A Connecticut Yankee

Alignment refers to celestial bodies. Human wishes often mimic the movement of planets and moons. Lunar and solar eclipses, interplanetary and stellar movements are the essence of cosmology and also astrology but they also function as metaphors in an imaginative context. When you have your chart read, you're looking into a crystal ball. On the other hand heavenly bodies can be used to obfuscate.  Remember how Hank Morgan uses a solar eclipse in Connecticut Yankee to convince Arthur of his magical powers.

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Andrenalin

Karl Marx

Controversy produces Adrenalin. Adrenalin is an antidote to priapism, which can create necrotic tissue. It’s also the chemical cause for impotence. You get anxious and lose your erection. Or if you’re a Hegelian "world-historical figure," adrenalin produces the antithesis that facilitates The Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

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Brave New World

Scarcity produces demand and hence cost. You have to pay a lot for those things that are in short supply. Can emotion be commodified? Imagine a commissary where one comes for states of mind. You might reply “go to a rave.” There you can acquire MDMA, LSD, cannabis, psilocybin, Bennie’s etc. remember Brave New World and Soma? The price of authenticity is the awareness of death. Unfortunately life’s ending has produced its own meme in which you're not turned into ashes but rather a piece of data. Will Costco sell suicidal thoughts or a perfume named Happiness?

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Bela Tarr's Damnation

Damnation (1988) which was recently revived at The Walter Reade Theater, as a part of a retrospective of the Hungarian director's films, has lots of rain and dogs and dancing. There's a married torch singer (Vali Kerekes), who has sex with two other men, one of whom, Karrer, (Miklós B. Székely) declares that he will debase himself in order to have her. Their sex is extraordinary in the history of cinema. Her legs are spread and she cradles her lover. The rocking allows her to orgasm, but the iconography is that of the Madonna and Child. The film, like all of the director's work is filmed in black and white which creates a chiascoro effect. The movie is a succession of paintings.  One is a Magyar "Night Watch" with the camera panning across the faces of townsfolk, posing uneasily. And the film has its resident seer, a Casandra with biblical innuendos, who resides in a cabaret named Titanik. It sports a broken neon sign and topless beauties. Everything is unremittingly depressing and filmgoers who are discomforted by the representation of happiness will feel at home. Damnation is also a masterpiece. In the final scene, Karrer gets on his hands and knees to threaten a barking dog. Speaking of painters, neither Bosch nor Brueghel could have thought this one up. The film screenplay was co-written by László Krasznahorkai, Tarr's frequent collaborator and the Nobel Prize winning author of Herscht 07769.

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Revenge

Christopher Marlowe died a violent death and there is a whole genre of Elizabethan revenge tragedy epitomized by lesser playwrights like Thomas Kyd, author of The Spanish Tragedy (1582). Theatergoers are more likely to see themselves in these plays than Hamlet. A contemporary example might be titled Road Rage, another Fighting My Wy WAY OUT which deals with the kind of person who perpetually finds themselves stuck in a paper bag. This last is particularly disconcerting, literally the country cousin to Psycho (1960). Here's the plot: The protagonist wants to get back at a friend for their cosmic indifference--by not showing up at an event where the nemesis is honored. No one, least of all the person at whom the gun is pointed cares. In the end the avenger is left holding that same bag they were trying to punch their way out of.

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Are Men From Mars?

Genitals are a touchy subject. One talks of phallic men. These type-A personalities are similar to the elite teams portrayed on Strike Force. Uterine women? In this age of gender-free pronouns, how is it possible to detect the effect of secondary sex characteristics on personality or even consciousness?Men Are From Mars Women Are From Venus is the title of a onetime bestseller which probably would meet with pushback today. It gets more complicated. People who come out can be like exchange students who return from their year abroad speaking another tongue. One wonders where the stereotypes of femininity or masculinity actually live. You’ve undoubtedly met up with francophiles who are laughable parodies. Is being manly necessarily a characteristic of one born with XY chromosomes? Are women sashaying because of high heels or morphology? In terms of role-playing, the Hermaphrodite raises questions which may be unanswerable but perhaps tantamount to Valentine Michael Smith, the earthling who returns from Mars in Stranger in a Strange Land, not knowing his ass from his elbow.

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Todtnauberg

Heidegger's hut

There are lots of jokes about the benefit of being alive. The alternative is not being alive. So it’s a  no brainer. These comedians may not be familiar with the Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan which is btw the soundtrack for Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia (2011). The Danish director is obviously trying to make a point when he plays it ad nauseum. Liebestod is literally "life in death," a term which is almost, but not quite, synonymous with another German word Leidenschaft or "passion." Juliet is a perfect example of this since she is dead and alive a little like Schrodinger's cat who is both here and not. Heidegger remarked that only in the awareness of death can humans live an authentic existence. Paul Celan the famed poet of the Holocaust once attempted to visit Heidegger in his Black Forest, Todtnauberg retreat one would guess to ask how a great philosopher could support Hitler? He might have also asked Hannah Arendt how she how she as the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism could have slept with her proto- fascist professor? That’s another thing about the world of the living. It’s full of things which are hard to understand.

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Hard Knocks

photo: Meanwell Packaging

“Knock, knock.”

“Knock, knock.”

“Knock fucking knock already,”

“If you don’t say ‘who’s there?’ I’m going to knock this fucking door down."

What are you supposed to do? You keep knocking on the same door with no one ever giving you any more than the same yawn of cosmic indifference. 

Thank you for asking but the answer is "no!"

The pounding gets louder. There's the sound of splintering, as a fist finally penetrates the wood.

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The Anschluss

During the Anschluss the Nazis annexed Austria, then followed the occupation of the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia. Trump started by attempting to march into Greenland. When that failed, he kidnapped Maduro the leader of Venezuela and placed him in The Metropolitan House of Detention, where he is still resides. It was lights out for Cuba which deprived of oil would be the next domino, but not before the mullahs were assassinated. If you redraw the map of the United States it will now include Venezuela and Cuba which is not strange when you consider Puerto Rico and Hawaii. Iran is a bit of an outlier. The closest state to it, in size, would be Alaska (a bit larger with 665,000 square miles to Iran's 636,000) though Iran has a bigger population with 93 million versus Alaska's 748,000.

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Inscriptions

As the world shatters into oblivion, old inscriptions have a new urgency and profundity. Here is one found in a second hand copy Library of America Nabokov Novel and Memoirs 1941-1951,purchased on Amazon (which includes the unspeakably beautiful Speak, Memory):

"When as if he believed in God, V.N. said, 'I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.' Thanks for being a good student and friend. All the best (signature not parsable)." 

Guess, the student/friend needed to deaccession a book.

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Political Violence

Can you be against political violence and still wish that certain politicians were dead? Or the very un Christian question of people in general? If you turn the other cheek, is it likely to get slapped? In the old days people got tarred and feathered or put in stocks. In The Scarlet Letter Heather Prynne is forced to wear an A on her dress. Certain people won't die no matter how many times you kill them. The trope of the vengeful monster returning drives many horror films. There are people who believe their thoughts and wishes come true. They desperately try not to wish that a certain figure will burn in hell. Usually they don't have to worry.

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Royal Flush

How many fortunes have been lost in the course of trying to stanch a loss? A pile of chips is an ineradicable memory. You are flush with money (albeit in surrogate form)! Dramatic shifts often occur effortlessly while batting an eyelash. Hi tech hubris, in fact is measured in bytes of data. Overnight you may find yourself under water and in debt to the house. In Democracy in America De Tocqueville talks about the lability of a society where one generation can be rich and the next poor. The impoverished aristocrat is not an anomaly—though the American aristocrat is really one of Disney's Aristocats. Bastille Day occurs, in theory, every four years. Loss aversion is the psychological concept explored by the Nobel prize winning economist, Daniel Kahneman, but it’s a fear and tempering mechanism that is too often lost in the heat of battle or battle--or lust.

