted relentlessly in the media that constant threats of this type are afoot.   But actually, it is the indifference of average citizens to the ever growing presence of the Security State and the erosion of basic liberties for others as well as oneself that is the much more profound threat.  There is an obliviousness that allows one to think that the government can trample the rights of others, disregard the Constitution, violate civil rights, even commit heinous crimes against people portrayed as “enemies of the State,” and somehow that will never come home to me.  What affects others does not affect me.  That’s their problem, not mine.  This attitude on the part of the average citizen is the most ominous threat to America as a free society.  It is the Eichmannization of the citizenry that is our most profound enemy.

Eighty million Germans had been shielded against reality and factuality by the same self-deception, lies, and stupidity that had now become ingrained in Eichmann’s nature.  These lies changed from year to year, and they frequently contradicted each other; moreover, they were not necessarily the same for the various branches of the Party hierarchy or the people at large.  But the practice of self-deception had become so widespread — almost a moral prerequisite for survival — that even now, eighteen years after the collapse of the Nazi regime, when most of the specific content of its lies has been forgotten, it is sometimes difficult not to believe that mendacity has become an integral part of the German national character.  (New Yorker, February 16, 1963, p. 111)

This could describe current conditions in the political and cultural climate of the United States.  There are so many lies being promoted by the government and the “information” media to the public with such a heavy handed insistence, being repeated so often and with such uncritical aplomb that they have almost become clichés.  People who point out the lies, the contradictions, the inconsistencies, the delusions, and question their sources are labeled ‘crackpots,’ or ‘conspiracy theorists.’

How many lies have the American people been told and accepted as fact going back many years to Vietnam, Iran-Contra, Iraq, Afghanistan, 9/11, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, climate change, among many other issues?  We seem to eagerly embrace hysteria and sensationalism, particularly when it provides opportunities to vent boundless spite and venom upon some demonized enemy.  Israel was probably hoping for such an opportunity in the trial of Adolf Eichmann, but it did not work out so well, because Eichmann turned out not to be a demon with fangs and horns, but a rather mediocre, almost innocuous, person.  Had he been in a different position with different responsibilities, no one would ever have heard of him.  It was almost bad luck, rather than malice, that resulted in his presiding over the extermination of millions of Jews.

Living in America you know that most of the population is deluded about many issues of vital public importance.  And yet, they are content to remain in that condition of numb indifference focusing mostly on themselves and their immediate circle, and when they do cast their eyes beyond that short field of vision, they see only bewildering, amorphous threats, and thus defer to the authorities to take care of it.

David Rousset (French inmate of Buchenwald) They [the S.S.] know that the system which succeeds in destroying its victim before he mounts the scaffold . . . is incomparably the best for keeping a whole people in slavery.  (quoted on p. 42, New Yorker, February 16, 1963)

This is understood by the United States government, and particularly by the Security Services.  This is why it is so important to destroy the Edward Snowdens and the Bradley Mannings, and to prevent such people from coming into existence.  Controlling the available information, controlling access to resources and information, controlling the attention and preoccupations of the public, while at the same time keeping one’s own actions secret and invisible, is key to maintaining and growing the Security State.  This is why it is necessary to keep track of everyone’s conversations, who talks to who, and what people look at and read on the internet.  It is the preliminary step to controlling and limiting who one can talk to and what information one may see and be exposed to.

The trial of Adolf Eichmann and the penetrating analysis of it by Hannah Arendt illustrates the perverse extremes to which a Security State can go, and those extremes are made possible and realized by the inconsequential, unthinking, unreflecting bureaucrat, obsessed with his own personal security and indifference to the consequences of his own actions beyond the fulfillment of his given duty.  Adolf Eichmann lives today, and is, in fact, very much in demand by the intelligence services of the United States government.  The Israelis were right to hang him.  But they thought they were hanging Anti-Semitism.  That would have been the simple, scripted outcome that the Israeli government was hoping for.  In actuality, Eichmann wasn’t even an Anti-Semite.  Instead, the trial revealed a much more profound truth: that the excesses and atrocities of totalitarian states are not fundamentally a manifestation of collective hatred, but rather a reflection of collective numbing of sensibility that brings on collective complicity and collective willful blindness.  The greatest Evil is turns out not to be a crazed terrorist throwing bombs and spitting venom.  The greatest Evil is a mundane, banal, average bureaucrat, going about his job, doing what he is told, even when he knows he is participating in madness.

