War Babies: Prophets of Peace

 This article was originally published in the Toronto Star, Sunday 12/29/2019

-- By Tom Phillips

Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, c.1963

The 1960's turn sixty in 2020, with their meaning and value still in hot dispute. It might help to divide the decade in two; the first half peace and love, the last fear and loathing. Still, in both phases, the Sixties were an age of prophecy.

Bob Dylan sang “The answer is blowin’ in the wind.”  Simon and Garfunkel saw “the words of the prophets written on the subway walls.”  New voices came out of nowhere, and found rapt listeners in the massive generation born after World War Two, the baby boomers. 

The prophets were not boomers themselves.  They were the big brothers and sisters of the boomers, the relatively small generation born during the war.  As elders, they knew from an early age that their voices would be heard. And they knew the world they were born into was not fit for future generations. Children of war, they became prophets of peace.  

Butoh a la Vangeline

"Hijikata Mon Amour"
Vangeline
NY Butoh Institute Festival 2019
Theater for the New City, New York
October 26, 2019

-- By Tom Phillips
                                               

Japan and France have long been yoked together by their mutual obsession with each others' elegant style. The US and Japan are connected forever by the atom bomb. "Hijikata Mon Amour" is a Triboro bridge connecting those three cultures, and -- in the subversive, twisted way of Butoh -- an attack on all of them.
                                         
                                                 Photo by Matthew Placek 

Puppet Love at Lincoln Center

Sonezaki Shinju (The Love Suicides at Sonezaki)
Sugimoto Bunraku Puppet Theater
Rose Theater, Lincoln Center, New York
October 19, 2019

-- By Tom Phillips                                                                                                                                                           

"The Love Suicides at Sonezaki," which opened Lincoln's Center's White Light Festival last night, tells the tale of a young Osaka shop clerk and a teenage prostitute, who kill themselves rather than face life apart. It was banned in Japan in 1723 after a wave of copycat love suicides, and not performed again until 1955. The US premiere of this production showed us nothing so much as the chasm between the worlds of 18th-century Japan and 21st-century America.

That said, tribute must be paid to the brilliance of these Japanese puppeteers, practicing an art unknown in the West. Disappearing inside black shrouds, they work in teams of two or three to manipulate half-size human forms around the stage. The puppets' faces and hands are immobile, so it is just with body language -- subtle movements of the limbs, head and torso -- that they show an astonishing range of emotions: erotic passion, anguish, anxiety, rage, indignation both phony and real, amazement, disappointment, despair, and on and on: there's nothing humans feel that these wooden figures can't express. 

Where Butoh Lives

-- By Tom Phillips

Melissa Lohman -- "Vessel and Void" 

Butoh is an art form that rose from the ruins of the atomic bombing of Japan -- an event that recalled the Big Bang at the beginning of time, and presaged the Resurrection of the Dead.   Both the beginning and the end were evoked last night at the second annual New York Butoh Institute Festival. 

This year’s festival features 14 performers – all female – from all over the world.  While Butoh is a Japanese art form, it lacks the strict formal traditions of Kabuki or Noh theatre. Instead it has a spirit, available to any culture that has survived destruction.  New York, which constantly destroys and rebuilds itself, is an ideal venue.

Melissa Lohman’s opening solo “Vessel and Void” was a New Yorker’s take on the Beginning – when a light shone in the darkness, and became flesh.  In an empty black space with a spotlight above, she lay white and prone on a what looked like a thick black duffel bag, over which she humped and crawled until she was seated on the floor and it was standing on its end like a thick black phallus.  Rising to her feet, showing mostly her back and sides, she made much of the body’s bilateral symmetry. The two columns of her back rose and fell independently like climbers on Jacob’s Ladder, to the sound of a single column of air, something like a Japanese bamboo flute. Her minimal script repeated the polarity of something and nothing – asking “what is this?” Toward the end her movements became more expansive and playful, and the score switched to what sounded like wind chimes – again columns of air but with a greater incidence of chance and play.  This was a creation story without a fall, a dance of mischief and joy. Bowing at the end, she patted her duffel like a fellow performer. Thanks, bro.

A Saint for the Middle Classes

-- By Tom Phillips

Mother Teresa shrine, Kochi

Forty years ago, when I first went to India, it was a poor country -- full of homeless beggars, subsistence farmers at the mercy of rains and floods, and enormous shantytowns on the edges of cities. Children died in the streets and the general attitude was -- there's nothing to be done, it's their karma. That was mainstream religious thought in India, but in this desperate environment appeared a saint, a high-powered woman who believed differently, and convinced India and the world to follow her. Mother Teresa from Albania brought her radical Christian mission of blessing the poor to a poor nation that actually takes religion seriously.  It took her in and made her a national hero, a symbol of India's dynamism, creativity, and potential for miracles.

