by Natasha Vargas-Cooper

For drama, in the Greek sense, to resonate with the modern viewer it needs have three elements: Acknowledgement of the universe’s benign indifference, recognition of the utter loneliness of human existence and a commitment to something or someone outside oneself even in the face of those two principles.

• The philosophical underpinnings of modern drama stem from the myth of Sisyphus. This is what Albert Camus described as the conflict between what we want from the universe (such as meaning, order, explanation) and what the universe gives us (a big rock that never makes it uphill). The great art produced in the latter half of the 20th century and this last decade embodies this existential stance.

• The exact moment of no spiritual return would have to be the use of the atomic bomb. In 1957, Norman Mailer diagnosed the unfathomable havoc the atomic bomb wreaked on the human psyche:

For the first time in civilized history, perhaps for the first time in all of history, we have been forced to live with the suppressed knowledge that the smallest facets of our personality or the most minor projection of our ideas, or indeed the absence of ideas and the absence of personality could mean equally well that we might still be doomed to die as a cipher in some vast statistical operation in which our teeth would be counted, and our hair would be saved, but our death itself would be unknown, unhonored, and unremarked, a death which could not follow with dignity as a possible consequence to serious actions we had chosen, but rather a death by deus ex machina in a gas chamber or a radioactive city; and so if in the midst of civilization-that civilization founded upon the Faustian urge to dominate nature by mastering time, mastering the links of social cause and effect-in the middle of an economic civilization founded upon the confidence that time could indeed be subjected to our will, our psyche was subjected itself to the intolerable anxiety that death being causeless, life was causeless as well, and time deprived of cause and effect had come to a stop.

The bleak realities of World War II, the camps, the annihilation of millions, according to Mailer, “presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it.” The traditional values and expectations-the guilty are punished, the virtuous are rewarded, the authority of the church and state stand as legitimate-could no longer hold the same guarantee.

• A secular world is a lonely world. Isolation, the absence of wholeness; the longing for some structural integrity to the psyche permeates modern drama. Nietzsche said that once we reject the Christian myth, chaos ensues inside of us: “Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up and down left? Are we not straying through an infinite nothing.”

Science then validated our sense of isolation and insecurity with two words: kinetic theory. The discovery that solid objects were comprised of negative and positive electrons bouncing off one another in a constant state of gyration destroys the assumption that we can trust what we see or touch in front of us, let alone what we feel in our own bloody hearts. This insecurity translates itself, in narrative, into an identity crisis for our heroes, the very essence of himself questioned and unknowable.

• How did you feel when Don wolfishly smirked at his next possible sexual conquest? If you’re like me, it was a twinge of disgust, then a rallying sense that “we got our boy back.” While the afternoon of spooning post anxiety attack seemed delightful, it’s Don’s delinquency that enthralls us. Characters with mass appeal win their audiences not by demonstration of their heroic dimensions but through their display of weaknesses and ambiguities. When we get glimpses of nihilistic, fuck-all instinct in our hero, it’s difficult not to feel twitches of worship. Pauline Kael, in an essay on appeal Dean and Brando called this certain kind of charisma “the glamour of delinquency”:

One thing seems evident: when the delinquent becomes the hero in our films, it is because the image of instinctive rebellion expresses something in many people that they don’t dare express…these kids seem to be the only ones irresponsible enough to act out, not the whole system of authority, morality, and prosperity.

If we know that attempts at individual decency go unrewarded, then it’s up to the delinquent hero to test our limits of how much self-indulgence we can stomach. Kael points out that we’re uneasy about the rebel’s moral indifference. “When he attacks the weak or destroys promiscuously” then we realize what are necessary values. Otherwise it’s all just too grim and disturbing. So we formulate our own ethical schema through their folly, always a bit on edge that we’ll unwittingly beg our hero to go too far. Anyhow, that’s why last night’s episode was so damn good.

I’m not sure why I didn’t bring it to your attention earlier, since I’ve read it three times already, but you absolutely should take a look at this GQ oral history on the making of Goodfellas. Oral histories can sometimes be pretty lazy or boring (and they’re ripe for parody), but this is a terrific example of the form.

Millennials Magazine is live. If you think the children are terrifying, this will cement the deal. If you can handle young people talking about their feelings and their world views and publications that actually print IM chats and also the sentence “I was in eighth grade when the pilot episode of The O.C. aired,” then you’ll be fine with the rest.

