Sexuality

The subject comes up every few seconds. Have you ever pondered how many people are having sex at any part of the city, at any particular time of the day? And what kind? How many people are taking their clothes off in front of each other first the first time? Oh it’s just the human body? Really? Nudity is downplayed by those who decry objectification? But the fact is instincts are mediated by consciousness. Love is the way consciousness negotiates the shoals of desire. Still the attempt to disinfect sex, to make it antiseptic is Sisyphean with the avalanche of emotion that accompanies the visual and tactile nature of coitus or even just a kiss. Then there’s thought and its police.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

CNN

The recent firing of Scott Pelli and several other well-known staff connected to Sixty Minutes is chilling. Paramount under David Ellison is playing up to Trump to secure the Warner Brothers merger. Add to that the demise of Colbert. The network cited earnings but that was a sorry excuse--the kind that's made when you don't care or simply want to destroy something that's in the way. The creation of a hugely wealthy class of American oligarchs with unregulated power, parallels the rise of Silicon Valley. Larry Ellison founded Oracle. There were robber barons at the end of the l9th Century. Their power was enormous, but the current cabal simply has exponentially more. Will CNN fire Wolf Spitzer or Christiane Amanpour? Will CNN go dark during a strike of employees? Or will there always be someone willing to pass the buck or take the baton. Power comes in all forms. People tell themselves all kinds of things. Undoubtedly there are members of congress who shook hands with the devil under the theory, better them than someone worse. Secretly they would rise up against Satan. The current Big Brother is more nefarious than Orwell's. He can be bought.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Shadow Play

Solipsism is the notion that all of reality is subjective. To Bishop Berkeley,  who said esse est percipi, "to be is to be perceived" nothing would exist without God--keeping the world in his mind's eye. The Matrix was based on the notion of the world as an inner state. Freud envisioned the mind as ego, superego and id, but these were names placed on functions that exist in some reality. In the absence of God, the solipsist finds himself blessedly freed from the notion of consequence. However, can one stand to live with the idea of nothingness? In a famous episode of the Twilight Zone, a condemned man, Dennis Weaver, pleads for his life. If he is executed, he argues, the world will disappear. This episode, "Shadow Play," season #2, episode 26, 1961 is arguably one of the greatest in the history of television. 

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Rush Hour

If you’ve ever journeyed back to the past you’ve noted the “Do Not Disturb” signs. The idea is to leave everything as it was so that the future will fulfill its promise or more specifically exactly the world you, the time traveller, occupied before you left. Is there a divine or supernal touch in this iteration or is it consistent with the philosophy of cosmologists like stephen Hawking whose A Brief History of Time is the Baedeker for those challenging the l86,000 mile per hour speed limit—at which spacetime curves? Everything is as it’s supposed to be or it would be different is a calming spiritual saw that makes it sound like everything is part of god's plan and thus set in a divine kind of stone or marble. However, with the once unthinkable becoming  ever more possible—in a quantum universe--a whole new set of parking regulations and speed limits is needed to accommodate the imminent cosmological traffic jam.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

The Maids at St. Ann's Warehouse

Kip Williams' adaptation of Genet's The Maids is extraordinary for both good and not so good reasons. What's not so good is its dazzling display of pyro-techniques. It a dog and pony show with flashing lights on a big screen in which Madam(Yerin Ha) is an influencer with millions of followers. You might criticize the production for being one big selfie, using an iPhone. The other side of the equation is that Genet's work is fundamentally a selfie, waiting to happen, as its primary stock is about identity and domination. The faces of the two maids Claire (Lydia Wilson) and Solange (Phia Saban) are explosive and the technology only amplifies the extraordinary feats of acting, in particular, the massive outcry of words, tumbling out of, at times, garishly painted mouths. One is reminded of Billie Whitelaw's famous mouth in Beckett's Not I.  The ending is also a question mark. Genet is a so-called absurdist playwright and the director pays homage to that by reinterpreting the finale as the end of the world. It's one of those Mad Max movies in which the characters negotiate a desecrated landscape, leaving all their frenetic attempts to be on top, as empty, hopeless attempts to fill the void.

Tintern Abbey

"Lines Written (or Composed) a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour" is the long title of the Wordsworth poem, "Tintern Abbey," dating from July 13, 1798. The poem comprises a definition of the romantic notion of beauty, a feeling of transcendence, by which the poet describes the sublime. The cover of the Penguin edition of a novel like Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, also set in rural England conveys a similar feeling. Today the sublime is disappearing. Its last remnant may have been the drive-in theater found on Route One or at the end of an Interstate like 95 as it runs past Co-Op City into Bruckner Boulevard. If you journey up to Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, a town famous for its psychoanalytic stable, you'll find a well-preserved relic of the past, the Wellfleet Drive-in Theatre, where another kind of romanticism once burgeoned (and perhaps still does) in the backseat of a sedan.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

 

Holstein, the Younger

 

Have you ever confused Holstein, a breed of cow, with Holbein, the Younger (1497-1543), the Northern German painter? Samstag Nachmittag, to introduce a non-sequitur, sounds like title of a British kitchen sink film, dubbed into German. Saturday Afternoon say like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), the Karel Reisz film from the Alan Sillitoe novel starring Albert Finney, as the factory worker, Arthur Seaton. But back to Holsteins. Imagine a Holstein, the Younger, whose life is cut short in an abattoir.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star