Fashion Neurosis

 

Imagine hooking up with someone only to find an ATM in their bedroom. “I like sex. Why shouldn’t I be paid for it?” Is your partner a sex worker?  It's unlikely you'll find a cash machine in an analyst’s office, but it’s not totally inapropos considering the expensive fees charged by by Park Avenue and Central Park West practitioners of what Janet Malcom termed “the impossible profession.” Monetizing psychiatry may sound callous. After all the brain, which tackles emotion, is not an appendix. Group is one way your shrink may apply economy of scale to your encounter. Imagine a handsome elegant couch like the one you see in Freud’s Vienna office at Berggasse 19 accompanied by one of those appliances you find in a supermarket which sucks in your bills and shoots back the change. Freud's great granddaughter, Bella, hosts a podcast entitled "Fashion Neurosis" and while you're at it, see "Dress, Dreams and Desire: Psychoanalysis and Fashion" at FIT.

read the Italian translation of Erotomania by Francis Levy (translator Franco Malanima), Articoli Liberi

read "Enjambment of Fallen Men" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

also read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy in Kirkus. 

White

"White on White" by Kazimir Malevich (1918)

Kandinsky wrote “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”--which was about color.  Franz Kline established a b&w style of abstraction. Dreams are color blind. “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat” is Oliver Sacks’ vade mecum of neurological anomalies (he was the Dr Johnson of mental disorders). White on the spectrum is the presence of all color and black is usually considered the absence. However white is a singularity—since it cites a being that is before the coordinates of time and space which the average artist attempts to navigate. Being and Time, Sein und Zeit is the Heidegger tome. Is white the ether preceding creation of all matter? “The Whiteness of the Whale” is chapter 42 of Moby Dick. Dark energy posits the universe is loosing its luminescence due to the growing distance between bodies, but besides consciousness the biggest mystery of perception is white.

read "Enjambment of Fallen Men" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

also read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy in Kirkus. 

Respectability

Is respectability only a social matter or condition? There are certain people held up as paragons of virtue  and historically others you warn your kid to stay away from—like the nasty old hermit at the end of the road. Virtue signaling is something that creates suspicion. Deeds are one way that people attain status, another is birth. On an individual level one achieves pride in one’s being, a feeling that derives from behavior in the world, ethics. There is a tradition of impudence carried on by those who rebel against norms. George Simenon and other infamous philanderers including Wilt Chamberlain who wore a fur covered in seals noses and boasted of having slept with a 1000 women create a topsy-turvy world in which what is bad is good. You get your stripes on the basis of how naughty you are. Utilitarians believe that the good is defined by what makes one happy. "All I'm asking for is a little respect when I come home," sings Otis Redding.

read "Enjambment of Fallen Men" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

also read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy in Kirkus. 

One Battle After Another

The first thing one might remark seeing bizarre cast of revolutionaries and their right wing counter-revolutionary counterparts in Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another is how familiar they seem. The Battle of Algiers has a cameo but this is a new form, surreal cinema vérité. "Ghetto" Pat Calhoun (Leonardo Di Caprio) and "Jungle Pussy" (Shayana McHale) are part of French 75. "Colonel Lockjaw" (Sean Penn) is "reverse raped" by "Perfidia Beverly Hills" (Teyana Taylor). Then there is The Christmas Club, a proto Project 2025, composed of Steven Miller, Russell Voigt  Michael Flynn and Steve Bannon type characters. All of this may recall Dr. Strangelove, with "Jack D. Ripper" (Sterling Hayden), "Major King Kong" (Slim Pickens) and Peter Sellers in the title role. The movie navigates a fine line between drama and parody and is also inadvertently a parody of itself. Sean Penn will undoubtedly receive an Academy Award nomination for his tour de force performance. Similar to Strangelove, One Battle After Another, which is based on Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, is a tone poem as it switches from bizarre cartoons to photojournalistic realities. The cages in the migrant detention camps and the rioting in the streets are  all newsworthy. The director's brilliance lies in his enduring ability, in The Master, Phantom Thread and this current release, to create worlds that are and are not of this world.

read "Enjambment of Fallen Men" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Memory

Yom Kippur is a holiday of remembrance. Yizkor the first service is often attended by mourners—though by definition everyone is a mourner. "Kaddish," the prayer for the dead is a poem by Allen Ginsberg. The greatest work about memory A La Recherche du Temps Perdu was written by someone  whose mother was Jewish. Nabokov’s Speak, Memory is the title of his autobiography.  Judaism is not alone. The Tibetan Book of the Dead influenced Gaspar Noe’s Into the Void in which the central consciousness is a dead soul. Dead Souls is the Gogol masterpiece. Then there is the architecture of death the necropolis and the practice of the mortician. Charon takes his passengers on their final voyage across the Lethe—the river of forgetfulness.

read "Enjambment of Fallen Men" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Tenacity

Tenacity is a labile quality. It’s invaluable if you're competing in a tournament, but it can easily turn you into a pariah. Social capital is a requirement for exercising what the Japanese call Bunraku or  non-quitting spirit. If you are not a desired commodity then you are a pest if you don’t skiddaddle. However like everything there is a graduated cylinder which tells you whether your glass is half full. A stranger who has something to offer may find their perseverance rewarded. Then there is lust, the lingua franca of all social intercourse. Sexual attraction exerts an almost gravitational pull as does charisma. Willfulness is required, but not in the perverse doses that can result in ostracism. 

read "Enjambment of Fallen Men" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Anarchy

 

WB Yeats

Anarchism has replaced democracy, but it’s more mental condition than political philosophy, Bovine spongiform encephalopathy is the human form of mad cow. "Unitary Executive Theory" is a prime tenet of Federalism. The Supreme Court has ruled in favor of Presidential Immunity. Why? The roots ultimately derive from the notions of monarchy and dynasticism—that Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke, Hume and Hobbes discountenanced. Hobbes in particular held that human appetite needs to be checked. The violation of the notion of "the emoluments clause" by the current administration is a just one example of unchecked balances.

read "Enjambment of Fallen Men" by Francis Levy in The East Hampton Star