Author: David Gorsline

Some links: 37

I really didn’t intend this to become the Facebook Sux Blog, but I have to spread the link karma to Matt Labash’s jeremiad (via Arts & Letters Daily) and Mike Booth’s video satire (via Gleeful Gecko).

I told him he was a very sad man, that collecting Facebook friends is the equivalent of being a catlady, collecting numerous Himalayans, which you have neither the time nor the inclination to feed. “You have obviously never been on Facebook,” he said. “It’s so much worse than collecting cats.”

So, David, enough already.

Prince William Forest Park

We took the first of two field trips that are part of Gary Evans’ Introduction to Ecology at the Graduate School, USDA. We visited two sites in Prince William Forest Park, the first a farmed-out agricultural area that is undergoing old field succession on its way to becoming deciduous forest, and the second an area that was apparently never farmed intensively.

big cedarThe site of the old Taylor Farm homestead is mowed regularly, so the veg is largely panic grass and broom sedge, but nothing seems to be a match for this humungous eastern redcedar (Juniperus virginiana).

soil profileWe spent a lot of time with the soil profiles of the two sites. This soil pit is from our second study site, in the drainage of the South Fork of Quantico Creek. Laid out in the spade, left to right, you can see the samples from the O horizon (organic material), the mineral-leached A horizon (cocoa brown), and the iron-enriched B horizon (ruddy orange). A Munsell color chart is visible in the right of the picture. The green sprigs of princess pine (Lycopodium clavatum) bespeak a sandier soil than at the farm site. Mountain laurel also appears here.

I also appreciate that Dr. Evans discusses some of the economic aspects of the study of nature, for instance, pointing out that the tighter growth rings for oaks and chestnuts are what make these hardwoods valuable to furniture makers and handcraftsmen. He also noted that much of the public lands acquired in the Roosevelt New Deal era were the result of forced relocation of starving farmers who had nothing left but their patches of knackered land.

Fairfax Cross County Trail, MM39-MM37

Just in case anyone is listening, the marker post for the Fairfax Cross County Trail on the south side of Silverbook Road at White Spruce Way is down. It’s especially hard for someone coming from the north side of Silverbook to pick up the trail, which continues unpaved and otherwise unmarked along the south side of the road. This trouble spot is about 100 yards from the place where the trail is informally rerouted around a closure of the trail for about 10 yards, right at the corner of the old prison facility.

repurposedImmediately behind me, as I made this image, is a rather birdy spot, considering the time and season. It’s waste ground in a little hollow, filled with tangled veg (and at least some rubbish). Flycatchers like the vantage point of the top of the old fence, at least where there is a rail for perching.

No equal

Ulrich stubbornly expanded on this point: “What one needs in life is merely the conviction that one’s business is doing better than one’s neighbor’s. Your pictures, my mathematics, somebody else’s wife and children—everything that can assure a person that he is in no way unusual but that in this way of being in no way unusual he will not so easily find his equal!”

—Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, chap. 54

At the park: 23

starting upOnly a light frosting of snow this morning on the still-sleeping woods (the bigger dump is expected this evening). We welcomed three new volunteers to the nest box program, and those of us working the main pond got instant satisfaction, as old reliable box #7 already showed a clutch of six Hooded Merganser eggs. Green-winged Teal and Northern Pintail are lingering in the wetland. Paul reported a big flock of White-throated Sparrows.

Do you remember GeoCities?

Dollar for dollar, schaden for freude, watching the missteps of Facebook management is more fun than tracking the misadventures of a certain jailbird hotel heiress. Marshall Kilpatrick’s most recent post is titled, “Facebook Management Has Lost Its Grip on Reality,” and I’m inclined to agree.

Multiple company officials on the call today said that the controversy showed how much of a sense of ownership users have over Facebook and that they wanted a sense of participation in its governing…. We’d argue that it is pretty clear people have a sense of ownership instead over their content and want Facebook to keep its hands off. Ownership of content, not the lack of input on policy, was what people were upset about.

Facebook appears to forget that it’s just one of many ways people use the internet. It’s wildly popular today, but just as people have used other social networks in the past – they have other options for social networks to use in the future.

Squeezed in Panama

Elisabeth Rosenthal reports on the controversial findings of Joe Wright, a senior scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, that the rate of secondary rain forest formation (through abandonment of farms via urbanization, and other causes) is outpacing the rate of primary rain forest destruction. The arguments critical of Wright and those in his support tend to tangle together the function of rain forests as a carbon sink with their role as a refuge for biodiversity.

Regenerated forests in the tropics appear to be especially good at absorbing emissions of carbon, but that ability is based on location and rate of growth. A field abandoned in New York in 1900 will have trees shorter than those growing on a field here [in Central America] that was abandoned just 20 years ago.

For many biologists, a far bigger concern is whether new forests can support the riot of plant and animal species associated with rain forests. Part of the problem is that abandoned farmland is often distant from native rain forest. How does it help Amazonian species threatened by rain-forest destruction in Brazil if secondary forests grow on the outskirts of Panama City?

Here in the East, you can observe the results of old field succession by taking a short drive to the Blue Ridge. Much of the now-protected parkland in the Appalachians was once in agricultural production, as the evidence of a family cemetery in the woods will attest.

Eurydice

The designers for Round House Theatre’s production of Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice have produced a masterful solution to the challenge presented by this, shall we say, post-modern Romantic play. It’s a modern retelling of the myth of Orpheus (Adriano Gatto)—the skilled musician who loses his wife to death, goes to the Underworld to retrieve her, escorts her back to to life on condition that he not look at her, and loses her again—told this time largely from her point of view. What should you do when you are lost to someone you loved? Is is less painful to remember and regret, or to drown in the waters of forgetfulness?

Rather than precisely specify a ground plan and a look for her plays (think of the precision of Williams or Beckett), and rather than leave everything up to imagination (Shakespeare), Ruhl demands that the director and designers fill in the gaps with their own creativity. Consider, for instance, these stage directions from movement 2, scene 3:

The father creates a room out of string for Eurydice.
He makes four walls and a door out of string.
Time passes.
It takes time to build a room out of string.

Set designer Clint Ramos, lighting designer Colin K. Bills, sound designer Matthew M. Nelson, costume designer Kathleen Geldard, and movement coach Karin Abromaitis have collaborated to create a techno Hell to hold Eurydice (wide-eyed Jenna Sokolowski) and her father (Harry A. Winter, a petit bourgeois with quiet dignity): multiple playing levels on a grid of industrial scaffolding, a series of water effects that start very small and end up harrowing, punked-out kandy-kolored costumes for the Greek chorus of stones, Big Stone (KenYatta Rogers), Little Stone (Linden Taylor), and Loud Stone (Susan Lynskey). (In an inspired last-minute response to recent laryngitis, Lynskey is currently signing her part in ASL, no easy trick when you’re hanging off the side of that scaffolding.) Presiding, as it were, as the Nasty Interesting Man/Lord of the Underworld, is the always-fun-to-watch Mitchell Hébert.

  • Eurydice, by Sarah Ruhl, directed by Derek Goldman, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Maryland

Fairfax Cross County Trail, Occoquan

across the riverI walked the southernmost two miles of the Fairfax Cross County Trail, from the marina on the Occoquan River to just beyond the Furnace Road underpass. The trail begins across the river from the picturesque marina and arts town of Occoquan, Virginia, then makes a long and steady climb of 250 feet, coming out of the valley to traverse less appetizing venues.

towersAt present, the trail passes the landfill on the right, then swings around the remains of the prison complex at Lorton, currently under redevelopment. After a stretch on the verge of Va. 123, passing the new Workhouse Arts Center, the trail follows Lorton Road, crossing broken pavement, before skirting more government property and diving into another patch of land under redevelopment. Where there is a patch of green to be found, bluebirds like the edgy habitat. Fortunately, the trail is well-posted in this stretch.

brick barrelJust before mile marker 39, the trail passes under Furnace Road via a brick barrel-vaulted bridge.

A short trip

approachI did a short bird walk this morning with NVBC. Nothing too special, a quick look at a Field Sparrow. The venue was Fort C.F. Smith Park in Arlington, which turns out to be a charming little pocket park overlooking the river to the north from a slip of land between North 24th Street and the George Washington Parkway. Acquired by the county in 1994 from the Hendry family, the park provides a mix of civilized amenities (it’s popular for weddings) and bird-friendly features (see the area managed for meadow in the right part of this image). We walked for a short time with David Farner, park manager, who pointed out activity to control invasive English Ivy.

backyard feedersThe property is prized by historians, as ruins of the earthworks that comprised Ft. Smith are still visible. Built in 1863, he fort was part of the perimeter protecting Washington from Confederate attack from the south and west.

Hell Meets Henry Halfway

The friendly space at 7th and D welcomes a traveling production from Philadelphia’s Pig Iron Theatre Company of the provocative Hell Meets Henry Halfway, with text by Adriano Shaplin, after a work by Witold Gombrowicz. Gombrowicz, Polish playwright and novelist of the avant garde, is best known (if at all, in this country) for the novel Ferdydurke.

The current offering, according to playwright Shaplin, is an adaptation of the first 40 pages or so of a gothic novel that Gombrowicz himself considered hack work. And frankly, not a lot happens, but it’s intriguing to watch it unfold. Traveling separately, a pudgy tennis pro (Gabriel Quinn Bauriedel) and a doctor of unspecified discipline (Steve Cuiffo) arrive at a small pension, the pro to give lessons to spoiled young woman Maya Okholovska (bitchy, neurasthenic Sarah Sanford) and the doctor to attend to the deranged sole resident of the fourth floor, known only as the Prince (actress Bel Garcia). The establishment is overseen by the titular Henry Kholavitski (wound-up-tight Dito van Reigersberg), fiancé of Maya. Serving the role of engaging us in the story is Jon the Ball Boy, played with juvenile goofiness to the point of idiocy by James Sugg. There is savage, ironic coupling; there is betrayal and death; there are rewards and returns.

Pig Iron’s approach is heavily movement based, as evidenced by a painstakingly slow, small, precise series of actions in a scene for Cuiffo’s Dr. Hincz; it makes for a nice opposition with the delicious, quotable language by Gombrowicz/Shaplin. Sugg and Shaplin provide the score for the production (nearly every scene has music behind it), featuring a menacing pulse that sounds like half of a heartbeat. The small-footprint set is by Matt Saunders, anchored by back flats painted in grisaille like the most fatal of Mark Rothko’s dark horizons. At the center, nearly a seventh cast member, is a magic wardrobe, which pivots into position or takes on additional furniture to become, for instance, an entrance hall, a railway carriage, a dining table, or a bedroom.

A running gag, if you can call it that, is Henry being pelted by tennis balls thrown from the wings, as if in some Beckett outtake. This play is Beckett grown more expansive, sexier, more grotesque; our polite titters of dread at times erupt into guffaws. But in the interest of accentuating the positive, let’s give Jon the last word: “How many for nothing? Hands up! How many for something? Hands! Okay! Something wins! Me too!”

  • Hell Meets Henry Halfway, conceived & created by Pig Iron Theatre Company, text by Adriano Shaplin, after Possessed by Witold Gombrowicz, directed by Dan Rothenberg, presented at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington