They live and work among us

In the course of tracking down a reference to a recent presentation he made on API design, I found the birding category of Elliotte Rusty Harold’s Mokka mit Schlag. He found the Western Reef Heron that’s been hanging around in Brooklyn, and thoughtfully included directions to one of the hot spots from the D train Bay-50th St station.

Dispersing the blue smoke

Timothy L. Keiningham et al. publish peer-reviewed research that questions whether the Net Promoter Score metric (promulgated by Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company, and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.) does a better job than other metrics of explaining business performance. Keiningham’s paper, “A Longitudinal Examination of Net Promoter and Firm Revenue Growth” says, from the abstract:

Using industries Reichheld cites as exemplars of Net Promoter, the research fails to replicate his assertions regarding the “clear superiority” of Net Promoter compared with other measures in those industries.

Stefan Kolle’s post includes an extended e-mail exchange with Keiningham, in which he is even more pointed in its criticism of Reichheld.

Not worried yet

Via The Morning News: Despite Anita Hamilton’s warnings, I’m finding it hard to get too worked up about the various services that scrape identifying personal information from the web. They do so poor a job of it, it’s not worth taking them seriously. ZoomInfo, for instance, knows of many different David Gorslines. What a career I have had, according to them: I’ve been employed by GFP Inc and by Birding magazine (I contributed one article); manager of an outfit called Stage; assistant director; squad leader (a particularly poorly-scraped page that had references to two different Daves); Member of the Advisory Board of WPA\C (I gave them some money); and, at some time in my life, I was Duke of Burgundy.

Photo novelty

I ordered a duck stamp (formally known as the Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Stamp), at the prompting of Paul Baicich. The smart thing that Paul has done is to locate a supplier for a plastic holder/carrier for the stamp that has a key ring; since the stamp costs $15 and you can’t use it for postage, the least you can do is hang it on your bins or your backpack. I tracked down his supplier information and product number (#92033) through Birdchick. But the gizmo is backordered for the next couple of weeks. The dealer is probably trying to figure out why this particular size of an 89-cent snapshot holder is so hard to keep stocked.

New creeps

Andrew Leonard is playing along with a Nigerian 419 scammer with a disturbing new angle: global warming. The correspondence from this crumbum “Zeeshan Ashraf” is alarmingly literate: I noted only one syntactic flaw, and he even managed the tricky affect/effect pair correctly. Still, as Leonard drily notes:

I find it a bit distressing that the original offer[s] of $610,000 for Individual and $950,000 for Corporate involvement have been knocked down to a paltry $250,000 and $500,000. Talk about your bait and switch! Now I’m not at all sure that I want to pursue this any further.

What gets in your way?

Jane Beard, professional actor and networker on the local scene for many years, is developing a book “to help performers break through some of the most common beliefs and fears which get in their way.” To that end, she is conducting an online survey (using one of Vovici’s competitors’ services, but no matter) to get input from performers about the barriers that they think are there. Most of the questions are checkoffs about the tapes we play in our heads while we’re trying to get work and then do work, like “the director is an idiot/inscrutable/unprepared,” or “there’s an insider list and I’m not on it,” or (one of my Top 40 hits) “what happens when everyone sees that I’m a fraud?” Jane’s intended audience is mainly performers working for pay, but the energy barriers that we put up know no professional/amateur division. If you perform for a live audience, help her out and take the survey by September 30.

Excellence vs. competence

Via scribble, scribble, scribble…, Steve Gimbel deflates the proponents of a certain Objectivist:

If you take the writings of Nietzsche and remove everything insightful, interesting, and funny, what’s left are the writings of Ayn Rand. These works are a narcotic to the upper-middle class white male of above average means and intelligence because it simultaneously meets two needs…

Contemporary American Theater Festival, 2007

wooden building-mounted signThis year’s festival in Shepherdstown engages with the world in a big way—questioning the American Dream, taking two different trips to Gaza, and challenging current trends in criminal justice and social policy. Certain parties felt sufficiently threatened by certain of the material as to withdraw support, and worse. Advocacy groups taking out program ads to present their side of the story, and police in the lobby! Exciting stuff.


