Tuesday, November 5, 2024

Trump and Derrida

Was Trump influenced by Derrida? He has always been impressionable. One wonders if he hung with a group of francophiles at Wharton who honed to deconstruction to explain the phenomenon of gaslighting. Was January 6 an attack on Democracy and the peaceful transfer of power? Retrumplicans would have you believe the mob were storming the Bastille. "Let them eat Brioche," said Marie Antoinette. Who does the pronoun, "them," apply to? Besides Derrida, Trump was also influenced by the Berkeley Free Speech movement since he says whatever he wants. In the famous Schenck decision Oliver Wendell Holmes famously argued against the right to cry "fire" in a crowded theater--an action that Trump obviously feels is not only permissible but desirable. 

"God Bless Pig Latin America" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "Ultimate Rejection!" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Monday, November 4, 2024

Project 2025



Is our current politics a Star Wars scenario with Kamala Harris as Luke Skywalker, Trump, Darth Vader, the Empire or Axis, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Hungry and China as the Mona Lisa whose emotion as conveyed by the expression on her face is famously enigmatic. China's two mandates trade and irredentism clash. China has become a vulnerable giant, the Polyphemus of the East and a potentially moderating force due to its divergent objectives. There's war in Ukraine, a worsening conflict in The Middle East and an explosive election in the US which holds no hope of resolution. The Confederacy was a "two state solution." Now there's nothing to unify a divided electorate  Trump has said he won't accept the results if Kamala wins, but it's quixotic to believe that Democrats will live with Steve Bannon, Project 2025 or the President of the United States performing oral sex on a Mike.

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

Sunday, November 3, 2024

Citizen Trump's MAGAlopolis


Will the Orson Welles of tomorrow (some distant melange that includes the DNA of the Coppola name) produce a media work (by that time it will probably be some construct that trains directly to the neurons and axons of the brain) rendering the current instantiation of Kane's Xanadu and Hearst's San Simeon akaTrump's Mar-A-Lago into a Death Star, one of those Kepler planets 1200 light years from earth into GREATNESS!  Will it be called MAGAlOPOLIS in homage to Megalopolis, the great wine grower's last work. By that time no one will even remember what a movie was--since memory will be a thing of the past, but Coppola will be canonized for his vineyards and an artifact of ancient civilization called The Godfather.

"God Bless Pig Latin America" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "Ultimate Rejection!" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Saturday, November 2, 2024

Anora




A strip club named Headquarters in Manhattan
  
Sean Baker's Anora is  Little Fugitive meets Leaving Las Vegas. If you remember the main character of Ray Ashley's l953 masterpiece runs away after becoming the victim of a prank--where he's made to think he's accidentally killed his brother. Anora is about a lost child, Ivan/Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), only his parents are Russian oligarchs and the bait is the lap dancer of the film's title (Mikey Madison). Las Vegas and a Brooklyn lap dance club, Headquarters, not far from the iconic Cyclone, provide the commodification that guides the bravado and slapstick. The keystone cops meet L'Avventura as the movie, a sequence of jarring cultural clashes, deftly wends its way through the clutter of sex and mock violence (that's plenty violent) to edge it's way into the seemingly alien universe of human emotion. Remember the cut where Monica Vitti comes upon her lover, the Italian aristocrat Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) in the arms of a 19-year-old American actress and would be writer Gloria Perkins (Dorothy de Poliolo). There's a similar kind of emotional dynamite in the final scene of Baker's movie. Anora gives her minder, Igor (Yuri Borisov), an angry lap dance which begins as a slap in the face. Then the garish is transformed into something resembling human love. It's one of those moments in film when the camera continues to move, but life stops. You might look at the characters being portrayed as a thug and a lap dancer, but they attain a purity that transcends the parameters of their lives. The other memorable moment in the film is the one is which Anora's whole delusion falls apart. The violence bifurcates the action. It's comparable to one of those natural disasters that recently hit the Southeast. The destruction is furious, unredeemable and at the same time such a perfect blitz that it leaves the viewer awestruck, gapingly openmouthed--like the nurse in Potemkin (yes the audience), and horrifyingly stunned.

"God Bless Pig Latin America" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "Ultimate Rejection!" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Friday, November 1, 2024

The Clash of Civilizations


The historian Samuel Huntington propounded the notion of "the class of civilizations." His theory was a repudiation of the work of his former student Francis Fukuyama who wrote The End of History and the Last Man. Actually Fukuyama would repudiate his own theory in the face of a highly polarized increasingly sectarian world. The Civil War itself illustrated a similar process. Reconstruction was followed by a recidivism which fired up the roots of slavery. Today the United States is as torn as it was in the post-reconstruction period and as divided as The Middle East. There will be no winner in the current election no matter who wins. A Two State Solution? If not what will be the disposition of the current divide? Dialectical materialism is a recipe for historical evolution. In the Marxist paradigm, the clash between feudalism  and capitalism lays the way for the dictatorship of the proletariat. What if that complex and lumbering dinosaur known as democracy no longer fits the foot of modern life? What ideology, system or philosophy will succeed it?

"God Bless Pig Latin America" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Thursday, October 31, 2024

Nineteen Eighty-Four




One Hundred Years of Solitude
is the famous Marquez novel but it's an almost biblical expression of an age of interiority. Now there is little privacy and still less quiet. Social media forces one's hand and identities are stolen as ubiquitously as gold in the Wild West. You may read about Chinese hackers getting into phones but consciousness itself is no longer sacrosanct. Claudius is almost murdered in prayer but thought itself is no longer sacrosanct. Tik Tok hath murdered sleep. Big Brother is the famous invocation from 1984, but the frightening truth is that today's Winston Smiths 
exhaust all possible escapes when the mind no longer provides a safe harbor.

"God Bless Pig Latin America" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Wednesday, October 30, 2024

Superconductivity

 


"Leon N. Cooper, 94, Who Unlocked Secrets of Superconductivity, Dies"--NYT, 10/27/24

"He surmised that electrons attract positive ions in the lattices of the atoms that make up certain metals.That creates a charge imbalance in the lattices, making one side of them slightly more positive. In superconductivity, that is enough to attract other electrons flowing through the metals towards the lattices."

"At Brown he became interested I neuroscience..."

"Their theory was that as synapses approach saturated levels of activity, the electrical signals that were driving them would become less effective and the synaptic connections would revert to less saturated levels. The connections would thus oscillate between being saturated and unsaturated, like a skier gliding between two fences but never hitting either."


"Phil Lesh, Bassist Who Anchored the Grateful Dead, Is Dead at 84"--NYT, 10/27/24

"In his autobiography, Mr. Lesh compared the Grateful Dead's music to life itself. 'Both,' he said, 'were a series of recurring themes, transpositions, repetitions, unexpected developments, all converging to define form that is not necessarily apparent until its ending has come and gone.'"

read "Why Big German Words Like Vergangenbangenheit Carry Weight" by Francis Levy, HuffPost