The Iceman

Remember Mr. Creosote's projectile vomiting? The courtly if somewhat obese waiter who's falling apart at the seams is a “pregnant” example of reality and appearance. Most prominently the once and a future president said he knew nothing about Project 2025. Women should not worry. He would take care of them whether it was a matter of abortion or anything else. He’d take care of them alright. On a less visible level most people employ the kind of life lies that infect O’Neill’s characters in Iceman, waiting in the bar for Hickey. Very few let it all hang out. Even those who do, tend to be kidding themselves. Exhibitionism is not tantamount to honesty. It may in fact veil it. The average person puts on a show for the world even when their life is falling apart. Narcissus drowning in his own image is tangentially related. Turns out the pond into which he dove was a wormhole leading to alternate universes—presenting an infinite magazine file of selves in which to hide.

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

and here's ChatGPT on "_RT" 

Do You Know Who Your Friends Are?

 

Bot (photo: Mr President)

Do you find yourself showing poems to ChatGPT? You get a better response than trying to foist these heartfelt screeds on friends or partners who roll their eyes. Are you getting a better response from your Alexa than than Alexis, when you ask "Alexa, where was Napoleon born?" Or say you're on the highway and suddenly make the wrong turn. Would you rather be told "Godammit, you did it again" by your partner in life or "make the first U-turn you can" by  Siri, who exudes, an equanimity in the face of human error when she instructs you "to make the first U-turn you can."

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

and here's ChatGPT on "_RT" 

Contemplating Vermeer

from "Contemplating Vermeer," paintings by Joe Fig

                                                                                                                                        

If you attended the Vermeer retrospective at the Rijksmuseum back in 2023, you may have been in the crowd with the American artist Joe Fig. You may even have been a subject for one of the paintings in his show "Contemplating Vermeer" at The New Britain Museum of American Art. The idea of painting or photographing a viewer of art is not singular. Most famously the photographer, Thomas Struth, did it in large-scale photographs of museum goers, themselves exhibited at the Met. What is particularly exquisite and breathtaking is the fact that the renditions of the original Vermeers, in Fig's paintings are so small. That’s the feat, the mountain to climb. The inception of these works themselves capture both the light and enclosure of Vermeer’s art. But it’s more than a high wire act since the portraits are not only portraits of paintings but portraits of people. One sidebar. If you remember, the Rijksmuseum show attracted record crowds. Scalpers were able to command large sums for tickets and the galleries were packed. The paintings were in this sense the light within an otherwise claustrophobic interior. The scale of the Vermeer's in Fig's painting create a similar effect.

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

and here's ChatGPT on "_RT" 

The Death of Heart

Elizabeth Bowen famously wrote The Death of the Heart (1938).  But remember Tradition and the Individual Talent, the essay which  argued for the impersonality of the artist. Never mind that The Four Quartets were a thinly veiled work of autofiction relating to the failure of Eliot's marriage. Your recommendation to yourself not to write from the heart may derive from questions of prosody. Do you really want the lingua franca of your poem to be the pain of love, "Pasio" in Latin is "suffering." "Leidenschaft" is Tristan and Isolde's experience, but if you listen to Wagner's "Prelude" (repeated ad nauseam Lars von Trier's Melancholia), it connotes the romantic agony of Heidegger's Sein-zum-tode, Being-towards-death. Writing from the heart leads to sententiousness and hyperbole, but then where to find the words? Answer: write with "fingers," the royal road to the unconscious.

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

Beria

Lavrenti Beria

During the Stalin era, there were show trials. The guilty like Solzhenitsyn ended up in The Archipelago which the famous Russian author famously compared to Dante’s Inferno in The First Circle where those in danger of deportation ended up in Limbo. Dante was in fact gaslighting and getting back at his enemies, but that’s another matter. Beria was the feared head of the secret police. Of course today we have Kash Patel who reports directly to the top. As in the Stalinist era, there are no governances restricting the abuse of power. The FBI has knocked on John Bolton’s door under the theory that president’s national security advisor unlawfully released classified formation information in books he published. Members of the January 6 commission such as Adam Schiff, who has organized a legal defense fund will be next. Alligator Alcatraz is one of the places illegal immigrants are detained. Trump has talked about resurrecting the real Alcatraz. Joseph McCarthy used the black list. It seems as if Trump is going one step further. He has accused Obama of treason for which the punishment is ultimately death.

