The Inferno

"The Map of Hell" by Sandro Botticelli

Death is painless unless of course you're Dante and believe in hell. Hell is other people is the famed Sartre iteration, but that's not the problem with the Underworld which sounds like it may be a liquid suspension. Broiling in oil is not just a very hot tub you endure with other sufferers. There’s no strength in numbers when it comes to misery. Solitary is the vigorish Satan gets. Buy let’s say you're an Epicurean or a follower of Lucretius who believes only in the present. Dying is anesthesia. You may try to catch the moment you lose consciousness, but you’re out before you've had a chance to let go. So take your pick. Suffer alone while retaining a muted form of consciousness or it’s simply lights out. In either case you've lost your voting rights.

Question of the day: Knock fucking knock...knock, knock...knock, knock, knock...knock, knock, knock, knock

Soren Kierkegaard's Die Hard With a Vengeance

Die Hard With a Vengeance was the third of the series starring Bruce Willis. "Die Hard" sounds a little like Fear and Trembling.  Epicureanism has become the existential condition du jour with the help of Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve, which popularized Lucretius’ De Rorem Natura. Taking away the Christian notion of the afterlife is the basic premise from which the great poem begins. But the thing about philosophical premises is they're hard to interpret and even harder to live by. Heidegger said that those who were not aware of death led an inauthentic existence. But death itself is open to interpretation. Batteries die, but how does that compare to organic matter, consciousness? Epicurus who shared Lucretius' stoicism  believed in “the golden mean.” Living in the present was not a  invitation to gluttony. Where does pleasure fit in? And what about pain? Is suffering itself optional, as the saying goes?

Questions of the day: Knock knock? Who's there?

White Bread

"White on White" by Kazimir Malevich (1918)

There are no dearth of conflicted souls. Hamlet is tortured by inaction, Lear by vanity and pride, Othello by jealousy, Oedipus by the awful truth, Antigone by righteousness and shooting ahead another two or three thousand years,  Beckett’s Nell and Nagg by the condition of the garbage cans in which they reside. BTW the two garbage cans bring back Plautus and Roman comedy where identity is the source of the farce. Has there ever been a play or work of art where nothing is wrong and the days pass with characters uttering only the dreadful “I can’t complain.” What about a Strange Interlude about two boring people who come home pop something in the microwave and watch the news. These folks don’t live lives of quiet desperation. Caveat emptor! You can write about boredom but you can’t be boring. Maybe the art of the happy but static existence culminating in a peaceful death is the mandate of the painter.

Answer of the day: "Knock fucking knock, if you don't answer I'm going to knock down the door."

Black Bag

Don’t try to figure out Black Bag. There is an answer, but you are likely to find yourself doing a lot of reticulated thinking in your attempt to parse out "the truth." Look at the palette Soderberg is using: drugs, a polygraph test (which one character manipulates  with her anal sphincter), fishing and the principle of loosening the line a bit before the catch, a dinner game and a chilling first scene in which one of the players delivers a stigmata by angrily sticking a knife into the other's hand. It's a crucifixion in what is described as "an amoral universe." Are you trying to get me or am I trying to get you?--is one locution. It’s truth or dare, fake news in the portrait of George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) and his wife Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchette) as a pair of married British spies. When the wife says she will kill for her husband you somehow believe her, but what about him? At first it's not clear. The actual hard espionage is naturally tied to Russia but the program at the heart of the plot, Severus, aimed at causing meltdowns, is curiously anachronistic. Moreover the expensive digs the agents occupy, replete with the latest in culinary and dress apparel are anomalous. Aren't spies civil servants? DOGE would be letting them go. Black Bag is the perfect movie in the age of gaslighting--where the standard of truth is insistence. Is there a there, there, but where? 

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

Site specific question of the day: Where are you?

Frank E. Campbell

If you grew up in Manhattan, Frank E. Campbell was the ur- funeral parlor. If it you grew up on the Upper East Side, it was tantamount to another institution Schrafft’s. You might even call Frank E. Campbell’s the Schraffts of funeral parlors. It was where all the blue bloods went. Now, it’s more ecumenical. As a side note it’s interesting that funeral parlors take on the name of their owners. You don’t have a Frank E Campbell cemetery. Most of the old-line cadavers interred by Campbell went to a place called Valhalla in the town of the same name. The name is btw spot on. Why would one want to affix one’s name to a funeral parlor? Most little boys don’t dream of being morticians when they grow up. It’s odd in fact there isn’t a Trump Funeral Chapel. You have Trump Tower, the Trump golf course at Bedminster. He’s put his name on every thing else.

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

Question of the day: What's in it for me?

A Checkers Speech

There were the Checkers and before that the oval shaped yellow cabs you see in 30s movies, in which the driver pulls down a flag-shaped lever. In the early 60s the starting fare was $0.35. Now it’s $7.75. There are “public intellectuals.” Susan Sontag was one. Fran Leibovitz was a “public humorist” during the days when she literally “took a cab” as she travelled around town in her Checker. With age she’s come to look like Hannah Arendt. The famous philosopher coined the term “banality of evil.”  Leibovitz who is the kind of celebrity who creates celebrity sightings so she can angrily recuse herself from attention. You know the type, but back to cabs. Remember Skull’s Angels, the fleet owned by the sometime art collector whose name has bitten dust along the way to oblivion. The Bauhaus “form follows function” might describe the New York Taxi of today. Some municipalities have been drawn to self-driving Teslas whose only problem is their occasional blindness to pedestrians. Beyond the fact that self-driving cars are known to kill people, they have also singlehandedly made a  once colorful profession obsolescent. Remember that gabby guy behind the wheel with the cigar in the side of his mouth? A.I. has done the same thing to writers who are the taxis of tomorrow--bilging out ideas without watching where they're going like a president posting rage- filled executive orders on the social media accountants by the the latest incarnation of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

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

Question of the day: When you walk into a room, full of strangers or even people you've known you're whole life, do you feel embarrassed?

Baise-Moi

Virginie Despentes is a French feminist. Actually that isn't quite the right word. Baise-Moi is her chez d'oeuvre. It's a novel about two women who are brutally raped. They steal cars and go on a brutal tear murdering everyone in sight, men, women and children, including mothers wheeling strollers. Despentes obviously studied Pierrot Le Fou. It's really a timeless book but also a metaphor for the Middle East, particularly with respect to sexual violence. You start off feeling empathic naturally in terms of the anger for the depredation, until the brutality of the revenge begins to set in. Any sense of the humanity of innocent and random victims is lost, but the anger ultimately self-implodes. You see this on a macro level say in the Bosnia Serbian war where both sides ultimately set their country on fire.

Question of the day: Is your life an embarrassment?