Author: David Gorsline

Around the corner

On a usual workday (that it, when there isn’t two feet of snow on the ground) I have a ten-minute walk from my Orange Line station to my client’s facility on Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. It’s a wedge-shaped merger of two buildings bounded by Mount Vernon Square and K Street. If the weather is bad, I can transfer to the Red Line to get to Gallery Place, and save myself some exposure to the wet, but most days are pleasant enough that the transfer isn’t worth the wait.

Google Maps draws the usual path I take, but since I need to make a diagonal across the grid, I actually have a variety of paths to choose from. And my usual strategy is to start walking north, past the sinister looking buildings that house the Voice of America, and past the doorman at the Marriott who is out in all weathers. When I get to an intersection, if the light is in my favor, I cross the street, and if it’s not, I turn (or cross in the other direction). This means that I don’t spend much time at all waiting for lights, and that I end up taking a few different paths over the course of the week. So sometimes I follow H Street all the way down to 7th; sometimes I cut across the frozen steppes of the parking lot on the old convention center site (don’t be fooled by the building outline on the Google Map). Returning in the evening, I follow the same strategy, so some days I’m just retracing my steps, and others I’m all the way down on G Street past the collection of colorful characters hanging out in front of the public library. Evenings I often see the wait staff at Bibiana seated in the dining room for a brief confab before the dinner rush—this is often the only spot where I have to wait for a light change.

There are just a couple of path segments I avoid. I find that morning crossings of 9th Street on the south side of the intersection (the downstream side, if you will) are extra dangerous: I’ve nearly been hit a couple of times by drivers zipping through a left turn into 9th. (Frankly, walking anywhere near Mount Vernon Square can be risky: I see drivers snapping off illegal rush hour left turns at 7th and Massachusetts nearly every day.) And there’s too much evening foot traffic on the blocks of 7th north of the Metro station, so I almost always slide around that.

If I feel like stopping at Starbucks on the way in, I have options: there are at least four within the 12th/New York/K/7th/G pentangle, including one in the brutish superblock of Techworld Plaza.

But the best part of my commute is the countdown walk signals at every corner. A signal that’s showing 20 seconds of green in the crossing direction, for instance, tells me I shouldn’t wait for the change, but should continue down the block. But if it’s only 3 or 4 seconds, I’ll wait. Something I’ve become more scrupulous about is not starting to cross once the red hand comes up. I have found that the D.C. signals are well-calibrated to intersection sizes, and if the hand is up, I need to move fast to get across before the change. The thing is, the street is full of drivers trying to squeeze their crossings in before the light changes, too. And if I’m running across and not watching out for them, I’m going to get pancaked one day.

Shade-grown coffee: state of play

The Birding Community E-Bulletin points to two reports: first, a recent summary by Robert Rice of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center on the supply of and market for the SMBC’s branded Bird Friendly® Coffee. It’s interesting that nearly 40% comes from Peru; Mexico and Guatemala are other major producers. On the demand side, nearly 350,000 pounds were consumed in 2008 (the last period for which full-year figures are available), divided almost evenly between Japan and the United States.

Amid the clutter of labelling and badging at the turn of the decade, the SMBC established criteria for coffee agriculture specifically designed to protect bird life, and chose to protect them with a mark. These criteria go beyond relatively simple organic certification. Rice’s precis:

… the coffee is:

  • Certified organic
  • Certified shade-grown (according to SMBC criteria developed in 1997 and based on scientific fieldwork)

Criteria include: a minimum canopy height of 12 meters; a species list of at least 10 trees in addition to the major or “backbone” species; at least 40% foliage density; and three strata or layers of vegetation that provide structural diversity. Criteria apply to the coffee production area itself, and industry and certification specialists consider them to be the strictest shade standards in the world.

Rice states that growers see a 5 to 10 cent per pound premium for meeting BFC standards, in addition to any price bump for being organic.

Unfortunately, as Ezra Fieser reports, that price differential has narrowed over the past few years from a 30-40% markon mid-decade to about 20% now. This trend is driving farmers back to conventional agricultural methods. According to the Center for Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education, costs to the organic grower run 15% higher (certification fees, losses to pests), while yields are 40% lower. As my old B school teacher liked to say, “Sell below cost, and in the long run, you’re out of business.”

Some links: 43

Two good theater pieces in the Gray Lady this morning: first, Patrick Healy interviews the cast of the Ethan Hawke-directed revival of Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind (which absence from my library I should rectify):

MARIN IRELAND: One trap with any iconic writer is that you think you know the tone of the play and motives of the characters. Part of our job is to look for the opposite in any moment.

(Completely irrelevant and inappropriately snarky, but doesn’t Ethan Hawke always look like he’s three-quarters stoned?)

Second, Charles Isherwood has some uncomfortable reservations about the Jones-Lewis-Hendel bio-revue Fela!:

As much as I enjoyed the show, directed and choreographed by Bill T. Jones, it left me with lingering questions about the depiction of the African milieu it evoked. In short, the emphasis in Fela! on the spectacle of African culture tilted the show a little too closely toward minstrelsy….

