Author: David Gorsline

There’s no “I” in “theater”

We are heading to the wire!! Make those reservations, see those shows, do those ballots! And be thankful that there’s no chance of WATCH being sold to Dan Snyder, because y’all are a great team!

—Weekly report to WATCH adjudicators for 28 October 2009

Although the adjudication coordinator is dangerously close to exhausting her quota of exclamation marks.

Perennial

Richard Harris visits Wes Jackson’s Land Institute, and also talks with plant breeder Lee De Haan.

As the silver-haired Kansan [Jackson] is fond of saying: If you’re working on a problem you can solve in your own lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.

Are those chickadees that we hear in the background of the outdoor actualities Black-cappeds or Carolinas? Kansas is a contact zone.

At the limit

… [Winnie said,] “I think it’s a mistake to lose one’s sense of death, even one’s fear of death. Isn’t death the boundary we need? Doesn’t it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit.”

—Don DeLillo, White Noise, ch. 30

Piedmont and Coastal Plain

After a gloomy, drizzly start, the wet weather held off and we had a great field trip, led by Joe Marx, exploring several sites of geological interest in the Four Mile Run and Holmes Run stream valleys in Arlington County and Alexandria City.

the view from the castleSetting out from East Falls Church Metro in the Piedmont, we paused to look at a cut in the stream bed of Four Mile Run to check out the alluvial layer from the last glaciation. The run slithers under I-66, skirting the so-called Brandymore Castle. At Joe’s fast pace, we climbed the castle, actually a lens of quartz from the middle Ordovician that protrudes into the landscape. The bedrock here is the Sykesville formation, a Cambrian schist, with bits of an even older actinolite intruding into it, and we found examples of both.

After a quick trip to Rosslyn to climb the first of five Tertiary period upland gravel terraces (the fifth and oldest forming the hill at Tysons Corner), we returned to Four Mile Run, farther downstream at the Long Branch Nature Center. We took a lunch break and indulged in some geology humor (Q: Where can you find the floodplain in Arlington County? A: Look for the picnic tables.) and did some sorting in the parking lot so that participants in Cliff Fairweather’s galls workshop got where they wanted to be. We stopped at Carlin Springs, now dry, but once a 19th-century resort stop on the W&OD railroad.

potholesalong the reachThe high point of this stop was visiting a lovely cascade of Four Mile Run, relatively unmanaged and unchannelled, known as Hoffman’s Reach (sp?). Here the stream has carved potholes in the Cambrian-period Indian Run formation; granite intrusions into the pale gray rock are visible in the photos. Joe also pointed out a good example of the bedrock decaying into saprolite; a soil scientist, working top-down from the other direction, would call this the C horizon, which is quite thick in this area.

the boundaryOur capstone stop was at the tiny sliver of a park in Alexandria named for Dora Kelley. Here, in the steep cut of a gully formed by a tributary of Holmes Run, Joe turned up an instance of the gravelly Potomac formation of the Coastal Plain (from 125 Mya) lying on top of the metasandstone of the Indian Run formation (from about 500 Mya). In the image, Joe is standing on loose gravel in the gully, and the rock exposure is behind him. The top horizontal edge of the dark, solid Indian Run rock is about even with Joe’s mid-thigh, and the layers of Potomac formation (gravel to clay) lie above.

The Laramie Project epilogue: an update: 3

Our reading of The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later on Monday went off very successfully, albeit with some last minute scrambling. When I walked into the green room at 6 (for a go at 8:30), there were three or so pages of e-mail with minor changes to the version of the script that we’d received the Friday before. Trouble for me was that about half of them affected my text, so I scribbled changes into my book, hoping I’d be able to read them. I groused that, since some of this material was journal entries made by the Tectonics, it was definitely going to look like I was reading my own journal entries.

Shortly after 8:00, the feed from Lincoln Center, projected in-house at RCC’s CenterStage, brought Glenn Close, Judy Shepard, and Moisés Kaufman to Reston in sound and light. Way cool. I am so honored to have been part of this event.

At about half past, we took out the grand drape and began to read for the 200 or so patrons assembled. We had only worked with lights in one prior rehearsal, and with the text changes that entailed characters coming downstage, needing light where there was none before, there were a few moments that recalled the spotlight business in The Actor’s Nightmare. But, as I said, we got through it.

I suspect that my affinity for Matthew Shepard’s story and The Laramie Project is less idealistic than it is for many other actors, designers, and technicians who have worked on various productions. Granted, I deplore what happened to this young man, and I support doing what we can to prevent it from happening to someone else, but I don’t have the visceral feeling that I have to work on the show because of that. Rather—and this is testimony to the fine job of playwriting that Kaufman and crew have done—I am fascinated by, drawn to, all of the personages-characters of Laramie, Wyoming that have been assembled into this text: the guys in the white hats and the guys in the black ones. I was as committed to telling the story of Fred Phelps (a seriously troubled man) as I was to Harry Woods, in my characterization a retiring, gentle man who acquires a measure of dignity. In the new play, I was as interested in pushing some personal boundaries as Jonas Slonaker as I was in the great work that David H. did as Representative Peterson and that Joshua did as Aaron McKinney.

And yet, who knows where this story will lead me next? I now own, by virtue of participation in this project, a copy of Judy Shepard’s The Meaning of Matthew. Once I read the book, I suspect that his meaning for me will have transformed in some way. Is Matthew Shepard my scarab? Perhaps, perhaps. A couple of months ago, I was helping my mother clean out her apartment. Generally, the only old magazines that she squirreled away had something to do with royalty, be it British (the Windsors) or American (the Kennedys). And she had forgotten that I had worked on The Laramie Project a few years back—trust me, I know she doesn’t remember. Yet there I was, crashing through a pile of old papers, and she walks in from the other room with a battered magazine and asks, “Would you be interested in this?” It was the 26 October 1998 issue of Time. Matthew’s fence was the cover image.

As to the text of the Ten Years Later epilogue, I admire the Tectonics for clarifying one of the piece’s themes: the stories we tell ourselves begin to change as soon as we tell them. The change comes from many directions: we don’t remember clearly, the facts are too painful or embarrassing to accept, the plain narrative doesn’t have a clear meaning, the eyewitnesses die or move away. Call it urban myth, call it folklore, call it rumor, but this is what a tragedy’s story becomes in the retelling. And as a result, the simple linear progress that perhaps the playwrights expected to be able to tell has become this murky, twining thing. To me, the core of the play is the moment called “Potluck,” which interleaves an interview with John Dorst, folklorist at the University of Wyoming (and read by yours truly), with an account of some average Joes of Laramie giving their take on what happened. In one draft of the script, Dorst says,

You start with more formed things, the facts of the case or the court proceedings. And the folkloric process is one of winnowing and reduction, the paring away of detail until frequently the actual events—something you might call a story—dissipate.

* * *

This is definitely the issue—maybe the core issue here in Laramie—the desire for control over memory or over history.

Elizabeth Blair’s piece for NPR is quite good, and expresses some of these thoughts more clearly; it excepts an article by JoAnn Wypijewski written shortly after the murder.

Blog Action Day 2009

In recognition of Blog Action Day 2009, herewith readings and resources for learning more about this complicated subject called “climate change,” one that is full of ramifications and interdependencies.

At Climate Interactive, you will find links to several simplified policy simulations: via animated graphics, you can see the effect of increased afforestation, decreased CO2 emissions by developed countries, and so on. Also find there an overview of C-ROADS (Climate Rapid Overview and Decision-support Simulator), which is designed to be used by policy-makers (not modellers) and runs on a laptop.

Read Johan Rockström et al.’s recent paper for Nature, “A safe operating space for humanity,” along with expert commentary. The paper’s thesis is that global climate change (as measured by radiative forcing [the rate of energy change per unit area of the globe as measured at the top of the atmosphere] as well as atmospheric carbon dioxide) is just one of ten parameters, all of which must be managed into safe operating levels, that are important for the survival of life on the planet.

