In the Realm of the Senses 2

"Spectator"
Choreographed by Shuji Onodera
Japan Society, New York
November 13, 2015

by Tom Phillips 

Amidst flying furniture and bodies, an ordinary piece of fruit --  an orange -- commands the stage in Shuji Onodera's dance/ mime/ theatre piece "Spectator."  The orange is bowled across the floor, passed from hand to hand, or held in place while seven acrobatic performers take turns supporting it. It's an object of curiosity, then of contention as two women fight for control, with one finally plunging a knife into it, driving the other to fling a fit. The action is presided over by a pretty female narrator, who introduces herself as a writer and the piece as a love story. But then she's a waitress, and still later a housewife suspected in the disappearance of her husband, who's been cleverly stuffed into an attache case.  What's going on?  We can't really say, and that turns out to be the key to the pleasures of "Spectator."  

Hiroshima Journal

-- By Tom Phillips

Hiroshima is the only city in the world with a trolley stop called "Atomic Bomb Dome," and I shuddered inwardly every time we passed it.  It's by the shell of a building just a quarter-mile from the bomb blast, a building that somehow remained standing, though everyone in it was killed instantly, vaporized by the heat. 

Later it survived an effort by the local government to tear it down, to remove a symbol of the city's destruction.  In the end Hiroshima decided to leave it standing, as a reminder -- a rare public protest in a country that usually prefers to cover things up. 

In the Realm of the Senses

Nansen-ji, Kyoto

-- By Tom Phillips

In college, more than fifty years ago, I was shocked to learn that the ancient Greeks gave Ethics a higher value than Aesthetics.  In my private pantheon, beauty was paramount, and included or implied every other virtue.  I believed instinctively in Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn --  "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, -  that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

A few years later I became a student of Zen Buddhism, which seemed to treat the two as one -- beauty as a realization of truth. This year I fulfilled a lifelong dream, touring Japan and contemplating the beauty of  Zen gardens.  And it was there that I finally, sadly, laid Keats's romantic illusion to rest.

The Spoils of War

Recently I was a guest in a college journalism class where students were reading my book, "A Beginner's Life."  Among their questions was this:  "Did you ever get shot at?"  Well, sort of, I replied, but it's not in the book.  I was chagrined.  So I told them, very briefly, my story of the first Persian Gulf War, which I covered for the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather.  Years ago I had written a chapter about it, but it wound up in the wastebasket.  It seemed just a bunch of typical "war stories," an excuse to brag that I was there.  Now I was kicking myself for trashing it.  So I went back and re-imagined it, and rewrote it, as follows: 

There is nothing in life so exhilarating, said Sir Winston Churchill, “than to be shot at, without result.”  

I couldn’t see that in my twenties, when I was of draft age and the Vietnam War was escalating.  I avoided the draft by accident – by the time it was reinstated in 1965, I was married and had a baby.  But I wanted no part of Vietnam.  When someone at CBS suggested I volunteer for the Saigon bureau, I wasn’t tempted.  I didn’t want to risk my 23-year-old life, or leave my fledgling family behind.

Twenty-six years later in 1991, the US was rushing troops into Saudi Arabia, following Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait.  Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein was massing troops near the border of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and could easily resume his march of conquest, sweeping down through the nearly unpopulated, lightly defended desert kingdom.  The US was preparing to drive him back – out of Kuwait, away from Saudi Arabia and its huge American oil operations.  

By then I had a new family, and six children altogether, two of them under six.  But this time, I felt the urge.  I had survived nearly half a century, and was willing to risk the balance of my life on a good bet that I would come home safe, and war would be an incomparable adventure.   I’d be cautious, and not take any stupid risks. I just wanted to see.

As a journalist, I wanted to witness the kind of destructive power that shapes the world we live in.  There is nothing like a war to alter the course of history.  Developments that would happen over decades in peacetime, or never happen at all, happen within days or hours in a war.  War is history speeded up, news that breaks faster than you can write it.
        

As an egoist, I wanted the badge of honor that goes with being a war correspondent, the badge my father never earned.  In my mind at least, it’s what separates the real journalists from those who would prefer to write about the world from the safety of their desks.  I also had a morbid curiosity about the death, destruction, and danger of wartime.  I’d seen the aftermath in London as a child, and I’d been on the edge of violence in Tiananmen Square, but had never been in an actual war zone.  I wanted to feel the frisson of mortal fear.            

    
As a father, my feelings were mixed.  I didn’t want my family to worry about me, though I knew they would.  At the same time, I wanted my children to have a father they could look up to, not one they felt sorry for.  I felt sorry for my father because he felt sorry for himself.  He never did the things he really wanted to do, never became the journalist he wanted to be, largely because of his own timidity. I had inherited some of that timidity, but I wasn’t going to let it rule my life.  I didn't consult my wife beforehand, or ask permission.  One day I just screwed up my courage, walked into Tom Bettag’s office, and said: “I’d like to volunteer for duty in the war zone.”

A family man himself, Bettag would go anywhere for a story, but he never would have sent me into a war zone on his own.  He warned me on the spot that we might wind up in Baghdad with bombs falling around us.  I gulped when he said that, but the die was cast.  I stuck with my offer, and he accepted.

Scraps into Art -- Poetry by Bill Christophersen

"Two Men Fighting in a Landscape" 

Poems by Bill Christophersen 

Kelsay Books, 2015

Some poets are good at conveying the menace of the city, the dangers of life.  Others are able to pull back into a contemplative, pastoral calm.  Bill Christophersen’s great challenge is to give us both states at once.  The title poem, “Two Men Fighting in a Landscape” sums it up:  A bloody battle in the foreground, dawn breaking silently on the horizon.  As the Incredible String Band sang, it’s a “troubled voyage in calm weather.”  

In “Streetscape with Blazing Locusts,” the poet tells us that he lives on a mean street, on the edge of Harlem, where not long ago he was held up at gunpoint and lost his front teeth in the ensuing struggle.  Despite friends’ entreaties, he declines to move, attached as he is to the beauty of his surroundings.  This he finds on the pavement on a brilliant day after a Halloween rainstorm, when the “..broken sidewalk squares of run-down side streets/ mimic stained-glass windows for a couple of hours.”

There Goes the Neighborhood

By Tom Phillips

When one has lived a long time in one place, any kind of change is worrisome.  Home is ideally the most stable part of your world, but all around, other people are messing with it, never asking your permission.  Morningside Heights, where our family has lived for 35 years, is in a continual process of change, and nothing new happens without a frisson of fear.  Even the plunge in the crime rate, which began in the 1990s and continues today, is cause for concern -- it's one of the factors that have driven real estate prices to astronomical heights, and brought in a whole new demographic and life-style.

Some day, we'll reach the tipping point where the old neighborhood is no longer recognizable.  And it may be just around the corner.  A block and a half from our house is rising an ultra-luxurious rental residence, a colossus of conspicuous consumption.  And it's rising on the very grounds of our most hallowed neighborhood institution, the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine.  They call it the Enclave.

Antigona Flamenca

Antigona Flamenca is back for another run through January 28, 2017 in New York.  It turns out to be a timely engagement. 

"Antigona Flamenca"

Soledad Barrio and Noche Flamenca

West Park Presbyterian Church, New York

July 15, 2015

Soledad Barrio as Antigona      Photo by Zarmik Moqtaderi

     Whether to go along with the tyrant in power, or risk your life defying his whims, is the argument between two sisters – and the first high point of this fiery flamenco version of Sophocles’ Antigone. 

Antigone – or Antigona, in Spanish -- cannot bear to see the body of her brother Polyneices left to rot on the battlefield, where he and his brother Eteocles slew each other battling for power in Thebes.  Ismene, her sister, would prefer not to look, to avoid the wrath of King Creon, who ordered a military funeral for Eteocles and a dog’s fate for Polyneices.   

The two sisters confront each other with electric foot-stamping and acrobatic turns -- the power of Ismene’s conventional thinking against the lonely righteousness of Antigone.  And of course it is Ismene who survives, who slides back into the chorus, observing the woes that befall others.          

    
Few dancers can match the intensity of Soledad Barrio’s flamenco, but Marina Elana as Ismene takes a good shot at it, following up a devastating monologue in English (“I’m bilingual,” she simpers) in which she bitches about her sister’s self-sacrifice. It is the viciousness of her bile, combined with the cowardice of her position, that makes the tragedy credible, and contemporary. Mean girls rule.

    
That’s true, of course, only in the short term, and in what we call the “real world.”  In the ideal, eternal world where Greek tragedy takes place, Antigone is the heroine, larger than life, greater than death.  And this is where Soledad Barrio comes in.