The Crying Game

The Crying Game (1992) was a stirring if somewhat histrionic title for a movie. It's right up there with Brief Encounter (1945) where Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson squeeze every drop of melodrama out of a relationship predicated on impossibility. Oh for the romantic agony! One is wistful for the artworks that provided an outpouring of emotion which made one's glass feel half full if only for the 1:09 minutes that the film lasted. Escape indeed, but in a tone poem full of settings, color and mood The Go-Between, with the Harold Pinter script of the L. P. Hartley novel, was another memorably moving title. Room at the Top (1959),The L-Shaped Room (1962) and Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) pulled at the heartstrings. They don't make 'em like that anymore. What's even more interesting is that the tonic of escape from depressing everyday life was just that--another dose of depression and sadness. Now what are the emotions from which Gen X seeks to free themselves and what are the vehicles?

and read "The Findings" by Francis Levy, Evergreen Review

Happier Hunting Grounds

In Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, there is a pet cemetery called "Happier Hunting Grounds." It's a parody of the excesses of Hollywood as well ss the futile hopes some humans maintain for an afterlife. What are the use of mausoleum's gravestones and expensive ceremonies if you've faded into nothingness? What's the use of being remembered if you no longer exist? Trust and estates fall into a similar category of hopelessness. Why would anyone want to control the behavior of their heirs when they are not here to appreciate it? Sure there are wastrels who won't benefit from misplaced largesse but at a certain point one is forced to putatively let go. You can't spare those you love from life anymore than you can allay the imminence of your own death.

read "Died Young" by Francis Levy, The Brooklyn Rail

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

The Dog and God Problem

Vidkun Quisling

You may have been rendered speechless by recent history. However everyone has words that are lifesavers, islands of civility amidst the decline of everyday speech. Take morganatic referring to royal bastards or quisling named after the Norwegian Nazi mole. Vergangenheitsbewaltig is a nice German compound word for those who feel they're carrying the weight of the world in their shoulders. Samizdat is a fun Russian word that comes in handy when you're trying to figure out why people don't read poetry anymore. People like what they can't have. Not to impugn intrinsic greatness, but there's no doubt Ossip Mandelstam profited from being a forbidden commodity. Know emordnilap? It's palindrome spelled backwards. LOL is a palindrome, but dog is the emordnilap of God.

read "Died Young" by Francis Levy, The Brooklyn Rail

Jack Smith

There's a generalized lack of hope. Everyone has stopped watching the news. Maybe someone else doesn't feel this way. You're still getting a pathetic smattering of Act Blue emails and you're hoping the fires are burning somewhere else. You equate your situation with that of the Jews in Nazi Germany. You're paralyzed but do nothing. You find yourself an endangered species. Maybe it won't be as radical as it seems but slowly liberties will be taken away. It's not a world you want to leave to your children. The resignation of the special prosecutor, Jack Smith, is the last straw. Plainly Trump can get away with it if he walks down Fifth Avenue and shoots somebody.

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

Axoniomatic

Francis,

People talk a lot after campaigns and share a lot of opinions, but too often we don’t talk about the people and processes behind campaigns that make them run.

I wanted to share what it’s like to close down a campaign after Election Day. It’s quite the process!

Our team is shrinking from over 50 employees down to just a handful, but in the days since the election, everyone worked hard cleaning out our office, moving furniture and supplies into storage

SSRIs deal with the synapses between the axons and dendrites (the neurotransmitters) that comprise the neurogenic pathways of the brain. One becomes programmed by internal factors but external stimulate are a significant part of that final process which makes up personhood. You may have found your exo-psychic world predominating over the intra-psychic  during a fraught election cycle like the one that just concluded. Ordinarily it's the Freudian past that rules the roost but sometimes the outside world takes over. It may be something as simple as the constant emails imploring you to vote for this or that candidate. Right up until Election Day the pleas are there then "the rest is silence."

read "Removing Your Unconscious" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Apres Moi

photo: Fredrik Posse

Is "Apres moi, le deluge" axiomatic of this moment? There are those who take the current withdrawal of Matt Gaetz as a sign, a decoy, a rather crafty surrender offered as a diversion, a Trojan Horse if you will, with an olive branch betokening the onslaught of alt right choices. Even Pete Hegseth is a sacrifice fly aimed at bringing the other runners home. Dems will hope as MAGAs discountenance these two choices. Then the floodgates open. Everyone thinks Trump is brash and out of control, but that is also his act. Hulk Hogan is one of his followers but you can't say Trump is all brawn and no brains. His mind is premeditated as well as warped.

listen to "Make America Great Again" by Pussy Riot

It's a Wonderful Life

Most urban dwellers exist in a hell of their own making. Marx talked about the alienation of the laborer from the commodity or product of their creation. The metropolis can be fun since it creates its own artificial order comprised of composites and  simulations--a horse and pony show that supplants a once quasi-natural order. Still, instead of plutocracy, oligarchy or kleptocracy, human existence once provided a window into nature. It's a Wonderful Life is one of the first movies to deal with parallel or alternate universes--in particular during the scene where a guardian angel, Clarence Odbody, shows George Bailey what the world would be like if he didn't exist. Life turns out to be a sad place with a Walpurgisnacht/purgatory that's a clear prognostication of dying center cities. George may have had a hard time but what would life be like him? It's turns out to be a lonely funhouse filled with pseudo joy of the virtual reality and AI variety. Humanity is the ingredient that's missing. Take a look in the mirror one day when you're rushing to brush your teeth and get out of the house. You might not recognize who you see.

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

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

Casaubon

What does it mean to be an intellectual? The life of the mind by definition owes something to the world which stocks the fish bowl. However, Proust wrote A La Recherche  du Temps Perdu in his cork-lined study. The tragic flaw of Moliere's Misanthope is his failure to understand his beloved Celimene who is a shameless flirt. Professor Rath, in Die Blaue Engel is a parody of the eccentric intellectual gulled into being an object of mockery and contempt, a pedant whose eccentricities turn him into a sad clown. George Eliot's Casaubon is the prototypic intellectual whose knowledge is purchased at the. cost of understanding. You may be drawn to imaginative and colorful characters but when you build your dream house, you're likely to opt for the  bricklayer over Ibsen's Master Builder Solness who falls to his death building a "castle in the air."

read "Died Young" by Francis Levy, The Brooklyn Rail

and listen to "Twenty-Five Miles From Home" by Edwin Starr

Retrumplican Semantics

You can blow your horn but if you want to get your horn blown you need an orchestra. There is a semantics to Retrumplicanism. In short they accuse the very people they are gaslighting of gaslighting. Another semantic characteristic  of Retrumplicans is their attempt to shut their adversaries down. They are engulfed with a torrent of language which can only go in someone else's face (Kellyanne Conway spoke Retrumplicanese, she was the ur-Retrumplican, homo Retrumplicanis). They're proliferates as well as being profligate and don't seem to possess manners as they interrupt and talk over their opponents' voices. It is the most emlematic attribute of Retrumplican speech and speaks loudly to anyone who might attempt to deprogram a member of what is essentially a massive cult. Biden may have stuttered, but unfortunately Dems slur their words, in the face of the Retrumplican onslaught of language.

listen to "Make America Great Again" by Pussy Riot

Les Normaliens

Ecole Normale

The Board of Ed instituted a tracking system in the 50s. The Stanford-Binet IQ test was administered to elementary school students who were placed either in the IG or "intellectually gifted" classes or on increasingly lower rungs of the totem pole. Class performance and grades were seldom factors. In England you had the O Levels until l988 and in France an even more selective criteria for those lucky students who become Normaliens and attend the Ecole normale superieure. North Korea undoubtedly has a similar program for those who will make their ICBMs. Either you think of yourself as naturally talented or not. For those who don't score well on standardized tests, the struggle for recognition can be elusive. Intelligence and particularly creativity don't always register in formulaic ways and a student with great potential whose mind blanked when confronted with a series of shapes may find it more difficult--at first. Reports about anomalies, of course, are, by definition, anecdotal since they aren't scored. How do you record the performance of someone with a low IQ who goes on to find a cure for cancer or an outsider artist like Darger? But whoever said life or death were fair?

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

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

The Last House on the Left

Wes Craven's The Last House On the Left (1972) is one of the most horrifying films ever made. Rape and torture comprise the narrative. Blair Witch Project (1999) combined the home movie style with horror. Now if you're feeling helpless, this is something you can do. Reach into your pocket. Take out your iPhone, switch to the camera then video mode the moment the congressional hearings with Matt Gaetz, the new AG pick, start. You probably like Newman's microwave popcorn with your movies. Remember The Munsters. Central casting couldn't have produced a better choice for a sequel to the popular TV series than Representative Gaetz. Gaetz also looks like  Frankenstein's Monster (Boris Karloff). Switch scripts to Psycho (1960). Cut and action. Gaetz is in the AG's private bathroom at the DOJ. An unidentified young girl is taking a shower in the AG's private bathroom. Now Gaetz dressed in his mother's clothes enters.There's a shriek. It's a montage scene with Bernard Hermann's famed score in the background. The viewer only knows Gaetz has been confirmed when they hear the screams and see the blood swirling down the drain.

read "Frankel" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Election 2024: A Post Mortem

Survivors of the election feel they're in a vice. Before the votes were tallied they were optimistic and carefree as they swam happily off Chappaquiddick. As the days passed the metal surface became more impenetrable. There was no way to escape or circumvent it. The metal was inexorable. They knew they would be crushed, just like their hopes. First there was the cold metallic claustrophobia and the terror of realizing the tiny glimmer of hope you held on to was gone. Only unspeakable pain lay ahead. How does one conceive the flesh of the body politic shredded like paper? Then there were the crushed bones, the choking after swallowing one's own blood and finally the suffocation. You dive too deep still thinking you can make it to the surface, only your muscles spasm.There is nothing left to do. Your agony will only be relieved by death.

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

From the 11/4/24 edition of The New Yorker

Yukio Mishima

From "The Big Deal" by Nicholas Lemann: "The Biden Admnistration passed...the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act ($1.2 trillion), the CHIPS and Science Act ($280 billion), and the Inflation Reduction Act."

On the page opposite, from the poem "Pregnant on Street-Cleaning Day" by Laura Kolbe:

"I see myself in those forgotten unbeloved/presidents of the nineteenth century/gaunt even when they were fat--"

"From the Wilderness" (1966) by Yuko Mishima:

"I'm speaking of the vast wilderness surrounding the metropolis of my being. Unmistakably, it's a part of me, but it is an unexplored, barren area that doesn't appear on my map. I is a region of desolation as far as the eye can see, no verdant trees or flowering plants, only a biting wind that dusts the surface of jutting rocks with sand and then blows it away. though I know the location of this wilderness, I've managed to stay far away, still, I know somehow that I was there once and that someday I will have to make the journey again."

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

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

Darkness Invisible

You might say "black" when someone asks you how you're feeling. But are there fifty shades of black? By definition no, but why not reply "blacker than black?" While black is an absolute on the spectrum there literally are degrees of emotional darkness. Darkness Visible is title of Styron's memoir of depression. You may feel an international darkness as if the world were closing in on you like a person who takes the air out of a room. Do you remember, when you were a kid,  getting up in the middle of the night and getting lost in a strange house when you were trying to get to the bathroom? You totally lost your bearings and began to panic. The darkness is the darkness but it is the repercussions that you're now dealing with. Once the lights go out the trouble begins.

read "Francis Levy's Playlist For His Story Collection," The Kafka Studies Department, Largehearted Boy

MASA (Make America Small Again)

