Dick Cheney

Al Gore, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris were all in prominent attendance at Dick Cheney’s funeral Though in a Protestant Church,  it was a truly Catholic event. In a divided country where assassination threats are freely bandied about, it was a validation of the democratic project. Still the assembled mourners represented the old elite that Retrumplicans have sought to destroy in favor of something far more onerous, despotism. Only an autocrat can challenge an aristocracy! Class is the enemy of the populist. It’s no wonder Trump went after Harvard. The funeral was not only a swan song for the former Vice President, it was a challenge to everything Trump stands for. If one were a Mamdani supporter, the service might occasion conflicting emotions. Liz Cheney was a prominent member of the January 6 Committee. But remember her father was associated with Hallibuton. With Pete Hegseth heading the Pentagon, the old military industrial complex can seem appealing until you remember the CIA brought down Mossedegh and Allende and was ultimately responsible for the Shah and Pinochet. Edit note: you may have been alienated from the world of fly fishing, football and 4x4s, but you start to appreciate Americana when the President of the country is issuing bitcoins while putting out the red carpet for a murderer. You may hate military industrial complex, but it starts to look only malign in the world of Palantir.

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

Who Are "the American People?"

From Nabokov's Speak, Memory:"My mothers grandfather, who being afraid of fires, had the staircase fashioned of iron, so that when the house did get burned to the ground, sometime after the Soviet revolution, those fine wrought steps, with the sky shining through their openwork risers, remained standing, all alone but still leading up." But getting back to present reality, "the American people" is a much bandied about phrase on the part of both parties. Everyone wants the best for "the American people," but there's no consensus on how to get there. In the meanwhile just "people" are getting threatened with assassination. Senator Fetterman, a Democrat, thinks the radical left is even more culpable in this area than the right.  Where would you rather be? America in 2025, before the fall of Trump? Or Russia l905. Having experienced one failed revolution, Lenin had yet to travel To the Finland Station.

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

Emoluments!!!!!!

former Trump International, Washington D.C.

 “ Emoluments!” The word echoes as it falls into the event horizon of a black hole created by the supernova, Democracy.  The cute sounding MBS (crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman) actually has something in common with Elon Musk besides wealth. They are both fascinated with chain saws. He’s also invested $2B in Jared Kushner’s Affinity Fund. Trump, for his part, wants to build towers in Riyadh and Jiddah. There was a piece in The Times about the plight of the stateless illegitimate children of Kenyan domestics raped by their Saudi employers. But that’s not more likely to be on the agenda than the dismembering of Adnan Khashoggi. BTW if you get lost in Istanbul don’t go into the Saudi consulate unless you want to be road kill. F-35s and the Abraham accords are purportedly on the agenda along with the blood red carpet welcome!

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

The Forbidden City

Imagine the palatial halls through which Kim Jong-un walks. Probably no American has penetrated the inner sanctum more than Dennis Rodman, piercings and all. Though Kim and Trump developed an epistolary relationship (right out of a Samuel Richardson novel), they always met on neutral ground. The palaces of other contemporary tyrants, Putin, MBS (sounds perilously close to AOC no?) and Xi Jinping in Zhongnanhai which is adjacent to the Forbidden City—would be fodder for a latter day Borges. Democracy is inversely proportional to exclusivity. If you’ve ever stayed at luxurious redoubts such as the Hotel du Cap or the Connaught for which letters of introduction can be required, you understand what rarefied means. In academia think of the crypt comprising Skull and Bones at Yale, only there’s no graduation beyond the Tomb of Hotshepsut.

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

Houyhnhnms and Yahoos

photo: Gage Skidmore

Rain, reign and rein are homonyms. Egregious and blatant are synonyms. If you're looking for an oxymoron, antonyms often qualify. Reverse Midas touch is an oxymoronic use of antonyms. "Good bad" is one. "Pretty funny," "seriously funny" and "awfully good" are examples. The White House for the presidency, however seriously compromised the structure might be by the destruction of the East Wing, is an example of another figure of speech, metonymy, in which you use an associated thing. Synecdoche, the part for the whole, is exemplified by an expression like "all hands on deck."  Let peace "rain" is a poetic use of the homonym which, by the way, has nothing to do with Gulliver's rational Houyhynhyms or their bombastic all too humanYahoos. What about a race of words? Have you ever been in a room with someone whose nonstop talking has obviously been devised to stop them from having to listen to their thoughts?

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

Speak, Memory

This from Nabokov’s Speak, Memory “His was the kind of colorful neurosis that should have been accompanied by genius but in his case was not, hence the search for a traveling shadow.” One could identify the subject of the observation. However it’s actually more fun to take it out of context to the extent it reveals more about the writer than one of the many specimens in the butterfly collection that he began when he was six. The memoir famously begins: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness." And this on his mother's quest for mushrooms. "Her main delight was in the quest, and this quest had its rules. Thus, no agarics were taken; all she picked were edible specimens of the genus Boletus (tawny edulis, brown scaber, red aurantiacus and a few close allies), called 'tube mushrooms' by some and coldly defined by mycologists as 'terrestrial, fleshy, putrescent, center stipitate fungi.'" 

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

The Degeneracy

Orwell’s "newspeak" is now teleportation. Do you dare ask for ICE or ask for scotch “on the rocks” or even for a few cubes? Don’t be surprised if ICE CUBE the legendary rapper changes their brand. Those who reassure you things will pass forget the depredations of the #Me Too era when the then editor of TNYRB was dismissed for allowing a #MeToo’d Canadian journalist to write a mea culpa. The Degeneracy aka Degenerintocracy is following the Gerontocracy, the Theocracy, the Plutocracy, the recent Kleptocracy of Trump-dumb and the generalized movement of cellular organisms to autocratic rule. Do you feel like Winston Smith seeking a sanctum sanctorum amidst the crushing juggernaut of deafening crypto-current noise pollution (Mar-A-Lago raining bitcoins)?

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

The Temptation to Exist

 

Emil Cioran

I and Thou (Ich und du, Either/Or)—what about a philosophical tome Same Different? One wants everything to be the same, to get up, go to work, come home to find the world intact. On the other hand, boredom and the unchanging mess of life are a problem for Madame Bovary. Flaubert’s character even resulted in the coining of a word, Bovarysm. The romantic agony is predicated on the desire for transcendence.  Yet the waves continue to come. There is a hypnotic and reassuring peace in their infinity. They precede and are left for posterity,  without the need for a subjective observer. You read about lives populated with events, the heartthrob with all the lovers. Thrilling existences have an allure, but the free soloist is deprived of serenity. Adrenalin ironically is the antidote for priapism. Anxiety and lovemaking are estranged bedfellows.

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

Fantasy

 

What is your dirty fantasy? Pornography is a "daydream" according to Robert J. Stoller author of Perversion: the Erotic Form of Hatred. No matter how much of an exhibitionist, no matter how liberated you are there are certain kinks (do they qualify as "desires?") you won't reveal anyone. Shame is in fact what fuels the arousal. Liberation on other hand is lame. You do the deed, but there is no after party, nothing to butt ones head against. When you transgress, you cross a line. It’s like having a record or rap sheet. Once a pickle no longer a cucumber. Samizdat made poetry precious and desirable.  Caveat emptor. So what is your forbidden thought? What do you try to push down and repress—for fear of being labeled and ostracized? There is a delicious adrenaline rush at the prospect of being caught—but, in your case, doing what?

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

Math

Srinivasa Ramnujan

It’s becoming increasingly hard to find a way out of the disheartening political situation which may have invaded your inner life, like roundworms in a dog's intestine. AI is like living in one of those Iron curtain countries during the Cold War. Remember the ads for Radio Free Europe, the large radio towers which beamed out waves of truth to women in shawls huddled around hidden receivers. How to escape the polluted discourse? One way is through tautology. Gertrude Stein famously declaimed “a rose is a rose is a rose.” Try entering that in Chat GPT or for that matter 2+2=4. Of course math itself can be the promised land. Remember Poincare’s “recurrence theorem?” Immersion in the Ramanujan prime and theta function is a new found land free of gaslighting. Drop what you are doing and enroll in an adult education course at NYU’s Courant Institute! Ay Ay AI, but...

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

Airplane!

Trump’s idea of deregulation is epitomized by the diminution in the number of air traffic controllers. Ultimately it will be the wild west at airports with pilots crazily riding their craft like Slim Pickens at the End of Strangelove. Imagine the latest Airplane sequel. Leslie Nielsen and Karim Abdul-Jabbar are in the cockpit. There are hundreds of planes colliding in the air. The tower is dark. Everyone is doing what they want. Remember "drill baby drill." Added to the free-for-all, the airport is full of ISIS terrorists who easily evade detection--since all TSA agents are furloughed.

