Armageddon

photo: The Daily Beast

The eBible Fellowship predicted the world would end with the Final Judgement on October 7, 2015 Turns out they weren't far off, considering that Hamas unleashed their attack on Israel 8 years later. Donald Trump is The Anti-Christ whose technique is gaslighting. As he threatens election workers, he paints himself as the defender of democracy. One of the platforms of his ticket is retribution against all his enemies. The screams of the Grand Inquisitor, Tomas de Torquemada's victims are woven into historical memory. BTW this is truly the Dark Ages in case you haven't noticed, pandemic=plague, crusades=Mideast crisis. Remember Bergman's The Seventh Seal, where the Knight plays chess against Death? What tortures will Trump inflict on his opponents? Nancy Pelosi's husband had his head bashed in. Will Biden be hung by the same mob from which Mike Pence was barely spared? ISIS is the paradigm of millenarian revolt which has spread throughout the Middle East. Liberation through Armageddon. Let the world go up in flames so that Zionists and other infidels may die. Iran is a different kettle of fish (or sharks). It lobs missiles at Israel after Hezbollah, its terrorist proxy, is shuttered. So what is there to look forward to? Israel destroys Iran's oil fields which allows fuel prices to skyrocket in turn allowing Bibi Netanyahu to put his Trumpian Anti-Christ back in power. The new axis is Russia, China and North Korea who all go to war with NATO over Israeli and the Ukraine. This result is as close as you'll get to a Brueghel or Bosch imagination of the end of the world.

read "An Incident of Defenestration" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Armageddon (Not the Movie)

The Grand Inquisitor, Tomas de Torquemada

The eBible Fellowship predicted the world would end with the Final Judgement on October 7, 2015 Turns out they weren't far off, considering that Hamas unleashed their attack on Israel 8 years later. Donald Trump is The Anti-Christ whose technique is gaslighting. As he threatens election workers, he paints himself as the defender of democracy. One of the platforms of his ticket is retribution against all his enemies. The screams of the Grand Inquisitor, Tomas de Torquemada's victims are woven into historical memory. What tortures will Trump inflict on his opponents? Nancy Pelosi's husband had his head bashed in. Will Biden be hung by the same mob from which Mike Pence was barely spared? ISIS is the paradigm of millenarian revolt which has spread throughout the Middle East. Liberation through Armageddon. Let the world go up in flames so that Zionists and other infidels may die. Iran is a different kettle of fish (or sharks). It lobs missives at Israel after Hezbollah, its terrorist proxy, is shuttered. So what is there to look forward to? Israel destroys Iran's oil fields which allows fuel prices to skyrocket in turn allowing Bibi Netanyahu to put his Trumpian Anti-Christ back in power. The new axis is Russia, China and North Korea who all go to war with NATO over Israeli and the Ukraine. This result is pretty close to a Brueghel or Bosch imagination of the end of the world.

read "An Incident of Defenestration" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Megalopolis

Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis is a nightmare superimposed on reality. New Rome, the bustling metropolis, is not the hedonic ancient world of Caligula nor the future but a deadly version of the present. It's a fable (the directors own word) Coppola style, a Gesamptkunstwerk in which a cinema legend pulls out all the punches for what is stated to be his last go round. Apocalypse Now would have been a good description of January 6 which is one of major obsessions of Megalopolis, which is is also a swan song for a generation of cinema legends from Lawrence Fishburne, to Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voigt. The movie is also a mess of operatic proportions. When you hear "to be or not to be," quoted by Adam Driver, the film's. visionary Ayn Rand style architect, you at first think it's a joke. Then you realize it's serious when "this is the stuff that dreams are made on" is tossed off. And what about the leaden dialogue itself? It's as if the screenplay had cotton in its mouth. No sign of the masterful transactions that characterized The Godfathers and almost every other film Coppola laid his hands on.  One can't help noting the allusion to Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927). It's interesting though that this metropolis is not really visionary. Rather it's post-apocalyptic and ragged in a Mad Max kind of way. The sets look like they've been hit by a hurricane. One scene in the major's office desk is sinking into sand. This is more than an imperfect world.  Is the film's dreamlike quality the message (as in Taumnovella, the Schnizler work on which Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut   (1999) was based or a byproduct of Megalopolis' own flaws?

listen to "Marc Antony's Funeral Oration" by Lord Buckley

Depression

 

Pinocchio by Enrico Mazzanti

Over 333.3 million American are depressed. That’s more than the entire population or over one for every 333.3 million people. Depressions are also holes or dropping points in an otherwise flat surface, but that's a matter that has little to do with the mental health of the citizens of this country. Lot of people have addressed depression but if everyone suffers from it, then it's no longer an anomaly. Imagine a population of people who all suffered from psychosis and were delusional. Normalizing any state of mind confers a legitimacy on it. If we all think there are gremlins outside the window, then that becomes the reality. It's unbearably simplistic to carry this argument into the political sphere where lying has become the lingua franca and the Big Lie about the 2020 election is accepted by MAGA Republicans as a form of scientific truth--but here you go. 

listen to "Marc Antony's Funeral Oration" by Lord Buckley

and listen to "Rapper's Delight"by The Sugarhill Gang

#MeToo Redux

Akhmatova by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin

Not to equate Harvey Weinstein with Akhmatova. But the worst excesses of #MeTooism are tantamount to the Stalinist purges--only worse, since no one speaks up when an editor of The New York Review of Books is recused for allowing a Canadian journalist to defend himself against the accusations against him. Only a Screaming Pope can get away with saying these things since "they" have nothing to lose. Here is a quote from Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station. "Salomon Maimon, in the century before, had tried to reconcile rabbinical philosophy with Kant. Karl Marx, also a teacher in the Jewish tradition, but not quite free of the Judaic system and with all the thought of Western thought at his disposal, was to play an unprecedented role as a leader in the modern world." Remember Philip Roth's "Defender of the Faith?" Here is a lovely non-sequitur from Meyer Schapiro, "Hipsterism is Hasidism without God."

read "Making the Graphic Novel Graphic" by Francis Levy, Vol.1 Brooklyn

and listen to "Boogaloo Down Broadway" by Johnny C

Cat Person

Was Trump inspired by the hit musical Cats when he accused the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio of eating Pets? Perhaps he's a lover of the T.S. Eliot's "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" or Kristen Roupenian's NewYorker short story, "Cat Person," which became a cri de coeur of the #MeToo movement. Trump notoriously talked about how famous guys like himself can do anything they want and grab women's genitals in between killing pedestrians with impunity on their way down Fifth Avenue. It's not much of a leap from adult cats to pussies. So it turns out that Trump and Vance both will be deported with all the Haitians due to what their onerous eating habits. Trump has said he will solve the whole Ukraine problem lickety split upon being reelected. He should eat crow.

read the starred review of Francis Levy's The Kafka Studies Department in Booklife

and listen to "Can You Feel It?" by The Jacksons

Yorick

A skeleton key opens many doors, but what about a skeleton crew? And what about the skeletons in your closet. If you're not cremated, you'll quickly become a skeleton, but if you get on a Keto diet or take Ozempic, you won't have to wait to hear people say you look like one. Indeed there are those who would rather drop dead or look like it then get fat. Model is a  interesting word in this regard since it refers to a condition one would look up to. You model your behavior on someone's. A model is like a clothes horse in which garments are hung. Hamlet stares at the remains of Yorick's skull in pointing to the ultimate condition of man--which is non-existence whether one is a skeleton or not--"death, the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns."

read "An Incident of Defenestration" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

and listen to "Boogaloo Down Broadway" by Johnny C