Author: David Gorsline

At the park: 35

light frostingThe forest floor is lightly frosted with drifts of Spring Beauty. Melina found a Hermit Thrush (Catharus guttatus) foraging at the edge of the parking lot; the first Common Yellowthroat (Geothlypis trichas) made his appearance.

Ten boxes have active nests, plus one with one cold Wood Duck egg that appears to be a false start. Box #68 is due to hatch out this week.

When I was out with Dirk last week, we looked at crayfish chimneys. We’re always glad to see evidence of crayfish (our most common is Cambarus diogenes) in the wetland, because they are an indicator species: they can’t tolerate certain water contaminants. In turn, as detritivores, they recycle decaying organic matter into the food web. And the question came up: what’s with the chimneys? what purpose do they serve? Turns out that authorities are not quite sure. It may be simply that the crayfish needs to do something with the mud it has excavated as it burrows down to the water table, so it leaves it at the entrance.

Quick fix

a little helpSometimes it does pay to complain. The sign for my bus stop was knocked down in the aftermath of the February snowstorms—a passing plow, a wayward pine tree, an overeager Bobcat, I don’t know. And it remained knocked down for weeks and weeks. Someone tried to prop it up into a pile of wood chips, but mostly it just lay on the ground. Recently someone else leaned it against the street name sign. And for weeks and weeks we had to tell bus drivers, yes, this is my stop at this corner, even though you can’t see the sign.

stumpClearly this wasn’t just a question of hammering the post back into the turf, because it was snapped off.

much betterAnd so finally last Friday morning I contacted customer service through the Fairfax Connector’s web site, notifying them of the problem. (I don’t know why none of the drivers on the two lines that service this stop, apparently, had done so as well.) Later that day I received an acknowledgement, and by Thursday evening, a shiny new sign (URL-enabled) was in place.

Now if the Connector’s ugly red and orange color scheme were as easy to fix…

Clybourne Park

Have you ever had this experience? A play finishes its first act, and as the house lights come up for intermission, you think, “that act was so polished and well-constructed that it could stand by itself; I could go home now and be happy.” That’s how we felt at the act break for Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park, an dark comedy that responds to Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun by telling the story of the Chicago house to which Hansberry’s Younger family aspires. Norris’s play probes the relations between America’s classes and races in the second half of the past century, relations where so much hangs on the nuanced meanings of the phrase, “thank you, but no.”

The first act, set in 1959, introduces us to the Arts and Crafts-influenced house, home to Russ and Bev (company bulwarks Mitchell Hébert and Jennifer Mendenhall). Russ is not immune to the charms of the National Geographic Society’s magazine and neapolitan ice cream eaten from the carton. The meticulous production design is realized by Properties Master Jennifer Sheetz and other Woolly Mammoth production staff. Russ and Bev are ready for the jump to the suburbs, and they have (unintentionally?) sold their home to a black family. It’s up to neighborhood association rep and general pain in the ass Karl Lindner (the exceptional Cody Nickell) to spell things out to them.

After the break, it’s now 2009, and the house has seen a lot of living. Lindsey (Kimberly Gilbert) and Steve (Nickell, again), a young white couple, have bought the house from the (unnamed) Youngers, and hope to build a new, architecturally engaging yet tasteful (?), home on the site. Another confrontation with neighborhood association reps ensues, this time sparked by Lena (the astonishing Dawn Ursula), who wants her family’s urban homesteading to be respectfully remembered. While Nickell’s Steve proceeds to offend everyone in the room (was there ever a man so gormless that he didn’t know to stop talking?), Ursula’s Lena delivers zingers serenely, sweetly. She’s a stealth bomber of black comedy.

By my reckoning, the play’s third act comes at intermission, when the stage crew tear down Russ and Bev’s cozy home and transform it into Steve and Lindsey’s work site. Velcro is a stage carpenter’s best friend.

  • Clybourne Park, by Bruce Norris, directed by Howard Shalwitz, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Focus

Via The Morning News, Howard Hill reports on a perhaps unexpected market for e-books on small screens like iPhone: dyslexics.

So why I had found it easier to read from my iPhone? First, an ordinary page of text is split into about four pages. The spacing seems generous and because of this I don’t get lost on the page. Second, the handset’s brightness makes it easier to take in words. “Many dyslexics have problems with ‘crowding’, where they’re distracted by the words surrounding the word they’re trying to read,” says John Stein, Professor of Neuroscience at Oxford University and chair of the Dyslexia Research Trust. “When reading text on a small phone, you’re reducing the crowding effect.”

