theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
I kid you not, this building is at the end of the block of Degraw Street where my no-frills European-style hotel was located.
As evidenced by the newly-established hotel, Park Slope and Boerum Hill are encroaching on this industrial neighborhood of Gowanus. We passed a shiny new condo block on the west side of 4th Avenue. Degraw and Sackett Streets are painted with bike lanes.
I took a vacation day Monday, before my training classes midweek, to explore some offbeat places in New York. I’d never been to Roosevelt Island before, so I got that tram ticket punched. The park at the southern tip of the island was closed, but the views across the East River from just outside are just as good.
At the northern point is a lovely, tiny lighthouse, dwarfing the Triborough Bridge in this perspective.
Back on the “mainland” of Manhattan, a painted advertising sign persists on 2nd Avenue. I look at the sloped lettering of PORTOVAULT and now I understand where Ben Katchor’s signs come from
Harold Pinter is perhaps at his most Beckettian in The Caretaker, particularly in the character of the shabby, smelly old man Davies (Jonathan Pryce, approaching statesman status). Director Christopher Morahan pushes the comedy as far as it will go, with a who’s-got-the-bag sequence that owes a little to Chuck Jones. Alex Hasselll as Mick delivers Pinter’s signature brooding menace, while Alan Cox gives us an understated gem of a monologue for damaged Aston, lit by an exquisitely gradually tightening pool of light designed by Colin Grenfell.
Extra-live acoustics in the work-in-progress BAM Harvey Theater at times rendered Pryce’s dialect too murky.
War Horse is a masterful piece of ensemble theatricality. This simple story of a boy and his horse Joey is told with live actors and bunraku-inspired puppets, augmented by a series of projections against a screen that resembles a torn scrap of paper.
The trials of Joey, acquired by the English army for service in the last major war in which cavalry was used (the so-called Great War), are our entry into an account of the inhumanity of that war — hence, as told here, this is not a piece that younger attendees will have the patience for.
This is the sort of puppetry that works because you’re always aware of the machinery, so a change to the fabric covering the horses’ bodies tells us all that we need to know about their condition.
If the acting and the musical underscoring are at times melodramatic, the work knows that its most touching effects are the simplest ones: a paddock established by four actors holding staffs; fallen bodies on a battleground transformed into a graveyard’s mounds by the arrival of the women they left behind, in chorus; the twitch of a horse’s ear or the heave of a foal’s chest; wagon ruts established by rumpled scraps of cloth laid on the deck. Perhaps most dramatic is the death of Joey’s rival-turned-compatriot, the horse Topthorn. When Topthorn goes down, the puppeteers detach themselves from his armature and back offstage quickly, his departing life force briefly become personified.
Shameful witness stacking continues in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, as Ben Pershing reports. Buttinsky Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) refused an opportunity for Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) to testify on legislation that directly affects her constituents in the District of Columbia, contrary to traditional House practice. Franks represents an extrusion-shaped district in the Phoenix suburbs.
D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) remarked sarcastically that if Franks feels strongly about how the city is run, “I would invite him to become a candidate for D.C. Council.”
Hugh Powell reminds us of the connection between wine bottle closures and the preservation of biodiversity. Cork prices are crashing, which threatens cork oak plantations on the Iberian peninsula.
Cork trees live for about 250 years, growing in open groves interspersed with meadows of tawny grasses and diverse wildflowers. Once a decade, skilled workers with hatchets carefully slice off an inch-thick jacket of bark, leaving the tree to grow it back. There are cork farmers right now slicing cork from the same trees that their great, great, great grandparents harvested. In all, some 13 billion corks are produced each year, slightly more than half of them in Portugal and the rest in Spain, France, Italy, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. It’s a $2 billion industry.
The skilled labor pays well, and the farmers can also keep livestock on the land. While they’re at it, the farmers keep a delicate balance in their forests, avoiding overgrazing but keeping shrubs from taking over, setting controlled fires and putting out fierce ones.
Among conservationists there’s a real fear that as cork prices fall, the cork oak forests will deteriorate or be converted into eucalyptus plantations or Mediterranean resorts.
Another generous review of August: Osage County, this time from Katie Elizabeth Quinn.
Teddy Wayne’s piece is long but worth checking out.
When I was a sprout, I was taught to supple up the bindings of my new hardback schoolbooks the way that Malorie Brooke reminds us. And I did it, when my teachers were watching. But I don’t think I’ve done it on my own since sixth grade.
Mind you, the practice or lack thereof doesn’t explain why all our scripts of August: Osage County from Dramatists have fallen apart.
The Bodleian Library has launched a pilot project to generate metadata for a collection of 64 boxes of sheet music from the mid-Victorian period. The project looks to crowdsource the extraction of key signature, tempo, genre, and other information about the scores, most of which are for piano.
Morgan and Rego challenge the claims by Reichheld and crew that Net Promoter Score is the single customer satisfaction metric necessary to explain business performance. While their peer-reviewed work does identify measures (e.g., Top 2 Box Satisfaction) that do correlate with short- and long-term success (Tobin’s Q, market share, etc.), their computation of “net promoters” is flawed: it is only a rough approximation of the ratio promulgated by Bain and Satmetrix, based on the “how likely to recommend” 0-10 scale. This shortcoming in the work is pointed out by Timothy L. Keiningham et al. Nevertheless, that follow-up note says
Despite the problems with the Net Promoter and Number of Recommendations metrics, Morgan and Rego (2006) have provided valuable insight regarding the relationship between business performance and other commonly used customer metrics…. We are unaware of another longitudinal study that examines the predictive value of satisfaction and loyalty metrics in such a comprehensive way.
And five years after the publication of The Ultimate Question, I’m waiting to see independent research that backs up its claims.
Genie Baskir gives the thumbs-up for August: Osage County at ShowBizRadio.
The entire talented ensemble replicates the bond of a family and they move around each other with a familiarity borne of generations of bloodline. …[Technical elements are] so ordinary and banal as to reinforce the idea that we really are all spying on the neighbors…
Sunday was a near-perfect day for a field trip to the Parkers Creek section of the American Chestnut Land Trust property in Calvert County on the western shore of the bay, led by Stephanie Mason. Chesapeake Bay’s not really visible from trails on this property, but you can sense it from the end of the Turkey Spur Trail.
We had the place nearly to ourselves. For a Coastal Plain site, the walking is remarkably hilly.
It was a middling day for birds. We watched a Green Heron stalking its lunch on Parkers Creek; had good looks at Prothonotary Warbler, Scarlet Tanager, and Northern Parula; heard Ovenbird (frequently), Wood Thrush, Hooded Warbler, Worm-eating Warbler, White-eyed Vireo.
At the lunch break, a skink mistook Ethan’s trousers for an extension of the log he was sitting on.
Some nice butterflies: Spicebush Swallowtail, several Zebra Swallowtails, and two Vanessa species, an American Lady and numerous Red Admirals.
Some good flowering plants to look at: the place is covered with Virginia Waterleaf (Hydrophyllum virginianum). Stephanie explained an concept that I hadn’t latched onto before, the difference between a determinate inflorescence (the plant decides how many florets to make and it’s done) and an indeterminate inflorescence (flower ’til you drop, like we saw with Mysotis).
And some great ferns. The image of Ebony Spleenwort (Asplenium platyneuron) at the left is an attempt to show the dark brown rachis. New York Fern (Thelypteris noveboracensis), at the right, tapers to a point at both ends, like a New Yorker burning his candle. Hay-scented Fern is the other species in our area that forms large clonal colonies like New York Fern.
Stephanie made the call on this Netted Chain Fern (Woodwardia areolata), which is very similar in appearance to Senstive Fern. I need to learn to look for fertile fronds when I’m looking at ferns.
New words acquired via studio reading: a couple of intermodal transportation schemes that don’t appear to have moved beyond the coinage of cutesy names: fishyback and birdyback.
Fishyback service is named by analogy with piggyback service, and consists of carrying loaded truck trailers on boats or barges. The top search results that aren’t definitions are newspaper clippings from the 1950s—and the textbooks where I read about it in the first place. Perhaps the transportation scheme was pushed aside in favor of the containerized shipping that we know today. I did find an Egyptian shipping company that advertises the service.
Birdyback intermodal transportation is the same idea, but with the trailer carried by a cargo plane. Presumably in the cargo hold, not Space Shuttle-style.
Ben Zimmer antedates the Disney team’s most famous nonsense word, precious to user interface designers and testers worldwide, made canonical by Henry Spencer’s decalogue. With the primary accent on the “flaw,” the word appears in a 1931 humor column for a Syracuse University student newspaper under the byline of Helen Herman.