Wednesday, July 31, 2024

Kaddish



Allen Ginsberg (photo: Hans van Dijk)

Modernity is becoming synonymous with millenarianism.  Ideologues deconstruct the very notion of reality in a way that is not totally disingenuous yet disingenuously pursue Armageddon in the face of anarchy. Imagine the rubble of an attack like the fire bombing of Dresden.That's a good description of the evolution of ideas. Relativism is evolutionary. It is not a question of bad actors though it is a field ripe for predation by philosophical despots who create manifests for the flight from civilization--at least as humanity now conceives and experiences it.

read the review of Francis Levy's The Kafka Studies Department in Booklife (PW) 

and listen to "Every Little Bit Hurts" by Brenda Holloway





Tuesday, July 30, 2024

Kamala




Lower the volume, you'll lessen the conflict. If you're a straphanger you know that. If you get an unexpected heated response from someone you've accidentally jostled, you can apologize or say "fuck you" which is like raising someone in poker. "Fuck you" leads to "what did you say?" "Your mother!" "What did you say about my mother?" Or you could say "I'm sorry" and avoid an altercation. Trump has called Kamala Harris "garbage." He had accused her being stupid, more liberal than Bernie Sanders and the acolyte of the worst president in American history. In the face of these slurs, she stopped in mid-sentence the other day and simply described the remarks of her opponent and his vice-presidential running mate by pausing and saying, "It's just plain weird." You can't go nuclear unless you have unstable elements and an igniter. Without reactivity, there's no explosion. It may be lacking in excitement but it can also be gratifying to get off at the next stop and go about your business without having to think about what you could have or would have said to an angry person.

read "Francis Levy's Divine Comedy," Exquisite Corpse

and listen to "You'll Never Walk Alone" by Patti Labelle


Monday, July 29, 2024

Little Murders


A girl is chained up willingly to a wall. She asks, "should I show my bosom?" She is intelligent looking and treats her ensuing degradation as a joke. She giggles at the start. Then she and her attacker are both laughing but isn't that how people handle what Jules Feiffer called Little Murders? You make something destructive look like it has no meaning. The way this particular perversion works is that a few girls start spitting in the face of the tied up girl. It's plainly group sex to the extent that sex is aggression. There are all these barnyard sounds the leader of the girl gang makes as she coagulates spit. How many people are aware of recondite sexual practices? Raise your hand if you know what "queening" or "bukkake" are? Coming on someone's face, in the past, was simply the end of an angry blow job. Bukakke is organized and reeks of religion. Why else would beautiful looking women allow large groups of men to come on their faces and then get filmed so their day in the sun goes viral? Doesn't bukkake sound like the Branch Davidians, Jim Jones or QAnon?

read "Francis Levy's Divine Comedy," Exquisite Corpse

and listen to "Duke of Earl by Gene Chandler

Friday, July 26, 2024

Garbage



Last night Lawrence O'Donnell gaslighted Trumpty Dumpty when he threw the former  president's appellation right back in "The Dumpster's" face. Trump brought political discourse to a new low when he called Kamala Harris "garbage" (this after responding to president Biden's heartfelt and memorable speech by calling him the worst president in US history). "Garbage" was how O'Donnell described Trump's behavior. O'Donnell is a journalist known for his keen-eyed preening of facts and calling Trump "garbage" is simply a matter of record. Everyone knows Trump aka "The Dumpster" is a repository for garbage. Rudy Giuliani, Mike Lindell, Jim Jordan, JD Vance, Mike Johnson etc are all the unrecycled "garbage"--that Trump doesn't have the courtesy to bring to the dump. Oh and yeah Trump himself is the kind of garbage that earns a fine when it's left the middle of Fifth Avenue (where the former president will be found exercising his immunity when he starts shooting people). O'Donnell was never so irate nor so brilliant as he was last night in reporting on the nation wide "garbage" crisis.

read "Francis Levy's Divine Comedy," Exquisite Corpse

and listen to "Duke of Earl by Gene Chandler

Thursday, July 25, 2024

Bannon



photo: Gage Skidmore

Eloquence and erudition can be hypnotic. Words cast a spell. They're like a disingenuous 
seduction.You're won over only to become a scorned lover who's nothing more than a notch on some Lothario's belt. Netanyahu and Trump are great speakers. Biden not so much. In the past Kennedy outshone Nixon and Obama, McCain. Bernie sanders is perfervid. AOC adds beauty to the mix. Majorie Taylor Greene is "grunge" and Matt Gaetz with his ghoulish pompadour is the Boris Karloff of the house. A number of factors can tip the scales. William Jennings Bryan famously came up short against Clarence Darrow on the evolution issue. Hearing someone like Bannon quoting Milton's "better to reign in hell than serve in heaven" in  American Dharma, you may have to wake yourself up when your conscience is caught off guard by that and his wicked repartee.

