Ted Kuenz in Ibsen's "When We Dead Awaken"

Ted Kuenz

Ted Kuenz who appears in the Renewal by Andersen commercial you have seen on CNN and MSNBC, before you stopped watching the news, is an actor who apparently plays himself. You didn't know that the folks at the Window Replacement Division of Renewal by Andersen were followers of Luigi Pirandello, the Sicilian playwright who wrote Six Characters in Search of an Author. Though "who is playing whom" may lie at the heart at the heart of this drama, it's not fake news! The question is, what role will Ted kuenz continue to play in future productions of the Renewal By Andersen Repertory Company? Will Ted Kuenz play Hamlet and ask "to engage the Replacement Windows Division of Renewal by Andersen or not? That is the question?" If nothing else Ted Kuenz is Waiting for Godot or anyone else who can close his windows aka mouth since there's a draft. imagine Ted Kuenz in Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken!

read "A Glossary of Bodily Functions" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Pain

House of Pain

Severely disturbed people inflict physical pain on themselves in order to squelch a deeper ache. Those who resort to self- mutilation, who cut and burn them selves, constitute a subcategory. The mind is so constructed that it can go on autopilot to produce the right quotient of maladaptive behavior necessary to quell the noise. Loss can produce bouts of logorrhea. You've encountered people who can't stop talking and bring conversation to a halt. These literally take the air out of a room. Traumatized children either look like ghosts with their deadened eyes or produce a level of noise which eradicates both thought and emotion. Meditation is a spiritual activity. You stop what you're doing. It's meant to clear the mind. But it can do just the opposite turning up the volume on the very voices it seeks to eliminate.

read "Francis Levy's Divine Comedy," Exquisite Corpse

Shit Show

The Fuck-Up was Arthur Nersesian's breakout novel. Self-published and placed in book stores on consignment, it eventually sold 140,000 copies. A translation of the The Fuck-Up has recently become a "succes d'estime," as well as a publishing sensation in France. It's not hard to see why the French would gravitate to Nersesian's world of 80s New York. It's a literal A Bout de Souffle with a main character who works as an usher at a Cinema Village type place and who then pretends to be gay so he can remain in the employ of a porno theater--yes, he's a male moll who avoids gangsters and doesn't sell The Trib like Jean Seberg. The point is it's got the mood early Godard that played the downtown art houses of the 60s. Nersesian likes expletives in his titles. His latest novel, his fourteenth, is Shit Show. The book is a  totally different bag of apples, in which the author deftly displays his gift for imagining history, moving from the Stalinist Russia of the 40s to Woodstock, then  9/11. Nersesian's character Morosov even writes a more than competent poem ending with these lines: "Since there was no sign of heaven, God dropped them on the Syrian/Plains to let his vultures feed/They were the bread unleavened, his hateful creed." Here is a non sequitur from Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station: "In spite of Marx's enthusiasm for the human, he is either inhumanely dark and dead or almost superhumanly brilliant." 

read "Making the Graphic Novel Graphic" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Assad

Will those painted gold Trump statues be tumbled someday just as Assad monuments are being desecrated in Homs, Aleppo and Damascus? Btw who will be appointed to be the head of the Assad's imperial guard of sports cars? Trump is one step ahead of his predecessors, issuing the commemorative coins and busts of himself before he even turns the Oval Office into "the shape of money." Remember Dubcek and Prague Spring and Lech Walesa ? Are the Trumps the Romanovs? Will Donald and Melania (a naturalized citizen in  danger of deportation) become Nicholas and Alexandra?

read "An Incident of Defenestration" by Francis Levy, Vol.1 Brooklyn

Plato's Retreat

The Ansonia Hotel

There are some people who dream of a sensual state that will be the cure for all their problems. Life is an eternal gray February day on the late 60s West Side with biting Hudson winds rattling icy windows. Only invoking the image of Plato's Retreat and the famed redoubt, The Ansonia Hotel, breaks the ice. Fill the emptiness with the ultimate erotic dream! But is free access to naked bodies the cure for lassitude? The Orgy is the title of a novel by the poet Muriel Rukeyser. Rome is a civilization once associated with indulgence. Caligula is the emperor whose name is most associated with an excess whose essence lay in the subjugation and exercise of power over his subjects. Caligula was a madam, classical civilization his brothel. He was also one of history's greatest Johns which poses the question, can a slave owner be a consumer of the very property he owns? The reciprocal love of women was memorialized by Sappho. La Grand Bouffe the 1970 movie starring Michel Piccoli anticipated Bob Guccioni's failed Caligula (1979). Gore Vidal, who wrote the script  along with Malcolm McDowell, who played the emperor, both abandoned the project. But the set itself exemplified the  excesses of an iconic institution which is now only a distant memory and footnote to the history of the upper west side in the disco era. 

read "Removing Your Unconscious" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and listen to "Boogaloo Down Broadway" by Johnny C (1967)

Bukowski

Are you so obsessed with yourself that you don't know whether you're coming or going? Freud talked about love and work, but many professionals whose career paths are, for good or bad, set in stone might say sex and food--two ephemeral entities that create a discussion that far exceeds their duration. Look at the literature of sexuality Catallus, Caligula, Sade, Chaucer, Rabelais, Fielding and in modern times Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, Phillip Roth, Simone de Beauvoir, Erica Jong,  Annie Ernaux, John Updike, Harold Brodkey and Daphne Merkin. And the literature of food is no slouch either, if you consider all the writers from  Escoffier to Marcella Hazan and Julia Childs. It's a paradox of fleeting pleasures that one could spend a lifetime writing about culinary exploits that take only a fraction of their production time to consume. Nevertheless, you'll probably be hungry and desirous until the bitter end. In fact, lust is a peculiar animal that owes as much to animal instinct as serotonin and is often masked by an intrinsic dissatisfaction with quotidien reality. In essence, humans afflicted by imagination, are all spurned lovers.

read "The Findings" by Francis Levy, Evergreen Review

and "Died Young" by Francis Levy, The Brooklyn Rail

Morbidity

"Carcass of Beef"by Chaim Soutine (1925)

Picasso was a serial killer. He turned his lovers, Olga Khokova, Dora Maar, Marie-Therese Walter into his subjects, painting, then leaving them, stags shot then mounted.  Too Far Too Go was John Updike's often heartbreaking rendering of the dissolution of a marriage which happened to be his, but as you read, you can't help thinking, why? When there is so much genuine love between two people, why need they part? Or is there a perversion involved, a psychiatric condition not listed in the DSM, where an artist needs to turn his subject into dead meat--a la Soutine. Do some writers inflict pain on themselves and others, in order to write about it?

read "An Incident of Defenestration" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn