Sunday, December 27, 2020

Trash Talk of 2020: The Year in Quotes

-- By Tom Phillips 


2020 was an epic year for news, but not for noble speeches. The Quotes of the Year were more like the oaths of warriors in combat: bravado, trash talk, mayday calls, dying gasps and pleas for mercy.     

What they said: 

"It is what it is.."  Donald Trump on August 31, downplaying US deaths from Covid-19 ".. because you are what you are."  Joe Biden, blaming him in the first presidential debate September 29.

“I can’t breathe.”  George Floyd, as he lay dying under the knee of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin May 25.  When Biden was declared president-elect November 7, CNN commentator Van Jones broke down on camera, weeping for his children and friends.  "It wasn't just George Floyd," he said through a flood of tears.  "A lot of people …felt they couldn't breathe."

 "Kill me!"  Luis Vasquez, a neighborhood resident who fired gunshots into the air in front of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, following a Christmas concert on the Cathedral steps December 12.  Police shot him dead.  The gunman's sister said he'd been "damaged" by prison time in the 1990s, and his mental state had worsened in the pandemic. 

Wednesday, December 16, 2020

Junk Dances 2020

"Plastic Harvest" 
Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance 
The Center at West Park, New York
Streamed Live December 15, 2020

By Tom Phillips 
-- 
Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips 

PlasticHarvest_TimeLapseDance_Dancer_Anika Hunter
Anika Hunter in "Plastic Harvest" 

In the early 1960s, choreographer Murray Louis took a ride up the escalator at Macy’s, the world’s largest store.

 ''I looked at rooms and rooms .. waves of coats and shirts,'' he told the New York Times. ''I thought, 'Who buys this?' And suddenly I had an image of excess as a theme.''  Shortly after, Louis attended a country auction where he bought a bundle of old umbrellas. He opened them up: ''They were all completely eaten away. It was wonderful.”  He had one thought: “It all turns to junk.”  

Out of this, in 1964 Louis and Phyllis Lamhut made a wonderful duet, set in an alley that steadily filled up with the detritus of a shopping spree – heaps and piles of paper bags, filled with goods destined to decay and disintegrate.  They called it “Junk Dances.”  Fast forward to 2020, and choreographer Jody Sperling is on the Down escalator, contemplating the end times of our long national shopping spree.  She calls it "Plastic Harvest." 


Today a tsunami of accumulated junk is filling up the whole earth.  And instead of paper bags full of ephemeral objects, we have mountains of plastic bags, filled with plastic products that will not decay or go away.  In 1964 our consumer products all turned to junk.  Today they start out as junk, and turn to toxic waste.      

“Plastic Harvest” is a Covid-era virtual work in progress, a video featuring four dancers in costumes fashioned from plastic bags.  Anika Hunter opens in a tub, taking a bubble bath in a sea of crackling plastic.  As she periodically disappeared under the surface, I thought of the warnings on some bags – danger of suffocation.  Hunter begins and ends her bath reading a book – “So You Want to Talk about Race.”  It’s a crisis, for sure, but not the one that’s immediately surrounding her.  Like the American consumer she appears unconcerned, even as she slips under the waves. 

Maki Kitahara follows in a wide-sleeved kimono made of bags tied and hanging from her outstretched arms as if from a clothesline.  This too is a disappearing act, through a trick of Sperling’s camera that shoots her in a split-screen mirror image.  Turning toward the center she disappears, turning outward she splits into two.  An identity crisis – is it a person, two persons, plastic, or nothing at all? 

Andrea Pugliese-Trager

The grand finale is a whirling balletic folk dance in swirling tutus and puffed plastic sleeves, intercut between Frances Barker on a suburban street and Andrea Pugliese-Trager in New York.  Both wind up crossing an intersection – Pugliese-Trager through a construction zone, Barker past a Stop sign into a weed-strewn vacant lot.  

Obviously, more questions than answers in this work-in-progress, but that’s as it should be.  The camera work is sharp and the split-screens stunning.  It’s all kept driving by Matthew Burtner’s repetitive score, which sounds like the infernal combustion of some satanic micro-mill.   

Besides the dancers, the most striking visual was the unheeded sign that said STOP.   Hey, it's not too late… 

-- Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips                                 

Junk Dances, 1964

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