Good on ya: 3

Three of my projects from last year have been honored with nominations for outstanding achievement from WATCH: Seussical, Never the Sinner, and Guys and Dolls. I was especially pleased to see the directing and technical work on Sinner receive its due recognition.

And Leta has the wow moment: she picked up a nomination for her work as Alma in Taking Leave for Vienna Theatre Company. I am very proud of her.

A clean, well-lighted place

beforeafterCheck out the spiffy new tile and furniture (at right) in the main men’s room at Silver Spring Stage. Renovations were completed to the men’s and ladies’ rooms just in time for the opening of Seascape. The best thing about the rehab is that the classic-era tulip-shaped urinal (see the “before” picture, at left) was retained. Second-best thing is that there is once again light in the stalls. Your contribution dollars at work! Thank you!

Another friend gone

This always happens when I check back with a morning news source later in the day: bad news. Sommer Mathis of DCist links to a column by Hank Stuever about the closing of the last of D.C.’s crackerbox art movie houses, the AMC Dupont Circle 5. The Dupont 5 never had the scope of the Biograph or the two-story interlock of the lovable Key, but attending a movie there always brought with it the challenge of getting there early enough to secure the one seat in each auditorium with decent sightlines. Apparently the cinemas’ closing has been quietly scheduled for some time. The doors close forever this weekend.

The Dupont 5 was a few dozen extremely familiar steps away from the south escalators of the Dupont Circle Metro station, between a Cosi and a Ben & Jerry’s, and not far from Olsson’s Books & Records. Here you had a perfect world of second and third dates. You could always see someone standing in front of the Dupont 5, wondering if his or her date was going to show up. (This was before everyone owned a cellphone.) A few hearts were broken in front of the Dupont 5.

Egregious muzak: 1

It’s been a while since I heard something piped in that made me say, “Aww, why did they have to do that to that song?” But there I was, walking into the Reston Chick-Fil-A this evening, and as I stood in line, I thought, “that sounds like… is that… yeah, it is…” The mooshy mix made it hard to tell whether the solo instrument was strings, or an organ, or a reed instrument, but the languid, swoopy intervals were unmistakeable: “Naima,” by John Coltrane, originally recorded on the Giant Steps album.

Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind

Chicago’s performance collective, The Neo-Futurists, returns to the Woolly stage with its 19-year-running Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, a post-modern amalgam of mime, politics, sketch comedy, audience participation, depredations of food, and general “what the hell was that that just was?” The objective of each aleatory performance of TMLMTBGB is to execute 30 mini-plays (in rotation from the group’s repertory) in the course of an hour counted down by an onstage darkroom timer. Some pieces are silly, some bits are straight. I was particularly taken with the wordless “Why This Why,” an examination of a dysfunctional love relationship with red noses and a whiff of Beckettian futility; and Jessica Anne’s “Food Related Play #2,” a blackly comic anecdote about a loved one’s untimely passing. Easily the best-dubbed play is “Kristie and John perform two lines of text from Our Town, yes the one by Thornton Wilder…” In a triumph of self-referentiality, it is one of the rare works of art with a title, the recitation of which constitutes a performance of the work. The crowd-pleaser of the evening is the goofy bit of nerdcake “Ryan Walters: Bad Ass Bike Messenger.” Obviously, the secret to making this work is to give each piece as much time as it needs and no more, whether it is “Replay of a Long Distance Relationship,” which requires the two performers to sprint from the orchestra to the balcony and back to perform its scenes (with impromptu audience color commentary from several rows behind us explaining that running downstairs takes less time than going up); or the mercifully short “Republican Compassion in Action.” But the genius of the group’s writing is that each play is never talky, never there just to make a point, but rather finds its own unique elements of theatricality.

  • Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, created by Greg Allen; written, directed, and performed by The Neo-Futurists, Woolly Mammoth Theatre, Washington

Cool, not cool

Paul Conley (thanks, J Luc!) has produced a fine profile for NPR of the wistful alto, the “swinging introvert,” saxophonist Paul Desmond. Desmond wrote “Take Five,” which appeared on the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s phenomenally popular Time Out, the jazz record that broke out of the 4/4 groove. Brubeck and Desmond, with their laid-back West Coast sound, were my gateway into jazz in college (the only thing I heard at home was a little Cal Tjader), but lately I’ve listened more to their bebop and post-bop contemporaries. Maybe it’s time to go back and give another listen.

Good things

Gloria liked rules, rules were Good Things. Gloria liked rules that said you couldn’t speed or park on double-yellow lines, rules that told you not to drop litter or deface buildings. She was sick and tired of hearing people complain about speed cameras and parking wardens as if there were some reason that they should be exempt from them. When she was younger she used to fantasize about sex and love, about keeping chickens and bees, being taller, running through fields with a black-and-white border collie. Now she daydreamed about being the keeper at the gates, of standing with the ultimate ledger and ticking off the names of the dead as they appeared before her, giving them the nod through or the thumbs-down. All those people who parked in bus bays and ran the red light on pedestrian crossings were going to be very sorry when Gloria peered at them over the top of her spectacles and asked them to account for themselves.

—Kate Atkinson, One Good Turn, p. 22

Believe it or not, Leta was flattered when I told her that I read this passage and thought of her.

Rana temporaria

Via Boing Boing: Perhaps this Modern Mechanix article (by S. L. Schutt, May, 1934) on raising frogs in the backyard inspired the delightful monologue Chug, by Ken Jenkins.

The advantage of frog farming is the fact that you can start practically anywhere and expand gradually as your profits mount. A vacant city lot, an old orchard or even a back yard can be utilized. Due to the cannibalistic nature of adult frogs, the frog farmer needs three separate ponds, segregating the breeders, tadpoles, and small frogs.

Adding it up

I hope to be able shortly to post in a little more depth about New Jersey’s Natural Capital valuation project, which was reported on by Janet Babin today for Marketplace. Since the days of Soviet command economies and the joke of Leontief’s input-output tableaux, through the imputation of the value of services (which dominate goods in the post-industrial economy), down through today’s valuation of privately-held companies, the assignment of a dollar figure to a transaction or an asset when no money is changing hands at a market-clearing price is a dodgy proposition. So a healthy skepticism is in order when it comes to assigning dollar values for the services provided by an ecosystem. Nevertheless, I am encouraged by New Jersey’s efforts to do just that.

Protecting the environment is a public service provided by government (along with other entities), and it requires the expenditure of money and effort to do it. So environment protection competes, if you will, for the scarce resources available to government, which is beset by demands for all sorts of other services (some of them worthwhile, some of them hopelessly foolish, some of them mere plundering). Putting a dollar figure on the value of undeveloped land, even one that is wrong by an order of magnitude, helps legislators and policymakers compare apples to apples and make better-informed decisions.

There is a tendency among certain members of the environmental community to treat the environment as a treasure without price, and in the extreme, that’s true. (It should be noted that defenders of human life and liberty, be they terrorism hawks or right-to-lifers, tend to argue similarly.) But I’m beginning to think that this is a fruitless way to reason about natural resource conservation.

Upcoming: 6

I really don’t spend as much time out in the field actively birding as I would like to, but I like to make time for Cornell’s Great Backyard Bird Count, which is held each February over the Presidents’ Day weekend. I’ve done a couple of Christmas Bird Counts, but the GBBC has some advantages. I’m in control of the when and the where—I can bird anywhere I like, for as little as 15 minutes at a time, any time in the course of the weekend. The Christmas counts have an air of friendly competition, and that’s fine, but the GBBC is more about reconnecting with your local habitat.

There is a half-mile stretch of blacktop trail along The Glade (a tributary of Angelico Branch) that I like to work for the GBBC. It’s mixed hardwoods with some open patches, so it’s usually good for the area’s common winter birds of the suburbs, including (most years) a Red-Shouldered Hawk. I can take a side trip to Lake Audubon to count geese and hope for some ducks. And this is all just a five-minute drive from my house.

Another thing that I like about the GBBC is that it provides a clearer picture of wintering populations. The Christmas counts always pick up a few stray migrants—indeed, that seems to be the big attraction, for some people.

So look for me in the field on the weekend of 15 to 18 Februrary, doing my little sliver of citizen science.

Green ears

still in the box The FedEx guy left a box at my door yesterday. A Saturday delivery? Yes, indeedy: the XO laptop that I received in exchange for my donation to the One Laptop Per Child project.

ready to be chargedThe machine is just adorable. If Elle Woods had designed a computer to go with her chihuahua, she would have come up with this (perhaps in pink).

browsing With the help of the getting started guide, I was connected to my wireless network in two shakes, and I was browsing in half a shake more. The web browser is pretty basic, as far as I can tell so far. Bookmarking doesn’t quite work the way we’ve come to expect after 15 years. A positive side effect is that it effectively comes with its own Flashblock. Oops, looks like the New York Times web site just crashed the browser.

The chiclet-y keyboard is is easier than any phone I’ve ever used. My lack of touch-typing skills will serve me well. There’s a little heat dissipated from the back of the screen.

Lots more to play with here, including figuring out what some of the keys do (like the mysterious Hand keys between the Control and Alt analogues). Maybe the games on the XO will entice Leta away from playing FreeCell on my Windows machine.

More than a cappucino

Starbucks is making strides in areas beyond finding creative, entertaining ways to separate you from your cash in its stores. Continuing to deepen its involvement with the agricultural sources of its drinks, the company is in the middle of a three-year partnership with the Earthwatch Institute supporting research into aspects of sustainable coffee production. The current project sends volunteers to member fincas of Coope Tarrazú, a co-op in Costa Rica. Using GIS technology, field workers are establishing baseline maps of resources (soil condition, water quality, etc.).

The volunteer effort supports the research of Karen Holl of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Holl’s research interests in Costa Rica include strategies for re-establishing forests in land that has been cleared for pasture.

…we have established 16, 1-ha sites in southern Costa Rica. We are testing questions about “applied nucleation” by planting islands of native tree seedlings to facilitate recovery and studying the effect of the amount of surrounding forest cover on ecosystem recovery. We are collecting extensive data on seed dispersal, seed fate, vegetation establishment, and seedling dynamics.

Also involved in the Costa Rica projects is Catherine Lindell of Michigan State University, who has published studies of habitat use by various bird species in Costa Rica.

Becoming reality

Brian Hayes’ XO laptop has arrived.

If the styling has a whiff of Fisher-Price about it, there’s also some thoughtful ingenuity at work here, and designers of machines for grownups might learn something from it.

* * *

The wifi transceiver is amazing. I never knew I had so many well-connected neighbors—people named linksys and netgear, for example. No other computer I’ve had in the house has ever detected any of these networks.

* * *

…the software is just not finished yet. Some basic capabilities (printing, a sleep mode) are not yet implemented, and there are various buttons that don’t yet have functions. The web browser is primitive (no tabs, very limited facilities for bookmarks). There’s an RSS reader that doesn’t seem to work.