This film, directed by Margarethe von Trotta is an excellent introduction to these issues and the personality and life of Hannah Arendt.  It directly bears on some of the most pressing trends in the political culture of the United States, and is illustrative of the human foundations of every totalitarian state.  I highly recommend it.

The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich

Directed by Antonin Svoboda

 

There are many things about Wilhelm Reich that never made sense to me.  I was hoping this film would clarify some of them, but it did not.  In fact, seeing this fictional depiction of him made me even more puzzled.  I have read many of Reich’s psychoanalytic writings and always judged him to be the smartest and best of the younger generation of psychoanalysts that succeeded Freud.  Reich understood the social implications of psychoanalysis and he understood the limitations of therapy focused individuals and the particular symptoms they present.  He saw the “neurotic” symptom as a manifestation of a structural problem that has to be understood in the context of one’s general character.  The symptom never occurs in isolation, but always in the context of one’s personality and familial constellation.  Similarly, the problems of individuals, although always specific and unique to particular circumstances, occur at the same time within a wider social context that provides the soil and the nurturing for similar kinds of difficulties that arise in the lives of many individuals living under those same cultural circumstances.  It is therefore necessary to understand and to address mental illness not only on the level of the individual, but also as a manifestation of cultural and social malaise.  This was one source of friction between Reich and the political and institutional establishment.

But there were others.  I am not as familiar with his later work on what he called “orgone energy.”  I was hoping  that the film would shed some light on this since this was what led to his wrangling with the U.S. government, the FDA, the American Psychiatric Association, and the Justice Department.  However, this film is not an in depth presentation of ideas.  It is a dramatization, not a documentary.   There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach, but the outcome differs considerably from my expectations and hopes. 

If we take the film on its own terms, and evaluate how well it accomplishes the tasks it sets for itself, I would only give this a grudging C minus.  It is nice to see someone lifting Wilhelm Reich once again into public view, but what you get here is a kindly, benign, grandfatherly figure who seems harmlessly eccentric, yet for some reason is relentlessly and severely pursued by the FBI and the FDA — quite unjustly as it appears.  But it doesn’t make sense.  If Reich were crazy, if his ideas were loony, if he were simply on some bizarre, fruitless quest destined to go nowhere, why would the FBI and the FDA spend so much time and energy trying to thwart him, stop him, silence him, and eventually put him in jail?  Reich was a much more rough edged person that what is portrayed in this film.  Reich was combative, driven, stubborn, nonconforming, egotistical, and paranoid (perhaps with good reason).  And his ideas were subversive.  However, one does not get that from this film.  I would like to see a little more clearly who was out to get him and why. 

Reich had considerable difficulty in his personal life.  The film shows some hints of ambivalence in his relationship with his daughter, Eva, but we don’t get any insight into this, no deep exploration that might reveal character or psychic conflict.  There is nothing about his background in Vienna, nothing about growing up, his parents, his first wife, Freud makes only a cameo appearance, and we do not see his influence on Reich nor the reasons they parted ways.  It is very shallow biographically.  It is hard to understand the point of this film.  Are they just trying to portray Reich as the hapless victim of a mindless vendetta by the U.S. government?    Is that all there was to it?  The film is completely vacuous on this score. 

The film brings up Reich’s disappointing relationship with Albert Einstein, but it leaves open whether Einstein himself considered Reich to be a quack or if Einstein’s aides blocked Reich’s access to Einstein and prevented their collaboration.  This is another point where, in my view, the dramatization does not offer enough substance to do the issue justice.   A more straightforward, documentary approach would have been more satisfying, here, and in many other issues raised by the film.  

