Fires in the Mirror

Anna Deavere Smith’s selection of the monologue as the mode of disquisition in Fires In the Mirror, her dramatic work about the Crown Heights riots of l991, currently playing at the Signature Theatre, is ultimately the most powerful and humanizing element of her project. The decision to employ the monologue is not surprising since Smith has created a reputation around this art form, in which she's usually the performer in a documentary style termed “verbatim theatre.” In this case Michael Benjamin Washington brilliantly interprets all the parts (though Smith herself performed the role in the original l992 production) which are real testaments of everyone from the playwright Ntozake Shange and George C. Wolfe director of the Shakespeare Festival fulminating generally on “Identity" to the Reverand Al Sharpton on “Hair” and Angela Davis on “Race.” It’s at first a bit reminiscent of Studs Terkel’s oral history. When it turns to the actual historical event in which the unlicensed driver of a Hasidic vehicle, one of the cars in Grand Rebbe Menachem M. Schneerson’s motorcade mowed down and killed a 7 year old black child, Gavin Cato and angry mobs retaliated by murdering a 29 year old Australian Jewish scholar,Yankel Rosenbaum, it displays both synchronicity and violence of Picasso’s “Guernica.” Having a black man playing the characters like the activist Sonny Carson or Minister Conrad Mohammed, New York minister for the Honorable Louis Farrakhan, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, one the founders of Ms., Norman Rosenbaum, the brother of the murdered scholar or the Luvavicher Rabbi Shea Hecht is like one of those biblical tableaux of hands reaching towards God. What’s equally powerful is the mixed audience of people like the one at a recent performance responding to this one character whose identity is both labile and as volatile as a nuclear reactor on the verge of meltdown. As you watch and try to weigh which is the most painful or touching of the speeches, you wonder how in fact the playwright is going to wind up the show. Who will get the last laugh as it were? For, at the end of the day, it’s apparent total equanimity is perhaps not the goal or the point and that there are many subliminal and not so subliminal messages. It’s a little like the collective unconscious of society dealt with in a form of esthetic marriage counselling. In a climate where the guardians of political correctitude mitigate against the portrayal of blacks playing whites or men playing women, Fires in the Mirror opens all manner of possibilities. Still, the play is seamless and sui generis and not some sort of cookie cutter that can be applied to all conflict. It’s power lies in the fact that it's a work of art and not a polemic and that, no matter how raw the wounds, art itself, through the act of mirroring (mirrors are an important part of the set), provides one alternative to suffering humanity.

Annals of Art and Commerce: The Philosopher

Jeff Koons manages to come up in the recent Times obituary for Jake Burton Carpenter, ("Snowboarding Visionary Jake Burton Carpenter Dies at 65,"11/21/19). It seems like an unlikely place to find the name of famous artist. But art and commerce, particularly in the case of Koons can produce strange bedfellows. If they haven’t done so already, Harvard, Stanford and the other major business schools might do well to add a course on Koons, particularly as it relates to the kind of cross-pollination between the worlds of art and business as documented in Nathaniel Kahn’s film about the art market, The Price of Everything.  Koons plays a major role in that movie and while one may despise the artist for his exploitative tendencies, there's a curious self-reflexively Brechtian element by which he not only earns barrels of money from what he does, but also makes a statement about commodification—much in the way that classic Pop Art did. The paragraph in the Jake Burton Carpenter obit refers to the fact that in the course of becoming a snowboarding enthusiast Koons involved himself with Carpenter, producing a snowboard called “The Philosopher.” The Times obit described it thusly: “It used Mr. Carpenter’s technical specifications, notably a twin tip that would let the snowboarder ride forward and backward, and Mr. Koons’s likeness of Plato with a rendering of the allegory of the cave from ‘The Republic.’” "High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture" was the title of a famous MoMA exhibit, but this art object, made to navigate the ground, has it both ways.

Tokyo Twlight

Yasujiro Ozu was one of the greats of the Japanese cinema, in a class with Kurosawa and Mizoguchi. Tokyo Story (1953) is the film that's probably best known to American audiences. His Tokyo Twilight (1957) currently completing a run at Film Forum is predicated on a series of narratives in which its characters are trapped. Shukichi (Chishu Ryu) is a banker. His son has died and he has two daughters. The eldest Takako (Setsuko Hara) is unhappily married to an alcoholic teacher, Numata (Kinzo Shin). The other Akiko (Ineko Arima) has become impregnated by her lackluster boyfriend. It's all tightly choreographed in an almost classically theatrical way with the window through which these characters are seen making their entrances looking also like a mirror. Tokyo Twilight is an essay in determinism a la Zola and Freud. The three narratives all compete in providing etiologies. Every time a character steps into a frame, they reiterate their story much the way patients on the couch often repeat the same narrative. In fact for a film made in Japan in the 50's Tokyo Twilight is curiously sophisticated from a psychological point of view. Takako for instance describes her husband as "neurotic." The potential reductiveness of the stories which often come off as melodramas is countered by the remarkable iconography and beauty of the cinematography. Is Tokyo Twilight a tragedy or is it ultimately about the stoic almost zen like acceptance of fate that many of Ozu's characters exhibit? One of the last scenes takes place in a train station. Kikuko (Isuzu Yamada), the elusive mother and proprietress of a mahjong parlor, who has exiled herself from her family, is again on the run. It's track 12. The numbers have no palpable meaning but they're also oddly definitive as the camera insistently returns back to them. It's both pointless and pointed like the nature of fate itself in Ozu's tightly defined universe. 

Temecula Journal: Departure

watercolor by Hallie Cohen

Leaving Temecula, you take 15 South to San Diego. You face the verdant foothills with their vineyards which have now become a major wedding venue, though a far cry from Las Vegas. If you were hiking them during your stay, the climb was short but steep. In the elevator of the local Embassy Suites you meet a fellow traveler with a plate filled with sausages and eggs, talking about fortifying himself for the ceremony which lays ahead. Now as you hit the freeway the green of wine country gives way to a borderless sea of craggy rock. You emerge from a civilization filled with tradition and convention, of Indian and Spanish and modern marital culture into something more undefined than historical time. Throughout the centuries in which South California was populated by waves of settlers, no one has managed to leave any imprint on this rocky territory which has an extra-terrestrial appearance. The harshness has an almost emetic effect, in which the spirit is set free. There are famous sites in the area like the Joshua Tree National Park, but these rugged protuberances manage to remain formidable in another way. You may be anticipating a visit to the San Diego Zoo or to the USS Midway Museum, but for now you stare out at an endless vista with its seemingly infinite horizon.

Temecula Journal: Old Town

entrance to Temecula's Old Town (photo: Francis Levy)

On an authenticity scale Temecula's Old Town, with its gated archway dated 1859, is a little more kin than kind. It rates higher than Sacramento's which is Disney-like, with its souvenir emporia, and less than say Key West's whose legendary depredations still convey a lived-in homey feeling. In Temecula you can partake of chocolate covered bacon at the Sweet Shop and listen to music at the O. T. B. C. or Old Town Blues Club. You can hit Old Town Antique Furnishings. A white-columned structure houses Yoga on top, La Pointe Wealth Management below and a Mexican restaurant called Espadin offering "Mezcal Cocina." The Infiniti Boutique advertising "'Its never too late to play dress-up" is located in the white stucco Hotel Palomar. Old Town even has its own process server, an outfit appropriately named, Rascals. There are empty storefronts which look like they could be either the start of a rash of vacancies or renovations and a kindly waiter at Mad Madeline's reassures you he'll save you a rack if you simply call in when they start serving ribs at 6.  A life-sized sculpture of St Nick is standing out in front of the Thomas Kinkade Gallery. Old Town is California's answer to Dodge, minus the hitching posts and horses, which are really a thing of the past.

Temecula Journal: Native Americans, Spaniards and CVS

 Temecula Street (photo: Francis Levy)

Every place has lots of history or it wouldn’t exist, but a city in California 58 miles north of San Diego and 85 miles southeast of LA, by the name of Temecula, gives itself away by virtue of its name. Situated in the heart of California wine country Temecula has both Native American (the Pechango Band of Luiseno Indians  have lived in the region for more than l0,000 years) and Spanish roots, with missionaries introducing Christianity to the local tribal culture. By the mid-l9th century Temecula’s Magee store was the stop off point for the Butterfield Overland Mail a stagecoach line which ran from St. Louis to San Francisco. Who would have dreamt that one day an itinerant traveler getting into town after l0 would be disappointed to find all the restaurants closed with the exception of a Subway and that yes Temecula had something called a CVS open 24 hours a day and that the vista of the town could be seen from the Embassy Suites, a part of the Hilton Hotel chain that provides the comfort of cloned environments! Under the cloak of darkness Temecula is none other than a series of shuttered storefronts. The sleeping empires of chains with their magical logos are greater than that of the Aztecs. But still there's the exotic name constantly inserting its own history. Who cares about Temecula? Though there's an Old Town, many of the major thoroughfares look like your typical Route #1. Yet there are the ghosts that lurk behind the brand lettering which cry to be ambushed by the archeologist of lost cities seeking to unearth another truth. By the way, there is a Temecula Valley International Film Festival.

The Final Solution: Alt-Rght or Left?

The Bill of Rights and the Constitution represent a set of beliefs that derived from the thinking of enlightenment figures like John Locke. But these ideas don’t come naturally. Due process is, when you consider it, rather foreign. Most humans have impulse control problems and live by making snap judgements. That’s how you avoid hitting a car in traffic. Notions like globalism or fighting wars in foreign nations or inviting immigration don’t come any more easily—even though this is a country of immigrants who arrived usually because they were fleeing persecution elsewhere, Americans are not immune to the stranger anxiety, that on a socio-political level, manifests as xenophobia. What’s frightening and disturbing about Trump and his base is that the bare knuckles approach to reality has an appeal. Alt-right people have no monopoly on prejudice. When there are a rash of extremist attacks by a minority of any ethnic group, it’s easy to jump to the notion of excluding everyone, as Trump did when he tried to impose his travel ban. It’s easy to come to the conclusion that America doesn’t need to fight other people’s wars and that an Iran nuclear treaty is as nonsensical as the Paris climate accords. In fact, the whole Obama agenda represented some sophisticated higher brain work (as opposed to mid or lower brain, emotion-based thinking) that is as novel as the whole idea of democratic society must have seemed when it was first proposed. The ferocity of the liberal discountenancing of reactionary thinking only displays a certain lack of introspection. It’s like murderous instincts. You have to understand them in order to avoid their destructive eruption on both an individual and collective level.