White Bread

"White on White" by Kazimir Malevich (1918)

There are no dearth of conflicted souls. Hamlet is tortured by inaction, Lear by vanity and pride, Othello by jealousy, Oedipus by the awful truth, Antigone by righteousness and shooting ahead another two or three thousand years,  Beckett’s Nell and Nagg by the condition of the garbage cans in which they reside. BTW the two garbage cans bring back Plautus and Roman comedy where identity is the source of the farce. Has there ever been a play or work of art where nothing is wrong and the days pass with characters uttering only the dreadful “I can’t complain.” What about a Strange Interlude about two boring people who come home pop something in the microwave and watch the news. These folks don’t live lives of quiet desperation. Caveat emptor! You can write about boredom but you can’t be boring. Maybe the art of the happy but static existence culminating in a peaceful death is the mandate of the painter.

Answer of the day: "Knock fucking knock, if you don't answer I'm going to knock down the door."

Black Bag

Don’t try to figure out Black Bag. There is an answer, but you are likely to find yourself doing a lot of reticulated thinking in your attempt to parse out "the truth." Look at the palette Soderberg is using: drugs, a polygraph test (which one character manipulates  with her anal sphincter), fishing and the principle of loosening the line a bit before the catch, a dinner game and a chilling first scene in which one of the players delivers a stigmata by angrily sticking a knife into the other's hand. It's a crucifixion in what is described as "an amoral universe." Are you trying to get me or am I trying to get you?--is one locution. It’s truth or dare, fake news in the portrait of George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) and his wife Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchette) as a pair of married British spies. When the wife says she will kill for her husband you somehow believe her, but what about him? At first it's not clear. The actual hard espionage is naturally tied to Russia but the program at the heart of the plot, Severus, aimed at causing meltdowns, is curiously anachronistic. Moreover the expensive digs the agents occupy, replete with the latest in culinary and dress apparel are anomalous. Aren't spies civil servants? DOGE would be letting them go. Black Bag is the perfect movie in the age of gaslighting--where the standard of truth is insistence. Is there a there, there, but where? 

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

Site specific question of the day: Where are you?

Frank E. Campbell

If you grew up in Manhattan, Frank E. Campbell was the ur- funeral parlor. If it you grew up on the Upper East Side, it was tantamount to another institution Schrafft’s. You might even call Frank E. Campbell’s the Schraffts of funeral parlors. It was where all the blue bloods went. Now, it’s more ecumenical. As a side note it’s interesting that funeral parlors take on the name of their owners. You don’t have a Frank E Campbell cemetery. Most of the old-line cadavers interred by Campbell went to a place called Valhalla in the town of the same name. The name is btw spot on. Why would one want to affix one’s name to a funeral parlor? Most little boys don’t dream of being morticians when they grow up. It’s odd in fact there isn’t a Trump Funeral Chapel. You have Trump Tower, the Trump golf course at Bedminster. He’s put his name on every thing else.

read "Never Brush Again" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Question of the day: What's in it for me?

A Checkers Speech

There were the Checkers and before that the oval shaped yellow cabs you see in 30s movies, in which the driver pulls down a flag-shaped lever. In the early 60s the starting fare was $0.35. Now it’s $7.75. There are “public intellectuals.” Susan Sontag was one. Fran Leibovitz was a “public humorist” during the days when she literally “took a cab” as she travelled around town in her Checker. With age she’s come to look like Hannah Arendt. The famous philosopher coined the term “banality of evil.”  Leibovitz who is the kind of celebrity who creates celebrity sightings so she can angrily recuse herself from attention. You know the type, but back to cabs. Remember Skull’s Angels, the fleet owned by the sometime art collector whose name has bitten dust along the way to oblivion. The Bauhaus “form follows function” might describe the New York Taxi of today. Some municipalities have been drawn to self-driving Teslas whose only problem is their occasional blindness to pedestrians. Beyond the fact that self-driving cars are known to kill people, they have also singlehandedly made a  once colorful profession obsolescent. Remember that gabby guy behind the wheel with the cigar in the side of his mouth? A.I. has done the same thing to writers who are the taxis of tomorrow--bilging out ideas without watching where they're going like a president posting rage- filled executive orders on the social media accountants by the the latest incarnation of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

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

Question of the day: When you walk into a room, full of strangers or even people you've known you're whole life, do you feel embarrassed?

Baise-Moi

Virginie Despentes is a French feminist. Actually that isn't quite the right word. Baise-Moi is her chez d'oeuvre. It's a novel about two women who are brutally raped. They steal cars and go on a brutal tear murdering everyone in sight, men, women and children, including mothers wheeling strollers. Despentes obviously studied Pierrot Le Fou. It's really a timeless book but also a metaphor for the Middle East, particularly with respect to sexual violence. You start off feeling empathic naturally in terms of the anger for the depredation, until the brutality of the revenge begins to set in. Any sense of the humanity of innocent and random victims is lost, but the anger ultimately self-implodes. You see this on a macro level say in the Bosnia Serbian war where both sides ultimately set their country on fire.

Question of the day: Is your life an embarrassment? 

The Circus

Trump's Second Term

One of the signature acts of any circus is the juggler. Having a lot of balls in the air gets even more complicated when you do it on a high wire, so is riding a bike on a high wire or even doing it riding a bike on a high wire with someone on your shoulders doing the juggling. Along with clowning, danger is the lingua Franca of any circus. The Wallendas tragically found that out.  Elon Musk clowns by dancing around grinning ghoulishly as he performs his chainsaw massacre. Trump juggles so many executive orders, it’s impossible to editorially respond or even realize what is going until like in The Apprentice “you’re fired!” There’s value free diplomacy for you. The president claims he will carry the ball (s) and break the record solving Gaza and Ukraine. It’s not surprising he is continually dropping them.

read "Never Brush Again" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Question of the day: Are you embarrassed?

Noel the Coward

Have you ever been convinced you don’t have one brave bone in your body? Climbing in the Himalayas is tough but you have company in the form of Sherpa guides, but what about joining a demonstration in the lobby of Trump Tower and being marched away in a paddy wagon. Say you’re claustrophobic and don’t like being locked up for the few hours before your  annoyed partner bails you out ( “I was terrified,” she screams, “don’t ever do that again!”). Ok you’re in caught in the cross walk as the light is changing and you casually give the bird to the driver of an incoming car. It’s easy to to say “fuck you” to someone to a person or object in motion. But lo here’s a chap who isn’t happy being told to fuck himself and is not afraid to pull up next to you, get out of his car and threaten you with his MMA resume. Might mention there’s liquor on his breath. You stand there like a goof ball with your hands in your pockets as he puts you before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Would you "have not decency" and "welch" on your old communist cellmate? Or would you go to JAIL and fail to collect you $200? You know yourself. Deep down you’re the stuff of Welsh rarebit. Run! That or try to excuse yourself from your local genocide by claiming you’re not the liberal intellectual you seem to be. Cry and lie—thems is your weapons, unless you’re the latest product of Walter Mitty’s or rather Lee Childs’ imagination, a super hero named Reacher!

Question of the day: Should you take it personally when someone rejects you?

Ukraine Light

 

“If you’re not on the table you’re in the menu” was the pronunciamento by a recent CNN guest described as a veteran negotiator. It’s the world of Kissinger, realpolitik which ultimately goes back to Machiavelli and before that Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. One has to smile about the strange bedfellows which derive from a cross-pollination of transactional and humanistic aims. Here’s one. Trump proposed that the United States take over Ukraine’s electrical grid and nuclear power plants. Ha! No need for a standing army to afford protection. The Russians Are Coming was the name of a 60s anti-war satire. While anything is possible, it’s highly unlikely Putin is going to take aim at a Connecticut Light and Power. "Value free politics" is the name of the game. Yet the transaction yields the right result—if you’re interested in preserving  autonomy and democracy both.

Question of the Day: Do people still eat each other?

Decline and Fall

Gibbons famously authored The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Then there were the tomes you may have grown up with, Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich , the six volumes of Churchill’s Second World War, Carlyle's The French Revolution, Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West, Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and finally Democracy in America, de Tocqueville’s peripatetic analysis of a political philosophy that ultimately may have outgrown itself. Are populism and democracy fundamentally incompatible? Are the complexities of the constitution its due process and inalienable rights difficult to by a populist base? As January 6 illustrated, it doesn’t take much for a collectivity to turn into lynch mob. Francis Fukuyama discredited his own The End of History and the Last Man, as it became apparent that tribalism would triumph over the notion of a unifying technocracy. The adoption of a precarious citation that some might even regard as tasteless by Karl Ove Knausgaard, in his Min Kamp, illustrates the question mark that hangs over any attempt to encapsulate the politics of the current world. Alfred Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz later adopted for television by Fassbinder used place to define Weimar Germany. What’s to be Done was the broadside by Lenin. Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations and Marx Das Kapital. What soubriquet will grace the book about this turbulent period of American history?

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

Rumble in the Jungle?

 

"Remember Float like a Butterfly." Then there was Mike Tyson, "everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face." The Dems have been KO'd. Approval rating low and heading downwards. What is needed is literally some one large. Remember also the Rumble in the Jungle where Mohammed Ali prevailed with his "rope a dope." Mohammed Ali had brawn, but he had brains too. He was really a talented poet. It's not only Musk and Trump, Doge and Russell Vought (who now runs The White House budget office). Have you watched "Reacher." Lee Child's creation is a larger than life figure who throw people through windshields but has a rap that comes fast and furious like that of Ali. Trump once cried "where's my Roy Cohn (which became the title of a film)?" Where is our Mohammed Ali? George Foreman trained by chaining himself to a jeep which he then proceeded to march up a hill, but down he went. It's a tall order, but who's the person capable of delivering MAGA that knockout punch? Or maybe here is the scenario. Trump continues the trade war, which he loses. Russia wins back Ukraine. The nation wakes up. The president is a Quisling. He's siding with the enemy--to the extent that the enemy is literally everything that is bad for the country. Isn't anyone who kills democracy a traitor to American values?

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

The Men in Their Glass Booths

You’ve undoubtedly read about the poor souls who have such compromised immune systems that they have to live their lives in isolation tents. That’s probably but as bad as a body cast. Then there was Eichmann. Robert Shaw wroteThe Man in the Glass Booth and he was Hannah Arendt’s subject (in Eichmann in Jerusalem), whence "the banality of evil."  All of these examples themselves traffic in extremis. Most people like to think they are keeping things close to the chest. Unbeknownst even to themselves they might as well be insects in a terrarium. The female praying mantis partakes of a sexual cannibalism in which they bite off their male counterpart's head. You have undoubtedly heard of women who are accused of being ball busters. The fact is it’s almost impossible to conceal anything. Counter espionage is a far cry, in the age of the digital footprint, from Vidkun Quisling the traitorous Norwegian minister of defense. The advent of AI has put everyone in a goldfish bowl. Disguises are a charade. It’s usually the perpetrator who has the wool pulled over their eyes.

and listen to "The Tracks of My Tears" by Linda Ronstadt

Mickey 17

Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 is full of eccentrically grotesque tropes that disguise a fundamentally derivative, somewhat simplistic plot. Mickey and Nasha, the romantic couple at the center of the disquisition, are reminiscent of Winston Smith and Julia in1984. The concept of dehumanization by replication recalls the marketing of organs in Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. In this case Mickey is an "expendable." You have replicants like Mickey on the one hand then a race of ghoulish "creepers" who are victims of the local Trump clone, Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo). The first lady, Ylafa Marshall (Toni Colette) makes sauces from the tails of baby "creepers." Parasite was a complex meditation on society and the structure of the human mind itself. The director’s ambition remains yet the result is constrained by the techno-tyranny that's the movie's palette. Parasite is a large armoire with many drawers and secret compartments while Mickey 17 is little more than a funhouse mirror. Every great director has to flex their muscles and prove their mettle by entering the commercial blockbuster sweepstakes. Not to diminish the huge ambition of Parasite, but this is Bong Jong-ho's Godfather (in fact Ruffalo does at times look at little like Brando as Vito Corleone in the way spittle emerges as he smacks his lips). The director parodies the AI generated universe he's created to make the movie; he's graduated from human parasites to a race of unearthly creatures. He's even got the lemmings.  

and listen to "The Tracks of My Tears" by Linda Ronstadt

The Magic Mountain

Thomas Mann creates a clever item in The Magic Mountain. It’s called a "silent sister"--a thermometer without a scale. The subject is pathology. How do you determine if someone is sick? One of Mann’s characters is deeply upset to learn she is to be sent home from "the berghof" (a sanitarium) because she has nothing wrong with her. Another of Mann’s profound concerns is time for which he evinces a more labile Bergsonian paradigm. Remember the clocks with no hands in Wild Strawberries? Where the mental life is concerned, there is the DSM, but therapists are, by definition, locked into their own counter-transference. When it comes to spirituality, Mann’s invisible gradation is a dramatic representation of life itself.

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

Misery

Can one take advantage of misery? Artists and writers have always used it. It’s an entitlement even Elon Musk can’t take away. It’s not only a font but a posture. No matter what happens, it can be written about painted or drawn. Normies don’t have this luxury. Yiyun Lin uses the suicide if her sixteen-year-old son as a subject while others are simply left to grieve. There's a famous shot of Sophia Loren crouched on the ground in the film adaptation of Moravia’s Two Women. Or take Antigone who defies Creon. Sophocles made a tragedy out of a once tragic reality. Sufferers don’t receive royalties for their pain, though they may be rewarded if they turn it into art. It was Anne Frank's father who profited. It’s fun to be an artist since everything is grist for the mill while the rest of the world just has to swallow it.

