Growing up in the Seventies became a search for the offbeat, the quirky (which might explain how I can put Lene Lovich, the Mael brothers, and Tristan Tzara in the same parenthetical comment). If the strange had already entered my school days with the plays of
Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Wolfgang Borchert, outside the school walls my friends and I entertained ourselves with the likes of Boris Vian.
The dark, comic play, The Empire Builders by Boris Vian (Les Bâtisseurs d'Empire ou le Schmürz, 1957, pub. 1959), was described by LA Weekly (commenting on one of its periodic revivals) in this way:
- "A respectable family of father, mother, daughter, and their maid,
flee within the confines of their home, from a strange, unknown and
terrifying Noise which pursues them as they move upward from floor to
floor until they reach the attic. In each room, they find the same
creature awaiting them: a dark, bandage-wrapped thing who suffers in
silence as the family casually beats, whips, and pummels him." (City Garage Theater, n.d.)
Le Schmürz followed the family from room to smaller room to garret, quietly suffering beatings and various tortures, until the remnant of the family ends the play by self-defenestration, and an army of silent, bandage-wrapped personages appear. As a teenager, I presumably incompletely assumed that (1) Europeans had a lot of unresolved issues after 1945, and (2) Vian was not enamored of the bourgeois family.
But today's report that "thousands of people have
taken to the streets in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo," suggest a similar shrinking scenario for Pres. Bashar al-Assad's regime.
- Syria's second city has so far not experienced the violence
seen in other cities during the uprising and has remained largely loyal
to the government...since protests began in
March 2011. ( "'Thousands' protest in northern Syrian city of Aleppo," 18 May 2012, BBC)
All is well; Damascus is largely loyal, said the bourgeois father from his attic room.
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