Author: David Gorsline

A mystery: 5

David Pogue prepares for a panel on taxicab technology, and along the way figures out something that I never quite understood: the difference between New York’s medallion cabs and “black car” services:

There’s a good reason why there’s no still no wireless way to let taxi drivers know you want a cab. Or, rather, a bad reason.

In the 1970’s, New York made a deal with the taxi drivers and the “black car” drivers. The rule: Black cars aren’t allowed to pick up passengers spontaneously hailing on the street; those people are for the yellow cabs only. On the other hand, in New York, you can’t call ahead for a yellow cab; that would eat into the black cars’ business.

There are, in fact, smartphone apps that let you summon a cab to your position, like TaxiMagic for the iPhone. But they can’t call cabs in New York. Why? Because summoning a taxi like this is against the law. That’s not hailing; it’s prearrangement, and that’s the domain of the black cars.

I don’t know. If I were the taxi union, I’d argue that the definition of “hailing” has to change with the times. Surely sending out an “I’m here! Come pick me up” signal, by Taxi Magic, text message or whatever, is little more than a modern-day version of sticking your arm out at the curb.

I also didn’t know that there are three times as many black cars as medallion cabs, but this makes sense when you consider the particular political-economic pressures that have affected the supply of medallions over the years.

Ferber decoded: 1

Although I am defeated (as many others before me) by Edna Ferber’s “The schnuckle among the nations of the world,” (A Peculiar Treasure, p. 10), Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish gives some guidance on the following:

It was Alexander Woollcott who acted as schatchen in the marriage between the novel entitled Show Boat and the music of Jerome Kern. (p. 304)

Rosten has:

schadchen

1. A professsional matchmaker
2. Anyone who brings together, introduces, or maneuvers a man and woman into a meeting that results in a wedding.

And, indeed, context explains this one. Woollcott and Ferber, attending an opening together, are hanging out at intermission, in different parts of the lobby, when Woollcott is accosted ever so gently by Kern:

“Look, Aleck, I hear you are a friend of Edna Ferber. I wonder if you’ll kind of fix it for me to meet her. I want to talk to her about letting me make a musical from her Show Boat. Can you arrange an introduction or a meeting or something?”

Mr. Woollcott, with a dreadful relish for the dramatic plum which had thus fallen into his lap (if any), said, musingly, “M-m-m, well, I think I can just arrange it if I play my cards right.”

“Thanks,” said Kern. “Thanks awfully, Aleck, I’ll be—”

Woollcott now raised his voice to a bellow: “Ferber! Hi, Ferber! Come on over here a minute.” Then, “This is Jerome Kern. Edna Ferber.”

Eclipsed; The Oogatz Man; Artist Descending a Staircase

Perhaps the theme for this review is “What is going on here?”

First up is Danai Gurira’s bracing Eclipsed: in a camp during the Liberian civil war of 2003, five women—four of them concubines of the local rebel leader and warlord—show us five different strategies for survival. We learn the ways of the camp through the eyes of the character known only as Girl (the masterful Ayesha Ngaujah), a teenager who has fled the town of Kakata (near Monrovia), only to be captured by the rebel LURD faction who are fighting against the forces of Charles Taylor. An aspect of the play that takes us out of our comfort zone is the language spoken, especially by the rural women. It’s a heavily-accented West African English with some creole elements (duplication of adjectives to intensify, e.g.), coached by Tonya Beckman Ross. At times, it’s as hard for us to follow the dialogue as it is for Girl to understand what has happened to her country, living as she is in such squalor that a solitary damaged book (a biography of a past American president) is the only entertainment to be found. Ngaujah confidently steers the wide arc written for her character, from doe-eyed runaway to the second act’s radicalized guerilla and back again, with even a side trip into comic goofiness. At the play’s close, she is left with a choice as vexing for us as it is for her: the way of the AK-47 or the way of the book.

  • Eclipsed, by Danai Gurira, directed by Liesl Tommy, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Later in the week we saw a pair of one acts from Longacre Lea, beginning with the brain-tickling The Oogatz Man, written by artistic director Kathleen Akerley. A story that begins with a simple premise—a man (Eric M. Messner) is preparing dinner in his apartment for his girlfriend (Heather Haney), with whom he intends to break up with that evening—but it quickly slides into a zone of indeterminate space and time, as if the imaginary force field he erects to keep her out of the kitchen has undergone a genuine power surge. Stair units at the back of the set sometimes take us upstairs and sometimes down; doorframe units are manipulated from scene to scene (by a backwards-gibberish-speaking building engineer) so that we see different sides of the same room; peculiar neighbors massage rolling pins into mind-controlling devices. It’s an ordinary walkup apartment building folded into a tesseract and peopled out of the imagination of David Lynch. Oh, and let us not miss Messner’s extended riff on the mentality that music takes him to, and the frustrations he feels trying to communicate that to someone else (dancing about architecture, anyone?), which leads into an ensemble air guitar session to selected tunes from Metallica. Much fun.

Akerley’s play is matched with Tom Stoppard’s Artist Descending a Staircase. Originally written for radio, the play does well in the black box of the Callan Theatre. The ensemble manages the scene transitions smoothly and with panache—and there are a lot of them, as the play (built from five nested flashbacks) is described in Stoppard’s script as having an ABCDEFEDCBA structure. The text has some of Sir Tom’s more provocative writing about art. Donner (the artist who descended, terminally, sometime between the A and B sections), says:

An artist is someone who is gifted in some way which enables him to do something more or less well which can only be done badly or not at all by someone who is not thus gifted. To speak of an art which requires no gift is a contradiction employed by people like yourself who have an artistic bent but no particular skill…. An artistic imagination coupled with skill is talent…. Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

In the end, the piece resolves into not much more than a shaggy dog story, but in the telling it is oh so entertaining.

  • The Oogatz Man, by Kathleen Akerley, and Artist Descending a Staircase, by Tom Stoppard, co-directed by Kathleen Akerley and Caitlin M. Smith, assisted by Mary Cat Gill, Longacre Lea, Callan Theatre, Washington

A little dig

Sly closing remark by Bill Poser at the end of a Language Log post about garbled entomology in a Customs and Border Protection press release (with my spelling correction):

The odd wording appears to have originated with Customs, in this press release. (Customs is now part of the “Department of Homeland Security” but I avoid using this name. Whenever I see it, I hear “Reichssicherheitshauptamt“.)

Out of the garage

Maybe a little too close to home: Jon Mooallem checks out self-storage culture in suburban California:

“My parents were Depression babies,” [Tom] Litton told me, “and what they taught me was, it’s the accumulation of things that defines you as an American, and to throw anything away was being wasteful.” The self-storage industry reconciles these opposing values: paying for storage is, paradoxically, thrifty.

Tripping Wires

Brandon Gentry looks back on the production of a mighty fine CD from 1994, ¡Simpatico! by local band Velocity Girl. Alas, there are no quotes from singer Sarah Shannon in the piece.

Coalescing at the University of Maryland in the late ’80s, Velocity Girl specialized in winningly sharp indie pop steeped in resonant major chord melodies and spry, agile rhythms…. Focused and concise, the best Velocity Girl is some of the best indie rock D.C. – or any other city – can claim to have produced in the last 20 years.

News from the park

Some tidbits from the most recent newsletter from Friends of Huntley Meadows Park:

  • The crayfish population is up! Resource Management Intern Alice Millikin writes that water quality monitors as well as turtle and frog trappers reported increases. The nets used for water quality monitoring caught 28 individuals, more than the catch for the past five years combined.
  • King Rails (Rallus elegans) are back! Park Manager Kevin Munroe says in his message that a parent with four or five chicks was seen at least three times in the period 19 July to 27 July. Higher water levels, a habitat mosaic created by muskrats and beavers, and increased crayfish numbers are responsible.
  • Construction for the wetland restoration project has been delayed again. A dam breach analysis was recently completed, with the anticipation that the project can be qualified as low-hazard, and hence move through the permitting process. A 2010 date for construction is still possible, but 2011 is more likely.
  • Also in 2010-11, the surface and toe boards of the boardwalk will be replaced, this time with recycled plastic materials. Lower maintenance, and a greener message. The project is funded by the 2008 bond referendum.

Three on a match

Aunt Taki showed some of the diaries that she has been keeping since forever. Her secrets are safe from me, as well as her kids, since she keeps them in Japanese. She usually uses a book with a cool set up: entries for three years on each daily page—sort of the hardcopy equivalent of blog entries that link to this time last year. She gets her books from Hakubunkan Shinsha (alas, no English page to link to).

Takeaways: 4

making connectionsSome snaps from my recent trip to Sacramento and suburbs to move my mother into her new place. Mom wasn’t fazed by using my mobile to leave a message for her friend Priscilla.


making breakfastDoing what she loves doing (and is dang good at), my aunt Takeko (my mother’s brother’s widow), cutting melon for breakfast. At the end of the week, I used Taki’s guest room as an operations base. She’s camera-shy, like me.


mission accomplishedThis was the end state to which Rita and I worked for six days: an empty apartment, carpets vacuumed but hardly blot-free.


sic transitIn the neighborhood, the old Tower Records store on Watt will reopen as a thrift store next month. The Gottschalks down the block is also empty. But the staff at the Starbucks just north of here are the friendliest I’ve ever found.

The right direction

James Hohmann visits WMATA’s sign shop.

button for elevatorDiscreetly, nothing is said about the hand-made annotations to the elevator call buttons that are meant to keep us from pushing the emergency notifier when all we want to do is get to the train mezzanine.

Technological developments continue to change the way signs are made and installed…. In the… not-so-distant past, workers meticulously copied the wording from a sign they needed to replace. Now they snap digital photos.

Bang

One evening, after a week or two of rehearsals [of Our Mrs. McChesney], I was leaving the theater rather late, when most of the company had gone. George Hobart and I had had some changes to discuss. [Augustus] Thomas was still there. Near the door I called out across the stage, “Good night, Mr. Thomas.”

He glanced up. “Ah—good night, Miss—uh—uh—mmmm——”

“Ferber,” I prompted him, icily. He had seen me every day for weeks.

“Yes, yes, of course, Ferber. Ferber. I never can remember these Jewish names.”

“That must have been difficult for you when Mr. Frohman was producing your plays,” I retorted, by some lucky stroke; and slammed the door. Nothing slams more satisfactorily than a good heavy metal stage door.

—Edna Ferber, A Peculiar Treasure, p. 218