Jason Grote‘s 1001 is an enchanting theatrical palimpsest of Tales from the Arabian Nights and Scheherazade, ethnic New Yorkers in the aftermath of 9/11, the centuries-old clash of East and West in the Holy Land, and a little bit of Alfred Hitchcock and the video for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” The play’s various Borgesian stories interlock and overlap one another, so that following a particular narrative thread becomes as difficult as following the decorative ceramic tracery on a Persian mosque, and a couple of them simply leave us hanging with no satisfying conclusion. Something like Life, which (as one character aphoristically has it) “is suffering: to be released from it a kindness.”

The piece is deftly executed by an ensemble cast of six, plus two supernumeraries. The multi-flexible Ariel Shafir’s eyebrow-rolling schtick as The One-Eyed Arab is noteworthy, as is Reshma Shetty’s skillful juggling of multiple voices, among them a London-educated girl of the Emirates and a lisping princess in a Vertigo sendup.

Intriguing design elements include sparkly costume decorations made from fragments of compact disks; everything is unified by the reappearance of silks and banners of Della Robbia blue.


Lee Blessing premieres a dystopian parable, set sometime in the near future, about current society’s twin tendencies toward constant monitoring of deviant behavior, and toward devolution of government prerogatives to private, corporate interests. The Lonesome Hollow of the play’s title is a minimum-security enclave where sexual deviants are incarcerated indefinitely; both predators and lesser offenders (like pornographers) are shunned by a country grown markedly theocratic, encapsulated by an archipelago of numberless similar facilities, each one less pleasant than the one before. Sharing themes with The Handmaid’s Tale and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the play’s warning is that things are likely to get worse, and then get worse again.

Lou Sumrall does good work as Nye, a hard-bitten predator of young boys; paradoxically, his character provides much of the play’s humor, while his chemical and electrical emasculation by the staff at Lonesome Hollow provides much of the pathos. He is matched by Frank Deal as Glover, a supercilious senior staffer at the site. Deal’s commitment to the demands of the role is compelling, playing as he does a subcontracting pseudo-head shrinker with a streak of sadism. The John Proctor of this tale is Tuck, played by Sheffield Chastain, a photographer-artist of the David Hamilton or Larry Clark stripe; his self-imposed occupational therapy is to build a meditation labyrinth of bricks set into the lawn.

The rings of security that surround the prison echo the ringed pattern of bricks in Tuck’s labyrinth. Ultimately, the degree to which they provide a barrier is equally illusory. As Glover points out that one need not follow the bricks to reach the center of the labyrinth, just so he also notes that the system of Lonesome Hollows does not provide a solution. “Even now we don’t feel safe,” he says. Oddly, perhaps this is the only note of hope that Blessing’s play offers.


Robert Klingelhoefer’s off-kilter set, panelled in fragrant cedar, greets us as we enter the Frank Center auditorium for Richard Dresser’s darkish comedy, The Pursuit of Happiness. Part of a trilogy of plays on the titular theme that Dresser is developing, Pursuit looks in on Annie and Neil, grasping but surviving professional-class parents who are faced with the prospect that their own child, Jodi, will not or cannot go to college. Jodi (Carter Niles), resists the pressure from her parents to recapitulate their own struggles for happiness, and at least for a time, doesn’t buy into the idea of happiness at all. She suspects, in a college application essay that goes astray, “If you see someone walking down the street smiling, don’t you assume that they’re insane?”

Andrea Cirie stands out as the driven, overwound Annie, a woman who will do anything to get her daughter into her alma mater. And Sheffield Chastain also shines as Tucker, Neil’s nebbishy office mate. His put-upon head-cock is a winner. The narrative seems to drag a bit getting us to the first-act closer, but otherwise there are good moments for all the cast to enjoy. Scene changes are framed by music from the Beatles, especially the gloomier bits of Abbey Road, under Sharath Patel’s design.


“Everyone must feel safe,” read Rachel Corrie on the wall of her grade-school classroom, and she took it as a motto for her life. Corrie went on to practice this thought to the fullest: as a young woman she travelled to Israel-occupied Gaza to serve as an anti-violence activist, or to use the more polemical term, a human shield. She met her untimely death in an incident with an Israeli bulldozer in 2003. Her journals and other papers have been assembled by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner into the 85-minute monologue My Name Is Rachel Corrie, a piece mastered by CATF veteran Anne Marie Nest. In the first half of the play, largely taking place in Corrie’s home in Olympia, Wash., during her college years, Nest works the confines of the Studio Theater (configured arena-style), flirting with the audience and often making direct eye contact. Corrie at this point in her life is a bit of a post-modern tree-hugger, albeit one who admits her imperfect grasp of the geopolitical situation.