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

In the Belly of the Beast

If you get caught in a rip tide don’t fight it. Of course it’s one thing to be one of those warning placards affixed to the wall of a beach cabana and another to face the panic accompanying the reality. Humans are outcome-oriented. That’s why there are focus groups in which responses are tested. The pilots of the Delta jet that flipped over on its landing into Toronto were not just lucky. Many unfortunate souls panic and take others with them as in the case of the Donner party. It’s dark in one of those waves that momentarily swallow you up. Recently a South American kayaker got swallowed by a whale. He was not quite in the Belly of the Beast to cite the title of the book written by Jack Abbott, a pardoned killer who murdered a waiter soon after his release. One definition of time is ignorance. Some people succumb to the wreckage of their futures. There are two choices. Quit or let go. If you fight the current you’re likely to drown.

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

Play It As It Lays

The viewer of Frank Perry's Play It As It Lays, based on the Joan Didion novel, and starring Tuesday Weld (as Maria) and Anthony Perkins (B.Z.), is placed in an extraordinary position. It's that of the time traveler. No one in l972,  when the film was made, could see it from the privileged vantage point of the present. The landscape is Southern California, with priceless shots of winding freeways, themselves like telephone cables, neon everywhere and a piece of raw looking signage, an oversized letter T marking the spot where Maria gets an abortion. The film is at once pithily brilliant and monstrous. Tuesday Weld declares "existentially, I'm getting a hamburger" to her husband Carter (Adam Roark), in mockery of his pretentious use of language. The movie starts and ends with the institutionalized Maria framed by hedgerows a la Last Year At Marienbad. The relational triangle with Carter, Maria and B.Z., a producer, recalls Contempt. The movie is essentially an essay in sententiousness by the director of David and Lisa. The over the top histrionics work for Perry just as they must have for Didion who famously lifted "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," from Yeats' "Second Coming" as the title for her famous book of essays about California in the 60s. What can one say about the despair of wealthy Hollywood filmmakers? The movie evinces a mockery mixed with an ambivalent compassion. Play It As It Lays is currently playing at Film Forum.You can make a movie about nothingness, but nothing has to be something or no one will go to see it. Reviving Play It As It Lays is a wonderful curatorial sally, unearthing a masterpiece of vapidity from the era of Manson and the Sharon Tate murders that is at the same time enormously entertaining.  

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

Comfort

photo: F. Levy

Eternity is reassuring. It's nice to realize the world will continue to turn, even if it’s hit by a gigantic asteroid, and that space and time are irrefutable--that If there is no more dark matter or dark energy, still a vacuum remains. Before the Big Bang and the creation of the boson, there was by definition an undefined primordial ether. The question of the beginning of time is a subject of speculation by cosmologists though the notion of an immeasurable non-space non-time is inconceivable. You may come upon some roadside diner in the middle of nowhere to find a mother and son ordering vast quantities of food most of which ends up being squirreled away in styrofoam containers provided to this not particularly improbable couple by an indifferent waitress with tattooed arms.

Tesla

The Trump modus operandi derives from Tesla’s driverless car. The most expensive part of a car is the driver. Remove them, you lower the cost. The CDC, USAID, the CIA, the Pentagon and the State Department are all labor intensive. With the exception of totally unnecessary departments like education, the Veterans Administration and Agriculture, most government agencies are too dependent on people who are the most expendable part of any agency. You go into a Tesla dealership, buy a car, then let it go off in its own. You don’t even need Rubio in State, or Ratcliffe at the CIA. With the money saved from their firings the US could again share intelligence with Ukraine. But take the argument to its logical conclusion. Like the driverless car you can have a driverless nation. You fire Congress, the Supreme Court (who are obsolescent anyway) and finally Trump himself. This last removal of the most expensive staff member of the executive will demonstrate how effective and bipartisan DOGE really is. The only problem is the journalism industry. Without the current occupier of The White House, there will be no news and employees at 24 hour cable news networks will all lose their jobs.

read "The Real Husbands of DC" by Francis Levy, TheScreamingPope

and listen to "The Tracks of My Tears" by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles

The Real Husbands of DC

The calm at the center of the storm, the inner sanctum, the primal scene. January 6 turned Congress into Animal House, literally. Now the White House is The Real Husbands of DC. Watch Trump and Vance bait their chump in front the  cameras. Zelensky needed a Reacher (the Lee Child’s character on Prime). The Ukrainian leader should have brought Vitali Klitschko the mayor of Kiev and a former heavyweight champ. It would have been fun to watch him box the ears of the two clowns who occupy the executive branch. It’s DOGE CITY—Elon Musk in ten gallon baseball cap with one of his 13 kids on his shoulders. How will the Supreme Court rule on polygamy? The right to many lives? Long live Joseph Smith! Remember when The White House was Camelot filled with the best and the brightest, when "president" was still a dignified position to hold and foreign leaders and visiting dignitaries didn’t have to worry about shake downs for mineral rights. Remember Khashoggi the journalist who failed to emerge from the Turkish embassy in one piece? Now the ranks of The White House press corps are dwindling by executive order. Just utter "Gulf of Mexico" and you get the boot. Clausewitz famously said war is politics by other means. Statesmanship in MAGA world is the stuff of the WWF.

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

Reign in Hell

What would paradise be like? Is it in the ken of humanity? In American Dharma Steve Bannon cites Paradise Lost, “better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.” It’s a wonderful epitaph for MAGA. Trump world is one of those post-apocalyptic Mad Max landscapes, Ukraine, 3 years after, burned out cities abandoned armor, battalions of impassive North Koreans out of Manchurian Candidate. Add rogue Wagner brigade populated with furloughed prisoners and led by a former hot dog vendor named Prighozin--whose plane is not mysteriously exploded. MDMA, Molly aka ecstasy the perfect drug for this party. Remember The Seventh Seal, the knight wandering home from the Inquisition through a landscape of plague and death. How easy to envision heaven, when hell is all you  know?

Listen to "Night Train" by James Brown from James Brown Live at the Apollo (1962)

Donald of Macedon

Is Trump Alexander fhe Great? Instead of Asia Minor, Egypt and the Orient, Trump has his sights fixed on Panama, Canada, Greenland and Gaza which he’ll turn into one of his  signature golf resorts. Actually you don’t need Robert Trent Jones. Trump Gaza will be a golf course with built-in holes. Trump's friend Putin suffers from a Peter the Great obsession.  Apparently Trump's friend Ron "Louder" was the one who gave the idea to Trump who got an icy reception from the Danish Prime Minister. Remember “a chicken in every pot?” And don’t forget “The Gulf of America,” though that was just a naming opportunity. Don’t forget also that English has just been declared the lingua Franca. Coq au vin in your neighborhood French place is now “chicken in wine sauce.” DOGE will enforce that executive order so don't ask for ICE. Just one question before Donald the Great continues his march, what will be the fate of all the legal immigrants who make up the country?

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

and listen to "Bewildered" by James Brown

Right v. Wrong

Jeremy Bentham

What do you do when everyone tells you, you’re wrong? Depending on your personality, you may either think you are wrong, think you are right and adopt the romantic notion of yourself as an embattled champion of justice or something in between? Is there a message you should be listening to or should you be stalwart in defending the truth? Sounds a little like the situation of the glum standoff which characterizes politics today, but it is also applicable in everyday relationships where another characteristic, or some might say flaw, comes into play, pride. It’s hard to back down from a strongly held belief since it potentially points to the superior intelligence or know- how of an adversary. After all, they better gauged the temperament of the body politic. However, does market research or an ability to assess how others feel form the basis of a moral position? Or does right action require a Kantian categorical imperative, an irrefutable determination of right and wrong which has nothing to do with subjectivity? Isn’t that what inalienable rights are all about? Are not life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to be guaranteed to all, no matter what the backlash is against a few? America has irrefutably given democracy and all her institutions a thumbs down. Even certain members of the Supreme Court adhere to this view. Is an honorable ability to hold to the truth a viable stance and is there such a thing?

Listen to "I Don't Mind" by James Brown and the Famous Flames

The Bride and Her Bachelors

"The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even" (Duchamp)

Was the object of Zelensky's trip consciously or unconsciously to disrupt? You've heard about the bride or groom who creates a scene whose motive is ultimately to allay a marriage. And what about the entourage? What about the best man? Naked came the stranger, David, Goliath? What’s the paradigm and what's the potential paradigm shift. A relationship counselor might have stated that the US under Trump no longer is interested in taking on the responsibility of making the world safe for democracy (a mandate going back to Woodrow Wilson). Further, Ukraine no longer wants to be the country cousin accepting handouts from a demeaning relative who they're bidden to please. Will Starmer, Macron et al remain faithful to their bachelor, thereby creating a new if precarious world order, one where NATO, assumes another anagram and still prevails?