Forty years later, this fall, I went back to India and saw miracles. That wretchedly poor country has become a middle-class economic powerhouse, leaping ahead in communications and technology, catching up fast in infrastructure and amenities.  In three weeks in India, I saw fewer beggars than I would have on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. And I saw things undreamt of in 1978:  Toyota  cars, movie stars, 5-star hotels, Pepsi vs. Coke, subways, and a state-of-the art airport (Cochin) run entirely on solar power.

Material success hasn't killed religion, though. Here there is practically no separation between church and state, and very little between heaven and earth. Every morning before the rooster crows, temples, mosques and churches are broadcasting their calls to worship.  Hindu gods are household icons, media celebrities, cult figures with chanting fans. And in this vibrant spiritual environment India has a new saint: for the poor, and for the middle classes too.

Amma on Tour 

The world knows her as Amma. She was born in a poor fishing village in India's western coastal state of Kerala, the site of her international ashram today. At the age of nine, it's said, she began giving hugs to strangers, prompting her father to throw her out of the house. To date she has hugged nearly 35 million people around the world, including me. Like Mother Teresa she runs a world-wide organization providing food, shelter, health care, and disaster relief to the poor.  But her ministry of hugs also has a special appeal to the middle class.

India Ink #3: Merry Christians

-- by Tom Phillips

Syrian cross in lotus

In a "A Passage to India," E.M. Forster describes a Hindu festival re-enacting the birth of Lord Krishna.  This includes a game in which the nobles of the state slide pats of butter down their noses, only to have them stolen and eaten by each other.  "By sacrificing good taste," he writes, Hindu worship "has achieved what Christianity has shirked: the inclusion of merriment."

Forster never mentions Indian Christianity, but here in the south Indian state of Kerala it is a prominent faith. Tradition holds that the Apostle Thomas sailed to Kerala in 51 CE and converted Hindus to the Way.  And to this day, many of these Christians have kept up their Hindu customs.

 This was the procession after Sunday's feast day  at St. Joseph's Syrian Catholic Church in Allapuzha -- even more colorful and noisy than the local Hindu festival.

Those umbrellas are not a sign or symbol, they're just for beauty and fun. Hindu tradition is full of these, and so is its Christian offshoot in India.

Praise God and pass the butter!

-- Copyright 2019 by Tom Phillips

India Ink: Jaipur Comes in Color

-- By Tom Phillips

Street sweeper, Jaipur

Everyone in Jaipur is either buying or selling, bargaining or begging. This capital of Rajastan's jewelry, textile and clothing industries is the most commercial city I've ever seen.  At this point, words like "crass" may occur to the American reader -- but Jaipur is anything but crass.

My Passage to India

-- by Tom Phillips

Just last year on the Road to Dotage, I began a Tour of Fear -- to places I've always  been too scared to visit.  My road to Germany was a revelation -- seeing how a great civilization can renew itself, even after a descent into Hell.

My next planned destination was Texas, the land of big hats, big hair, big boots and big shots. When I worked as a TV newswriter, many of the network anchormen were Texans, and I've always been afraid to go to a place where such personalities are the norm.

Once I was working with a well-known Texan anchorman in New York, when he came across an AP  story about the "hippest cities" in America. "NEW YORK!" he cried in disbelief. "New York is not the hippest city in America!"

Timidly, I inquired what city he thought was most hip.  He looked at me as if I ought to know.
"Why, FORT WORTH!"

I'm probably not hip enough to appreciate Fort Worth. So this year, in a detour, I'm going back to a place I've been, but one where a westerner always carries a frisson of fear.

In 1978 I spent two months in India, traveling with a fellow seeker after truth and adventure -- Arnold "Rusty" Glicksman.  Each of us has written a memoir in which that trip plays a life-changing part.  (Rusty's is still unpublished -- watch for it.)  In a few days, right after Labor Day, we're going back.

Rusty's red hair is white now, and he is winding down the jewelry-making business he's had since the 1980s, with gold and stones he buys in Rajasthan.  I'll spend a few days with him in Jaipur, and then head out for adventures in new places.  First to the Caves of Ellura and Ajanta, ancient temples carved out of moutainsides, with some of the finest and best-preserved religious sculpture in the world.  My must-see deity is a reclining Buddha carved in a wall.

According to legend, the Buddha didn't sleep -- his mind was so clear that he had no need to knit up "the ravel'd sleave of care."  He would just lie down and rest for a few hours.

My other most-desired deity is this sexy female in Ellura. Though present-day India suffers from a hangover of Victorian prudery -- kissing in public is still a crime -- its gods and goddesses cavort freely with one another and love every kind of sexual pleasure.

How I wish I could rest like the Buddha, and romp like Lord Krishna with his consort Radha!

That was back in the Axial Age, when human wisdom and vision reached its zenith.  I'm touring today's troubled world, and India is no exception.  Still, with God all things are possible.

More later, God willing.

-- Copyright 2019 by Tom Phillips

(Originally published on my other blog, The Road to Dotage.)

Mormons for Truth

-- By Tom Phillips

"We Are Africa!" 

Well, we finally did it. After years of my staring at the stratospheric ticket prices for "The Book of Mormon" on Broadway, the cost came down a bit, so in these latter days I splurged $300 on two tickets for our 40th wedding anniversary.

I'll refrain from a review,  because it's already been endlessly reported that this is a great show, a hilarious send-up of the Mormon religion with dazzling song and dance numbers, a tribute to the young performers from everywhere who keep Broadway bursting with theatrical talent. My favorite song was "We Are Africa!" performed by an all-white, clean-cut corps of Mormon missionaries in a fictional version of Uganda.

Still, what I really loved about the show is that it aims its sharpest satire not at religion but at the real enemy of the truth -- the evil empire of Walt Disney. Many people are not aware of the extent to which Disney has taken over Broadway theater, turning it into a kind of Disney World in Gotham. Disney's corporate creative department churns out plastic productions and formulaic sequels for the tourist trade -- reducing classics like "Mary Poppins" or "Beauty and the Beast" to the tritest of thoughts and the most obvious emotions. If this is what people are taking home, theater has lost its function of renewing the mind.

Rolling Thunder

-- By Tom Phillips

If you've ever wondered about the mysterious reverence people born in the 1940s and 50s have for their contemporary Bob Dylan, you owe it to yourself to see Martin Scorsese's Bob Dylan Story -- "The Rolling Thunder Revue." This is Dylan and his crew at their  most intense and powerful -- calling out the changes in America and actually making them happen. To see Bobby drop everything in mid-tour, visit the falsely convicted boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter in prison,  pound out the story of the Hurricane, convince CBS Records executives to put it out, and then sing it in closeup with his teeth clenched, eyes flashing, face masked in white, trading lines with the sphinx-like fiddler Scarlet Rivera, locked in to a song of howling protest -- ashamed/ to live in a land where justice is a game! --and then to see the delight on Rubin Carter's face, his amazed satisfaction with this eloquent new not-guilty plea, is to see what art in America is capable of. 

Hub of the Universe

-- By Tom Phillips

After sixty years of puzzlement, I finally get it. The cartwheel logo of the Boston Bruins, with a capital B at the center, refers to Boston’s traditional nickname, the Hub. I talked to five Bostonians and to my surprise, none of them knew this.  This gives me the courage to analyze Boston for them.

I’ve been trying to understand this place since my first visit in 1952, when I was ten. My father brought me up from the New York suburbs to see a Red Sox game at Fenway Park. I was excited to see Kenmore Square, which I envisioned as something like Times Square. Nothing prepared us for its sepulchral drabness. After two days in Boston my father concluded -- "This is a small town."

It still is, but not like any other small town. As the Hub, it is the biggest small town of ten thousand small towns that make up New England civilization. The wheel is not geographical but conceptual – showing the place Boston occupies not on the map of New England, but in its mind.  

White Noise: Overheard at the Biennial

-- By Tom Phillips

Nicholas Galanin: "White Noise: American Prayer Rug" 

Writers who cover Art are much more glamorous than we ordinary journalists; I noticed lots of leather and leopard-skin on women at the Whitney Biennial press preview.  (Faux, naturellement, but  expensive.) Two scribes were chatting in the row behind me as we awaited the news conference.  I didn't turn around, but took these notes: 

Says the one:  You know, I skipped the War-hole (Warhol) show.  I skipped it because I just don't like him. It seems to me he represents all that's worst about us -- the commercialism, the celebrity, sensationalism. Enough of War-hole, I say, let's move on!

Her friend agrees heartily, calling Andy Warhol the "father of Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst." They move on. Says the one:   

-- Someone asked me to write an article about art collecting. I don't want to do it because I don't believe in collecting art.  

Says her friend:  But you're a collector yourself!

-- Oh no, I'm not a collector.  I inherited most of my art.  I mean, if I see something I like and there's room on my wall -- which there isn't! -- I'll buy it.  But that's not collecting.  

Her daughter is a senior at an ultra-prestigious Ivy League college, where she's working on the student newspaper. She told her mother she was thinking of going into journalism. Her mom's  reaction: 

-- I told her, I said:  Over my dead body are you going into journalism!

 Just sayin' ... 

--- Copyright 2019 by Tom Phillips

Curran Hatleberg: "Dominoes" 

Biennial Buzz

2019 Whitney Biennial
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
May 14, 2019 
-- By Tom Phillips 
Copyright 2019 by Tom Phillips

      "Stick," by Simone Leigh, "Incoming," by Keegan Monaghan  

Neck-deep in controversy before it even started, the 79th Whitney Biennial opened this weekend, promising a “snapshot of contemporary art-making in America.” The exhibit showcases emerging young artists, and lifts up the poor and marginalized, in the art world and American society. It also exhibits the museum's own contradictions.  

Exhibit A is a film about anti-personnel weapons that are  manufactured and sold by a director of the museum. Warren B. Kanders is CEO of Safariland, which sells tear gas canisters and other weapons to police departments and governments including the US. The film by Laura Poitras unveils a technology that can track the use of these weapons – and did when they were used by US troops against asylum-seekers at the Mexican border. Safariland’s new tear-gas product “Triple Chaser” works like a cluster-bomb, breaking into three pieces when it hits the ground. The film details the effects of the gas on its victims – as well as the bloody effects of bullets the company sells to the Israeli army, which fired them against Palestinians charging the border fence at Gaza.

Kanders says he is “not the problem” and has resisted calls for his resignation or ouster. To him, the problem is rioters and demonstrators endangering the police and soldiers who “keep us safe.”  But who exactly is “us?”  The exhibit as a whole identifies with the poor, people of color, the excluded and rejected -– and artists, struggling to survive in an art world so deeply implicated in the politics of privilege and oppression.

A few impressions from a fast preview:

A symmetrical bronze sculpture by Simone Leigh: a stylized black woman atop a ballooning skirt, bristling with black metal spikes. She’s black, beautiful, permanent, fortified.

"Dominoes" 

A series of back-country and inner-city photographs by Curran Hatleberg showing the resilience of the poor, comfort amid squalor. Politics be hanged, these people say, let’s play dominoes, crawl over a broke-down truck, fool with a snake, sit by the river and smoke.

An animated cartoon of NFL football scenes that shows pity for everyone -- players kneeling at the national anthem, others standing defiant or doubt-filled, soldiers venerating the flag, the band playing on, schlumpy photographers recording the historic muddle.

An old-fashioned ringing telephone, painted in old-fashioned oils by Keegan Monaghan, ambiguously titled: “Incoming.”

The biggest, loudest statement in the show is a zombie-like outdoor "Procession" by Nicole Eisenman.  Its ruined slaves and captives made me think of a Fourth of July parade in the Hell we're headed for.

But the signature piece, to me, was one with a quieter irony: a large woven rug by American Indian artist Nicholas Galanin simulating a TV screen without a signal – nothing but “snow.” He calls it “White Noise: American Prayer Rug."     

White noise, black lives, zombies on parade, and the Gordian knot of oppression paying for the art  that rails against it. It’s impossible to take a snapshot of America, the field of vision is too wide. But curators Ru Hockney and Jane Panetta combed the countryside to try to get the sweep of it. The result is broad, inclusive, gutsy, fresh, real.

It runs through September 22 at the Whitney.

-- \Photographs by Tom Phillips

"White Noise: American Prayer Rug" 

Beatledom without the Beat

"Pepperland"
Mark Morris Dance Group 
Brooklyn Academy of Music
May 11, 2019

-- By Tom Phillips

"Pepperland" 

Great artists know where they shouldn't go.
George Balanchine, for example, never choreographed to Beethoven, because he said Beethoven's works were complete in themselves, nothing to add.  Mark Morris could have used that kind of discernment when he accepted a commission for a 50^th-anniversary tribute to the Beatles’ masterpiece “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” The resulting “Pepperland” is an uncharacteristically shallow work that does worse than add nothing. It subtracts much of the album's best content -- no Lucy, no Rita! -- for original segments by composer Ethan Iverson that have only fleeting connections to the Beatles. Beyond that, the whole project completely misses the spirit and style of "Sgt. Pepper."

---

The Morris troupe has perfected a casual, communal style of ensemble dancing that celebrates relationships, particularly those among its dancers, who typically spend many years collaborating until their movements and mannerisms meld into each others'. This is almost a Platonic ideal of society transformed by dance. Unfortunately, it is completely at odds with the content of “Sgt. Pepper,” which brings to life a gallery of misfits and loners pursuing fantastical dreams. Morris might have reached his Platonic ideal in response to Sgt. Pepper's loneliness. But to get there he would have to walk his company through descending levels of Hell, like Virgil leading Dante. And this he would not do.

“Pepperland” begins with a promising gesture: a tight circle of dancers opens out from the center of the stage, unspooling like the grooves of an LP record. But the imaginary world the Beatles created on that disk, the psychedelic trance of “Lucy in the Sky,” the stuck-in-a-groove frustration of “Getting Better,” the narcissistic self-pity in “She’s Leaving Home,” the loopy frustration of “Lovely Rita,” and most of all the thunderous moral critique of “A Day in the Life” are all absent or caramelized into playful, sentimental pas de deux.

“When I’m 64” is a three-ring clown circus, full of gawky leaps and flopping around in groups, but the comic pathos of "will you still feed me?" is unfelt. The only song this work seems to take seriously is George Harrison’s eastern meditation “Within You Without You,” lamenting the “the space between our souls.” Harrison echoes the theme of "Sgt. Pepper" but his lyrics lack the bite of Lennon and McCartney’s –- a problem the Beatles solved by isolating this cut at the beginning of Side Two, and following it with a laugh track. Morris makes it central to “Pepperland,” with a crossed-legged dancer meditating center stage.

As for the sound: One of the Beatles' great innovations in popular music was the import of classical elements, most strikingly the harpsichord and string passages composed by producer George Martin. Still the Fab Four were fundamentally a rock band, inspired by American Rhythm-and-Blues and its solid, gritty core. Composer Iverson ignores the roots and embraces the refinements. His arrangements play around with Beatle tunes but excise their soul, banishing the thumping beat of rock for a light, airy, often atonal classical-jazz. The dancing follows the music -- predominantly classic-jazzy, with character shoes and a lot of ballet steps.  Morris makes it flow with his weaving, looping moves for shifting groups of dancers. Very charming as always, but it looks more like a tribute to Balanchine than the Beatles.

“Pepperland” is a place Mark Morris should never have gone. And if you love "Sgt. Pepper" as complete in itself, neither should you.


-- Copyright 2019 by Tom Phillips

Parable of the Plant Kingdom

"Estado Vegetal" 
Manuela Infante 
Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York 
May 3, 2019

-- By Tom Phillips 

In medical Spanish, "Estado Vegetal" means a vegetative state, where basic life functions go on but consciousness and thought are lost. Politically, a "Vegetative State" could mean rule by the plant kingdom. This intense theatrical piece, starring a young Chilean woman and an array of potted plants, suggests such a state is exactly where humanity is headed.

Dirty Dancing

"One. One & One"
Vertigo Dance Company 
Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York
March 6, 2019
-- By Tom Phillips 

Except for a neat row of dirt at the front of the stage, the opening section of “One. One & One” by Israel’s Vertigo Dance Company looks much like the closing elegy of George Balanchine’s “Serenade.” It’s a solemn communal idyll, to sonorous cellos in a minor key, with a motif of dancers leaning on each other for balance and support. They seem to be a close-knit group, working out complex tasks together –- as when three men braid the hair of a woman while she uses her long tresses to pull them across the stage.

The communal spirit stays as more dirt is spread in the rectangular, closed space. But the mood changes suddenly with the sound of a cannonade -- big guns, firing in the distance. After that, the dirt and the dancers start to fly, and the communal idyll is transformed into what looks like an army boot camp, whipping troops into combat readiness. The motif here is “bring it on,” with dancers lining up on each side of the stage and charging at their opposite numbers, trying to breach their defenses. Every charge is repelled!

So much for “Serenade.”  This looks more like socialist realism, the kind of state-sponsored art that Balanchine came to America  to get away from. And if it reminds you of the modern history of Israel, as seen by the State of Israel, that’s just what it looked like to me.