As You Like It: an update: 1

We had our first stumble-through of Act 1 tonight, and it wasn’t bad. It was even good, in spots. Most people are off book, or nearly so, so there is some real acting going on. Alas, I still have a lot of work to do in our scene 12 (Shakespeare’s II.vii). But we have some talented, hard-working cast members playing the young lovers, and Jay’s Touchstone is giving me a lot to work with, so I think it will be an enjoyable show.

We have most of the rolling and sliding set pieces built and available for rehearsal, so Michael has already assigned scene shifting responsibilities, and we worked those into the run.

Michael has set the play neither in Shakespeare’s time nor our own, but rather at an interesting juncture in recent European history. So the forest-dwellers, like Brian (Silvius) and me, are shaggy-haired. So shaggy that I’m counting the days until I can cut my hair in May.

Moreso than “All the world’s a stage,” Michael and I are wrestling with Jaques’ material from earlier in that scene. The passage that begins, “Why, who cries out on pride” is especially vexatious. It’s not that the reasoning is all that subtle: for the most part, it’s just variations on “I can criticize anyone, and if he complains, then I win (because my criticism strikes home), and if he does not, I win (because he’s innocent and I’m just blah-blah-blah).” But the language is a little twisted, and the trick of physicalizing the argument so that the audience can follow it has escaped me so far. The couplet “Doth it not flow as hugely as the sea/Till that the weary very means do ebb?” is a challenge. Footnotes in some of my sources suggest emending wearer’s or watery for weary, but I’m not sure that any reading makes any more sense.

Aliens?

Not to be outdone by The Flibbertigibbet in documentary comprehensiveness (although I yield in the area of single-minded devotion to the craft), herewith my theater viewing statistics for the past twelvemonth. The plus-ones are shows that I called or was in.

  • April 2009: 1
  • May 2009: 5+1
  • June 2009: 3
  • July 2009: 2
  • August 2009: 5+1
  • September 2009: 4
  • October 2009: 4+1
  • November 2009: 7
  • December 2009: 3
  • January 2010: 5+1
  • February 2010: 2
  • March 2010: 3

44 (+4) isn’t anywhere close to 121.

Scoundrels

Back in the 1990s, I had a close friend who joined a multi-level marketing organization, a rather large one. One of the things she told me was that the company was experiencing strong growth overseas, in places like South Korea. Perhaps there is a connection to an anecdote that Barbara Demick tells in her book Nothing to Envy. The book recounts the recent economic implosion of North Korea through the lives of six defectors. And so maybe it can shed some light on one of the engines of that MLM growth.

Although South Korea did not expressly encourage defections, those that made it into the country could qualify for acculturation training and a generous one-time payment. But North Korean emigrés often remained naive about matters economical, starting with basics like how to balance a checkbook. Demick’s pseudonymous Dr. Kim, formerly a physician in the North Korean system, learns a hard lesson:

In March 2002, Dr. Kim arrived at Incheon Airport, euphoric at the prospect of of starting a new life. But these feelings did not last long. Dr. Kim was convinced by a man she met at church to invest most of the $20,000 resettlement in a direct sales operation in which she was supposed to peddle soap and cosmetics to acquaintances. Dr. Kim hadn’t learned enough in her month of orientation… she lost nearly all of the government stipend. (p. 259)

You can’t handle the truth

Via Bits, Paul Lamere notes that, if it chose to do so, Amazon.com could derive and publish metrics of how people actually read, page by page, their Kindle-powered e-books, leveraging the data collected by Whispersync. He suggests some useful categories:

Most Abandoned – the books and/or authors that are most frequently left unfinished. What book is the most abandoned book of all time? (My money is on A Brief History of Time)

and similarly:

Dishonest rater – books that most frequently rated highly by readers who never actually finished reading the book…

Most attempts – which books are restarted most frequently? (It took me 4 attempts to get through Cryptonomicon, but when I did I really enjoyed it).

I dunno: is the world ready to learn that hardly anybody actually reads John Galt’s enormous monologue, the one towards the end of Atlas Shrugged?

At the park: 34

Spring Beauty (Claytonia virginica) is just starting to break through the leaf litter on the forest floor. Maples are heavy with blooms. The team spotted Rusty Blackbird (Euphagus carolinus) and Red-headed Woodpecker (Melanerpes erythrocephalus) along lower Barnyard Run. Box #67 has become a dump nest, with 26 eggs by last count. New bird arrivals on the scene: Tree Swallow (Tachycineta bicolor) and Purple Martin (Progne subis) winging after insects over the pond; ants-at-a-picnic Brown-headed Cowbird (Molothrus ater) deeper in the woods than usual; and Brown Thrasher (Toxostoma rufum) at the observation tower.