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

Derrida-Like Clone

Jacques Derrida (photo: Philosophie)

Trump is a deconstructionist. MAGA gaslighting. Is it Derrida at work? The US President should be invited to lecture at the Ecole Normale. Paradigm shift was the expression coined by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (62). For Retrumplicans paradigm shifting is the Hokey Pokey; it’s a dance they do with every piece of reality they confront. The net result: no moral center, no right and wrong. Of course Trump literally deconstructed the East Wing. Truth was the loser on that side of The White House.

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

7025 AD

photo: Midweek Post

It will be interesting to see what life is like in New York 5000 years from now. The Pyramids and Petra have lasted. What will be the fate of Grand Central and the statue of Cornelius Vanderbilt that greets you as you scoot up the ramp of the Viaduct? What about the cavern of seemingly immortal stone that comprises Park Avenue? BTW will “pre-war” have any meaning? By then there are going to be lots of wars and not so long ago—during the pandemic—midtown registered the desolate landscape of a post-apocalyptic world. Actually with teleportation the chosen means of travel, there’s unlikely to be much touring about in real space/time. However, you do have to live on a day to day basis and one option is always virtual reality where all your wants and desires are taken care of. Even as far back as 1635 Pedro Calderon de la Barca wrote a classic play Life is a Dream—which essentially deals with what to do when the carpet's pulled out from under you.

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

The Concept of Anxiety

The "esthetic," the "ethical" and the "religious"  were three stages of existence Kierkegaard proposed. Dark energy and matter and the cosmological constant emanate from the annals of cosmology. Conspicuous consumption and ostentation a la Veblen and raw ambition aka romanticism are materializations of agency. If you find this abstract, consider the advent of paper currency—transcendentalism employed in the service of coinage. Is inflation inspired by otherworldliness?  Piaget identified the stages of development as "sensorimotor," "pre operational," "concrete operational" and  "formal operational." Elizabeth Kubler-Ross also identified the stages of dying as "denial," "anger," "bargaining," "depression" and "acceptance."

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

Semisaurus

At night the semis and car trailers fill the highways, it’s not unusual to spot oil deliveries. When it’s raining, curtains of water blind windshields. The drivers of lesser vehicles may find themselves snubbed like the person at the tony gathering who is short on social capital. These large juggernauts fill freeways with a reptilian civilization whose only threat is the coming ice age. If you listen to the horns occasionally blaring in the darkness, you think you’re watching Wild Kingdom.

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

Nouvelle Vague

Is Richard Linklater making a documentary about the making of Breathless (1960) or a documentary in the style of Breathless or a fiction film in a documentary style? Of course Godard was, in fact, making an American style gangster film with Seberg, a star whose last film, Bonjour Tristesse (1958), was shot by Otto Preminger, as the moll. One of the truly Godardian aspects of the film is the use of language and particularly aphorism. Godard famously said "cinema is truth 24 frames a second." The dialogue is punctuated with a series of Brechtian declamations about the nature art and reality and life ("I don't know if I'm unhappy, because I'm not free or if I'm not free because I'm unhappy") and cinematic citations (the poster for Humphrey Bogart in The Harder They Fall, Plus dura sera la chute appears in both films). Where Nouvelle Vague is disconcerting is in the portrayal of the supernumeraries, Truffaut, Chabrol and Melville who come off as parodies (the title of the film is misleading--it's not about the "new wave, but a single film) and its attempt to translate Breathless which quite simply falls short. Linklater is an original himself. Nouvelle Vague is his film and not simply a homage to Godard--and that's ultimately the problem. (Edit note: BTW see Breathless whose greatness lies in its imperfection).

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

Understanding

Descartes

Reading comprehension starts to be measured in grammar school. Of course, who knows what the dreaded future will hold! Forget AI! Chance is exponential. Moore’s Law about chips can be applied to anything and there is a cost for everything. Technology in sedentary. Suddenly you don't have to think. Who woulda thought? And how do you know what you’re reading is not the product of a Nvidia chip. Romantic love will really be romantic when it’s computer generated and lives eternally in cyberspace. No more Tristans or Juliets. Advanced systems can’t imbibe poisons though they can get viruses. One computer will request the bitcoin to pay off the hijacker. No need for any human hands to get dirty. Is ChatGBT responsible for the decline of reason?

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

The Omnivorous Rodent

 

Say you want to eat the world. The problem is you've become a cockroach, genus Gregor Samsa and there is only so much space in your gut. Your eyes are bigger than your tummy. Mice and rats are your dinosaurs. It is almost unfair that you have to be satisfied with crumbs while all the other rodents get to dine on you. What could be worse? If only it were possible to talk to one's confreres scratching in the walls. See that water bug scurrying away. It's one thing to sense danger and another to talk about it. Everyone knows that the only cockroaches that have words are the ones who went through their life-changing metamorphoses from man to bug. 

