Take it away, Sand Box John:
The feeler car is now located in the Falls Church Yard. This could mean that WMATA is close to making the first run on the route under third rail power. Word has it this move should happen before the middle of December.
Author: David Gorsline
Postcards from Ohio: 4
Leta and I walked around downtown Piqua on a quiet, somewhat chilly Saturday afternoon. We had coffee at a local ice-cream parlor, chatting with the proprietor; he said that much of his business was party catering out of a truck. I found a fallout shelter sign on the wall of the YMCA where I used to play bumper pool.
Evidence of the city’s milling and manufacturing past is still quite evident. This building is close to the river, just a few blocks down Main Street from what used to the the movie theater and is now a Hallmark store.
The centerpiece building of the downtown square, once the Orr-Statler Block and then the Fort Piqua Hotel (where the Greyhound buses would stop), is now the recently-restored Fort Piqua Plaza. The public library is the main tenant; I can’t turn up the story of how and why the library moved out of the Flesch mansion on Greene Street.
You for Me for You
Yury Urnov uses an eclectic mix of theatrical devices to tell the story of Mia Chung’s You for Me for You, a fantasia of two sisters seeking to escape from North Korea to America: a revolving ring that delivers actors and props on stage, that can render a New York streetscape with toy taxis and waist-high apartment buildings; a backdrop stacked high with Asian storage boxes that pivots to reveal industrial scaffolding over which the sisters (Ruibo Qian as Junhee and Jo Mei as Minjee) clamber in their flight; a sound design by Elisheba Ittoop that simultaneously evokes the rumbles below decks of a huge cargo ship and taiko drumming; a song and dance break suggestive of Family Guy.
What, exactly, are the women escaping to? A consumerist paradise populated with fast-talking New Yorkers (uttered hilariously by Kimberly Gilbert as a salad of English understood imperfectly by newly-arrived Junhee) where the simple act of buying a phone requires graduate-school training? One that lacks the simple connections to the earth and home captured in a single ripe persimmon. And yet, as one of them says as they cross the border, “There’s nowhere else: let’s hurry to get there.”
- You for Me for You, by Mia Chung, directed by Yury Urnov, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in association with Ma-Yi Theater Company, Washington
Postcards from Ohio: 3
We didn’t have as much time to explore Cincinnati as we had hoped, but we did make it to my first intended destination: the American Sign Museum, located in an industrial district between the Mill Creek expressway and the rail yards.
The strength of this place is its collection of neon and other lighted signs, but there are some fun non-electrified artifacts as well. This Big Boy adheres closely to the original design: three-dimensional slingshot in the back pocket, striped pants, saddle shoes, and a zaftig physique. You can also find some well-authenticated Burma Shave signs, not the dime-a-dozen reproductions.
The examples of neon on display are just stunning, and many of them in remarkably clean condition, especially considering the proprietor’s disposition against restoration work. Leta was extra fond of this tavern sign, at right.
This Crosley sign features a lateral lightning bolt that zings on and off, much too quick for my point and shoot.
Long before electronic ad rotators and carousels on web pages, before windowshade roller signs at the ballpark, these flip-down rotating ads were in service. No, there’s no such thing as progress.
Just a few blocks back toward the freeway, at Colerain Avenue and Hopple Street, we stopped for cheese coneys and chili at Camp Washington Chili, then back on the road!
Top-down
Brian Eno talks to Ha-Joon Chang about free-market capitalism, Terry Riley’s In C, and wasting time.
BRIAN ENO: One of the characteristics of people, whether on the left or the right, is that they can’t tolerate uncertainty. They don’t want a system with any leaks in it. They want to think they’re capable of battening everything down – and if only people would fucking stick to the rules, it would work. When those systems don’t work, it’s always because, in their opinion, somebody didn’t play the game correctly.
Postcards from Ohio: 2
Fortified with gluten-free donuts, we set off south from Columbus to visit three Scioto Valley sites dedicated to preserving earthworks built by pre-European peoples. We talked a lot about the “mound builders” when I was going to school as a boy in Ohio, but I can’t recollect actually visiting any of the sites.
The first two were built by what we know as the Hopewell culture, Mound City, north of Chillicothe (first capital of Ohio)…
…and the Seip Earthworks, southwest of town. This section of a circular wall has been reconstructed; original or not, it’s impressive.
The orderly groundskeeping by the NPS makes you wonder what the Hopewell did to keep these enclosing ceremonial walls tidy. Certainly they didn’t have access to golf course fescue for planting.
We continued southwest, and after recovering from a wrong turn in the town of Bainbridge and chasing the setting sun, we proceeded to Serpent Mound, near Peebles. Current scholarship now attributes this work to the Fort Ancient people. The two approaches could not be more different. Where the Hopewell sites are geometric and situated on level ground, the Fort Ancient construction is organic, undulating along a ridgetop. It reminds me of Andy Goldsworthy’s wall at Storm King. The one thing the sites have in common is proximity to a watercourse.
No more elephant hunting
Last week I donated Alberta, my venerable Ford Explorer, to one of my local public radio stations. She and I had a good run: we traveled (usually on birding/hiking trips) to Louisiana, Key West, Niagara Falls, the Adirondacks, twice to the beaches of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, Cape May, several trips to Delmarva. She carried set pieces to a theater competition in Geneva, N.Y.; we took Mom birding in southeastern Indiana; during nesting season, my waders were always in the cargo area.
