Month: April 2007

Lafayette trip report: 2

lunch breakTuesday morning our bus departed at 6:00 for Iberia Parish and the coastal wetland habitat of Lake Fausse (pronounced like the choreographer) Pointe State Park, followed by a visit to Avery Island, the site of a managed heron rookery (lots of puffball Great Egret chicks) and the McIlhenny family’s Tabasco sauce plant. I picked up my first lifer for the trip, Swallow-tailed Kite (Elanoides forficatus) while most of the bus was checking out the gift shop. Also feeding young, on the water, were a pair of Common Moorhen (Gallinula chloropus). Prothonotary Warbler (Protonotaria citrea) is a regional specialty, and we got up close and personal looks both on Tuesday and Thursday.

One of the things a convention is meant to do is charge you up to continue doing what you’ve been doing, and the workshops on Wednesday by Andy Farnsworth and Brian Sullivan, both with the ornithology lab at Cornell, did just that. Brian’s presentation on technology and birding touched on some of the cool gadgets that we birders with too much disposable income can play with (the Zeiss integrated spotting scope and digital camera is so tempting), and then segued into sources of information on the web (more in a later post) and eBird, Cornell’s web-powered bird observation listing application. eBird’s not-so-hidden agenda is data collection for research purposes, and I left with a mild resolution to start using it to record my Huntley Meadows visits, in the same way that I report nest box activity with the allied app for cavity nesting. But the app is lacking the capacity to export trip reports as URLs (although Brian told me that there’s interest in adding this feature); once Cornell does this, they’ll join the ranks of other players in the social software arena.

Andy Farnsworth covered two areas of his research, monitoring bird migrations using WSR-88D weather radar and by recording flight calls. He talked about all the things that can show up on radars that are neither weather nor birds, like “aerial plankton” (dust, smoke, insects) and sunset, which at the right time of day looks like back-scattered radiation. I found his segment on flight calls particularly interesting, because it was the first time I’d taken the time to look at a sound spectrogram while I’m listening to a vocalization. And since flight calls are briefer (as short as 0.02 sec) and simpler in structure, it’s easier to match sight and sound. Andy indicated that you want to look at the strong central trace of a spectrogram and discount the fainter overtones above and below it (on the other hand, the Eastern Bluebird chip that he played seemed to get its melodic character from the fainter traces in the spectrogram). A buzzy call will show regular variation in the frequency domain, perhaps 1kHz up and down each 1-5 msec. These are the calls we like to call “zeeps”, while the “seeps” stay on one pitch.

Thursday’s field trip took us past the oil refineries, chemical plants, and paper mills of Baton Rouge, up Highway 61, into West Feliciana Parish and the Tunica Hills, glacier-formed uplands (we stopped before we got to Angola and the state pen). We alighted at Oakley Plantation, once a home of John J. Audubon, and Mary Ann Brown Preserve, a Nature Conservancy property. Oakley was particularly pleasant, still cool and dripping from the cold front that blew through Wednesday bringing thunderstorms. Off by myself while most of us scattered to take the house tour or check out the gardens, I got a good look at a Red-headed Woodpecker and all too quick a look at a gray-over-yellow warbler that I couldn’t ID. Similarly, at Brown Preserve, the group saw a waterthrush that our leader ID’d as Louisiana, but I didn’t feel like I’d seen enough of the field marks to tick it. The last planned stop of the trip at Sherburne WMA was nearly a complete washout, as poor scouting on someone’s part left our motor coach unable to get over a steep railroad grade crossing.

Lafayette trip report: 1

Greetings from Lafayette, Miss., in the heart of Cajun country, where I am attending the 2007 American Birding Association convention (while Leta house sits back home).

I made the drive down from Reston on Sunday and Monday, with little in the way of mishap. The only construction delays that I encountered came in the vicinity of Cleveland, Tenn., and I noticed something happening there that you never see back home. The merge down to one lane was out of sight, over a couple of hills and around a curve, but no sign was posted to let us know which lane was going to be dropped. Yet all of us politely started lining up in the left lane: some of us, the locals, must have known which lane was closed, while we long-distance travelers figured, “everyone else knows to get in the left lane, so I will, too.” There was no pushing ahead to the merge point, with a line forming for last-minute move-overs. (I say, “all of us,” but there were a few exceptions, including an impatient Greyhound bus.)

Two smells along the drive, both of them overpowering: first, in a couple of stretches in the Shenandoah Valley, the stench of dairy farms (I’ll remember this stink the next time I’m in the butter-and-egg aisle in the supermarket); second, from Laurel, Miss. southward, blasts of perfume from a white-flowering shrub that is in full bloom here already. (There seems to be some confusion about how to identify this plant, which smells like honeysuckle: one trip leader has named it Rough-leaf Dogwood, Cornus drummondii.) (Update: Privet (genus Ligustrum) is probably the correct ID, based on the fragrance match. Trip leader Virginia, who has lived down here, loathes the smell.)

The verges were carpeted with a number of unfamiliar wildflowers, purple, blue, golden, masses of something cloverish with a maroon flower.

