Class

Up until fairly recently, America had an upper class, composed of the descendants of robber barons or blue bloods who had come over on the Mayflower. Harriman, Roosevelt, Rockefeller are some examples. Like all elites self-preservation was high on the agenda. However, one could always depend on this Brahmin clan to defend democracy, in particular the constitution. America is now a populist meritocracy. Power is conferred on a few billionaires--Musk, Zuckerman,Thiel and Trump--by a dissatisfied majority that rails against a deep state.The very rich have become the proxies of the very poor. Much of this new wealth is a creation of the media. Trump and Murdoch both are products of their own infernal machine. The Murdochs are the stars of Succession, Trump of The Apprentice but these shows would never have come into existence without their personal narratives. Dallas is also a model. Politics is irrational. Someone like Trump presents the hope of a second coming. In essence democracy has democratically defeated democracy since the majority of Americans have responded to what is essentially a Super Bowl commercial—a commercial as powerful as Jim Jones’ Kool Aide.

read "Pet Buddha" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

and listen to "Twenty-Five Miles From Home" by Edwin Starr

Liar

It’s easier to lie than tell the truth. Truth telling is an art. There are many shades to truth. Lying is one dimensional, categorical and easy to handle. Also liars are charismatic.  Liars make everything simple, a matter of good and evil, black and white. Truth tellers waffle. The Pied Piper was a liar so was Iago. Cordelia told the truth. Look where that got her. Here’s a simple one that appeared in the news lately. Russia didn’t invade the Ukraine. The lie has been corrected on many occasions, but it miraculously has taken on a life of its own. Zekensky is arriving in Washington on Friday to pay the US for its services. Did the French and British reimburse the US for D-Day? While your at it, did Germany invade the Sudetenland in 1938 after Neville chamberlain had received assurances from Herr Hitler or was it the other way around? Did the Czechs invade Germany? Gaslighting is a form of lying in which the tables are turned. Try it the next time you get into an argument. Someone leaves you the $5 they owe on the kitchen table. When they ask if you got the $5, pocket the bill and say "no."

Overheard  on an Uptown 6:

Straphanger #1: "Donald Trump can suck my dick."

Straphanger #2: "Yeah, he's a fucking asshole."

Straphanger #3: "Fuck Trump!"

Straphanger #4: "Hochul's got balls."

Listen to "Make America Great Again" by Pussy Riot

Lillian Ross

In the100th anniversary issue of The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik relates that Ernest Hemingway was not unhinged by Lillian Ross’s unflattering portrait. Ross was no less harsh on her boss and lover William Shawn in her memoir, here but not here. But what about another famous portrait, that of the pseudonymous psychoanalyst in Janet Malcolm's The Impossible Profession? Gopnik remarks that "if Hemingway never took offense at Ross rendering, the analyst faithfully Freudian could never forgive Malcolm for hers." Objectivity is a ruse. You're often predisposed in one direction or another. History facilitates the comforting familiarity created by projection. So-called love really has little to do with the other in the presence of mutual longing. In fact desire is a hallucinogen called romanticism whose aura facilitates the consummation of the sexual act. Forget about the journalistic profile, the question is, what's one seeing in the hall of mirrors that psychoanalysis terms "transference? Jill Lepore's piece, "War of Words," about how The New Yorker's "writers and editors see one another" describes yet another form of human love.  

read "Pet Buddha" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

and listen to "Twenty-Five Miles From Home" by Edwin Starr

Pennywise and Pound Foolish

Pennywise 

The current administration is The Dark Force. Take a relatively small thing, the rescinding of “congestion pricing”—an initiative which almost immediately proved beneficial in terms of facilitating traffic flow in Manhattan. That came on the heels of Trump’s declaration that Zelensky not Putin is the dictator and that Russia never invaded Ukraine. Trump's gaslighting and rewriting of history—well it’s as if the president were going through the terrible two’s. If you inform him that clean energy works, he sticks out his tongue and says “drill baby drill.” In the face of a potentially serious bird flu pandemic, he appoints a vaccine skeptic to be secretary of health and human services. Elon Musk, chain in hand, with one of his 13 kids on shoulders as he trades favors with Modi at Blair House, is Pennywise the dancing clown of Stephen King's It. Many of Trump's actions would be comically mad were they not tragic--in particular the destruction of USAID. Then in one fell sloop, he eradicated NATO leaving Europe and the US perfect targets for today’s Axis  Iran, North Korea, China and Russia. The effects of the famed “Access Hollywood” outburst similarly made a mockery of women’s rights in one “executive order.” As part of its downsizing effort, DOGE let go some of the staff National Nuclear Safety Authority, which is charged with overseeing the United States's arsenal of weapons. The edict was rescinded. Just lucky they didn't need another hand on deck that day. 

listen to "Here Comes the Judge" by Pigmeat Markham (1968)

and read "Pet Buddha" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

The Polar Bear

mother bear and cubs sleeping

There was a point in the earth's history when the arctic and antarctic, the terrestrial poles symbolized the cold frozen expanse of eternity or infinity. In the meanwhile global warming is literally breaking the ice as far as the conversation about time is concerned. It’s all now a mish mash that’s lost its significance. Polar bears and seals seek to spare themselves from the destruction of the habitat which keeps them alive. Still the idea of forever, a cicerone of time that is timeless is alive and well in the cosmos where Einstein showed gravity warps space time and where magnificent displays of creation and destruction, dying stars or supernovae, offer a blinding efflorescence of light before they they suck everything into the ultimate embodiment of oblivion, the black hole.

read "Pet Buddha" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

and listen to "Twenty-Five Miles From Home" by Edwin Starr

Welcome to Vulgaria!

 

Vulgaria (environs)

Welcome to Vulgaria, a small province between Transylvania and Hungary (population to be determined). Naturally like most wannabe nation states, Vuigaria is a monarchy, ruled by the benevolently despotic Mistah HO. Anyone who posits this ruler’s name as an anagram citing a tumescent member will be sorely correct! Vulgarians are by temperament isolators. They neither defend nor attack anyone. It’s a live and let live place where abortion is forbidden except when it's permitted and where what you do with your body is everybody else’s business. It's a right to life society where the strong are allowed to take advantage of the weak until they get too tired to continue doing it. The rule of law is what citizens live by except when it’s not the right thing to do. Mistah HO has strengthened the executive branch to such an extent that anyone breaching authority will find themselves on the event horizon of a black hole. The love Mistah HO elicits from his followers is so strong he could walk down Fifth Avenue and kill somebody and everyone would gleefully cry out “the witch is dead.” Mistah HOOOO  is so cute! Women love him and allow him and all celebrities like him to grab their crotches. There is even a name for it, "crocheting." Enjoy your stay in Vulgaria but don’t try to be one of those fentanyl smuggling immigrants who have escaped from jails and mental institutions or you will find yourself on a plane in shackles on your way to the place where all the cat eaters of Springfield go—the all-inclusive  last resort, Guantanamo Bay.

read "Pet Buddha" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

and listen to "Twenty-Five Miles From Home" by Edwin Starr

Proliferation

Lucy

Proliferation not carbon or gravity is the essential property of life in earth. In fact earth imitated the macrocosm ie the Big Bang in which the infinity of the universe, created with both dark energy and dark matter, was unleashed. Bosons were the seed from which everything from inorganic matter to sentient life would be formed. Life on earth passed through many eras Mesozoic, Pliocene, Pleistocene to the present Cenozoic  period. Just think there were the hominids like the famed Lucy with a prehensile faculty that allowed for tool making, the Flintstones, the Aztecs The Etruscans, The Greeks, Alexander and Peter the Great.  You don’t need to believed in parallel universes to understand the effects of genetics and epigenetics on everything from one-celled paramesia to Eric Kandel's eels and Ray Kurzweil's "mindful machines."  

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

and listen to "Bernadette" by The Four Tops