Month: October 2007

Memorable

John Dean generally puts his biography subject, President Warren Harding, in the best possible light, but he does quote this assessment by H. L. Mencken of Harding’s speechmaking:

It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of a dark abysm… of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and rumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash. (p. 73, quoted from Paul Boller, Jr., Presidential Anecdotes)

On the road

Google Maps’ search features have become more forgiving, so that a state-by-state search for thoroughfares named Gorsline turns up usable results:

Each one is a concrete tracing of someplace that my ancestors and family have passed through.

Summer Garden

Naturally, Miss Dawn Astra reciprocates Ambrose Hammer’s love, because all the time she is Julius Smung’s sweet pea, the best she ever gets is a free taxi ride now and then, and Julius seldom speaks of her as an artist. To tell the truth, Julius is always beefing about her playing the part of a strip dancer, as he claims it takes her too long to get her clothes back on when he is waiting outside the Summer Garden for her, and the chances are Ambrose Hammer is a pleasant change to Miss Dawn Astra as Ambrose does not care if she never gets her clothes on.

—Damon Runyon, “So You Won’t Talk!”

The various venues known as the Winter Garden are well-known in New York, but I had never heard of the Summer Garden. So far, all I’ve been able to turn up is a 19th-century theater also known as Wallack’s Theatre. Not much on dates of operation, but by 1937 the repertory at Wallack’s seems to have moved downscale.

Guys and Dolls update

It’s been a busy, busy couple of weeks, but we are comfortably moved into the theater and we’re on a glide path to opening on Friday. Crew are working out the logistics of scene shifting. Here’s hoping all works out with the operational fountain that is planned for the “If I Were a Bell” scene, which is my surprise favorite, due to the tipsy abandon that Molly brings to the song.

I’m really enjoying working with Brian as a music director. A lot of the things he does (like actually conducting warm-ups, so that we will focus on following him; and his harmony exercises) I’m sure are standard practice, but they’re new to me. He has a dead-calm demeanor, which can make him hard to read sometimes, but placidity during tech week is a valuable commodity. Along with my keyboard and iPod, a really helpful tool has been MTI’s RehearScore, a MIDI-based rehearsal pianist who never gets tired. I’ve been looking forward to music rehearsals, because the music for my four songs (“Luck Be a Lady,” “The Oldest Established…,” “Sit Down You’re Rockin’ the Boat,” and the reprise of “Guys and Dolls”), for the most part, has been easier to learn than the choreography that goes with it.

It’s no surprise that I am one of the slower learners at choreography. Choreographer Ivan and assistant Katherine have been generous and flexible as they take a bunch of middle-aged white guys and make them look like spicy salsa dancers and jitterbugs. Building a dance, in my sparse experience, is more like fashion than anything else: it’s about trying things, piling on things, and then editing them down. From the outside, it looks like the choreographer is “making it up as he goes along.” All this can be unnerving to us short-bus dancers in the back row. When you’re struggling to execute something, it’s hard to hear, “okay, that isn’t working, let’s try this” or “there’s a little dead spot here, so we need to add something…” Now in a scene, if a director were to say, “it’s not reading, try it sarcastic… now try it tragic,” I would think nothing of it. That’s the work. But remembering which way Ivan’s “Happy Arms” move goes, and expressing something with my face at the same time, is another thing. Section leaders Chris and Mark have also been very helpful in getting us through the dances.

Most days at the rehearsal hall, my practice clothes have been a fedora, t-shirt, hiking shorts, and shiny black FBI-shoes oxfords. I look like a hapless tourist. But I am long past caring about that.

Nothing Sacred

Firebelly Productions takes on George F. Walker’s Nothing Sacred, an adaptation of Ivan Turgenev’s novel from 1862. Walker, Canadian taxi driver turned incendiary playwright, is not one to be pigeonholed, and nothing bespeaks this fact like the current offering, a tragi-comic Russian study of generation gaps and social revolution.

The central figure of the story is Yevgeny Bazarov, medical student and nihilist, played with ample quantities of supercilious arrogance by Jon Townson, who brings a whiff of Kevin Kline to the role. Bazarov befriends Arkady (Patrick Flannery), son of Nikolai Kirsanov (amiable Charles St. Charles), a freedman on whose farm most of the action takes place. Arkady, newly graduated from university and still somewhat impressionable, is seeking a path through life different from that of his father and his Europe-infatuated uncle Pavel (Dave Bobb). Unfolding events lead to declarations of love inappropriate, foolish gestures in defense of honor, much fumbling and fighting (most of it in the moonlight), and a death by stupid accident.

Among the supporting cast, Scott Zeigler makes his mark as Viktor Sitnikov, a fawning innkeeper’s son and friend to Arkady and Yevgeny with a keening laugh, maybe the most annoying sound in literature; and Cliff Williams III as Sergei, bodyguard to the widow Anna Odintsova (Kelley Slagle)—Sergei is a Clydesdale of a man with a comic susceptibility to folk tales of wood demons.

Director Robb Hunter keeps the action moving at a good clip, but sometimes doesn’t allow moments the time they need. For instance, Nikolai’s hesitations and self-interruptions seem forced and unmotivated. On the other hand, Hunter’s device of using title cards to help us keep track of scenes is well-handled (and indispensable in the modest playing area at Theatre on the Run) and is nicely reprised at the curtain call.

To from whence it came

Sources are ambiguous about the precise meaning of Hollanderize in Adelaide’s line from “Take Back Your Mink”:

So take back your mink
To from whence it came
And tell them to Hollanderize it
For some other dame.

While most indicate that it is simple cleaning and reconditioning, Seymour Kass, in a 1992 letter to the New York Times and speaking from a position of authority, points to a subtler connotation:

The common meaning of Hollanderize, when I worked as a furrier for my father (“King of the Muskrats”) in the 1940’s and 50’s, was to dye the cheaper, plebeian, widely worn muskrat coats to give them the look of mink.

It’s all the more confusing, because when the verses are repeated in the fast, dance section of the song, the Girls sing instead “and go shorten the sleeves/For somebody else.”

This week’s photographic narcissism

what's in my pockets
My entry for Lifehacker’s Show Us What’s in Your Pockets gallery:

Arranged in the top of the handmade jewelry box that I use to collect it all at the end of the day, here’s what goes in my jeans pockets, shirt pocket, and on my wrists. Starting at 3 o’clock and going clockwise:


  • Casio multifunction watch. With this I can time a rehearsal, or check my elevation gain when I’m hiking.
  • Wrist band worn to remind me of Leta’s celiac disease.
  • Palm Tungsten E2 organizer in a scratched-up case. This is the third Palm I’ve owned, but I don’t like it as much as the Tungsten T that it replaced. I keep the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary loaded on an expansion card in the PDA. I use the two storage slots in the case to hold weekly backups of my must-have documents (since I back up my computers to disk as well, these are backup backups).
  • Souvenir coin purse. Absolutely essential to my well-being. I go through one of these about every ten years, and when one wears out and cracks apart, I try to find the cheesiest one I can to replace it. I still have the fragments of the first one I owned, which I brought back from the 1964-65 World’s Fair.
  • Rollerball pen. Rollerballs rule!
  • Pencil/stylus/ballpoint combo, the kind that twists to change tips. I’m hard on these things, and it’s becoming more difficult to find replacements. The combos that use gravity and a button don’t do it for me.
  • Keys to the house and one of my cars, on two rings. On the house key ring is a Leatherman Micra multi-tool. I’d like to find a nicer fob for the car key, ’cause the one I have just touts the dealership.
  • A gentleman always has a clean handkerchief.
  • A nicely worn wallet from Coach. You didn’t really think I’d show you inside that, did you?

Best efforts

Cory Doctorow forms an interesting analogy about dealing with the firehose of internet information flow:

There was a time when I could read the whole of Usenet — not just because I was a student looking for an excuse to avoid my assignments, but because Usenet was once tractable, readable by a single determined person. Today, I can’t even keep up with a single high-traffic message-board…. I’ve come to grips with this — with acquiring information on a probabilistic basis, instead of the old, deterministic, cover-to-cover approach I learned in the offline world.

It’s as though there’s a cognitive style built into TCP/IP. Just as the network only does best-effort delivery of packets, not worrying so much about the bits that fall on the floor, TCP/IP users also do best-effort sweeps of the Internet, focusing on learning from the good stuff they find, rather than lamenting the stuff they don’t have time to see.

In a lot of ways, I feel the same. Time was, I could be a completist about what I read and listened to: in college I bought every album released by Chicago (and after the first one, they were conveniently numbered) and I set myself the task of reading all the William Faulkner in print. Now, I am content to cherry-pick an author or a band. I really liked Graham Swift’s Last Orders, but I didn’t like his next book that I picked up, so I’m done.

Lime green

David Pogue reviews a beta version of the XO, the controversial “$100 laptop” device from One Laptop Per Child. As has been reported elsewhere, to help drive down unit costs, a donate-one-get-one program will be in place for a limited time. I’m thinking a solid-state Linux box with web browser would be a cute thing to have around the house. And the tax deduction wouldn’t hurt.

Upgrades: 3

After an irritating couple of hours fumbling about with the WordPress documentation, I came up with this fragment to draw the dynamic part of my left sidebar:


<!-- Begin - Links from the 'Links Manager'-->
<?php
$link_cats = get_categories('type=link&orderby=ID');
foreach ($link_cats as $link_cat) {
?>
<div class="left-widget-title"
id="linkcat-<?php echo $link_cat->cat_ID; ?>">
<?php echo $link_cat->cat_name; ?>
</div>
<div class="left-widget">
<ul>
<?php wp_list_bookmarks('categorize=0&category=' . $link_cat->cat_ID . '&orderby=name&title_li=0') ?>
</ul>
</div>
<?php
}
?>
<!-- End - Links from the 'Links Manager'-->

The assignment of the id= attribute to the widget title <div> is mainly there for debugging purposes.

Man oh man, it’s miserable work extracting information from the WordPress docs. And I’m not really happy about an app that breaks existing code every time a point release comes out. Oh well, it didn’t cost me any coin.

I used these doc pages: category, wp_list_bookmarks, and get_categories.

Upgrades: 2

Once again WordPress has reworked the category system:

WordPress 2.3 introduces our new taxonomy schema. Any plugin that queries against the old table will break horribly. Plugins that use the category API should be fine.

This means that this code in my left sidebar, which I modified from the original Tiga theme:


<?php
$link_cats = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT cat_id, cat_name FROM $wpdb->categories");
foreach ($link_cats as $link_cat) {
if (get_links($link_cat->cat_id, '', '', '', FALSE, 'id', FALSE, FALSE, -1, FALSE, FALSE)) { /* anything to show? */
?>

needs some work. Looks like this evening’s project is figuring out how to use category filters.