Old Movie, New World

-- By Tom Phillips 

Omar Sharif as Dr. Zhivago 

With nowhere to go until the Pandemic is over, we've been watching old movies we failed to see the first time around.  I skipped "Dr. Zhivago" in 1965 because it sounded like sentimental claptrap, and it is.  But it was a cultural icon, a landmark for my generation.  Sometime in the not too distant future Hollywood will make a sentimental movie about love during the Pandemic of 2020.  

No one alive can remember anything like it -- a political crisis, wrapped in an economic crisis, inside a global pandemic.  It resembles 1918, with the Russian Revolution bundled in World War One and the flu pandemic.  Paging Dr. Zhivago... 

Then as now, politics comes first.  The pandemic will be over in a year or so.  The economy will follow the nation's health into recovery.  But the political crisis will not be resolved in 2020.

Devils Fall in Shootout: Bucket List Cut by One

Newark, February 5, 2020
-- By Tom Phillips

Tomas Tatar at full tilt 

The Montreal Canadiens defeated the New Jersey Devils 5 to 4 last night in a thrilling overtime contest decided by a shootout after the Devils tied the game in the final minute. No one in the crowd of 15.000 was more thrilled than a gray-bearded New Yorker in the fourth row behind the goal, attending his first professional hockey game at the age of 78.

Thus did one item get crossed off my bucket list.  I had always had a passing interest in hockey, along with every other kind of game covered in the sports pages.  But it was a game I never played.  Not having grown up with frozen ponds at hand, I can barely skate, much less juggle a puck through a hostile crowd at 50 miles an hour. So I was a pure fan; and I was agog.

The Unknown Dancer

"The Unknown Dancer in the Neighborhood"
Written and Directed by Suguru Yamamoto
Japan Society, New York
January 10, 2020

-- By Tom Phillips

Wataru Kitao as the Unknown Dancer.

                                      
Mayday! Mayday! Is a cry that comes up repeatedly in Suguru Yamamoto’s dance/drama “The Unknown Dancer in the Neighborhood.” It means “help me” in French, but it seems to fall on deaf ears in Tokyo, the setting for this theater piece by and for a new generation of Japanese artists.

Despairing dramas about alienated people were a staple of the last century.  What makes this fresh is that it suggests alienation is actually the flip side of community. We feel disconnected only because we're connected.



“The Unknown Dancer” is a whole cast of characters, played by one brilliant young dancer-actor, Wataru Kitao, equally at home with hip-hop and ballet, in male and female roles, as a child or an old person, as a human being or an animal. The ability to cross so many lines is a feat of acting empathy – the very opposite of disconnecting. 

India Ink: A Reporter's Notes

-- By Tom Phillips

A lot has changed in India since I first went there in 1978.  But its psyche feels the same: Driven.

India is the only place I know where the energy is higher than New York.  In New York, motorists are warned not to honk their horns, on pain of a $350 fine, which deters even though it is never enforced.

In India, everyone honks their horn continually, 24 hours a day.  You honk when passing, turning, speeding up, or just getting angry.  Indian drivers keep themselves at a boiling point.  On our first night in the country we hired a car to go from Delhi to Jaipur, a 250 km straight shot that took five hours, from midnight to five a.m.   Nearly all the way the four-lane road was clogged with brightly painted, heavily used trucks carrying cement and other materials for India's never-ending national construction binge, honking their way around each other, jockeying for position.  In India, the preferred position is the center of the highway, straddlng the white line. Here you are King of the Road.

Our driver was Surinder Singh, a Rajput warrior from Jaipur, who loves his car and defends it against threats and slights, real and imagined. Half-a-dozen times he stopped the car and leaped out to wipe the windshield, scold the driver behind, dispute with a toll collector, or drive home a point to the guy next door.  (The Encycledia Britannica notes the ethos of the warrior Rajputs includes a "mettlesome regard for personal honour.")  He told us proudly that he lives in a part of Jaipur open to Rajputs only -- no other caste allowed.

Surinder takes tourists all over India, and sleeps in the car when his customers check into a hotel.  The passenger seat folds flat like a first-class airline chair, so he made it up as a bed for Rusty, after his marathon flight in economy class.

Halfway to Jaipur, at three o'clock in the morning, we passed a noisy parade of pilgrims, in buses and on foot, waving a flag and blasting music from boom boxes. It was the start of a Hindu festival honoring Lord Krishna, right on the heels of a national veneration of Lord Ganesh, the elephant god, the hugely popular remover of obstacles. The Times of India reports Ganesh is so beloved that the cast of a hit TV series took time out to perform the climactic pageant of the festival, right on the set.  Fake news, celebrity news, pictures.

Behind India's energy is religious devotion, sectarian rivalry, and a fervent desire to make money.  New York has only one of those three, how could it compete?

--- Copyright 2019 by Tom Phillips

My Detour to Germany

 -- By Tom Phillips

Frankfurt Airport

I hadn't meant to go back to Germany so soon after my first visit last year, but Pakistan and India are playing games of "gotcha" again, and the Paks closed their airspace the day I was to fly.  At least that's what United Airlines told me, so I wound up flying a different route, with a twelve-hour layover in Frankfurt Airport.

Last year's Tour of Fear cured me of my Germanophobia, convincing me that the Germans have done a much better job of repenting for their past crimes than we in the US.  But nothing prepared me for just how comfortable I felt among the end-of-summer German holiday crowd in Frankfurt.

My Passage to India: Prologue

-- 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

Circumambulation 4: Turn, Turn, Turn.

-- By Tom Phillips

Dervishes   

Saving the airfare to Istanbul, I went yesterday to a one-day workshop on Sufi whirling in midtown Manhattan, hoping to learn the best way to turn. In a large, airy, second-floor studio, about twenty New Yorkers showed up -- mostly young and female, plus a few young men and middle-aged women. Most had some dance training, and many were spiritual seekers. I was by far the oldest student, and at 77 the senior person in the room. The teacher was 73.

A dumpy, grandmotherly presence, she introduced herself casually by her Sufi name, Khadija -- also the name of the Prophet Mohammed's first wife.  It didn't take long to recognize her as a quintessential New York intellectual, well-traveled and well-versed in several esoteric traditions, liberally seasoned with kosher salt. Look her up and you'll find she started out as a modern dancer in New York, then to San Francisco where she encountered Sam Lewis, the father of Sufi dancing in America. This sparked a pilgrimage, overland from Europe to India and back in search of true whirling -- which she found with the Mevlevi order of dervishes in Turkey. Forty years later, she runs an upstate retreat for devotees of whirling meditation and cleansing diets, and returns periodically to Turkey to teach.

She's also been a Zen student for decades, with Sasaki Roshi of Los Angeles.  But turning is better meditation, she told us. Sitting on a cushion one can look like a little Buddha, all the while obsessing  about work, sex, or lunch.  But whirling requires utter mindfulness. Think lunch for a half a second and you're in danger of falling.