theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
A pleasant change, at least in this Helvetica skeptic’s eyes: the Central Park Conservancy is rolling out new signage parkwide, set in Titling Gothic. Very nice set of images by David W. Dunlap that capture the historical range of fonts and styles of signs in the park.
(Link via The Morning News.)
“Now you look here! The first thing you got to understand is that all this uplift and flipflop and settlement-work and recreation is nothing in God’s world but the entering wedge for socialism. The sooner a man learns that he isn’t going to be coddled, and he needn’t expect a lot of free grub and, uh, all these free classes and flipflop and doodads for his kids unless he earns ’em, why, the sooner he’ll get on the job and produce—produce—produce! That’s what the country needs, and not all this fancy stuff that just enfeebles the will-power of the working man and gives his kids a lot of notions above their class.”
—Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922), chap. II
At home, the quake left a little evidence of its passing. In the basement, some coffee cans of picture framing hardware spilled from the top of a high shelf, and a clock likewise fell.
Upstairs in the back bedroom a lamp tipped over and a lava lamp hit the deck. I am very grateful it fell on carpet and did not smash. Everything else looks just like I left it this morning. The various cracks in the walls, the result of the house’s settling ever since I started loading my belongings into it twenty years ago, are no worse than before.
Fulfilled my modest Chunkster Challenge for the year, so most of the pending titles are more slender. My to-read list includes a couple of borrows from Leta, new titles from my favorite A’s (Ali, Anne, Atkinson), some backlist items from Four Seasons Books in Shepherdstown. Towards the left end of the shelf, some art books to browse through during hockey intermissions.
So the last place you would probably expect a workshop on grasses identification to take place would be Great Falls Park. It turns out, however, that the park harbors some specialized habitat—globally rare, according to trip leader Cris Fleming—that is especially hospitable to Poaceae and the other graminoids.
The Potomac River’s periodic floods, every twenty or so years, is the key to the grasses’ success. Right along the edge of Mather Gorge, large trees don’t get a chance to establish a closed canopy which would shade the grasses out.
The result is tiny patches of specialized plant communities that otherwise you’d expect to see in the tallgrass prairie of the Great Plains. Tucked into the crags and clinging to the extremely thin soil are species like Big Bluestem (Andropogon gerardii), Little Bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium), and various Panicum species, like Switchgrass. Members of some other plant families like it here, too, like the flashy blue Dense Blazing Star (Liatris spicata), the diminutive Whorled Milkweed (Asclepias verticillata), and Wingstem (Verbesina alternifolia).
It should come as no surprise that grasses are a challenging photographic subject, especially when the photographer and gear are of the point-and-shoot variety. But I did manage to snap this image of Wild Oats (Chasmanthium latifolium) in a slightly shadier spot.
Of the fescue tribe of the grass family, we looked at Elymus virginicus, Virginia Wild Rye (not related to the domesticated rye), with its aggresively long awns; Bottle-brush Grass (E. hystrix), looking like a herringbone; Purple-top (Tridens flavum), also known as Greasegrass: it feels more tacky than greasy. North of the visitor center, in the bed of the Potowmack Canal, we saw two Leersia species, including Rice Cutgrass. My old posts suggest that this native plant is a problem at Huntley Meadows Park, but we saw just a small patch here. It does resemble the violently aggressive Stilt-grass (Microstegium vimineum), but its leaf lacks the silvery pale midrib.
We also found some nice examples of non-grasses, a nice sedge (Cyperus strigosus) and a rush all in fruit (Juncus tenuis) ekeing out life on the towpath. Elsewhere, the Black Gums (Nyssa sylvatica) are starting to go red in the leaves. Black Vultures (Coragyps atratus) were kettling and generally hanging out with the more numerous Turkey Vultures.
Bill Keller proposes that the current occupants of the Capitol would benefit from a little poetry:
Poetry is no substitute for courage or competence, but properly applied, it is a challenge to self-certainty, which we currently have in excess. Poetry serves as a spur to creative thinking, a rebuke to dogma and habit, an antidote to the current fashion for pledge signing.
He quotes from William Carlos Williams (somehow I had remembered these lines as coming from Whitman): “It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there.”
His colleague David Orr suggests some works that might serve as antidotes to the paralysis. I think Kay Ryan’s “All You Did” is especially pertinent.
