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 

NC-65

Tokyo Story (1953)

You must be 65 or older to read this post, have you ever seen an old woman with a shopping cart approaching you on a sunny morning in June where youth is displaying its beauty and realized in a major insult to your being that you are in all probability older than her? And that your only recompense is to write about it, after the fact? You may remember Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953) about the older couple who feel they're no longer useful or wanted and even a burden. That's not you, you can be reassured. How to describe your state? Try superannuated.

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

Plinth

plinth from 2001: A Space Odyssey

Do you ever feel you’re about to be crushed by an all encompassing plinth out of Kubrick's 2001. Reality is both impenetrable and entrapping. Kafka envisioned the ideational form of such inelasticity in Before the Law. It is the absence of philosophical traction that epitomizes this Sisyphean state. The Sickness Unto Death, Fear and Trembling and The Concept of Anxiety are Kierkegaard's philosophical riptide. Binx Bolling the protagonist of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer calls his struggle against despair, "The Search." You are knocking your head up against a brick wall or facing the loneliness of the white canvas with its incipient mark or the empty page on which the first character has yet to be typed. 

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

Access Hollywood

 

“Macbeth hath murdered sleep.” DJT once said he could walk down Fifth Avenue and shoot people. That was back in the halycon days of Access Hollywood. Today the only way he could get down Fifth Avenue would be in an Abrams tank. Destruction has become the lingua Franca of conversation. Have you ever looked at someone with IPods, thinking at first than they’re one of those mad psychotics who were prematurely released from mental institutions? The product of MAHA politics is a race of people reliving personal attacks and the ripostes  they might have given to their opponents—who are like the title of the Phillip K Dick novel Ubik or everywhere.

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

Charon

Charon Forcing Sinner Into His Boat in The Divine Comedy (Gustave Dore)

One day when you're holding back, you realize it's almost over and there's soon going to be nothing that you have to protect yourself from anymore. It can be because either you or they have caught the famous ferry for which there are no roundtrip tickets. You also may find yourself in the predicament of wishing you had told the departed the thing you wanted to say or, having departed yourself, wishing you could tell someone still left back on the river's edge the self-same message Neither Western Union, nor Verizon, nor Google services that area.

July 20, 1944

Graf von Stauffenberg

Hitler's Wehrmacht officers failed in their plot and ended up being hung. However, one wonders it it would have made a difference, if history were fated to be otherwise--and the suitcase with the bomb hadn't been inadvertently moved away from the Fuhrer at the last moment. The July 20, 1944 assassination attempt by Stauffenberg at the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia was thwarted, but the attempt to put an end to the Nazi plan (which bears some similarity to Project 2025) went as far back as 1938. One dreams of this or that action changing the course of events, but Hitler couldn't have maintained his power, if he hadn't had the support of the populace, as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen pointed out in Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.

Routine

typewriter scene from The Shining

Routine is the great leveler. Sure you’ve met people who lead seemingly unstructured existences in which they’re buffeted by the winds of chance and fashion. You’ve undoubtedly been told to let go by someone who's critical of your determination. However maturation inevitably creates the need to perform and survive  For instance most jobs go from 9-5. A more precarious freelance existence ultimately requires work. Creativity, goes the old saw, is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration The insouciant type who was the monkey on your back may hide it under a devil-may-care veneer, but most people secretly end up living leading lives of quiet or not so quiet desperation--locked in the prison of what they are.

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

 

Sexuality

The subject comes up every few seconds. Have you ever pondered how many people are having sex at any part of the city, at any particular time of the day? And what kind? How many people are taking their clothes off in front of each other first the first time? Oh it’s just the human body? Really? Nudity is downplayed by those who decry objectification? But the fact is instincts are mediated by consciousness. Love is the way consciousness negotiates the shoals of desire. Still the attempt to disinfect sex, to make it antiseptic is Sisyphean with the avalanche of emotion that accompanies the visual and tactile nature of coitus or even just a kiss. Then there’s thought and its police.

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

CNN

The recent firing of Scott Pelli and several other well-known staff connected to Sixty Minutes is chilling. Paramount under David Ellison is playing up to Trump to secure the Warner Brothers merger. Add to that the demise of Colbert. The network cited earnings but that was a sorry excuse--the kind that's made when you don't care or simply want to destroy something that's in the way. The creation of a hugely wealthy class of American oligarchs with unregulated power, parallels the rise of Silicon Valley. Larry Ellison founded Oracle. There were robber barons at the end of the l9th Century. Their power was enormous, but the current cabal simply has exponentially more. Will CNN fire Wolf Spitzer or Christiane Amanpour? Will CNN go dark during a strike of employees? Or will there always be someone willing to pass the buck or take the baton. Power comes in all forms. People tell themselves all kinds of things. Undoubtedly there are members of congress who shook hands with the devil under the theory, better them than someone worse. Secretly they would rise up against Satan. The current Big Brother is more nefarious than Orwell's. He can be bought.

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

Shadow Play

Solipsism is the notion that all of reality is subjective. To Bishop Berkeley,  who said esse est percipi, "to be is to be perceived" nothing would exist without God--keeping the world in his mind's eye. The Matrix was based on the notion of the world as an inner state. Freud envisioned the mind as ego, superego and id, but these were names placed on functions that exist in some reality. In the absence of God, the solipsist finds himself blessedly freed from the notion of consequence. However, can one stand to live with the idea of nothingness? In a famous episode of the Twilight Zone, a condemned man, Dennis Weaver, pleads for his life. If he is executed, he argues, the world will disappear. This episode, "Shadow Play," season #2, episode 26, 1961 is arguably one of the greatest in the history of television. 

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

Rush Hour

If you’ve ever journeyed back to the past you’ve noted the “Do Not Disturb” signs. The idea is to leave everything as it was so that the future will fulfill its promise or more specifically exactly the world you, the time traveller, occupied before you left. Is there a divine or supernal touch in this iteration or is it consistent with the philosophy of cosmologists like stephen Hawking whose A Brief History of Time is the Baedeker for those challenging the l86,000 mile per hour speed limit—at which spacetime curves? Everything is as it’s supposed to be or it would be different is a calming spiritual saw that makes it sound like everything is part of god's plan and thus set in a divine kind of stone or marble. However, with the once unthinkable becoming  ever more possible—in a quantum universe--a whole new set of parking regulations and speed limits is needed to accommodate the imminent cosmological traffic jam.

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

The Maids at St. Ann's Warehouse

Kip Williams' adaptation of Genet's The Maids is extraordinary for both good and not so good reasons. What's not so good is its dazzling display of pyro-techniques. It a dog and pony show with flashing lights on a big screen in which Madam(Yerin Ha) is an influencer with millions of followers. You might criticize the production for being one big selfie, using an iPhone. The other side of the equation is that Genet's work is fundamentally a selfie, waiting to happen, as its primary stock is about identity and domination. The faces of the two maids Claire (Lydia Wilson) and Solange (Phia Saban) are explosive and the technology only amplifies the extraordinary feats of acting, in particular, the massive outcry of words, tumbling out of, at times, garishly painted mouths. One is reminded of Billie Whitelaw's famous mouth in Beckett's Not I.  The ending is also a question mark. Genet is a so-called absurdist playwright and the director pays homage to that by reinterpreting the finale as the end of the world. It's one of those Mad Max movies in which the characters negotiate a desecrated landscape, leaving all their frenetic attempts to be on top, as empty, hopeless attempts to fill the void.