Thracian Girl

This post is going to be a little more esoteric than the rest, but hopefully it will resonate with some of you out there.

Since my sophomore year of college, I have prided myself in possessing a certain kind of darkness. I started wearing all black, which continued for a couple of years. It fit in with my political theorist persona, and I adorned it with heavy metal waist belts and leather boots. I spent my first two years of graduate school writing about S&M, watching Bunuel films, and reveling in the anxiety of despair.

Hedonism can be a wonderful thing. When I was nineteen someone said to me: “Youth is wasted on the young.” And for better or worse I took it to heart. I love drinking good wine, eating swine wrapped in swine, and I like my steak a little bloody. Nothing gives me more pleasure than a delicious meal, eating out, or cooking in; I love food. No Reservations has a whole episode dedicated to the pornography of food for a reason: It’s sexy, delicious, and satisfying. Food is an easy way to continually assuage the pleasure cycle of wanting, desire, and satiation. Salt, salt, salt, saturated fat, wetness, texture, the joys of mastication are unparalleled. And I have always taken a certain sadistic pleasure in slowly eating a steak, or biting into a perfectly tender piece of pork belly.

Lately, I have been starting to question my indulgences though, my self-discipline, and what really gives me lasting pleasure. A combination of reading Plato and doing yoga daily has given me a new sense of what balance and harmony could feel like. Reading The Republic, it is hard to ignore the argument that Plato’s Socrates makes for a balanced soul – a kind of ying and yang between rigid discipline and little indulgences. A strong intellectual life is neatly paired with rigid physical training, and desire is tempered by reason. Plato realized the essential nature of education, which is why most of the Republic is dedicated to the education of citizens and guardians, and the development of daily life. In implementing a strict reading schedule with a rigorous yoga practice, my body has started to feel more unified than it has – ever. After a while you begins to realize where your weaknesses are, and there is nothing more delightful than feeling your body becoming stronger, opening up, and being balanced.

Which is why my body was upset with me last weekend, after an over-indulgent trip to Chicago where I gorged on crispy pig tail, lamb belly, lamb heart, beef sausage, mortadella – you get the picture. I could feel my organs stuck together, my mind was fuzzy, and I could barely forward bend.

So, the question becomes – is it possible to balance my western habits with my developing physical and spiritual practices? Can you eat pork belly and chant to Shiva? There is a part of me that wants to completely turn away from my western self, bury my darkness inside, and open up like a lotus flower. The other part of me still wants to eat saturated fat and crispy salmon skin.

Which is why I have decided to try vegetarianism for 30 days. Beginning Monday no more meat. For thirty days I am going to play with cooking and baking vegetarian. I am cutting out meat, milk and fish. It is going to be an exercise in self-discipline and restraint. No more bacon at brunch, no more delicious burgers from Rogue States. At the end of thirty days, I will decide either to go off meat forever or return to trying to find a balance between my west and east.

Right now I am hoping that I will be able to find a balance – taking more pleasure in little indulgences and find lasting satisfaction in restraint and routine. I guess we’ll see.

In the meantime if you have any great veg recipes, send em’ my way. I’m sure I’ll need them.

In 1999 at the dawn of the millennium a new kind of American Hollywood movie emerged. The first time I saw it, I thought it was innovative, new, charming, clean-cut and funny-sad. Now, I feel like it’s all I see, and has become the benchmark for what people consider to be a good movie. American Beauty offered a new look behind the closed-doors of suburbia, giving credence to what we all suspected life was really like for the American middle class. The bewitching appearance of Italian silk couches and perfect rose blossoms were set against the passionless lives of genuinely unhappy people. Something was amiss behind the white-picket fence even though it was perfectly painted.

But now it has gone too far.

American Beauty opened the floodgates for the Indiewood flick – a crossbreed between traditional Hollywood and Indie cinema. Some people have taken to calling these dramedies, but dramedy appropriated a late eighties genre, and it doesn’t quite capture what is happening now. Some of these movies are independently written and directed, but they are backed by Hollywood. They combine non-traditional elements of cinema with the mundane, rarely innovating on style or form. They tend to be character-centric and rely on music and timing to drive the plot-line forward. The art of the Indie art film has been boiled down to pair with the streamlined aesthetics of alternative corporate brands like Apple and JetBlue. Simplicity is more, but decadence is not lost in trying to create a sense of wholeness. These movies always provide some form of catharsis or sense of well-being, or at the very least remind you why you are successful, or why it’s okay if you’re not.