Ineptitude

Andrew Marvell

Does everyone have the opposite of halcyon days, perhaps days of ineptitude? You may have been a gawky kid who wasn’t good at anything. Then all of a sudden you find yourself. You discover a previously hidden talent for boxing (perhaps as a result of early frustrations). You become a crack student (at least of human behavior) and the repository of some "gull," yes gull's romantic wishes. Someone else will use you to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Then by the time you arrive, you will be told it’s time to go. You are certainly not in your prime. When you get in the literal and metaphoric ring, you find your strength is already beginning to fade. In fact you walk right into someone’s metaphorical stiff jab. You forget everything. You would console yourself with the notion of starting all over again "if there were world enough and time"--to quote Andrew Marvell. 

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Sirat

Oliver Laxe's Sirat, which has been taken seriously by Manola Darghis, Robert Ebert and virtually every other major critic is simplistic, pretentious and sententious. A father, Luis (Sergi Lopez) is looking for his lost daughter. The post-apocalyptic landscape with its unnamed repressive military recalls the Mad Max films. Tribalism and cultish behavior return in the form of raves.  Molly (MDMA) is usually the drug of.choice at these events though LSD and pot are what are evidenced in the film. The rave is particularly haunting in wake of the October 7 Hamas attack. Watching half dead characters die or dissolve a  is the arc of the plot. What's disturbing is seeing a host of critics as brainwashed as the characters they're writing about. Almodovar is listed as a producer. He should have known better. One day Sirat will be history.

Hegseth or Goring?

The difference between Hermann Goring and Pete Hegseth is that the former was a connoisseur of art, who, in fact, sought to steal the great masterpieces of Italy for a Fuhrermuseum in Linz. The same aspirations cannot be said for Pete Hegseth who great claim to fame before being appointed Secretary of Defense was being the co-host of Fox and Friends Weekend. Incidentally, he's a Christian Nationalist who invited Pastor Douglas Wilson, opposed to both homosexuality and women's right to vote, to speak at the Pentagon. Hegseth not only exemplifies "the banality of evil," he epitomizes the banality of banality. Who would you rather have pointing the barrel of a gun at you? A fundamentalist with an axe to grind or an art historically orientated racist anti-semite art lover and looter whose great creation was the Gestapo?

The Magus

Is it easier to end something in fiction than in life? For that matter what’s the difference? Is arranged marriage tempting fate? Your ancestors write no tale, yet your descendants are in the manufacturing business. It's axiomatic that you can’t rewrite the past but you can refuse to fixate on the ruins of the future. He lived to tell the tale is a strange locution when you think of it. What accounts for the emergence of an esthetic? Is one creating art or it simply a part of life?

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Ideas

You can’t kill an idea. Millenarianism will not be quashed by force. That, in fact, is the problem with intangibles. You can swat a fly or a person, but you can’t exterminate QAnon or for that matter Comintern. There are antidotes to poison and people carry epipens for anaphylactic reactions, but what are you gonna go do about Fourier or the Federalist society. In fact ideas resemble rambunctious children. The more you tell them to pipe down, the louder they get. What fuels the fires is suffering. Ideas thrive on misery.  That’s where the idea of a messiah comes from.

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The End of Ideology

The geopolitics du jour is power grabbing. Putin naturally didn’t start a protocol that goes by to Alexander the Great, but civilization was supposed to have evolved before the resurgence of the current Neanderthal mentality. In the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall technology, for one, held the promise of what Bob Marley called “One love…” Daniel Bell wrote The End of Ideology (1960).InThe End of Ideology and the Last Man (1992) Francis Fukuyama held out a hope that in fact had already been dashed earlier by the author's own mentor, Samuel D Huntington who underscored the draw of tribalism. Now Trump extracts the leader of Venezuela, putting him in The Metropolitan Detention Center while preparing to dispatch Marco to take over Cuba. The Rules of the Game (1939) is the name of the Renoir classic. What about the fate of Taiwan and what about North Korea, the pit bull of international relations? The current sortie into Iran is not liberating anything. Millions of people are filling the main squares in Teheran and Isfahan. The only result of the bombings is to destroy infrastructure, turning Iran into a fourth world country--another Sudan or Somalia.

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Getting High

The Matterhorn (photo: Rafał Raczyński)

The problem with all highs is their evanescence. So what constitutes the thrill that makes both addicts and normal people want to come back for more. Is it simply a matter of serotonin running across the synapses of the brain? For example love is a high that produces effects characteristic of drugs—in particular a euphoria that is whet the moment a stimulation is removed then returned. Yet people do, in fact, find each other and continue on after the initial flame has died. The evolution of emotions is the bedrock of enduring. The initial thrill kindled by the imminence of loss leads to a host of states. Flatlining is death, but the learning to navigate a level playing field and tolerate emotions which are unlikely to produce endorphins is a form of sustenance found in marathoners who depend on steadiness more than exhilaration to keep themselves in the race.

read "Current Events" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Bushel of Therapists

A flock CPTs were honking as they passed.  You see a lot of these old guys, the Reichians lugging their orgone boxes on trolleys and the schools of psychoanalysts stepping off the stage of the Ancient Greek theater where a certain play referring to a certain complex is being played. Lacananians wearing their Persistence of Memory tee shirts and then the Kohutians who starred in Tarkovsky's Solaris. Naturally Gilles Deleuze and Guattari at the protest with their "Anti-Oedipus" signs. Everyone knows psychopharmacologists are the closest thing to AI. All they do is sit around and write prescriptions. The regular  therapists, the ones you used to go to for advice, are shivering on the crosstown bus. You feel like advising them to cover-up a Come in From the Cold. 

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You Only Live Twice

Should one be surprised You Only Live Twice (1967) is a font of grotesque invention with its script by Roald Dahl who wrote the story on which a famous Alfred Hitchcock Presents was based. You may recall a ship's lottery based on how many nautical miles are achieved by a certain time. The plan of the ill- fated grifter goes awry when the woman he's talking to before he jumps overboard is blind. It’s a little like what happens to the ghoulish Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Donald Pleasance) head of Spectre whose plan is to foil American astronauts by creating a death ship, with an open mouth that literally swallows them up. One of the most glorious creations is a tank of piranhas into which a fetching succubus amongst others is tossed. Just a wish bone remains in one case.There’s the pool filled with sharks in Thunderball but this is the coup de grâce.

read "Current Events" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

4:35AM

photo: Francis Levy

Civilization is coming to an end. In response to a brutal assault by Hamas, the Israelis flattened Gaza. Ayatollah Khamenei was a horrific and dangerous man who was the modus state behind October 7th and innumerable acts of terror. Now right before the eyes of world, there's Trump using America’s military might to flatten a country of 80 million people.Trump's a name that might have been used by a Restoration Playwright--where soubriquets have an onomatopoeic effect. Think of the cast of characters in Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove besides the lead, Merkin Muffley, Gen. Buck Turgidson, Jack D. Ripper. Just say “Trump" aloud. Listen to it. Let it roll off your tongue. “Trump” is a good word for what is happening to the world. Will the president fill the broken landscape of Iran with Trump Towers. Will Trump put his face in the Iranian Rial? Will there be Trump tampons? Will American cheese be renamed? Hegseth is another name that totally fits the clowning of this satiric  and rowdy band of latter day Merry Pranksters, out to murder the world. The current offensive is working like clockwork, Clockwork Orange that is, with its Droogs led by yet another great name Alex DeLarge. How about Trump Aces of Spades and, of course, the famous bridge bid "3 no Trump!"

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Philanthropy

Philanthropy is not unconditional love. You give ostensibly to help but the act is also supposed to make you feel good. If you can’t give it away you can’t get it goes the old saw. If you traffic in spirituality it's a no brainer but on an everyday basis many people like being praised for their generosity and don't want to be criticized for being parsimonious tightwads. Conversely, one can feel blackmailed. There's something superficial about all these people who make big contributions so their names can decorate a bench in some park. If you don't give to the homeless person then you're a heartless miser--especially if you're affluent. What then about the anonymous donation? Knowing one is being altruistic is a reward in itself (don't forget the deduction if you're giving to a 501c3).The only problem then are the whisperers, the accusers who are wondering why you're cheap?

read "Current Events" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Unrenowned

"Unrenowned" is not a word that's usually attached to someone. You don't usually say "Bob is unrenowned in his field." If you were trying to describe Bob's modest accomplishments, you might say what Bob did. Bob was a poet who specialized in sonnets. The fact you are not labeling Bob as an expert in a Petrarchian or Shakespearean form of the sonnet means that they have not distinguished themselves from the huge mass of sonneteers whose hands are risen in supplication say to the Poetry Foundation who received a $100 million dollar endowment form Ruth Lily in 2003. Bob has not and will not be published by the arm of the Poetry Foundation, Poetry Magazine and obviously he's not going to be able to buy his way in. Of course there are lots of arenas in which one can be undistinguished or undistinguishable from others of equally limited talents. Writing is just one area. All of art, science, mathematics, diplomacy and, of course, the law are comprised of practitioners who you have never heard of. Take the book Amino Acid and Peptide Synthesis by John Jones. You probably haven't heard of the title and what can one say about the author? There are a lot of John Joneses in the world. The author's first and last names are so recognizable, they ultimately don't describe anyone. But just listen to the name Laszlo Krasznahorkai. You may throw your hands up and say sure with a name like that you're going to be distinguishable, if not downright distinguished. You're right. Krasznahorkai, whose novels were the basis for several films by Bela Tarr (a filmmaker you probably don't know), won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2025.

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Food

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is the titled of Raymond Carver's l981 collection. The following is a non sequitur. The best food is sometimes right around the corner. More likely than not there's a Burger King within a stone's throw from your house. And if you're eating The Impossible Whopper (whose symbolism is impossible to miss), you are getting a plant based product--that's healthy and doesn't involve the brutalization of animals. The classic crispy chicken, though delicious, satisfies neither of these criteria, but move on to the question of fries. Saying "McDonald's fries are great" is tantamount to the first proposition of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, "the world is all that is the case." Guess what? They're no longer what they once were! The slow food movement is a reaction to the phenomenon of assembly line cooking. But what are you after in a meal, health, taste, economy, alacrity or that ineffable and ultimately elusive catharsis that comes when one attempts to satiate or should one say void the senses?

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Tehran

The Seventh Fleet will attack in a week, ten days.  On CNN, Admiral James Stavridis, the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO recently gave it a 60% chance of it happening in 7-10 days. Kidnapping the Ayatollah will be a trifle harder than the antiseptic operation that moved Maduro from Caracas to the Metropolitan Detention Center. Imagine the Supreme Leader imprisoned there. Well, it's not far from the site of 9/11. Succession may be the biggest issue. Will the Shah's son rise to the occasion? Word has it that his rhetoric is already extreme. Iran is a country of 80 million people. Thousands of demonstrators recently died in a massive crackdown by the Revolutionary Guard. The problem is not simply regime change, but the aftermath. How to juggle all the varying interests, political, religious and economic? Lastly, there is the impact on the region.  During the initial attack US bases in friendly nearby countries like Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Jordan will be threatened. In the aftermath, regime change in Iran is likely to unleash extremist elements throughout the Middle East. In Syria, Bashar al Assad fell, but ISIS still has a stronghold.  Remember that Iran is also part of the Axis that includes Russian and North Korea. It's the Domino theory and also--"spheres of influence," a vestige of the 50s political order which has ironically been reignited by Trump in his Greenland grab.

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Mania

Pyromania, nymphomania, dipsomania Vergangensheitsbewaltigung (the burden of the past) anglophile, bibliophile. diarrhea, logorrhea—all of these are inclinations, with the exception of loose stools, generally something  which is out of the control of the sufferer. The sympathetic fallacy occurs  when nature mirrors the interior mind of a headless horseman. Onomatopoeia is a word that sounds similar to the thing described. Inspissation is an example of onomatopoeia. An emordnilap is the opposite of a palindrome like say nun, a word which can retain its meaning backwards and forwards. Prolepsis is anticipating the answer to a question which has yet to be asked. Zeugma or yoking is when one verb applies to multiple nouns. And then there are eggcorns, "for all intents and purposes" used wrongly in place of "for all intents and purposes"--"slips of the ear," named after "acorns" by the linguist Geoffrey Pullum in 2003.

read "Current Events" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star.

9½ Weeks

Trump's last State of the Union was 99 min. Yesterday's was threatening to weigh in at 9½ Weeks. Hitler and Mussolini also were known to give exceptionally long speeches. Haranguing is really the form. Why when you know tedium makes people angry? Answer, when oratory crosses a certain line it transforms from informational to medicinal. MAGA is a cult based upon irrational adoration, under the theory of The Second Coming. Yes Christ is now a portly figure who sports the hairdo of one of those used car salesman on Northern Boulevard. Trump is a real Queens man. All he needs is the white patent leather shoes with the faux gold bunion and a 70s double knit disco suit and he’ll be at home in the beloved outer borough which will always treat him like Ofysseus. It’s hard to think of Melania as a Penelope since she’s undoubtedly too busy with her staff of beauticians to attend to her McDonald’s quaffing warrior. For a proto fascist the whole idea of speech giving is incite not insight—will the midterms be another January 6 with DJT Big Mac in hand declaring a state of emergency and martial law when the house and even senate turn color.

Release Checklist for Ghislaine

mug shot Ghislaine Metropolitan Detention Center

Memory stick with Jeffrey's emails, massage table, hairdryer, hand weights, golf clubs, hot plate, massage table (2), swim suit, goggles, fins for snorkeling at Club Fed, hot plate, espresso maker, Neuhaus Valentine's Day dark chocolate selection, hardback Art of the Deal,  God Bless the USA Bible, red MAGA hat, "enjoy your stay" cards from Pam Bondi, and Kristi Noem received on arrival at Bryan Federal Prison Camp, autographed Bryan guest services manual including room service menu, together with check-out times, schedule of yoga classes, Marjorie Taylor Greene workout video, guidebook Little Saint James.

Lonely Are the Brave

David Miller’s Lonely Are the Brave (1962), recently revived as part of the The Sag Harbor Cinema’s 60’s Western series, is a predecessor to John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy (1969). The difference is social consciousness versus stylized, albeit sublime anomie. Here Kirk Douglas on his horse finds himself mowed down by the oncoming traffic. In Midnight Cowboy a young Texan (Jon Voight) dresses up as a cowboy to become a Times Square hustler.The movie also stars Gena Rowlands of Cassavetes fame, Walter Matthau as the sheriff and Carol O’’Connor aka Archie Bunker as the ill-fated trucker who unwittingly becomes the representative of ugly modernity. The movie is hard to gauge at first. Who is this character riding saddle in traffic and choosing solitude over the chance for love? Then suddenly the pieces fall into place. A signature scene where Douglas in flight from a posse of cops literally drags his rambunctious horse up a mountain pass attains a mythic grandeur. Taken literally, the movie makes no sense. There are still cowboys today but they're too busy herding cattle to challenge the conventions of modernity. However, that’s the point. Lonely Are the Brave is Death of a Salesman meets The Lone Ranger. Speaking of the depredations of capitalism, the screenplay is by Dalton Trumbo, one of the blacklisted Hollywood 10. Two civilizations on a collision course is ultimately the source of the drama.

Ezra Klein

On Fareed Zakaria’s GPS Ezra Klein iterated the theory that opponents can’t counter one sally, if another is leveled right after. According to him, the idea, "muzzling," originates with Steve Bannon and comprises the playbook of the administration. In the world of fisticuffs you have "brawlers" and “boxers.” Mike Tyson who famously said, "everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face," is the type to mix it up. You level a flurry and the fight is over. Lennox Lewis was a champion who won all his fights counterpunching with a brutal jab. MAGA people never let the opposite side get a word in edgewise. Listen to Steve Miller or any other of Trump's henchmen as they talk to a CNN anchor. A barrage of words follows every question. The interviewer is hard put to interrupt and point out the subject is off topic when they veer off the point--or their rocker, in fact.

Interiority

"The Persistence of Memory" by Salvador Dali (1931)

Interiority has never been popular—despite Proust. Belly button gazers was the accusation by those who  attended the Communist Internationals. You could put The Interpretation of Dreams in your backpack if you joined the Lincoln Brigade but Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? would go over better with your comrades. The mind resembles a toilet which works on the principle of the siphon. Vacuity is the aim. Think of it. Most people complain of emptiness in the aftermath of the stimulations of food or sex. You're always going against the grain when you risk solitude. But in today’s virtual reality universe where bytes of data comprise the lingua franca, the dendrites and axons which guard the synapses where neurotransmitters flow are chemically challenged. It’s akin to what green gases are doing to the environment. Stimulation is addictive; it’s no surprise that the turbulence of this moment of history is a juggernaut. It’s hard to get one’s breath back when one's always having to duck the next oncoming wave.

Ilse Koch and Kristi Noem

Only their hairdressers know for sure

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem bears some comparison to Ilse Koch, the infamous Bitch of Buchenwald. One of her most notable moments was an appearance at the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador. There she paraded around in her signature revealing outfits, as tattooed inmates packed into cages, looked on. One knows what happens to prisoners in such facilities who get erections during the visits of dignitaries. Koch made lampshades out of human skin and used prisoners to build a riding ring. By comparison five-year olds are detained in ICE facilities, like the Dilley Family Detention Center, with untreated diseases.  Ghislaine Maxwell is being held at "Club Fed" in anticipation of her prospective release--which is likely to be one of the last pardons Trump gives before leaving office. {Editor's Note: The New York Post reported Noem was having an affair with Corey Lewandowski. Melania Trump and Noem ought to rent CECOT for a Victoria's Secret fashion show in honor of Jeffrey Epstein associate Leslie Wexner }

The Secret Agent

The title of Kleber Mendonca Filho's The Secret Agent cites the Conrad novel after which it is named. In the eponymous work, the main character is a rather ineffectual spy. The same tone of irony is at work in the current production. In the opening scene, a corpse is covered by cardboard, but when the police arrive, it's to shakedown the main character Armando (Wagner Moura). Lucky he has the required fire extinguisher in the glove compartment of his car. Armando's yellow beetle is an iconic presence in the film, a Beetles "Yellow Submarine" bobbing through an atmosphere of impending doom as the main character tries to skirt a pair of assassins during the l977 Brazilian Carnival in Recife. The atmosphere of joy, with masked revelers and public sex, alternates with constant fear and terror. Armando's father-in-law, Sr. Alexandre (Carlos Francisco) is the projectionist in a theater where Jaws is being shown while Chicago's l976 hit "If You Leave Me Now" provides the soundtrack. Armando takes refuge in a safe house in Recife, but he's given a job in an agency which creates government identity cards and where he spends his free time searching for information about his late mother, who he barely remembers. Throughout the movie there are continual cuts to the present time in which, Flavia a researcher working to identify victims of past brutality, visits Armando's son Fernando, who works in a blood transfusion unit situated on the site of Sr. Alexandre's old movie theater. The film creates its own internal atmosphere which is timeless even as it moves from past to present. Industrial espionage and fascism bookend the action, but the style is one of cinematic magical realism in which history and memory create their own timeline and tapestry.

JE

                                                      

One hesitates to even employ the name. The ubiquity is the issue. The only comparison is Covid from which no society is immune. Was it passed from Dennis Rodman onto Kim Jong-un. Were those in solitary infected? Did Rex Heuermann, the Gilgo Beach murder have dealings even after the first conviction in 2008.  Did artificial intelligence become superficial? People are earnestly abhorrent but what to think of something that crosses state and party lines? BTW how did the eponymous JE vote. Was it a democrat? Or did it move right just as a thermometer moves up? Soma was the drug employed in Huxley's Brave New World to drug the populace. Corruption is by definition value free. Beria and Thomas Jefferson were both corrupt and would both have been prone to JE? The DOJ harbored millions and millions of documents, but why and when did it start? Say Door Dash delivered to JE townhouse one night in 2009 then to you? As is evident with ISIS or Hamas, it's impossible to extinguish an idea.  JE Wanted Dead or Alive. 

Ogen Nash

Nash and Dagmar 

Are you tired of the monotony of politics? Ideology is another matter since it’s a form of thinking. Who would you listen to? Tommy Tuberville, Joseph de Maistre or Ogden Nash? Stupidity can be colorful. Don’t count on the world of poetic discourse for a respite from the culture wars. There are 9 circles of Inferno at every Dante conference. If you entertain the belief that Gilles Deleuze’s Anti-Oedipus has anything to do with mental health, you may be in for a surprise—ditto trying to explain why you still have to pay the full fee for a Lacanian 50 minute session, that’s cut off. If you're an event organizer, you may have to juggle Turning Point America, The Eulenspiegel Society and the Right to Die. Spoiler Alert: it's all someone else's fault. Sure go listen to the annual Moby Dick reading in Sag Harbor but don’t think the world of Melville scholars isn’t riven by a Unified Executive.

read the review ofThe Wormhole Society by Francis levy and Joseph Silver in The East Hampton Star 

The Story of O

Perversion is altering something from its original course. Perversion of justice, for instance. Something is perverse when it begins this process. Perverts are those who enjoy such derailments and a perversion, when it comes to sex is defined as abnormality. "What is normal?" is the complaint of every pervert from the Marquis de Sade on. One walks a slippery slope in trying to lower or raise the bar in reference to that which some deem to be a form of pleasure. There are those who may derive their kicks from getting their leg pulled. That train has left the station means an inalterable process has begun. A pervert trying to reverse course is similar to a fish swimming upstream. Yes salmon return home to die, but the average tuna will find itself canned. You'd think perversion would be an easy thing to cure. Just give the person the correct directions. Easier said than done. It's hard to eradicate an idea.

read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver in The East Hampton Star

The Wild One

It may seem odd in this age of Jeffrey Epstein to remember America is a puritanical society. The Scarlet Letter is worn by every American. Sexuality not only results in humiliation, it’s predicated on it. Shame was the 2011 Michael Fassbinder movie about a sex addict. America isn’t the only country where transgression fuels arousal. Catholicism and fascism were the cocktail that formed Pasolini’s sensibility, but America is a secular society where there's at least the illusion of freedom. So the outlying forces, the attraction between positive and negative plus and minus in fact create the buzz. In The Wild One (1953), Marlon Brando auditions as America’s great heartthrob by leading a motorcycle gang into town. James Dean, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty and their female counterparts Janet Leigh, Natalie Wood and Marilyn Monroe all become stars by defying the mores of society.

Read "Boudu Saved From Drowning" by Francis Levy with a painting by Hallie Cohen in The East Hampton Star

How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel

Can an inward turning figure be an activist? What revolution would Proust lead? There has famously been a conservatism to great 20th  Century modernism, Ezra Poind ended up in St. Elizabeth’s in the wake of his fascist broadcasts during the Second War. Tolstoy is an exception particularly with regard to the Christianity which infused his writing in the latter part of his career. Andre Malraux, a Gaullist political figure, wrote both Man’s Fate and Man’s Hope (if manifest content is significant, the titles tell part of the story). Camus, the editor of the famed resistance paper Combat, was the author of The Stranger, a unique combination of interiority with intention and there were Koestler, Silone and, indubitably, George Orwell whose complex convictions are an essay in consciousness itself. Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Save Your Life  fuses the how-to genre with a Proust's excavations of memory in both its voluntary and involuntary forms (as exemplified by the iconic madeleine). The potential humor and even silliness of the endeavor is belied by acuteness of the author's insights.

Read "Boudu Saved From Drowning" by Francis Levy with a painting by Hallie Cohen in The East Hampton Star