'Irrational Man'

Philosophy As Enabling Bullshit

It's very hard to figure where Woody Allen posits classical and traditional Western Philosophy in his life. His earliest writings crack jokes about Plato ("He used to knock over little boys. What the hell would he know?") and even Kant's moral imperative ("if we all behave that way, willI get to eat my lunch and keep it?"). This fixation has wound its way through his career as plenty of punchlines were dished out at the expense of Socrates through to Heidegger at various junctures. It's worth wondering just how seriously he takes it if he wants to so talk about it. After all, his famous joke goes he was flunked from college in a metaphysics test when during an exam, he turned to the boy next to him and looked into his soul.

Here, with 'Irrational Man', we finally get the pastiche philosophical patter rolled into the dialogue of one character, The results are quite funny and funny because they are awkward, but also because what happens is in a way Woody Allen's admission that he holds no hope in philosophy. Maybe that's a good thing.

Spoiler alert as usual.


What's Good About It

In Emma Stone and Joaquin Phoenix, Woody Allen has two great actors who can carry the lines with adroitness and gusto. The two of them make hefty words sing as ordinary dialogue. It's quite the accomplishment. Woody Allen's dialogue doesn't seem to be getting easier in his old age. His recent films have been filled with difficult turns of phrases with demands for expert comic timing. As the film consists of many scenes that are two handers and three handers featuring the two, it is striking just how good Stone and Phoenix are in their respective roles.

Woody Allen's mordant wit is a kind of elaborate gallows humour, but he does a great job of holding off his plot twist. He is a magnificent writer of dialogue and excellent observer of character - he sure has the mettle of his men and women measured down pat. I wonder if a hundred years from now, people will watch his films and grapple with the vocabulary and the interchangeable vernacular of modernity and classical thought as expressed in a varsity context. He captures the anxious speech of educated people so well.

What's Bad About It

Maybe Woody Allen is getting a little tired of the philosophy jokes themselves. If there is a single failing in his portrayal of character, it is that Phoenix's philosophy professor whois so deep in despair seems to be getting through the basic curriculum fairly breezily. It is basic sort of stuff, but he seems all too at ease with the dispensing of pedagogy.

Also the snippets of philosophy he teaches come across as cribbed notes and not very interesting. Maybe it's meant to show just how bored Phoenix's character Abe Lucas is with the framework and historic context Western Philosophy, but it comes over as way too glib. As one drop out to another, it makes me want to say, "well, hold up right there. That's totally an un-nuanced view of..." That's bad writing.

Similarly, his presentation of Emma Stone's Jill as being fundamentally middle-class and therefore unable to escape her own class prejudices is a harsh assessment of her character. After all, his film is positing an extraordinary position where murder might be acceptable. For a film that wants to show the attempt to transcend moral concerns of the bourgeoisie, it takes a harsh stance on the very same moral framework that allows the plot to turn.

What's Interesting About It

It's interesting that Philosophy is at the centre of this film, which is at its core a simple yarn about an attempt at a perfect crime. It's couched in terms of philosophy exactly because it serves to obfuscate the motive for the crime. Much like 'Throw Mama From The Train', the central point of getting away with the perfect crime, resides eliminating motive. And just as 'Throw Mama From the Train' works very hard to establish the ground rules as to why the motive needs to be eliminated for the perfect crime, this film posits that a man can arrive at the point of enacting a crime through philosophy, and because he does so through his philosophical excursion, he would be able to obscure his motive substantially as to make it look like there is no motive.

When one casts one mind to it, if a murder is completely without motive, it suggests the work of a psycho-killer; and such movies have a particular tenor that leads to detective fiction. Abe Lucas has a motive, and it is to do one deed that would have a positive impact on somebody he overheard in a cafe. It's arguable whether it is a strong enough motive to lead a man to murder somebody he doesn't really know.

On one level, for all the exposition that Abe is a brilliant philosopher, if all it leads to is this crime, then either we're being sold a crock or philosophy is a crock. This being Woody Allen writing and directing, we're given the slanted evidence that it is philosophy that is bullshit. Mind you, a lot of philosophy scholars I know have ended up in pedagogy of said bullshit, so much so that I'm even inclined to believe Woody Allen's dig at a big Western Institution. Nonetheless, I had to say it's probably Woody Allen who is selling a crock of shit in this instance. As fragile and vulnerable it may seem, there's a lot more intellectual muscle in Western Philosophy yet.

Existential Despair As Plaything

Finding tenure as a philosophy tutor in this day and age has to be pretty cool when you think about it. Abe's philosophical predicament of existential despair is actually a little unrealistic. Most PhD. grads I know who have done philosophy would love exactly that job. If there's one job that a philosophy major would not feel existential despair would actually be holding a chair in academia as a philosopher. There are many kinds of conditions of existence which induce the kind of nausea or despair that existentialists of old may have written about, but being a philosophy academic is not one of them. Complaining about that condition of life is a bit like complaining about being a rock star or a movie director. If anything, it's like Larry David's never-ending complaints in 'Curb Your Enthusiasm'.

Still, it's one of Woody Allen's tropes whereby the main character is tormented. When it is Sean Penn playing a tormented guitar player in the 1920s, feeling outshone by Django Reinhardt, that's one kind of torture; but some of the other roles would invite the suspicion that these characters were posturing wankers rather than genuinely beset by existential despair. It's rather unclear where Woody Allen stands on the very topic because he's made so many jokes about it, at its expense and his own expense. Judging from this film, there are no new breakthroughs in his thinking - although the fact that he is able mount these discourses as grim black humour without inserting himself as a character shows that he's generalising his theory of existential despair as a plaything for the bored.

The Older Man, The Ingenue

Woody Allen's other trope for which he gets a lot of flack is the older man and younger woman set up. It recurs in his work because, seemingly, it's the only understanding of relationships he has any more. Oddly enough, because he writes it so often, he has written so many versions and inversions of this relationship dynamic, he's certainly the expert.

At least he's stopped casting himself as the older man, and the movies are better off for that.

Music Life

Joaquin Phoenix Quits Acting For Music

For some reason known only to the man himself, Joaquin Phoenix has announced he's quitting acting to take up Music.

Phoenix is apparently giving up acting to pursue music, a passion of his since he learned to play guitar to play the role of Johnny Cash in 2005's "Walk the Line." According to Billboard, Phoenix is working on an album with Tim Burgess, frontman for the UK group The Charlatans. Burgess said, "Once he learnt guitar he found that he had quite a lot of demons inside himself that he wanted to expel through music.

Phoenix appeared at the charity event on Monday with his brother-in-law, Casey Affleck. Affleck is married to Phoenix's younger sister, Summer. In explaining his retirement decision, Phoenix said, "It's Casey's time now."

Affleck confirmed for E! Online that Phoenix is telling the truth when he says he's leaving the acting profession, saying, "I guess he's getting into music. He's putting out an album." But both Affleck and Phoenix hurried away from the cameras without elaborating.

It's all a little nutty if you ask me, but what do I know?
Drummer Bill Bruford once said that if there is a choice between playing music for a career and something else, then there is no choice at all, you become a musician. That's probably what happened to Joaquin Phoenix, based on a bunch of guitar lessons so that he could play Johnny Cash.

What I'm In To Right Now
Tom Waits. Just send me more Tom Waits stuff.
I can't do that stuff, but I'd like to incorporate some of that vibe into my future work.

What I'm Looking For
There's a bit of cognitive dissonance in my own wanting-more-instruments thing. For a start, I don't know if the instruments I want necessarily dovetail with the music I'm playing.
For instance, I would like a fretless bass. Why? Because I'd like to seriously noodle around on a fretless bass and do some mellow stuff... I think.

The reality is that I'm more likely to get more use out of a grunty bass with round-wound strings than a fretless with tape-wound strings. I'm not really a jazzer, so why fake it?

