Author: David Gorsline

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.

Some links: 62/a

Two recent articles pertaining to food labeling: First, Gustave Axelson recaps the labels vying for your attention as you shop for bird-friendly coffee.

…coffee sellers don’t always advertise that their coffee is Bird Friendly. “Probably about only 10 percent of coffee from Bird Friendly certified farms carries the Bird Friendly stamp on the package,” said Robert Rice, a research scientist at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center.

For example, Starbucks and Whole Foods sell some coffee from Bird Friendly certified farms. But they don’t see the need to make room on their packaging for a separate label that appeals to a relatively small—and silent—minority: birders.

Next, Mark Bittman proposes labels for packaged food that put the information you need right up front. A caption to the print version of the story recommends scanning the standardized list of ingredients in today’s packaging, not necessarily reading it in full:

…if the list of ingredients spans an entire paragraph, chances are you don’t need it.

I like Bittman’s red-yellow-green color codes, and I like the prominence of the Welfare measure. It would be nice to give more visibility to ingredients to which various consumers are allergic or intolerant.

Silver Line progress report: 26

still closedIt’s been a while since I photographed the construction site at the future Wiehle Avenue (temporary) terminal. The building definitely resembles a station at this point. See how nice and clean all that gravel ballast is.

bridge to be madeWork for the pedestrian overpasses is also progressing nicely, and the canopy over the west end of the platform is in place.

Cape May fallout

birding the elmsAlmost ideal weather conditions (Friday’s passing cold front with storms, Saturday’s northwest winds) set up a great weekend birding in Cape May with a group led by Mark Garland. Warbler migrants were numerous (15 species for my count, including my darling Black-throated Blue and Black-throated Green). In the afternoons, we worked the neighborhood streets around Lily Lake. An insect hatch in the elm trees caused them to “turn on,” in Mark’s words. A brilliantly yellow Prairie Warbler; a crazy weekend for Red-breasted Nuthatches (Sitta canadensis).

reached the beachFalcons and accipiters were also plentiful (ID mnemonic: the tail of a Sharp-shinned Hawk is sharply cut off, while a Cooper’s tail is rounded) , and easier to see from the west side of Cape May Point than from the official watch station in Cape May State Park. A trio of Brant in Delaware Bay was a small surprise. Mark called the goldenrod thriving in this windblown habitat Beach Goldenrod (other sources call it Seaside Goldenrod) (Solidago sempervirens).

Sunday morning at Higbee Beach we were seeing half a dozen Northern Flickers at a time. Higbee runs north-south along the bay side of the peninsula. Mark explained an early-morning phenomenon that I didn’t understand the first time I visited Cape May, in 1998. As the sun comes up, a passerine (migrating by night) that finds itself over Delaware Bay takes the strategy “water! go back the way you came!” So at sunrise you will see birds flying back north over Higbee, looking for a dry spot to land.

Monarch butterflies were also in migration, a steady stream all weekend. The flicker of a butterfly was always catching my eye, making me think that I’d spotted a bird. I added Common Buckeye (Junonia coenia) to my very short butterfly list.

a point of lightEveryone came scrambling to see the Say’s Phoebe (Sayornis saya) in the park east of the lighthouse. I’ve seen this bird in the west, so I got my look and then went elsewhere: there had been reports of Clay-colored Sparrow in the brush along the back of the dunes, and some of our group got a brief look, but I did not succeed.

80 species for the weekend, plus good looks at several Cape May Warblers for a life list twitch.

Mark’s suggestion paid off: Westside Market on Broadway is a good place to get a sandwich and Krimpets for lunch. If you’d like a split of wine to go with dinner (many of the restaurants are BYOB), Collier’s is the place to go.

funky nouveausodas and iceI like the funky nouveau street name signs in Cape May City. And the hand-painted sign at my motel (a mom and pop operation now converted to a chain’s branding) was very cute.

The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity

Kristoffer Diaz’s 2009 play is an entertaining slam of all things masscult, one that works on multiple levels. Macedonio “Mace” Guerra (the outstanding José Joaquin Pérez) is an artist doing what he has always wanted to do, performing as a professional wrestler. Small but physically talented, he is a journeyman playing the “heel” roles, making the charismatic “face” wrestlers (like the titular Chad Deity, well played with preening entitlement by Shawn T. Andrew) look good—and not getting his neck broken in the process.

When the beleaguered Mace meets Vigneshwar “VP” Paduar (Adi Hanash), an Indian immigrant in Brooklyn with moxie and mojo to match Chad’s, he envisions a story line for the two of them that ends with the little guy on top. Alas, his dreams are quickly co-opted by the promoter Everett K. “E.K.O” Olson (fearsome Michael Russotto), who is as culturally tone deaf as any Hollywood suit.

What makes the satire work is that hardly any cultural group escapes ridicule. The hayseed Billy Heartland (with a perfect theme song from Big and Rich) is just as annoying and stereotyped as the Muslim terrorist character that E.K.O. assigns to VP. Chad Deity serves to lampoon two conventionally opposed groups: he’s a trash-talking African-American and a Romney Republican who makes his entrance into the ring tossing dollar bills to the crowd.

What makes the show work as theater is the quiet intensity of Pérez. He narrates much of the story as a fourth wall-breaking monologue, and he’s not afraid to make us wait for what he has to say—this is appropriate, because Mace has spent his life withholding his true thoughts from others in order to keep a job, in order to get by. When Mace finally unloads on E.K.O. in a bravura surrogate fight scene (with echoes of a similar climax in Lanford Wilson’s Book of Days), pleading for the opportunity to tell his own story, we get the physical release that we’ve been hoping for.

Doing his part to make of Pérez look good in turn is James Long, who covers three ensemble roles and is a professional wrestler IRL.

In a story in which every character has at least one name given to him by someone else, a world of traditional Mexican face masks and engineered personas, of outer borough denizens reappropriating one another’s “authentic street” culture, perhaps it’s fitting that VP’s dialect is a little slippery.

If you really did get to tell your story, what would that look like?

  • The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, by Kristoffer Diaz, directed by John Vreeke, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

e-scriptive

Two of our major play publishers, Dramatists Play Service and Samuel French, have made recent announcements about releasing plays in various electronic formats. Dramatists has 60+ scripts available in ePub format now (including several by Craig Wright); French’s will begin making material available at the end of the year. There is the hint that the app for Samuel French scripts will provide sides for memorization.

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