Both Alabama and Louisiana’s respective transportation departments should be persuaded to pick a different shield design to designate their state highways. They currently use modifications of the state’s map outlines, with crummy-looking results. Louisiana simplifies the outline by cutting off all the wiggly bits along the Gulf Coast, so we’re left with what looks like a fabricator’s mistake. Alabama’s crime against design is to stretch the outline horizontally to accommodate 3-digit route numbers: Washington state with a burst appendix. And while we’re at it, both Alabama and Mississippi use the state outline for their buckle-up signs, and since the outlines are close to mirror images, it looks like one engineer copied off another’s exam bluebook.

If you would drive cross-country, you would do well to develop a taste for country music, classic rock, and contemporary Christian (which combines the worst features of both). But I did find a couple of fresh college stations around Charlottesville and Baton Rouge, and a great R&B station in Hattiesburg, in what they call the Pine Belt.

(Since I’m reading Agee and Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, I was expecting to see long and wide stretches of cotton farms as I rolled south. Instead, I found mile on mile of pine plantations. Generally, the forestry company is smart and leaves a buffer of uncut pine and hardwood understory between the road and the patch that has just been logged. Much better PR than rubbing our noses in the clearcut.)

Anyway, FM radio with Dead Kennedys, obscurer Janis Joplin, and Elvis Costello singing Little Feat with Alain Toussaint: it doesn’t get much better than that.

I’m not sure when I’m going to get to post this, because our hotel’s idea of “available Wi-Fi” means “available for $10 a day.” I may be stuck trying to look up local businesses the old school way, with The Phone Book.

The Pillowman

“Don’t believe everything you read in the papers,” is perhaps our take-away from Martin McDonagh’s bitter-bitter black comedy of a fairy tale. It concerns Katurian (the indomitable Tom Story), a writer of bleak children’s stories (nearly all of them for his trunk), who is taken into custody by a pair of brutal Kafkaesque detectives when incidents in his tales begin, lethally, to come true. Most, but not all, of the ensuing violence happens in the mind or offstage. In the end, to protect his addled brother Michal (the engaging Aaron Muñoz), Katurian makes sacrifices of several kinds.

The grim outcome of this play is never much in doubt, and the work’s themes— the writer’s responsibility to his audience (Katurian tries vainly to convince that his stories are just that, that they don’t say anything), the tension between autobiography and creative invention, the preservation of his words after his death—are laid on a bit heavily at times. But the performances of Hugh Nees and Denis Arndt as the two policemen, a Lum and Abner of the Stasi set, are delectable. Nees, as the torturer Ariel, exchanges his customary teddy bear persona for one of clean-shaven malevolence; Arndt, as the so-called “good cop” Tupolski, squeezes out a deadpan sarcasm over a grit sandwich. Tupolski says, “I don’t have a world view. I think the world’s a pile of shit.”

Two of Katurian’s stories are reenacted with Taymoreseque wit by an ensemble of four, while he narrates, and after the second, we begin to think, enough with the stories, back to the plot. But Arndt/Tupolski redeems the trope with his own story, a drowned shaggy dog of a fourth-grade math problem he calls, “The Story of the Little Deaf Boy on the Big Long Railroad Tracks. In China.”

And unlike the best dark tales of Grimm, Lang, or Goose, the play leaves several loose ends. What significance does Katurian’s double name have for us? And why does Michal give Katurian the information that he does?

  • The Pillowman, by Martin McDonagh, directed by Joy Zinoman, The Studio Theatre, Washington

Crime and Punishment

Campbell and Columbus strip Dostoyevsky’s novel to its bones, producing 90 minutes of strong theater that zeroes in on the question of human redemption. Using just three actors in a production that recalls RHT’s similarly minimal two-person The Turn of the Screw, it remixes the story of feckless student Raskolnikov—who kills the crabbed pawnbroker Alyona, buries his robber’s booty, and ultimately confesses his crime— into a fractured narrative, one fitted around the biblical story of resurrected Lazarus. Roskolnikov cannot explain the reason for this crime to his friend, the prostitute Sonya, not even to himself, and that is perhaps his defining tragedy. Whether he can step from the grave of his crime into salvation is a question left for us to answer in the lobby.

The production is well-served by Robin Stapley’s set, a tilted disc threatening to spill its one set piece (a perilously trapezoidal chair) forward into the house, like some bleak Cezanne tabletop; the disc is surrounded along its upstage half with irregular lucite panels, slightly reflecting: the whole effect suggests a Hadean hockey rink of the soul. Likewise the show’s music, provided by the Bergonzi String Quartet, establishes the right mood of tension and introspection.

Aubrey Deeker’s shabby übermensch Raskolnikov (he is a stripling Napoleon in a long dirty coat, a Russian Dylan Klebold) evokes the right mix of emotions: sufficient disgust that we might question whether he deserves rebirth, mixed with enough pity that his saving can feel appropriate. The deft mind games played by Mitchell Hébert’s detective Porfiry Petrovich suggest a 19th-century Frank Pembleton. And RHT newcomer Tonya Beckman Ross manages her transitions from confessor Sonya to rebarbative Alyona to slightly daft Lizaveta with grace.

  • Crime and Punishment, adapted by Marilyn Campbell and Curt Columbus from the novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, directed by Blake Robison, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Md.

Ready when you are, Miss Lamont

Via kottke.org, David S. Cohen notes that the technological transition from film to digital video is having an unexpected effect on acting styles, one that may prove as revolutionary as the introduction of sound in the late 1920s.

For actors, that additional experimentation means an entirely new way of working, says thesp Marley Shelton.

Shelton appears in both parts of Grindhouse: Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror was shot digitally, while Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof was shot on film.

With film, says Shelton, “there’s a beginning, middle and an end between ‘action’ and ‘cut.’ As an actor, one is trained to listen for cues such as ‘roll sound’ and slate, and you use that moment to prepare and go on a journey as your character for a few minutes or seconds. You use that time to suspend disbelief for yourself. In that 10 seconds, you’re sort of going into a zone.”

But, Shelton says, when shooting digital, the freedom to keep rolling means “you’re sort of sifting for diamonds. It’s great in that you can probe deeper in certain moments, but it’s less conducive to riding the impulses your character is having chronologically.”

Crooked CA watch: 2

Wang is wrong: a blistering report by Computer Associates’ board of directors implicates former head Charles Wang as the leader of a pervasive culture of fraud.

Mr. Wang created a “culture of fear” at Computer Associates — now called CA — and deliberately put inexperienced executives in senior positions so that he would have more control, according to the report. He discouraged executives from meeting with each other and arbitrarily fired managers or employees who disagreed with him.

“Fraud pervaded the entire CA organization at every level, and was embedded in CA’s culture, as instilled by Mr. Wang, almost from the company’s inception,” the report said.

How convenient for Wang, who stepped down as chairman in 2002, that the statute of limitations is only five years.

ESTA Festival 2007

Leta and I ran up for the weekend to Ephrata, Pa., to the Eastern States Theatre Association Festival, Leta serving as last-minute replacement techncian for Silver Spring Stage’s entry and I serving as driver and audience member. The Stage returned with an acting award (Toni as Mrs. Popov), while the excellent production of Daniel MacIvor’s Never Swim Alone from Port Tobacco Players (which we saw in Frederick, Md., in January) advanced to the national competition in Charlotte, N.C., this coming June.

Ephrata Performing Arts CenterThe black-box performance space (comfortable, roomy) is built on the bones of a venerable summer stock venue (Ephrata is an easy drive from Philadelphia) organized by John Cameron in the 1950s. Lobby and backstage photos feature Roy Scheider, Dody Goodman, Hugh Reilly, and Stephen Sondheim. The Ephrata PAC now houses a community theater presenting a half-dozen productions yearly. The building is located in a park close to the city center, on the banks of Cocalico Creek.

building detailDowntown Ephrata, in Pennsylvania Dutch country, doesn’t offer too many surprises, but the decorative brickwork ornamenting this pre-1900 building at the city’s zero-point is quite charming.

Dirty jobs

Possibly the only job worse than being personal assistant to a certain local sports team heiress (so my sources tell me): scribble, scribble, scribble quotes from Charles C. Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus:

Minions collected and stored every object [Thupa Inka, an Inca chief] touched, food waste included, to ensure that no lesser persons could profane these objects with their touch. The ground was too dirty to receive the Inka’s saliva so he always spat into the hand of a courtier. The courier wiped the spittle with a special cloth and stored it for safekeeping.

Much worse than the time I ASM’d Forum and a cast member gave me her half-consumed cough drop to hold before she went onstage.

Just the work

Conceptual artist Sol LeWitt has left us. From Michael Kimmelman’s obit:

To the sculptor Eva Hesse, he once wrote a letter while she was living in Germany and at a point when her work was at an impasse. “Stop it and just DO,” he advised her. “Try and tickle something inside you, your ‘weird humor.’ You belong in the most secret part of you. Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool.” He added: “You are not responsible for the world—you are only responsible for your work, so do it. And don’t think that your work has to conform to any idea or flavor. It can be anything you want it to be.”

Upgrades

Hmm. It looks like WP 2.1.x (to which I just upgraded) has hidden the linkcategories table. Come out, come out, whereever you are! My left sidebar hurts!

Specifically, I’m trying to find the equivalent code for

$link_cats = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT cat_id, cat_name FROM $wpdb->linkcategories");
foreach ($link_cats as $link_cat) {
if (get_links($link_cat->cat_id, '', '', '', FALSE, '', FALSE, FALSE, -1, FALSE, FALSE)) {
...
}
}

Howzat?

My own moment of typographical double-think, the equivalent of Jasper Johns’s trick of stencilling names of colors onto his canvasses in paint of a different color: to look up from my copy of Against the Day, out the window of the subway car at a stop on the Orange Line in Arlington, only to see Clarendon rendered in bold Helvetica.