Author: David Gorsline

Paul Taylor Dance Company 2010

The Taylor company opened its one-night visit to the D.C. suburbs with Brandenburgs (1988), a last-minute replacement for the planned Also Playing. This is one of Taylor’s lovely pieces that achieve such stunning effects with simple gestures—a group of dancers executing simple two-foot turns while rotating in circle, but blindingly fast. Certain of the stage pictures look stylized and flattened, as if Taylor was looking back to an even more distant classical period, his dancers glazed onto the surface of a Greek krater. There’s a ankle-shake ornament that the women do that’s an answer to the musical accompaniment (movements from the J.S. Bach Brandenburg Concertos), sort of a choreographic mordent.

We received the first Washington performance of Phantasmagoria, set on compositions from the Renaissance period, a stew of folk dance and bawdy hijinx wrapped around a poison mushroom of death. Signature Taylor is a dance for four men who comically fail to execute cleanly: as the bumping and shoving degrades into fisticuffs, this bransle has become a genuine brawl. Less effective is another Taylor trope, the Bowery Bum who provides the piece with its second ending.

The evening closes with the powerful Beloved Renegade (2008), inspired by writings of Walt Whitman and scored by passages from François Poulenc’s Gloria. The dance was commissioned in memory of James Harper Marshall by his family. For the most part, this is the Whitman of “The Wound Dresser,” the poet of somber joy who found a path to glory amid the world’s suffering and pain. By turns balletic and vernacular, the piece is a celebration of the mystery of life. Laura Halzack is majestic as the spirit who eventually carries away Michael Trusnovec’s poet in “the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.”

  • Paul Taylor Dance Company, Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts, Vienna, Va.

A journalist

Let us mark the passing of Daniel Schorr: hired into Edward Murrow’s news team in the 1950s, named on the Nixon “enemies” list, barred from Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, dubbed a “son of a bitch” by CIA Director Richard Helms. Quite a life of accomplishments.

In the recent past, many of Schorr’s radio commentaries came off as nothing more than a recap of the week’s events. Perhaps that was his point.

It’ll be fun

One day before your procedure:

Drink only clear liquids for breakfast, lunch and dinner. All solid foods, milk, and milk products are not allowed. No alcoholic beverages of any kind….

Approved clear liquids: All clear soft drinks: 7-Up, Sprite, etc. All clear juices: Apple, white cranberry, white grape, or lemonade. PULP FREE. Gatorade or Kool-Aid (not red or purple)…

You may also have: Jell-O or Popsicles (not red or purple); Clear broth or bouillon; Black coffee and tea

No, this isn’t the latest checklist for travelers from the TSA.

Do you think I can convince them that chardonnay is white grape juice? At least I’ll have coffee. And what the heck is white cranberry juice?

Makes a good story, at least

(Since I was a teenager, I’ve been going to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which mixes Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean plays. I recently saw the understudy—with twenty-four hours’ notice—play the lead in Cyrano de Bergerac. Every fifteen minutes or so, he’d call out to the assistant director, sitting in the front row, to provide the line for him. This Cyrano’s crippled eloquence, the actor’s grace, his refusal to wilt, was much more moving to me than anything in the play or any other play.)

—David Shields, Reality Hunger, §508

Jug Bay: mushrooms

from the deckWe were assembled before 9:00 this morning (and before staff had opened the entrance gate!) at Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary, situated on the east bank of the Patuxent River in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, for our first field trip in David Farr’s introductory mushrooms (and other macroscopic fungi) class.


work tableAs with Don Messersmith’s insect life class, the field trip procedure is simple: go find some specimens, bring them back to the table, and then everybody gets to see everything at once while the instructor leads the ID. David started us off with a particularly fine large (25 cm tall) poisonous Amanita, visible at the lower right corner of the table.


decurrent gillsboleteAt left, Omphalina chrysophylla is our teaching example of decurrent gills (that is, the lamellae [gills] extend down the stipe [stalk]). The specific epithet means “gold leaf,” and the gills are somewhat that color. Alex found this striking yellow Gyrodon meruloides: you’re looking at the fine network of tubes and pores on the underside of the pileus (cap). Alex didn’t report any Fraxinus in the area where he found this bolete, but the book says that these trees will be around. I had my best luck with easy-to-find wood substrates: on 1-cm sticks I found some nice Schizophyllum commune, easily grown in the lab and hence well-studied.


In my first field and desk test of Miller and Miller’s field guide, I am frustrated that the index doesn’t always include entries for genera, only species—to me, this is like trying to find a name in an Icelandic phone book.

Some links: 49

USGS’s home page for the magnitude 3.6 this morning, event ID us2010yua6. No shaking felt in Reston: but rather a boom loud enough to rouse me from indifferent sleep. I checked the basement for some mishap, found nothing. I figured that, somewhere down my row of neighbors, a bookcase had fallen over. Then Leta’s Facebook news feed began to light up with WTF?s from friends in suburban Maryland.

Contemporary American Theater Festival 2010

This year’s festival, the twentieth, offers two plays that take fresh perspectives on the past decade’s hostilities; a two-character drama; and a musical contrivance that almost defies description. Despite what one character says of the conflict in Iraq and its aftermath—”It’s your mess, nothing to do with me”—Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s Lidless makes it clear that all of us own this mess. When Alice (the super-flexible Eva Kaminsky), an interrogator at Guantanamo Bay and now out of the service running a flower shop fifteen years in the future, is confronted by Bashir (the doleful Barzin Akhavan), one of the prisoners on whom she performed extraordinary interrogation techniques, her repressed memories of that time come roaring back. The effects on Alice’s family take a tragic turn, leaving one of them literally breathless, but in the end a semblance of integration is achieved. Cowhig is a powerful storyteller with images: the passage in which Bashir crushes the blooms of a bouquet of yellow roses is stunning, while the climactic quintet rings with intensity. Certain plot developments (the question of daughter Rhiannon’s parentage, specifically) don’t seem to be fully anticipated, but a curtain speech suggests that this good work is still under development.

