Category Archives: Nihilism

Ke Huy Quan swung that damn fanny pack everywhere. It hung from an unusually long strap, and for weeks Quan swung it in the kitchen, he swung it while watching TV, he swung it all over the house. I broke so many things, he says, laughing. My wife was not too happy about it. But Quan was determined to master his technique because that fanny pack plays the weapon in his big action scene in Everything Everywhere All at Once. Up to that point in the story, the film has mostly been a domestic drama, and Quans character, Waymond Wang, a meek, soft-voiced husband, father, and laundromat owner. When things suddenly go haywire, he tears off the fanny pack hes been wearing and whips it around with breathtaking expertise, using it in the style of a wushu rope dart to subdue a group of IRS security goons.

Everything Everywhere turns out to be a deeply emotional, multiverse-hopping sci-fi action-fantasy about life, family, culture clashes, and the cosmos. Its the second feature directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, who work together under the moniker Daniels, and as it proceeds, Quans performance explodes into different personae, all of whom frantically circle around Waymonds wife, Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), a harried Chinese immigrant who has just discovered she may be the only being powerful enough to prevent the forces of nihilism from destroying all of existence. Evelyn is the protagonist, but Waymond is in many ways the films heart and the first time he appears onscreen, you may realize youve seen Quan before. He looks a little older, a little wearier, but his face is seared into the brain of anyone who grew up in the 1980s: When he was 12 years old, Quan scored a lead role in one of the biggest movies of the decade, playing the wisecracking street-urchin sidekick Short Round in Steven Spielbergs Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Quan as Short Round. Photo: MARKA/Alamy Stock Photo

While the film was a huge hit in 1984, it was also controversial, criticized for its gore and its outdated, exotic-cultures-of-Asia story line. Still, kids loved Short Round. We wanted to be Short Round, the only child lead in a series we worshipped. A year later, Quan played the boy inventor and intrepid adventurer Data in another Spielberg-produced blockbuster, The Goonies. The friend group I had in middle school was obsessed with The Goonies we would watch it every week. I was the Asian kid of the group, so whenever we would go out and play pretend, the mantle of playing Data was put on my shoulders, says Kwan. And I loved it. That character is so smart and so brave and so weird. We didnt have many great role models.

But then Ke Huy Quan grew up. It didnt take long to discover that Hollywood roles for Asian men were few and far between. He did a few films in Asia. He left acting behind and went to film school, then started working behind the scenes. Decades passed. Not until Quan saw the success of Crazy Rich Asians in 2018 did he allow himself to think about performing again. I was happy working behind the camera, but this entire time something felt missing, he says. When those opportunities dried up, I spent a long time trying to convince myself that I didnt like acting anymore. I didnt want to step away with the feeling that it was because there were no opportunities. I was lying to myself.

He hired a new agent, and within just a couple of weeks he wound up with the script for Everything Everywhere. He stayed up all night reading it, waking his wife with shrieks of laughter: I had tears running down my cheeks. I said, I think this role was written for me!

It wasnt but the Daniels became taken with the idea of reviving Quans acting career. The hardest thing about finding this role was that it required a lot of different skill sets, says Kwan. He had to be able to speak Cantonese, Mandarin, English. He had to know martial arts. But he also had to be an incredibly believable sappy pushover. The directors imagined someone like Jackie Chan, who can serve as sweet comic relief one minute and perform dazzling feats of heroism the next. One day, on Twitter, I saw a picture of Ke Quan as Short Round, says Kwan. My brain was like, What is that guy doing right now?

I meet Quan, now 50, on a chilly, windswept day in Los Angeless Chinatown. Hes chatty and energetic as he shows me around this neighborhood, where his family including his mother, father, and eight siblings settled after arriving in the U.S. as refugees from Vietnam in 1979, when Ke was 8. The family, which has roots in Hong Kong and mainland China, tried to get out of Saigon twice. They succeeded by splitting up: Kes mother and three of the kids went to Malaysia. Ke, his father, and the rest of Kes siblings boarded a boat with thousands of other people; it was among the largest vessels involved in what was known as the Boat People crisis of the late 1970s and early 80s. They landed in a Hong Kong refugee camp.

It wasnt very big. We had a chain-link fence around the building, and it was just makeshift beds right next to each other, Quan says. There were guards to make sure we wouldnt get out. He pauses. I dont think Ive spoken about this stuff in 30 or 40 years. I knew that it was tough. I knew that was not my home. I knew we left a home behind. I knew I missed my brother. I missed my mom. They were stuck there for a year. He remembers the elation of getting U.S. visas and flying to L.A., where the family was reunited. It was the first and most important plane ride of Kes life.

We make our way to the historic Chinatown public school Castelar Elementary, where Spielbergs casting director, Mike Fenton, discovered Ke in 1983. The Temple of Doom team was desperate, searching all over the world Hong Kong, Singapore, London, New York to find the right child to play Short Round. But, strangely enough, they had not tried L.A. Kes younger brother David tried out for the part first. Ke had to wait while David auditioned, and he couldnt resist coaching his brother: I didnt know what the hell was going on. I was like, Hey, David, do this, do that! Fenton asked Ke if he would like to try out too; the first time he auditioned, his mother made him wear a three-piece suit with a little gold chain hanging off the pocket, he remembers, chuckling. Id never seen Star Wars. Id never seen Raiders of the Lost Ark. I walked in the room, and it was just three grown men with a beard and a mustache. They were Spielberg, George Lucas, and Harrison Ford. Three weeks later, Ke and his mother were on a plane to Sri Lanka.

A few other parts followed: The Goonies; one season of the sitcom Together We Stand, in which Ke played the adopted son of Elliott Gould and Dee Wallace; a season and a half as a transfer student on the high-school sitcom Head of the Class. Soon, though, the work dropped off. Quan remembers hanging out with other young actors at parties and feeling embarrassed hearing them talk about all the auditions they were going to. Yeah, this week I just have three auditions. I got five next week! And Im thinking, Man, the last audition I had was six months ago.

But he continued to fight literally. Quan loved Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung movies growing up, and hed been training with a Tae Kwon Do master ever since he started learning the martial art on the set of Temple of Doom. He leads me to an abandoned shopping center once called Bamboo Plaza, where we sit on some benches in an atrium surrounded by pigeons and long-shuttered businesses. He points to an empty storefront where one of his sisters used to have a travel agency. One day in 1998, he visited her while Lethal Weapon 4 was shooting in the mall. Behind the camera was his old Goonies director, Richard Donner. He also ran into Lethal Weapon 4s action director, Corey Yuen, whom hed met before. Quan was then studying film at the University of Southern California, and he told Yuen he would graduate in a year; one year later, Yuen called and asked if Quan could fly to Toronto on short notice to help with the fight sequences in a new film. It was X-Men. He taught me everything that goes into choreographing a fight sequence: how to shoot it, how to edit it, Quan says. It was one of the best times in my life.

He spent the next decade or so working on productions in the U.S., Hong Kong, and elsewhere, mostly as an assistant fight choreographer and assistant director. He learned the difference between how Hollywood and Hong Kong crews do action scenes: The former tends to plan everything in advance, while the latter choreograph as they go, making scenes look fresher, more spontaneous, and creative. As the assistant director on Wong Kar-wais 2046, he watched as Wong spent a whole day focused on one elaborate tracking shot, adding takes and tweaks long after everyone else agreed it was perfect. Quan brought the all-hands-on-deck attitude of Hong Kong shoots to his work on Everything Everywhere and some of the traditions too. Scheinert and Kwan (who compare Quan to a fun uncle who loves to party) say the actor insisted on getting a suckling pig for the first day of production; every time an actor shot a scene in which they had to die, Quan made sure they received a hongbao, a red envelope with money in it.

Quan and Michelle Yeoh as Waymond and Evelyn Wang.

For all his enthusiasm, Quan still carried the bruises from his last experiences acting in Hollywood. This was only Quans second acting gig in nearly 20 years. (The other was a 2021 Netflix film, Finding Ohana.) Even when he got the part of Waymond, he didnt tell anybody but his wife, his agent, and his entertainment attorney Jeff Cohen, who also happened to play Chunk in The Goonies because he was worried hed be fired a week into shooting. He couldnt believe he would be working alongside actors like Yeoh, whom he describes as the freaking queen of martial-arts movies. He became obsessed with getting everything right, working with a number of trainers and coaches to master Waymonds fighting skills and the vocal inflections and movements of his various iterations. If you look at the movie, theres a lot of whiplash moments where that character has to go from being like a dopey, wimpy emotional wreck to a straight-faced alpha male, Kwan explains. But we didnt have to resort to cutting or anything too overdramatic. It was all in his performance.

The picture bears the hallmarks of Quans many lives: Hong Kong action (the kind Yuen helped pioneer), melancholy lyricism (as perfected by Wong), and sci-fi fantasy that builds toward cathartic, unifying uplift (which one might call pulling a Spielberg). The film also channels something deeper, a sense of stifled potential unlocked. A few days after we speak, Quan will start shooting the new streaming series American Born Chinese alongside his Everything Everywhere co-star Yeoh, Daniel Wu, and Chin Han. Hes surprised to be a working actor again; he is relieved that he stayed the course. I dont think I could have played Waymond had this been ten or 15 years ago, Quan says. I needed all that life experience to give me the nuance and the depth to give me the different versions of him.

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Ke Huy Quan on 'Everything Everywhere All at Once' - Vulture

The Los Angeles Lakers lost again on Wednesday night, falling to 28-37 on the season, failing to pickup any cushion on a Pelicans team that lost to the lowly Orlando Magic earlier in the evening.

The Lakers likewise faced off against one of the leagues worst teams as they paid the Rockets a visit in Houston, and while their stars performed much better on the offensive end LeBron James had 23 points, 12 assists, and 14 rebounds and Russell Westbrook had 30 points, six assists, and eight rebounds they were conscientious objectors to the concept of defense, allowing the Rockets to pour on 139 points in what became an overtime win.

Jalen Green had one of his best games as a pro, scoring 32 points in the win, as the second overall pick from last June embraced the stage of playing the Lakers and took over to start the overtime period. In overtime, Houston opened things up with a 10-0 run, which included a three-pointer from Kevin Porter Jr. that was waved off after review because the shot clock had expired, to bury the Lakers almost immediately after the extra period started.

It was a disastrous performance from a team that has had a number of those this season, and after the game James Worthy summed it up best on the Lakers postgame show stating matter of factly that I didnt think we could hit a new low, but we hit a new low tonight.

I think my favorite part of Worthys remarks are him closing simply with they dont seem to believe in anything [theyre doing], because if you were to ask someone to describe the ethos of this Lakers team, nihilism certainly would have to be up there. Worthy on the postgame show has often been a more entertaining watch this season than the Lakers themselves, and tonight even he seemed more defeated than usual by what transpired in Houston.

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James Worthy Can't Believe The Lakers 'Hit A New Low' In Loss To Rockets - UPROXX

According to Lionel Latoszek of Long Jetty, nothing comes close to having to explain Column 8 in another language. My 18-year-old niece with rudimentary English was flicking through the pages of the Herald I had bought when leaving Sydney Airport for Poland in 2019, when she read in Column 8 about spotting a pair of budgie smuggler swimmers at the beach on the weekend. Can you imagine my already difficult task of explaining this with my limited Polish language skills? I tried to keep a straight face while her parents and her friends listened with mouths agape. In case your interest is piqued, the column in question was from January 29, 2019.

Hearing himself described by Kerrie Wehbe as one of the quirky nerds who need to get out more, only without the faces (C8), George Manojlovic of Mangerton offers the following correction. Kerrie, I take my face wherever I go, unattractive as it may be.

Rhoda Silber of Manly shares the description her brother Gus in Johannesburg uses to explain Column 8 (C8) to the uninitiated. The side-bar where all the cool, interesting and curious people hang out. Gus is clearly angling for inclusion as one of the quirky nerds.

Column 8 can now add gift guide to its growing list of attributes. Among the birthday gifts recently received by Don Bain of Port Macquarie was a king-size magnifying glass, requiring some strength to heft but more than capable of dealing with microscopic packet instructions. An appreciative shoutout to Richard Stewart, who was credited with the thought behind it, and who has spared me many a surly squint.

Reading of the renamed street in Latvia (C8) brought to mind images of Cold War spies for Randi Svensen of Wyong, and of a certain Nordic creativity. In Oslo, the street where many embassies are located is called Inkognito Street.

Writing to Granny as one grandparent to another, Jim Pollitt of Wahroonga heard the following word salad on his favourite radio station: The new vibe in the zeitgeist could be a blend of nihilism and opulence and wondered: Is it time for us to stand aside?

Betty Radcliffe of West Ryde recalls that a friend who was an academic at a shall remain nameless university, told her that, a few decades ago, scribbled above the toilet paper dispenser in a cubicle (C8) of the senior faculty loo was BAs, please take one.

Column8@smh.com.au

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Incognito in the zeitgeist - Sydney Morning Herald

A few weeks ago I came across an article about a kid who watches television at 1.5x speed so he can cram as much viewing in as he can. It seemed that his unquenchable desire to get through shows in the Golden Age of television meant hed sacrifice the entertainment value of the show just to get to the end.

Man, this guy would have been crucified in 1993, I thought.

As a 45-year-old card-carrying member of Generation X (those born between 1965 and 1979), I remembered a time when nobody bragged about the amount of TV they watched. In fact, they bragged about not owning a TV. I don't watch TV, man, people would say. It only exists to sell you stuff.

This complete reversal on the social acceptance of gluttonous TV viewing made me wonder what happened to the values we were raised on as Gen Xers? We were taught that sincerity was for simpletons, everything corporate is evil, old school is always better than the latest and greatest, authenticity is king, conformity is death and there is nothing worse than being a sell-out or a poser.

Nobody would have ever referred to themselves as an influencer in 1991thats the definition of a sell-out.

After writing this book, Im back in the mindset of 90s thinking, which is that nothing is worse than selling out, Chuck Klosterman, author of The Nineties: A Book, told Esquire. Nothing was more embarrassing in the 90s than trying to convince people to like the thing you made."

Deep inside the heart of almost every Gen Xer is a deep-seated feeling of nihilism. We didnt trust the corporations that laid off our parents or gutted their pensions in the 80s. In fact, everything corporate was predatory. We didnt have a lot of faith in family values because we were the first generation raised by single parents or in daycare. We didnt care much about politics either. Back in the 90s, Gen Xs aversion to politics was historic.

Of course, these are all generalities about a generation of nearly about 65 million people, but studies show that there are some definite hallmarks of being a Gen Xer.

According to a generational differences document circulated through the business community, Gen Xs core values are skepticism, fun and informality. Theyre described as self-reliant, independent, unimpressed with authority and motivated by freedom.

In the young Gen Xer, the culture of the era instilled a wariness and skepticism, and a kind of figure it out for yourself mindset, Paul Taylor, author of The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown told The Washington Post. And with that came a sense that you dont have to shine a light on yourself. Youre not the center of the universe.

But things have changed since the 90s when Gen X was coming of age. We live in an American culture that is fractured by political partisanship, fueled by a constant culture of outrage, crippled by a preoccupation with technology, plundered by greedy boomers and annoyed by overly sensitive millennials. All of this is happening while we face the greatest challenge of our times, climate change.

The answer to all of these problems is simple: admit that Gen X at one point had it right and if we followed its lead, we could reverse these terrible trends. OK, it might not fix all of our woes, but the way things are going now surely arent working. Plus, werent the 90s great?

Also, with hat in hand, I must admit that this message is for Gen Xers as well. Many of us have lost our way by forgetting our disdain for authority and skepticism toward institutions. This is a call for us to remember what we once stood for and to fight back by doing what we do beststaying above the fray.

Gen X, its time to strap on your Dr. Martens boots and get back to fighting the Battle of Who Could Care Less. Its time we collectively got our whatever back and showed the other generations how powerful dismissiveness can be.

Here are the top five Gen X values that we need to embrace again.

Nothing was less hip in the early 90s than wearing mall clothes. If you had any style you shopped at a thrift store and bought used duds from the 70s and early 80s and remixed them into something awesome. If you were into hip-hop or skating you shopped at the surplus store and rocked some super-durable Dickies or Carhartt gear. The mood of the times was totally anti-fashion. These days, we live in a world where fast fashion is killing the environment. By embracing the Gen X value of old-school cool, we can help the planet while looking much more fashionable in the process.

In the early 2000s, people fell head-over-heels in love with smartphone technology and social media so quickly that nobody stopped and said, Hey, wait a minute! Now, we have a world where kids are depressed, the culture has become divided and nobody talks to each other in public anymore, they just stare at their phones. I can totally understand why young millennials and Luddite boomers would fall for the big-tech ruse, but sadly, Gen X was asleep at the wheel and fell victim, too. The generation that embraced the notion that TV rotted your brain needs to remind everyone to go outside and play in the sunshine or read a book. And if you read a book it should be by Bret Easton Ellis.

Two of the most popular Gen X phrases were whatever and talk to the hand (because the face dont give a damn). These may seem to be flippant responses but they are the correct way to deal with other peoples nonsense and in 2022, we have to deal with a constant barrage of it.

Somewhere along the way, people forgot that its even more powerful to ignore someone than to admit they got under your skin. In the world of social media, we unintentionally amplify the most wretched voices by subtweeting, commenting and liking the posts from the army of grifters fighting for our attention.

We also live in an era where many seem to be addicted to outrage. The quickest way to stop fanning the flames of outrage is with a simple, whatever. Like dogs distracted by squirrels, weve got our heads on outrage swivels these days. Throwing around the occasional whatever gives us the time and energy to focus on the problems that really matter and take action.

These days whatever matters more than ever.

Good taste used to matter. In the 2000s, millennials decided that people have the right to like what they like and that its worse to judge someones personal taste than to have bad taste. Gen Xers based their entire personalities on taste and demanded integrity from artists and were rewarded by living in a time of superior films and music. These days, no one listens to new music and were stuck in a world dominated by comic book movies because no one stood up and shamed people for liking low-effort culture.

Americas political divide has calcified over the past decade because more and more people are basing their personal identities on their politics. This has created a culture where the dialog between liberals and conservatives has become a shouting match that only makes people dig their heels in further. Its also created a culture in Washington, D.C. that has attracted a more debased form of politician and led to the gridlock that has halted any sense of progress. Sadly, Gen X has also been sucked into this vortex.

Things were a lot different in the 90s. Back in 1999, Ted Halstead at The Atlantic noted that Xers appear to have enshrined political apathy as a way of life. He added that Gen Xers exhibit less social trust or confidence in government, have a weaker allegiance to their country or to either political party.

Compared to whats going on in America in 2022, this type of apathy seems welcome. Back in the 90s, taking a chill pill could solve everything. Wouldnt it be great if everyone took one, and then we could open our ears and hearts and have some constructive discussions?

There was a common lament in the 1980s that the boomer hippies had sold out and became boomer yuppies. They went from being concerned with peace, love and the planet to stocks, bonds and conspicuous consumption. Gen X is now in its 40s and 50s and its fair to say that we've moved from being the outsiders to creating technological and political machines that are generating the type of conformity that we once railed against.

Now that Xers are at the age where we get to run the world for a few decades, its time to recommit to the core values that make us well us. The great news is that as Gen Xers, itll be easy to get back to our roots because we were raised to ironically love the past.

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Five Gen X values from the 90s that can save todays world - Upworthy

Photo: FUNimation Entertainment; HBO

Spoilers follow for every season of Attack on Titan and Game of Thrones.

The ultimatum is out. At the end of Attack on Titans 80th episode, From You, 2,000 Years Ago, and nine years since since the shows debut, protagonist Eren Yeager initiates his plan to exterminate the vast majority of the human race by rumbling the weapons of mass destruction at his disposal: an army of brainless humanoid giants eager to trample the human race underfoot. Erens stated goal is to punish the world that has historically persecuted his people, the Eldians, by using the Titan powers that are both the Eldians curse and their genetic heritage.

Its a break-bad moment that, in both the anime and creator Hajime Isayamas original manga, frames his face like that of a menacing gargoyle, carved from stone and intransigent as he becomes the villain of his own story. You dont come back from mass murder.

Attack on Titans path to this point has been about as wobbly and disconcerting as its titular, grotesquely caricatured behemoths. For most of the fantasy seriess early seasons, the audience is told that humanity lives solely within giant walls erected to protect them from the rampant Titan threat. The world outside? A no-mans-land. Eren and his friends join the military and help hunt down the Titans right as he discovers he can turn into one at will. We learn over time that Titans arent beasts but Eldians who have been changed; that, in fact, there is a whole world beyond the walls; and that the Eldians are trapped in exile behind the walls, robbed of their memories by a conspiracy involving their royal family. Attack on Titan is a story about 2,000 years of violence and misery begetting increasingly more of the same. When the Eldians first discovered the Titan power, their enemies fought them until they managed to persecute the Eldians, ghettoize them, and steal the powers for themselves.

Erens mission is, in its indefensibly twisted way, a corrective to that history of violence. And its not a bluff, as his old comrades reckon with in the next episode, Thaw, which follows the aftermath of his declaration. He really means it when he says, The Wall Titans will trample every inch of the world beyond this island until every last life beyond our shores is wiped out.

That declaration, the explosiveness of these episodes, and the overall arc of this season of Attack on Titan collectively bring to mind another final-season heel turn: that of Daenerys Targaryen, who vowed, I will take what is mine with fire and blood, rode a black dragon into a city full of civilians, and indiscriminately torched it in the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones, a series I often fall back on when struggling to explain this highly divisive, dopamine-pumping anime to non-anime watchers. The shows share common references to Norse mythology, including magical trees, ancient creatures linked to those trees, and warriors who lose arms in tragic struggle. They were both adapted from sprawling fantasy texts George R.R. Martins A Song of Ice and Fire novels and Isayamas manga that are split into diverging, often conflicting points of view. They share an interest in shock value, viscera, decapitations, and (often problematic) allegory. They have a fair number of incestuous couplings: Jaime and Cersei, Jon and Dany, and Eren and Mikasa, who are in love despite having grown up in the same house as brother and sister. Their production schedules ran across years of high anticipation after shockingly brutal first seasons. They both led fans to petition for a change to the endings of their respective stories. They even share a few minor character designs because Isayama is apparently a Thrones fan. And their protagonists start out likable but grow so corrupted by power that the true heroes rally to stop them.

Game of Thrones has been criticized for ending in a cynical, nihilistic way, framing Danys actions in The Bells as the result of an inherent, genetic madness rather than a choice that felt earned. Erens final-season pivot is framed just as nihilistically, if not more so, spinning out of the revelation of a causal loop he created. In season four, as Eren and his brother, Zeke, explore the memories of their father, Grisha, they uncover the night he murdered the Eldian royal family and its children and took the power of their Founding Titan for himself. Attack on Titan reveals it was Eren who, by looking at this moment, managed to traverse time and goad his father to kill them, setting in motion the events of the entire series since Erens father gave him those same Titan powers that first manifested in season one. Put more simply: After four seasons of events that occurred only after Erens dad killed the royal family, stole their Titan powers, and passed them on to Eren, Eren went back in time to tell his dad who didnt want to kill children to kill the royal family and steal the Titan powers. Erens Back to the Future moment leads, eventually, to genocide.

Time-travel paradoxes can be plenty of fun in films like Looper or even weepily compelling in one like Interstellar, but this one feels literally created ex nihilo, or out of nothing, a phrase that comes up a lot when you read about paradoxes. Though it is foreshadowed in season three that a form of time travel (or, in this case, a kind of time omnipresence) will take place, making Eren responsible for both the start of his arc and his ultimate turn to villainy robs the evolution of its meaning, leaving behind an empty void for both Eren and the viewer. It feels like a moment out of Albert Camuss play Caligula, in which Caligula is crushed by his own nihilism. As the Roman emperor chokes Caesonia, his words echo Erens state of mind: I live, I kill, I exercise the rapturous power of a destroyer, compared with which the power of a creator is merest childs play.

Its not that Erens rage isnt justified. In From You, 2,000 Years Ago, we are shown the backstory of Ymir, the first Titan child, who lived 2,000 years before the events of the series. Her subjugation is horrifying; despite the fact that she became a military asset for the early Eldians, nothing could save her from being dehumanized in life and condemned to an eternity of servitude in death or save her descendants from centuries of pain. But rather than use his power to mete out some strategic advantage for his comrades or broker a peace compromise with the nations of the world, Eren would rather succumb to the hate, watch the rest burn, and make enemies of his loved ones.

Theres a whiplash to this. Narratively, arcs like those of Caligula, Daenerys, and Eren are more satisfying as cautionary tales. No one with a conscience roots for mass murder. But as Game of Thrones finale showed us, once youve let an audience fall in love with reprehensible characters, dramatizing their deaths often isnt enough. If you spend season after season valorizing characters only to rip the mask off at the end, audiences will crave a cogent, well-established reasoning for it, a counterargument for the time and sympathy theyve invested. The characters nihilism, ironically, needs to say something concrete. As audiences judged Game of Thrones, over time well ultimately judge Attack on Titan not by the onscreen cruelty it portrayed but by what it said about that cruelty once the dust is settled.

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'Attack on Titan' Echoes 'Game of Thrones' Death Rattle - Vulture

If you are planning for a year, sow rice; if you are planning for a decade, plant trees; if you are planning for a lifetime, educate people.Chinese Proverb

Posted on Feb 20, 2022 | Author HAMNA MUNIR

We all must be knackered by the repetitive deliberations and discussions on the subjects of Education, Academic Institutions, Student life, etc. But how many of us have reflected upon it with serious concern. It is as if we are ready to make amends in whatever seems redeemable but then give up due to indolence. What really is education? To some, it is a good degree in hand, a creditable post in an office of work; all in all, to live life well. Unfortunately, education has become more of a burden than a blessing in this day and age. We necessitate ourselves in this particular institution not as if by choice but a salient convention merely to be followed. Education maketh a man. This assertion is apodeictic and needs universal comprehension. However, what should also be understood is that not everyone comes through the same. Life is a staircase of certainty and disbelief, and the acceptance of both should be the sine qua non, to which everyone must adhere. One needs support regardless of what one wants to pursue, and the execution of ones performance in a particular field at a specific period should in no way be taken as a benchmark to ascertain their worth.

It has nearly been over two years now, and the global pandemic COVID-19 has positioned a threat to everything ubiquitously. Education has reached a fatal standstill, and efforts in this direction seem ineffectual. It appears that students are on a mere Sisyphus Climb reaching out for a better upcoming hopelessly. Albert Camus has veritably stated that, what is the point of living and not living in a universe devoid of order and meaning. That is precisely how the students perceive the world now. They are being predisposed towards nihilism rendering everything and anything unavailing. So how come one be brought out of it? It is a question of immense understanding. If you ask me, I will acknowledge the declaration that rectifying any problem we face is a human approach. Our etiquettes make us who we are and what impact we leave on others. We cannot change what is out there with immediate effect, but we can perceive things constructively.

A good outlook on education doesnt necessarily, as a matter of course, require one to indulge in esteemed colleges and universities and procure felicitous degrees. Although these are admirable but whats more fundamental is that one needs to be content with whatsoever one is engaged in. Above all, if you are satisfied with what you are doing, your perspective on life will be pragmatic, and eventually, you will pave the way to a world of better understanding. Unfortunately, the majority of the students are stuck in a quandary pursuing degrees they dont even relate to either by obligation or to meet up the ostensible standards of society. Nowadays, they are engaged in an infinite loop of online and offline adventures. Just as Estragon and Vladimir wait for Godot to come likewise, students wait for better days. Nevertheless, this continuance will come to a stop sometime someday as Jacques Derrida has truly verbalized that everything is a matter of deconstruction and demands questioning and analysis.

On the whole, my main motive to indite this write up is that we need to be less captious and more considerate. Not everything can be deliberated in terms of philistinism. One must aspire to keep their conscience content to live a blissful life. As Camus says, A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.

One must always imagine Sisyphus Happy.

(The Author has done PG in English Language and Literature from IUST and is currently pursuing B.ED from Kashmir University)

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Education: Handling the student/ Sisyphus Convolution - Rising Kashmir

The world is in turmoil, and even our calm and friendly neighbors to the north might no longer be immune to the strains of totalitarian right-wing lawlessness that have infected other countries, most prominently the United States. Is Canadas recent anti-government uprising an indication that there truly are no remaining safe havens from reactionary populist violence and nihilism?

In two recent columns on Verdict (here and here) and a companion column on Dorf on Law (here), I noted that more Americans than ever are considering leaving their country in search of a safer alternative. With large numbers of Republican politicians excusing violence, and with open talk of a civil war, it is understandable that people might think this is the time to move elsewhere.

I noted in those earlier columns that I am unlikely to join this migration, but I did refer to myself as someone for whom this is a viable option. Most people in non-professional jobs, and even the vast majority of those in the professions, simply lack the resources to consider emigrating, while others have children in school or non-transportable economic relationships that essentially require that they stay in the United States, for better or (more likely, unfortunately) worse. The pool of potential emigrants is thus not large as a percentage of the population, but it could still involve enough people to become a very important phenomenon if things continue to spiral downward in the US.

In those earlier columns, I concluded that Canada was a fairly definitive first-best answer to the question: Where to move? But is that answer likely to change, now that the Great White North has seen Trumpish disruptions that could be the harbinger of worse things to come? Although the future is yet to be written, the signs are still good that Canada and some other countries will continue to be relatively safe places for those who increasingly fear living in this country and who might be willing and able to bug out.

Before I address the changed political situation in Canada, there is a related question that I ought to address up front. After my first column was published, one very nice reader contacted me to ask about the legal barriers to moving to Canada. Because my focus in that column was on the where and the why, I had not talked about the how. Even if a person wanted to move to Country X, this reader asked, what is the legal process?

That is an important question, and it was especially pertinent to that particular reader, because he and his husband have actively been investigating a possible move to Canada. They are finding that the process is (unsurprisingly) complicated and expensive, and it is possible that even countries such as Canada that have relatively welcoming societies might nonetheless have laws in place that would rule them out as destinations for Americans who do not meet various entry criteria.

At a fundamental level, however, providing that kind of granular information is simply not what columns like this one are about. That is not my best value-added, as economists would say, because I am not an immigration lawyer. Fortunately, not only are there many good immigration lawyers out there, but the internet exists, and there is a treasure trove of information about the logistics of migration at our fingertips. Among other things, the governments of the countries to which I have referred in these columns all have extremely good official websites (offered in English, even in countries with other official languages).

In my Verdict columns last month, I noted in passing that a surge of Americans trying to move to Canada could quickly overwhelm their immigration system. Even short of that, there is no question that relocating across national borders is a unique challenge in the best of times, and it might not be possible at all.

I also noted, however, that an American who moved to Canada decades ago had sent me an email saying that someone in my situation (a mid-career academic with extensive international experience) would have an easy time meeting the Canadian immigration standards. His word, not mine. Going into any further detail would have turned the column into something far too specific, so I left it at that.

Rather than ignore the logistics entirely, however, it does make sense for me to write a future column in which I analyze the various criteria that countries have set in place to sort among potential entrants into their countries. Even though the focus of my analysis is still on why and whether to move, not how, I will summarize in that future column a few basic facts about Canadas criteria as well as similar key information about the rules for immigrating into a few other plausible destinations, including the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria, New Zealand, and Australia.

Again, however, the purpose of these columns is very much not to provide nuts-and-bolts advice. It is to analyze the growing threats of authoritarian and even fascist takeovers in what are thought of as stable democracies and to compare and contrast recent developments in the constituent nations of what has long been known as the free world.

Several weeks ago, a fringe group of big-rig truck drivers in Canada decided to protest a new rule that required truckers crossing the border into the United States to be fully vaccinated. This was a rule promulgated by the US government, mirroring a Canadian rule (that only applies to non-Canadians driving trucks into Canada), which surely seemed risk-free to the Biden administration, because Canadian truckers cannot vote in the American midterm elections.

The kindest thing one can say about the Canadian protests against the new American rule is that they were an attempt to petition their government to use its influence to convince the United States to change its vaccination laws. There is strong reason to doubt that such a nuanced thought process was ever a part of this outbreak of lawlessness, but even if it might once have been defensible in that way, the on-the-ground reality is a different story entirely.

The protest quickly became an occupation of the central area of the seat of Canadas national government in Ottawa, Ontario. The list of grievances became more and more unhinged, including demands that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau immediately resign or be removed from office.

Notably, the Canadian Teamsters union has been clear that it opposes this action. That is, this is not a truckers versus the government story but a tiny subgroup of truck drivers joining with other anti-government extremists to push a quasi-anarchist agenda. The protesters have been receiving money and lavish amounts of attention from American right-wing media and Republican politicians. It should, given all of that, come as no surprise that some of the protesters have been carrying Confederate battle flags around Ottawa.

Moreover, the protests have gone far beyond the familiar bounds of marching and rallying to seek redress. For weeks, the capital city has been enduring nonstop truck airhorns, diesel fuel-fouled air and noise from revving engines, and other disruptions. The people who live in those areas, many of whom are (because of Canadas welcoming culture) non-White, are being harassed with racist slurs and physical intimidation. And because hatred comes as a packaged deal, there is a great deal of misogyny as well.

What might once have been called peaceful protests have become illegal blockades, not only in one large city but on key border crossings into the US. The supposed defenders of regular guys thus ended up putting auto workers and those in related industries on both sides of the border out of work. But American opportunists like Senator Rand Paul are cheering this on, calling on American truckers to clog cities here in the US.

As we saw in the January 6 insurrection last year, government responses to lawlessness are much gentler when the protesters are White than when the gatherings are mostly others. Even so, Prime Minister Trudeau did finally take action, with the editorial board of The Washington Post praising him and saying that his government is right to proceed with caution to restore order. I am not, of course, saying that Trudeau should have acted rashly, but it does seem that he put up with far worse behavior from White protesters than even Canadians would have tolerated had this been a progressive, multiracial protest.

There is plenty to worry about in this situation, even for those who would never consider moving to Canada. But for those who might have been thinking about it, what has changed, if anything? In my January 20 Verdict column, I referred to the obvious choice for any American who thinks for even a moment about leaving this country: Canada. Is the choice less obvious now?

No, at least not based on what we currently know. One good sign is that, [a]ccording to a poll released Monday, 3 in 4 Canadians are fed up and want an end to the protest. Trudeaus popularity is apparently now sky-high, and the political situation in Canada is still very much opposed to Trumpish tactics and goals.

One of the Canadian scholars whom I have cited as being very worried about the deteriorating situation in the US is Stephen Marche. Is he worried about Canada going in the same direction? Given his clear-eyed pessimism about the degradation of democracy and the threats that right-wing populism pose to stable republics, I was relieved to hear him say the other night that the situation there is not spinning out of control.

Indeed, Marche pointed out that even Canadas conservative politicians are shunning these protesters, saying that the very few conservatives who have sort of flirted with supporting the trucker convoy have all backed away. Canadian conservatives have really kept their integrity and kept their decency, and they do not want disorder for disorders sake. He concludes: Canadian conservatives are opposed to this in a broad sense, and I think that that is something that is very important for our country. (Marche also wrote about this in an article in The Atlantic this past weekend.)

A member of the Canadian comedy troupe Kids in the Hall had a famous quip that a Canadian is like an American, but without a gun. Thus, it should not be surprising that there is a subset of Canadians who are like a subset of Americans in their extreme anti-government views. But the without a gun part of the story is very real, and it is no joke. Canada allows more gun ownership than many other countries do, but their country is not awash in military-grade weapons in the hands of unlicensed and untrained civilians.

Police in Alberta did announce the other day that they had seized a large cache of guns and ammunition from a group that was plotting to use violence in the ever-escalating trucker standoff, so domestic terrorism is a threat there, as it is everywhere.

Still, if one were thinking purely in terms of personal safety, the recent news from Canada would not come close to tipping the balance back toward the United States. And even short of the violent aspect of the recent unrest, knowing that all but the most extreme Canadian politicians are refusing to try to foment and escalate the lawlessness is reason to feel some confidence in Canadas future tranquility.

Again, this column is not a how-to guide to emigration. It is, instead, an observation that the sense of foreboding that many people in this country feel is being mirrored by unfortunate developments in even the most placid foreign countries. As it stands, however, the last few weeks in Canada serve less as a warning of trouble brewing and more as confirmation that their inclusive political system and welcoming society continue to be quite inhospitable to the kinds of tear-it-all-down extremism that have become sadly mainstream in Americas Republican Party.

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Second Thoughts? How the Anti-Government Protests in Canada Affect Americans Who Might Want to Move There - Justia Verdict

Plenty of movies capture the punk rock attitude and aesthetic as it exploded in the late 1970s and early 80s: Repo Man, D.O.A., The Great Rock & Roll Swindle, The Decline of Western Civilization, even Sid and Nancy. But perhaps no movie captures the nihilistic pull of punk in the shadow of the 60s countercultures collapse than Dennis Hoppers nearly lost Out of the Blue, which opens in a gloriously restored edition at the Hollywood Theatre this weekend.

Hopper, who rocketed to directorial prominence with 1969s Easy Rider, was just as suddenly cast into the wilderness after the debacle of his followup, 1971s The Last Movie. Nearly a decade later, he was cast in Out of the Blue as Don, the father to the films teenaged protagonist, CeBe, played by Linda Manz. The story goes that, a couple of weeks into production, Hopper took over the directing chores, rewrote the screenplay, and ended up producing a stunningly potent drama that doesnt come by its nihilism cheaply.

Truth be told, there are two geniuses to thank for Out of the Blue, and Manz is the other. From her screen debut in Terence Malicks Days of Heaven, Manz exuded a unique, genuine combination of spunk and vulnerability. Her CeBe is a paradigm of lost youth, worshipping Elvis and the Sex Pistols in equal measure while pining for her pop, whos in prison after drunkenly driving his semi into a school bus full of children. Left in the care of her drug-addicted mother (Sharon Farrell), CeBe runs away to join the punk scene in Vancouver, B.C. Theres a fantastic sequence, in which she attends a show by a band called Pointed Sticks and gets to sit in for the drummer briefly, that captures the thrill of collective rebellion and unfettered expression beautifully.

Alas, CeBes escape is only temporary, and shortly after shes returned home, Don is paroled. (Six years for multiple vehicular homicide seems light, but this is Canada) He gets a job at the local garbage dump, and theres the barest hint of redemption in the air. But Don is, it turns out, irredeemable. His coming-home party devolves into drunken, rage-filled mayhem. CeBe, who has preserved an image of her father in her mind all these years, finally comes face to face with his true, despicable nature.

The movie gets its title from Neil Youngs My My Hey Hey, which reprises repeatedly throughout and seems to have inspired the character of CeBe. (The king is gone but hes not forgotten; this is the story of Johnny Rotten.) And, as Young sings, the only way out of the blue is into the black, so thats the path CeBe takes. If Hopper thought that Out of the Blue was his chance at a directorial comeback, he certainly didnt compromise in order to make it more commercial.

Out of the Blue premiered at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival, but despite good reviews from Roger Ebert and Vincent Canby, it didnt get a (token) U.S. release until a couple years later. It then basically vanished, although Sean Penn liked it enough to hire Hopper to direct Colors, the film that did jumpstart his filmmaking career, later in the decade. This new 4k digital restoration, presented by indie stalwarts Natasha Lyonne and Chloe Sevigny, looks amazing, especially considering the movies minimal budget.

Hopper was always unfairly tagged as a sort of hippie auteur, but what made him and his work so complicated was his appreciation for the dark side of the counterculture. With Out of the Blue, he holds an unflattering mirror to the disillusionment and psychic hangover of the post-Vietnam years, a mirror that reflects both its specific time and a universal, generational rage. (Opens Friday, Feb. 18, at the Hollywood Theatre.)

Strawberry Mansion: The character actor Kentucker Audley has maintained a thriving parallel career as a director of no-budget films, and this, his latest, is his most ambitious. Its set in the year 2035, and centers on James Preble (Audley), an ordinary tax auditor. Ordinary, that is, except for the fact that what he audits are dreamsin this future, were all taxed on any products that appear in our dreams. He arrives at the home of an elderly, eccentric artist (Penny Fuller), who hasnt paid her taxes in years. To audit her dreams, which are preserved on thousands of VHS tapes, he must watch them all using a sort of deep-sea-diver helmet contraption.

Wait, it gets weirder. As Preble investigates the womans dreams, he finds himself drawn to the younger version of her (Grace Glowicki) he meets there. He also comes across a devilish, capitalistic conspiracy designed to bring advertising into our subconscious minds. Theres also a saxophone-playing waiter with the head of a frog, sailors with rat heads, and a lot of fried chicken. In other words, its a gloriously weird cult classic in the making.

Strawberry Mansion, which Audley co-wrote and co-directed with Albert Birney (who plays Frog Waiter), is a masterpiece of inexpensive ingenuity, using handmade practical effects and convincing, lo-fi digital work to conjure a vision thats somewhere between Michel Gondry and David Lynch. And the message at its core is one that a filmmaker such as Audley can surely appreciate: never let the people with money tell you what to dream. (Opens Friday, Feb. 18, at the Living Room Theatres. Many of Audleys previous films are available to stream through Amazon Prime.)

Breaking Bread: The latest culinary documentary to come down the pike combines mouth-watering foodie fare with a positive political message. It follows Dr. Nof Atamna-Ismaeel, the first Arab winner of Isreals Master Chef, who starts a festival where Arab and Israeli chefs collaborate on dishes that honor their respective traditions. Maybe resolving this regions age-old problems involves more than just not being hangry, but its a good place to start. (Opens Friday, Feb. 18, at the Living Room Theaters)

TAG! Queer Short Festival: The 2022 edition of this fest is streaming-only, but is presented by the Hollywood Theatre. It features dozens of short films from around the globe, exclusively directed by queer and trans folk. The movies are organized into six themed blocks, one of which will debut online each day between Feb. 21 and Feb. 26. Purchasing a ticket to a given block will allow access through March 6. For more information, go here.

Marc Mohan moved to Portland from Wisconsin in 1991, and has been exploring and contributing to the citys film culture almost ever since. As the former manager of the landmark independent video store Trilogy, and later the owner of Portlands first DVD-only rental spot, Video Vrit, he immersed himself in the cinematic education that led to his position as a freelance film critic forThe Oregonianfor nearly twenty years. Once it became apparent that newspaper film critic was no longer a sustainable career option, Mohan pursued a new path, enrolling in the Northwestern School of Law at Lewis & Clark College in the fall of 2017. He cant quite seem to break the habit, though, of loving and writing about movies.

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FilmWatch Weekly: 'Out of the Blue' and 'Strawberry Mansion' - Oregon ArtsWatch

Fyodor Dostoyevsky by Vasily Perov, 1872.(Photo by VCG Wilson / Corbis via Getty Images)

The first act of Fyodor Dostoevskys Crime and Punishment is not what you would call straightforward. The novel opens with a dropout law student heading to the apartment of a local pawnbroker, where he sells a trinket and then plans how he will murder her later. He then goes to a dive bar and listens to the endless sob story of a drunken civil servant, escorts him home, and goes to bed. The next morning he wakes up and reads a 10-page letter from his mom, wanders around the city, passes out in a bush, and has a nightmare about a bunch of guys beating up a horse. He then wanders around some more until he overhears the pawnbrokers sister saying shes going to leave their apartment the following evening, at which point he returns to his bed and sleeps through most of the next day. He wakes up in the evening, walks downstairs, steals an axe, heads to the pawnbrokers apartment, and murders her with it, then murders her sister when she unexpectedly shows up and finds him in the apartment.

As is ever the case with the novels of Dostoevsky, the opacity of this narrative is part of the reason for its irreducible magnetism. The works of the great Russian novelists major period often feel like they have been assembled post facto by some kind of collage artist, or else have been abridged at crucial points by a redactor who believed rationality and evenhandedness to be cardinal artistic sins. When reading Dostoevsky, one often gets the paranoid feeling that the real story is happening somewhere else, just around the corner or on the other side of town. Perhaps the best description of this phenomenon is from a long-lost lecture by T.S. Eliot, who states that in Dostoevskys novels there are everywhere two planes of reality, and that the scene before our eyes is only the screen and veil of another action which is taking place behind it.BOOKS IN REVIEW

The inscrutability of Dostoevskys fiction is also what has attracted so many of its interpreters. The gnomic pronouncements that fill his pages almost cry out for easy explanation, and that is what Kevin Birmingham tries to provide in his new book, The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece. Intertwining the tale of Crime and Punishments composition with the story of Pierre-Louis Lacenaire, an infamous French spree killer whose deeds fascinated Dostoevsky, the book announces itself as the first to provide sustained attention to what Lacenaire meant to Dostoevsky and how his years-long consideration of the French murderer shaped his understanding of both the nature of evil and the way it was evolving amid the centurys new ideas and tribulations. The author of a book about James Joyces Ulysses that discusses the novel in light of the censorship controversy that followed its publication, Birmingham attempts to do something similar with Lacenaire, using the real-world story of the French murderer to throw light on the famous character of Raskolnikov. The result is unsatisfactory on two counts. The first is that Birmingham has great difficulty proving his central claim, that the gentleman murdererinspired a masterpiece. The second is that the claim itself is not a very interesting one. What makes Crime and Punishment so great is not the character of Raskolnikov but the dark moral universe that he inhabits.

It takes quite a while for Birmingham to arrive at the book and Lacenaire. The first half of The Sinner and the Saint is devoted to a truncated biography of Dostoevsky, from his childhood until the time he began work on Crime and Punishment at the age of 44. The authors life story is one of the strangest and most compelling in literary history, so its understandable Birmingham wants to review the greatest hits. He shows us Dostoevsky ranting at his engineering academy classmates about Schiller, fainting in front of a blonde lady at a ball, getting condemned to death for taking part in a radical reading group, receiving a commutation from the czar just before his execution, gawping at fellow convicts during his eight-year sentence in Siberia, returning home to develop a roulette addiction, losing his brother to a liver ailment and his first wife to a disease that made blood gush from her throatyou get the idea.

The authoritative biographies of Dostoevsky by Joseph Frank and Leonid Grossman are bound to loom large over anyone who writes about the novelist, so Birmingham focuses on the material most relevant to Crime and Punishment. He interrupts Dostoevskys gruesome life story to tell us about the development of nihilism as an intellectual movement in Russia, running from the devilish German egoist Max Stirner to the famous radical thinker Nikolai Chernyshevsky, author of the seminal proto-socialist handbook What Is to Be Done? But Birminghams biggest innovation in the first half of the book is to splice into its sections some biographical chapters on Lacenaire, a well-to-do layabout poet who murdered two innocent people in the 1830s to provoke bourgeois society. These chapters build, and soon we begin to realize where they are going: A year before he began work on Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky started studying Lacenaires crimes. He did so not for a novel but an article about instincts and Lacenaire, an article he abandoned around the time he began Crime and Punishment.

The idea here is clear enough: Birmingham wants to show that Dostoevsky drew on the intellectual precedent of nihilism and the biographical precedent of Lacenaire in creating his famous murderer. The former claim is well-established, as a number of contemporary philosophers espoused an egoism that bears a resemblance to Raskolnikovs own professed belief system. The latter claim, though, gives Birmingham a bit more troublehe cant demonstrate in any meaningful way that Lacenaire was a primary influence on Crime and Punishment.

The first problem is that the differences between Lacenaire and Raskolnikov could not be more pronounced, choice of murder weapon notwithstanding. Lacenaire was a kleptomaniacal dandy who seems to have possessed a sincere enjoyment for violent acts, and he delighted in the hysterical attention he received from the press and the youth of Paris after his capture and imprisonment. Indeed, his prison cell became a kind of literary salon in which he would receive starstruck visitors and dispense memorable mots for dissemination in the newspapers. Raskolnikov shares his philosophy that humankind can be divided into headsmen and victims, but in everything else he is Lacenaires opposite: He is broke, erratic, self-loathing, and remains unsure about his murderous intentions up until the very moment the axe hits the pawnbrokers skull. Despite his ranting self-justifications, he has little interest in robbing the pawnbrokerhe neglects to take most of her money, for one thing, and he hides what little he does take under a rock in the courtyard of an apartment building. Current Issue

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The second problem is that there were several other obvious models for Raskolnikov, some of them even more interesting than Lacenaire. First there was Orlov, an unrepentant murderer whom Dostoevsky met in Siberia and whom he described as a new type of man; then there was Chistov, a religious schismatic (or Raskolnik) who murdered two women with an axe and whose story made Dostoevsky sick for weeks. Even after the first volume of the novel was published, two more sources of inspiration appeareda law student named Danilov, who murdered a pawnbroker in Moscow (the similarities seem to be a coincidence), and a political radical named Karakozov, who attempted to assassinate the czar in broad daylight. All four of these models made deep impressions on Dostoevsky while he was writing Crime and Punishment, and though Birmingham has to mention them in order to stay faithful to the history, he never explains why Lacenaire gets star billing as Raskolnikovs prototype, especially since the two are so dissimilar in temperament . (This is to say nothing of Birminghams assertion that the lives of thepoet-murderer and convict-novelistfaintly resemble each other, a claim in dire need of emphasis on the word faintly.)

Birmingham thus understandably leaves it up to the reader to infer the parallels between Raskolnikov and Lacenaire, a tack that doesnt help out all that much given that Dostoevsky left a trail of evidence that undermines this thesis. The novelist drafted many hundreds of pages of notes for the noveloutlines, philosophical summaries, deleted scenes, alternate endings, even pictographic character sketchesand yet he does not appear to mention Lacenaire in any of them, at least not the ones that Birmingham has excavated for inclusion in his account. Indeed, the notes show that Raskolnikov was not modeled on any specific person or idea but rather hewn over the course of months out of a whole universe of psychological and philosophical material. Like Stavrogin in Demons and Dmitri in The Brothers Karamazov, Raskolnikov is not the facsimile of an existing person imported from the real world but an organic creation, the manifestation of a particular species of delusion and bad conscience.

The mystery [of Crime and Punishment] is not who killed the pawnbroker, Birmingham writes at the start of his book. The mystery is why. Is it, though? Thats what every high schooler who reads the novel is told, but in the narrative itself the question is far from mysterious. The erratic Raskolnikov is remarkably consistent throughout the novels 500 pages about his two reasons for murdering the pawnbroker: First, he wants to steal some money to raise himself out of poverty, and second, he wants to take a new step in the tradition of great historical figures like Napoleon. He offers this reasoning to himself and to the prostitute Sonya, and he even hears it repeated back by the detective whos trying to goad him into a confession. In one of the novels more ham-handed plot points, its even revealed that Raskolnikov wrote a law article called On Crime in which he justifies murder on the exact same grounds.

When it comes to Crime and Punishment, the question of motive may be the least interesting way to approach the great novel. As Birmingham himself points out, Dostoevsky refrained from bringing most of Raskolnikovs inner impulses to the surface of the narrativewe dont see him thinking to himself that hes falling in love with Sonya, we get almost nothing on the loss of his father, we dont even know why he dropped out of law school. That Dostoevsky confines all this material to the novels subtext but takes great pains to narrate Raskolnikovs reasons for committing the murder should tell us something about where he thought the true heart of the novel lay.

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Only once you look beyond Raskolnikovs motivation can you appreciate Crime and Punishment for what it is: a battle royal between psychologies. The novel isnt just about the nihilistic murderers journey into the arms of the all-virtuous prostitute but also about the cramped social sphere in which both his crime and his redemption take place. You cant understand Raskolnikov without setting him alongside his dithering mother, his all-seeing younger sister, the babbling and disgraced civil servant Marmeladov, the loving Sonya, and the pretentious fop Luzhin, to say nothing of the depraved and cynical landowner Svidrigailov, a presence so malign and irresistible that he hijacks the last portion of the novel altogether, overpowering Raskolnikov in a tense barroom conversation and stealing the show for a solo scene that leads up to his dramatic suicide. These characters reproduce the social types of their day, but they also transcend them, so that the novel is more a drama of spiritual fragmentation than it is one of ideological competition. Crime and Punishment is about more than one form of spiritual degradation: It asks not just what could drive an individual to murder but also what else can happen in a world where murder is possible. To focus on the historical genesis of Raskolnikovs motives and methods misses the forest for the trees: The murderer only becomes mysterious and inscrutable in the context of the psychological carnival that surrounds him.

Dostoevsky began Crime and Punishment as a first-person confessional in the tradition of his earlier Notes From Underground, but he changed to the third-person omniscient midway through the writing process, as new characters like Svidrigailov and Marmeladov came to take up more space in the narrative. Just as Dostoevsky had a reason for shifting his novel from the first to the third person, he may also have had a significant reason for calling the book Crime and Punishment instead of, say, Murder and Penal Servitude or even The College Dropout. There is more than one type of crime in the novel, and more than one punishment. It is understandable that Birmingham might want to focus on why Dostoevsky wrote about a man who kills a pawnbroker and gets sent to Siberia, but an attentive reader is apt to find that the novels true subject is a different kind of punishment, one that has nothing to do with the judicial system. This is the punishment of consciousness in a raucous world, Dostoevsky tells us; this is the punishment of living in a sinful universe and knowing that the afterlife may be nothing more than, as Svidrigailov puts it, a room full of spiders. Readers interested in criminal behavior will find no shortage of contemporary literature that can satisfy their curiosity better than Crime and Punishment or Birminghams exegesis on the novel. Those who are interested in the more profound sweep of human experience, though, will find that Dostoevsky still has a great deal to say.

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What Inspired Crime and Punishment? - The Nation

Read the reviews that the German conductor Michael Gielen received during his career, and you find a running theme.

He looks like an academician, Raymond Ericson reported in The New York Times after Gielens New York Philharmonic debut in 1971. His baton technique is not flamboyant; it is clear and precise.

A year later, the Times critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote, of a concert with the National Orchestra of Belgium at Carnegie Hall, that his Mahler was almost painfully literal.

A sensuous approach is exactly what the unsentimental Mr. Gielen is unprepared to give, he added.

Eleven years after that, Donal Henahan complained of a Carnegie visit with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, which Gielen led for six seasons in an initially confrontational, eventually admired tenure: Even Bruckner wants to sing and dance at times. This rather schoolmasterish performance denied him that pleasure.

These were meant as barbs. But Gielen gloried in the critical discomfort, in defying the expectations of a culture industry he thought had its priorities all wrong. When a Cincinnati Enquirer reporter asked in 1982 if he was too cerebral an artist for his own good, Gielen said, If I compare what I do to what I hear of certain less intellectual colleagues, then I must say I agree myself. Nothing is more horrible than stupid music-making.

Nobody could possibly accuse Gielen, who died in 2019, of that. One might now think him narrow in his doctrinaire modernist focus; or see him as misguided, even elitist, in forcing listeners to hear what he thought good for them; or not share the ever more pessimistic leftism that informed his work.

But Gielen raised fundamental questions in his conducting. He interrogated music for what it had said at its creation, and asked what it had to say to the present. He insisted that old and new works said similar things in different accents, and he thought audiences lazy if they could not hear that. He believed it dishonest to settle for easy answers: Beethovens Ninth Symphony so troubled him in the century of Auschwitz and Hiroshima that he spliced Schoenbergs A Survivor From Warsaw between its slow movement and its Ode to Joy finale, a choice that expressed his lifelong commitment to shattering complacency.

Art offers the opportunity to encounter the truth, Gielen wrote in 1981 to Cincinnati subscribers who were rebelling against his rule. And thats not always pleasant.

Even if Gielen mellowed a little over the years, pleasant would be the wrong word to describe the recently completed Michael Gielen Edition from SWR Music: 88 CDs that cover five decades of recordings and offer the deepest insight yet into this conductors work, from Bach to Zimmermann.

Many have been available before; some are new to disc; other important releases must be found elsewhere. But there is more than enough in its 10 volumes to confirm Gielen as one of the most stimulating conductors of the 20th century.

He made the bulk of these recordings with the SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg, the radio ensemble that he led from 1986 to 1999 and worked with until just before its demise in 2016 in part with the intention of using its practically unlimited rehearsal time to make an archive of recordings as close as possible to his intentions.

Those intentions were often provocative, in the best sense. With his strict analytical clarity and his facility for transparency, Gielen stripped as much personal emotion out of scores as he could, which had immense payoffs in Mahler, even in Beethoven. His Haydn does not chuckle as freely as it might; his Mozart is robust, not prettified; his Bruckner has little interest in storming the heavens he denied, though it does plumb the depths he saw all around him.

But relaxation or enjoyment could more properly be found eating well, or taking a good shower, than in engaging with music, Gielen told The Times in 1982. His recordings were made for the head more than for the heart. Gielens was conducting to think with, and he is worth thinking with still.

Music and politics were combined from the start for him. Born in Dresden in 1927 to Josef Gielen, a theater and opera director, and Rose Steuermann, a soprano noted for her Schoenberg, Michael and his family fled the Nazis, eventually settling in Buenos Aires in 1940.

Surrounded in Argentina by refugees who had no sympathy for the style of the conductors who stayed behind to serve the Third Reich, Gielen, a rptiteur and budding conductor at the Teatro Coln, gravitated toward the textual literalism of his two antifascist idols, Erich Kleiber and Arturo Toscanini. He shunned what he called the gigantomania of Wilhelm Furtwngler, under whom he would uncomfortably play continuo for Bachs St. Matthew Passion in 1950.

Back in Europe, Gielen focused on opera during the first half of his career, though not exclusively so. He was a staff conductor at the Vienna State Opera, then had spells leading the Royal Swedish Opera and the Netherlands Opera, before eventually triumphing as general music director of the Frankfurt Opera, then the most aesthetically ambitious house in Germany, from 1977 to 1987.

Lamentably little of Gielens operatic legacy survives. But working with the dramaturge Klaus Zehelein, he built Frankfurt into a crucible of Regietheater or directors theater, in which the directors vision tends to dominate hoping to restore something like the original shock of pieces that he thought had become bland under the weight of performance traditions.

For Gielen, there were two ways to do something similar in the concert hall. One was to come up with programming that radicalized the old and contextualized the new. So he made a montage out of Weberns Six Pieces and Schuberts Rosamunde; put Schoenbergs more classically-inclined works next to Mozarts more Romantic ones; and stuck Schoenbergs Expressionist monologue Erwartung before Beethovens Eroica.

Gielens other method remains bracingly apparent on record: an interpretive technique that prized restraint. Other musicians working at the same time explored period instruments as a way to recover the shock of the worn, but he thought that path illusory (even if he invited Nikolaus Harnoncourt to conduct in Frankfurt). Putting on a wig doesnt make me an 18th-century man, he wrote in his memoirs.

Instead, Gielen tried to clarify structures through a careful analysis of tempo relationships, and to expose details, though not so many as to muddy the overarching form. Critics often suggested that he aimed for an objective interpretation, but he knew that there were many ways to expose the truths he found in a work. The three accounts of Mahlers Sixth that are available on SWR, from 1971, 1999 and 2013, take 74, 84 and 94 minutes: the earliest brisk, streamlined; the middle one the dark heart of his essential complete Mahler survey; the last unbearably slow and heavy, consumed from the start with a desperate nihilism.

Gielen thought he would be remembered as an exponent of the Second Viennese School and of contemporary music, and the two SWR sets dedicated to that work are exemplary. There is anguish in his Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, but also a forlorn lyricism; like much of Gielens conducting, these sit somewhere between the clinical angularity of Pierre Boulez and the warm intensity of Hans Rosbaud, Gielens predecessor in Baden-Baden. The six-disc volume of post-World War II music one CD, dedicated to Jorge E. Lpezs astonishing Dome Peak and Breath Hammer Lightning, comes with a health warning for its extremes of volume is a despairingly intense affair. Ligetis Requiem, which Gielen premiered in 1965, practically smokes with rage.

But Gielens approach generated equally fascinating, complicated results in other music, too. His taste for detail fully convinces in late Romanticism, where his repertoire was particularly broad. Rachmaninoffs The Isle of the Dead comes off as a colossal masterpiece; Schoenbergs Gurrelieder is given expansive treatment, a Klimt glittering blindingly; Schrekers Vorspiel zu einem Drama has never sounded so glorious.

Gielens ability to seem as if he was getting out of the way of the music he conducted lets these kinds of scores stand in full bloom, with the effect of demonstrating exactly why later composers reacted so strongly against them including Gielen himself, in his few, stark works.

Elsewhere, Gielen felt it necessary to stamp out overkill in Romanticism where it was unwarranted above all in his Beethoven, which still has unusual energy, even if many conductors have since come around to Gielens once-unusual insistence on trying to keep up with the composers controversial metronome markings.

That energy is not at all benign; for Gielen, the violence in Beethovens scores is as much a part of their humanity as their idealism is. While the Eroica was for him a genuinely revolutionary piece that built a new social existence around individual dignity in its finale he recorded it repeatedly, and enthrallingly the Fifth Symphony he believed a terrible awakening. The relentless C major hammering of its finale evoked not triumph or freedom, Gielen wrote, but affirmation without contradiction, and with it the trampling of any opposition, imperial terror. If his 1997 recording does not fully convince it sounds empty, even barren you suspect its not supposed to.

Complexity where others found simplicity; enigmas where there might seem to be answers. For Gielen, there was no escape. You see me helpless before the confusing picture of the last century, he wrote near the end of his autobiography.

All that was left was to think about music. That always had more truths to offer.

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His Conducting Wasnt Always Pleasant. But It Was the Truth. - The New York Times