Time Machination

 

from "The Clock"

It's very simple, really, no magic. You travel from New York to Rome at Christmas and supposedly “lose” six hours in the process. You're literally racing to sunrise. Arriving 7:00 AM at Fiumicino, it is still only 1AM in New York. When you would have gone to sleep, you are asked to get up and start your day. Ostensibly you will gain the lost time on the way back, arriving at say 7PM and ready to start your evening which is already over in Rome. Were you back in Rome, you would have been getting ready for bed. It's not similar to Proust’s concept of “lost time,” which really refers to the “involuntary memories" often triggered by sensation. Time zones are one of those interesting sometimes labyrinthine notions which end up being exercises in rationality of a very literal sort. There is, for example, Greenwich Mean Time, but so what? Speaking of time, Christian Marclay's 24 hour movie, "The Clock" will be running at MoMA through February 17th.

"Em

Brendan Behan and Jackie Gleason

You may have noticed that Irish people say 'em. It's a sound that's a form of reflective pause. Sounds are different from vowels and they're definitely not words which boast of meaning. Does an utterance which could be part of a noun tantalize with the prospect of association? A breath may hint at the prospect of naming. After all intention always lurks in the background. 'Em is a vibration that men feel in their Adam's apples. It is right below a growl though there's nothing threatening at work. The sound is that of an engine idling. The motive is less to hesitate than to warm up in the way one does before a drive through a snowy landscape. Ireland is full of cold and mist and one can see why many if its countryman might need to do away with the blarney before they set about their business.

Listen to "Mustang Sally" by The Commitments

The Room Next Door

Pedro Almodovar's The Room Next Door, the director's first English language feature, is based on What Are You Going Through, the highly acclaimed novel by Sigrid Nunez. But the presentational style is so arch and self-evident, one wonders about the director's intent. Is the consequent humor inadvertent or intentional, in such a way as to make the movie a parody of itself? It's the old say it versus show it dealt with in Creative Writing 101. The invention Almodovar used in Tell It To Her (2002), about the grief for a comatose female matador, is absent.The story of a terminally ill journalist Martha Hunt, (Tilda Swinton) who appoints an old friend Ingrid Parker (Julianne Moore) to be the witness to her suicide is hardly the stuff of comedy. In this case it's the occasion for a series of flat linear stories that one may initially try to excuse. At one point Damian (John Turturro) a former lover of Ingrid's states that she has the unique ability to suffer while not making those around her feel guilty. It's an odd locution. Just as you're about to discountenance the obvious deadpan plot, doors open up just like the red one which Martha will eventually use as a signal. One wants to give Almodovar credit, not of the directorial kind, but in terms of the benefit of the doubt. It's not really clear what he's up to, but that may be part of the effect. Verisimilitude is not the aim and the final ending, which bears some comparison to Bergman's Persona, undoubtedly casts an unexpected shadow of clarification on what has come before.

read Francis Levy's review of "Broken Embraces," TheScreamingPope

and read Francis Levy's review of "The Skin I Live In," TheScreamingPope

Cruise to Nowhere

Retirees tend to be big travelers. Petra, Angkor Wat (also known as Angkor, What! to some argumentative couples). Cruises to Antarctica together with long distance balloon trips and 20 000 leagues under the sea in submersibles are all on the itinerary. Tourism has become a developmental stage. Is it a preparation for the final journey over the Acheron with Charon as oarsman?  The search for ever more exotic locales has become increasingly frenzied. Safaris are tantamount to social security. Just about everyone you meet is coming or going from one and flying Air Emirates whuch offers pasha- like treatment for those who can afford it. What do sites afford? Young back packers generally are looking for adventure. They free solo and skydive. They slum. But the Seven Wonders are the province of those who are on their way to the afterlife. Perhaps they will sign up for one of the appropriately named Cruises to Nowhere.

listen to "25 Miles" by Edwin Starr 

and also listen to "Boogaloo Down Broadway" by Fantastic Johnny C

Matt Gaetz For Senate!

Matt Gaetz would have been qualified to run for the Roman senate during Caligula's reign. It will be interesting to see what he is like after he gets out of rehab. Or will he be like Eichmann who claimed he had been taking orders from his superiors? DJT is a hard act to follow since he can provide a guide to living--"Access Hollywood"--that would send most who follow it to jail. Apparently Gaetz had sex not once but twice with a 17-year-old, on one of which occasions, there were witnesses (eg he likes doing it in public). Chacun a son gout is an expression that will probably be banned in light of the Gisele Pelicot atrocity. It isn't hard to imagine Gaetz and his boss surrounded by pulchritude and fruit. Rome provided the model of governance in a "Girls Gone Wild" ambiance.

listen to "Tears of a Clown" by Smokey Robinson

Economy of Scale

Have you ever awakened and not known where you are? It's easy to do in one of those nameless hotel chains say a Courtyard Marriott whose design is based on the production line principle of replicability. Economy of scale can apply to dwellings as well as Campbell's soup cans a la pre fab houses of the 50's that paradoxically have become relics the more they disappear from view. It's hard to get ones bearings in a world of uniformity. His does Big Brother figure here? Orwell couldn't have dreamed this one up? Due to ubiquity modernity has a leveling effect. There's no pace like home, literally!

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

The Civil War

You may look rightly at the Retrumplicans as brainwashed, but the schizoid nature of the country is accounted for by a litany of delusion on both sides of the tracks. It takes two to tango or to create a folie a deux. One knows what describes the profile of the Trump supporter: the slavish devotion to the cult of the Second Coming. The followers of Jim Jones suffered from a similar passion. You can see where that got them. With all the "sickness unto to death" following the election, it's easy to forget what maladaptive behaviors characterize the Left particularly with regard to a form of Orwellian Newspeak centered around pronouns. And let's not forget about the #MeToo and blackballing on college campuses, where the accused are guilty before being proven innocent. It's The Scarlett Letter redux. If only Nathaniel Hawthorne were alive today.

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

The LIE

Is there any difference between the present and the era when McCarthy put the army on trial?Trump thinks Liz Cheney should be tried and possibly even jailed. The same holds true for Bennie Thompson and the other members of the Select Committee including Adam Schiff. On the other hand members of the House Ethics Committee voted to release a report that former DOJ nominee Matt Gaetz has been fighting to suppress. When will the rubber hit the road? What event will ignite a paradigm shift where "the deep state" will have no more power as a jeremiad than the saying in a fortune cookie? When will Pizzagate and QAnon have a "second life" in the next generation of computer games? Will QAnon be the Dark Force in the Star Wars of tomorrow (which will undoubtedly be played out in alternate universes and on a highway called Time)? First it was Jack Smith then Fani Willis in Georgia and Alvin Bragg in New York. People who travel on the biggest LIE in the world, the Long Island Expressway, encounter drag racers winding in and out of traffic at hair raising speeds. Maybe the day the cops finally catch up with them will be the oracle for change you have been waiting for.

listen to "I Love to Love" by Tina Charles (1975)

The Castle

Kafka's The Castle ends mid-sentence. Is this bad grammar or a statement about the fragmented nature of human reality? Is it a comment on time itself, a critique of chronology, of time moving forward? Is it a protest against action and classic notions of narrative? If you've been in any conversation or for that matter read any letter or email, you may have pushed back at the fact that the correspondent can't get to the point. People spend too much time looking for an ending, a way to stop talking or writing. Have you ever listened to someone going on and on, simply because they couldn't find a way to wrap things up? Could Kafka's message be simply "get to the point, Mac?" So what if you have to stop in the middle of a sentence.

listen to "I Love to Love" by Tina Charles (1975)

The Miracle of the Grain Ships

detail from "The Miracle of the Grain Ships"

Florentines faced shortages wheat in 1332. If you look into Lorenzetti's maritime scene, you clearly see the faces of the sailors. Humanization is one of the themes of "Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350" at the Met. What were the sailors in this detail from the panel thinking? Were they eager to satiate their stomachs or simply anticipating praise. Remember the burghers on the shore in Vermeer's "View of Delft?" How far away but at the same time near to these early inklings of personhood in painting! Freed from the constraints and uniformity of convention the Sienese painters of the early Renaissance, Duccio, Martini, Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti explored character and individuality. What will happen when the boats arrive? Is that where the story begins or ends? Yet to the contemporary eye, what makes these paintings compelling is the sincerity and the lack of irony. Devotion and belief are still the modus operandi. Hope springs eternal.

and listen to "Dance With My Father" by Luther Vandross

A Complete Unknown

How do you prevent a biopic from becoming a hagiography? Filling it with stereotypes and melodrama. James Mangold's A Complete Unknown deals with Dylan's formative years l961-The overly earnest Pete Seeger (Ed Norton) refusing to name names, the tubercular Woody Guthrie in a Jersey Sanitarium, the competitive and self-serving Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) and an alternately debauched and detached Dylan (Timothy Chalamet) who is literally and metaphorically, the Riddler. Not since Margarethe von Trotta's Hannah Arendt has any character smoked so insistently as Mangold's Dylan.The camera pans back and forth from the face of a renamed Susan Rotolo (Ellie Fanning) the girl on the cover of the Freewheelin' Bob Dylan--as her lover becomes a legend at Newport before her eyes. They well up. Then they well up, more. What's Dylan's great cause? Not civil rights or war, it turns out, but rock. It's a war between Folkways and John Hammond at CBS. What's missing is nuance. The director makes his larger than life characters real by making them trite. The result is an ignoble portrait of a Nobel prizewinner.

and listen to "Like a Rolling Stone" by Bob Dylan

Ted Kuenz in Ibsen's "When We Dead Awaken"

Ted Kuenz

Ted Kuenz who appears in the Renewal by Andersen commercial you have seen on CNN and MSNBC, before you stopped watching the news, is an actor who apparently plays himself. You didn't know that the folks at the Window Replacement Division of Renewal by Andersen were followers of Luigi Pirandello, the Sicilian playwright who wrote Six Characters in Search of an Author. Though "who is playing whom" may lie at the heart at the heart of this drama, it's not fake news! The question is, what role will Ted kuenz continue to play in future productions of the Renewal By Andersen Repertory Company? Will Ted Kuenz play Hamlet and ask "to engage the Replacement Windows Division of Renewal by Andersen or not? That is the question?" If nothing else Ted Kuenz is Waiting for Godot or anyone else who can close his windows aka mouth since there's a draft. imagine Ted Kuenz in Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken!

read "A Glossary of Bodily Functions" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Pain

House of Pain

Severely disturbed people inflict physical pain on themselves in order to squelch a deeper ache. Those who resort to self- mutilation, who cut and burn them selves, constitute a subcategory. The mind is so constructed that it can go on autopilot to produce the right quotient of maladaptive behavior necessary to quell the noise. Loss can produce bouts of logorrhea. You've encountered people who can't stop talking and bring conversation to a halt. These literally take the air out of a room. Traumatized children either look like ghosts with their deadened eyes or produce a level of noise which eradicates both thought and emotion. Meditation is a spiritual activity. You stop what you're doing. It's meant to clear the mind. But it can do just the opposite turning up the volume on the very voices it seeks to eliminate.

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

Shit Show

The Fuck-Up was Arthur Nersesian's breakout novel. Self-published and placed in book stores on consignment, it eventually sold 140,000 copies. A translation of the The Fuck-Up has recently become a "succes d'estime," as well as a publishing sensation in France. It's not hard to see why the French would gravitate to Nersesian's world of 80s New York. It's a literal A Bout de Souffle with a main character who works as an usher at a Cinema Village type place and who then pretends to be gay so he can remain in the employ of a porno theater--yes, he's a male moll who avoids gangsters and doesn't sell The Trib like Jean Seberg. The point is it's got the mood early Godard that played the downtown art houses of the 60s. Nersesian likes expletives in his titles. His latest novel, his fourteenth, is Shit Show. The book is a  totally different bag of apples, in which the author deftly displays his gift for imagining history, moving from the Stalinist Russia of the 40s to Woodstock, then  9/11. Nersesian's character Morosov even writes a more than competent poem ending with these lines: "Since there was no sign of heaven, God dropped them on the Syrian/Plains to let his vultures feed/They were the bread unleavened, his hateful creed." Here is a non sequitur from Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station: "In spite of Marx's enthusiasm for the human, he is either inhumanely dark and dead or almost superhumanly brilliant." 

read "Making the Graphic Novel Graphic" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Assad

Will those painted gold Trump statues be tumbled someday just as Assad monuments are being desecrated in Homs, Aleppo and Damascus? Btw who will be appointed to be the head of the Assad's imperial guard of sports cars? Trump is one step ahead of his predecessors, issuing the commemorative coins and busts of himself before he even turns the Oval Office into "the shape of money." Remember Dubcek and Prague Spring and Lech Walesa ? Are the Trumps the Romanovs? Will Donald and Melania (a naturalized citizen in  danger of deportation) become Nicholas and Alexandra?

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

Plato's Retreat

The Ansonia Hotel

There are some people who dream of a sensual state that will be the cure for all their problems. Life is an eternal gray February day on the late 60s West Side with biting Hudson winds rattling icy windows. Only invoking the image of Plato's Retreat and the famed redoubt, The Ansonia Hotel, breaks the ice. Fill the emptiness with the ultimate erotic dream! But is free access to naked bodies the cure for lassitude? The Orgy is the title of a novel by the poet Muriel Rukeyser. Rome is a civilization once associated with indulgence. Caligula is the emperor whose name is most associated with an excess whose essence lay in the subjugation and exercise of power over his subjects. Caligula was a madam, classical civilization his brothel. He was also one of history's greatest Johns which poses the question, can a slave owner be a consumer of the very property he owns? The reciprocal love of women was memorialized by Sappho. La Grand Bouffe the 1970 movie starring Michel Piccoli anticipated Bob Guccioni's failed Caligula (1979). Gore Vidal, who wrote the script  along with Malcolm McDowell, who played the emperor, both abandoned the project. But the set itself exemplified the  excesses of an iconic institution which is now only a distant memory and footnote to the history of the upper west side in the disco era. 

