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?