Ineptitude

Andrew Marvell

Does everyone have the opposite of halcyon days, perhaps days of ineptitude? You may have been a gawky kid who wasn’t good at anything. Then all of a sudden you find yourself. You discover a previously hidden talent for boxing (perhaps as a result of early frustrations). You become a crack student (at least of human behavior) and the repository of some "gull," yes gull's romantic wishes. Someone else will use you to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Then by the time you arrive, you will be told it’s time to go. You are certainly not in your prime. When you get in the literal and metaphoric ring, you find your strength is already beginning to fade. In fact you walk right into someone’s metaphorical stiff jab. You forget everything. You would console yourself with the notion of starting all over again "if there were world enough and time"--to quote Andrew Marvell. 

read "Current Events" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Sirat

Oliver Laxe's Sirat, which has been taken seriously by Manola Darghis, Robert Ebert and virtually every other major critic is simplistic, pretentious and sententious. A father, Luis (Sergi Lopez) is looking for his lost daughter. The post-apocalyptic landscape with its unnamed repressive military recalls the Mad Max films. Tribalism and cultish behavior return in the form of raves.  Molly (MDMA) is usually the drug of.choice at these events though LSD and pot are what are evidenced in the film. The rave is particularly haunting in wake of the October 7 Hamas attack. Watching half dead characters die or dissolve a  is the arc of the plot. What's disturbing is seeing a host of critics as brainwashed as the characters they're writing about. Almodovar is listed as a producer. He should have known better. One day Sirat will be history.

Hegseth or Goring?

The difference between Hermann Goring and Pete Hegseth is that the former was a connoisseur of art, who, in fact, sought to steal the great masterpieces of Italy for a Fuhrermuseum in Linz. The same aspirations cannot be said for Pete Hegseth who great claim to fame before being appointed Secretary of Defense was being the co-host of Fox and Friends Weekend. Incidentally, he's a Christian Nationalist who invited Pastor Douglas Wilson, opposed to both homosexuality and women's right to vote, to speak at the Pentagon. Hegseth not only exemplifies "the banality of evil," he epitomizes the banality of banality. Who would you rather have pointing the barrel of a gun at you? A fundamentalist with an axe to grind or an art historically orientated racist anti-semite art lover and looter whose great creation was the Gestapo?

The Magus

Is it easier to end something in fiction than in life? For that matter what’s the difference? Is arranged marriage tempting fate? Your ancestors write no tale, yet your descendants are in the manufacturing business. It's axiomatic that you can’t rewrite the past but you can refuse to fixate on the ruins of the future. He lived to tell the tale is a strange locution when you think of it. What accounts for the emergence of an esthetic? Is one creating art or it simply a part of life?

read "Current Events" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Ideas

You can’t kill an idea. Millenarianism will not be quashed by force. That, in fact, is the problem with intangibles. You can swat a fly or a person, but you can’t exterminate QAnon or for that matter Comintern. There are antidotes to poison and people carry epipens for anaphylactic reactions, but what are you gonna go do about Fourier or the Federalist society. In fact ideas resemble rambunctious children. The more you tell them to pipe down, the louder they get. What fuels the fires is suffering. Ideas thrive on misery.  That’s where the idea of a messiah comes from.

read "Current Events" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

The End of Ideology

The geopolitics du jour is power grabbing. Putin naturally didn’t start a protocol that goes by to Alexander the Great, but civilization was supposed to have evolved before the resurgence of the current Neanderthal mentality. In the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall technology, for one, held the promise of what Bob Marley called “One love…” Daniel Bell wrote The End of Ideology (1960).InThe End of Ideology and the Last Man (1992) Francis Fukuyama held out a hope that in fact had already been dashed earlier by the author's own mentor, Samuel D Huntington who underscored the draw of tribalism. Now Trump extracts the leader of Venezuela, putting him in The Metropolitan Detention Center while preparing to dispatch Marco to take over Cuba. The Rules of the Game (1939) is the name of the Renoir classic. What about the fate of Taiwan and what about North Korea, the pit bull of international relations? The current sortie into Iran is not liberating anything. Millions of people are filling the main squares in Teheran and Isfahan. The only result of the bombings is to destroy infrastructure, turning Iran into a fourth world country--another Sudan or Somalia.

read "Current Events" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

 

Getting High

The Matterhorn (photo: Rafał Raczyński)

The problem with all highs is their evanescence. So what constitutes the thrill that makes both addicts and normal people want to come back for more. Is it simply a matter of serotonin running across the synapses of the brain? For example love is a high that produces effects characteristic of drugs—in particular a euphoria that is whet the moment a stimulation is removed then returned. Yet people do, in fact, find each other and continue on after the initial flame has died. The evolution of emotions is the bedrock of enduring. The initial thrill kindled by the imminence of loss leads to a host of states. Flatlining is death, but the learning to navigate a level playing field and tolerate emotions which are unlikely to produce endorphins is a form of sustenance found in marathoners who depend on steadiness more than exhilaration to keep themselves in the race.

read "Current Events" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star