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

Is Democracy Dead?

 

Is this Dresden after the fire bombing? Politically democracy has been mortally wounded. One cannot turn back the socio-economic structure of the country to the Enlightenment ideals on which it was based. On an individual basis it’s similar to a relationship in which trust had been lost. Once the fabric is  torn, it’s nigh impossible to mend. Who would have thought the the basic foundations created by the Constitution and The Bill of Rights were as fragile as the East Wing which fell so easily to the wreckers ball? 9/11 was prescient. The United States protected in both sides by oceans never seemed vulnerable to attack and it wasn’t even a foreign government, rather a small guerrilla force. Who would have predicted that Putin would have gone "nuclear?"

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

The Godfather Grandfathered

Just when you thought organized crime was relegated to film-- and picking up the trash, one discovers the Mafia is grandfathered into the culture. The recent basketball scandal makes it apparent you shouldn't take anything for granted. Could the Bonannos and Gambinos accomplish what congress has been unable to do ie restore law and order? What if Trump or even Kim Jong-un were made an offer they couldn’t refuse? Surely the latter day Corleones can get more done than Nancy Pelosi. The Democrats are looking for someone who can stand up to MAGA world. The answer is the syndicate which will run circles around $ Patel—even if the DOJ is making them jump through hoops.

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

Make It New

 

Citroen 2CV

"Make it new," said Ezra Pound. Perhaps he didn’t even know what that meant. Does "new" refer to a poetic form (Pound famously wrote in Cantos) or the impulse behind the artistic endeavor itself?  When it comes to appliances most people would say they prefer a new Sub Zero refrigerator to an old Amana, but there's something charming about the waffle iron that comes down in the family bringing with it a host of olfactory memories. Cars epitomize old and new. The word “model” connotes something to be praised and imitated as in a “model student.” On the other hand one talks of vintage cars which have the resonance of a fine wine, One of Anne Beattie’s most famous stories is “A Vintage Thunderbird"--1978! You can go to IKEA to get Danish Modern Modular furniture, or hunt for antiques in Hudson. Everything about this latter runs against the notion of machine line production with its economy of scale. What comes off a conveyor belt is as new as an Ezra Pound poem—if not more so, but in a decidedly mechanical way.

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

Pizza, Natural Selection, Regime Change and the East Wing Demolition

East Wing Demolition (PBS)

Prehistoric man didn't go down to Third Avenue for a slice. In fact pizza is a product of natural selection along with totalitarianism. Along the way came Pizzagate and QAnon.  Regime change is another form of natural selection. Adolescent love is fake news, a gigantic hormonal fantasy, a gerrymandered election. Is democracy merely a placeholder for cryptocurrency? Recently Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, replied "your mother did" when Huffington's S.V. Date texted "Who suggested Budapest?" Leavitt latter posted the exchange on X. Is this an example of on line bullying?

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"

Darling

Julie Christie, Dirk Bogarde and Laurence Harvey are the triangle at the heart of Darling (1965)--currently completing a run at Film Forum. The threesome comprised of iconic figures of 60s cinema actually play odd man out. The movie, a satiric portrait of class and sexual mores, hinging on the creation of a happy advertising image--brilliantly turns on a dime, leaving its alternately glamorous and hapless characters to drown in their own self-created halos. Hindsight is not 20/20 when it comes to revisiting a classic like Darling since it's curiously difficult to suspend disbelief, swimming, as one does, in this school of talent. John Schlesinger’s direction complexly navigates the tightrope of tragicomedy weaving a latticework of reaction shots that counterpoint the entrapment of closeups. The big reveals are what these three image makers refuse to see.The tone of the film is flip to start. Bogart’s wife, a figure out of the kitchen sink school of British cinema, is blind-sighted by her husband. Then Schlesinger wields the cudgel of gravitas. Oedipus kills his father and sleeps with his mother. Christie sleeps with both men and ends up sentenced to life.

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

Wanted Dead or Alive

Is it possible to get a final message through? Why does it matter? Say dad always wanted you to be a lawyer but you dreamt of being a celebrity dental surgeon or an oral hygienist to the stars? You've won, obviously? It’s tantamount to punching your way out of a paper bag. In today’s age of ear fobs, you never can tell who's the crazy person talking to themselves. It’s a walking seance. You may be dressing to impress while success itself remains the elusive part of the equation. If you’ve ever been doubted, if you've ever had others look at you askance, you realize validation lies in being “wanted dead or alive!”

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

and watch Wisconsin's "Jump Around"