Bob Miller's Multitude

Bob Miller and Friends at the Chairs 

There's a hole in the soul of Morningside Heights this summer  -- an empty space on the sidewalk where a crowd of people used to  gather around Bob Miller.  A few weeks ago, as he neared his 93rd birthday, about 150 friends threw him a farewell party at what he called "the chairs," meaning the benches at the western end of 111th Street, a few steps from his apartment building on Riverside Drive.  The next day, his two daughters came up from Florida, and moved him down into an assisted living facility near them in the Miami area.  He hates it  -- "everybody here is old!" he says, and they don't know how to talk to people.  "I was spoiled by Morningside Heights," he says.  But it was Bob himself who created the social scene in the Heights during the Pandemic era.  

It started to form in the summer of 2020, on the street, late at night.  He was not afraid to hang out on a street corner -- usually Broadway and 111th, outside Walgreen's -- all alone, in all weather.  Bob describes himself as a "loner who needs people."  So he would stand on the corner, just  waiting for a chance to strike up a conversation. 

It didn't take long.  People would ask him how he was. and he would snap "terrible!" every time, and complain about the agonies and infirmities of old age.  After that, he would listen.  Bob drew people to himself not because he was entertaining, but because he was willing to be entertained.  He didn't laugh unless he thought it was funny, so people made an extra effort to amuse him. This cheered  everyone up.  Bob could spend a half hour on the corner and not say a word -- watching the conversation around him grow more and more animated.  Mostly it was funny stories and tall tales.  If it strayed into gossip, Bob kept silent. He never had an unkind word to say about anyone.   

He would get up -- usually after noon -- and go to Samad Deli for his first meal -- freshly scrambled eggs and onions in a tinny aluminum  container.   "The guy made it for me once and I liked it, so since then I have it every day," he said.  In good weather he would spend early afternoons in front of Citibank, dancing and grooving -- minimally but rhythmically --  to reggae music on the boombox of Fletcher, whose natty clothing stand is a fixture on the sidewalk. Bob wore a selection of colorful hats from Fletcher.  In winter he would follow the sun across Broadway, first to the center mall, and then to the northeast corner by the drugstore.  In hot weather he usually gravitated west, from Broadway to Riverside, to the little plaza of "the chairs," where he and his friends would stay until dark.    

Who is Bob Miller?  The following sketch is not a biography, but a collection of things he told me about himself over the last few years.  I couldn't interview him in journalistic style -- he doesn't want to be interviewed, he just wants to talk with you.  

Bob was born in Philadelphia in 1930 and grew up in the Jewish neighborhood known as "Strawberry Mansions."  He was small and shy -- they called him Stumpy at Central High School.   But he found something that saved his life. "Football saved my life!"  Bob was a fullback -- small, but a power runner.  I can picture him with his head down, both arms around the ball, exploding through the bigger guys on the opposing line.  Football gave him a team, and something to throw himself into besides teenage angst.  

Everyone was brilliant at Central High School, says Bob.  "I graduated third from the bottom of my class, and I was a genius!"    When he was fourteen a distant relative, a mobster known as "Chinky" Rothman, came to town incognito for a family event, and took a liking to Bob. Two weeks later Bob was pressed into service as a pallbearer at a Mafia funeral.  His best time of year was summer, which he spent on Long Beach Isand, working as a milkman for his uncle's grocery store.  

He got in and out of college somehow, but then his parents insisted he go to law school.  He hated it, and his professor could tell. "You don't want to be a lawyer, do you?" But he put his head down and did it, and hated it.  Then sometime in the 1960s, he discovered a new field that saved his life.  "Computers saved my life!"  Bob Miller could talk the language of computers, and teach it too.  He taught computer science at City College and Columbia, and then became an IT wizard at Con Edison.  In his late 80s he was still on call at Con Ed as a technological fixer.  

Sometime in the 1960s, Bob went to a party in Harlem, and eventually asked where the bathroom was.  The hostess told him he would have to go outside and pee in the parking lot. There was a sign on the bathroom door that said "Blacks Only."  That cracked Bob up.  He married a West Indian woman from the island of Grenada. They had two daughters, and according to Bob they never had any racial problems with anyone.  "This is New York," he would say.  

