Word: kafka
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Coagulated Syrup. The company's longest single item is "The Post Office," a sort of Our Town story as Kafka might retell it. A dusty, creaky, self-important postmaster rubber-stamps his way through bizarre, touching and humdrum encounters with the town's citizens. At skit's end, the postmaster is walking around with an inverted wastebasket covering his head. Poof! The postmaster disappears, but the basket is still there. This is typical of the evening's pseudoprofundities-here today, and a basket case tomorrow...
Then the growth explosions began. They're still going on. No other city in history so typifies the delusions, the momentum, the pace and direction of its time. Some residents feel its heartbeat and would never live elsewhere. Like Joyce and his Dublin they commune inextricably. Others (more like Kafka and his Prague) live perpetually estranged and threatened by their city. But almost no one is indifferent to New York...
...Kafka evokes the terror of a citizen forced by a faceless and brutalizing state to stand trial for an unspecified crime. Cheever writes of a subtler terror: that of citizens richly and pointlessly rewarded by an equally faceless society. Unsupported by arrogance of family or formal rank, equipped with no irreplaceable skill, the well-to-do suburbanite wonders vaguely and passionately why he deserves the country clubs, the trips to Bermuda and the swimming pools. More sharply, he wonders how long it will last. Will the money stop? Will the unpredictable demons of alimony or Internal Revenue turn treacherous...
...slice of new American cinema filmed on an off-Broadway stage by Jonas and Adolfas Mekas (Hallelujah the Hills) with such brutish authenticity that it won a Venice festival grand prize as best documentary. Part drama, part polemic, with shockwave sound and a nightmare air that suggests Kafka with a Kodak, the movie does exactly what it sets out to do-seizes an audience by the shirtfront and slams it around from wall to wall for one grueling day in a Marine Corps lockup...
...world is full of such beleaguered souls, looking, like Kafka's Joseph K, for someone authorized to cope. And naturally enough, this modern dilemma reaches an apogee of sorts in New York, the world's most modern city. There, the tenant who pays some $250 for his apartment is likely to find the price does not include a kindly landlord or even one who can be tracked down; faced with a leak that can't be stopped, and no one but his wife who cares, he must plunge into the morass of building regulations...