To get started on understanding Reich, you have to understand his ideas on psychoanalysis and particularly his differences with Freud and the intellectual debt he owed to Freud.  In Reich Speaks of Freud, Kurt Eissler conducted a lengthy interview with Reich about Freud and related topics that is fascinating for its illumination of the personal relationship between Reich and Freud and the intellectual differences that led to their parting.  You can get a much better feel for who Reich was as a person and the direction of his ideas from this volume than you can from this film.  But this lengthy interview leaves much unexplored and unexplained, and that was where I was hoping the film would pick up and expand.  But, alas, it did not.  The film creates an impression of Reich that differs markedly from the Reich we see in this 1952 interview.  The Reich in the film is a tame version, a soft soap version of the Reich in the interview.  It is clearly a fictionalization and one that tends to obscure and distort rather than enhance ones understanding of the subject.  I came away very disappointed in this film.  There is a lot more I would like to know about Wilhelm Reich.  I hope someday someone will put together a film that will treat him with the depth and insight that he deserves. 

Seen at the Jewish Film Festival, Castro Theater, San Francisco, July 30, 2013.  

 

 

Higgins, Mary; and Raphael, Chester M.;  Eds. (1967)  Reich Speaks of Freud.  New York:  Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Celebrating its “four-and-twentieth” season, Marin Shakespeare Company has reached even farther into theatrical history and come up with a pre-Shakespearean hit, Thomas Kyd’s “The Spanish Tragedy.”
Kyd’s play was packing playhouses by the time Shakespeare arrived in London, and “Spanish Tragedy” was revived over and over, even after The Bard began producing his own work. He certainly would have seen it at least once, and dramatic evidence suggests he borrowed from it here and there.
Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” for instance, is rooted in the young prince’s vow to avenge his father’s death, a vow inspired by the father’s angry ghost. In “The “Spanish Tragedy,” it is the father who’s bent on getting revenge for his murdered son. Revenge is a character that lingers onstage in company with the ghost of another murder victim. (Revenge looks and sounds not at all as you might expect.)
The ghost’s former love — now a bereaved young woman — could almost stand in for Ophelia, and “Tragedy’s” smarmy, sneaky young nobleman could double for Iago, the villain in “Othello.” To top off the resemblances, Kyd even scripted a play-within-a-play as payback for the guilty parties, and as in Shakespearean plays to follow, the bodies begin to pile up.
Director Leslie Schisgall Currier has revived this gory old favorite, set it in a multi-level castle and cut it down to a manageable two hours and forty minutes’ playing time. The action begins with a tolling bell and a long funeral march of white-masked mourners. The deceased follows the march, describing the foul deeds that have made him a ghost. Ghost stays visible throughout the play, accompanied by Revenge.
The Duke of Castille, the King’s brother, describes the battle and shows off its most famous prisoner, Balthazar, Prince of Portugal. Horatio has helped apprehend him, though the Duke’s son, Lorenzo, claims that he was the real nabber. Lorenzo’s sister, Bellimperia, captures Balthazar’s attention, and in no time, speculations begin that a marriage between the two would cement peace between their nations. The young lady, however, had been the sweetheart of Don Andrea, now the Ghost pacing the battlements. She is not available, though her servant vows that the lady’s affections have recently turned to Horatio. This information enrages Balthazar; Horatio’s too much in his way.
But despite all the royalty represented onstage, the most complex character in “The Spanish Tragedy” is the judge, Hieronimo. When he finds his beloved son murdered, Hieronomo’s reaction is similar to King Lear’s over the corpse of his daughter, Cordelia. Justice now equals revenge.
In this large, outdoor performance space, trained voices enhance the show. Julian Lopez-Morillas is superb as Hieronomo, commanding the stage with a big voice and big emotions. Scott Coopwood, as the Duke of Castille has a similar presence, as does Jack Powell as the Viceroy of Portugal. Both Elena Wright in the role of Bellimperia and Jessica Powell as Hieronimo’s wife, Isabella, have roles with heavy vocal demands. Erik Johnson plays the ill-fated Horatio, and in three widely varying roles, Steve Price, who grew up on the Peninsula, portrays a Portuguese nobleman, a petitioner and a hangman. In a last-minute substitution on opening night, Liam Hughes took over the role of Balthazar. Twenty-five additional cast members round out this generously-sized production.
“The Spanish Tragedy” will play at the Forest Meadows Amphitheatre on the Dominican University campus until August 11 and in repertory with “A Comedy of Errors” after July 27. Friday, Saturday and Sunday evening performances are at 8 PM, with Sunday matinees at 4 PM. For tickets, directions and more information, call 499-4488.
As with all outdoor performances, dress for the weather and bring extra layers as the theatre gets cooler after dark. Picnics are welcome.

Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle

Josh Kornbluth is best described as the Woody Allen of the West.

Presently Josh is performing at the Ashby Stage a.k.a. the Shotgun Players.

Most of his previous work consisted of monologues delivered below street level (The Hungry Id (sic) in San Francisco and La Val’s Subterranean in Berkeley).

Now, merely twenty years into the business, Josh no longer descends below the sidewalk to get to the stage to perform in the case of SEA OF REEDS.

The fulcrum of SEA OF REEDS is his dilatory Bar Mitzvah at the sagely post-adolescent age of 52, four times the Hebrew National average for such ceremonies.

Josh explains, that as the son of communist parents, he spent his early years being a non-Jewish Jew and it wasn’t until he became a father that he became a humanist Jew believing that the collective imagination of man was actually God.

Assuming Josh is correct, God’s primary residence in Silicon Valley.

As prescribed by tradition, Josh is directed by his presiding rabbi to read a passage from the biblical prophets called the Haftorah.

Because Josh’s ceremony is in July, his reading assignment is from the Book of Numbers, Chapter 25 to be exact.

While most of Israel is hot during July, Josh holds his Bar Mitzvah in the Negev where one can bake matzo on the sidewalk.

In the passage Josh reads, the peripatetic Nation of Israel is temporarily abiding in Shittim; no scatological overtones intended.

Shittim was crawling with Moabite Shiksas and soon some wayward Israelites were dating—to use a PG-13 euphemism—the locals i.e. the Daughters of Moab.

As usual, one thing inevitably leads to the next; it’s a slippery slope: first it’s sidelong glances, then holding hands and in no time, these randy exogamous Israelites were kowtowing to the Pagan Goddess Baal Peor.

Baal Peor, is most politely translated, is the Cleft Deity; some theologians attribute modern pole dancing to her.

This Pagan Fertility Goddess demands rigorous obeisance and specific forms of surrender from her acolytes and votaries; none of which are PG-13 in priggish societies.

As reported in Numbers 25, Baal Peor revelry eventually spills into public view.

Zimri, the son of Salu, and his Midianitish consort Cozbi, the daughter of Zur make a public spectacle of themselves.

Phinehas, Zealous the Grandson of Aaron, is appalled by their exhibitionism.

Phinehas takes a javelin in hand and skewers both Zimri and Cozbi—the woman symbolically through her belly.

Thanks to Phinehas’ moral vigilantism it was believed that a plague was stayed from the children of Israel thereby saving thousands of lives: A seemingly happy ending.

Josh thinks he is expected to reconcile himself to this bit of tabloid zealotry.

Instead, his response is an elegant exhortation for tolerance and it is possibly the core message of the play.

If you go to the play, you owe it to yourself to stopping texting at this point and listen carefully to his Bar Mitzvah address.

One bay area critic has mistaken Josh’s earnestness and sincerity for didacticism—which is apparently a misdemeanor in theater.

The play is filling with amusing boyhood reminiscences of being raised peripherally Jewish without becoming Jewish.

It is filled with intelligent humor without falling back on the usual shticks like sex or politics.

Rather than going solo, this time Josh has Amy Resnick (who starred in Haiku Tunnel with him) to prod him along.

Amy is part director and part surrogate Jewish mother.

A quartet provides musical support as Josh plays the reeds of his oboe.

The play, while not elitist, is sophisticated humor; it prioritizes artistic success well ahead of popular success.

David Dower directs this delightfully entertaining piece.

For tickets call 510-841-6500 or go to shotgunplayer.org.