Jamie Raskin

What gives Jamie Raskin the strength? It’s hard to conceive him a role model since so few people have to dig down that deep in the face of illness and unspeakable tragedy. The latest Supreme Court decision about extending executive privilege over the judiciary makes any response simply more exhausting amidst the numbing horror. Such a state is not a good place from which to act. It’s as if one were sedated or administered Novocain in a dentist’s chair. Perhaps the best preparation for a Job-like circumstance is the gratuitous act. Curiously it’s something that’s in the province of classic Existentialism in which meaning is created in a succession of moments that have little to do with what verdict or executive order SCOTUS or POTUS delivers on any particular day.

read "Rhododendron" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

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

Raw

Dog and God are palindromes. War and raw are showstoppers which make a noxious cocktail. Strange bedfellows is an oxymoron. Casus belli is an occasion for war. Ordinance is a bomb. Fission reactions use U-235. There were, it turns out, insects left in Hiroshima after the dropping of the first atomic bomb by the crew of the Enola Gay, whose captain, Paul Tibbets was, contrary to myth, not institutionalized. Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car is about a director who is putting on a production of The Seagull in Hiroshima. His wife, who is a sex addict, dies of a brain aneurysm he has a chance to intervene.

read "Rhododendron" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Zohran Mamdani

Charles Fourier  (1772-1837)

Speculating on politics is a little like the stock market though you don’t always get payback in terms of money, if you pick a winner. In fact, if you like free bus fare and no rent increases, somebody is going to pay the piper. Socialism is a dirty word to Republicans, but is individualism really curtailed when ifJeff Bezos ore the world’s richest man, EM, are left with say 20 billion each. Why do people need so much money? Zohran Mamdani’s victory is a test. The  Bernie Sanders AOC tour was impassioned, but what about the radical centrism of the much maligned and highly humane Joe Biden? Meanwhile the failure of Cuomo's cynical negative campaign tactics is another nail in the coffin of the Democratic political machine.

read "Rhododendron" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Castlevania

Castlevania

GRAND THEFT AUTO is one of the biggest computer games and there is GRAND AUTO THEFT which is no game. And of course you remember SUPER MARIO. But there are two new ones that exist in totally virtual universes. In that field SECOND LIFE offers its own currency and way of life, but a Mark Zuckerberg clone or drone, a mysteriously elusive guy, like the founder of Bitcoin, has created POTUS and SCOTUS. In fact, don't be surprised if you find not only kids but all your friends and neighbors walking around with the new versions which will soon be available at your local Facebook or Tesla dealership. where AR (Augmented Reality) and VR (Virtual Reality) are the lingua franca.

read "The Waste Land" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and also read "Punk" by Francis Levy, Vol.1 Brooklyn

Cosa Nostra

 

Trump by way of the middle east is defeating Putin. He has become the local tough, the local strong man of international politics--for good or for bad. He and Netanyahu are one of those gangs that you might have sentenced to Cetco, for their unlawful behavior. Fight fire with fire. It's a world of criminal syndicates, say Godfather on the world stage with Donald Trump as Don Corleone. Putin may do all the threatening he wants. He'd be dumb to give Iran nukes. In the meanwhile, hopefully Ukraine will come out on top. Why not? Trump at this point doesn't need Putin anymore. He's the strong man. Giving the Russians Ukraine would only build up their war chest with those rare minerals everyone wants. BTW there will be some minor changes to geography to reflect the new Cosa Nostra (literally "our thing"). BTW Mare Nostrum ("our sea") was what the Romans called the Mediterranean. Most of the map will simply be Trumplandia (natives will run the two words together so they sound like "Trumplunds"). There will be the Sea of Putin. That relatively small province that used to be North Korea will be Kim Jong-oink. A baby's first words will be "MAGA" rather rather than "mamma." Nothing much will have changed besides that. 

read "The Waste Land" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and also read "Punk" by Francis Levy, Vol.1 Brooklyn

Prince Myshkin

drawing of his character by Dostoevsky

Prince Myshkin, the anti-hero of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot is a simpleton. His innocence is a force of nature. He possesses a perverse trust, his love is a paraphilia considering the norms of not just the society in which he lives but "society in general, and even the species, in its broadest sense--Homo habilis? He's a figure out of the world of early Christianity in which man’s relationship with God was not yet mediated by the Church. Is he a Christ figure? Perhaps not since his presence is even more illuminated by his humanity.

read "The Waste Land" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and also read "Punk" by Francis Levy, Vol.1 Brooklyn

The Trojan War

The Trojan Horse is the ur example of confounding the enemy, the wiles of Odysseus the epitome of the cleverness that has characterized great generals. But remember Pyrrhus? Win the battle and lose the war or there's Clausewitz famous dictum, war is simply a continuation of diplomacy by other means. The fine line between war and diplomacy is echoed in the choice between B-2 bunker busters and a delegation proceeding to Geneva. Then there's "the domino theory" and  "spheres of influence" another Cold War adage --that’s curiously relevant today considering the new Axis of North Korea, Russia and China Finally, there was Mata Hari and the Trojans  undoubtedly enlisted by The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.

read "The Waste Land" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and also read "Punk" by Francis Levy, Vol.1 Brooklyn

Has Humankind Sunk Into a Fetal Position?