Bob loved Morningside Heights, New York, the USA and Western civilization.  He was a one-man counterculture on the Upper West Side.  One time a bunch of us were bemoaning the evils of Western Civilization, and he burst out:  "What is wrong with Western Civilization?  Western Civilization is the greatest thing that ever happened to the world!"  Bob was drafted into the US Navy in the mid-1950s, the height of the Cold War.  He still wears a cap embroidered with the insignia of the aircraft carrier USS Coral Sea.  They were in the Mediterranean in 1956, during the Suez conflict between Britain, France, Israel  and Egypt. "There was a war, but we weren't in it," he says.   

Western civilization built Bob Miller.  Today he is stranded with a bunch of superannuated midwesterners in a fancy Florida senior complex.  He says it's a "waste of life," but he's going to stay.  The food is good, the concerts are good, the physical therapy is helpful,  And he can always work on his book, tentatively titled "Building Success through Low Self-Esteem."  The trick is to need other people, and let them know you need them.  Making other people feel good about themselves can make you feel better, too. 

Who knew?  Thank you, Bob, from all your needy friends.    

                                                                      Groovin'

 

--    Photo and Video by Tom Phillips 

---  Copyright 2023 by Tom Phillips and H. Robert Miller                  

Something out of Nothing

 --  By Tom Phillips 

Still from For a Dance Never Choreographed, 2021. Photo: Stefano Croci 

For artists and introverts, the Pandemic of 2020-22 was a window of opportunity -- a chance to observe the world in the absence of normal human activity.  During lockdown and quarantine periods, as we walked through deserted streets or sat in empty public spaces, we could suddenly see form without function --- the structure of civilization without its uses.   

Italian artist-choreographer Luca Veggetti found himself stuck in his hometown of Bologna, Italy, when the pandemic struck in 2020.  So he made something out of nothing.  

Veggetti’s film For a Dance Never Choreographed (2021) takes place in an empty plaza designed by Japanese architect Isamu Noguchi, with a text of notes by Martha Graham for a dance she never made.  The movement of the earth around the sun is represented by dark shadows creeping over the plaza, and the only human presence is the sound of voices crying, whispering, gasping and groaning --- expression minus words.  The whole impression is made by taking things away, removing the contents of  civilization and examining its substrate of earth and bricks, light and shade, desire and discontent. 

The 22-minute film is now permanently on view in the digital collection of the Noguchi Museum in New York.  To watch, click here and follow the link to the museum.  

Now--- shhhh. 

-- Copyright 2022 by Tom Phillips 

Pleasure and the Pandemic: Is it Over?

 -- By Tom Phillips 

Downtown Art/Alpha Omega, 19 E. 3rd St. 

Sixty years after the Sixties, The East Village can still feel like the most sensuous part of New York.  Like their spiritual forebears, people in this low-rise, low-rent district live for pleasure – erotic, psychedelic and aesthetic.  So it felt right that a graffiti-scarred vacant lot on East 3^rd Street was the scene for a revival of live experimental theater in the dying days of the pandemic.  Interdisciplinary artists Jasmine Hearn and Sugar Vendil concluded the 2021 LaMama Moves! Dance Festival with emotionally charged solos, under a blue sky on a sultry Sunday.     

Jasmine Hearn:  Photo by Steven Pisano 

The stage covered half the lot, but it didn’t seem big enough for Hearn (pronoun “they”) who danced and sang along with three songs from their new album Pleasure Memories. A child of south Texas, Hearn whirled, dove, and slid across the floor, spilling over the edge, slamming up against the wall of the adjacent building.  They undressed and dressed on stage, pulled pants on inside-out, then ducked into what looked like a slave’s gunny sack. All this was mockumented by a buddy called Missy, who scrawled squiggles upside-down on a poster board held like an apron. Inside-out, upside-down and all over the place, they smiled recalling pleasures of the past and cried out with desire for pleasures to come. Their bottom line was survival, and they made it through. 

Sugar Vendil, a second-generation Filipinx-American, took a grimmer view of a year that saw racial and political turmoil erupt into anti-Asian violence.  She performed several of her Test Sites, brief experiments in process and form—whose title is also a reminder of post-war US nuclear tests that devastated Pacific islands, leaving them radioactive to this day.  (Anyone remember Eniwetok?)

Like Hearn, Vendil’s ambience was a mix of live song and processed soundtrack, with various forms of the piano: In one piece, she plunked the keys of a toy baby grand.  In another she ran her hands wildly across a miniature keyboard. 

In “This Too Shall Pass,” Vendil used repetitive movement clashing with inchoate sound to evoke the madness of pandemic life—one day just like another, amid a storm of conflicting emotions.  At the end of this exercise she invited the audience to join in a primal scream, which felt good – conclusive, hopeful, fun. 

At the end of her set she was joined by five Asian women, planted in the audience, who came to the stage bearing wildflower bouquets and bubble tea in plastic cups.  Vendil helped herself to a bubble tea and was surrounded by sweetness, community and love.  Thus passes the pandemic, we pray.  

The bulk of the festival took place online.  The earlier shows--- wildly varied, a la LaMama --- are available on demand through June 30 at https://vimeo.com/ondemand/lamamamoves21

-- Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips 
Performance photos by Steven Pisano 

 

 

 

Sick Time: Pits of the Pandemic

-- By Tom Phillips  

Kolonial: Stefanie Batten Bland 

America is starting to emerge from 14 months of viral living, but like all traumas, this pandemic year will live on in mind and body. Reams of research and acres of art will record how we lived and died with the coronavirus, and how it changed us.  Ahead of the game, the Baryshnikov Arts Center of New York is offering the first fruits of an ugly season --- a piece created and performed during the pandemic, under medically-prescribed COVID health and safety protocols. 

Choreographer Stefanie Batten Bland assembled half a dozen dancers in BAC’s Jerome Robbins Theater, in an installation by Conrad Quesen. They begin the drama in separate plastic bubbles, close enough to see each other but barred from touching.  In a recorded introduction, Bland says Kolonial is about isolation, being on display, voyeurism, the desire to touch; finding ways to be with others, and then finding why we can’t be. The 20-minute video performance captures the recurring misery of pandemic life, its constant approach and avoidance of human contact, its multiple barriers of plastic.   

Rites of Spring

-- By Tom Phillips  

Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance 

One problem in dealing with the world’s environmental crisis is that it’s composed of so many interrelated problems, most of them difficult to picture. Science does a lousy job of dramatizing climate change – so by the time people are forced to recognize it, their homes may be gone and their lives in danger.  And so it falls to the arts to show what business-as-usual is doing to us.  And Earth Day is an annual opportunity to seize the outdoor stage. 

The Strangest Dream

 -- By Tom Phillips 

 Picasso: Guernica

Vaccinated at last, on the eve of Easter I flew masked across America, not looking out the window, not talking to my neighbor, and arrived in Seattle to meet our new granddaughter, already nine months old.  My sleeping meds disappeared enroute, probably somewhere "in security." I went to bed, prepared for the worst.  And I dreamed:  

Forty years, forty years.  The phrase kept echoing in my head, an anvil chorus, an indictment, a sentence imposed by a merciless court.  There was music, a vicious descending line that came down like a hammer, repeat, repeat.  And I saw men taking sledgehammers to a nursery, to the place where their children play, bringing down their hammerheads to pulverize everything, to turn it into trash, shards, the ruins of a civilization.  

I awoke in horror. Trained to see people in dreams as fragments of myself, I thought -- can this be?  My meds were repressing a wrecker of all I supposedly love? 

But no, most of me was a bystander, one who watched for forty years as men took sledgehammers to a civilization -- destroying the world that had been a-building, the world meant for their children and grandchildren.  

I had dreamed the Reagan Revolution.   

Future Bible Stories: King Donald and the Bugs

 The manuscript fragment below was recently discovered by Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration's campaign to develop a vaccine before election day. Sources say the project had accelerated to several times the speed of light when engineers discovered they were in a time warp.  The manuscript was discovered stuck to the windshield in the year 4525 CE.  It was damaged during the rapid deceleration that followed as team members worked frantically to return to their present lives. It appears to tell the story of the 2020 presidential campaign, in the language of a latter-day Bible.  

In the fourth year of the reign of King Donald, in the second month, the Lord sent a bug to plague the people of the earth, as a sign against the king because he did not love justice.        

The prophet Woodward went to the king, and he was afraid.  The king said, "You just breathe the air and that is how it is passed.  It is also more deadly that even your strenuous flu.  This is deadly stuff."  And the prophet wrote that in his book.  

Then the king went to tell the people. He stood at the gate and told them, "When it gets a little warmer it miraculously goes away.  The King of China is working hard and it's going to work out fine."  And the people went home and did not fear the plague.  