The biggest body damage she sustained was a scrape in the driver’s side rear fender: I ran into a support column in an otherwise empty parking structure in Vienna. Another time, a driver banged into her in Falls Church, but he nosed down and hit her square in the hub cap: you can’t see the damage at all.
It was the multiple trips to the shop that did her in: she was on her third transmission; we repaired the brakes last October only to have them fail again in May. But we still got past 200K miles before Della came on the scene, and we finished up with 208469.4. I will miss her.
Trash
Christopher Kompanek profiles Tony-winning designer Donyale Werle, who specicializes in using salvaged, recycled, and upcycled materials in her sets.
“You get this stuff and you wrestle with it,” [Werle] explains. “Materials and colors can be anything. All the time, I’m like, ‘Okay, this is what we’ve got. This is what’s in front of us. How do we use it?’”
Postcards from Ohio: 1
Leta and I took a quick road trip to Ohio last week. First stop was Bexley in the Columbus suburbs to visit friends. On our way out of town we stopped at the Cherbourg Bakery, which makes an excellent line of tasty treats, all of them gluten-free and Leta-friendly.
Next to our parking space on Main Street, we found a mileage marker from the original National Road. We had covered the 254 miles from Cumberland much more quickly than those who traveled before us. Distances from Wheeling, to the east, and nearby Columbus, just 3-1/2 miles to the west, are somewhat legible in this image. (Point and shoots don’t do well with inscribed stone.)
After the blight
Helen Thompson reports on current efforts, via breeding and “cisgenic” techniques, to re-establish chestnuts in the Eastern forest.
Pretty bird
Five North American birds that I find exceptionally beautiful to look at. I’ve been fortunate to see all of these, at one time or another.
- Scissor-tailed Flycatcher (Tyrannus forficatus). The bright red in the axils is something special.
- American Kestrel (Falco sparverius). The adult male is a delicate sonata of rufous, black, and slate blue.
- Sanderling (Calidris alba). It’s the grayscale basic plumage that I find especially fine.
- Painted Bunting (Passerina ciris). The male is a little flashy: a guilty pleasure.
- Great-tailed Grackle (Quiscalus mexicanus). I like the subtle iridescence of all the grackles. The Great-tailed has the mostest in the tail department.
In the heart of the Gothamic metropolis
Some time ago, I made a note that a link to The Nation’s profile of Ben Katchor had gone missing, and I collected some new links to replace it with. Since then, the link has revived; but that shouldn’t stop me from sharing links to Robert Birnbaum’s interview for The Morning News—and Birnbaum’s earlier interview for Identity Theory. Hmm, maybe Birnbaum is as obsessed with Katchor as I am.
A sample of Katchor’s strips for Metropolis Magazine is available online.
The waxwing slain
Toronto’s glass-and-steel skyline is an architect’s delight, but quite deadly to fall migrant birds. Despite Canadian government regs that make newly-built towers less lethal, there is still great room for improvement. Ian Austen tours the city, and picks up a few carcasses, with Michal Mesure and volunteers for the Fatal Light Awareness Program.
At least the train goes to Airport
Yuck. Ersatz D.C. Metro system with a nonsensical map and extra helpings of brown and muddy orange in the color scheme.
The producers of TV’s Leverage slapped some signs on a Portland light rail station and rolling stock to make it look part of the Metro system—excuse me, the District of Columbia Subway Transit System. Perhaps the silliest sign is the one posted in the Washington Park station (the only fully underground station in that system): it says “DC Subway.” How many signs do you see inside a subway station that tell you, yes, you are indeed in a station of the system you are traveling on? Fox forbid that I should step out of a Chicago Red Line car at Jackson and need the reassurance that I’m not, in fact, somewhere on Boston’s T?
Holly Down in Heaven
Forum Theatre continues its investigations into questions of faith with Kara Lee Corthron’s Holly Down in Heaven. The Holly of the title (the self-possessed) is a precocious 15-year-old who has placed herself in what she describes as religious exile for the term of her unintended pregnancy. Self-banished to the basement, she bickers with her tutor Mia (Dawn Thomas) and manipulates her preternaturally doting father (affable KenYatta Rogers) (a Steve Douglas lacking in tough love), but her deepest conversations are with the heterogeneous members of her extensive doll collection. And these dolls talk back, led by a marionette of Carol Channing (manipulated and voiced by the skilled Vanessa Strickland), the only therapist whose advice the fragile Holly will heed. We are cautioned against false gods, but it’s not the dolls that constitute Holly’s idolatry; rather, perhaps it is her own believed self-sufficiency.
As perhaps we would expect, Mia has issues of her own, which Thomas divulges (nay, it’s more like an evisceration) in a bravura second-act monologue. (And she does a fine Carol Channing riff, too.) But it’s the off-the-beaten-track storytelling of the puppets that’s the real charmer of this show. So strong are these alter egos of Holly that they conduct their own colloquy at the end of the first act, without Holly even being in the room.
- Holly Down in Heaven, by Kara Lee Corthron, directed by Michael Dove, Forum Theatre, Silver Spring, Md.