Death Redux

"The Waters of the Lethe by the Plains of Elysium"

  
When one of you is no longer there, the other will feel rejected. Death is the ultimate rebuff. There's always the hope you can turn someone's head around, change the feelings of the client who has decided to change their loss of supply. Death won't be convinced otherwise. It's impossible to absorb death or the idea that there are no possibilities left. Why not one final word, one last chance to set things straight or even just say goodbye? Finality is itself an impossible concept to entertain. Doesn't every one gets a fortune cookie's length of reprieve, the chance to exchange an aphorism, pieties or merely just one last neither/nor. Not the tired "Neither a borrower nor lender be." That's silly advice to the dead, but just the truth, "For loan often loses both itself and friend."

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

painting by John Roddam Spencer Stanhope

Visconti's Bellissima

Visconti's Bellissima (1951), currently in revival at Film Forum, is "romantic neorealism." It’s an obvious vehicle for Anna Magnani whose operatic flourishes make one cry. It’s about the depredations of cinema albeit in their most melodramatic form. At one point Magnani beautifully and simply says that acting is being someone else, but the plot centers around a contest. You’ve seen the crowd scenes and screaming mothers in other films particularly In Pasolini’s Mamma Roma and Fellini’s Roma. Here the histrionics reach the level of farce since all the mothers including Magnani are promoting their 5-8-year-old daughters. Spoiler Alert: Magnani is depicted in her usual desolate state, but the little girl who has been the subject of ridicule gets the part—in fact because of her lack of beauty and ability (she can’t even blow out the candles on a cake). It's meta to the extent that the film is about the film, the casting of an Italian Shirley Temple. American films are everywhere with Magnani and her husband watching a John Wayne western on a huge screen put up on their neighborhood street and one of the would-be child stars lifting her skirt to do a Lana Turner. You may feel the film is not the Visconti at his best while appreciating the set pieces which include some wonderfully sublime portraits of Magnani's face.

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

Paradise Regained

The Deed is a term adolescent male personalities use to describe sexual intercourse. It's also a document that records the ownership of property. A deed can be an act. One can do a good deed, sometimes of an eleemosynary nature, though it's sometimes might too casual to qualify as charity. Let's say you help a neighbor with their packages or open a taxi door for a fellow resident, when the doorman is helping someone else. The altruistic instinct informs many benevolent actions. Larissa MacFarquar's Strangers Drowning deals with a more extreme situation. A person who is going down often panics and can take a potential rescuer with them. You probably have asked yourself if you would have the courage of the real estate broker from New Jersey who jumped onto the subway tracks to save a fellow straphanger, with a train coming. "Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n," says Satan in Paradise Lost.  

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

The Phenomenology of the Pickle

"Once a pickle, no more a cucumber." so they say. But what's wrong with pickles? They are one of the most adaptable of condiments, delicious on hamburgers or with tuna salad. "Pickled" may describe someone who's had one too many, but neither pickled cabbage or beets hurl or pass out. No pickled vegetable ever forgot what they said. "My downfall came when I started to steal from other people's plates," begins Lost Weekend, a memoir about a food addict. The nice thing, from a phenomenological point of view, is that no food has agency. So that the journey is something no cucumber has control over, anyway, since neither pickles nor cucumbers possess volition. Farther and Wilder was the memoir Charles Jackson was writing at the time of his death in l968, but the earlier book, the original Lost Weekend, is what put Jackson the map. Consult the laws of metaphysics for a moment. Imagine a 12-step program for pickles. "I'm Howard," says Howie, who is one. Yes, he has learned to be grateful to want what he has, which is the dish he is sitting in, on the table in front of the argumentative couple, and though he's a mere pickle Howie can still imbibe a Maurice Merleau-Ponty, '45.

Gaslight

Humanity is evolving right before one’s eyes. Stephan Jay Gould coined "punctuated equilibrium." What’s going on definitely could use some periods. The thing about the rant which is the mode of discourse propagated by the president is that it’s usually NAS. You may remember that acronym from freshman composition. Ranting btw is viral. All the Trumpeters sound the same. Have you ever listened to an interview with Stephen Miller? Gaslighting is the means. The weave, as Trump terms it, is the method. The result is an art served up with the loss of a moral center, hold the mayo. "Value-free politics" is the name of the game and speech. The bowdlerization of language is part of MAGA man, Homo MAGAensus, a creature who trundles through Lilliput crushing all the insects (aka insignificant creatures) that get in his way. Is it fascistic to call a fascist, fascist?

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

Condition

electron micrograph of Ebola virus

De Clerambault's or erotomania, ataxia, Wernicke's, temporal lobe epilepsy, Capgras, prosopagnosia and Tourette's are all neurological disorders. Then there are Ebola, Marburg's, spongiform bovine epilepsy,ALS and Parkinson's which are diseases that result in the actual deterioration of the brain. Are delusions, like consciousness itself, just another biological process? Certainly schizoid personality disorder has biological and sometimes genetic roots. Irredentism is the propensity for formerly balkanized countries to reconstitute themselves. Putin displays a demagogic form of the syndrome. Hemorrhaging with the loss of considerable amounts of blood is a direct result of these behaviors. 

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

Raising Cain!

Accepting limitations runs contrary to the American creed. And there are "No Inhibitions Allowed" signs everywhere in the modern all/inclusive resort Homo Ludens resides in. You may not want to be a member of a club… but you probably can’t being yourself to say no to this weeks offering at Club Hedonism. Addictive personalities ultimately have to accept the notion of abstinence and even dreamers end up selling their copy of The Fountainhead to The Strand. Who would you rather be Citizen Kane or Bishop Tutu?

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