It continued with Zach Braff and Natalie Portman standing over a landfill screaming in the rain in 2004. The story line was simple, filled out with young hyper-intellectual verbosity and driven forward by the latest hipster music. The movie opens quietly, some or most of the characters suffer from a form of depression, life hasn’t quite taken them were they thought it could and let us not forget the ubiquitous drug-infused party-scene where people try to connect to good times past by dancing like drunken buffoons.

Yes, American Beauty gave way to Garden State, which gave way to Eternal Sunshine of the spotless mind and this summer’s deluge of Indiewood flicks. From the flat-out obnoxious disaster of Greenberg to the disgusting sadness of Cyrus to the heterocentric portrayal of lesbians in The Kids are Alright, to the ultimate assuagement of liberal guilt in Please Give, I can’t take it anymore.

The male characters are pathetic portrayals of fragile narcissism, the female characters seem incapable of being okay without their useless male counter parts and the overwritten dialogue is simply gratuitous. (Juno, anyone?)

What is most infuriating about this trend though is the seeming belief that these movies somehow provide a counterpart to the Hollywood Blockbuster (Knight and Day). What makes them so subversive? What higher-intellectual power are they appealing to? As far as I can tell, they have watered down the traditional Indie-Flick, trying to make it more appealing to go to the movies. The problem is that these exposes on character-types does not require much post-watching digestion, or thought, like Groundhog Day. Instead of going to watch things be blown up, people go for a kind of human voyeurism that makes them feel a little better about life. Depending on which city you live in for ten dollars you too can pretend to have seen a great movie. This trend in cinema isn’t dramedy, it’s just sad.

The way we experience time changes when we realize that we are always living at the eleventh hour. We like numbers, counting, measuring and weighing, because they create a sense of importance, difference and authority. From the beginning, in Plato, we see the importance of being able to count and calculate. Through methods of division, addition, subtraction and so forth one is able to render something, or someone, intelligible and visible – alive. In book VIII of The Republic where Plato outlines the extended education of the philosopher-guardian class he turns to the study of mathematics. “So we shall require that a soldier must learn, as well as other things, how to calculate and count” (522e). Being able to calculate and count enables us to create order amidst chaos and create an impression of form. Nietzsche believed that this sort of illusory structure was both necessary and detrimental to humans. And he was right in the sense that sometimes it seems like we are constantly hanging in the balance over the abyss. We move back and forth between living within the forms we create, including time, and realizing that they are part of the un-real.

So it makes sense that most of the time we forget about time. Hannah Arendt once remarked in a letter to Karl Jaspers that she will never understand the way Americans think about death. It is true; Americans tend to sweep death, sorrow, mourning and all emotional outpours of loss under the subconscious rug. Hope, progress and moving forward are essential qualities of the American spirit – the ever reverent belief that one can become something which one is not, something better. “Even though I am going to die, I can live.” This form of hope is deeply connected to the ignorance and or avoidance of death. Life is the slow progress of loss, and we are all moving towards the end. There is great joy in believing that one can renew oneself, but this joy is symbolic of our desire to assuage a reality that confronts us all. When we are reminded from time to time that we too must die, ought we turn towards this false hope for new life, or acknowledge this truth as part of the human condition?

Some things that reminded me of the end this week:

Senator Robert C. Byrd (92) passed away after 51 years of service to Congress.

After 25 years on CNN Larry King has decided to retire. (He announced his retirement via Twitter.)

The USA fell to Ghana in a close round-of-16 world cup match.

After a slew of scathing reviews following their last movie, the ladies from Sex & the City have officially put their Manolos away.

I have been reading so much Plato lately, I have started dreaming about having conversations with Polemarchus, Thrasymachus and Adeimantus. So, I suppose it makes sense that I would start thinking about how Plato applies to everyday life, the way we live, and whether or not Plato changes the way I think about the world, or if the world changes the way I read Plato. Either way, it is safe to say The Republic is one of those books that changes every time you read it. Personally, I enjoy books 1,3 and 7 the most – Socrates’ society of swine, poets and education, and of course, the cave, are road-markers when I go back and reread.

So, what does Plato have to do with friendship?