Via DCist, The average color of the Washington D.C. sky, updated every 5 minutes.
Longacre Lea makes good on its promise of “physical productions of cerebral works” with this year’s Something Past in Front of the Light, an articulate, allusive, provoking examination of the nature of faith in the divine: whose promises can you trust?
Alexander Strain is stunning as a young man who presents himself to Christopher Henley’s documentary filmmaker with a once-in-a-lifetime proposition. Strain’s character, so he says, is The Devil—Beelzebub himself—and the wants Henley to tell the story of his life. He can provide some home movie clips to fill in the details.
Whoever he is, Satan, or “Stan” as he comes to be known, is not of this world. He inhabits Strain’s body like one of David Byrne’s big suits; the voice is overloud and the social niceties ignored, as if he were somewhere in the midband of the autism spectrum; a barefoot, awkward gait recalls Shaw’s hoofed demon in Man and Superman. When Stan chooses to participate in a conversation, he speaks in koans—or are they midrashim? The easy sentiments of a pop love song, as well as the rare display of integrity of character, are equally likely to spin him into a collapse to the floor.
Kathleen Akerley’s script places this personification of negativity in a pop/classical culture context. Stan imagines the Crucifixion as a stage-managed cinematic event; a catfight on a strangely reflexive television reality program echoes the postures of Laocoön and his sons. A second-act encounter with Stan’s nemesis, his Other, is somewhat unsatisfying, suggesting as it does an audience with Bokonon over closed-circuit TV. But then, it was Satan who arranged this meeting. Double bluff?
Missy Frederick welcomes a half dozen new theater company startups in the area.
Via Greater Greater Washington, John Hendel links to videos produced by Metro’s Brian Anderson demonstrating the gear and techniques used for track maintenance.
The first thing to know about visiting Bodie State Historic Park is to plan extra time, both because this busted gold mining town is much bigger than you would expect and because the drive in will take more time than you’ve planned for. At first, I planned on driving in on Cottonwood Canyon Road from CA 167, but a sign promised “very rough road” and the prospect of covering 10 miles in 30 minutes. I had abused my rental enough already, so I backtracked to U.S. 395 and CA 270.
The good news about CA 270 is that the Caltrans has an active repaving project for the state highway-numbered section of the road. This is also the bad news, because you will sit for a good period of time waiting for a pilot car to escort you through the one-lane work zone. The bad news is that, once you get out of the work zone, the pavement is very rough in multiple patches. The bad bad news is that CA 270 only designates the first ten miles of the road into Bodie: the last three miles lose the highway number and the pavement.
What strikes me about Bodie is that it comes from an era where land was cheap and sanitation was not. There is a lot of empty space between buildings (although the interpretive brochure, $2 at the entrance station and a bargain, says that only a small fraction of the town’s original buildings are standing). Nevertheless, I noticed that only the hydro plant and the firehouse are located close to Bodie Creek—good idea to give the freshwater supply plenty of room. Very few buildings are two stories, not even all of the hotels. However, the schoolhouse has two floors. And the buildings are not crowded together, beetling over one main street, like they would be in a Hollywood movie set.
There is a museum to tour, and when we look in the windows of some of the structures, we see some artifacts have been positioned to give us the sense that someone might still be living here. But the dusty roads and the whine of the high mountain (elevation 8,379 feet) wind in the wires are authentic. Since most of the structures are wood, and built all at about the same time (the town housed about 10,000 people in 1879), most of the structures are at the same state of crumble. There are some brick structures (like the post office in the left image, and the remains of the vault for the first bank). The sawmill (right image) is one of the more decrepit buildings.
The mill area (the gray-blue structures at the left of the image) is off-limits to casual touring, but I did see a guide leading small groups through it.
The interpretive brochure simply describes this as Dog-face George’s house. It’s on Green Street, on the way out of town up the ridge heading southeast. Too bad we don’t know more of George’s story, but at least his nickname and his house are remembered.
Bonus birding: a couple of looks at Sage Thrasher (Oreoscoptes montanus) on the drive out of town back to U.S. 395.
My semi-rustic accommodations near the western short of Mono Lake (no phone, TV, A/C, internet) were pleasant enough, save for the regular noise of heavy truck traffic on U.S. 395, just a few meters from the cabin.