The Anti-Christ

The great Anti-Christ appears in Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” poem. Tomas de Torquemada was the terrifying real thing who burned infidels at the stake. Infidel meaning unfaithful. Sound familiar?  Senator Adam Schiff  of California is just one of the October 7 commission who have needed to establish legal  defense funds. Still with that hairdo Trump looks like he should be selling used cars on Northern  Boulevard. Steve Bannon quotes Milton’s Satan in American Dharma. “Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.” A perfect description of Project 2025!  Knausgaard’s 6 volume autobiography Min Kamp appropriates Herr Hitler as a provocation. Trump is not even in the minor leagues. He drools evil. He hellraises all right, but like an infant in a high chair (aka the Oval Office) who manipulates his parent by screaming when they don’t get what they want.

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

The Closing

Cockfight in Mexico (1913)

What kind of. closing do you have following a cock fight? You know those illegal matches where knives are attached to the left leg of the bird. Both bleeding out is one possibility.  Remember Fight Club? Value-free animosity is the lingua franca of Trump World. "You know, they had a hard relationship, very bad, very bad relationship. And now we'll see how. they do and, if necessary--and it probably would be, but, if necessary--I'll go and I'll probably be able to close." Maybe Trump should wear a striped ref shirt and declare a TKO before someone gets put to sleep. Remember Benny Paret? The missing element is history. Why don’t these guys like each other? Whitewashing is literally what Project 2025 is doing to the Smithsonian. So what’s left? Social Darwinism which is the ultimate “zero sum.” Back to The Art of the Deal. What’s the score? You don’t get points for good behavior when the field starts to narrow and the contenders take off the gloves.

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

Real Estate

Is it surprising Trump regards the Ukraine as a real estate deal? Land is the issue, but in the Trump Weltaunshaung, it’s all about the market. Remember the first Zelenskyy White House visit where the president harangued his visitor about not having the cards. Forget that DLJ is playing without a full deck. Every one is dealt a different hand.That’s life.Too bad for the smaller country. Too bad for its larger neighbor whose hand is being called, but getting back. Trump regards himself as the broker. In that capacity it’s been convenient to "gaslight." Instead of Russia invading Ukraine, why not start with Ukraine occupying the old USSR or going further back Peter the Great's Imperial Russia? Put Ukraine in the dog house. If you have ever bought a piece of property you know brokers create an air of faux intimacy. There’s a lot of backslapping and hand holding. You bring people together. "Wrap things up" was the term Trump used recently. Forget all the death and destruction. In this case the brokerage commission is the Nobel Peace Prize.

read "Luggage Tags" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "The El" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

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

Choking Up

Sally Rooney is one of the great documenters of extended adolescence and also of sexual mores. In this regard "choking" is the foreplay du jour. Practitioners of jujitsu choke each other out with opponents signaling when they’ve had enough. You can’t cry "uncle" obviously. You slap the mat.  Back in the long ago era of Roth, fellatio was the transgressive activity. These days, in certain circles blow jobs don’t even qualify as sex. You walk into someone’s house and they matter of factly blow you. It's a far cry from "hello!" Times change. The 80s for example was the era of golden showers. Then came rough sex and bukake. Strindberg wrote Dance of Death which may someday be the swan song for this era of "choking," though today it’s everywhere. That same host or hostess who once blew you has become a veteran MMA who no longer wants to be a door mat. Go to a gathering of thirty somethings and you’ll be the guest who's being detained or restrained. Remember the choke which was part of the apparatus of the old standard shift? Remember when "gay" meant "happy?" Choking as an element of lovemaking has nothing to do with being gay. Most sexual intercourse amongst young people since the time of the pandemic has involved choking. If Godard were alive, he’d undoubtedly have directed a sequel to Breathless which would deal with this phenomenon. If you remember Anna Karina plays the prostitute in Vivre Sa vie. Talking dirty was the paraphilia explored in that film as it was in the porn series Talk Dirty to Me. Humankind always in the move has come a long way since then.

read "Luggage Tags" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "The El" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

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

Highest 2 Lowest

Spike Lee's thriller noir, Highest 2 Lowest, is based on Kurosawa's High and Low (1963) and Ed McBain's King's Ransom (1959). Provenance is one of the subjects of the movie. The very last powerful confrontation between a rapper and kidnapper named Felon (ASAP Rocky) and David King aka King David (Denzel Washington) is between "old" (King's "discovery" at the movie's climax is accompanied by a Steinway) and "new" style. Jeffrey Wright who played the role of the black writer Thelonious "Monk" Ellison in American Fiction functions not only as a character but citation. If you recall Ellison adopts a faux prison rapper persona to succeed in the Cord Jefferson movie. However, the antinomy, the Gregorian chant between King and Felon, separated by a penitentiary's plexiglass divider is the movie's coup de grace. (Edit note: the range of Denzel Washington's performance is off the charts).

read "Luggage Tags" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "The El" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

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

Dip in the Pool (Alfred Hitchcock Presents, l958)

Disasters provide a function. Particularly if they’re part of a collectivity (of as little as two) they can bring people together. "We three make up a solitude. For none alive to-day. Can know the stories that we know. Or say the things we say. (WB Yeats). No one wishes comeuppances on anyone, but they’re unavoidable. You might think of them as side bars, side roads or detours that can take on a life if their own. Whole ways of life have been uprooted by the recent floods in Texas and the Southwest where rescue crews and even FEMA can create their own intimacies. There was recently a very touching picture of first responder rescuing a woman trapped in her car and literally carrying her across a flooded highway. It’s unlikely these two will ever forget each other. The only thing better than being saved is saving someone. 

read "Luggage Tags" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "The El" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

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

The Night Watch

The Night Watch by Rembrandt (1642)

Sleep hygiene is a phrase that’s sometimes used to refer to nocturnal habits. Of course there are those who work nights, for instance, soldiers on the lookout for the enemy. Your doctor may have arranged for you to go to a clinic where they hook you up and test for things like sleep apnea but there is another kind of sleeplessness--the physical manifestation of a metaphysical plight. "The Night Watch" is one of Rembrandt’s most famous paintings. The subject is a group of men, what sixties radicals would have called The Establishment. But when you think of it, the title is resonant of the very things that might keep people up. It’s hard to sleep when you feel your world is falling apart. Is that what Rembrandt was thinking about when he produced his great masterpiece? Probably not. He was plainly interested in applying paint and that task was so all encompassing, there was little time left to the think. No it’s unlikely Rembrandt tossed and turned. When you look at "The Night Watch," you'll likely conclude, the artist got a good night’s sleep.

read "Luggage Tags" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "The El" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

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

Beyond Good and Evil?

Is evil relative? Is there a little bit of larceny in everyone? Today it’s easy to see evil as absolute. Just pluck from the grab bag of headlines about evil people say Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas trying to beat out the incumbent,  John Cornyn for the Republican senate seat nomination. There's  Cetco, Jair Bolsinaro luckily under house arrest in Brazil, naturally Putin, Kim Jong-un (who purportedly blew his uncle up with a mortar). Netanyahu washes his hands of Gaza by killing all the Palestinians and taking it over. The latest bit of treachery was the murder of 4 Al-Jazeera journalists. Marjorie Taylor Greene the embodiment of evil gets points for condemning the genocide. Where is the relativity, where the gray areas? Is there an ounce of good in Trump? Or is that like mistaking apples for oranges? It’s literally a new Ice Age. Can it be said good came from the previous one—to the extent that human life for good or bad might not have come to be without it?

read "Luggage Tags" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "The El" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

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

The Great Dictator

Remember the scene in The Great Dictator when Chaplin bounces the globe around like a ball. Now Trump is meeting with Putin to finalize an agreement on Ukraine’s fate. Zelensky may be allowed to attend in observer status after all it is his country that's being discussed) but he won’t have any say. This coming after the announcement The White House Rose garden is being turned into a cement patio and 800 National Guardsmen will be called in to patrol the capitol even though crime is down. Is the country a kingdom or police state? Don’t be surprised to see The Icemen Cometh in repertoire at The Kennedy Center. The next step for Ghislaine Maxwell will be a move from the minimum security prison to house arrest at Mar-A-Lago. Netanyahu is washing his hands of Gaza by killing all the inhabitants. As Kurt Vonnegut remarks about the bombing of Dresden (and war in general) in Slaughterhouse- Five  “And so it goes”

read "Luggage Tags" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "The El" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

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

The Naked Gun

The decision to cast Pam Anderson as Beth Davenport the sister of a murder victim breaks down the fourth wall. Anderson’s supposedly stolen marriage video in which she’s shown avariciously fellating Tommy Lee, during their honeymoon (1998) augured in the era of reality television. "The Celebrity Wives of Deep Throat" should have been the title of the pirated video which rivals Chloe Sevigny’s memorable performance in Brown Bunny. But Akiva Schaffer’s The Naked Gun which stars Liam Neeson in the role popularized  by Leslie Nielsen is "surreality reality TV" in film form.  Un Chien Andalou (1929) challenged the conventions of cinema when a razor cut an eyeball. Here the films Top Gun literally punches open the screen after he’s also bent apart the film’s credit sequence. The verbal pyroteomics derive from another master of surrealism Groucho Marx. When Pam Anderson is asked “did you see LA?” she blithely says she’s an alumnus (of UCLA). It’s all up hill, down hill and sideways from there.

read "Luggage Tags" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "The El" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

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

Clockwork

 

"Even a broken clock is right twice a day," reads the old saw. But there are brief remissions where time seems to slow down and you don’t feel like a rat on treadmill. Quotidian reality is a double whammy. You're getting nowhere with a built in loss factor. In fact if you are loss averse life isn’t for you. But oases can be found in the most unexpected places. Go to one of those malls in the middle of nowhere and enter the CVS whose stores are made from a template, all with similar footprints. Your past melds with the present and suddenly you are not living in the wreckage of your future. Whoever thought you’d quote Eliot in a real wasteland? "Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future..." (Burnt Norton) The chains that link are the same ones that bind. 

read "Luggage Tags" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "The El" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

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

Rebel Without A Cause

Within the mythology created by American Film, beaufiful young women are attracted to guys who flirt with danger. James Dean was the prototype and Rebel Without a Cause, the film. Life mirrored art since Dean himself met an early and tragic end in a car crash. One could hardly describe the current administration as swashbuckling thought they certainly flirt with danger, DJT is a little like Popeye flexing his muscles into rubber bands that snap right back in his face. Some poker players insouciantly up the ante and get wiped out. But is China actually the poker-faced dealer in the current tariff wars. Remember there’s an Adrenalin high to gambling, but when all is said and done, the house is the winner. (Edit note: could there be any better name for a Las Vegas mogul than Steve Wynn?)

read "Luggage Tags" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "The El" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

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

A La Recherché du Temps Perdu (Mathématique)

Henri Bergson

Does the past seem closer today than it did 10 years ago? Is the sense of pastness inversely proportional to the length of time that’s transpired from the incident or event being remembered? Do you have trouble remembering what you did, what you ate and who you saw yesterday while it feels you have just gotten off the phone with a lost love fifty years back? Remember the old wooden booth with the black rotary pay phones? You’d can almost hear the coins clink as they drop, first a dime for 3 minutes, then a quarter, until suddenly you were in the orbit of the cell? How to name this property of time?

read "Luggage Tags" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "The El" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

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

Superman

James Gunn's Superman (David Corenswet) is the ultimate immigrant--a visitor from another planet. Like many illegal immigrants, he's forced to veil his identity.The resultant disguise is an ingenious way of looking at one of comic book history's famous doppelgängers, Clark Kent. Gunn's Superman is an almost too obvious political allegory with Boravia (Russia) and Jarhanpur (Ukraine) in a conflict engineered by Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult). But it's the virtual reality graphics that tell the story. Superman is a computer game in a surrealist Dali landscape. Note Metamorpho's floating head. Is this hyperactive Krypto, Un Chien Andalou (1929)? In his latest iteration, Superman is in danger of losing his DACA status until the Justice Gang, The Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), Terrific Man Ed Gathegi) and Hawkgirl (Isabella Merced) intervene. Dream on. (edit note: what constitutes the modernity of the movie is not the advanced computer simulations, rather the ambivalence of the relation between Clark and Lois).

read "Luggage Tags" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "The El" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

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

Unified Executive Theory

Russel Vought

The movie Zone of Interest epitomizes being in a bubble. Can people live a normal existence in the face of atrocity.  Day after day the pillars of democracy have fallen. Rome’s ruins exude the sublimity of Tintern Abby. You marvel at the  emotion without remembering the title of a famous tomeThe Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Trump announces dicta willy nilly. No president has ever done x y or z and there is no legal precedent. In an unprecedented act Ghislaine Maxwell, a sex offender, is transferred to a minimum security prison. “The unified executive” trumpeted by Russell Vought, is the ideology (Project 2025). In the meanwhile you find yourself commuting from one biosphere, the Upper East Side to another East Hampton with no thought of the Gilgo Beach murders and the bodies of tortured prostitutes buried by Rex Heuermann along Route 110 in Manorville, linking the LIE with Route 27. Compartmentalization facilitates survival and murder.

read "Luggage Tags" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "The El" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

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

Madeleines

Old standbys are like people. You go back to them thinking you will retrieve the past but they have aged too. Have you ever seen someone who looks vaguely familiar? You can’t place them until the face emerges from the flesh. The next time  you recognize Tom or Julie right away. The preconception established in memory trumps the realities of the present. You are back there. It’s not the Proustian Madeleine with its mesmerizing smell rather a blast from the past.

read "Luggage Tags" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "The El" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

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