Cosmic Indifference

Black Hole

Have you ever faced the cosmic indifference of the universe? You always think that your behavior is what's causing the problem, going through the painful analysis of what you would or would not have done or said to deserve the treatment you received. What's worse is the realization it has nothing to do with you.

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

Head

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

What if the Earth Were Square?.

AI generated image of Rubik's cube

What if the earth were square and warning sides put up everywhere, "Beware the steep descent." Ancient Greek thinkers such as Eratosthenes and Aristotle discountenanced such notions in the 4th century BC. But what if reality is the illusion? For instance many people wrongly think that abstract paintings are just about the surface of the canvas, when in actuality abstraction is tantamount to photorealism with so called figurative art being the delusion. What is the world? In this universe, you learn to take "he's going off the deep end" seriously. Christo might be employed or of course each country could put up its own fence. A square world would give new meaning to the concept of a "rip tide," since the inertial force of the water falls would continually wash away existence.

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

Misery

 

Misery is a great title for a horror thriller. Many people wrongly. associate the emotion with malaise. However,  the kind of drudgery and hopelessness one associates with cement shoes is truly terrifying. Edgar Allen Poe's "The Cask of the Amontillado" deals with revenge by immurement. Waiting For Godot and Endgame are generally regarded as existential comedies, but Hamm and Clov live in garbage cans, only poking their head up to answer a turn of phrase. "Do you believe in the life to come?" Clov asks. "Mine was always that" is Hamm's response. "Insanity is doing the same thing over again and expecting different results" is a common saw. Another one is often framed in flowery plaques on bathroom walls, as an admonition to men. "We aim to please. Will you aim, too, please?" The joke rests in between the commas.

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

Straight Flush

 

"Fountain." Duchamp" (1917)

  
SNL modified Trump's "we have all the cards" remark to the Iranians. "We have all the cards, you only have a straight" was the joke.  You can be flush with victory which is the expressions Hegseth and Trump have evinced repeatedly, as they counted their chickens before they hatched. Or simply flushed like the heroin in that famous Trainspotting scene. You night say that The White House has a straight flush when it comes it comes their continually declining arsenal.

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

Cage Aux Folles

Unless you're polyamorous, a great deal of weight is placed up the notion of faithfulness. The underling notion is truth of course. A polyamorous individual is being as truthful and one who is monogamous. Things get a bit more complicated when a supposedly monogamous individual cheats. The reverse is not true of polyamory. Few polyamorous individuals who ware secretly monogamous will ever be upbraided for the feeling that they only want to be with their legal partner in life, although as strange as it may sound there are covens of gay, straight and trans people who demand a certain allegiance to the cause. The Sullivanian analytic movement argued for promiscuity as cure for possessiveness. The underlying notion was a critique of the oedipal triangle which also came under scrutiny by French analysts like Deleuze famous for his Anti-Oedipus tome. The comic possibilities of perverse or not so perverse arrangements are legion. Remember Cage Aux Folles?

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

Embarrassment

"An Embarrassing Proposal" by Antoine Watteau

Are you the kind of person who has always had their hand up waving for attention? Did it start in grammar school, when you got kicked out of class after calling out an answer? Did you do it because you felt you weren't being called on fast enough or potentially at all? Has such behavior become a humiliating practice that makes human existence itself a source of embarrassment for you? You can stop crying out for attention, but nothing is going to change. Once a pickle no longer a cucumber. Society has your number. People realize full well that you're shutting up because you're enraged.

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

Hatshepsut

Queen Hatshepsut

This is a horror movie, one of those old 30s British affairs, where the Oxbridge archeologists upset the spirit of of some dignitary like Hatshepsut. If you haven't visited her tomb at the Met, here's the details. Hatshepsut c 1505 BC was the sixth pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt, ruling first as regent, then as queen regnant from c.1479 BC c. 1458 BC and the Great Royal Wife of Pharaoh Thutmose II. She's not the kind of person whose sleep you want to disturb. You think this is it. In honor of Lindsay Graham, Russia will finally be sanctioned. Cornyn and Tillis will stick to their guns and refuse go along with an agreement about President's fund that's not worth the paper it's written on. Even fanatics like Laura Loomer and Jean Pirro will stand up. But there is no slaying the monster, whose fingers crawl like bugs out of their crypt, just as you're convinced you've buried them forever. 