Don, beware

New peculiar spam comes in through the transom. What in the name of Michael J. Fox are they phishing for? Gullible drapers?

HELLO
MY NAME IS JOHN .

I AM NOT SURE THAT U CAN HELP ME WITH MY CURRENT PRODUCT , SO NOW , NOT
ONLY I WANT TO PURCHASE THE ITEMS ,,,, BUT YOU NEED TO CONDUCT BUSINESS
…WE WILL ALSO WORK TILL WE OFFER TRANSLATION PROGRAM

I WANT TO ORDER: CURTAINS

100% polyester knit

SIZE : 37″ w x 63 “L

Colors: White

AND I WOULD LIKE U TO EMAIL ME BACK WITH THE TOTAL PRICE OF 1 PIECE ,SO THAT I WILL KNOW HOW MUCH I AM GOING TO ORDER ….
AND ALSO I WILL LIKE U TO EMAIL ME WITH UR CELL PHONE NUMBER AND NAME , KINDLY ADVICE ME TO THE KIND OF
PAYMENT U ACCEPT ,,,I WILL BE HAPPY ON UR QUICK RESPONSES

N.B: I AM NOT THE 1 WHO IS GOING TO PAID FOR IT , IS THE WORK OF MY
MANAGER ,,,,SO I WILL INTRODUCE HIM TO U WHEN IT COMES TO PAYMENT …..

BEST

REGARDS

JOHN

At the park: 33

Adapted from my report to park staff and the nest box team:

A fast start to the season!

As of our third trip out, we have nesting activity in six boxes: #7, #13 (main pond), #77, #67, #61, and #68 (lower Barnyard Run). Three boxes are Hooded Merganser, two are Wood Duck, and one has 5 HM eggs and 2 WD eggs.

Alan and I cleaned out the squirrel drey from box #9 (and woke up a cranky squirrel, who promptly exited). We’ve been pulling trash from the run flowing into the main pond, but I think there is more to be found on the west bank. On the 14th, we spotted a Wood Duck pair standing on the boardwalk just beyond the observation tower.

Also on the 14th, Red-Winged Blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus) and Eastern Phoebe (Sayornis phoebe) made their first appearance. On the 21st, we watched an Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) fishing over the main pond.

Diagram

He saw the inside of the [subway] car for what it was: a controlled environment, a staging area, planned down to the last detail by people he would never know or see. No surprises in here, Lowboy said to himself. No accidents. He studied each element of the car with his new eyes, imagining it as a kind of blueprint…. He would never meet the people who’d drawn the blueprint, never have a chance to question them, but he could learn things just by looking at the car. You could see, for example, that they were fearful men. The pattern on the walls, which he’d always taken to be meaningless, was actually made up of thousands of miniature coats of arms, symbols of the authority of the state. The interior of the car was waterproof, the better to be hosed down in case of bloodshed. And the seats were arranged not for maximum efficiency, not to seat the greatest number of people comfortably and safely, but to express the designers’ fear with perfect clarity. No one sat with their back turned to anyone else.

—John Wray, Lowboy, p. 94

The Light in the Piazza

In their temporary digs in Crystal City, Arena delivers an effective, if modest, production of Guettel’s small-scale musical of an American mother and daughter on tour in post-war Italy, an abbreviated family unit in which daughter Clara may be less than she seems. The simple set is lit well by Michael Gilliam: moving instruments allow us to move adagio with Clara and her mother Margaret through the streets of Florence,—although elsewhere in the show, the projections of famous Florentine paintings against the set are sometimes a distraction.

Clara falls in (as American girls will do) with a charming, handsome Italian, one Fabrizio, who has an endearing partial command of English as well as the first act “Il Mondo Era Vuoto,” sung by Nicholas Rodriguez with muscular brio. Indeed, some of the best music in the show is sung in Italian, especially the spiky second act opening quintet, “Aiutami.”

But the story, and the evening, belong to Hollis Resnik’s Margaret, who brings a mature clarity to “Dividing Day.” In the second act, when she cuts short a long-distance phone call to her husband Roy, she gives a little yelp, as if startled by her own determination to carry out her plans.

  • The Light in the Piazza, book by by Craig Lucas, music and lyrics by Adam Guettel, directed by Molly Smith, Arena Stage, Arlington, Virginia