Tom Phillips's 116th Dream

-- By Tom Phillips 

Irreparable 

I dreamed that I was fighting for a new America, a better America, in a rebellion that had just been named the "Green Patriotic Uprising" or something like that.  I was in a school gymnasium, waking up at dawn next to a young woman who was my wife or girlfriend.  She told me the name of the uprising; and I said -- OK that's what they call it, now let's go fight it!  I was gung-ho, as they say.   
 

We were to move out at dawn.  My assignment was to run to the front lines pushing my upstairs neighbor, a fellow septuagenarian and a long-time activist, in a wheelbarrow.  She wanted to fight, but had a bad leg and couldn't run.  I grabbed the wheelbarrow with Myra lying down in it and began to run, full tilt along a narrow wooden track, with the rest of the rebel force close behind.  But the wheel got caught in a crack and stuck.  I was holding up the charge, so I worked frantically to free the wheel.  Then  it occurred to me that neither Myra nor I had any kind of weapon.  How did we expect to fight? 

At this point I woke up.  

Before military commanders go out to fight, they look at the balance of troop strength in a document called the Order of Battle.  Under my pillow, I found the current Order of Battle for the conflict between the Powers-that-Be (PTB) and The Movement (TM).  

Bound for Glory

Woody Guthrie 

                           your old men shall dream dreams,
                       and your young men shall see visions.  
                                      Joel 2:28

In this apocalyptic time, as America is revealed in all her shame and beauty, an old man dreamed a dream: 

I was walking the wrong way on Grand Central Parkway --- a road without a sidewalk -- making my way against a tide of traffic speeding into New York.  My clothes were filthy, my shoes battered.  

A voice said stop, wake up, before you get hit by a car and killed.  But another voice No, keep going, walk the walk.  I kept going.   

The first voice said watch out, here comes a truck.  I walked through the truck and it vanished. Then I knew the dreamer was not a bum going the wrong way, but a spirit bound for glory.   

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.