Is this still the childhood of civilization? After all human kind is only 5000 years old (give or take), allowing 2000 for AD or AC and 3000 for BC which takes us back to Ancient Greece and the Peloponnesian Wars. The mythologies of the great heroes, Odysseus and Achilles and conflicts like The Trojan War, mediated by Gods such as Zeus occupy a space of imagination outside history—that also informs historical memory and the history of culture. “Judith Beheading Holofernes” was a subject undertaken by both Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi. But what about adolescence and early adulthood? There is Jaques “Seven Stages of Man” speech in As You Like It. Will human life itself end up “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans everything?” The scale of conflagration only increases. It feels as if history has gone from being Stephan Daedalus’ nightmare to a flesh eating bacteria. The wonderful thing about B movies such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and Night of the Living Dead (1968) is that they offer a vision of value free horror and misery that is oddly in tune with this moment in time. Perhaps civilization has sunk back into a fetal position.

Listen to "Shake Your Groove Thing" by Peaches and Herb

Statecraft

Putin can’t be too happy about the Middle East. He’s lost two proxies Syria and Iran (and in turn Hamas and Hezbollah). Many years ago an Atlantic contributor analyzed how Putin compensates for a chronic physical deformity. In short, it’s similar to a snake which curls up protectively before making a deadly strike. No doubt a single physical deformity can lay claim to history! Putin also has his hands full with Ukraine. It’s doubtful he has enough arms to offer the embattled Iranians. Of course he could offer the Ayatolah asylum as he did Assad (imagine those two fellow travelers as roommates), though the Ayatollah carries a good deal more baggage than his Syrian counterpart. It’s doubtful Putin wants to set up a Muslim version of the Vatican in his otherwise secular state. Nor does he want to open his arms to every dictator who attains refugee status. Come to think of it maybe North Korea will become the nominee. Imagine Kim Jong-un will regale his deposed visitors with tales of Dennis Rodman and the NBA.

read "The Waste Land" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and also read "Punk" by Francis Levy, Vol.1 Brooklyn

Was Camelot Stormy?

You may remember Robert McNamara tearfully repenting of his role in the Vietnam War. He was a formidable presence with his scholarly glasses and slick backed hair. Camelot was not always what it was billed to be. In fact The White House pool area often had the look of one of those seedy spas with Caesar in the title— so popular during the 70s era when NY was a wide open city. In her memoir, one of Kennedy’s assistants recounts how the president issued executive orders for her to pleasure a friend while he'd watched. Sounds reminiscent of P. Diddy no? Don’t believe for a minute that Jackie was oblivious to what was going on. Of course Access Hollywood is hard to top. Would that Stormy Daniels had simply created her reputation as a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

read "The Waste Land" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and also read "Punk" by Francis Levy, Vol.1 Brooklyn

Materialists

Nathaniel Kahn's The Price of Everything was about the commodification of the art market. Materialists, closer to the bone, centers on a matchmaker, Lucy (Dakota Johnson), who  trades in human worth. At one point a client bridles at being "a good catch" protesting that she "is not a fish." If art is a tangible asset, love should ideally be unquantifiable, an "intangible asset." Note the movie is Materialists, not The Materialists. Is speciation the  subject? But what happens when the seller of flesh finds herself on the auction block? Prostitution is of the film's subliminal themes. Lucy has two suitors John (Chris Evans), an impoverished actor and sometime waiter and Harry (Pedro Pascal). One plays nothing to the other's everything. The conceit which is fleshed out at Lucy's agency, Adore, ad nauseam, can be tiresome. However, the director, Celine Song, cleverly introduces devices. Love and worth are, it turns out, not fungible currencies. In this sense she is heir to the romantic comedic tradition of Preston Sturges in which a sociological idea, whether political corruption, The Great McGinty, (1940) the plight of the disenfranchised, Sullivan's Travels 1941) or the  love of money, Palm Beach Story (1942) is the igniter. Song, like Sturges has a gift for pithy exchanges which epitomize her satiric point. That including her gift for unexpected turns of plot, which appear just in time to rescue the script from moments of tedium, is not surprising, since Song is also a playwright. 

read "The Waste Land" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and also read "Punk" by Francis Levy, Vol.1 Brooklyn