Akhavan returns as Yashin Shalid, a curator of antiquities in Mosul anxious that his museum’s treasures be protected from the imminent United States invasion, in Inana, by Michele Lowe. This is a slightly more comic role for him, as Yashin has just arrived in London bemused by his new wife Shali (Zabryna Guevara) who is exceptionally reluctant to begin the celebration of their wedding night. Michael Goodfriend shows some nice range in a couple of ensemble roles. While the story has a good misdirection to keep us guessing, it’s ultimately unsatisfying because Yashin’s success at saving the trove seems inevitable.

Kaminsky is joined by Helen-Jean Arthur in Jennifer Haley’s Breadcrumbs. Arthur plays Alida, a reclusive and crabbed writer, now an aging woman in the middle of her slide into dementia; she is accosted by needy, free-wheeling Beth, who tries to help Alida write her last story. The play is missing something: these two characters need someone else to bounce off them, so it came as no surprise to read Haley’s playwright’s note that they were lifted from a draft five-person play.

Lee Sellars’ and Max Baker’s concert with scenes, The Eelwax Jesus 3-D Pop Music Show, widely anticipated, disappoints. There’s certainly a lot to look at here: the four-piece band (sardonic indie rockers Eelwax Jesus) is set up center-right, while most of stage left belongs to a group home of residents who watch the band on TV, sing and dance along, and generally try to break through the glass of the screen. Then there is an 50s-era office set upstage (in front of the exposed back wall of the Frank Center theater), a scruffy man’s apartment, a woman ironing handkerchiefs (the tireless Margot White), and two large projection screens. At intermission, the screens offer a diverting montage of cheesy drive-in movie snack bar promotions and countdown clocks, and in the second act we see a fascinating old-school animation of basic plane geometry concepts—so engrossing that it upstages the live action. Alas, pacing in the book scenes (except for the “banter” between the band and the TV host, Kurt Zischke as the pneumatic Mr. Shine) is slow. And there just isn’t any there to tie this slightly surrealistic production together.

  • Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W.Va.
  • Lidless, by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, directed by Ed Herendeen
  • Inana, by Michele Lowe , directed by Ed Herendeen
  • Breadcrumbs, by Jennifer Haley, directed by Laura Kepley
  • The Eelwax Jesus 3-D Pop Music Show, book and lyrics by Max Baker, music by Lee Sellars, directed by Max Baker

Piscataway Park

early fourthAn ANS walk through several sections of Piscataway Park began with this stop at Piscataway Creek. The trip yielded lots of nice dragonflies and butterflies and some good birds: Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) (adult and immature), Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) (patrolling but not catching any fish), quick looks at a Louisiana Waterthrush (Seiurus motocilla), a cooperative pair of Blue Grosbeaks (Giuraca caerulea). Buttonbush proved to be a good spot for finding butterflies. New ones to my very short list: Zebra Swallowtail (Eurytides marcellus), black-morph Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio glaucus), Juniper Hairstreak (Callophrys gryneus), Least Skipper (Ancyloxypha numitor).

On deck: 5

on deck: 5The August Wilson is on the shelf because I really need to catch up my familiarity with his work; the Neil Simon and Nicky Silver (alphabetical order buddies) are for a post that is gestating. The TriQuarterly volumes are the penultimate in the series; my “hometown” literary journal is slated to go online-only after #137. Nathanael West is a re-read of much-loved snark: cold comfort food, if you will. The Guy Davenport replaces a copy of this collection lost in last winter’s snowmelt floods.

Less good than harm?

A recent Earthtalk column summarizes research by Aiello et al. that calls into question the practice of adding triclosan as an antibacterial ingredient to consumer products. The literature review, published in Clinical Infectious Diseases, asked two questions: (1) Does triclosan, in the typical consumer formulations (0.2-0.3% by weight), do anything more towards preventing infectious disease than ordinary soap? (2) Does triclosan contribute to the emergence of bacteria that can tolerate the chemical, and can this tolerance jump species? The answer to (1), per “Consumer Antibacterial Soaps: Effective or Just Risky?”, is no, while the evidence for (2) is less clear. The research team found evidence from lab-based studies of antibiotic cross-resistance, but field studies did not provide equally strong support for the claim.

It’s worth noting that we’re talking about the concentrations used in over-the-counter soaps and hand sanitizers, not the 1% and more used in surgical scrubs. (Shockingly, how much triclosan can be added to soap is not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.) In other words, there’s enough of the stuff in your soap that it may be making staph and strep stronger, but not enough to kill the bugs. Deader than they are, that is, by just washing your hands.

Triclosan seems to be in everything these days. As hard as it is to read a food product label to find out whether it’s got wheat (and is therefore verboten for someone with celiac sprue), it’s equally hard to find out about triclosan in products from the health and beauty aids aisle. Leta found triclosan in a container of shaving gel. Fortunately, some manufacturers, like Method, are now labeling their soaps as triclosan-free.

The least offensive solution

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman Chuck Underwood describes an audacious plan: in response to the Gulf of Mexico oil cock-up, the agency will translocate several hundred sea turtle nests across the Florida panhandle, with hopes that the hatchlings will find a home in Atlantic Ocean waters.

“We have a lot of partners involved that normally would not all necessarily agree on something,” Underwood says. “But the general consensus is this is at least an opportunity to try to do something in a situation that has been less than ideal for wildlife.”