Another instrument I'm more than passingly interested in is the Micro Korg with a vocoder. Why? Because I think I'd like to play around with some vocoder stuff. Of course, when I stop to think about it, I could do that stuff within Logic because it has a vocoder tucked away somewhere in its many little nooks. The thing is, I'd just like to play with a vocoder. Not necessarily turn myself into a late 1970s techno outfit.

I mean realistically, I'd probably end up doing a version of "Machine Messiah"'s vocoder section and never use it again. So why get it? - But I still would like one.

Then there are the constant sirens inviting me to the sea of indulgence... guitars. Wont go there today, but the call is eternal. Would like a Double Humbucker Fender Jaguar, I keep thinking... but I just can't justify it to myself.

Ditto with the digital piano. Would like one, but then where do I put it? And I might end up just doing a bunch of covers of things like 'Hey Jude' and 'Let it Be' with it', and what would be the point of that. But a digital Piano is something I'd like to have. You can never have enough good instruments with which to make noise.

Another thing I'd like to get is a really good electronic drum set. Why? because I'd like to play drums. Yes. At this point in my life, I want to learn to play drums. I've even bought a book on how to do basic stuff like paradiddles. Yet, it seems like a distant goal. Do I really want to be taking up drums at this point in my life? Yes I do. Can I afford it? Not yet.

This is why I...

Bought Another iPod
When I bought my 60GB iPod in Jan 2006, I thought it would last me a long time. I guess 2 months short of 3 years is a lifetime in technology terms. I began to reach capacity a little while ago and decided I needed to get the 160GB iPod classic. What is this need for capacity? I don't know. My own music tallies up to 17GBs of information because I carry it around as .AIF files, which is sort of unwieldy-huge enough that all my stuff won't fit on a 16GB iPod Touch. Bummer.

Recently Walk-Off HBP handed me another 19GBs of music, which just doesn't sit on my iPod with the rest of the stuff I want to have at hand, so I've been listening to that 19GB in piecemeal. It's not much fun. So the need for capacity has grown exponentially in the 3 years, as Moore's Law implies. besides which, Brew's Law says nothing succeeds like excess and 160GB is nice and excessive... until they come out with a 250GB iPod, one would think.

Then of course Apple updated their latest series of iPods and the largest-capcity iPod classic in the new range only goes to 120GB. The Apple shop in Chatswood said they'd sold out the 160GBs.
"No-no-no-no-Nooooooooooh!"

That's me screaming in my own head as I checked out the new 120GB iPods. Yeah, it's got new features and stuff, but being short-changed 40GB is no mean thing. Do the maths! It's a 32GB iPod Touch plus a 8GB iPod Touch's worth of capacity they're short-changing you. Yeah, that's 40GB all right, and it's more than the 30GB that was the second biggest iPod when I bought my iPod Video back in Jan 2006. Nobody's going to sit quiet at that 40GB of capacity not being there.
The guy in the shop shrugged and said, "Yeah well, these are slimmer."
Slimmer? What's he talking about slimmer, like it's some selling point? Who gives a shit about them being slimmer? This isn't exactly super-models or starlets or hookers, it's iPods! They still weigh like bricks!

Thus I thought the 160GB models were all gone, and felt further bummed out.
Then by accident I found out there were still four of them lying around at Dick Smith at Macquarie Centre, so it was time to go and score one for myself. By the time I arrived at the DS Power House, there was just one black one left. They had sold 3 of them that very afternoon. All of which goes to show that other people were on my wavelength and scrambled to score the left-over 160GB iPod classics over the new, slimmer 120GB models.

Of course I found out today that Tony Fadell, the dude in charge of iPod development has left the firm. He probably got shoved out of the door for coming up with the 120GB model after the 160GB model, and then claiming it was a good idea. It's not, dude.

BTW I got my new car, a Mazda2. It's hardly musical, but it's still pretty cool.