Taste

Focus groups are used by advertisers and purveyors to psyche out the desires of populations. Vance Packard the author of books like The Status Seekers epitomized the world of 50s advertising. His version of popularized sociology epitomized the  post-war consumer culture. Dwight McDonald famously wrote Mass Cult and Mid Cult. Mad Men presented another look at the attempt to survey and profit from consumerism. Taste is the common phenomenon. Lionel Trilling ‘s The Liberal Imagination is an attempt to help readers of literature examine good from bad. The Dow and The Pulitzer are both forms of measurement and certain bestsellers represent the meeting point between commerce and art.

read "En Plein Air" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

A Connecticut Yankee

Alignment refers to celestial bodies. Human wishes often mimic the movement of planets and moons. Lunar and solar eclipses, interplanetary and stellar movements are the essence of cosmology and also astrology but they also function as metaphors in an imaginative context. When you have your chart read, you're looking into a crystal ball. On the other hand heavenly bodies can be used to obfuscate.  Remember how Hank Morgan uses a solar eclipse in Connecticut Yankee to convince Arthur of his magical powers.

read "En Plein Air" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Andrenalin

Karl Marx

Controversy produces Adrenalin. Adrenalin is an antidote to priapism, which can create necrotic tissue. It’s also the chemical cause for impotence. You get anxious and lose your erection. Or if you’re a Hegelian "world-historical figure," adrenalin produces the antithesis that facilitates The Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

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

Brave New World

Scarcity produces demand and hence cost. You have to pay a lot for those things that are in short supply. Can emotion be commodified? Imagine a commissary where one comes for states of mind. You might reply “go to a rave.” There you can acquire MDMA, LSD, cannabis, psilocybin, Bennie’s etc. remember Brave New World and Soma? The price of authenticity is the awareness of death. Unfortunately life’s ending has produced its own meme in which you're not turned into ashes but rather a piece of data. Will Costco sell suicidal thoughts or a perfume named Happiness?

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

Bela Tarr's Damnation

Damnation (1988) which was recently revived at The Walter Reade Theater, as a part of a retrospective of the Hungarian director's films, has lots of rain and dogs and dancing. There's a married torch singer (Vali Kerekes), who has sex with two other men, one of whom, Karrer, (Miklós B. Székely) declares that he will debase himself in order to have her. Their sex is extraordinary in the history of cinema. Her legs are spread and she cradles her lover. The rocking allows her to orgasm, but the iconography is that of the Madonna and Child. The film, like all of the director's work is filmed in black and white which creates a chiascoro effect. The movie is a succession of paintings.  One is a Magyar "Night Watch" with the camera panning across the faces of townsfolk, posing uneasily. And the film has its resident seer, a Casandra with biblical innuendos, who resides in a cabaret named Titanik. It sports a broken neon sign and topless beauties. Everything is unremittingly depressing and filmgoers who are discomforted by the representation of happiness will feel at home. Damnation is also a masterpiece. In the final scene, Karrer gets on his hands and knees to threaten a barking dog. Speaking of painters, neither Bosch nor Brueghel could have thought this one up. The film screenplay was co-written by László Krasznahorkai, Tarr's frequent collaborator and the Nobel Prize winning author of Herscht 07769.

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

Revenge

Christopher Marlowe died a violent death and there is a whole genre of Elizabethan revenge tragedy epitomized by lesser playwrights like Thomas Kyd, author of The Spanish Tragedy (1582). Theatergoers are more likely to see themselves in these plays than Hamlet. A contemporary example might be titled Road Rage, another Fighting My Wy WAY OUT which deals with the kind of person who perpetually finds themselves stuck in a paper bag. This last is particularly disconcerting, literally the country cousin to Psycho (1960). Here's the plot: The protagonist wants to get back at a friend for their cosmic indifference--by not showing up at an event where the nemesis is honored. No one, least of all the person at whom the gun is pointed cares. In the end the avenger is left holding that same bag they were trying to punch their way out of.

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

Are Men From Mars?

Genitals are a touchy subject. One talks of phallic men. These type-A personalities are similar to the elite teams portrayed on Strike Force. Uterine women? In this age of gender-free pronouns, how is it possible to detect the effect of secondary sex characteristics on personality or even consciousness?Men Are From Mars Women Are From Venus is the title of a onetime bestseller which probably would meet with pushback today. It gets more complicated. People who come out can be like exchange students who return from their year abroad speaking another tongue. One wonders where the stereotypes of femininity or masculinity actually live. You’ve undoubtedly met up with francophiles who are laughable parodies. Is being manly necessarily a characteristic of one born with XY chromosomes? Are women sashaying because of high heels or morphology? In terms of role-playing, the Hermaphrodite raises questions which may be unanswerable but perhaps tantamount to Valentine Michael Smith, the earthling who returns from Mars in Stranger in a Strange Land, not knowing his ass from his elbow.

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