Viral Spring #14: The Glamour of Evil

-- by Tom Phillips 

Yes Sir, Boss: Parscale models campaign gear

When President Trump's  campaign manager Brad Parscale called his media attack machine the Death Star, Democrats mocked him for invoking the Evil Empire from Star Wars, and scolded him for joking about death while the world is in the grip of a Pandemic.  But Parscale didn't apologize, and won't.  "Laugh all you want," he tweeted. "We'll take the win."  

It's the Democrats who are being naive here.  They don't understand that evil and death are part of the president's appeal.     

Viral Spring #13: The Death Star

-- By Tom Phillips 

Inside the Death Star 

Listen up, everybody:  Brad Parscale, President Donny's campaign manager, has an important announcement,  Brad?  

"For nearly three years we have been building a juggernaut campaign (Death Star). It is firing on all cylinders. Data, Digital, TV, Political, Surrogates, Coalitions, etc. In a few days we start pressing FIRE for the first time." !!!!

Thus tweeted Parscale last week, shortly after the President threatened to sue him over a poll showing him ten points behind Joe Biden.

The last guy who boasted about an attack before pressing "fire" was Donald Rumsfeld, defense secretary for George W. Bush -- who in 2003 called his machine "Shock and Awe." It was supposed to be so awful that the invasion of Iraq would be over almost as soon as it began, with Iraqis panicking at the sight of American power.

Like Rumsfeld, Parscale is super smart and super confident. He says Joe Biden won't know what hit him. So what can we expect from his video game?

Viral Spring #8: Passion in a Pandemic

Andrea Mantegna:  The Crucifixion 

-- By Tom Phillips

Why do we call the events leading up to Easter the "Passion" of Jesus Christ?  Many people think “passion” refers to the strong emotions Jesus felt during the last days of his life. But according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word originates in Christian theology, and its first meaning is simply “the suffering of pain.”  Its second definition is “the fact of being acted upon, the being passive.”  It's an idea that takes on new meaning in this Pandemic year, with no defense but distance from a deadly viral foe.

Viral Spring #4: Gimme Shelter

-- By Tom Phillips

Following the advice of anxious family and friends, I have decided to curtail my reporting jaunts in the neighborhood, and concentrate on sheltering in place. I still go for walks, but plan them so they can be solitary or with my wife. I hang out the window to join the ovation for local health care workers at 7 p.m. each night.  I read the papers, go to classes and conferences via Zoom or Google Hangouts.  And we watch TV, something we rarely do in ordinary time.  At last I'm getting my money's worth from the cable company.   And TV has changed my life. 

Today I watched Governor Andy Cuomo's daily briefing -- an hour-long monologue with Power Point graphics popping up before he even starts talking about a topic. He knows what he's going to say and likes to underline it with a simple caption like STAY HOME. 

Cuomo's soaring popularity shows how quickly perceptions change in a crisis. This is the same governor whose autocratic, power-grabbing, know-it-all, Andy-centric, self-aggrandizing antics have made him so tiresome to New Yorkers in his interminable third term.  The difference is that in a crisis, autocrats become assets.

Since when does a governor of New York get to appeal for National Unity?  Since when does a governor of New York tell other states to send medical supplies and personnel, and promise to return the favor when the pandemic comes to them?  Since the breakdown of the federal system is when.

Cuomo begins with obligatory praise for the president's help, then details how thoroughly the federal government has bungled the crisis -- telling the states to fend for themselves and then sending FEMA in to outbid them for medical supplies.  When are we gonna get those ventilatahs??  When the US gets its act together, probably not in time. 

Since when does a governor share his family life with a national audience?  Not since Mario Cuomo spoke to the 1984 Democratic Convention has any politician's devotion to his mother been so widely shared.  Not to mention Andy's tender care for little brother Chris -- a sweet guy, and strong, but "not as strong as he thinks he is." Stay home, bro, says Andy.  And that means you too, America.    Amazingly, I'm convinced, shamed into compliance. Andy has done what my family and friends couldn't do... keep me off the street. 

If he were running for president, this is how he’d do it.  But I believe him when he says he’s not.   A good Democrat, he would rather see the party lose than tear it apart.  There’s always 2024.  The problem is, he won’t have the virus as his running mate.

-- Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips