Ilse Koch and Kristi Noem

Only their hairdressers know for sure

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem bears some comparison to Ilse Koch, the infamous Bitch of Buchenwald. One of her most notable moments was an appearance at the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador. There she paraded around in her signature revealing outfits, as tattooed inmates packed into cages, looked on. One knows what happens to prisoners in such facilities who get erections during the visits of dignitaries. Koch made lampshades out of human skin and used prisoners to build a riding ring. By comparison five-year olds are detained in ICE facilities, like the Dilley Family Detention Center, with untreated diseases.  Ghislaine Maxwell is being held at "Club Fed" in anticipation of her prospective release--which is likely to be one of the last pardons Trump gives before leaving office. {Editor's Note: The New York Post reported Noem was having an affair with Corey Lewandowski. Melania Trump and Noem ought to rent CECOT for a Victoria's Secret fashion show in honor of Jeffrey Epstein associate Leslie Wexner }

The Secret Agent

The title of Kleber Mendonca Filho's The Secret Agent cites the Conrad novel after which it is named. In the eponymous work, the main character is a rather ineffectual spy. The same tone of irony is at work in the current production. In the opening scene, a corpse is covered by cardboard, but when the police arrive, it's to shakedown the main character Armando (Wagner Moura). Lucky he has the required fire extinguisher in the glove compartment of his car. Armando's yellow beetle is an iconic presence in the film, a Beetles "Yellow Submarine" bobbing through an atmosphere of impending doom as the main character tries to skirt a pair of assassins during the l977 Brazilian Carnival in Recife. The atmosphere of joy, with masked revelers and public sex, alternates with constant fear and terror. Armando's father-in-law, Sr. Alexandre (Carlos Francisco) is the projectionist in a theater where Jaws is being shown while Chicago's l976 hit "If You Leave Me Now" provides the soundtrack. Armando takes refuge in a safe house in Recife, but he's given a job in an agency which creates government identity cards and where he spends his free time searching for information about his late mother, who he barely remembers. Throughout the movie there are continual cuts to the present time in which, Flavia a researcher working to identify victims of past brutality, visits Armando's son Fernando, who works in a blood transfusion unit situated on the site of Sr. Alexandre's old movie theater. The film creates its own internal atmosphere which is timeless even as it moves from past to present. Industrial espionage and fascism bookend the action, but the style is one of cinematic magical realism in which history and memory create their own timeline and tapestry.

JE

                                                      

One hesitates to even employ the name. The ubiquity is the issue. The only comparison is Covid from which no society is immune. Was it passed from Dennis Rodman onto Kim Jong-un. Were those in solitary infected? Did Rex Heuermann, the Gilgo Beach murder have dealings even after the first conviction in 2008.  Did artificial intelligence become superficial? People are earnestly abhorrent but what to think of something that crosses state and party lines? BTW how did the eponymous JE vote. Was it a democrat? Or did it move right just as a thermometer moves up? Soma was the drug employed in Huxley's Brave New World to drug the populace. Corruption is by definition value free. Beria and Thomas Jefferson were both corrupt and would both have been prone to JE? The DOJ harbored millions and millions of documents, but why and when did it start? Say Door Dash delivered to JE townhouse one night in 2009 then to you? As is evident with ISIS or Hamas, it's impossible to extinguish an idea.  JE Wanted Dead or Alive. 

Ogen Nash

Nash and Dagmar 

Are you tired of the monotony of politics? Ideology is another matter since it’s a form of thinking. Who would you listen to? Tommy Tuberville, Joseph de Maistre or Ogden Nash? Stupidity can be colorful. Don’t count on the world of poetic discourse for a respite from the culture wars. There are 9 circles of Inferno at every Dante conference. If you entertain the belief that Gilles Deleuze’s Anti-Oedipus has anything to do with mental health, you may be in for a surprise—ditto trying to explain why you still have to pay the full fee for a Lacanian 50 minute session, that’s cut off. If you're an event organizer, you may have to juggle Turning Point America, The Eulenspiegel Society and the Right to Die. Spoiler Alert: it's all someone else's fault. Sure go listen to the annual Moby Dick reading in Sag Harbor but don’t think the world of Melville scholars isn’t riven by a Unified Executive.

read the review ofThe Wormhole Society by Francis levy and Joseph Silver in The East Hampton Star 

The Story of O

Perversion is altering something from its original course. Perversion of justice, for instance. Something is perverse when it begins this process. Perverts are those who enjoy such derailments and a perversion, when it comes to sex is defined as abnormality. "What is normal?" is the complaint of every pervert from the Marquis de Sade on. One walks a slippery slope in trying to lower or raise the bar in reference to that which some deem to be a form of pleasure. There are those who may derive their kicks from getting their leg pulled. That train has left the station means an inalterable process has begun. A pervert trying to reverse course is similar to a fish swimming upstream. Yes salmon return home to die, but the average tuna will find itself canned. You'd think perversion would be an easy thing to cure. Just give the person the correct directions. Easier said than done. It's hard to eradicate an idea.

read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver in The East Hampton Star

The Wild One

It may seem odd in this age of Jeffrey Epstein to remember America is a puritanical society. The Scarlet Letter is worn by every American. Sexuality not only results in humiliation, it’s predicated on it. Shame was the 2011 Michael Fassbinder movie about a sex addict. America isn’t the only country where transgression fuels arousal. Catholicism and fascism were the cocktail that formed Pasolini’s sensibility, but America is a secular society where there's at least the illusion of freedom. So the outlying forces, the attraction between positive and negative plus and minus in fact create the buzz. In The Wild One (1953), Marlon Brando auditions as America’s great heartthrob by leading a motorcycle gang into town. James Dean, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty and their female counterparts Janet Leigh, Natalie Wood and Marilyn Monroe all become stars by defying the mores of society.

Read "Boudu Saved From Drowning" by Francis Levy with a painting by Hallie Cohen in The East Hampton Star

How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel

Can an inward turning figure be an activist? What revolution would Proust lead? There has famously been a conservatism to great 20th  Century modernism, Ezra Poind ended up in St. Elizabeth’s in the wake of his fascist broadcasts during the Second War. Tolstoy is an exception particularly with regard to the Christianity which infused his writing in the latter part of his career. Andre Malraux, a Gaullist political figure, wrote both Man’s Fate and Man’s Hope (if manifest content is significant, the titles tell part of the story). Camus, the editor of the famed resistance paper Combat, was the author of The Stranger, a unique combination of interiority with intention and there were Koestler, Silone and, indubitably, George Orwell whose complex convictions are an essay in consciousness itself. Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Save Your Life  fuses the how-to genre with a Proust's excavations of memory in both its voluntary and involuntary forms (as exemplified by the iconic madeleine). The potential humor and even silliness of the endeavor is belied by acuteness of the author's insights.

Read "Boudu Saved From Drowning" by Francis Levy with a painting by Hallie Cohen in The East Hampton Star