We propose that human changes to atmospheric CO2 concentrations should not exceed 350 parts per million by volume, and that radiative forcing should not exceed 1 watt per square metre above pre-industrial levels. Transgressing these boundaries will increase the risk of irreversible climate change, such as the loss of major ice sheets, accelerated sea-level rise and abrupt shifts in forest and agricultural systems. Current CO2 concentration stands at 387 p.p.m.v. and the change in radiative forcing is 1.5 W m-2.

By comparison, the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere, pre-Industrial Revolution, was 280 ppm by volume, and the rate of radiative forcing at the beginning of what is now being called the Anthropocene Epoch was zero. The other parameters (keep in mind that most of these are rates of change rather than values) are:

  • rate of biodiversity loss;
  • nitrogen and phosphorus cycles;
  • stratospheric ozone depletion;
  • ocean acidification;
  • global freshwater use;
  • change in land use;
  • atmospheric aerosol loading;
  • chemical pollution.

The authors find biodiversity loss (as measured by species extinction rate) and N2 removals from the atmosphere for human use running at the most troubling rates. While the pre-industrial era extinction rate was 0.1-1 species per million species per year, the current rate is something like 100, and order of magnitude more than their proposed redline value of 10. The nitrogen situation may be even worse: pre-industrial man removed no net nitrogen from the air. Rockström et al. propose a limit of 35 million tons per year; the current rate is 121 million tons annually.

A recent leader by The Economist explores the political landscape, and in particular the problem of effective transnational agreements to lower carbon emissions. The U.S. Senate must ratify any international treaty that the President enters into. Arguing that the Kyoto protocol failed because it could not get approval of these 100 Americans, nor did excessive emissions by Kyoto signatories actually lead to sanctions, the editorialist writes:

There is an alternative: moving the negotiations onto a different diplomatic track…. Australia has proposed another route. All countries would come up with a “national schedule” of programmes, such as cap-and-trade and low-carbon regulations. Developed countries would also specify an amount by which they mean to reduce their emissions. These commitments would have the force of domestic law, but would not be subject to international sanctions.

Finally, at the softer end of the spectrum, for inspiration and exhortation, take a look at this anthology assembled by the Union of Concerned Scientists: Thoreau’s Legacy: American Stories about Global Warming, 67 pieces of writing and art “drawn from nearly 1,000 submissions about beloved places, animals, plants, people, and activities at risk from a changing climate and the efforts that individuals are making to save what they love,” available both in print and as a handsomely designed Flash-based interactive.

Blog Action Day 2009

My Blog Action Day 2008 post.

Conscientious inconsistency

In an excerpt from his forthcoming book, for the Times Magazine annual food issue, Jonathan Safran Foer explains his bumpy practice of vegetarianism. Although most of his qualms run along the lines of not wishing to hurt animals, he also mentions the reason I try to avoid eating terrestrial vertebrates:

According to reports by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. and others, factory farming has made animal agriculture the No. 1 contributor to global warming (it is significantly more destructive than transportation alone), and one of the Top 2 or 3 causes of all of the most serious environmental problems, both global and local: air and water pollution, deforestation, loss of biodiversity… Eating factory-farmed animals—which is to say virtually every piece of meat sold in supermarkets and prepared in restaurants—is almost certainly the single worst thing that humans do to the environment.

Time to go shopping

Mike Veseth, the Wine Economist, reports on the state of wine retailed in box containers—good value, low environmental impact:

The top box wine, going by the rating numbers, is a white: Wine Cube California Chardonnay, which sells in Target Stores for $17 per 3 liter box, which is $4.25 per standard bottle equivalent. It earned a very respectable 88 points [from Wine Spectator].

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How can decent wine be this cheap? One answer, of course, is that you can choose to make the wine itself less expensive by economizing in the cellar in many ways (less oak or none at all for red wines, for example). But to a considerable degree the box itself is responsible for the savings.

The bag in box container costs less than $1, according to the Wine Spectator article, which automatically saves $4 to $8 compared with a similar quantity of wine in standard glass bottles and the box they come in.

(Via The Morning News.)