Misery

 

Misery is a great title for a horror thriller. Many people wrongly. associate the emotion with malaise. However,  the kind of drudgery and hopelessness one associates with cement shoes is truly terrifying. Edgar Allen Poe's "The Cask of the Amontillado" deals with revenge by immurement. Waiting For Godot and Endgame are generally regarded as existential comedies, but Hamm and Clov live in garbage cans, only poking their head up to answer a turn of phrase. "Do you believe in the life to come?" Clov asks. "Mine was always that" is Hamm's response. "Insanity is doing the same thing over again and expecting different results" is a common saw. Another one is often framed in flowery plaques on bathroom walls, as an admonition to men. "We aim to please. Will you aim, too, please?" The joke rests in between the commas.

read "Chicago" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Straight Flush

 

"Fountain." Duchamp" (1917)

  
SNL modified Trump's "we have all the cards" remark to the Iranians. "We have all the cards, you only have a straight" was the joke.  You can be flush with victory which is the expressions Hegseth and Trump have evinced repeatedly, as they counted their chickens before they hatched. Or simply flushed like the heroin in that famous Trainspotting scene. You night say that The White House has a straight flush when it comes it comes their continually declining arsenal.

read "Chicago" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Cage Aux Folles

Unless you're polyamorous, a great deal of weight is placed up the notion of faithfulness. The underling notion is truth of course. A polyamorous individual is being as truthful and one who is monogamous. Things get a bit more complicated when a supposedly monogamous individual cheats. The reverse is not true of polyamory. Few polyamorous individuals who ware secretly monogamous will ever be upbraided for the feeling that they only want to be with their legal partner in life, although as strange as it may sound there are covens of gay, straight and trans people who demand a certain allegiance to the cause. The Sullivanian analytic movement argued for promiscuity as cure for possessiveness. The underlying notion was a critique of the oedipal triangle which also came under scrutiny by French analysts like Deleuze famous for his Anti-Oedipus tome. The comic possibilities of perverse or not so perverse arrangements are legion. Remember Cage Aux Folles?

read "Chicago" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Embarrassment

"An Embarrassing Proposal" by Antoine Watteau

Are you the kind of person who has always had their hand up waving for attention? Did it start in grammar school, when you got kicked out of class after calling out an answer? Did you do it because you felt you weren't being called on fast enough or potentially at all? Has such behavior become a humiliating practice that makes human existence itself a source of embarrassment for you? You can stop crying out for attention, but nothing is going to change. Once a pickle no longer a cucumber. Society has your number. People realize full well that you're shutting up because you're enraged.

read "Chicago" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Hatshepsut

Queen Hatshepsut

This is a horror movie, one of those old 30s British affairs, where the Oxbridge archeologists upset the spirit of of some dignitary like Hatshepsut. If you haven't visited her tomb at the Met, here's the details. Hatshepsut c 1505 BC was the sixth pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt, ruling first as regent, then as queen regnant from c.1479 BC c. 1458 BC and the Great Royal Wife of Pharaoh Thutmose II. She's not the kind of person whose sleep you want to disturb. You think this is it. In honor of Lindsay Graham, Russia will finally be sanctioned. Cornyn and Tillis will stick to their guns and refuse go along with an agreement about President's fund that's not worth the paper it's written on. Even fanatics like Laura Loomer and Jean Pirro will stand up. But there is no slaying the monster, whose fingers crawl like bugs out of their crypt, just as you're convinced you've buried them forever. 

read "Chicago" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

What is to Be Done?

There are two basic lessons to be learned from history--beyond the fact that Hegel's "world historical figure" is a value free notion. Avoid nice guys and those who threaten to "get things done." Chamberlain made the mistake of thinking Hitler was a nice guy when he promised the Sudetenland was Germany's last grab. Most recently Pete Hegseth and Trump both have threatened to bomb Iran into oblivion."A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again," Trump recently declared. Hamlet is always held up as an example of what happens when you think too much. Trump, one might say, is the opposite of Hamlet. In the name of bringing industry back home, he exercises tariffs for which the consumer pays the price.

read "Chicago" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Anxiety

Senator John N. Kennedy

John N. not F Kennedy is the Republican senator from Louisiana. You may not like his politics, but his iterations can be amusing such as his description of Trump in regard to the president's insistence that vandals were responsible the failures of the reflecting pool. "He exists loudly, and he grows anxious when he has an unexpressed thought." Iterations about states of existence are an art form in and of themselves. You might call them existential memes. It's an ability that crosses the aisle and is an odd value neutral touch of light. A Republican with a name like John Kennedy is, btw,  subliminally bipartisan. Is it not?

read "Chicago" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star