US v. Commissioner of Baseball

In Dobbs, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Now,  rumors have it, the DOJ under Attorney General Pam Bondi is filing to overturn Schenck.The opinion, written by Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1919, famously injures against “crying fire in a crowded theater.” In a separate case US v. Commissioner of Baseball, the court ruled 5-4 against rules in sports. Such shibboleths as the 3 bases plus home plate requirement, the right of the team with the higher score to win, together with prohibitions about drunken fans throwing beer bottles at players they don’t like have been deemed unconstitutional. America will be great again if citizens are allowed to have fun. The new line of originalist thinking propagated by justices Alito and Thomas, of course, makes exceptions for DACA dreamers who are not allowed to have any fun or freedom. Anybody can now exercise their First Amendment rights in crying “fire,” but the bad criminal who allegedly started the fire will be forced to relinquish their right to a trial before being sent to the notorious Cecot prison in El Salvador--forever.

read "Pet Buddha" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

and listen to "Twenty-Five Miles From Home" by Edwin Starr

Extemporize Your Eulogy or Eclogue

The ability to extemporize is a gift, particularly when it relates to eulogies. You may have been invited to speak at a memorial service or even a graveside. If it’s a person of note  you’ll be part of a coven of friends and colleagues. Not to be humorous at the expense of…but how to eulogize a mortician?  If cremation or embalming are involved, you need to call upon someone who can speak to a particular skill set. Eulogies are similar to eclogues which Virgil was famous for. Should a eulogy be a hagiography or encomium? Premeditated eulogies tend to fall into the trap of idealization. On the other hand speaking from the heart may yield inadvertent hurts. When you’re standing at the edge of a grave, you see not only dirt but eternity. Write it all out and you don’t have to worry but when you look down at the coffin and realize Joe really died, you may find your mind drifting to how Joe behaved at his bachelor party 40 years when he almost ran off with a stripper. Alas poor Joe, he wasn't joking when he said, now that we've talked about me, let’s talk about me. So the next time you’re called on to deliver parting words, throw away that crumpled piece of paper you’ve stuck in your pocket and let the words fly.

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

Mediocrity

Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi are mediocre. They exemplify the kind of limited personalities that Trump surrounds himself with. The only MAGA individual who has at least pretensions to anti-humanism is Steve Bannon. In American Dharma he quoted Milton’s “better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” Bravo! Steve Miller, Pete Navarro, Ed Martin—these are the black shirts. There isn’t even a Goering who as Hitler's Maecenus attempted to loot Italian masterpieces for the Hitler Fuhrermuseum in Linz. Trump probably never heard of Caravaggio, but as Satan in the current Medieval passion play, he has a significant role to perform. This jolly crew does not represent "the banality of evil"--the phrase used about Eichmann. A description of them does not earn that level of locution. These clowns are just banal.

read "Pet Buddha" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

and listen to "Twenty-Five Miles From Home" by Edwin Starr

Friends With Benefits

"Friends with benefits" is a prominent entry in the dictionary of urban legendary. It's the ultimate albeit quotidian expression of transactional behavior, pleasure being the lingua franca of barter and exchange. Trump's The Art of the Deal is the Gideon Bible of a universe where the calling of Saint Francis with its abrogation of materialism is an increasingly faint barely audible whisper. Barter is actually an ancient profession that precedes currency. Lewis Hyde has related these kinds of economics in his concept of "the gift," which is a non-reciprocal form of exchange. Generosity and benevolence in this paradigm are tantamount to toolmaking in the advent of consciousness. What's so singular about the current Ice Age of sensibility is that it brooks no past. The president conveys a delusory reassurance in his incantations about tariffs. It's as if you no longer remember a world where there was anything else.

read "Pet Buddha" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

and listen to "Twenty-Five Miles From Home" by Edwin Starr

Amor Fati

 

Spoiler Alert: 

In the last episode of The White Lotus  one of the main characters cries “he killed my father.” “He was your father” is the plaintive response. "Amor Fati" is the finale. It means "a love of fate." As you will recall Oedipus brings about the very thing he's running from—which is a life lesson for everyone. It’s a particularly clever turn of the screw in this instance  Rather than trying to elude the oracle, the perp is a victim of misinformation. He's got his facts wrong. This final scene also recalls the kind of carnage you find in the finale of Medea. The blood of innocents flows. The notion of the tragic flaw or "hamartia" is almost perfectly limned by Mike White in the creation of his sullen wayfarer. BTW the death scene of the two lovers lying on lilies recalls Millais' "Ophelia."

read "Pet Buddha" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

and listen to "Twenty-Five Miles From Home" by Edwin Starr

Eephus

The premise of Carson Lund's Eephus is wistful and nostalgic. The baseball field, where a local team plays, is being ripped down. However the disquisition itself is noticeably reserved and lacking in sentimentality. One way this is accomplished is by virtue of cinematic digression. There are a number of painterly moments in the film including one of a cloud, another of the woods in back of the field where balls get lost, and another of the Eephus itself. It's a high arching pitch in a baseball game. It distracts the batter and is an objective correlative for striking out.The movie creates a dialectic between the haunting sublimity of loss and the constant intrusion of present reality, which includes one scene in which the ball is literally coming at the movie audience. When it gets dark and the lights of the aged stadium go out, the players pull up their cars, using the headlights so they can meet their one objective, which is not so much to win as to finish the game. The great documentary filmmaker Fred Wiseman makes a voice over cameo appearance as a local radio announcer.

read "Never Brush Again" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

The Decline of the West

Plato, Aristotle, Loomer, Herodotus are amongst the names engraved on the frieze of Columbia’s Butler Library. The bane of the Multiculturalist movement is Western White Male Culture.Aeschylus Socrates, Shakespeare are the hegemons. Saul Bellow famous countered with his famous “who was the Shakespeare of the Zulus?" Bellow would be removed from the Unuversity of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought were he alive today—the university’s notorious stubbornness about free speech not withstanding. Still history creates strange bedfellows. Remember how anti-pornography feminists like Andrea Dworkin bonded with fundamentalist Christians. Now ironically MAGA and DEI have their triggers aimed at the same thing—Western Culture! But here’s the problem. Trump has appointment himself head of the Kennedy Center, but what’s going to be on the bill. You can’t have the classics which represent Harvard and Columbia, but you also can’t feature August Wilson who's too DEI. Jackie Robinson was even a bridge too far for Pete Heseth when he took over the Defense Department (his webpage was removed and restored). Maybe  Clint Eastwood is a good beach head. Dirty Harry will appeal to the MAGA anti-gun control and Ivy League film society third alike. 

read "Never Brush Again" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and listen to "Make America Great Again" by Pussy Riot