Martial Arts

Clifford Odets

A trainer once said to an overly enthusiastic young boxer, "You've got the martial part. Now you need the art!" The same can apply to art itself. Marshall McLuhan famously said "the medium is the message." Yes there are pressing. issues,  but what is worse, providing audiences with a hyperbolic universe of delusion or the absence of any message at all? Melodrama is "unearned emotion." An overly promiscuous practitioner becomes a slut, who can use the same lovemaking technique with different lovers. A chorus of misery is a potent tool, but place it in the hands Great Replacement theory advocates and you can become a tearful advocate for segregation. Awake and Sing (1935) is the title of a famed Depression era Clifford Odets play. Sing for what, is the question?

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

Emoluments

Scott Bessent showcasing Trump $250 bill

  
What is the relationship facts or data and emotion? Or is there any?  Gaslighting is the term used for the way politicians turn meanings upside down. Trump's self-described rhetorical device is "the weave." Today, deontology is not the lingua franca of discourse, even in institutions as august as the Supreme Court. Many of the justices regularly hand down decisions that are ideologically rather than legally or even ethically driven. Neither Alito nor Thomas seems to have shaken the yoke of MAGA politics--and it's a troubling form of behavior for which there is no precedent, ditto the White House's defiance of the emoluments clause of the constitution. Cryptocurrency is a perfect way to veil self-dealing, though many recent behaviors, such as the attempt to create a $250 bill with Trump's image on it, seem be taken as acts of defiance in and of themselves.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

NC-65

Tokyo Story (1953)

You must be 65 or older to read this post, have you ever seen an old woman with a shopping cart approaching you on a sunny morning in June where youth is displaying its beauty and realized in a major insult to your being that you are in all probability older than her? And that your only recompense is to write about it, after the fact? You may remember Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953) about the older couple who feel they're no longer useful or wanted and even a burden. That's not you, you can be reassured. How to describe your state? Try superannuated.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

Plinth

plinth from 2001: A Space Odyssey

Do you ever feel you’re about to be crushed by an all encompassing plinth out of Kubrick's 2001. Reality is both impenetrable and entrapping. Kafka envisioned the ideational form of such inelasticity in Before the Law. It is the absence of philosophical traction that epitomizes this Sisyphean state. The Sickness Unto Death, Fear and Trembling and The Concept of Anxiety are Kierkegaard's philosophical riptide. Binx Bolling the protagonist of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer calls his struggle against despair, "The Search." You are knocking your head up against a brick wall or facing the loneliness of the white canvas with its incipient mark or the empty page on which the first character has yet to be typed. 

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

Access Hollywood

 

“Macbeth hath murdered sleep.” DJT once said he could walk down Fifth Avenue and shoot people. That was back in the halycon days of Access Hollywood. Today the only way he could get down Fifth Avenue would be in an Abrams tank. Destruction has become the lingua Franca of conversation. Have you ever looked at someone with IPods, thinking at first than they’re one of those mad psychotics who were prematurely released from mental institutions? The product of MAHA politics is a race of people reliving personal attacks and the ripostes  they might have given to their opponents—who are like the title of the Phillip K Dick novel Ubik or everywhere.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Charon

Charon Forcing Sinner Into His Boat in The Divine Comedy (Gustave Dore)

One day when you're holding back, you realize it's almost over and there's soon going to be nothing that you have to protect yourself from anymore. It can be because either you or they have caught the famous ferry for which there are no roundtrip tickets. You also may find yourself in the predicament of wishing you had told the departed the thing you wanted to say or, having departed yourself, wishing you could tell someone still left back on the river's edge the self-same message Neither Western Union, nor Verizon, nor Google services that area.

July 20, 1944

Graf von Stauffenberg

Hitler's Wehrmacht officers failed in their plot and ended up being hung. However, one wonders it it would have made a difference, if history were fated to be otherwise--and the suitcase with the bomb hadn't been inadvertently moved away from the Fuhrer at the last moment. The July 20, 1944 assassination attempt by Stauffenberg at the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia was thwarted, but the attempt to put an end to the Nazi plan (which bears some similarity to Project 2025) went as far back as 1938. One dreams of this or that action changing the course of events, but Hitler couldn't have maintained his power, if he hadn't had the support of the populace, as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen pointed out in Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.