Author: David Gorsline

Hotel Cassiopeia

Fourth wall-breaking opens this production of Charles Mee’s one act on the life and works of assemblage artist Joseph Cornell, a man who found both sides of the picture post card equally interesting. Preceding Wilderesque self-introductions, the cast solicits donations from the audience of found objects to be arranged into a box construction in the course of the play. (Can it be called a fourth wall when the stage in the black box Kogod is configured galley style?) In any event, it’s a nice touch to open this 70-minute fantasia, a co-production of the University of Maryland theater department and Round House Theatre. Scheduled for presentation at Round House’s space later in the year, let us hope that certain aspects of the production settle into more of a performance groove by then.

Mee’s intriguing, deceptively challenging, script effectively conjures the dream-like world of Cornell, one of infatuations with shop girls, devotional consumption of sweet treats, obsessions with movie stars, and tender caring for his infirm brother Robert. It’s a universe where a ballerina can drop by with a chocolate cake, or a lonely artist working in a basement can burst into song. The text enters Cornell (Equity member Scott Sedar, who approaches the role with bemused gravitas) into dialogues with his contemporary artists (Gorky, Duchamp, Matta) as well as a chorus of three men (coached by Leslie Felbain) who flounce like twittering birds—and in each case. we’re not sure how much of each dialogue is projection by Mee’s Cornell onto the other speakers. There are longish passages where Cornell watches Hedy Lamarr and Lauren Bacall in Algiers and To Have and Have Not, and he recites the dialogue along with—but to Sedar’s credit, not mechanically like a Rocky Horror Show fan, but rather a beat before or after the sound track, as one who is remembering in real time.

The standout among the ensemble cast of student actors is James Waters, as a member of the flittering birds chorus and as a character called the Astronomer: he delivers his monologues with a cool economy of means.

  • Hotel Cassiopeia, by Charles L. Mee, directed by Blake Robison, University of Maryland Department of Theatre and Round House Theatre, Smith Center Kogod Theatre, College Park, Maryland

Mee himself constructs plays as a collagist. He writes:

…I try in my work to get past traditional forms of psychological realism, to bring into the frame of the plays material from history, philosophy, insanity, inattention, distractedness, judicial theory, sudden violent passion, lyricism, the National Enquirer, nostalgia, longing, aspiration, literary criticism, anguish, confusion, inability.

I like plays that are not too neat, too finished, too presentable.

On deck: 4

on deck: 4Yes, this is what I’m doing instead of a more constructive use of my leisure time, like preparing for next week’s auditions: snapping pix of my bookshelves. I’m saving the Jonathan Kern as a memento until my onsite gig wraps up. The Thoreau is perhaps ambitious. I’ve been through Walden and I’m curious about the other books in the LOA edition. John Adams and the Therberge and Therberge via the free book shelves at work; Morton via Mattie; Sir Gawain via the Strand. The John Brunner is one of the few sf titles from high school that I’ve held onto; since it’s set in 2010, I thought it would be good to find out how well he predicted. The Chinua Achebe is there because it just feels good to say “Chinua Achebe.”

A simple ramp

In an excellent post, Matt Johnson explains what happened after Friday’s White Flint-bound Red Line train found itself on the pocket track just beyond Farragut North, how the electromechanical safety systems did the job they were designed to do, and how a derailer works.

… not only did the derailer prevent a collision or damage to misaligned switches, it also prevented the train from fouling either main track. However, while this event saw the safety system avert potential disaster, it is not clear why a potentially dangerous situation was allowed to progress so far.

But the parkways are clear of trucks

Via Arts & Letters Daily, delicious curmudgeonliness from Charles Petersen: Mark Zuckerberg as the Robert Moses of the internet:

As Facebook expanded from colleges to the rest of the public, always retaining tight control over how every page appeared, the site’s aesthetics thus began to seem less comparable to the dorm room design principle of in loco parentis and more akin to the authoritarian building codes of a planned community.

How would Elizabeth take this?

A well-packed path leads past the partly iced-over lake to the shops. The Safeway and CVS are open, the Subway and Dinner Zen are not. No New York Times to be found at any location. South Lakes Drive is showing one lane each way of wet pavement, and one lane’s worth of slush and pack.

the championthe challengerLots of downed limbs from small trees; the shrubs in the little frisbee field where Leta took my headshot are pretty much clobbered. The most spectacular is this two-tree pileup involving a pine and a Norway Maple. Between the snowstorms and Isabel, there’ll hardly be any Norways left in the cluster.

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.