I started the morning on the north side of the lake, at the county park. Very pleasant: a clear sky; shirtsleeves rolled down; save for one other photographer, I had the place to myself. A scope would have been a helpful to get a better view of the phalaropes feeding, but it wasn’t essential. In late July, the birds are almost all out of breeding plumage, so I was using field marks like bill length to separate Wilson’s from Red-neckeds. The short boardwalk trail leads straight out to the lake, with no loop. Some up-close encounters with the tufa, described by someone as a petrified spring.
As compared to the interpretive signage on the federal property on the south side of the lake, the county is more explicit about the role of the City of Los Angeles in the depletion of Mono’s water. The lake itself is not the water source; it has no outlet and is too salty for drinking. (That Mad King Ludwig calcium carbonate geology didn’t happen overnight in the 20th century.) Rather, it is the diversion of water from the Owens River and elsewhere in the watershed that is causing the lake to dry up.
In case we needed reminding, the city still owns land and water rights here. Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.
Following a tip from the Westrichs’ book, I followed an unmarked section of Cemetery Road that became gravel, beyond the boneyard, to a place marked by a shack, where Yellow-headed Blackbirds once congregated. No more. But I did learn something useful: car birding in a hybrid is brilliant! I was rumbling along the gravel, slow enough that I was already in electric mode, when I saw a bird I wanted a better look at. I touched the brake, the car stopped—and everything went quiet. No idling noise, no vibration. Just quiet.
On the south side of the lake, on Forest Service land, the trail forms a loop and you can get right to the water, if you care to. (It feels a little oily, or like watery gelatine.) There are consequently a lot more people. On the plus side, the sun angle is much better for looking at the birds. One or two of the Red-necked Phalaropes bore some traces of breeding plumage. Along with the signature spinning strategy, the birds seem to herd the alkali flies up to the shoreline for easier snacking. No vertebrate life survives in the water, but along the with flies, the lake is home to an endemic brine shrimp, Artemia monica.
Undisturbed, the flies form thick clusters. But the shadow of a slow hand wave is enough to get them moving.
I left the lake, tried another birding stop that might have been great at publication time (1991), then paid a short visit to Panum Crater. The volcanoes here in the basin are dormant; it is estimated that Panum was active only 650 years ago. Shards of obsidian on the trail. I didn’t walk the entire loop of the crater rim: hot, dry, not too many other visitors, and I really couldn’t be sure that the sketchily-marked trail made the complete circuit. Ever so slowly, the veg is making a place for life in the volcano’s crater.
Jamaica Bay’s conservationists — fishermen and firefighters, limousine drivers and owners of small boats — are not your typical tree-hugging types, not “Upper West Side, Park Slope, brownstone Brooklyn people,” as Mr. Riepe put it. They are people like Mr. Lewandowski from the canoe club, a transit official…
Sunday was intended for driving and birding, but I did as much botanizing as I did birding, and that without a local field guide. I drove east over the mountains along the road to Tioga Pass, which was not cleared of snow and opened to traffic until June 18 this year. I used LoLo and Jim Westrich’s Birder’s Guide to Northern California and Jean Richmond’s Birding Northern California as guides.
At Hodgdon Meadow (4,900 feet), I heard a few difficult flycatchers but saw few birds. At the campground, smoke was still evident in the air from a managed burn a couple weeks previous. I saw a lot of this lupine, perhaps Lupinus grayi.
At Olmstead Point, I couldn’t even scare up a Clark’s Nutcracker. Tenaya Lake is beautiful, but wasn’t birdy when I visited mid-day.
At Tuolumne Meadows, the bird that surprised me was Spotted Sandpiper (Actitis macularia), working the banks of the river.
On a side trail from the meadow, I found this fuzzy congener of the lupine I saw at lower elevations. I believe this to be Lupinus breweri. It was doing a scrappy job of colonizing otherwise bare soil; pines were the only other veg in evidence.
A final stop at Dana Meadows (about 9,700 feet) yielded a distant look at a Cassin’s Finch (Carpodacus cassinii). I got a good look at the strong red crown contrasting with the rest of the head feathers.
I left the park at Tioga Pass, just shy of 10,000 feet, and dropped down into the Mono Basin via Lee Vining Canyon.
