theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
It just gets weirder and weirder. The former CFO of my homeowners association’s previous management company, Jeffrey Koger, who is generally believed to be responsible for embezzlement of funds between 2004 and ’06, has been charged in connection with a shootout involving police this past weekend.
In October, a lawsuit alleged that a large portion of the missing homeowners association money might have been invested in a sushi and steak restaurant that opened on Capitol Hill last summer.
Google has released a Social Graph API, reports Scott Gilbertson, which means that some value might come of one’s meticulously coding XFN rel= attributes on links. Apparently, Twitter friend relationships automatically are marked as rel="friend", so the Social Graph API can follow these automatically.
Via kottke.org, ten brief essays on quirks of baseball, including how to pitch six strikeouts in one inning and the 23 ways to reach first base. So what’s the difference between fan obstruction and specator interference?
HANNAH: It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in. That’s why you can’t believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final.
—Tom Stoppard, Arcadia, sc. 7
On the player grand piano on the food court level of Chevy Chase Pavilion: the piano part only from the end of “Layla” by Derek and the Dominoes.
There’s a lovely passage in Mark Morris’s Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes (1988) where something happens that you don’t often see: the dancers look down at their feet. The ballerinas on pointe, arms outstretched, step forward daintily, their eyes demurely cast down, as if they were moving from one rock to another to cross a mountain stream in spring spate. That’s the fresh feeling of this ensemble piece, set on Virgil Thomson piano etudes.
After spring must come summer and fall, and both of the latter seasons are represented in the superb There Where She Loved (2000) by Christopher Wheeldon. Cheery sexy pieces set on Chopin songs (performed by soprano Kate Vetter Cain with Glenn Sales’s accompaniment) (e.g., Brianne Bland’s post-coital joyful rolls on the floor) alternate with dark ruminations on love gone wrong by Kurt Weill. The most heart-breaking of these is “Surabaya-Johnny” (wrenchingly interpreted by mezzo Shelley Waite): serially monogamous Luis R. Torres dances through three girls, Diana Albrecht, Morgann Rose, and Jade Payette. Unfortunately the background scrim created some nasty moire patterns when it was hit by the follow-spot.
I have a weak spot for Twyla Tharp’s Nine Sinatra Songs (1982), and not in a good way, as it is scored with some of the worst late-career excesses from the singer Frank Sinatra, chief among them the smug attitudinizing of “My Way.” But it’s hard to resist Erin Mahoney-Du as the comic drunk girlfriend who won’t leave the bar, her trapeze dress failing to stay in place to cover her bottom, in “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road).” Or the adolescent fumble of “Somethin’ Stupid” by Maki Onuki and Zachary Hackstock. Ball gowns for the women, designed by Oscar de la Renta, are stunning.
The comfy seats in the Harman Hall steeply-raked balcony have extra-high backs.
Sarah Boxer reviews the current crop of books about blogs for The New York Review of Books. I find it a little odd that she finds it necessary to explain emoticons to NYRB readers, but no matter. Boxer is most drawn to the snarky, neologizing sector of the blogosphere:
Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can’t fake that. ;-)
She manages some nice turns of word herself, and pulls off a neat comparison to Plato.
One more thing to look out for in the park: a weathered sheet of plywood lying on the ground might be a snake board, sheltering small mammals and the herps who eat them, reports the Winter 2008 number of the Fairfax County Park Authority’s newsletter, ResOURces. Tony Bulmer’s checklist for boards at Ellanor C. Lawrence Park (he’s a naturalist and interpreter there) includes nine species of snake, as well as skinks, salamanders, and toads. Caution: if you find a board, don’t disturb it. If you flip it over without knowing what you’re doing, you may find yourself nose-to-nose with a copperhead.
Via kottke.org: Sometimes they just write themselves. As blogged by Scott Horton, George Bush’s favored painting, which to him looks like a Methodist evangelist riding into country to spread the good word, was originally made by W.H.D. Koerner to illustrate a Saturday Evening Post short story about a smooth-talking horse thief.
Bush has consistently exhibited what psychologists call the “Tolstoy syndrome.” That is, he is completely convinced he knows what things are, so he shuts down all avenues of inquiry about them and disregards the information that is offered to him. This is the hallmark of a tragically bad executive. But in this case, it couldn’t be more precious. The president of the United States has identified closely with a man he sees as a mythic, heroic figure. But in fact he’s a wily criminal one step out in front of justice.
Malkom Boothroyd and his parents are on a biking and birding big year: they set out from the Yukon Territory last June. By December, they had travelled 6,000 fossil-free miles and had twitched 374 species. They’re in Florida now.
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 new administration will be sworn in on 20 January 2009.
Check 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!
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.