They Fight With Cameras

When you visit Omaha beach, you're astounded by the Sisyphean nature of the task the invading allied armies faced. Soldiers stared death in the face. One can't imagine mustering up the level of courage required to scale those cliffs under enemy fire. Nina Rosenblum and Danny Allentuck's They Fight With Cameras tells the story of Walter Rosenblum, the famed photographer who filmed D-Day, Dachau and numerous signposts of invasion, as a member of the Signal Corps. It's a rather amazing document that will break the composure of even the most hardened souls. The film also tells the story of its own inception through lost letters, miraculously retrieved, that Rosenblum had written to his first wife. But it's particularly significant today, since it trades in empathy and sentiment, two notions that are in short supply in the current universe of self-regard. Soldiers risked their lives and cared about their compatriots from other countries. Sounds obvious, no? Not in the transactional hell, the world of Trump, Putin and their minions where no human being does anything for anyone, unless there is something in it for them. "Lasciate ogne speranza voi ch'intrate" abandon all hope, ye who enter here" are the words that graced the gate of Dante's Inferno and that should be the warning to visiting dignitaries like Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Cyril Ramaphosa who dare to enter the current White House.

read "The Waste Land" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and also read "Punk" by Francis Levy, Vol.1 Brooklyn

Slumming

favela of Rochinha in Rio

No one is accusing anyone of being a snob but you may, on the other hand, be guilty of slumming. It's what well-to-do educated people prosecute when they hang around the tough part of town. As a kid you may have been afraid of getting beaten up. So one day you joined a dojo or boxing gym. What's the result? You remain a sissy who's basically still afraid of their own shadow. Here is a comment from a prosperous friend: "In the past 10 years I have been in two scary situations. In the first, crossing 21st and 3rd, I gave the bird to some guy who was honking me. He pulled over and threatened me with his MMS abilities. I smelled alcohol on his breath. Situation #2--I stupidly made eye contact with a loony on an R. He started provoking me, calling me “grandpa” etc. I have replayed this back and forth in my head. What if I had  sat right smack down next to him and upped the ante? Of course I walked away with my tail between my legs in both instances. I have no street smarts. I mean niente, nada! I am still that kid, tormented by the neighborhood toughs who threaten you with rocks in socks on Halloween.”

read "The Waste Land" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and also read "Punk" by Francis Levy, Vol.1 Brooklyn

Is the Earth Square?

Galileo and Copernicus were charged with sacrilege for demonstrating the earth was not the center of the solar system. There are those in the QAnon metaverse who have changed things back. Not only will the earth be the center, but also square. So along with those vaccines which cause autism you have to make sure not to fall off. The human brain often mistakes interiority for the empirical universe. The unconscious is a rife with conspiracy theories.

Listen to "Shake Your Groove Thing" by Peaches and Herb

Esther

closeup of "Esther Preparing to Intercede with Ahasuerus" (F. Levy)

There are the greats of the past, Rembrandt, Vermeer,  Velasquez and those of the modern world de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko, Johns and Rauschenberg--who all emerged in America during the 50s. The current "The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt," on exhibit in tandem with the Purim holiday at the Jewish Museum, illustrates how geopolitics and culture create not a classic paradigm shift but a paradigm. The show’s titular painting is luminescent in a sui generis way. It is neither one of the masks or "tronies" by which the master demonstrated his gift for role-playing, nor the usual tincture of darkness out of which say an early self-portrait, also in the show, emerges. It’s as if the mercantile forces which allowed for freedom were epitomized in this singular portrait of an iconic biblical icon. On a more overarching level, any Rembrandt show is a challenge to the present. Clement Greenberg the ideologue of the abstract-expressionist revolution would temble in his grave, but to rephrase Saul Bellow’s famously reactionary quote “Who is the Rembrandt of the 9th Street Bohemians?”

read "The Wasteland" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and also read "Punk" by Francis Levy, Vol.1 Brooklyn

Fighting Your Way Out of a Paper Bag: Lesson #1

The Rumble in the Jungle

There are two basic ways of fighting yourself out of a paper bag, but the most important thing is to protect yourself at all times. You have to keep your hands up. Have you ever seen someone fighting themselves out of a paper bag? It’s actually a familiar sight in this age of ear buds where people always look like psychotics having animated conversations with themselves. But you have to be there! Man v bag. If the bag is big enough to fit over your head, you won’t be able to see.The one fighting their way out of the bag in question at a distinct disadvantage. Since they are momentarily blind, they can’t see the woods from the trees. Lots of energy is spent by blind men who punch at air.

Listen to "Shake Your Groove Thing" by Peaches and Herb

Mind

"Thinking" may turn out to be the closest thing to the driverless car Imagine mind taking the place of SMS, emails and text. Caveat Emptor, you may have to practice blanking yours if you don't want the wrong kind of command to get away. What if a program called "Mind" became competitive with A.I. As has been demonstrated driverless cars have plowed through pedestrians as they negotiate intersections. Now there are driverless semis and a drone is a driverless plane. With the advent of Mind, many cars planes and even trucks may start thinking for themselves. You may input Philly into your Google maps and find yourself on the way to Scranton or more likely Florida if you possess the kind of AI that's a snowbird. Don’t try stopping for s coffee at the next rest stop if you have a Cassandrish AI which throws out jeremiads. “Drinking coffee makes you pee!” "But not drinking makes me fall asleep and crash” might be your riposte. Have you ever encountered a driver getting into a fight with their AI and not watching where they were going? “The horror the horror” says Kurtz in Fart of Harkness (“just checking to see if you’re awake”—Ed.)

Listen to "Shake Your Groove Thing" by Peaches and Herb

Quotidien Recurrence

So you travel down the same road or if you’re a a Manhattanite the same street leading to the upturn express bus at 23rd or the stairs down to the Hades of the Lexington Avenue Uptown 6 on Park Avenue. You don’t think it’s going to go on forever, though it will. If you have a nice apartment, you’re not leaving. In the current downswing of the residential market, you're going to incur a comparative loss (from 6 months ago). When you try to find something else you’ll find the price way too high for anything as nice as you had.The same thing for changing courses in mid stream, when it comes to love.The price you pay for the new emotional residence you think you desire is too high. One could go on, but you may find yourself ending up like Oedipus, who by running away from fate, brought about the very things he feared.

read "The Wasteland" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and also read "Punk" by Francis Levy, Vol.1 Brooklyn

Friendship

You may have walked out of Andrew DeYoing’s Friendship not because of the theme of an anomie which is as old if not older than Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kroger. Tim Robinson plays Craig Waterman a malaprop market executive to Paul Rudd’s Austin Carmichael a tv weather anchor and sometime punk rock guitarist. Craig falls for Austin big time. It’s more subliminally homoerotic, though isn’t idealization tantamount to infatuation? Outsiderdom which is ostensibly what the movie is about is generally part of a  fabric made up of more than one pattern. Friendship suffers from perseveration (yes real friendship does too--ed). At one point  Craig sinks so low in his abjection that he eats soap. It’s as if the director were afraid you didn’t get the idea. In fact DeYoung is a little like his character who is always overplaying his hand. Woody Allen made the schlepp and anti-hero into cultural archetypes which unfortunately didn't rescue him from opprobrium. But the joke is really on the director here since in some circles Craig will still rise above the dullards who will be mockingly dismissed. One other criticism, Craig is a father and executive. He wouldn't have gotten any where, if he didn’t possess some degree of know how, the movie's script doesn’t accord him.

read "The Wasteland" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and also read "Punk" by Francis Levy, Vol.1 Brooklyn

Mustard or Sauerkraut?

"Yellow Submarine" sang The Beatles. Then there are Subway, the Philly sub and the submersible that can go 20,000 leagues under the sea to the Lost Continent of Atlantis. Maybe that’s where Malaysia 370 finally landed. Floyd Collins became lost in the subterranean  tunnels of the Mammoth Cave. Jersey Mike’s is the latest, particularly if you are looking for a hero, a wily Odysseus who will help you to navigate your appetites so you won’t be lured by the Sirens of gluttony. You won’t be triggered by that famous Popeye sandwich that an antsy patriot once killed for? You shouldn’t die (non-sequitur-ed). Subs are food for thought particularly if you are on the couch and dealing with unconscious fantasies that lurk beneath the surface, the subtext that defies the kind of simplistic either/or categories like “mustard or sauerkraut?” proposed by the hot dog vendor in front of The Met (Goldfinch territory-edit.) protected from sun (Daedalus--ed?) by his blue and yellow Sabrett umbrella.

read "The Wasteland" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and also read "Punk" by Francis Levy, Vol.1 Brooklyn

Submittable

Submittable is like Dickens’ Bleak House. No it’s not a porn site. Would that it were capable of dispensing that level of pleasurable displeasure. No, rather it's tantamount to the hip dysplasia hounds suffer making it impossible for the poor animals to walk, then they are put down. This is a long-winded way of describing a site that is a concentration camp for poems and short stories. Magazines such as The New Yorker and literary journals like The Paris Review are deluged with tsunamis of submissions from wannabes. These wannabes have no real understanding of the editors who they scream to from the wrong side of the velvet rope. There is an organization called The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP). That and a number of similar organizations must have had a summit in which Submittable was created  to deal with the flood of manuscripts they receive. Know those storage facilities filled with items no one will ever see again. Submittable is the DOGE of the world of letters. Perhaps you remember BicycleThieves (1948), the Italian neorealist film about a father and son's desperate search for a stolen bicycle in post-war Rome. That’s a perfect description of what it’s like to submit to Submissible.

read "The Wasteland" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and also read "Punk" by Francis Levy, Vol.1 Brooklyn