read "Fav Lines From Francis Levy's Seven Days in Rio" Two Dollar Radio

and listen to "There's a Moon Out Tonight" by The Capris

Wednesday, July 24, 2024

Picasso




When you took algebra you learned about equations with two unknowns and about plotting lines with coordinates representing X and Y values. Would that the universe followed such neat laws. The kinds of mathematical relationships are reflected in math, but have little if nothing to do with life. The amount of unknowns is generally incalculable. Imagine trying to plot a graph of one's life, even as you got closer to the point where you were closer to the end. Calculus is designed to deal with variation, but it's a little like "there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio." Math like art is a form of beauty that distills and at the same time excludes the complexity of the life force as it paints its truth. "Art is a lie that makes us realize truth" is the famous Picasso quote.

read "Francis Levy's Divine Comedy," Exquisite Corpse

and listen to "Duke of Earl by Gene Chandler

Tuesday, July 23, 2024

Raskolnikov


There are unrepentant criminals and sociopaths who only know a "crime" is something you can't get away with? Are crimes those acts which societies regard as offenses against norms? For instance, inTexas, even a woman in danger of death is guilty if she terminates a pregnancy. Most New Yorkers would encourage her and the inmates of Sachsenhausen to break the law.Those opposed to a carceral state tell inmates to escape no matter what. Raskolnikov had no problem seeing the murder of the old pawnbroker as a crime. If anything Dostoevsky's character has an over active conscience. The novel, after the murder, is about wrestling with their own evil--amongst other things. Kamala Harris was the attorney general of California before she became vice president. She knows how to try a case. Her opponent has publically stated he could walk down Fifth Avenue and shoot people (btw what happens if another gunslinger shoots him back, do they partake of presidential immunity?) and that major celebrities can grab women by the crotch. How will she prosecute her felonious opponent?

read "Francis Levy's Divine Comedy," Exquisite Corpse

and listen to "Duke of Earl by Gene Chandler

Monday, July 22, 2024

Alfred Döblin


'Alfred Doblin (1878-1957

Hive mind is a meme which places an entomological spin on human behavior. Actually in a beehive, the queen dominates and there's little room for alienation.You don't find bees behaving like characters in Berlin Alexanderplatz, the Alfred Doblin novel made into a TV series by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Better yet there are no Holden Caulfield bees or bees that jump off bridges after reading the Sufferings of Young Werther. As Lionel Trilling once pointed out non-conformity can be a form of conformity. It's called trying too hard. You've seen those characters with the Count of Monte Cristo fixations entering the gathering wearing green cowboy boots and red scarfs around their necks. You don't find too many bees (except for the queen) dressed to kill. Conversely the comforts of the hive where identity is set are often lost on the average girl or guy. Prescribed behavior may be the order of the day in the military, therapeutic communities or cults like the Branch Davidians. But for your average lifer every day is an exercise in self-invention. You get up feeling a little like Meursault inThe Stranger then it's SOS (shave, shit and shower) and off to another thankless day drowning in a sea of workstations.

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

and also read "Francis Levy's Divine Comedy," Exquisite Corpse

Sunday, July 21, 2024

Todestrieb


Freud's couch (Robert Huffstutter)

Freud's concept of the death instinct" orTodestrieb in German is like flesh eating bacteria. First an arm, then a leg. That's whats happening to the Democratic Party. The only difference is that it's embarrassing, like a kid having a tantrum, the dirty tear-stained face followed by enuresis. Another form of this tantrum actually is paralysis. The mob famously fitted their enemies with cement shoes but this kind of defeat is one of those routs in football. The game is over. There's no way of catching up. Yet you have to run out the clock.

Friday, July 19, 2024

Lucy


Lucy (Australopithecus)

You will never foresee the future nor unravel the past. If you have a child, they are the carriers of yorr genetic footprint, your DNA. The chromosomal structure of a fossil can be analyzed. However, you can't walk with Lucy while she forages. Survival itself transforms and evolves. Homo sapiens, if it survives, will not only look but exercise the ability intrinsic to its name ina unique way concomitant with the conditions of its time. Homo sapiens are by definition epistemologists. What does it mean, to know, to be wise, sapient? Will the brain itself atrophy and even grow smaller in size with the advent of A.I.? Will there be, for instance, a Darwinian struggle between Virtual and de facto Realitly? Will one be able skip out of the material world with Empress Travel goggles? Who is to adjudicate which is "the real thing" to quote Stoppard? Will the line become so blurry that ultimately it will be impossible to know? Will there be a danger of losing one's self on vacations spun out by imagination? Which embodiment or something else? 

read "Pet Buddha" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

and listen to "Tears of a Clown" by Smokey Robinson and The Miracles





Thursday, July 18, 2024

The Second Coming


Senator Tim Scott of South  Carolina

If you survive an assassination attempt your approval rating jumps. First is the shock then the notion you've been saved in a holy war against satan (as Senator Tim Scott proclaimed with ministerial rhetorical flourish). Then comes the notion of enlightenment. It's a little like Paul on the road to Tarsus. Now introduce into this seemingly benignant mix one of the greatest public relations gambits in modern electoral history. Suddenly the contentious, fractured. and wounded Republicans of 2020 are united under Christ (or the Anti-Christ from Dostoevsky's "Grand Inquisitor" poem) aka Trump. Add to that the notion of a miraculous biblical personality transformation. The angry Moses crashing tablets has mellowed. There are no more soubriquets like "lying Hillary" or "crooked Joe." Trump has finally listened to his advisors or better God and become presidential overnight, 2024 AB or "after Butler." Add to the mix a young brash new vice presidential hopeful, with his rags to sharkskin story and beautiful wife, Usha, Yale Law School educated wife (and child of immigrants). The Democrats should simply surrender. That's not giving up by a long shot. Rather it signifies a spiritual conversion in which they will cross the aisle and make America great again by banning abortion and allowing women with troubled pregnancies to die during childbirth while an ICE dragnet purges the country of illegal immigrants and Elon Musk increases his market share of the country at large.

read The Global Impact of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion by Esther Webman

and listen to Freda Payne's "Band of Gold"

Wednesday, July 17, 2024

The Berenstain Bears Access Hollywood



If Trump is re-elected will he paint The White House red like his ties? After all red states are Republican. The White House is an example of metonymy, a figure of speech in which the part symbolizes the whole. Eh voila you can just hear Wolf Blitzer talking about CNN's Red House correspondence. The White House has always been a nice tradition and surely some other Pennsylvania Avenue residents would not be happy about the color. School kids get all fuzzy when they acquire their replica Constitutions in the congressional souvenir shop. However, if Steve Miller has his way that's another "tradition" that's going to fall by the wayside. Oh and remember all the fuss about Access Hollywood--where Trump claimed one of perks of success was being able indiscriminately grab women's crotches? If there is one thing Donald Trump has taught everyone is, history is not what happened. It's what you want it to be. When the MAGA Republicans recapture The Red House, Access Hollywood will be renamed, "The Berenstain Bears Access Hollywood."

read The Global Impact of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion by Esther Webman

and listen to Freda Payne's "Band of Gold"

Tuesday, July 16, 2024

The Riviera



Hotel du Cap--Eden Roc

The French Riviera is both the embodiment of glamour and squalor at the same time. Huge temples of leisure, white edifices like The Carlton
 face the narrow  beaches where a lone topless sun worshipper slowly achieves their dream of turning leather skin. Despite the annual film festival Cannes can be as seedy as Graham Greene's Brighton Rock where Pinkys lurk in the shadows of narrow backstreets, not to mention the lone lifeboats of excrement that floats ashore courtesy of cruise liners anchored off shore. Tina Turner lived in Villefranche one of the most lush and verdant spots on earth but one troubled by crime. Speaking of crime or war crime The Hotel du Cap in Antibes is filled with Russian gangsters and their molls, legs spread in homage to Courbet's L'Origine du monde, on poolside settees. Saint Tropez is where you go if you want to expose yourself. There you'll find a beach even popular with amputees. Sometime back terrorists made headlines stabbing parishioners at a Nice church, not far from the Promenade, facing Le Negesco--where Aschenbach auditions take place on a daily basis.

read the review of The Kafka Studies Department by Francis Levy on Booklife

and listen to "Private Dancer" by Tina Turner

Monday, July 15, 2024

Thespianism





Porn has become more minimalist or shall we say, to the point, than it's ever been. However, it still has its stars. Remember La Ciciolina, the wife of Jeff Koons and one-time Italian poltician, and such great as John Holmes and Harry Reems? Today there are unnamed stars of fetish loops. For instance Any Porn features, the incredibly popular "Two Hotties Take Turns Sitting on Guy's Face." In another world they would have made it to Colbert. Now they are only on they are only on To Night and not the one hosted by Jimmy Fallon. These are two henna haired Russian beauties whose happily tied up "victim" gets sprayed with whipped cream in a denouement reminiscent of one of the early classics of silent cinema L'arroseur arose (1895). It's an updated form of pie in the face slapstick affectionately known by its practitioners as "queening." Every paraphilia has its star and there is one particularly self-effacing master of the genre who is not a Clint Eastwood or Cary Grant,  but who recalls great heart throbs of the past, particularly in his ubiquity. Basically he plays the same role in all his movies--that of the husband of an oversexed wife who coerces her hubby into believing that the marriage will only be improved if he fellates her boyfriend while then watching the two of them fuck. This anonymous and unheralded star of underground cinema would doubtless have merited a story in Arthur Knight's legendary "Sex in the Cinema" column, if Playboy had continued to exist. Linda Lovelace would later claim she'd been exploited during the making of Deep Throat, but remember Pornhub which gets tens of millions of hits per day bills itself as a "community" which is only a hop, skip and a jump from cults like MAGA . Many of today's stars look at their acting stints as pro bono work, whose only benefit finally derives from the tax deduction performers receive for the time devoted to their thespianism.

watch "Sit on My Face Song" by Monty Python

Sunday, July 14, 2024

Icon Maker


"Washington Crossing the Delaware" by Larry Rivers (1953)

Trump is, if nothing else, an icon maker. That is his brilliance. The first thing he does is to create an image which in his case involves raising the flag at Iwo Jima. George Washington was an Icon maker. "Washington Crossing the Delaware" inspired the painting by Emmanuel Leutze, appropriated by Larry Rivers. There are the icons of the Greek Orthodox Church, Christ's Manger, Moses smashing the Ten Commandments and Pompeii. Hearing a train whistle far away is another of icon. Thomas Matthew Crooks joins John Hinckley Jr in the parade of attempted assassins. Then there are Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, Mark David Chapman. Crooks, 20 years old and two years out of high school was a registered Republican who would have voted for the first time in his life.

Friday, July 12, 2024

A Fan's Notes

 



From A Fan's Notes: “Like James Joyce, who tried to bend and subjugate the ironmongery of the cosmos with words (wasn’t it The Word Joyce was after?), Mr. Blue tried to undo the empyrean mysteries with Seedy and his red carpet, with his elevated alligator shoes, with the ardent push-ups he seemed so sure would make him outlast time’s ravages, with his touching search for some golden pussy that would yell to his lips the elixir of eternal life. And like Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, like Quixote, Mr Blue had become the perennial mock-epic hero of his country, the salesman, the boomer who believed that at the end of the American sojourn of demeaning doorbell-ringing, of faking and fawning, he would come to the Ultimate Sale, conquer, and soar….And though Mr. Blue’s way of death was fitting…anxious about his impotence in this land of sexual gargantuan, he could have sent to a degenerate mail-order house for a faradic device which attached to the genitals helps stimulate with electrical charges a more rapturous equal act, only to have the device miscue and electrocute him, frying off his balls in the process...I had a hardcover edition of Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary. To gauge the dictionary’s breadth when buying it, I had looked up thurible, an Oriental looking container in which one burns incense, and gorp, a freakishly obese person who eats constantly because he achieves a kind of erotic splendor when sitting on the throne. The former was listed, the latter not, and and because the latter never is listed, because I don’t to this day know where I ever heard the word..." 

and listen to James Brown and Wilson Pickett together "In a Cold Sweat" et al.

