theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
Via Leta: my internship in New York came a little late (1978), but here I am at Sterling Cooper (standing in for W.R. Grace & Co.), ready to set the world on fire. (Actually, John Molloy would have been appalled by the short-sleeved shirt.)
Here comes the sad but inevitable news that Merce Cunningham has died at the age of 90.
A name from the past: C. Northcote Parkinson has a page at Economist.com, excerpted from Tim Hindle’s guide to management gurus. Looking back, it’s not clear to me that Parkinson was ever serious in his assertion that “work expands to fill the time available for its completion”—the sequels that he generated suggest that he had found a moneyspinning idea that he could not drop—but back in high school in the 1970s, at least some of us took him seriously. John Lund was on my debate team, a year or two ahead of me, and John’s politics were substantially righty. He made a specialty of arguing either side of whatever resolution we were working that year—funding secondary education, judicial reform—from the standpoint of Parkinson. Assigned the affirmative position that the federal government should clean up the air and water, John could argue (not necessarily persuasively) that the most effective way to stop pollution is to do nothing about it. As was often the case with counterplan and other gimmick tactics, they often succeeded because the other side had no specific preparation against John and his partner’s preposterous lines of reasoning.
…under the pressure of endless human tinkering, cultivated plant varieties evolved too quickly for agricultural writers and lumbering printing presses to keep up…. See growing things as the earth’s software for which manuals can never quite keep pace. Rapid botanical change has been a constant feaure of the cultivated plant world since the beginnings of domestication.
—Stanley Crawford, “A Farmer’s Bookshelf [1993],” in The River in Winter, pp. 157-158
On my last trip to California, I was dealing with family business, so I didn’t in get much sightseeing or birding—none, really. But I did start building my collection of West Coast street name signs with this easy-to-read example from Arden Arcade, an unincorporated suburban area of Sacramento County. The arrows (which don’t appear consistently) indicate the direction in which street numbers increase.
A host of others, smiling killers and gruesome butlers, stalk through the dark,rainy landscape of the film like wraiths. The Big Sleep [1946] is something other than a detective story, with the drive toward rationality that designation is supposed to represent. It is a carnival of criminality, its underworld supernumeraries crowing the film not so much as picturesque character bits, but as tiny, finely-drawn portrayals of deceit and self-interest in a tapestry of meanness.
—Kevin Hagopian, Film Noir Reader 4, p. 42
Via kottke.org, awesome annotated transcript of the last half hour of audio communications between Houston and the Eagle LM during its descent and landing on the Moon. I didn’t realize that an important part of the astronauts’ navigation was watching how fast objects moved past scribed marks on the craft’s window, as means of computing velocity. Sort of like watching tell-tales.
I remember staying up to watch the first walk, my Instamatic in hand to take a snapshot off the TV screen.
A couple of years later, when Apollo 15 landed at Hadley Rille, I thought it would be a fine idea for the city of Oakwood to rename its Hadley Avenue for the lunar feature.
Good piece by Jeff Lunden on playwright Theresa Rebeck, on the art vs. commerce dance and writing for TV series.
“In television, what you are doing is trying to fit your voice into a particular mold,” Rebeck says. “When I was a staff writer on NYPD Blue, it was truly my job to hear David Milch’s voice for that show and to deliver episodes that embodied that voice.”
Hooray for us: it has come to my attention that Providence Players of Fairfax’s production of All My Sons has been honored with the 2009 Ruby Griffith Award for All Round Production Excellence.
The image from Henry Darger used in the cover design of the NYRB’s reissue of a novel from 1929 by Richard Hughes, is apparently all too appropriate, if we trust reviewer Andrew Sean Greer.
To say A High Wind in Jamaica is a novel about children who are abducted by pirates is to make it seem like a children’s book. But that’s completely wrong; its theme is actually how heartless children are.
* * *
…the children have such a deformed sense of right and wrong that it’s soon the pirates who are frightened of them.
Geoffrey K. Pullum reproduces a turd of plagiarized septic verse.
1st Stage presents another successful showcase for its developing young talent in Joe Calarco’s Shakespeare’s R&J, another script that calls for flexible ensemble performers. Four boys in a Catholic prep school take a break one evening from “amo-amas-amat” and antediluvian sex education textbooks and start horsing around with the Shakespeare text they’ve been set. They begin with an overly broad riff on one of the street scenes from Romeo and Juliet, and before they know what’s hit them, they’re realizing a complete performance of they play, picking up male and female roles on the fly as called for. Somewhat like Moby Dick Rehearsed, it’s a script that distills the essence of its source material through the alembic of caricature and improvisation.
Alex Mandell, as “Student One,” brings a fine athleticism to his Romeo, while Aeneas Hemphill (“Student Four”) revels in his comic turn as the Nurse. “Student Three” has the greatest challenge, in that he must cover the widest range of characters, from a ditsy Lady Capulet to a brawling Mercutio, and Jonathan Elliott generally meets it. His is certainly the most vigorous Friar Lawrence you’re likely ever to see. Finally, “Student Four” finds himself pressed into the role of Juliet: this role has the greatest arc, moving from “who me?” diffidence through to full-blooded, warm love. Jacob Yeh does a lovely job with it, especially the moment when his character realizes that it’s time to cowboy up and play the role that’s been assigned him. (Disclosure: I’ve worked with Jacob on projects in the past.)
The set, designed by Mark Krikstan, is a marvel: a thicket of bamboo (harvested by cast and crew from a farm in Calvert County) lashed together by a team of Eagle Scouts into two walls that look like piles of pick-up sticks or a pair of tank traps. It provides multiple playing levels and an endless supply of staffs for the good-looking stage fights, choreographed by Paul Gallagher.
Lots of little tasks accomplished today; the sad thing is, none of them are actually written down on a to-do list. This is just dealing with little piles of stuff all over the house.
Alex Ross falls under the spell of the Make Music festival in New York:
It was in the spirit of the day to be charmed rather than annoyed by the accidental music of the city: the beeping of a bus’s wheelchair lift during [Terry Riley’s] In C; the syncopated barking of a dog energized by the drumming of Loop 2.4.3.
Oy: 767 posts and three years of this stuff.