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Articles

Addled Essence

David Birch looks for the links between the teen spirit & the philosophical impulse.

Near the beginning of his film Crimes and Misdemeanours, Woody Allen’s character offers his niece some advice. “Don’t listen to what your schoolteachers tell you,” he instructs her: “Just see what they look like, and that’s how you’ll know what life is really going to be like.”

Besides Allen’s presumptions that the role of a teacher is to show us what life is like, and the Wildean suggestion that our bodies give away more than our words, his words also imply that in order to understand something you just need to look at the people who do it. You will, for instance, learn more about the Last Night of the Proms [British concert series] by watching it on mute than by listening to it blind. The audience says it all; and in life, the livers say it all.

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