Thursday, July 11, 2024

The Banquet Years




Inanition is a capacious antonym of ignition. Meanings and the derivations of words are archeological and usage can defy evolution. Remember when "gay" meant happy. Today if you say a democrat is "gay," you're definitely not referring to their political condition. Matisse and Derain were Fauves. The name means wild animals ostensibly due to the way these artists shocked even the liberal-minded salon d'automne of l903. You might mistakenly think Rousseau was a Fauve because he painted sublime scenes of 
savage innocence delineated in Roger Shattuck's, The Banquet Years--an exploration of another side of the French avant-garde including theater personages like Alfred Jarry whose last words were "give me a toothpick." Today there are sentences that "wake" (aka "woke") to find themselves Swiss cheese. Language can create strange bedfellows as evidenced in the unholy alliance between fundamentalists and feminists over porn. Interestingly Porn Hub bills itself as a community. But don't count on finding any rent stabilized housing on their site.

read Evan Harris's review of The Kafka Studies Department

and listen to "In the Bush" by Musique



Wednesday, July 10, 2024

Lear





Is Biden Lear on the heath, the blind man led by a fool? Who is Cordelia? Who Goneril and Regan? Who Hotspur? Who Falstaff? Who Prospero or Caliban! Who Brutus (Jerry Nadler) or for that matter Satan or Bannon? Who Hamlet and Oedipus? Who plays Claudius? Who has played his chips? Who still has pieces on the board? Or is it an endgame, "a tale told by an idiot" (The Sound and the Fury in fact). At least Biden has a running mate which is more than his felonious assailant can claim.

listen to Francis Levy's playlist for The Kafka Studies Department,

Tuesday, July 9, 2024

Revelations




One of the last sections of George Eliot's last book, Daniel Deronda is "Revelations" and one of the last chapters begins with this quote from Keats: "My spirit is too weak: mortality/Weights heavily on me like unwilling sleep,/And each imagined pinnacle and steep/Of godlike hardship tell me I must die/Like a sick eagle looking at the sky." You will also recall that The Seventh Seal which comes towards the end of The Book of Revelation, the final book of The New Testament, also hearkens the Second Coming. And from this Bergman drew the title of The Seventh Seal in which Max von Sydow plays chess with Death (Bengt Ekerot ). George Eliot was a more profound thinker than Freud. Buy Middlemarch on Amazon for the twenty bucks it will cost you and you'll save on 20 years of hefty psychoanalytic bills. Deronda, as you may remember, saves the destitute Mirah Cohen, an aspiring opera singer, from death. The scene recalls Virginia Woolf's suicide except that Eliot's character is spared from drowning. Here is Eliot describing Mordecai, a Cabbalist, who is Mirah's long lost brother: "this consumptive Jewish workman in threadbare clothing, lodged by charity, delivering himself to hearers who took his thoughts without attaching any more consequences to them than the Flemings to the ethereal chimes ringing above their market-places--had the chief elements of greatness: a mind consciously, energetically moving with the larger march of human destinies... ."

read the review of Francis Levy's The Kafka Studies Department in Booklife (PW)

and listen to 'Hello Stranger" by Barbara Lewis



Monday, July 8, 2024

Norman Mailer's Gesamtkunstwerk



Jeff Zimbalist's How to Come Alive colorfully documents a career in work and love that included six wives (and nine children) one of whom, Adele Morales, Mailer comes near murdering the night before the announcement of his unsuccessful campaign for mayor. He makes himself the central figure in Armies of the Night thereby, with a wave of his staff, creating New Journalism. He directs three films including Maidstone where his character Norman T. Kingsley, "the American Bunuel" and its creator (Mailer) are hit in the head and almost killed by the actor Rip Torn. The creator of classics of nonfiction like The Executioner's Song, about Gary Gilmore, he advocates for convicted murderer Jack Abbott who infamously goes on to kill after his release. Author of The Naked and the Dead, boxer and fighting public intellectual, author of 11 bestsellers, the recipient of 2 Pulitzer prizes, he famously debates Gore Vidal on Dick Cavett and feminism in an iconic Town Hall debate where he appears in the role of Satan, going into the ring with the likes of Betty Friedan, Susan Sontag, Germaine Greer and Cynthia Ozick. Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n. As a newspaper publisher (Citizen Mailer btw also debates Orson Welles), he's a founder of the The Village Voice. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy might have been Mailer's mantra. Free speech and expression are too limiting as categories to describe his project, but he's an early opponent of political correctness which places ideology over idea and which he regards as a harbinger of fascism. Is Mailer a figure of world historical importance a la Hegel? Definitely not. Did he wish to be? He is short like Pushkin and Napoleon. He rolls with titans as varied as Mohammed Ali and Marilyn Monroe (to whom he devotes a book). Juggling wives and lovers, drinking and fighting. Was it a deficit of conscience that allowed him to thrive or is Mailer defined by his conflicts (a rebellion against morality and bracingly moral nature) that ultimately make him an exemplar of the 60s zeitgeist? Mailer's Gesamtkunstwerk was his life.

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

and also read "Francis Levy's Divine Comedy," Exquisite Corpse

Friday, July 5, 2024

Death


The question is without stooping to the inanities of the paranormal, is there communication after death? Can you get a last word in? On a practical basis let's say you have an a date with a famous writer who has been an idyl (not idol) forever and as is wont to happen as time goes by he or she dies. If he's someone like Stephen King (who has gotten a special dispensation to "report back" which will allow him to write one novel tentatively titled Death--following his New Yorker short story, "A Death") you may have a chance to get a word in edgewise before they step off the High Dive. However in most cases that final conversation is going to end  up in the equivalent of the dead letter box. But there are ways and there are ways. Icarus learned about flying the hard way but if you could engage with the birds who begin their mad chatter  before dawn, you'd likely find out a little something about it. Have you ever met a mortician who was mortified? The answer is probably no. They've seen it all.

read the review of The Kafka Studies Department in Booklife (PW)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne

Thursday, July 4, 2024

The Bees


photograph: Hallie Cohen

Remember Tippi Hedren in The Birds. Not to make light of terror by degrading it to a ditty but there's also The Bees which recently completed filming on location in The Hamptons.The  filmmakers have even created a neologism to honor their "beepocalypse." Beekeepers fearlessly lure the queen and the whole hive follows. Queens are very powerful and their solders will die for them. Then there are drones which have nothing in common with the ones you find attacking Russian tanks in Ukraine. Bees sting, but so do insults.

read "Limbo" by Francis Levy, Evergreen Review

and listen to "Boogaloo Down Broadway" by Johnny C

Wednesday, July 3, 2024

Stranger

If Things have gotten more strange, they are. It's not only that there really is global warming or cooling depending on how you want to look at the fact the earth is not what it once was. Never mind Trump and his Waffen SS commanded by Sturmbannfuhrer Bannon (remember that Hitler and many members of his beer hall putsch were convicted felons) and never mind the pandemic which changed life in impalpable, but permanent ways. If you are a certain age you may find your self a Stranger Drowning to cite Larissa MacFarquhar or for lack of referents reaching for intellectual life buoys like the Unheilichkeit, Heidegger and Freud allude to. Everything--language, love, geography are caught in a barely visible but nonetheless frightening riptide that threatens to waft you away, not even to blissfully foreign shores.

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

and listen to "Hello Stranger" by Barbara Lewis

Tuesday, July 2, 2024

Wake Up to the Hotel Mar-A-Lago



Trump Golf Course at Bedminster

In the light of Trump's overwhelming victory in the debate, world leaders have unanimously agreed to turn the planet into the former president's largest golf course and country club. Huge populations of impoverished asylum seekers will be given jobs as caddies. Owning a set of golf clubs will be looked at as an entitlement like health care or takeout food. Under the next Trump 
Presidency no one will have to wait to tee off since traffic at golf clubs will be managed by the FAA. Imagine arriving for your typical country club dinner. You'll enter a dining room as large as the eye can see whose management has been subcontracted to Mattress Firm whose showrooms are so ubiquitous there are several orbiting near the international space station. Golf once looked at as an elite sport will now be played by everyone. It will also be a requirement, comparable to paying your income tax or showing up for the draft during a time of war.

and listen to Freda Payne's "Band of Gold"

and listen to Wilson Pickett's "Funky Broadway"

Monday, July 1, 2024

Pearl Harbor

view of Pearl Harbor from Japanese Plane

Pearl Harbor led to the destruction of the Axis Powers. It's a perfect illustration of Hegelian dialectics. Even though Philip K Dick's Man in the High Castle posits an alternate universe in which the US comes into fascist orbit, the country was always in a unique position as a result of geography--a reason why isolationism has always been a dubious but viable foreign policy alternative. Not so in our current highly interconnected world. Today social media and rogue leaders like Kim Jong-un, who are threatening to use their ICBMs to bring about Armageddon, are a lethal combination. Fundamentalist sects like Hamas and the government of Iran, which like MAGA hold to an irrational belief in all powerful leaders, make it impossible to pretend there is safety in numbers or distance. The Trump/Biden"debate" was Pearl Harbor. Restitution will, hopefully, unleash a comparable result in destroying the dangerous movement towards autocracy in modern nation states.

read the review of The Kafka Studies Department in Booklife (PW)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne