Choking Up

Sally Rooney is one of the great documenters of extended adolescence and also of sexual mores. In this regard "choking" is the foreplay du jour. Practitioners of jujitsu choke each other out with opponents signaling when they’ve had enough. You can’t cry "uncle" obviously. You slap the mat.  Back in the long ago era of Roth, fellatio was the transgressive activity. These days, in certain circles blow jobs don’t even qualify as sex. You walk into someone’s house and they matter of factly blow you. It's a far cry from "hello!" Times change. The 80s for example was the era of golden showers. Then came rough sex and bukake. Strindberg wrote Dance of Death which may someday be the swan song for this era of "choking," though today it’s everywhere. That same host or hostess who once blew you has become a veteran MMA who no longer wants to be a door mat. Go to a gathering of thirty somethings and you’ll be the guest who's being detained or restrained. Remember the choke which was part of the apparatus of the old standard shift? Remember when "gay" meant "happy?" Choking as an element of lovemaking has nothing to do with being gay. Most sexual intercourse amongst young people since the time of the pandemic has involved choking. If Godard were alive, he’d undoubtedly have directed a sequel to Breathless which would deal with this phenomenon. If you remember Anna Karina plays the prostitute in Vivre Sa vie. Talking dirty was the paraphilia explored in that film as it was in the porn series Talk Dirty to Me. Humankind always in the move has come a long way since then.

read "Luggage Tags" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "The El" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and also read "Punk" by Francis Levy, Vol.1 Brooklyn

Highest 2 Lowest

Spike Lee's thriller noir, Highest 2 Lowest, is based on Kurosawa's High and Low (1963) and Ed McBain's King's Ransom (1959). Provenance is one of the subjects of the movie. The very last powerful confrontation between a rapper and kidnapper named Felon (ASAP Rocky) and David King aka King David (Denzel Washington) is between "old" (King's "discovery" at the movie's climax is accompanied by a Steinway) and "new" style. Jeffrey Wright who played the role of the black writer Thelonious "Monk" Ellison in American Fiction functions not only as a character but citation. If you recall Ellison adopts a faux prison rapper persona to succeed in the Cord Jefferson movie. However, the antinomy, the Gregorian chant between King and Felon, separated by a penitentiary's plexiglass divider is the movie's coup de grace. (Edit note: the range of Denzel Washington's performance is off the charts).

read "Luggage Tags" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "The El" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and also read "Punk" by Francis Levy, Vol.1 Brooklyn

Dip in the Pool (Alfred Hitchcock Presents, l958)

Disasters provide a function. Particularly if they’re part of a collectivity (of as little as two) they can bring people together. "We three make up a solitude. For none alive to-day. Can know the stories that we know. Or say the things we say. (WB Yeats). No one wishes comeuppances on anyone, but they’re unavoidable. You might think of them as side bars, side roads or detours that can take on a life if their own. Whole ways of life have been uprooted by the recent floods in Texas and the Southwest where rescue crews and even FEMA can create their own intimacies. There was recently a very touching picture of first responder rescuing a woman trapped in her car and literally carrying her across a flooded highway. It’s unlikely these two will ever forget each other. The only thing better than being saved is saving someone. 

read "Luggage Tags" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "The El" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and also read "Punk" by Francis Levy, Vol.1 Brooklyn

The Night Watch

The Night Watch by Rembrandt (1642)

Sleep hygiene is a phrase that’s sometimes used to refer to nocturnal habits. Of course there are those who work nights, for instance, soldiers on the lookout for the enemy. Your doctor may have arranged for you to go to a clinic where they hook you up and test for things like sleep apnea but there is another kind of sleeplessness--the physical manifestation of a metaphysical plight. "The Night Watch" is one of Rembrandt’s most famous paintings. The subject is a group of men, what sixties radicals would have called The Establishment. But when you think of it, the title is resonant of the very things that might keep people up. It’s hard to sleep when you feel your world is falling apart. Is that what Rembrandt was thinking about when he produced his great masterpiece? Probably not. He was plainly interested in applying paint and that task was so all encompassing, there was little time left to the think. No it’s unlikely Rembrandt tossed and turned. When you look at "The Night Watch," you'll likely conclude, the artist got a good night’s sleep.

read "Luggage Tags" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "The El" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and also read "Punk" by Francis Levy, Vol.1 Brooklyn

Beyond Good and Evil?

Is evil relative? Is there a little bit of larceny in everyone? Today it’s easy to see evil as absolute. Just pluck from the grab bag of headlines about evil people say Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas trying to beat out the incumbent,  John Cornyn for the Republican senate seat nomination. There's  Cetco, Jair Bolsinaro luckily under house arrest in Brazil, naturally Putin, Kim Jong-un (who purportedly blew his uncle up with a mortar). Netanyahu washes his hands of Gaza by killing all the Palestinians and taking it over. The latest bit of treachery was the murder of 4 Al-Jazeera journalists. Marjorie Taylor Greene the embodiment of evil gets points for condemning the genocide. Where is the relativity, where the gray areas? Is there an ounce of good in Trump? Or is that like mistaking apples for oranges? It’s literally a new Ice Age. Can it be said good came from the previous one—to the extent that human life for good or bad might not have come to be without it?

read "Luggage Tags" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "The El" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and also read "Punk" by Francis Levy, Vol.1 Brooklyn

The Great Dictator

Remember the scene in The Great Dictator when Chaplin bounces the globe around like a ball. Now Trump is meeting with Putin to finalize an agreement on Ukraine’s fate. Zelensky may be allowed to attend in observer status after all it is his country that's being discussed) but he won’t have any say. This coming after the announcement The White House Rose garden is being turned into a cement patio and 800 National Guardsmen will be called in to patrol the capitol even though crime is down. Is the country a kingdom or police state? Don’t be surprised to see The Icemen Cometh in repertoire at The Kennedy Center. The next step for Ghislaine Maxwell will be a move from the minimum security prison to house arrest at Mar-A-Lago. Netanyahu is washing his hands of Gaza by killing all the inhabitants. As Kurt Vonnegut remarks about the bombing of Dresden (and war in general) in Slaughterhouse- Five  “And so it goes”

read "Luggage Tags" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "The El" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and also read "Punk" by Francis Levy, Vol.1 Brooklyn

The Naked Gun

The decision to cast Pam Anderson as Beth Davenport the sister of a murder victim breaks down the fourth wall. Anderson’s supposedly stolen marriage video in which she’s shown avariciously fellating Tommy Lee, during their honeymoon (1998) augured in the era of reality television. "The Celebrity Wives of Deep Throat" should have been the title of the pirated video which rivals Chloe Sevigny’s memorable performance in Brown Bunny. But Akiva Schaffer’s The Naked Gun which stars Liam Neeson in the role popularized  by Leslie Nielsen is "surreality reality TV" in film form.  Un Chien Andalou (1929) challenged the conventions of cinema when a razor cut an eyeball. Here the films Top Gun literally punches open the screen after he’s also bent apart the film’s credit sequence. The verbal pyroteomics derive from another master of surrealism Groucho Marx. When Pam Anderson is asked “did you see LA?” she blithely says she’s an alumnus (of UCLA). It’s all up hill, down hill and sideways from there.

read "Luggage Tags" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "The El" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and also read "Punk" by Francis Levy, Vol.1 Brooklyn