“He had all of the room in the world to do it because there was nothing else there in the way. There was no band in the way, no backing singers, no arrangement of instruments-nothing in the way of him doing it. The only thing there other than me was him, and he was using pieces of me on top of me. It worked out real good.”
–Neil Young talks about his experience working with producer Daniel Lanois on the new album Le Noise, which comes out tomorrow. This selection from it, “Walk With Me,” is a fine example of Neil all piled up on top of himself.

The “Who Runs New York?” edition of New York magazine is surprisingly free-floating and pleasantly daft, stepping as it does right into the intellectual space ceded by the New York Observer. (Don’t believe me? The inclusion of the phrase “moguls and machers, pooh-bahs and potentates” in New York’s introduction is a dead giveaway.) And so who does run New York? The Brooklyn pullout goes for Cobble Hill heroes Jonathan Ames, writer and troublemaker, and Rebecca Collerton, proprietor of New York City’s best sandwich shop, Saltie. The photo of City Hall’s open plan office is fantastic. The mini-profile of Gawker Media blog honcho Nick Denton is fine if not so revelatory, though the sentence “London, 1966: the apex of Mod, the year of Twiggy and Blow-Up” seems a bit hilarious. (1966: The year Ronnie Kray murdered George Cornell and Guyana became independent. 1966: “Star Trek” premieres and the National Organization for Women is founded!) The only thing that seems truly wrong for the moment is the tale of agent Andrew Wylie. That’s all made up for by the hilarious flowchart of backscratching and odd priorities, which is what happens when you ask 13 people who the most important New Yorker is. (Unemployed former Newsweek editor Jon Meacham salutes Charlie Rose! Oh dear!)

I have no iPad and I doubt I ever will, so I rely on some first impressions regarding the New Yorker’s iPad version from others: “$5 per week? That is very expensive!” And: “Paid $3 for Lumines, which has nearly endless replay value, unlike Gladwell-on-Twitter game.” There is also a very strange video starring Jason Schwartzman. Shirtless. And sometimes pantsless. The magazine itself says something wise and reasonable: “Right now, editing for the iPad feels similar to making television shows just after the Second World War, when less than one per cent of American households owned a television.” Semi-relatedly, I am very much enjoying “Bored to Death” on HBO these days, in which Schwartzman stars. It is also amusing.

It’s time to get to know your next governor of New York state a little better!

He met his future wife, Mary Catherine Hannon, at one of the events he planned, though their first meeting did not go well. He made a joke about her uncle back in Buffalo, whose indictment was all over the newspapers, and she threw a beer at him. “It wasn’t nice,” he said of his remark, calling it an early, if unheeded, lesson about keeping “my big mouth shut.”

Also he believes the IRS killed his father-in-law. Also he didn’t manage to tell his wife about his secret family until his mistress’s child was nine? I’m impressed. (We’re kidding, by the way. He’s not going to be the governor. Probably!)

by Awl Staff

• Ritter, Dene, Voss: it just opened!

• And Everything Is Going Fine: Steven Soderbergh’s documentary about Spalding Gray. -Dan Kois

• Paul Thek at The Whitney Museum and Justin Bond at The Kitchen. –Barry Hoggard

• The Company Men-but mostly because of “Chris Cooper, HELLO.” -Doree Shafrir

• Greg Dulli’s solo tour! (Also Mariah Carey’s Christmas album because the loop underneath its ad on mariahcarey.com sounds kinda good in an ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You… Too” sort of way.) -Maura Johnston

• I am looking forward to “Evenings With Grumpypus,” aka “Strange Powers: Stephin Merrit and the Magnetic Fields,” if only because Mr. Merrit and I have shared both a boyfriend and a cleaning lady, but I’ve still never seen the inside of his apartment. -Dale Peck

• JUSTIN BIEBER 3D MOVIE WITH JOHN CHU!!!!! Oh also Nico Muhly everything 2010 Q4. -Mary HK Choi

• Iain M. Banks’ Surface Detail.

• I JUST ORDERED DAVID RAKOFF’S NEW AUDIOBOOK!!! OH AND THERE’S THE TRAILER FOR ‘HUMAN CENTIPEDE PART TWWOOOOOOO’ which will affect my Halloween costume choice (slutty human centipede)!!!!!!!!! -Natasha Vargas-Cooper

• WILD FLAG! WILD FLAG! WILD FLAG! -Jason Linkins

• Gary Oldman as George Smiley in the remake of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. (Tom Hardy is in it, too!) Also Tom Stoppard’s adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End-coming soon to BBC 2. Also Daft Punk playing Disneyland for the opening of Tron??? -Maria Bustillos

• The Pipilotti Rist show at Luhring Augustine; Julie Wertz’s new comic-book memoir “Drinking At The Movies.” (Buy it now!) Also brussels sprouts. -Emily Gould

• Listen to This.

• New Kanye West/Jay-Z album coming in November. The Harry Potter movie(s). Thanksgiving. Christmas. The NBA season. -David Cho

• Aeon Flux does ballet? No, just kidding, it’s Frances Chiaverini, not Aeon Flux — but she really looked that way to me on Wednesday night, during the staged U.S. premiere of the Kaija Saariaho ballet, Maa, at Columbia’s Miller Theater. See Chiaverini at the 1:59 mark of this video, which documents the ballet’s work-in-progress showing at the Guggenheim earlier this month. Look at her moves! And … those pants, which are flexy and floaty but also jut out at seductive and strange angles. There are two final performances of Maa at Miller Theater. That’s tonight and Saturday, each one costing $40, though some cheaper rush seats may be available (call ahead). Otherwise, for a taste of Saariaho’s gorgeous (and sometimes violent) music, check out the Notes on Light album, or else her opera L’Amour de Loin (the DVD of which you can even Netflix). -Seth Colter Walls

• Continuing to watch the oddly satisfying yet filthy one-two punch of “Vampire Diaries” and “Nikita.”

• I’m looking forward to more news of premature wrestling deaths coming out of the woodwork and dooming Linda McMahon’s Connecticut Senate bid, and for everyone to read Irvin Muchnick’s “Wrestling Babylon” and vote in Richard Blumenthal, a fine public servant! This is really the only part of the midterms I care about, and I care about it a lot — it’s a nice dream, at least! -Daniel D’Addario

• Somewhere (return of the Dorf!)
Blue Valentine (return of the Gosling!)
Burlesque (for the camp)
Due Date (for the Planes Trains and Automobile-ness and RDJ and Z G)
How Do You Know (JAMES L BROOKS whut!)
Let Me In (will the crazy cats make it in there?)
The Kings Speech (stutter to the Oscars!)
All the movies with Helen Mirren.
Also “Friday Night Lights”: the last season.
And Jon Hamm hosting “Saturday Night Live” -Sara Vilkomerson

To Britain, where it is estimated that 300 denizens of that misery-sodden isle find themselves on the sharp side of a glass every week: The Royal College of Surgeons of England and the British Medical Association, alongside Knifecrime Island’s emergency room doctors, are calling for pubs to make a switch to shatter-proof polycarbonate glassware.

Since the introduction of the trial in Hull in 2008, nobody has been injured because of “glassing” and the local NHS has saved £7.2m in eye surgery costs.

Research presented tomorrow at a conference in London on safety shows young people are happy to drink from plastic containers, whereas older drinkers prefer glass. “It’s much easier to eliminate glass than knives. Young people don’t mind plastic, but people over 40 prefer glass because, they say, it keeps the drink cooler, which is nonsense,” said Alasdair Forsyth of the centre for study of violence at Glasgow Caledonian University.

(I imagine that violence studies is probably the most popular major at Glasgow Caledonian.)

I understand the concern that these medical practitioners have for their disgusting countrymen, but I’m not sure they should be so hasty. Glassing is a great British tradition, recognized worldwide as a symbol of a kingdom whose foul-smelling subjects love nothing more than to stab each other and will use whatever tool is at hand to get the job done. Is it worth tossing that aside just so the island’s repugnant, vomit-encrusted layabouts will have slightly fewer facial scars? Will no one think of the yobs?

“We have received reports that a firearm has been discharged on the 10th floor of 750 building, 3rd Avenue in New York. If you are in a safe location, remain where you are. Get behind a locked door, or hide behind some type of obstruction. Lay down on the floor, and remain as quite as possible. Evacuate the facility only if you deem this safe or necessary.” Don’t worry, Conde Nasties: that crazy email you all just got? It was just a drill.