theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
A bit of historical subway architecture: an entrance to the Bowling Green IRT (4 & 5) station.
My favorite breakfast spot (“Cafe Olympia Cafe”) down the block from my favorite hotel in Midtown East is gone. There was a diner a couple blocks up that I think is gone, too. There is still an awning with the name “Palace.” I think that was the place.
The shoe repair/tailor shop is no longer on the block, but a sign in the window says that it’s just moved.
Seen outside the Guggenheim New York. What exactly is a “New York Cheese Steak”? What distinguishes it from a Philly Cheesesteak?
Whenever my friend M. sees a play that he doesn’t care for, he’ll say that the play is very long. This play is very long.
Wallace Shawn’s disposition to acidulous, lengthy monologue, salted with dialogue scenes, is stretched to three hours in the current material.1 A routine love affair, some sordid practices, struggles with achieving and accepting success: at moments it seems that we’re watching The Four Faces of Wallace.
The play’s formal twist, that some of these four characters are speaking to us from a, shall we say, unique vantage point, doesn’t redeem the work; indeed, that vantage point yields no special insights. Maybe the single dialogue scene, after the second intermission, between Tim and Elaine, established an emotional connection or intellectual bond between the two, but it’s not a strong one—I’d drifted off by then.
1For a briefer example in my experience, see the film version of The Designated Mourner.
If you’re one of us Joyceans, then likely you have a favorite chapter of this strapping big book. No matter which of the eighteen you fancy, you will taste a delicious sample of it in this 3-hour reduction of Ulysses—introduced through the fourth wall by Scott Shepherd. (If you’re not familiar with/entranced by the book, hopefully you will find something of interest, be it the orchestrated chaos of “Circe” or the quiet opening of “Telemachus.” A handy synopsis of the material is available.) Only “Penelope” is presented in full, a gentle, intimate reading by Maggie Hoffman.
Myself, I’m partial to “Eumaeus” and “Ithaca,” with Shepherd answering the questions with ghostly reverb. But it’s the explosion of sound (Ben Williams) and projections (Matthew Deinhart) in “Aeolus” that knocked my socks off, every clank of the printing press turned up to 11. KMRIA!
Shepherd again breaks the fourth wall at two other points, to unpack the subtle satire of “Cyclops,” and before that to poke at a question that had not occurred to me: Bloom appears certain that Boylan will visit Molly at 4 PM, but nowhere in the text are we given an explanation of how he knows that.
Of necessity, this “greatest hits” interpretation of the book omits some characters in the interest of clarity, but there still are scads of characters for this vituoso ensemble to embody—among them, Stephanie Weeks as an oversexed Martha Clifford; Kate Benson as Zoe, Myles Crawford, and The Citizen; and Vin Knight as Leopold Bloom. A wonderful choice is to have two actors speak some of the internal monologue lines simultaneously, both the actor-character and a narrator. In Shepherd’s introduction, he suggests that every reading of a text is a misreading, and indeed this production amps up the juicy, saucy bits (see above, something for everyone). Most characters speak with an American dialect; perhaps some of the music is lost. To that end, I was somewhat taken aback by the pronunciation of Mr Deasy’s name as “DEE-zee.”
One more nugget that I’ve never noticed before: Molly speaks of men and their “20 pockets.” Yes, we are usually blessed with an abundance of places to store cakes of soap and potatoes and mash notes, but why 20? Did Molly come up with that number herself?
Cheers for the editor who crafted this clever headline for Mark Landler’s analysis piece in the print edition of today’s times, unfettered by length or search algorithmic constraints: How a Year of Trump Changed Britain, from D.E.I. to Diego Garcia.
Twelve days out from opening and I’ve found one very good reason why Robert Falcon Scott is in this play: Scott and J. M. Barrie were good friends. One of the last letters that Scott wrote from his death tent in Antarctica was to Barrie.
I stumbled across this old post about my aunt Takeko’s journaling practice.
Now that I’ve found a Japanese source for a weekly planner, and hence have fallen in with the purveyors of stationery pr0n, I see that JetPens offers 3-year diaries from at least two makers.
If I spent all my digital ink on linking to stories debunking ridiculous, egregious, preposterous1 claims by officials representing 47, my electron deficit would be yuge. But this one really got up my nose: Dr. Oz is wrong: Medicaid does not automatically register people to vote.
1From Latin praeposterus (“with the hinder part before, reversed, inverted, perverted”), from prae (“before”) + posterus (“coming after”).
Renewed interest in a coffee alternative brewed from a plant native to the American south. Grant Blankenship has the story for GPB.
Archives assembled by NPR of the January 6 putsch. “A visual archive of Jan. 6, 2021, through the lenses of those who were there.”
A little digging turned up the designer of the bronze platform map at HBLR’s Exchange Place station that I so admired: Gregg LeFevre.
Most of my outings are walks rather than hikes these days.
Yet another middling successful season of monitoring nest boxes at Huntley Meadows Park, Fairfax County, Va. I performed invasive surveys and management in several locations in Northern Virginia, including the Nature Conservancy’s Fraser Preserve.
New fare media from last month’s trip through New Jersey. And New Jersey Transit—bless ’em—still produces well-designed map/timetable brochures. The TAPP card for PATH doesn’t accept add-value at stations, so it’s largely a nice-to-have for now.
Rehearsals are chugging along, with just a bit of incidental song and choreography yet to be built. Tonight is our design run, an opportunity for a reality check-in with the various designers. Are there problematic quick costume changes? Will this bit of the set cause sight line issues? Oh, I see you need a prop here.
Rehearsals are taking place in the Arlington County Cultural Affairs facility, an interesting edifice stitched together from at least two predecessor buildings. The building hosts a black box theater, Theatre on the Run; craft studios; conference rooms; and several quite comfortable rehearsal studios, some with barres and mirrors. At the moment, we’re working next door to rehearsals for Dominion Stage’s Xanadu and Synetic Theater’s Antony and Cleopatra. And let’s be honest, sound does travel from studio to studio: sometimes we have to sing ff to be heard over Synetic’s booming score.
What is not so comfortable is the tiny parking lot behind the building.
The neighborhood is typical of where rehearsal studios find themselves: a low-rent mix of auto body shops, home design showrooms, ball fields, kennels, commuter cycle tracks, walking trails, dog park, and food pantry—all running along the channelized Four Mile Run. It’s where Signature Theatre played for several years until moving into posh digs across the creek as part of the Shirlington redevelopment.
Towards the middle of this strip, South Walter Reed Drive drops precipitously down into the valley. Not a street that you want to be on when frozen precip is in the air.
Not so much commuting on the subway, fewer books finished—but some fat ones.
A favorite from the year: Command Performance, by Jean Echenoz, translated by Mark Polizzotti, in particular for the bravura passage in which a character is dispatched.