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

What is to Be Done?

There are two basic lessons to be learned from history--beyond the fact that Hegel's "world historical figure" is a value free notion. Avoid nice guys and those who threaten to "get things done." Chamberlain made the mistake of thinking Hitler was a nice guy when he promised the Sudetenland was Germany's last grab. Most recently Pete Hegseth and Trump both have threatened to bomb Iran into oblivion."A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again," Trump recently declared. Hamlet is always held up as an example of what happens when you think too much. Trump, one might say, is the opposite of Hamlet. In the name of bringing industry back home, he exercises tariffs for which the consumer pays the price.

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

Anxiety

Senator John N. Kennedy

John N. not F Kennedy is the Republican senator from Louisiana. You may not like his politics, but his iterations can be amusing such as his description of Trump in regard to the president's insistence that vandals were responsible the failures of the reflecting pool. "He exists loudly, and he grows anxious when he has an unexpressed thought." Iterations about states of existence are an art form in and of themselves. You might call them existential memes. It's an ability that crosses the aisle and is an odd value neutral touch of light. A Republican with a name like John Kennedy is, btw,  subliminally bipartisan. Is it not?

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

The Fly

You will say this has been said before. Why do you insist on dwelling on the depressing fact that one day you are not going to wake up? Not to beat a dead horse, you will no longer be perceiving the world. Can you get arms around that or the fact that your dying has no more significance than that of the death of one of the ants in the pile you step on creeping out of the cracks in pavement or the irritating fly you wreak vengeance on with your swatter!

Read "Chicago" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

TOE

 

photo: StoneIsland 24

TOE is the acronym for "time of the essence." If anyone ever asks where you got it, just answer "podiatrist." You might send a foot fetishist, someone who likes to "shrimp" or suck toes to a psychoanalyst. Remember Freud's "Rat Man" who was fixated on his anus? But if you really want to get under the surface, it's probably better to look at the metatarsal, which lies at the very heart of the human sole.

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

Kissing

"The Kiss" by Gustav Klimt (1907-8)

Do you remember the first person you ever made out with, the way your lips found those of your lover and seemed to freely search out a cavity of the body that's even more intimate than the genitals? You were in love, but because you hadn't learned to fuck, you soon grew bored and even tired of the other's mouth. After all saliva is not particularly known to be an aphrodisiac. Spittle was all that was left from your moment of passion. Only later in life when you learned that romance was nature's way of facilitating the shoals of desire, did the magic of kissing then return, as something once passed over and taken for granted in the rush for consummation. 

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

Hemorrhoid

 

Naomi entreating Ruth and Oprah to return to Moab (William Blake)

Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein have given perversion a bad name. They make the Marquis de Sade, with his 120 Days of Sodom, a good guy. Well at least Sade didn't gaslight like the President. Words play a role in transgression since they're the way one iterates desire, words and actions, that is, and certain words are almost impossible to spell. Take hemorrhoid or Naomi.  You're likely to strike out with the former. It sounds like hemmorrhoid or hemorhoid. Niomi, Nioami are frequent misspellings. It's hit or miss to get to hemorrhoid. Hemorrhoids are not celestial objects, like asteroids Quite the contrary. They're part of the GI rather than solar system.

read "Cri de Coeur" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Too Solid Flesh

"O that this too too solid flesh would melt" is the key to the Booker prize winning Szalay novel. If you were one of the doubters who felt the out of body inner body experience of Istvan, the central character, was a bit of the been there done that, then you will be chastened by two pages near the end. Spoiler Alert: they are two blank pages that are two of the most eloquent expressions of nullity in all of literature. There is a scene in Sean Baker's Anora, when the whole world of the movie's central characters is destroyed. It's not even a matter of starting all over again or rebuilding. Flesh does melt. Cars do crash changing the lives of their occupants forever.

The Paradox

Do you feel like the tortoise or Achilles in the famous paradox? Or a member of a member of the Trolley Problem focus group? Will you finally decide to run down the one unlucky soul in lieu of the group? What a hero you will be to everyone but the loved ones of that unlucky soul who gets run over! Are you increasingly in a rush to take care of things, knowing your end is growing increasingly near? It’s not a morbid  thought. It’s no different than making your arrangements, choosing the site and even the stone or maybe the urn in which your ashes will lay.

