The prophets of the absurd saw all of this coming. As the Bush era collapses into ignominy, we find ourselves somewhat in the position of the explorer in Kafka’s In thePenal Colony, watching in a kind of dissociated abhorrence as a Gonzalez-style flunky tightens the screws for one last ride on the torture machine: “Have you ever heard of our former Commandant? No? Well, it isn’t saying too much if I tell you that the organization of the whole penal colony is his work.”
And if Gonzalez, in all the blandness of his fanaticism, can be found in Kafka, then those two beasts Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld can be found in Ionesco — in his play Rhinoceros, where humans are changing one by one into brutal, hard-charging pachyderms. “Moral standards!” bellows one such man/rhino, as his hide thickens and the beginnings of a horn bulge out of his forehead, “I’m sick of moral standards! We need to go beyond moral standards!” Chop his fucking fingers off.
As for the rest of us, faced with this inconvenient problem, we seem to have learned well the lesson enacted by Père Ubu in Jarry’s sequel, Ubu Cocu: take your conscience out of its suitcase, consult it briefly and then flush it — like the Koran — down the toilet.
Related:
Slideshow: Contemporary animation in Providence, True originals, Old masters, More 
- Slideshow: Contemporary animation in Providence
Next week in Providence, two unrelated but complimentary events combine to create one of the finest showcases of contemporary animation that you’ll probably find anywhere in North America this year. And it’s all free.
- True originals
David Thomas is a 300-pound acrobat tiptoeing along a high wire stretched over chaos and control.
- Old masters
Last month, students at Boston Conservatory and Boston University paid tribute to two notables of modern dance's second generation in the best possible way: by performing their work.
- Straight outta Kafka
We want to get into the shower and not emerge until November 2008.
- Hedonism at its best
In 1888, a 15-year-old French kid and a couple of his buddies wrote a script, modeling its gross and laughable anti-hero on a school teacher whom they had it in for.
- Life, examined
Solo performer Mike Daisey has been described as a cross between Noam Chomsky and Jack Black, Spalding Gray and Robin Williams and — my favorite — “Jackie Gleason meets Franz Kafka.”
- Controlled chaos
It’s 11 am on a Thursday, and Andy Moor is having his first coffee just a few doors down from the American Repertory Theatre’s Loeb Drama Center, the site that will be home to one of his most ambitious projects yet. The Ex, "Weapons for El Salvador" (mp3)
- Just a baby label
A week ago Thursday, Great Scott got a thick slab of prime Ohio grass-fed rock in the form of Gil Mantera’s Party Dream.
- Future heads
Matador head and contrarian tastemaker Gerard Cosloy recently wrote: “No, post-punk does not actually exist.”
- Somewhere in time
As we sip sherry, Mr. Salley points to a picture of Cinderella’s castle at Disneyland, that glorious patamechanical nexus.
- Eternal returns
When film festivals are programmed as extensions of life, not merely celebrations of cinema, commerce, or hype, everybody wins.
- Less
Topics:
Lifestyle Features
, Politics, U.S. Politics, Eugene Ionesco, More
, Politics, U.S. Politics, Eugene Ionesco, Brian Aldiss, Janeane Garofalo, Michael Tucker, Petra Epperlein, Yunis Abbas, British Politics, George W. Bush, Less