It’s vibrant, exciting and fabulously performed.

But there really are no characters, aside from Fela Kuti himself.

The B feature

Via Arts & Letters Daily, Lucie Skeaping recaps what we know of 17th century jigs, bawdy theatrical afterpieces.

Were jigs recited over the tunes, did they contain song interludes, were they through-sung like mini-operas, or did all three of these at various times apply? Of the 12 surviving English jig texts roughly half contain specific tune titles printed at various points alongside the text, that is, the names of popular ballads or dance tunes of the day.

A discovery

in the squareI’ve been walking down this block most workdays for the past year, and it was only this morning that I noticed there are wind chimes hanging from many of the trees in Mount Vernon Square, on the grounds of the Carnegie building, now home to the Historical Society of Washington D.C. This set of chimes is barely audible above the ruckus of 8:45 A.M. traffic. But even so, it’s nice knowing that it’s there.

Connecting the dots

The Economist summarizes recent publications by Adamatzky and Jones and Atsushi Tero that use Physarum polycephalum, a species of myxomycetes (a/k/a slime mold, probably my favorite simple organisms), to model the tradeoffs between efficiency and redundancy in designing macro networks, like rail lines or motorways.

Of course, neither Dr Tero nor Dr Adamatzky is suggesting that rail and road networks should be designed by slime moulds. What they are proposing is that good and complex solutions can emerge from simple rules, and that this principle might be applied elsewhere.

In the wilderness

The longest period of fasting was fixed by his impresario at forty days, beyond that term he was not allowed to go, not even in great cities, and there was good reason for it, too. Experience had proved that for about forty days the interest of the public could be stimulated by a steadily increasing pressure of advertisement, but after that the town began to lose interest, sympathetic support began notably to fall off; there were of course local variations as between one town and another or one country and another, but as a general rule forty days marked the limit.

—Franz Kafka, “A Hunger Artist,” trans. Willa and Edwin Muir

The Last Cargo Cult

For a man who spends two hours sitting behind a desk and talking, Mike Daisey reveals an energy and grace in his movement worthy of a tai chi chuan master. Steepling his fingers to make a point, then softly melting them to the side, storyteller Daisey explores in his current offering at Woolly Mammoth the peculiarities of the natives in the islands called Vanuatu and the big island called Long, and shows them to be hilariously ridiculous in equal measures.

If his analysis of the past years’ financial embarrassments is rather glib, bad economics, Daisey’s perception that we experience the spongy bottom of the current recession to be disappointingly mild—in his word, “AWK-ward,”—is acute. And his parsing of the false egalitarianism at a New England liberal arts college into the contents of the boxes unloaded by each arriving freshman, some of them with technological riches that inspire him to say, “our shit is AWESOME,” is well executed.

He is better off on his trip to a speck of land in the South Pacific, the island of Tanna, to observe the playing out of an annual rite, part village festival, part perverse appropriation of Western culture. At one point in the spectacle, a man is chased in circles by another man, the pursuer wearing a fright mask from the movie Scream: this is explained to Daisey by an interpreter as “President Obama being chased by a dragon.” Oh-kayy. Daisey, a generously proportioned man, figures that he is a match for anything unusual or unpleasant on offer by Tanna’s cuisine. But, as he comically bellows in a richly modulated voice, “the fermented yam paste proved me wrong.”

It’s Daisey’s control of his polychrome voice, which can range from the avuncularity of Garrison Keillor to the manic jeremiads of Chris Farley, often in the same paragraph, sometimes in the same sentence, that makes for such an entertaining evening.

  • The Last Cargo Cult, created and performed by Mike Daisey, directed by Jean-Michelle Gregory, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Carderock

frozen canalThe weather was once again kind to us, this time for our first field trip in winter woody plant ID (trees mostly, and some shrubs). We worked a short bit of the towpath of the (still iced-over) C&O Canal and the B section of the Billy Goat Trail in the Carderock Recreation Area, on the Maryland side of the Potomac just outside of the Beltway. Elizabeth Rives is teaching the class, and she’s started us out with the opposite-branching trees. So we spent time with various maples, ashes, and Flowering Dogwood (Cornus florida) today. I found that ID’ing one particular dogwood that wasn’t showing many buds to be a particular stumbling block.

We also looked at a Bitternut Hickory (Carya cardiformis) example, with its strongly yellow buds; the many-synonymed Musclewood (Carpinus caroliniana); Eastern Hophornbeam (Ostrya virginiana), a shaggy-barked catkin-bearing member of the birch family; Hackberry (Celitis occidentalis) with a corky bark that isn’t spongy like an elm. One more opposite-branching shrub was Black Haw Virburnum (Vibirnum prunifolia). Black Walnut (Juglans nigra) is allelopathic, but colonies of PawPaw (Asimina triloba) can tolerate it as a neighbor; the walnuts we saw didn’t look very purplish in the bark to me. The easy-fun tree for everyone was the shrubby Bladdernut (Staphylea trifolia), with its seeds rattling around in capsules that look like a fat man’s pants.

lunch breakWe previewed the oaks, on which we will spend a lot more time later. Bonus tree for the trip was a huge American Linden (Tilia americana). Bonus birds for the trip were a couple of Bald Eagles making their way down the river, seen fairly easily from our lunch break spot up on the rocks.

Dickens decoded

At the present time, in the dark little parlour certain feet below the level of the street—a grim, hard, uncouth parlour, only ornamented with the coarsest of baize table-covers, and the hardest of sheet-iron tea-trays, and offering in its decorative character no bad allegorical representation of Grandfather Smallweed’s mind—seated in two black horse-hair porter’s chairs, one in each side of the fireplace, the superannuated Mr and Mrs Smallweed wile away the rosy hours.

—Bleak House, ch. 21, p. 343

Wile away: eggcorn or no? Arnold Zwicky isn’t so sure. My edition is merely the 1971 Penguin paperback, and doesn’t offer any editorial suggestions about Dickens’ intentions. There are many versions of the book online that amend the phrase to the more widely accepted while away.

In chapter 38, Mr. Guppy is hypermeticulously securing an oral witness (Caroline) to a renunciation of a marriage proposal:

‘Married woman, I believe?’ said Mr Guppy. ‘Married woman. Thank you. Formerly Caroline Jellyby, spinster, then of Thavies Inn, within the City of London, but extraparochial; now of Newman Street, Oxford Street. Much obliged.’ (p. 602)

A dictionary and some thought gives us extraparochial as “outside of any church parish.” So before she married Turveydrop, Caroline lived in a place within the City that was not part of any parish. But the connotations of this term run deeper, when we consider Dickens’ (who composed Bleak House in the early 1850s) steady theme of providing for the poor. A UK government guide to 19th century census reports elaborates:

Besides parishes, with their tythings or townships and chapelries, there were also many places in England and Wales not contained in the limits of any parish. These extra-parochial places had inherited an independence by which they enjoyed virtual exemption from taxation; from maintaining the poor, since there was no Overseer on whom a Magistrate’s Order could be served; from the Militia Laws because there was no Constable to make returns; and from repairing the highways, because there was no official surveyor….

In 1857 the peculiar privileges enjoyed by extra-parochial places were curtailed under an Act ‘to provide for the Relief of the Poor in Extra-Parochial Places’ which decreed that places named extra-parochial in the 1851 Census report were to be deemed parishes for this purpose and to have Overseers appointed for them by the Justices of the Peace. In the case of extra-parochial places covering a very small piece of land, the place was annexed to an adjoining parish, if the consent of the owners and occupiers of two-thirds in value of the land was forthcoming. Special provision was made for the particular cases of the places in London termed the Inner Temple, the Middle Temple and Gray’s Inn where the officer acting for the time being as Under Treasurer, and the Registrar in Charterhouse were appointed Overseers. This act did not apply to places not specified as extra-parochial in the census reports. In these cases the act was merely permissive and, therefore, largely inoperative. In a later Act of 1868 it was declared that every extra-parochial place existing on 25 December 1868, should be added to the next adjoining civil parish which had the longest common boundary. In spite of these acts there are still some places in England and Wales which are extra-parochial from civil parishes. They are all islands or lighthouses which were probably overlooked in the act since they were not contiguous with any parish and, therefore, could not be added to any. There are also still many extra-parochial places from ecclesiastical parishes which enjoy special privileges under Church laws or custom.

Yes, I’m a little woozy after reading that, too. According to a Wikipedia article stub, certain places in the City are yet today considered extraparochial. Something to do with the Knights Templar, ’nuff said.

Welcome to this situation

Arthur Lubow profiles Tino Sehgal, zero-impact conceptual artist/sculptor/choreographer.

Unlike so much of contemporary art, Sehgal’s art evokes passionate reactions among the unschooled as well as the cognoscenti. Anyone who has seen the onlookers trudging passively through an art museum (all too often the Guggenheim ramp resembles the humane cattle slaughterhouses designed by Temple Grandin) can appreciate the achievement. What fascinates me about Sehgal is that working only with human clay, he can call forth thoughtful and visceral responses from people who remain unmoved by more conventional paintings and sculptures. When I expressed this to him, he laughed at me. “I’m more ambitious than that,” he said. “That’s too little of a game.”

Pocket change

The neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) don’t necessarily kill: they maim, blind, and stunt the world’s poor. It’s estimated that of the world’s bottom billion in poverty, at least everyone is afflicted with at least one of these nasties, from hookworm infection to dengue hemorrhagic fever to lymphatic filariasis. Most of these diseases can be controlled, even eradicated, for as little as 50 cents a person, according to Peter Jay Hotez and the Sabin Vaccine Institute. That’s not 50 cents a day, that’s 50 cents a life.