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.   

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.   

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 #9: Hoop Solitaire

-- By  Tom Phillips 

What do you miss most in this Viral Spring?  I asked that question at a recent social-distance gathering with three other people, and got four different answers.  Working, partying, going to church were three.  Mine was: Sports.

April is the coolest month, for both players and fans -- winter sports climaxing just as baseball returns. Pro basketball and hockey teams scramble for playoff spots. The outdoors warms, the boys of summer fly north, and the buzz of spring training becomes the roar of Opening Day.

Not this year.  Baseball, basketball, hockey are all stilled.  Tennis courts stretch empty in the parks.  Playgrounds are closed.  Here on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the only sound of sporting life seems to emanate from a backyard on 111th street, where the thump of a basketball on concrete is followed by the clang of a shot off the rim. 

It's me, playing Hoop Solitaire.

I've been shooting balls through hoops for 70 years, starting in a suburban driveway on Long Island.  I hoped to be a star, but I had limited value to my high school and college teams, because the only skill I worked at was shooting.

My game is Hoop Solitaire.  And suddenly, it's the only game in town.

Viral Spring #7: A Little Night Music

-- By Tom Phillips 

President Trump is not the only one tweeting in the wee hours. With the campus of Columbia University emptied of people by the Coronavirus, a congress of American Robins has flown in for their spring break and mating season.  At midnight they perch in trees and bushes, on fence posts and statues, and sing their little heads off.  

Viral Spring #5: Chickens Home to Roost

--  By Tom Phillips

Socio-economic effects of the Coronavirus in the US:

The society that had everything in the 1950s, the envy of the world, has become the society that has nothing -- at least, not what it needs.

Viral Spring #3: Cuomo's Moment; Darkness on the Heights

-- By Tom Phillips
   

One by one, the lights are going out in Morningside Heights, as restaurants close, grocery stores and pharmacies limit the number of customers inside, and other businesses stay open, but with reduced hours and only to hand things off at the door.  For the first time ever, customers have to line up outside West Side Market... and live without the late-night luxury of Koronet Pizza.

Suddenly, we know several people sick with the coronavirus.  One is in a hospital in Brooklyn.  Her daughter is not allowed to visit.

Tom's Restaurant is closed for the duration. The Hungarian Pastry Shop went dark today.  Everyone with a second home or children in the countryside has left town.  A young couple in our building were packing their vacation gear and their big dog in a car Saturday, hoping to head for the Outer Banks of North Carolina.  The beaches there are closed, but you can't really close a beach, right?  I don't know, I said.  But driving with New York plates, you might get pulled over and quarantined. Rhode Island is already doing it.  Who knows where they'll crack down next?

The rest of America finally has a reason to persecute New Yorkers.  We may replace Asians in the role of chief scapegoats, reviled and spat on in the streets, or locked up until we prove ourselves healthy.  Only because Fox News is itself based in New York can we be confident that what they call the  "Chinese Coronavirus"won't turn into the "New York Coronavirus" on Fox TV. 

Viral Spring #2

    -- By Tom Phillips                                   

                                                        You know something's happening

                        But you don't know what it is -- 

                                                   Do you, Mr. Jones?

New York City now is the "epicenter" of the viral spring, with 23,000 cases of Covid-19, and at least 365 deaths. This is in a city of eight million, and we still don't know anyone who knows they have it.  But we met online with our sidelined hospice singing group last night and heard the news: two people dead in the synagogue of one of our members. A nurse died at a hospital where another member works. Co-workers are angry -- blaming the lack of personal protective equipment.  Some nurses are already exhausted, feeling desperate.  

Outside, people walk in the empty streets to avoid passing on the sidewalk. A cylindrical hut has sprung up on 113th Street, outside the entrance to St. Luke's hospital.  It's a triage center, ready to separate patients into four categories: (1) those needing immediate lifesaving interventions; (2) those who need significant intervention that can be delayed; (3) those needing little or no treatment: (4) those who are so severely ill that survival is unlikely.  

The system was developed in the wars of the last century, when many of the wounded had to be given up for dead.  

Viral Spring

all the merry little birds are

flying in the floating in the

very spirits singing in

are winging in the blossoming...

and everybody never breathed 

quite so many kinds of yes

                       e.e. cummings 

The traditional flora and fauna of the Upper West Side couldn't care less about a coronavirus. While humans huddle in their homes, birds, bees, dogs and rodents enjoy a once-in-a-lifetime springtime  of clean air, quiet streets, and parks with fewer people.

At the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine,  the albino peacock shakes his tail feathers and brazenly charges an eager photographer who moves too close for comfort.   "OK, OK," says the human, backing up hastily.  I thought we were friends.

Corona Journal

-- By Tom Phillips

Things you never thought you'd see:  The world's greatest city, cowed into silence, emptied out by a virus.  This was the scene at Tom's Restaurant on 112th Street at 11 p.m. last night. The everlit neon sign, emblem of Jerry Seinfeld's Upper West Side enlightenment, extinguished.  The nighthawks of  the counter back in their nests.

Closed

Meanwhile three New Yorkers duke it out in the political version of a playground feud.  Bill the Mayor, Andy the Governor, and Donny the Class President each vies to turn this Coronavirus Crisis to his everlasting advantage.  

Bill opens with disastrous blunder. New York should do like San Francisco, he says,  Shelter at Home.  Andy responds with a Bronx cheer.  You jerk, New York don't imitate San Francisco!  Don't tell people what to do.  

Donny from Queens, the wannabe bully who cries every time somebody challenges him, comes up with his latest brilliant idea: He'll borrow a trillion dollars from his father and just hand it out to everybody on the playground!  This idea he stole straight from his enemies, Brooklyn Bernie and the Yang gang.  Donny thinks it will assure his re-election as Class President, which everybody knows he cheated to win the first time.  

Donny's secret is well known.  He borrows money and doesn't pay it back.  

Meanwhile New York's introverts stay home and work on their projects.    

Checkout girls from places like Burkina Faso keep working at West Side Market, handling money all day, three feet or less from their customers.  Who's gonna get sick?  

Homeless people sit on street corners all night.  Donations accepted.  Three guys from Central America huddle on a heating grate outside Columbia, drinking vodka from a bottle, talking it over in Spanish.  St. Luke's is filling up with Coronavirus cases.  Everybody knows we don't have enough beds, not even half the capacity of a place like Italy. Why is that?  

Don't ask Donny.  Somebody asked him -- why is it celebrities are getting tested for the virus, but there's no tests for ordinary people?   

Donny's answer: That's just the "story of life."  

More to come. Worse to come.  

--  Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips