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