The impassioned speechifying and tears are reserved for the closing moments of the second half, set in Gaza during the last two months of Corrie’s life. The heaviest moments (perhaps too heavy) are spoken on tape, in which a fellow activist gives his account of Corrie’s death. The passages of the play where Nest is called on to speak the words of others in her life—her mother, an ex-boyfriend—are less effective.

Perhaps we’re left with the feeling that Corrie’s life and death was the stuff of theater, that no one could be this intense. But in a coda, we see a 10-year-old Corrie captured on video, speaking before a school assembly against poverty and violence with the eloquence and assuredness of any adult.

Far from sermonizing, the monologue is an inspiring, challenging work. Of her own death, Rickman and Viner have selected a set-piece from Corrie’s writings that suggest she is stoic, perhaps even mystical, about her passing. The passage from life to death, she writes, is “just a shrug.”


In a program interview, Lee Blessing says,

What’s great about CATF is that they’re absolutely unafraid of subject matter. They seek out plays that challenge us as a society…. This play is not meant to move to completion of what to do. My hope is that it will trouble people and make them want to discuss the issues. I want them to feel that the play has credibility, that there is something troublingly believable about it.

  • Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W. Va.
  • 1001, by Jason Grote, directed by Ed Herendeen
  • Lonesome Hollow, by Lee Blessing, directed by Hal Brooks
  • The Pursuit of Happiness, by Richard Dresser, directed by Ed Herendeen
  • My Name Is Rachel Corrie, from the writings of Rachel Corrie, edited by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner, directed by Ed Herendeen

Shade-grown wheat?

A recent article in Scientific American caught my eye. It’s by Jerry Glover et al. of The Land Institute, a Kansas-based organization that is working to establish agriculture on the Great Plains that has both the stability of the prairie and the yields of annual crops. Food from perennial grains, in other words.

Perennial crops with their deeper roots, so the argument goes, do a better job of sequestering carbon, and have favorable impacts on other wildlife. Land planted in annuals, by contrast, is more dependent on chemical inputs to maintain its productivity. To me, the affinity with agroforestry issues in the tropics is clear.

Sweet

Terrence Rafferty previews Film Forum’s N.Y.C. Noir series, which kicks off with Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success:

…the way [J.J.] Hunsecker drags the movie’s protagonist, an overeager press agent named Sidney Falco…, down into the ethical sewer with him is as brutal as what Richard Widmark does to the old lady in Henry Hathaway’s Kiss of Death (1947)….

It’s the nakedness of the newspaperman’s exercise of power, and the inability of the other, less monomaniacal characters to fight it, that make the picture unmistakably noir, even without gunplay. A sense of powerlessness — often disguised by tough-guy bravado — is a common trait in the heroes and heroines of film noir, and this is a feeling that New Yorkers know a thing or two about. We know too that the threat of physical violence is far from the only means the masters of our fates employ when they want us to know there’s no way out. In this dirty town, where people come to Make It, our desire to succeed and our terror of failure are usually all the ammunition the powerful require to keep us right where they want us.

IBWO spotted in Maryland

…traveling about 65mph, riding on the back of a Toyota. It turns out that the state of Arkansas has issued a license plate with a design that features the Ivory-billed Woodpecker.

Hmm. Virginia has plate designs that feature Mallard and Northern Cardinal, and West Virginia has a nice Rose-breasted Grosbeak plate. It’s not entirely clear what sort of heron Maryland was going for with its Chesapeake Bay plate. I wonder how long a list one could compile from plates of the 50-plus states, districts, and territories. Here’s the place to start looking.

Scaffolding

Via Lifehacker, Steve Pavlina explains scaffolding as a means to establishing productivity habits.

A personal productivity scaffold is like wearing braces. It’s a way to redirect your time and energy back onto the “straight” course and away from the crooked one. Once you’ve set it up, it’s fairly easy to maintain, although you may still regard it as a small sacrifice.

Perhaps the most important function your scaffolding must perform is keeping your attention focused on what you want and off of what you don’t want.