David Gorsline – Page 132 – A Honey of an Anklet

Strange liberators

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., at Riverside Church, New York, 4 April 1967:

A few years ago there was a shining moment… a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.

* * *

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

A recent column by David Alan Grier gives a mixed review to citizen science and related activities. He speaks well of the CubeSat, at standardized design for experiment packages to be designed by students and launches into space; he also likes the BOINC framework for harnessing household computers to solve computationally intense problems. But his praise for generalized crowdsourcing of research is tempered:

Citizen science may not be able to make major changes to scientific institutions, but it should be able to occupy some niche in scientific practice. As we have seen in other activities that attempt to coordinate the contributions of the general public with the Internet, these efforts have a way of disciplining work and overcoming gross inefficiencies associated with mass labor.

Mass labor, especially when it is a volunteer effort, can prove to be remarkably resistant to discipline. Volunteers are prone to follow their own inclinations no matter how much guidance a professional scientist might offer. One of the major citizen projects devoted to recording biodiversity claims to offer a global perspective on flora and fauna, but its volunteers have shown a remarkable propensity for collecting images from the world’s wealthy shopping districts and resorts. Pictures of Yellowstone can be of great interest, but they are of little use when you hoped to see images of plants found in Yaoundé.

I’m inclined to agree. Doing science is not the same thing as snapping a photo with a smartphone or checking in at foursquare. Perhaps the sweet spot for this approach is the application of what we might call semi-skilled knowledge work: trained observation and transcription. As examples, consider eBird and the related projects from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Distributed Proofreaders component of Project Gutenberg, or my own new volunteer project, the North American Bird Phenology Program.

Sk8r boi

Rachel Carson explains something that I often see on my infrequent visits to the ocean beaches:

The tidal flotsam abounds, too, in many little empty egg cases in which various sea creatures passed their first days of life…. The black “mermaid’s purses” belong to one of the skates. They are flat, horny rectangles, with two long, curling prongs or tendrils extending from each end. With these the parent skate attaches the packet containing a fertilized egg to seaweeds on some offshore bottom. After the young skate matures and hatches, its discarded cradle is often washed up on the beach.

—The Edge of the Sea, ch. III

Reclamation in a conflict zone

Via Utne Reader, Samiha Shafy profiles Azzam Alwash, co-founder and director of Nature Iraq, that country’s only environmental organization. The organization’s focus is reclaiming the wetlands at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, which were drained and poisoned during Saddam Hussein’s regime for political purposes.

Incredible Girl

Celia Aurora deBlas, an erstwhile theater colleague, is crowdsourcing the funding for her indie film project, “Incredible Girl,” a sexy look at empowerment through the lens of same-sex encounters. Woo-hoo, contributions are tax deductible! but the funding round extends only through 7 February.

Stung

Via Utne Reader, Katy Butler interviews Jeff Bridges for the fall 2010 issue of Tricycle:

Movies are a wonderful spiritual playground. The film you actually make is like a beautiful snakeskin that you find on the ground and make a hatband out of. But the making of the movie is the snake itself. That is what I take with me. That includes hanging out with the other actors in the trailer after work, and getting into this position where you’ve empowered another actor to have a power over you, to affect you. That’s a spiritual place to be.

On the bus

Via Laura Miller at Salon comes an invitation to the Chunkster Reading Challenge. I’m game for the first level: the Chubby Chunkster. To fulfill it, all I have to do is read four 450-page books between 1 February and 31 January of next year. Might as well get some credit for taking on Jennifer Homans’ epic-length history of classical ballet, Apollo’s Angels.

Missing the 70s

Winter is now a little quieter: NPR reports that Gerry Rafferty has died. Just the other day, I was just listening to City to City on my walk.

Washington Auto Theater Club

The WATCH adjudication assignments are out for this year. A lot of my shows are still TBA, so I’ll list the places in the metro area I’ll be driving to:

Late addition, corrected: Vint Hill, ~~Prince William County, Va.~~Fauquier County, Va.
Woodbridge, Prince William County, Va.
Fort Washington, Prince George’s County, Md.
Greenbelt, Prince George’s County, Md.
Annapolis, Anne Arundel County, Md.
Sterling, Loudoun County, Va.
La Plata, Charles County, Md.
Arlington County, Va.
Annandale, Fairfax County, Va.
Herndon, Fairfax County, Va.
Bowie, Prince George’s County, Md.

In the down under

Two trip reports of illicit underground (sewers, subways, and steam tunnels) explorations of New York by Steve Duncan and Erling Kagge offer different perspectives. Jacki Lyden’s long piece for Weekend ATC is relatively straightforward, albeit with a dose of Radiolab sound effects. Alan Feuer’s diary for the New York Times, on the other hand, takes a hard left turn midway. The story turns into the story of the documentors of the project.

Wednesday, 12:15 a.m.
114 Delancey Street, Manhattan

…there are problems: the entourage has gotten too large. Everyone wants to go into the subways: me and a photographer from The Times; Jacki and an NPR producer; Andrew the videographer; even Will Hunt, the spotter. There were four of us in the sewers; now there are eight. What, I think, has happened to the intimate expedition?