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

and listen to "Boogaloo Down Broadway" by Johnny C (1967)

Bukowski

Are you so obsessed with yourself that you don't know whether you're coming or going? Freud talked about love and work, but many professionals whose career paths are, for good or bad, set in stone might say sex and food--two ephemeral entities that create a discussion that far exceeds their duration. Look at the literature of sexuality Catallus, Caligula, Sade, Chaucer, Rabelais, Fielding and in modern times Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, Phillip Roth, Simone de Beauvoir, Erica Jong,  Annie Ernaux, John Updike, Harold Brodkey and Daphne Merkin. And the literature of food is no slouch either, if you consider all the writers from  Escoffier to Marcella Hazan and Julia Childs. It's a paradox of fleeting pleasures that one could spend a lifetime writing about culinary exploits that take only a fraction of their production time to consume. Nevertheless, you'll probably be hungry and desirous until the bitter end. In fact, lust is a peculiar animal that owes as much to animal instinct as serotonin and is often masked by an intrinsic dissatisfaction with quotidien reality. In essence, humans afflicted by imagination, are all spurned lovers.

read "The Findings" by Francis Levy, Evergreen Review

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

Morbidity

"Carcass of Beef"by Chaim Soutine (1925)

Picasso was a serial killer. He turned his lovers, Olga Khokova, Dora Maar, Marie-Therese Walter into his subjects, painting, then leaving them, stags shot then mounted.  Too Far Too Go was John Updike's often heartbreaking rendering of the dissolution of a marriage which happened to be his, but as you read, you can't help thinking, why? When there is so much genuine love between two people, why need they part? Or is there a perversion involved, a psychiatric condition not listed in the DSM, where an artist needs to turn his subject into dead meat--a la Soutine. Do some writers inflict pain on themselves and others, in order to write about it?

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

Brave New World

Why does CNN belabor every story? It's informative to hear Will Ripley explaining the declaration of martial law in Korea to the anchor, Pamela Brown, but not ad nauseam. BTW Ripley was reporting from Taiwan. Will he be reporting from Pyongyang when Xi Jinping invades the former Formosa? In the case of the situation in Seoul the network was creating Esperanto without being aware of it? Know the ticker tape underneath your screen that drools out the same iterations which either rhyme or sound like Mar-A-Lago? If you switch to MSNBC you are in another world of mishaps but at least you aren't limited to one catastrophic event when so many others are happening such as Republicans lining up their ducks to nominates a Russian asset to a cabinet post.

and listen to "25 Miles From Home" by Edwin Starr

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

and while you're in your romantic agony listen to "The Tortured Poets Department" by Taylor Swift

Polyphemus

David and Goliath is as monstrously overused as "narcissism" and "depressed." What is the use of describing someone as a narcissist, with that meaningful  "depressed" look people evince when they refer to those exemplifying the "N" word, if everyone is suffering from the same thing? A disorder is supposed to be exceptional otherwise "breathing" would be a condition. Imagine labeling someone "a breather" and saying it with the same serious look you reserve for "a narcissist?" But getting back to D&G. Who will combat the Dark Force aka "Cash" Patel? Who will spare Americans From The Empire aka The Trump Organization? Remember those sabers you bought for your kids? Darth Vader and Elon Musk were once good. So there is hope for a turn around. This same cannot be said about Trump who never even pays his bills. To MAGA, America needs someone with the wiles of Odysseus, someone who can beat Goliath at his own game.

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

Musk(y)

Take the Musk Out of Muskie and What Do You Get? 

Is our current period comparable to Rome after Augustus, Greece after the Trojan war or has frequently been said Germany before the rise of Hitler. Certainly a large class of unemployed unskilled workers and veterans, the lumpen proletariat, fueled the beer hall Putsch which was tantamount to January 6. Is Elon musk Goebbels with his propaganda machine and freaky Mother in the background a la Norman Bates? Interestingly Germany before Hitler was a supernova sending out the bright explosion of the dying star. Berlin Alexanderplatz, the Alfred Doblin novel, later adapted by Fassbinder, Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, Ernst Broch's The Sleepwalkers along with the novels of Stefan Zwieg and Joseph Roth and essays of Walter Benjamin were all part of the cultural renaissance that eventually fueled the wrong kinds of fires. Christipher Isherwood's Berlin Stories became Cabaret, but is life ever really a cabaret, my friend? You may not find sleepwalkers but many people walking in their sleep not realizing there is someone bragging about being able to shoot people and get away with it. BTW, where will all the democrat donors and January 6 investigators be imprisoned? Will Alcatraz be brought back into service? Joseph McCarthy tried to court martial the army but maybe the writers of Project 2025 will have better luck?

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