A Last Dream

"Man Behind Bars" by Franz Kafka

You haven’t experienced this yet, since if you did, you wouldn’t be here to tell about it. But imagine your last dream. You’re stuck inside and there’s no way out. It’s a dream in which there is a long hall with lots of black steel doors. They could be monks cells or prison cells, unforgiving, solitary. You run up and down the corridor looking for a way out. There is no way the inmates can help you since they themselves are locked in forever. It’s the ultimate silent retreat. Just in passing you think: How are they fed? However, the idea is soon forgotten. You have more pressing matters at hand like how to get out of this nightmare and back to life?

The Rape of the Lock

Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

Alexander Pope’s mock epic "The Rape of the Lock" is a satire of the sententiousness and superficiality of 18th century aristocratic society and its obsessions with relatively minor sufferings. You might say Pope’s poem took on the “woke” culture of its time. The lock is, if you will, the "survivor." The poem resonates with our current culture where there are so many would be victims that the real ones are lost in the shuffle. What many fail to remember is that there was Stalin as well as Hitler, Big Brother as well as a Fuhrer.

Concerning the Spiritual in Art

 

Improvisation 27, Garden of Love ll (1912)

Kandinsky's l911 treatise "Concerning the Spiritual in Art," is a classic essay on abstraction. The famous painter draws an analogy with music which by turn sets the stage for a discussion of abstraction in painting and other arts. Prosody can be a linear and seemingly realistic literary form such as in the case of  "Tintern Abbey," but modernist poets like John Ashberry use language in ways that can be difficult to parse. The experience is tantamount to not being able to navigate one's way around a canvas. If the medium is the message, then, in this case, don't mistake the messenger. Going back to plasticity, can it be said that Jackson Pollock's "Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)" is the real realism, reflecting neuronal movement of axons and dendrites between synapses to regulate the flow of serotonin while so-called realism is, in effect, a construct, a delusion constructed by the mind, as a way of regulating bodies in space?

Therapy

 

Have you noticed that within the demographic of educated affluent liberals that everyone speaks like a therapist? They don't even need training or accreditation. At the very least, they will ask what their fellow discussant feels about this or that turn of events, instead of shooting off at the mouth, which is what they may have done in their past lives. Accompanying the restraint is a meaningful gaze. They may not really be listening or even care, but the simple posture of holding back on thoughts confers an undeniable power. Let the other person babble on in the face of silence, like the nurse in Persona and you will come out on top or bottom, depending on your penchant, both literally and metaphorically.

Sick

Popeye (King Features)

When you were a kid, you stayed home from school when you were sick. School was boring and it was more fun to watch cartoons. On the other hand, you had to deal with your symptoms, whether fever, coughing and sneezing or even diarrhea. Such vacations from the normal order of things have almost no appeal for adults, who like to reassure themselves of their longevity and the degree to which they're survivors who can brave the elements. Some people even have a need to demonstrate their ability endure under the most adverse of conditions. The weak shall inherit the earth is not their mantra, until something happens.

The Whopper

There's a new Whopper in town. Go to the Met or anywhere on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, have a salad in the cafeteria, and you'll get Legionaire's Disease and cyclosporiasis--which is not something you want to contract in your peloton. Everyone says  Legionaire's is not contagious, plus you don't have to get eat raw vegetables, which are where the cyclosporiasis bacteria reside. Legionaire's is found is microscopic droplets and lettuce can be sautéed, but let's take a best case scenario. You are in a space capsule, a la Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972), or on the Mars mission that NASA has been touting. You eat the lettuce, since there is no time to sauté it. Which way will the powerful diarrhea propel you, towards the red planet or earth?

Denial

signing of Versailles Treaty  (June 28, 1919)

One (and there are many) ways  to explain the phenomenon of Trump is denial. Climate change is a hoax. Even as the rivers overflow and the forests burn away, the easy thing is to say it isn’t happening, to wish it away. That's why gaslighting Trump's favorite rhetorical device. The same thing happened in Weimar Germany. In that case the villain was the Versailles treaty with its onerous sanctions. Hitler's Willing Executioners is the title of the Goldhagen book. The Germans particularly the lumpenproletariat, who paid the price economically,  were on board with a messianic unifying message which blamed the Jews. You don’t have a Trump or for that matter a Jim Jones, unless you  have followers. 

Algae

c

cyanobacteria on Lake Erie

There has been a tidal wave of humanity engulfing the East End of Long Island a new form algae that is flowing along the highways. It has been preceded by flocks of sickly Canadian geese. You know something is wrong when you see a goose or bird standing motionlessly along the shoulder of a road, but as another kind of roadkill are the visitors with their horrendously blank expressions, faces that are airport runways in a vanishing perspective. Flocks of expensive cars drown out the tweeting of birds. Who are these people? What do they want? You might think it's pleasure, but the expressions aremean spirited and filled with exasperation at having to wait in line. "Where have all the flowers gone?"--sang Pete Seeger.

Poltergeist

"Hamlet and His Father's Ghost" (William Blake, 1806)

Ghosting is a pregnant notion. Of course people have rejected each other by refusing to answer calls, or even walking right past them without saying hello, but with the explosion of social media and now AI, the possibilities are relentless. Do you want to create damage or merely dodge bullets? The best way to accomplish either is to refuse to acknowledge their existence. It's definitely a great way to inflict a wound. If you just want to be, bothered you get a twofer. After all, the kind of person you want to stay away from is generally someone who is annoying--and even though you don't really have an axe to grind, it's fun to give them a dose of their own medicine, ie annoyance.

The Invite

 

Olivia Wilde's The Invite is Strindberg on Xanax, one of the drugs that's actually taken by Wilde herself playing the characterAngela as she attempts to quell the anxiety-producing prospect of couples swapping. Actual it's Miss Julie and The Father tinctured with Scenes From a Marriage. The conceit is simple, the old married couple upstairs hears their younger counterparts going at it. To be diplomatic  they decide to invite Penelope Cruz (Pina) and Ed Norton (Hawk) down for snacks. Cruz is a sex therapist married to a former firefighter who Rolfs for a living. The combination is funny and sexy as Cruz and Norton unleash their "menu" which includes pegging with strap-ons and DP, (double penetration). Anagnorisis is recognition in Greek tragedy, but here it may refer the list of paraphilias the film rolls out to the cackles of the audience. Seth Rogen (Joe), a failed musician who gloats in his misery is the last to come on board, but the comedy soon gives way to self-revelation, as Rogen's back spasm stops the orgy before it even starts. Rogen is brilliantly funny and the acting, of this dialogue driven movie is totally on point. The Invite is a chamber film and its brilliance lies in the way it juxtaposes slapstick with inevitability, as the plot leads to the sweet pathos of a piano duo.

Only Fans of Flesh

David Szalay

Flesh was exuberantly Booked or Booker (ed), but it is also soft core porn. Titillation is the lingua franca and the message is not particularly mediated by a self-consciousness about its own manipulations. Istvan our feckless hero is seduced by the upstairs neighbor as a teenager (the author is keen to note the hair running from her vagina to her belly button). The protagonist then murders the neighbor's husband, an act that could be viewed as random or intentional depend how you view it. He joins the army and shows his mettle. He's good with his hands and with women and ends up marrying the wealthy widow of his benefactor. Her friends sunbathe topless by the pool of the estate in which the couple live, their breasts described in some degree of detail. Around every corner lies a seduction. There is a rather graphic for The New Yorker set of photos (shot by Katy Grannan) accompanying a piece on OnlyFans by Jennifer Wilson. That's soft core porn too.

King of the Hill

Casey Greenfield and Jeffrey Toobin (Daily News)

There is a lot of justifiable outrage at Trump ghouls such as Goring Himmler Clone, Stephen Miller,  but look at some of the left's Plutocrats. Jefffey Toobin, a former Crimson editor, banished New Yorker writer and now sometime legal contributor to CNN, himself a scion of media aristocracy (his mother ABC's Marienne Sanders and his father TV producer Jerome Toobin.), marries his Harvard sweetheart, who he also worked with on the Crimson (they are both distinguished Dumpster House alumnae) Amy Bennet McIntosh, only to fly the coop for Casey Greenfield, theYale Law School progeny of ABC's Jeff Greenfield, who in turn sues her former lover for child support. Family law is her deal btw. Nice people huh? Sure Access America, E. Jean Carroll and Stormy Daniels are all part of Trump's CV, but how can you compete with someone jerking off at a New Yorker staff meeting? Yes, Tina Brown, the consummate insider praises Toobin's writing in spite of it all. Then there's the Graham Platner affair. Trump is Hitler,  but Stalin and Big Brother are alive and kicking in the world of pronouns vetting and  #MeToo vigilantism.

Sportsocost

   Tadej Pogacar

Are you getting tired of sports? If the American team were so great and highly-low-minded (which all lionized competitive athletes need to me), why didn't they boycott the FIFA mafia? Trump makes a call to the don and voila. Do you also have a headache pursuant to Knicks fever and a feeling of disgust at the Bryant Park watch party where Seattle fans were pummeled by inebriated crowds of toughs. What is this? Who cares about the Yanks or the Giants? Then there's hockey. Yes, the athletes are in great shape like their counterparts on the Tour de France, but these are basically savages on ice. To come back to biking. That's OK, right. Climbing is the metaphor and at a certain point the act transcends the competitive angle and becomes a spiritual act. You have the Labyrinth, the Minotaur, Icarus and Daedalus or perhaps sad old Sisyphus. The Tour and the Giro before it are the stuff of dreams.

Reciprocity

"spotted Hyena" (photo: Eli M Swanson)

Can aggression and reciprocity co-exist? Is there, for example, aggression in a romantic embrace? No one regards love as selfless, but is it similar to eating? Is passion an appetite little different from wolfing down a steak and potato? Take language. You can harangue or treat talk as form of listening. The average person having little consciousness of the other, equates speaking with relieving themselves and most interchanges with others as "dumping" (aka one's problems on a defenseless fellow traveler). The supposed therapeutic bond treasured by practitioners of talk therapy is merely an exchange of bodily fluids, in this case saliva, between the patient and the doctor who, if they are lucky, will be able to dart away before they're hit smack in the face by a glob of angry spit.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

Truth

tracking of engraving of Sosibious Vase by Keats

A Million Little Pieces was not so much a succes de scandal as a simple scandal, due to the fact that James Frey's journey of recovery was at least partially fictionalized. In this era of gaslighting where the titular leader of the country makes things up at will, it’s almost refreshing that anyone cares about the facts. The other side of the argument is that all autobiography is art and all art, autobiography. Deconstructionism has added to the problem since it views statements to be culture bound. In addition, there's the problem that the fuzzy waves in the air you may see on a hot day are the presences of parallel universes bursting at waist.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

Is the Universe a Gated Community?

The Hubble Ultra-Deep Field

Closed universes are tantamount to gated communities, albeit on a phenomenological scale. They are a philosophical version of the Great Chain of Being. Essentially human existence is a level playing field. Attempts to frame it, as Einstein or Freud did, are always subject the new kid on the block syndrome, whether it's quanta or the latest neuroscientific discussion of serotonin, axons dendrites or whether memory is procedural or episodic in rats.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

Flesh

David Szalay's Flesh received a Booker before the judges could say "boo." The subject is Istvan, a Hungarian version of Kosinski's Chance in Being Time, (played by Peter Sellers in the Ray Ashby movie. Szalay's main has what might be called "out-of-body, body experiences." In other words, lots of sex for which he is "here because he is not all there," to coin a phrase used by 12 steppers. He is seduced by a neighbor at the beginning. At first, he isn't attracted, but the sex is an awakening particularly to her anatomy which includes an alluring bit of hair that runs up from her vagina to her belly button. He is rebuffed in his first love experiences and ends up in juvenile detention after accidentally or not so accidentally killing the woman's husband, by pushing him down a flight of stairs. This question of intention is of course essential in determining culpability, but it's a metaphor for Istvan's condition, which vacillates between the conscious and unconscious. You may recognize this personality type from an adolescent reading of The Stranger, It may even register more intimately, but that is also the problem. The book is sexy and hard to put down, but is it original? Does it expand the readers horizons? Or does it leave them trapped like a rat on the behavioral  or even psychoanalytic treadmill? (to be continued).

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

Digital Insertiveness

Young men are taught to assertive though not necessarily digitally insertive, vaginally speaking. Speaking of which Trump Tower is going to standard issue federal architecture say like the ubiquitous red brick of NYC public schools. If Pete Hegseth has his way all warriors will sport their leaders yellow duck bill hair style. Which brings up a non sequitur. Economic inequality is growing and what is one of its causes? 

Answer: racism. What better way to create a servant class whose wages are so comparatively low that they’re essentially slaves.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

The Pathetic Fallacy

John Ruskin

The pathetic fallacy, a term coined by the English art critic, John Ruskin, often lives up to Its name. It takes work to leap to the conclusion that thunder and lightening signify anything other the presence of an electrical storm. Lake effect snow is nothing more than beauteous meteorology. A tsunami is often the result of Vulcanology. Sorrowfully humankind are wanderers whose connection to the storm is that they may require an umbrella.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

Diarrhea and Dysphoria

Big Brother (Bob Flag)

Surely you have made mistakes? Perhaps one of them is blurting out an inanity. If you're a writer, you have scribbled one that falls  deafeningly on deaf ears. Perhaps you have even gone so far as to make matters even worse, by digging yourself even more deeply into a hole. Perhaps this kind of behavior has emerged in the middle of one of those high-minded gatherings filled with like-minded folks which tend to make you, as a great man or woman of historical importance, uneasy. You don't want to be a member of a lynch mob, even a well-intentioned one, you argue. You're opposed to collectivities of any sort, unless, of course, the collectivity is the face of your own dysphoria. You could go on but you won't.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

Nostalgie

 

"Nostalgie de la boue" is longing for shit--en Francais. But the expression is also "loaded." Nostalgie connotes something more than mere nostalgia. It is also aspirational in its romantic agony. You wish for something sad and dour and difficult, but ostensibly this Inferno, or to expropriate the Huysman's titled A Rebours or going back, which in English translates as Against Nature, is a form of replenishment, a Fleurs du Mal a la Baudelaire. The notion of diving deep into Hades is part of ancient mythology. Orpheus in Hell, Offenbach's comic opera. It is only Sade's 120 Days of Sodom and the Pasolini movie it inspired, Salo, that preclude the illusion of faith or belief.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

Trainspotting

filming Trainspotting toilet scene

Remember the iconic scene in Trainspotting (1995) when the drugs disappear down the toilet. The moment sets off a hallucination as iconic as the horrified nurse in the Odessa Steps sequence of Einstein's Potemkin. Cataclysmic discombobulation that sets one's life in a tailspin is something you know if you've ever fallen asleep at the wheel, waking up suddenly to screams at the terror of the incipient path of destruction that you've wreaked. Have you hit or even killed someone? "Down the tubes." That's where you're headed is something you've undoubtedly felt. One door closes and another opens is dispelled by the reality that when one door closes another likely closes too. In fact, if you are like the bag of junk in the Danny Boyle film, you are just another domino  falling.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

Silent Retreat

 

Mont St. Michel

Most creatives seek an audience. Writers and poets want be to read. Playwrights want their work performed, but in the age of AI, the role of the artist is recusal. Remember Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four? Now in 2026 it is hard to find authenticity. Inadvertent plagiarism was a problem long before the advent of AI. Without meaning to, many writers found themselves bombarded with memes and tropes whose provenance was hard to recognize. Now, ThinkSpeak has taken over. SSRIs are tantamount to Soma, the excising of personality being the price one has to pay for quieting depression and anxiety. In "The Double," Dostoevsky's alter-ego appropriates the life of its foundational self. Art in the 21st Century will be practiced by monastic orders which protect expression, by limiting its diffusion. You probably have already heard about people who go off to silent cell phone free retreats where electronic devices are not permitted.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

Free Expression

Samuel Beckett's "Not I" (The Guardian)

This is the Age of Expression and it’s not all for the good. There's something to be said for inhibition. Things pop so naturally out of the mouth of the President that he is smitten with belief prior to investigation. It’s all part “The Weave” aka gaslighting, whereby fiats and realities are fungible. A notion becomes reality simply because it's uttered and that is part of the problem. A pronunciamento or piece of rhetoric is soon an urban legend with little regard for the source. Influencers with millions of followers are the product of this Brave New World.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

JCPOA

satellite image of Natanz nuclear facility

Is there a limit to the deterioration? Sinkholes have been discovered on one of the two runways at LaGuardia, but they're literally more than depressions. You can either be a depressed personality or someone who lives in a psychotic state. What do you do in the face of a wizard whose worldview is a product of what he says? Yes utterance is at the heart of empiricism, but it usually posits the notion of so-called "real" objects on which the gaze is set. In current circumstances you have a person who constantly tells lies which he posits as truth. Occasionally statements are the result of ignorance, but "gaslighting" has now become public policy.  Such is the case with the JCPOA. Trump derisively refers to the former president name highlighting the Hussein part to imply the presence of a foreign agent, a quisling at the helm before going on to state the total success of an agreement which actually accounts for none of the key things that an unnecessary war was supposed to have brought about--the chief of which being, halting nuclear proliferation. But then again the pot is calling the kettle black. Is the current executive branch, with its abrogation of rights and its search for unquestioned power any less volatile than your once and a future Ayatollah?

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

Knicks

The Atlantic.com

Common experience is almost a garish concept. Americans pride themselves on individuality and also their degree of alienation. MAGA politics is rightly regarded as stupidity but it's also a response to disenfranchisement. Economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton coined the term "deaths of despair" to. describe the high rate of suicide amongst white working class males. The working class which built the country for the Robber Barons is being marginalized. Mining is a tough business, but travel to Appalachia and you will discover a pride of belonging. The advent of the first trillionaire epitomizes the concept of income inequality that is the subject of Piketty's Capital in the 21st  Century (ironically a bestseller the author obviously profited from). It is hard to think of Trump as a figure of World Historical Significance,  as was Napoleon for Hegel. Trump voices a dissatisfaction with elites. The lumpenproletariat which is another word for the MAGA demographic actually is a rather sophisticated response to obsolescence. With AI the anger will only increase. Actually Trump for all his money and street smarts will be an excellent example of Great Replacement Theory when he is finally either impeached, or forced out of The White House--when he refuses to leave at the end of his term.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

Recolonization

East India House (Thomas Malton, 1800)

Is the master/slave relationship just a reflection of the Great Chain of Being, with God at the top and human then animal life below. Or a device of the imagination? Post hoc does not mean propter hoc. The fact of inequality does not define it as a necessity. The advent of the first trillionaire with the assets to colonize the whole planet, as pointed out in a recent NYT Op-Ed piece "Elon Musk is Colonizing Earth" (6/12/26), brings the issue to light. Now income inequality is so great that the wealthy few, a biblical whale seems poised to devour everything. Trafficking in countries is nothing new BTW. During the age of the British East India Company, the continent of India was itself on the chopping block and countries who now make up NATO were busily gobbling up the developing world ie Africa, Mexico and South America. Remember The Belgian Congo? Trump going after Greenland, Mexico and Canada has precedent in the Colonial Age. During the past century, decolonization has become the byword, as the British Empire was reduced to England. No one dreamt the master/slave relationship would return, as a governing social force on both a collective and individual level. Trump rhymes with thump. How do you relate to a trillionaire who creates a literal and metaphorical sinkhole when they buy the land beneath your feet?

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

Martial Arts

Clifford Odets

A trainer once said to an overly enthusiastic young boxer, "You've got the martial part. Now you need the art!" The same can apply to art itself. Marshall McLuhan famously said "the medium is the message." Yes there are pressing. issues,  but what is worse, providing audiences with a hyperbolic universe of delusion or the absence of any message at all? Melodrama is "unearned emotion." An overly promiscuous practitioner becomes a slut, who can use the same lovemaking technique with different lovers. A chorus of misery is a potent tool, but place it in the hands Great Replacement theory advocates and you can become a tearful advocate for segregation. Awake and Sing (1935) is the title of a famed Depression era Clifford Odets play. Sing for what, is the question?

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

Emoluments

Scott Bessent showcasing Trump $250 bill

  
What is the relationship facts or data and emotion? Or is there any?  Gaslighting is the term used for the way politicians turn meanings upside down. Trump's self-described rhetorical device is "the weave." Today, deontology is not the lingua franca of discourse, even in institutions as august as the Supreme Court. Many of the justices regularly hand down decisions that are ideologically rather than legally or even ethically driven. Neither Alito nor Thomas seems to have shaken the yoke of MAGA politics--and it's a troubling form of behavior for which there is no precedent, ditto the White House's defiance of the emoluments clause of the constitution. Cryptocurrency is a perfect way to veil self-dealing, though many recent behaviors, such as the attempt to create a $250 bill with Trump's image on it, seem be taken as acts of defiance in and of themselves.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star