Isolationism, which means America abandons Ukraine and Taiwan, will ultimately do the reverse of what it intends. Diplomacy is a subtle form of colonialism which has allowed the United States to be a dominant power in Europe through both NATO and CENTO. The expense of NATO which Trump has railed against is actually a sound economic investment. Trump and Musk negotiating a deal is the first stage in ceding power to Putin. Dreams of an Imperial Russia will be enhanced by Axis allies like North Korea, China and Iran. Once a commanding presence in both the East and West, the U.S. will become small. The loss of political power will anticipate an economic decline--as a newly dominant bloc of nation states divide the spoils amongst themselves. 

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

Blitz

Steve McQueen's Blitz is an unfortunate vehicle for Saoirse Ronan and not the star from which she might wish to shine. You may remember her multi-dimensional performance in Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird (2017). She no doubt fared better as a gifted high school student in Sacramento rather than a single mother of a mixed-race child in war-time London. J. G. Ballard's imagination has a monopoly on portrayals of children in deserted or destroyed cities--somethiing which Steven Spielberg exploited elegantly in Empire of the Sun (1987). Here it's a gigantic mess. It's sad not only to turn a talented actress into a stock character out of central casting for wartime femme fatales, but even sadder to use stylization in the service of melodrama. Blitz is not Goya. Rather it becomes a series of stereotypes from cockney predators to a heroic Nigerian, who discovers the lost boy and fights against the racism which infects Londoners seeking safety in The Underground. One of them most terrible things that a work of art can do, when it pretends to take on history, is to turn it into something which avoids the reality of what actually transpired.

Weather

Pilots use the word "weather" to refer to air turbulence. It's  actually an interesting locution since you can have sunny clear skies, rain, sleet, hail, hurricanes  typhoons and tornadoes attendant upon global warming. It's as if weather were one of those words like "gay" that has taken on extracurricular meanings. There was a time when "gay" meant happy and it would be interesting to trace the evolution of that meaning. There was a time when weather was at the very least a neutral term. Should it be assumed that pilots have engendered a double entendre or innuendo that's the result of climate change? It will be interesting to see how the meanings of certain other words change over time. Alexander Payne directed "Election" back in 1999. It would be interesting to think about what he would have titled his movie today.

read Joan Baum's review of The Kafka Studies Department, NPR

Gregor Samsa

It's not fun to realize  you're ultimately no more significant than a  cockroach. That's what Kafka's Metamorphosis is about. The most profound irony of Kafka's story is the fact that Gregor Samsa's tormentors are ultimately no better off than he. The inception of life is an unfathomable a mystery as is consciousness in humans yet all living creatures have the same ignoble end. There may be income inequality, but death is the great leveler. There is, in fact, a certain freedom in knowing that one day one will be free from the pain and burden of living itself. In The Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt quotes Lucretius' De rerum natura thusly: "Mourners," Lucretius wrote, "always wring their hands in anguish and say, 'Never again will your dear children race for the prize of your first kisses and touch your heart with pleasure too profound for words. But they do not go on to add, 'You will not care, because you will not exist.'"

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

History

Louis Auguste Blanqui, leader of the Paris Commune

You are always part of history but not everyone has the opportunity to experience History and more specifically life changing events, such as the revolutionary wars in America, France (including the Paris Commune) and Russia.Then there is, of course, the end of dynasty, the rise of nationalism with the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek and finally the Long March and the ascension of the Communist Party and Mao. All of these events themselves leave indelible imprints that spawn processes like the industrial revolution. On a microcosmic level, the effects on the brain are almost meteorological, molding the neurogenic pathways which make up consciousness. The current moment will undoubtedly be looked back on as a watershed equivalent to the advent of atomic energy and its darker manifestation in the annihilation of Hiroshima.  Naturally it's impossible to be objective when one is living through a cataclysm. Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20.  One thing that may without exaggeration be said about the ongoing conflagration in the body politic is that life will never be the same.

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

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

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

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

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

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