Author: David Gorsline

Under escort

Gary Stix profiles Omar Fadhil, ornithologist and researcher with the University of Baghdad. Field work in Iraq presents special challenges.

Whenever I go out, villagers always ask, “What the hell are you doing here?” I never engage them directly. Instead I get out my binoculars, set up the camera tripod and take out my bird books. I show them pictures of the birds I’m looking for and, when possible, let them look through the binoculars at the birds themselves.

After a time, they often warm to me. They point to a bird in the book and say, “We’ve seen this one but not that one.” They become my scouts. Despite the war, I have found six new species that had never been seen before in Iraq.

Henhouse asylum

There was a certain coherency in [John Maynard] Keynes’s (the intellectual godfather of the IMF) conception of the [International Monetary] Fund and its role. Keynes identified a market failure—a reason why markets could not be left to themselves—that might benefit from collective action. He was concerned that markets might generate persistent unemployment. He went further. He showed why there was a need for global collective action, because the actions of one country spilled over to others. One country’s imports are another country’s exports. Cutbacks in imports by one country, for whatever reason, hurt other countries’ economies.

* * *

Today, however, market fundamentalists dominate the IMF; they believe that markets by and large work well and that governments by and large work badly. We have an obvious problem: a public institution created to address certain failures in the market but currently run by economists who have both a high level of confidence in markets and little confidence in public institutions. The inconsistencies at the IMF appear particularly troubling when viewed from the perspective of the advances in economic theory in the last three decades.

—Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (2002), ch. 8, p. 196

Some links: 51

Along with some perhaps justifiable criticism, Daniel Mendelsohn unpicks one of the secrets to Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men.

This, more than anything, explains why the greatest part of the audience for Mad Men is made up not, as you might have imagined at one point, by people of the generation it depicts—people who were in their twenties and thirties and forties in the 1960s, and are now in their sixties and seventies and eighties—but by viewers in their forties and early fifties today, which is to say of an age with those characters’ children. The point of identification is, in the end, not Don but Sally, not Betty but Glen: the watching, hopeful, and so often disillusioned children who would grow up to be this program’s audience, watching their younger selves watch their parents screw up.

Hence both the show’s serious failings and its strong appeal. If so much of Mad Men is curiously opaque, all inexplicable exteriors and posturing, it occurs to you that this is, after all, how the adult world often looks to children; whatever its blankness, that world, as recreated in the show, feels somehow real to those of us who were kids back then.

(Link via Arts & Letters Daily.)

At the park: 41

waking upThe mergansers continue their pattern of being unpredictably predictable. We found a nest already started on our first day of monitoring, but it wasn’t in the expected location; rather, we found four eggs in box #13, nearest the observation tower.

The work went a little quicker than past years, because now we have only fourteen boxes to check. After reviewing our records back to 2006, we had asked Dave Lawlor of the park staff to remove five boxes that haven’t been producing.

The weather was unusually pleasant for February, with clouds giving way to sun by mid-morning.

M.K. used a GPS to get latlongs of the boxes and produced a nifty map.

Red-winged Blackbirds (Agelaius phoeniceus) are already chattering (seems early for them); the light frosting of red on the maples is barely perceptible at distance. On the way back to the cars, above the boardwalk I saw a big black bird riding a thermal, a bird with a flash of white. The rest of the team confirmed my guess (I’d left my bins at home): Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus).

Sky blue

I live on an island at the edge of a maze of estuaries, at the convergence of a bay and a sound, a place full of waterbirds, even in the dead of winter.

Janice P. Nimura goes birding on the East River.

…they were gadwalls, not mallards. The female looked mallardish, but the male was different, with dove-gray feathers, paler at the tips, over a black rump. Understated and elegant, like a morning coat. I love the word “gadwall”; it sounds Dickensian, the name of a prosperous man of business, paddling about on the social pond.

Beginners’ parallax

Chuck Almdale assembles a mini-handbook for field trip leaders on how to help others find the bird you’re looking at.

In an open area, twelve o’clock is always straight ahead, six is directly behind, three and nine are 90 degrees right and left, respectively. Other hours fall in between. For a vertical object such as a tree, twelve is the top, three is ½ way down on the right side, and so on. …12 o’clock is not simply the direction in which you happen to be looking at that moment.

Oedipus El Rey

The use of a prison setting for the recital of familiar material is well-known for its effect in theater, from Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good, set in colonial Australia, to the legendary production of Waiting for Godot by the San Francisco Actors Workshop at San Quentin. And here it works again, in the powerful Oedipus El Rey by Luis Alfaro, an ensemble retelling of the myth from Sophocles and the Greeks by tattooed inmates of a correctional facility in southern California.

In Alfaro’s version, Oedipus (the flexible Andres Munar) is born to a Latino drug kingpin in Los Angeles and spends his exile in North Kern State Prison; on his release, he follows the fated steps of killing his father Laius (David Anzuelo, an onstage character added from the Sophocles version) in a road-rage incident, taking over the family narcotics business from Creon (the intense Jose Joaquin Perez), and marrying his mother Jocasta (the fearless Romi Diaz).

Classical and contemporary elements blend well in this piece. A runway thrust stage (designed by Misha Kachman) ends upstage with a pair of industrial doors that evoke the devices in Greek theater, traditionally sliding away to reveal the results of bloodshed offstage—but here the sex and violence is front and center. The blinding of Oedipus is especially well-done: terrifying without making us fear for the safety of the actor. Choral work by Mando Alvarado and Jaime Robert Carillo is short, sharp, and sometimes funny, rather than rhapsodic; we liked the Coro’s remarks that explain the cruelty of Laius’s abandonment of Oedipus as “fathers sometimes do that.” Yoga, doo-wop, tai chi—all the pieces come together. While there are few passages of monologue, there is at times in the writing a gritty lyricism, as when Jocasta likens her tears to the Los Angeles River, usually dry and channeled, but gushing when in flood.

  • Oedipus El Rey, by Luis Alfaro, directed by Michael John Garcés, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Coover decoded

Robert Coover oversteps a bit when he writes in The Public Burning of Time magazine, personified in his novel as the national poet laureate,

Time in any case has kept his father’s counsel, pursuing those stylistic infatuations that bedizened his earliest work and have been ever since the only passion he’s ever known: the puns and quips, inverted sentences, occupational titles, Homeric epithets and rhythms, … and Time‘s own personal idioglossary of word-coinages, inventions like “kudos” and “pundits” and “tycoons” and hundreds more which have passed into the national lexicon. (ch. 18, p. 326)

Not quite on the coinages. The magazine may have popularized their use, but Oxford gives several 19th-century cites for kudos, pundit, and tycoon; in the case of the first two, definitely the modern senses. The 1987 supplement does give Time a cite (from 1959) for pundit as a verb. Stronger is the case for Henry Luce (in Coover, the mother of Time) and Briton Hadden’s (the father) introduction of the current sense of tycoon as “business magnate,” adapting a 19th century word used by Westerners for a Japanese official. The sense evolved from a nickname for Abraham Lincoln:

1861 J. Hay Diary 25 Apr. in Lincoln & Civil War (1939) 12 Gen. Butler has sent an imploring request to the President to be allowed to bag the whole nest of traitorous Maryland Legislators. This the Tycoon… forbade. 1886 Outing (U.S.) IX. 164/1 The tycoon of the baggage car objected to handling the boat. 1926 Time 14 June 32/3 Married. Fred W. Fitch, 56, rich hair-tonic tycoon.

One down

I knocked off my first book in the year-long Chunkster Challenge, Robert Coover’s The Public Burning. I picked up my copy from Encore Books in Philadelphia. (Encore was a chain somewhat like our failed Crown Books here, trafficking in new releases, overstocks and remainders, and other castoffs. My copy, originally retailing new at $13, sold as a recycled library book for $1.98.) The last time I started the book, I bailed out at page 44, and marked my place with a phone directory listing notice from Bell of Pennsylvania.

Some time later in the next eleven months, after I finish class reading and everything else on my shelf, I am slated for Apollo’s Angels, Watership Down, and The Annotated Origin, Charles Darwin annotated by James T. Costa.

Silver Spring CBD

How do we define where an urban space is, what its edges are, without making those edges into barriers? That is one of city planners’ problems that we explored in our first field trip for my land use principles class, led by our instructor Katherine Nelson through the Central Business District of Silver Spring, We were joined by Reemberto Rodríguez, Director of the Silver Spring Regional Center, who proved to be a government executive blessed with equal parts of pragmatism, sardonic wit, and visionary enthusiasm. For Rodríguez, Silver Spring in all its diversity “is America”—nay, it is “the center of the universe.”

ready to goSilver Spring’s CBD, designated by the state as an arts and entertainment district, has seen a massive amount of redevelopment in the past decade, and for the most part that redevelopment has been successful. But there are many projects in the planners’ books that are still empty lots, like this block scheduled for high-density housing just north of the new civic building at Veterans Plaza. The gradual relocation of light industrial businesses and low-density in the Fenton Village and Ripley districts, to be replaced with intensive development with FARs around 4, is also yet to come.

a breathersomething preservedPreservation of Silver Spring’s historic heritage, in whole or metonymically, was another theme of our walk. While the entire Silver Spring post office and a (currently rundown) tile-roofed building that was the birthplace of dry cleaning are protected complete, it is only the facades of the Silver Spring Shopping Center and Canada Dry bottling plant that have been retained.

to be reloadedPathways (narrow and broad) and open space are always fruitful topics of analysis when it comes to a place like downtown Silver Spring, situated as it is at the conjunction of three major arterials (Maryland 410, East-West Highway; U.S. 29, Colesville Road; and Maryland 97, Georgia Avenue), a passenger and freight rail line, Metro’s Red Line, and the future light-rail Purple Line. We looked at mandated public use spaces that worked, like a sliver of land attached to a condo block on Fenton Street (occupied by two residents even on this blustery cold February day), and a gateway space for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; and those that were less successful, like the fenced and gated garden at Discovery Communications. I’ve walked that block of Wayne Avenue many times and I wasn’t aware that the space in front of the building was open to the public.

forlornHonest-to-Fox green space, at present, is mostly pushed to the margins of the CBD, like Jesup Blair Park and this forlorn bit of space along Fenton Street. Jesup Blair was deserted on this unfriendly Saturday, but the soccer fields showed evidence of heavy use.

the back wayKatherine led us down down several alleys along the walk, cutting across the twisted grain of the street grid, where the strong diagonals of the District line and railroad contend with the natural inclination of north-to-south. Numerous signs directed us to nearby bike paths that didn’t quite penetrate the CBD’s core. We looked at the edge-and-barrier problem along Cedar Street, where single-family homes are converted by special exception to light office uses like lawyers and clinics, and cut-through vehicle traffic is inhibited by turn restrictions.

dressing it upBoth Katherine and Reemberto pointed out the strength of small design details and amenities: a newly-built sidewalk bulb-out at Georgia and Bonifant, the banners (for money reasons, no longer maintained) that once identified the district, some distinctive brick and metalwork along Fenton Street. I noticed the mosaic and mural Silver Pass, a valiant effort to dress up the pedestrian underpass (all right, tunnel) that carries walkers along Georgia Avenue under the rail tracks.

And along East-West Highway, we even found, in a somewhat shabby state, the original Silver Spring. Not to mention the cryptically named Roger Miller Restaurant.

I came away from the field trip, a visit to an area that I thought I knew well, with a generous handful of places to come back and explore fully: the scrappy new Bonifant Theatre Space, the historical society in the original train depot, jazz at Vicino, the shiny performing arts venue at Montgomery College, Silver Spring Books (also on Bonifant).

The $26.47 solution

Via DCist, Ann Scott Tyson (for Dr. Gridlock) explains those shiny clear plastic domes that have been appearing over the smart card targets on Metro fare gates. According to spokesperson Angela Gates,

The domes are intended to allow the antenna of the SmarTrip card reader to be better positioned to communicate with the card…

Sometimes, in radio communications, 1 centimeter makes all the difference.