I have been thinking lately about what friendships is. I used to believe that friendship should be based upon a kind of magical connection between two people. An instant click, as it were. A friend meant someone you could call at anytime, someone who improved the quality of your life, someone who was there for you, broadly speaking. In all relationships there are ups and downs, ins and outs, one person gets angry at the other or criticizes them in someway. But so it goes, you usually make up and move on. That seems like friendship – mutual trust, connection, reliance, a kind of fraternite. (I am going to leave out the kind of friend who only calls you up when times are rough, the kind of friend who seems to only have friends to make themselves feel better by constantly criticizing you, and the kind of friend who only wants favors and to borrow things. And so on, all of those negative friendships.)

But there seems to be a different kind of friendship, a more common kind that seems to define what most people mean when they say: “my friend.” Living in a town where everyone constantly seems to be networking, grabbing after-work beers, and socializing with a purpose, has started to shed light on what it means to make friends, let us say, in this way.

At the beginning of The Republic, Socrates asks Cephalus whether or not his wealth provides a great comfort and ease to him in old age. Cephalus tells Socrates that it does, because he is already a good and sensible man. He offers the first definition of justice, or, what it is to do right saying that it is not lying and giving everyman his due, and money indeed enables the ability to do this. As Cephalus exits the argument, and Polemarchus takes his place, Socrates twists the argument to say at first that justice is helping one’s friends and harming one’s enemies. Straight forward enough, but what does it mean to help one’s friends and harm one’s enemies? Socrates bends Polemarchus into saying that justice – this helping or harming – is only useful when one wants to keep money on deposit. It is implied that a just man will not steal. However, Socrates shows Polemarchus that if a man is good at protecting he is also good at stealing. The conclusion being that a man who seems a friend can be an enemy and visa versa, and so sometimes it follows to harm one’s friend and help one’s enemy, but harming anyone will only make him less excellent and is not good.

The conversation goes on and Thrasymachus challenges this conventional view of justice by offering a sophist’s reply that justice is actually what is in the interest of the stronger. But I am going to leave that alone for the moment. Thinking about what it means to give someone their due, to help one’s friends and harm one’s enemies seems to offer a kind of contemporary insight into the dynamics of fast-past technology-powered friendship. Today we connect with people at a rapidly increasing tempo, which means we can connect, disconnect and reconnect at an unprecedented rate. Which also means we need to, as Polemarchus might say, put things on deposit more often. The faster we move the more we do, and so the more we need from other people.

I have talked to people who refer to some friendships as favor-banks, where there seems to be a kind of mutual understanding or agreement that people form with one another. Maybe friends for life, maybe not, but their company in the mean time is pleasant enough, life has landed them in relatively similar places, and they have acquired useful things. Which makes it seems like depth of relation has been substituted by simplicity and usefulness in a way. Perhaps this is a leap, but if you spend more time with people collectively and less time with each person individually, then it seems to follow that each interaction wouldn’t be as meaningful. A recent article in the NYTimes made the claim that children, nowadays, no longer have “best-friends.” They simply have too many friends to have best friends, and while Facebook might enable you to romantically commit to one person, it’s true best-friends isn’t an option. Top-friends is, but no single soul-mate. No Sex and the City foursomes.

A question or theme that underlies Socrates question of what is justice, is what is happiness? Or, who is happier, the just or the unjust man? The answer, of course, for Socrates is the just man, because he is at peace with himself. And, I have to say I agree with Socrates. Although this doesn’t come without some irony. The world of social-bankers seems to be a happy one. There is a human network of assurance, and the opportunity to meet new people has increased exponentially, so if your stock dips a little it shouldn’t take long to find new investments. Put another way, happiness in friendship seems to be dependent upon a kind of mutual using of one another. Does the depth of conversation matter? Or, is simply being able to fool around and have a laugh what is important? Can we ever be certain these friends of convenience aren’t going to turn around and screw us in someway? Maybe having more people in the friend-bank assures a greater return. Maybe Cephalus was right to say that having more only really helps though if each man is already good and sensible, maybe then it is the few single, fragile friendships we form that we should be weary of. A society where we have more, need more, move faster, and require more assistance, is a society where more friends equals more happiness. If there was only an iPhone application to keep track of all the favors you have saved up, a friendship stock portfolio, as it were. 


What do you think, friend?

Italy has one of the most successful football teams in the world, with four World Cup wins (1930, 1934, 1982 and 2006) they trail Brazil by one victory. They also hold a European Cup title and club championships. So, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised at how obnoxiously they play soccer.

If you watched the Italy v. Paraguay game yesterday, which ended in a 1-1 tie, you might have been surrounded by others like me. I am not really cheering for Paraguay, but I am definitely not rooting for Italia. It is always fun to watch the champion take the field and see what they have brought, but I was quickly reminded just why I don’t like Italian footballers.

They are rude and have no sportsmanship. Two specific things stuck out to me in this respect yesterday. First, they refuse help up, after they roll around on the ground for what seems like endless hours. At one point after being knocked down on the ground De Rossi refused the hand of a Paraguayan player. Helping other players up is a common gesture offered by opposing team members. To refuse a hand seems snobbish, manly-manish and out-right insulting. And it is a good thing that the referee does not add on stoppage time for players on the ground, because Italy games would never end. A tiny tap in the shin-guard and they hit the ground rolling from side to side in agony. It makes one wonder if this is part of their regular practice.

The second thing that stood out, especially in the second half when Italy was down a point after being dominated by Paraguay’s short-passing techniques, was their retributive aggressiveness. Every time one of their players got “knocked” down, somehow a Paraguayan player somewhere on the field was taken down. This happened at least three time I could count in the second half.

Aside from being rude, they play dirty. They slide into players cleats-up with reckless abandon, and usually when there isn’t even a chance of touching the ball. This practice only yielded possession yesterday, but there should have been yellow cards. Camorenesi received a yellow card in the second half for stepping on Vera’s ankle, but that didn’t even seem to compare to when Zambrotta got kicked in the head when Gilardino decided to do a standing split that ultimately missed the ball. Last I heard that was a red card. The Italians must have made the referees an offer they couldn’t refuse, which would not be surprising after their game fixing attempts in 2006.

All in all though, yesterdays game was reassuring for us anti-Italy soccer fans. In contrast with Lipi who said “it’s a shame not to have won because we deserved to,” Italy unquestionably lost the first half of the game. And if they continue to play this poorly they will be back in Italy watching the second round in no time, which is fine by me. Paraguay played a tight defense, had a composed midfield that Italy simply wasn’t fast enough to beat, and put it in the net. True, Paraguay’s magic midfield fell apart in the opening quarter of the second half and they let the Italians in, but Italy’s game still looked poor. Paraguay just might be the team to watch this year, after their formidable display against Italy and after they decimated Argentina and Brazil in the qualifying rounds. Who knows, maybe red and white striped socks are in my future.

This post is the product of trying to rationalize a career in academia. So much of the time I am overwhelmed by the seeming futility of it all: Who cares? What for? Is this really worth doing? What am I getting out of this?

Or, as I like to say: What do I get out of sitting alone and reading Plato all day? I personally happen to dislike the endless dialogues of Plato’s Socrates, but that is not important.

Academia seems removed from the world. After a while, one really does begin to realize how cliquish, how small, how narcissistic it is. Little classrooms, filled with little white men, with Lenin-sized egos. How much can one person take?

Enjoy.

I am so tired of ego. Everywhere I go there are men just waiting to have their egos stroked. It’s as if they read Freud and said: Ah, it’s good to be a man.

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That is how it works. You decide to write about something and then all of a sudden every time you see it, you know, that word, your heart stops a little. You gasp. Haaa, you suck in. Someone else has thought about my word. IT’S NOT YOUR WORD, I yell at myself. Okay, Okay, well let’s see what they had to say about it.

Yeah. Not much.

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Unfortunately this is the way most academics think. They go around spouting the religion of discourse when the only people they discourse with are themselves. Oh the agony. The horror.

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I must believe that there is a difference between elitism and narcissism. Knowing what you like and why you like it doesn’t mean you are a know-it-all, elitist or control-freak. It simply means you are comfortable enough with yourself to have your own tastes. That doesn’t mean I think my taste is better than yours. It simply means that I probably prefer to spend my time with people who have the same tastes as me. It’s your insecurity with your own taste that makes you propel these self-hating projective labels onto us. So, shut up, turn around, and go figure out who the hell you are. And for the love of all that is tasteful don’t try and super-impose some kind of moral or self-righteous compass onto why it is that I choose to like what it is I like. I make no greater claim than to say: I like; I don’t like; I might like; I don’t know.

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Be wary of those who won’t say: I don’t know. If you can’t say: I don’t know, chances are you don’t know anything. Academics tend to be Socratic in the sense that they never ask questions that they don’t already have an answer for. That is to say, they believe they already know everything they need to know; that it was given to them by some higher power, and that they simply need time, alone, to draw it out. Time alone in contemplation, I should say. (see Gorgias, or Machiavelli)

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The problem with being raised by a narcissist is that your greatest fear is becoming a narcissist, which can become a narcissistic tendency.

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The problem with narcissists is that they are so convinced the entire world has excluded them that they actually are excluded, which only strengthens their claim that nobody cares about them. Nobody does.

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Context is overrated. Who needs context? People think context is important because without it they are lost. But moreover, people like context because it allows them to believe that whatever they have said or done can exist within a unique space in time. Context, in this way, allows whatever it is they have created to belong to them. It creates ownership. If you strip away context all you are left with is the thing in and of itself. And then each person who encounters it can give it new meaning, and so it can take on multiple lives.

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Sometimes I think all academia has taught me is how to be petrified of certain words. So that every time I hear: democracy, meaning, power, authority, loss, victory, melancholy, space, time, public, private, culture, social, media, global, technological, and even love, a red flag is hoisted in my head. STOP. And then all meaning unravels. I become confused and dizzy and need twenty books and a database of articles to explore the meaning of meaning. Meaning has been lost, if this is all that I am left with.

When I was driving through Texas last fall I didn’t have a chance to stop at the Rothko Chapel in Houston, but I did recently have the opportunity to go see “Red.” And although I have never been overawed by Rothko’s towering color-blocks, they do, as Plato might have said, make an impression upon one’s self. Sitting in the Phillip’s Collection permanent Rothko room or the current tower exhibition at The National Gallery, one is swallowed by the delicious colors – the stygian reds, blacks, violets, plums, and dark blue-hues. There is a palpable tension between the swirling colors and misshapen rectangles pushing against one another, like opposite ends of a magnet. It is easy to succumb to their pull, rotating around the room, taking in each piece. I have never found much depth in The New York School, generally, but I think that there is something to be learned from their abstract expressionism.

“Red” is a stunning play that offers a stark, intense and brilliant look at Mark Rothko in the 1950’s when he was commissioned to decorate The Four Season’s dining room. The play revolves around an ongoing dialogue with his assistant over the course of two years. When the young man enters the room for the first time Rothko (Alfred Molina) asks him: What do you see? His assistant (Eddie Redmaybe) quixotically answers: Red. The audience is exposed to the rawness and rashness of Rothko, who spends the next two hours peeling back the layers of red. He tells his assistant to read The Birth of Tragedy, who in turns tells him his art is Apollinian – devoid of Dionysian pleasures – structured, rigid and boring. Rothko tells him that it isn’t so much about the colors in and of themselves as it is about the movement between them. The red cannot be swallowed by the black, he says more than once. The force between the black and the red is the life force, the Nietzschean will to power, the will to live. If the black swallows the red then the space between the colors collapses, there is no more movement. And, it is not so much the blackness of it all, as it is the loss of space, the loss of tension between the opposing colors. For Rothko red is the opposite of black, and when there is no more red, there is no more life.

In the 1960’s Rothko returned to the black he began with in the 1930s. Standing in front of the pieces one is overcome with a kind of gravitational pull. If one stands close enough, playing with the art, the black seems to become a shade of white, reflecting off of the deep maroons, browns, and plums. At that point Rothko was playing with two contrasting fields of color. The black rectangles that consume the middle canvas are painted in a kind of matte that creates the illusion of reflection, which is then contrasted to the thicker, more palpable black framing the rectangles. One is never too far away from the Nietzschean abyss when standing in front of a Rothko.

Rothko was indeed interested in a kind of Apollinian simplicity, but it seems that he was also interested in giving his art a scourging affect, illustrating and invoking the darkness of the human condition. He did not care for natural light; he blocked the windows in his studio, turning it into a cavernous space for creation and contemplation. A kind of philosopher, Rothko dwelled deep within the space he made for himself, churning out works that were reflections of despair, suffering, agony, unhappiness and ultimately death. In order to escape the darkness of life, Rothko had to paint the world black, with just enough light to live.

The space between the colors, the space of movement and motion that mimics life is the world in which we move. But it is not simply movement that is necessary for life, it is a kind of friction, excitement, titillation. We must be provoked, incited, inspired. The tension between moving towards darkness and moving towards the light reflects our endless struggle between wanting to live and wanting death, between Apollo and Dionysus. From the moment we emerge writhing in blood until that final moment of death, we are living in the shadow of darkness. And eventually, no matter how hard we try, the black will consume the red.

*Spoiler Alert*

Sex and the City, question mark. Towards the end of season four, after the Aiden debacle, and before Burger, Carrie goes through a sexless phase. She resorts to writing about men and socks and hiding from her editor before she realizes that he just wants to tell her about a book deal. That’s not the kind of sex-and-the-city question mark I am talking about. No, no. And, unless you are an avid fan you won’t know that this Sex and the City city is Abu Dhabi. Abu Dhabi, one of the seven United Arab Emirates, which requires women to cover their bodies with a headscarf or the Burka. They are forbidden to make physical contact with men in public, in any way, and we all know how hard this is for Samantha (not me, the character). There are exceptions for hotels and resorts, but when women are in public they are expected to be respectful of culture and tradition. Americans, on average, I am willing to say, are usually not very good at adhering to local customs. Indeed, our nationalist hubris has gotten us into more than one quarry with peoples who abide by different social mores, both at home and abroad. In Sex and the City II, Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte seem to take this stereotype to a whole new level. Yes, there is fashion porn, yes there are basically naked world cup soccer and rugby players, Mr. Big, Aiden, and for men even a couple of tits, but there is also cultural . . . something.

The movie opens with Stanford and Marcus’s over-the-top “gay” wedding featuring Liza Minnelli. And for those who pay close attention, you might have even noticed a Barbara number on the wedding program. Swans, all-male choruses singing show tunes, cottages in Connecticut; it was a spectacle. I put “gay” in quotes, though, because they used the word about fifty times in the first five minutes. “Is this a gay wedding or what?” “A gay man just hit on me,” proclaims Mr. Big. “This is the gayest gay wedding ever.” And on, and on. Okay. We get it. They’re gay! One has to wonder how far we have come if a show like Sex and the City has to make such a big fuss about all of the gayness.

But, to move away from the gays to the girls, we seem to have gone back to old York, as it were. Carrie is afraid that she and Mr. Big are losing the “sparkle.” Charlotte is afraid her husband is going to pull a Jude Law with the big-breasted, no-bra wearing nanny, while coming to terms with the trials of motherhood. Samantha is going through menopause. And Miranda is suffering from sexual discrimination at work. So, you might ask, what happens? Samantha is offered a free PR tour of Abu Dhabi, the new hot spot in the Middle East, and the four girls pack up and head out in style. Carrie ends up kissing Aiden, apropos season three; Miranda quits her job instead of fighting back; Charlotte refuses to use her Jewish name Goldenblatt because she is in the “Middle East”, and obsesses over Harry who isn’t returning her text-messages; and Samantha, well Samantha gets arrested for having sex on the beach. Literally. Carrie tells Mr. Big about Aiden, who buys her a big diamond in turn, so she will always remember she’s married (sparkle!). Miranda goes to some woman-friendlier firm; Charlotte realizes her nanny is a non-threatening lesbian (because apparently men don’t like big, hard nipples on women who like other women); and Samantha of course ends up finishing what she started in Abu Dhabi with a hot Dane. With the exception of Samantha, all of the women seem to finally settle into some form of domestic bliss.

While this seems bad enough for a group of gals who began long ago talking about how women should be having sex like men, the way the film portrayed the women and men of Abu Dhabi was far more troubling. Some women, like Samantha, say screw social customs and just put it all out there, while others, like Miranda, try to learn a little about local culture. Women who watch this movie and don’t know anything about other forms of feminism, say the kind that support women wearing the Burka as an act of liberation, are going to walk away from this movie with a very western, America-centric view of the Middle East. Which is probably not the best thing Hollywood could be putting out there right now, more than ever. At the end of the movie, before the girls get on the plane, a couple of Arab women pull them into a tent and show them that just because they dress that way in public does not mean that they are that way in private. Ripping off their Burkas, they reveal the new falls lines of Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Burberry. They are also reading a book on aging by thigh-master mistress Suzanne Summers. The same bible Samantha has been carrying around in her purse. Ah! What a sigh of relief, they can go home at ease seeing that they are, underneath, just like them. Carrie even calls one woman the real-housewife of Abu Dhabi.

Now, whether or not you have some greater moral yearning that tells you these women are oppressed, or you seek comfort in knowing that they too shop at Bergdorf Goodman and ogle at fashion week and iPhones, you are still clinging to the same form of liberal feminism. This is what a woman is! As they sing at a karaoke bar; “I am Woman”, and damn it if there are any other kinds out there.

For such modern women, these ladies need to work some new ideas into their old York ways. When did domestic bliss become the new benchmark for happiness? When did liberal feminism come back into style? I love Sex and the City, and I won’t jump off the island, but these ladies (and writers) ought to take more social responsibility, and they ought to update their social and political views, with their wardrobes.

“Art is the promise of happiness that is constantly being broken.”

- Theodor Adorno

Please Give is a dark comedy that pulls the audience down into an unforgiving abyss. You will certainly leave the theatre with a hollow feeling in the pit of your stomach, uncertain of the unsettled feeling that seems to linger. The film focuses on Kate and Alex who have a teenage daughter, Abby. They buy furniture from the mourning relatives of the recently deceased, and re-sell it at their trendy 10th Avenue store. The main story-line evolves around their uncomfortable and impatient wait for Andra, the old woman next door, to die so they can expand their apartment and build a master-bedroom. Andra is visited by her two granddaughters Rebecca and Mary, who live together. As the film progresses you discover that their mother committed suicide when Rebecca was fifteen and Mary was in her twenties. Rebecca deals with her grief by turning inwards, becoming quiet, and taking close care of her grandmother, while Mary becomes completely cold, insecure and superficial. The presence of death and loss are constantly reinforced in the film. It is like a ghost that follows the characters around as a constant reminder of their own finitude. Please Give illustrates the emptiness of life, the fragility of the human condition, and reminds us that “nothing ever gets better.” While the characters individually deal with their losses, the film overall furrows into a grittier aspect of loss, stripping our illusions to a deeper level, exposing the ugliness that lies beneath the exterior.

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche tells us that there are two kinds of sufferers. He writes “[E]very art, every philosophy may be viewed as a remedy and an aid in the service of growing and struggling life; they always presuppose suffering and sufferers. But, there are two kinds of sufferers: first, those who suffer form the over-fullness of life–they want a Dionysian art and likewise a tragic view of life, a tragic insight–and then those who suffer from the impoverishment of life and seek rest, stillness, and calm seas, redemption from themselves through art and knowledge, or intoxication, convulsions, anesthesia, and madness.” (GS, BK 5, 370 P 328) There are those who suffer from an over-fullness of life, and so are driven to seek a tragic view supposedly because they have too much. Then there are those who suffer from the impoverishment of life and so seek calmness and redemption through art, knowledge or intoxication. While many-movie goers might be the latter kind of sufferers, seeking to assuage their seemingly empty lives with a flash of momentary happiness, or intoxication, they rarely go to the cinema to be reminded of the tragedy of existence. Which is exactly how one feels as they exist Please Give.

The characters in Please Give seem to suffer from an over-fullness of life. For instance, Kate (Catherine Keener) seems to mollify her feelings of guilt by entertaining the idea of doing charity work. She says “It is easy for me to give money,” but she clamors I want to do something. Each time she goes to visit a potential volunteer position she starts crying. “It’s just so sad.” Feeling sad about other people’s lives, allows her to not be so sad about her own. In the same way that her husband Alex (Oliver Platt) is able to ignore the breakdown his wife his having and his own internal guilt by having an affair with the young and pretty Mary (Amanda Peet), who quells her own insecurities by obsessively tanning and stalking her ex’s new girlfriend.

In this same vein, the film exposes what we might call the dark side of liberal morality, highlighting the overwhelming guilt and shame that accompanies (for some) a well-off life. Reaching beyond the shadowiness of liberalism though, the film illustrates the lack of a moral center that we never seem to find. The mother can justify spending two-hundred dollars on a pair of blue jeans for herself, because she is an adult, but not for her daughter, because there are forty-five homeless people in their neighborhood. The father, Alex can justify having an affair with Mary, the unctuous granddaughter who gives facials for a living, and not telling his wife, but only because he will “never go back there again.” Kate also struggles with they way they buy furniture on the cheap from grieving family members and sell it at a handsome mark-up price. When Keener starts to question their business, Platt tells her that she doesn’t have to do it if she doesn’t want to, but somebody else is just going to do it anyway. This form of moral justification seems to guide the decisions made. If I don’t rip these people off, then somebody else is going to, so why shouldn’t I make the money? Why shouldn’t it be me? Indeed, this point is only reaffirmed in the film when Kate thinks she is turning a serious profit on an antique kitchen table, only to realize that she has sold it to another furniture dealer who sells it for more money. Take as much as you can get, because if you don’t, somebody else will just get more.

Towards the ends of the film Mary yells at her dying grandmother: “Noting gets better. It only gets worse.” Indeed, nothing does get better and Ms. Holofcener does not offer the audience any form of reprieve in the end. In the final scene as Alex, Kate, and Abby walk home from the funeral, Abby pauses in front of a boutique window, eyeing a pair blue-jeans. The family enters, and we see the daughter triumphantly try-on a two-hundred and thirty-five dollar pair of jeans, finally convincing her parents to buy them for her. Kate and Alex smile at one another, as their pimple-faced fifteen year-old girl smiles in the mirror at her victory. For her, the jeans are more than expensive denim, they represent an exterior that she is trying to cultivate, a magic trick that will slim her thighs, and give her the confidence she needs to be a teenager. For the parents, the purchase magically, momentarily, reprieves their guilt.

The only character that seems to have any sort of moral compass is Rebecca (Rebecca Hall). The film reaches a stultifying apex when Kate and Rebecca are both crying. Kate tells Rebecca that she is a “good person” for taking care of other people. While Kate is crying under the weight of her guilt and shame, Rebecca is crying for the loss her grandmother. But there is something more heart-wrenchingly sad about all of the tears shed. The audience realizes that there isn’t going to be a happy ending, that there isn’t going to be any resolve or reprieve, much like life itself. No matter how many facials we get or new blue jeans we buy, we are all parading towards death. The loss of sight, hearing aids, bad knees, pained feet, none of it is going to get better, and Holofcener artfully exposes the ugliness beneath the surface, beneath all of the illusions that make us feel better about the things we do.

Nietzsche emphasizes the virtue of both climbing down into the abyss, and the wondrous feeling of climbing out. We never feel more human when we’re exposed to the fragility of life, through sickness and pain and age, and we never feel more alive than when we have forgotten our bodies and moved back into the world. We can’t have one with out the other, and life would not be worth living without both. Only because we have seen the dark side of what it means to be human, can we place value in the illusions we create for ourselves to make life livable, most of the time. Perhaps some form of morality can be found between the two, between all of our living and dying.

Drink Hope you say? That’s right, not only can we have our Hope, we can drink it too. “Haiti Hope” is the newest brand of Odwalla juice. Sealed tightly in a clear plastic bottle with a bright green lid, hope comes in a refreshing mango lime-aid flavor. The bottle proudly advertises that 100% of the profits go to the Haiti Hope Project. How wonderful, right?

Not really. That organic juice with clever names that you love to chug so much — mango tango, super food, blueberry b — is owned by mega-corporation Coca Cola. It’s bad enough that Coca Cola has already been dubbed “the dark waters of imperialism,” but now it comes in a bright green mango lime-aid flavor, which Coca Cola said is supposed to “create opportunity for 25,000 Haitian mango farmers and their families by supporting the development of a sustainable mango juice industry in the country.”

Not only does Coca Cola have a reputation for human-rights violations at its many bottling factories, but it has a history of abusing Haitian workers. In 2006, workers at the Brasserie de La Couronne, S.A./Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Haiti Brewery in Cap-Haïtien in northern Haiti reported numerous human right’s violations and abuses that included wages below the legal minimum, violation of the overtime law, and the firing of union leaders. In stark contrast to this reality Coca Cola announced in their press release that they have been apart of the Haitian community since 1927. Brasserie de la Couronne is the largest private-sector employer in the country. While they claim that their 3.5 million dollar investment, coupled with the American Development Bank (IDB), will promote sustainable farming and more jobs, they are really just using this crisis as an opportunity to expand in a country that they helped to cripple. It is corporations like Coca Cola that break apart unions, pay low wages, and force labor that prohibit the Haitian citizens and government from building a sustainable infrastructure.

Haiti does not need more Coca Cola, and it doesn’t need bottled hope. It needs real industry, jobs, working wages, and infrastructure. How are we supposed to know that the profits aren’t going into the hands of Coca Cola who is investing the money?

If you want to support Haiti there are better options.