Hidden Under a Bushel

    "Hidden Under a Bushel" by Hallie Cohen (watercolor 5'x12')

"The Mona Lisa" was the subject of Freud’s essay on Da Vinci. You might be more inclined to Sargent’s "Madame X" with her majestic presence punctuated by the signature black gown. There has always been speculation about the model for Courbet’s “The Creation of the World." It was long held she was Whistler's mistress, but it is fairly certain she was Constance Queniaux, a member of the corps de ballet of the Paris Opera. Her wanton pose is a far cry from the Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile. Is Lavinia Fontana’s “Young Noblewoman” a possible love interest for a male or female viewer? Was her moustache a message or cosmetically common for the time? In Hallie Cohen's "Hidden Under a Bushel" she looms as the dominating presence in the stark intersection at the top of Rome’s Gianicolo (a symbol of change and perhaps sexual or cultural transition). At the same time she disappears into the coffered ceiling atop the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls. This latter momentarily steals the spectator's attention in a dramatic perspectival sweep. Still Fontana’s subject maintains her poise as the center of the painter’s reality. What do you love someone for? Looks? Character? In this case character is subtly entwined with nobility to create qualities of mystery, equanimity and grace. 

Putting the Cart Before the Horse

 

"cart pushing" by a horse in l907 Paris

Are you someone who chronically puts the cart before the horse? If so your dasein is in trouble. You don’t need to study inertial force to realize that the frightened horse is going to push the cart into a building or worse possibly a group of bystanders who have stopped to watch. If you’re in the driver's seat you’re going over head first. So at least wear a helmet. Husserl and Heidegger both averred that objects have no agency. It’s one of the primary precepts of phenomenology. Have you said to a wagon, "33rd and Third, please?" Have you ever known a trailer that had a mind of its own and simply took off without the car it's usually attached to (speaking of co-dependent)? This is not to imply that horses possess human consciousness. For more on this subject read Thomas Nagel's "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" Cart before horse people are the same folks who win the battle and lose the war. They don't know their ass from their elbow. They cut off their noses to spite their face. They always sound like they have a plan.They're on the same page, at the end of the day.

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

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

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

Wanted!

Seeking applicant for job of reading responses to customer satisfaction surveys. Spoiler alert how effective is a survey of services provided in the age of A.I? You   must be proficient in providing answers without using A.I.  For instance what does A.I know about the quality of the meal service on Delta business to Rome? This, naturally, brings up a basic question about A.I. Can an artificial intelligence have an opinion? The election was rigged. A real intelligence wil say nonsense while artificial intelligences all voted yes. Artificial intelligences are MAGA Republicans who voted for Trump while real intelligences were for Kamala Harris. Getting back to the job of evaluating surveys. Answer in 500 words or less. What makes you feel you’re better qualified to evaluate surveys than the artificial intelligence sitting next to you?

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

and listen to "Bernadette" by The Four Tops

Odysseus on the GW

Zero Mostel as Leopold Bloom in Ulysses in Nighttown

Odysseus’ wiles enabled him to put a wooden stake in the eye of Polyphemus and also to avoid the lure of the Sirens. Dostoevsky wrote a story entitled "The Double" where a character encounters his doppleganger during a snow storm in St. Petersburg. Imagine Odysseus transported from Greek mythology to America and confronting his double as he crosses the GW Bridge at rush hour. You can hear 1010 Wins Traffic and Weather announcing a 45 minute delay in the outbound with famous Greek hero scheduled to arrive at Ellis Island to claim his birthright citizenship by dusk.

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

Vergangenheitsbewaltigung

Vergangenheitsbewaltigung is German for “the burden of the past.” It’s a majestic looking word comprising a visual onomatopoeia. Centuries old resentments bottled into a Saint- Emilion of poison. The Bosnian Serb conflict rose up with the fall of Tito. Before was the massacre of Armenians by Turks. Hutus murdering Tutsis in Rwanda are one of many genocides There are no shortage of tyrants from Savonarola to Robespierre and Idi Amin to manage the gallows. Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor puts Christ on trial. Of course there have been Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in South Africa and Tunisia. There was the Marshall Plan which subsidized the rebuilding of Germany. It was a far cry from the punitive Versailles Treaty which can be credited for the rise of huge inflation in Weimar Germany, then fascism. Sound familiar? Now Trump has taken away protections for John Bolton and Anthony Fauci. Will retribution make America great again? It’s an ontogenic as well as phylogenetic question whether to adjudicate or hold out an olive branch. It all comes down to the 23rd psalm.Thou prepare a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.

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

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

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

The Mass of Poets Lead Lives of Quiet Exasperation

There are those who literally knock their heads against brick walls and have scars to prove it. The proverbial brick wall is invisible to all but those who run into it—say climbers like Ibsen's architect Solness, who is building castles in the sky. Is it possible to separate aspiration and culmination? Can one be ambitious as an artist and free oneself from the muggy torture of being misunderstood that some, certainly not all, creatives experience? Alain Robbe-Grillet once said new forms seem like the absence of form. What would have happened to Jackson Pollock were there no Clement Greenberg? Pollock was well on the way to alcoholic oblivion anyway. Perhaps the intervention of a critical mind bought some respite that civilization ultimately profited from. No matter—the mass of poets lead lives of quiet exasperation!

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

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

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

Pompeii

erotic fresco from Pompeii

Fantasy and romanticism go hand in hand. The romantic yearns for or postulates a transcendent reality.  Both Epicurus and Lucretius believed in carpe diem. It was the opposite of "the search" which Walker Percy’s Binx Bolling pursues inThe Moviegoer and certainly a 180 from Christian notions of redemption, resurrection and the Afterlife--though Percy was a Catholic. But fantasy can function in a purely biological way as an attribute of mind and therefore body. It’s what makes eroticism possible. Bodies in and of themselves are defined by their corporeal essence. Reality defies platonic forms. Attraction is a brief madness that creates a nimbus of eros, the potion that turns a quotidian male or female into a desired object and evolutionarily the messenger that exports the DNA of one generation on to the next.

listen to Allen Ginsberg reading "Howl" (1995)

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

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

Rome, Open City

Rome, Open City

You anxiously wait for the last straw and correspondingly for salvation. The occupation of Rome by the Nazis was famously and tragically depicted by Rossellini in Rome, Open City (1945) which might be the first example of the kind of cinema verite techniques evidenced in later movies like Battle of Algiers. The idea was to create a documentary effect on scripted film. Fascism was feared then as it is now. Liberation ideology is predicated on the notion of freedom an irrefutably desirable commodity. History repeats, but is full of amnesia.  De Gaulle, the great hero of the Resistance, was a villain to the students who manned the barricades in '68. The benevolent despotism of Tito was followed by the murderous Bosnian conflict. The irredentist notion of reconstitution led to murderous tribalism and a revivification of centuries-old hatreds between neighbors who had lived peacefully under the Yugoslavian flag. The democratic ideal is predicated on the notion of free expression and independence. The tragic paradox rests in the fact it contains within it the germs of dissension and ultimately hate. 

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

and listen to "Love's in Need of Love Today" by Stevie Wonder

The Gospel According to St. Matthew

Is Italy a Catholic country or a Communist country? Pier Paulo Pasolini was a heretic and Communist who made one of the most sacrilegious works of all time, Salo based on Sade's 120 Days of Sodom. Still his Gospel According to St. Matthew was called one of the greatest Jesus films of all time by the Vatican.Graham Greene created a defrocked priest, who is Christ symbol, in The Power and the Glory. Being a prophet is a lonely project. Pasolini's brand of Catholicism could be found in the Ragazi di vita the impoverished young criminals like Ettore in Mamma Roma, portrayed chained to a prison hospital bed in a homage to Mantegna’s "Lamentation of Christ." The old PCI was as much a representative of the faith as Savonarola or Opus Dei.

read "Limbo" by Francis Levy, Evergreen Review

and listen to "Love's in Need of Love Today" by Stevie Wonder

The Vatican Museum and the Sistine Chapel (Yelp!)

"The School of Athens" by Raphael

Is it a sacrilege to criticize the Vatican and especially its Museum or the vaunted or vaulted Sistine Chapel? Anyone who has practiced “sex” in the missionary position knows what it’s like to stare up at an often nice hotel ceiling. Ok this one is by Michelangelo "bravissimo!" Been there! On the way, you do pass Raphael’s “School of Athens.” But how can you enjoy a museum which is no more than a human cattle car of culture-- one btw where there are no seats along monstrous narrow corridors. Orson Welles should have used these funnels in his expressionistic rendering of The Trial.  The Vatican Museum is a spiritual space where the creator obviously didn't cotton to any human plantings. Proliferation is the primary idea. Sure there are lots of heads in the antiquities section of the MET, but it’s apparent the The Holy See or Sea is set in eliminating competition. The Vatican is a gigantic box store, a Walmart of sacred artifacts. There should actually be warning signs about how long the corridors are. Is the Vatican Museum competing with El Camino de Santiago? At times after seeing the umpteenth arrow pointing “Sistine,” you may feelin a state of free fall say like one of those unfortunate Everest ascenders who will never hear the angels singing. Getting in to the structure itself is another ordeal. There are barricades everywhere. If you’re lucky, you’ll tag onto a Christian version of the Hajj and find yourself reaching for your credit card in front of the Holey Door. 

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

and listen to "In the Midnight Hour" by Wilson Pickett

Speaking in Tongues

Katz's Tongue Sandwich

Stanislavski, who was Chekhov's great interpreter, was the champion of using one’s own psychology to bring the role to life. In America Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio followed suit. When you see Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, it’s the Moscow Art Theater at work--despite Brando's claims to the contrary. Meyerhold on the other extreme was a director who believed in working from the outside in. You brought the mask to life. Which raises the question of learning a language. A lot of newcomers fumble around. They're afraid to jump into their role, which is to act the part of a creature, gesturing frantically like an Italian or feigning a mixture of insouciance and indifference in the manner of the French. Curiously, though they’re enemies Ukrainians and Russians can sound alike. Not only because Russian and Ukrainian are Cyrillic languages but also by virtue of the fact both languages possess an intrinsic braggadocio. For instance one irate Ukrainian recently completed his critique of Russia, which he described as the new guy in the block, historically, by saying Russians couldn’t write. That included Tolstoy and Dostoevsky too-- which brings back Tolstoy's famously remarking to Chekhov that he was almost as bad as Shakespeare. No mind. If you want to speak Swedish imitate Max von Sydow inThe Seventh Seal. If you're a woman your role models would be either Bibi Andersson or Liv Ullmann in Persona.

listen to Allen Ginsberg reading "Howl" (1995)

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

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

Volti

Contemplate a remake of Rossellini’s Roma citta aperta (1945) just as fireworks mark the beginning of 2025. Naturally there are no caravans of Gestapo. Can you spot your Anna Magnani in the still winding narrow streets, the arteries filtering into the Piazza Navona and the Campo dei Fiori where the roar of Fellini's motorcycles from Roma (1972) has never left the air. The worlds out of which La dolce vita (1960) La Strada (1954) and the haunting Alberto Sordi vehicle Una vita difficile  (1961) are long gone, but their powerful iconography creates a scrim over the present. Have you ever encountered someone you knew when you were growing up? At first you don’t recognize them but then the original face emerges from the flesh and for the moment you have them back.

listen to Allen Ginsberg reading "Howl" (1995)

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

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

Non Compos Mentis

"Non compos mentis" is Latin but "non capire," "not to understand" is Italian. Of course "sapire"  to know is derived from the Latin,"scire." Italian is the Romance language closest to the mother tongue due naturally to proximity. Roman ruins site the past, but it's hard to imagine the past when one ventures into the everyday life of a modern metropolis. Similarly it's near impossible to imagine a conversation being held employing the grammar of a dead language you studied in high school--evolving into the mixture of gestures and words that constitute the lingua franca of Trastevarians (those inhabiting the world of what would one day be Trastevere). Ironically where you find the classical world represented most dramatically is in the facade of the Palazzo della Civilta in the E.U.R. a piece of Mussolini era architecture where the proliferating arches evinces the passion for the order and form of the empire.

read "Rome Journal: the EUR by Francis Levy, HuffPost

listen to Allen Ginsberg reading "Howl" (1995)

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

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

Was Alexander the Great Oxymoronic?

The Persian Gate in Present Day Iran

You know hyphenations like Greco-Roman? They drive from Alexander the Great whose form of empire building involved blurring the lines. Sound familiar? The difference is Alexander studied with Aristotle. Was Alexander a philosopher-king or the prototypic benevolent (or not benevolent) despot? Did he invent the oxymoron as he conquered the Peloponnesus, Egypt, finally the Punjab. Would Alexander's hyphenation lead to Hegel and ultimately dialectical materialism? Empire makes strange bed fellows when you consider that the impulse to free the worker through Communism and the impulse to liberate the robber baron with free market capitalism would result in their own respective forms of tyranny? "Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains," said Rousseau inThe Social Contract.

listen to Allen Ginsberg reading "Howl" (1995)

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

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

You Me

Martin Buber

There are a spate of Asian restaurants in Rome including a very good Korean, Igio in Piazza di Cosimoto, and an excellent Ramen, QQ Ramen on on the Viale di Trastevere. There are also a number of all you can eat Chinese/Japanese on the way to Testaccio but You Me is nowhere to be found on any of the restaurant sites. The Israeli philosopher Martin Buber famously authored I Thou  to which I It relationships, with their intrinsic objectification, are invidiously compared. Which brings up the subject of pronouns in general. Gender fluidity is as much a part of Roman life as it is in any other cosmopolitan city, though "they" don't always know what U want when it comes to me.

listen to Allen Ginsberg reading "Howl" (1995)

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

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

Portrait of the Artist as a Selfless Intellect

D.T. Suzuki

Practitioners of Zen seek a diminution of ego. Buddha mind is expressive of an empathic relation to the universe, with the dissolution of self being the ultimate destination of the spiritual journey and ultimate compassion its end. Desire is the beginning of suffering say the high priests of this religion—with the extinction of human agency the mountain to climb. In the meanwhile there are a lot of skins of the onion to peel away. People who live on the sites of ancient civilizations are literally buried by history. "History is nightmare" says Stephen Daedalus. Maybe not for tourists to Rome. However it’s like starting to ascend the Everest of Impersonality with stones in your rucksack.

listen to Allen Ginsberg reading "Howl" (1975)

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

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

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

Fighting Your Way Out of Paper Bag in Rome

Bacon, Freud and the School of London (Rome, 2019)

Rome is an excellent town in which to fight your way out of a paper bag. No matter that Rome, NY was not a town Sal Paradise passed through with his friends Carlo Marx and Dean Moriarity in On the Road. The Colosseum is a condemned Aqueduct Track (lest one not forget the true Parco degli acquedotti over which the Christ figure hung from a helicopter in La Dolce Vita). Remember the Etruscans came before the Romans and after Caesar and Augustus came Constantine and the Visigoths. Anyone returning to Rome is carrying a lot of baggage both physically and metaphysically. Back in 2019, there was an exhibit of work by Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon and a number of other British toughs at the Chiostro de Bramante near the Pantheon. It was a perfect stop for that pugnacious road show.

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

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

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

Quo Vadis?

Society prize success. Gladiators like Kirk Douglas were stars who played winners. Dirty Harry, the master of the 44 magnum, got the bad guy. But what about all the weaklings, the deformed, the forgotten. What was the fate of the slow learner in Ancient Rome? Someone had to take last place in the games. You perhaps imagine Ancient Rome like today, a large groaning board, a feast filled with delights to satisfy the appetites of all the winners including nubile women and young boys. Of course Epicureans like Lucretius put a different spin on things, but De rerum natura was unlikely required reading in the Senate. Augustus was an unlikely adherent to the golden mean. But what about the last who are never first in the paradigm of human excellence. Christianity came with the advent of Constantine and along with him the 23d Psalm. "You prepare a table before me in the presence of mine enemies." What is your vade mecum?

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

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

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

Epiphanic

 

Materasso Alto 17

Epiphany is defined as a moment of sudden realization or revelation. In Italy, the gentile form of such illumination, La  Befana, is celebrated by literally closing everything down. The streets of Rome are empty.  La Befana would not be a good day to purchase a new mattress at the Roman franchise of Mattress Firm say Materassi Simmons (still you may find a sale here and there in the spirit of Lucretius De rerum natura whose Epicureanism preceded Christianity). If nothing else Rome’s archeology, as Freud pointed out, is a metaphor for the varying and sometimes conflicting aspects of the human mind (conscious versus substrata). Still in all, life does slow down in a way that’s rarely apparent on a pagan landscape like New York where the enchantments of paradise are nowhere to be found. La Befana actually originated during 13th century and ever since children have left their stockings out the night before so that the witch of ancient lore, who had encountered the Magi, could fill them with gifts originally meant for Jesus.

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

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

Crowd Saucing

photograph by Hallie Cohen

Crowd sourcing is what people do when they use Go Fund Me.  Perhaps they need money for a film or theater project. Maybe they're just broke and need some dough. Crowd sourcing is what occurred on Rome's Gianicolo Hill, New Year's Eve. There fireworks were coming so fast and furiously you felt you were in a war zone minus the death. It was a mixture of Pamplona and Guernica with crowds surging both towards and away from the blasts. Anthony Bourdain left his imprint on Rome as does Stanley Tucci and both undoubtedly witnessed the kind of crowd saucing that occurred on New Year's, in Rome's restaurants. Wonderful sauce and spices flood the dishes in any Roman restaurant. Even if you don't drink, you're likely to get sauced--no matter what kind of restaurant you choose to attend. 

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

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

Repulsion

How is it possible to climb out of one’s head  The modernized version of Descartes is “I think too much.” Is your world wall papered with the black hole of interiority? Has a stranger ever walked in on you while you were naked? It’s an embarrassment of riches for those who want to be spared their own astronomy. The files fill in from the dormant program called “reality.” Remember the scene in Polanski's Repulsion where the psychotic Catherine Deneuve envisions a crack in the wall which the film viewer never sees? Her break is a case of the blind leading the blind. Behind the monotony of every day life lurk the monsters that haunted The Overlook Hotel. 

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

and listen to "Bernadette" by The Four Tops

Did Innocent X Fail to Live Up to Their Name?

Spoiler Alert! At the end of Conclave, Cardinal Benitez, the dark horse who becomes the leading contender for the Papacy, reveals he has a uterus. It’s a brilliant touch in an otherwise prosaic, movie. Look at Velasquez’s "Portrait of Innocent X" next time you go to the Pamphilj. There's a reason why Innocent became the model for Francis Bacon’s "Screaming Popes". No Innocent was probably no more of a buggerer than any other pope. It’s that Innocent X was a girl. Role reversal was actually even more common in that era than it is now. In Elizabethan theater all the female parts were played by boys or eunuchs. Now of course many major male Shakespeare parts ate played by female actresses like Glenda Jackson. While a female Pope might be a stretch even in the current era of gender fluidity, there are rumors that Innocent May have gotten under the wire. But if he were a woman, there would have to be a major rewriting of that pope's cv.

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

and listen to "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)" by Sylvester