Steve senses the concern and hastily announces that he, Andrew and Erling will go ahead; the rest of us can follow at a distance. I fail to see the point in exploring without the “explorers.” I confront Steve, tell him this is useless. Is this an expedition, or a media event? Disillusioned, I leave.

4:03 a.m.
West 181st Street, Manhattan

From home, I e-mail Steve and Erling: “I understand why you guys wanted to publicize this poetic adventure. … Unfortunately, the thing that wanted to be publicized was slowed down and rendered moot by the distracting number of people you brought in.” I add that it’s become impossible to describe two men on a journey when, in fact, a media army — with sound booms, cameras, video equipment — is in tow. I wish them well, offer no hard feelings.

3:32 p.m.
620 Eighth Avenue, Manhattan

An e-mail and an epiphany. The epiphany: When Ernest Shackleton went to the South Pole in the early 1900s, he himself documented the journey in a diary. Not so, in 2010, in media-soaked New York, where, it dawns on me, the crowd of chroniclers is fitting in its own way.

Another twist in Feuer’s version of the story that is more This American Life than The Gray Lady is the abrupt end to their visit with the woman known as Brooklyn, dweller in the Amtrak tunnel: B.K., her boyfriend, shows up and throws the whole lot of them out.

I’m uncomfortable with Lyden’s lack of reciprocal acknowledgment that another reporter and photographer were accompanying the urban spelunkers.

At any rate, the naturalist in me finds it interesting that one of Duncan and Kagge’s routes follows Tibbetts Brook through the Bronx, a waterway long ago confined underground by pavement.

Sugarloaf Mountain loop

Bands of showers, clouds, and a little sunshine passed over us on Sugarloaf Mountain, on an ANS hike led by Cathy Stragar. Birding on the trail was slow—shreds of mixed winter songbird flocks, a few winter woodpeckers—although a Common Raven (Corvus corax) did oblige by flying overhead and vocalizing. But generally we were able to enjoy the quiet, punctuated from time to time by the patter of some light rain.

Tree life on the mountain is dominated by Chestnut Oak (Quercus montana); there are numerous stands of Mountain Laurel (Kalmia latifolia) filling in the understory. I found a couple sprigs of Spotted Wintergreen (Chimaphila maculata), and Cathy pointed out the first spikes of Skunk Cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) emerging from a wet spot.

Cathy set a fairly brisk pace, so we covered the five and half miles of the blue loop trail plus side trip to the summit in 5:15.

This view to the west from the summit is a perspective maintainer, with the gentle curve of the Potomac River offset by the stacks of the coal-fired generating station at Dickerson. Wii juice has gotta come from somewhere.

After I snapped the landscape, I found one of the survey monuments for the peak at my feet. (Here’s a shinier image of what they look like.)

What should I read next?

Leta mentioned that our friend Amy was looking for scripts to read, just for general background. Everyone else has an idea about what’s important theater to be familiar with, so I figure that I’m entitled to post my own list. Herewith a shortlist of important, entertaining, challenging straight plays (no musicals) from the period 1945 (or thereabouts) to the present. Most were published originally in English. They are marked by psychological complexity and offer staging challenges that can be met in many different ways, depending on the creativity of the team and the resources offered by the performance space. These are in no particular order, just the order that I transcribed them from my scribbled notes.

Sarah Ruhl: The Clean House; Dead Man’s Cell Phone
Marsha Norman: ‘night, Mother
Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot
Craig Wright: The Pavilion
Christopher Durang: Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You
Mary Zimmerman: Metamorphoses
Lanford Wilson: The Hot L Baltimore; Book of Days
Lynn Nottage: Intimate Apparel
Jean Anouilh: Antigone (trans. Lewis Galantière)
Tony Kushner: Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika
Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman
Neil Simon: Barefoot in the Park
Nicky Silver: The Food Chain; Fat Men in Skirts
Harold Pinter: Betrayal
Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Alan Ayckbourn: “The Norman Conquests:” Table Manners; Living Together; and Round and Round the Garden: I would love to persuade three local community theaters to produce this trilogy in simultaneous or sequential rep
Caryl Churchill: Top Girls: fabulous parts for women, something always in short supply in community theater
John Pielmeier: Agnes of God
Bertold Brecht: The Good Person of Szechwan
Richard Greenberg: The Violet Hour

I made my case for a few of these titles and playwrights for inclusion in Silver Spring Stage’s upcoming season. Decisions have not yet been made. We’ll see.

To be free

A slightly belated tribute to Billy Taylor, who passed away this week after a long long career, as reported by A Blog Supreme. Several years ago, I attended a series of “jazz appreciation 101” talks by Dr. Taylor, given in Kennedy Center rehearsal space. He was a welcoming, generous teacher. One of the things I remember is his observation that you can learn a lot about jazz harmony just by mastering Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life.”