Author: David Gorsline

Shoot

Peter Schjeldahl recaps performance artist Chris Burden’s career for The New Yorker. I don’t know how long the link will stay alive, but check out this pithy definition:

In pragmatic terms, art is a privileged zone of gratuitous activity, with boundaries maintained by the agreement of the vested authorities. Artists of the Duchampian sort delighted in effacing the boundaries, which, with increasingly avid complicity on the authorities’ part, kept being redrawn to corral the effacements. It was a silly game, in the end. Ultimate limits were discovered, most pointedly by Burden, whose influence on conceptual and installational artists, to this day, is immeasurable.

Some numbers: 1

I hadn’t seen statistics from RFB&D on the number of borrowers for some time, so I was interested to see the breakdown in the 2006 annual report: the organization reckons the total number of student listeners in the past year to be 147,000, of which 118.6 thousand are served through institutions and 28.3 thousand as individuals. 76.5% of our students have learning disabilities (including dyslexia), while 19.2% are blind or otherwise visually impaired. The education level brackets are 40.0% elementary school; 34.3% high school; 19.4% undergraduate; 6.2% graduate school and other. The numbers for college and graduate school surprise me, because most of what we record in the D.C. unit is at the college level.

Volunteer hours for the period were 390,021, resulting in 140,300 hours of recorded material and 5,831 new books produced. This fits with my micro experience: in a two-hour session, I can produce about 60 minutes of recording, covering 10 to 30 book pages. The organization-wide ratio of 2.8 hours of volunteer time per hour of material is pulled up by sessions that use both a reader and a director, and by the overhead of checking and production. Another way to look at these numbers is to figure 66.9 hours of volunteer time to produce one book on CD. Plus paid staff time, of course.

Gluten’s 15 minutes

Avoiding gluten in the diet is becoming fashionable, reports Kate Murphy.

“A lot of alternative practitioners like chiropractors have picked up on it and are waving around magic silver balls, crystals and such, telling people they have gluten intolerance,” said Dr. Don W. Powell, a gastroenterologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.

Sloane Miller, a 35-year-old freelance editor in New York, went on a gluten-free diet six months ago on the advice of her acupuncturist, even though a blood test and a biopsy indicated that she did not have celiac disease. Long plagued with gastrointestinal distress and believing that she might have an undetectable sensitivity to gluten, Ms. Miller said giving it up was “worth a try.”

Unfortunately, the inevitable backlash against this fad is likely to make life more inconvenient for those who legitimately suffer from CD.

Lafayette trip report: 4

Some non-birding props to hand out:

I had a nice meal, and a very nice couple of glasses of cabernet, at the Blue Dog Café. I had chosen it based on recommendations and its proximity to the hotel, unaware of its connection with the iconic canine of George Rodrigue. Heck, I didn’t even realize that Blue Dog was a Louisiana thing.

Solas on stageI slipped away from a couple of convention dinners and presentations to the Festival International de Louisiane, which (coincidentally?) was happening the same week as our birding event. Music on multiple stages, vendor booths from around the world, local food for $6 a hit—fabulous! My music choices ranged from local zydeco legends to Celtic and French gypsy-klezmer bands from Europe.

Under the rubric of the festival, I saw a staging of a version of Cody Daigle’s Life/Play, an experimental autobiographical blog-driven piece inspired by Suzan-Lori Parks’ 365 Plays/365 Days. It’s a little raw, some of the playlets are not much more than shoe-gazing, but there are some genuine theatrical moments there. I especially liked the Compliment Fairy, the dance (28 January) that The Guy does the night that his play is presented, and the fact that some of the bits are so unstageable that they work better with The Director reading the stage directions.

Thanks to local chain CC’s Coffee House for providing free wi-fi access.

I saw no pelicans on this trip!? But I did spy two road-killed armadillos on I-12.

Found art

One of the things that annoys me about Tina Howe’s Museum is that it calls for any number of unrealistic behaviors on the part of the museum-goers and guards, specifically (at least in the production I saw recently) for a couple of the viewers to become entranced by the view out the museum’s window. And yet, and yet…

I took a visual break from this year’s Artomatic, held this year on two floors of a Crystal City office building, lately the precincts of the Patent and Trademark Office. (I was particularly taken by Jennifer Foley’s photographs of decaying New England mills.) I looked out the eighth-floor window to the east, onto a parking structure by the airport, bracketed by hardwoods lining the parkway in the foreground and the river and some of the grimier bits of the District in the background. There was something about the sweep of the scene and the flat light of this overcast Saturday. I looked out on the top level of the parking structure, nearly full of cars blue-white-black with a occassional dot of red, none of them moving, the scene a frozen bit of hustle-bustle. The scene had the timeless grandeur of an image by Jeff Wall.

At the park: 6

Well, I thought that the big splash of the morning would be the Wood Duck nest that has been started in the new box hard by the boardwalk, the one that is easy to see but hard to walk to through the cattails and brambles. But other events were brewing. The park staff had designated today Wetlands Awareness Day.

Myra and I worked the upper wetland and then came down to lower Banyard Run. I came up to box #62 and carefully opened the box from the side. I spied the white teardrop-eye of a female Wood Duck. Now when we unintentionally find a hen in a box, she is just as likely to flush through the side door as she is through the entrance hole at the front of the box. So I took a step backwards, in case she went for that route, with optional gut evacuation. I stepped back, and then my world turned into a slow-motion backfall into a foot of water and six inches of mud, as I uttered imprecations all the way down.

Paul (nursing a recently-sutured foot) and Myra were sympathetic, but there isn’t much you can do to help out a guy who’s just found his own awareness of the wetland in the seat of his jeans. I splodged back to the parking area. At least the water wasn’t early-March cold the way it was the last time that I fell in.

Most of my gear is air-drying or in the laundry. Too soon to tell whether my optics suffered any permanent damage.

Why is it that this sort of thing never happens to Annie Dillard?

Lafayette trip report: 3

I closed out my field trips at the convention with a bang on Sunday, riding a van driven by Donna Dittmann and Steve Cardiff into Jeff Davis, Calcasieu, and Cameron Parishes west of town. We hit the farmland (much of it in rice) and refuge impoundments and saw a surprising variety of birds from various families, some of them I expected and some that I didn’t—American Coot (Fulica americana) (known locally as the “Ivory-Billed Gallinule”), the spectacularly-plumed Scissor-tailed Flycatcher (Tyrannus forficatus), shorebirds, waders, Dickcissel (Spiza americana), grackles, larids, and the “wow” bird of the trip, Northern Caracara (Caracara cheriway). We saw phalaropes doing their signature spinning; stilts on the nest; a mixed flock of cormorants, ibis, spoonbills, and egrets scaring up food; a nighthawk hunkered down on a fencepost; Cattle Egrets (Bubulcus ibia) actually hanging out with cattle. Donna pointed out some remnants of damage from Hurricane Rita, but we remained 30 miles inland or so, so we didn’t see the evidence that Amy Hooper witnessed on her field trip to the coast. The casualty of the trip was the tripod mount from my scope, which shattered (probably as a result of my abuse), but it’s all good, ’cause the mount never worked that well for me. I exceeded my best expectations for lifers for the whole convention, crashing through the 350-species milestone to end at #357.

looking for warblersWe spent the day before east of Lafayette in the Atchafalaya Basin. We scraped up some warblers and my target bird for the trip, Painted Bunting (Passerina ciris), on a walk led in part by Jim Delahoussaye, who lives along the river. (I first saw this bunting in a movie (maybe it was one of the Batman flicks), and when I saw this impossible-looking bird, colored with blocks of green and cherry red and electric blue, I figured that I must be looking at CGI effects.)

fire antsJim helped illustrate why you don’t want to step on the fire ant mounds.

on the bayouThen it was on to the water in a flotilla of three gas-powered flatboats. I didn’t see anything new here, though someone eared a Blue-winged Warbler (Vermivora pinus). But, as my seatmate Dick put it, this part of the trip was “kinda touristy, but cool.” Our destination, such as it was, was a Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) nest. When boatman Jacques finally cut the engine, the stillness was so deep that we could hear the eagle vocalizing.

I got lucky and had great weather for the whole trip, in the sense that I wasn’t birding in the rain or in a 30-knot gale. The storms that blew through came on our off day. The hardcore among us took the frontal movement as a cue to hare off into Cameron Parish hoping for a fallout. And the mosquitoes behaved themselves!

On Friday, David Sibley presented on the confusions, delusions, and self-fulfilling expectations of field ID, and told some entertaining war stories, including one about the time that he identified a bit of red flagging tied to a barbed-wire fence as a Vermilion Flycatcher. My subtitle for the talk would be, “Why You May Not Want to Scramble Off to Delaware Every Time Someone Reports a Rarity on the Hotline.”

The highlight of Friday’s chalk talks was a short presentation by Keith Ouchley of the Nature Conservancy on the natural provinces of coastal Louisiana—the alluvial valley (a/k/a bottomland hardwood forest), the savannah-like longleaf pine forest, and the coastal prairies and marshes. Each has been transformed in its own way by agroforestry, as the tallgrass prairie has been converted to rice and sugar cane farming; the pine woods planted in faster-growing loblolly pine; and the alluvial region literally burned to make room for soybeans. We learned that Red-cockaded Woodpecker (Picoides borealis), a pine woods specialist, is responding to artificial nest cavities built into the trunks of trees.

No one is neutral

Andrew C. Revkin explains why I feel uneasy about the current carbon-offset market:

As long as the use of fossil fuels keeps climbing—which is happening relentlessly around the world—the emission of greenhouse gases will keep rising. The average American, by several estimates, generates more than 20 tons of carbon dioxide or related gases a year; the average resident of the planet about 4.5 tons.

At this rate, environmentalists say, buying someone else’s squelched emissions is all but insignificant.

The worst of the carbon-offset programs resemble the Catholic Church’s sale of indulgences back before the Reformation,” said Denis Hayes, the president of the Bullitt Foundation, an environmental grant-making group. “Instead of reducing their carbon footprints, people take private jets and stretch limos, and then think they can buy an indulgence to forgive their sins.”

“This whole game is badly in need of a modern Martin Luther,” Mr. Hayes added.

Knowing when to edit

Ruth La Ferla profiles designer Santo Loquasto:

To reinforce the emotional heat of 110 in the Shade, a Roundabout revival of the 1963 musical with songs by Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones (The Fantasticks), for which he also did both sets and costumes, he hung an enormous disc from the ceiling of Studio 54. Depending on how it is lighted and angled, it functions as a moon or, more often, as an implacably brilliant sun.

The knack for making less say more has established Mr. Loquasto as one of America’s foremost stage designers. “Santo has a great editorial sense, said Doug Hughes, the director of Inherit the Wind. “Among the battery of props that are all exquisitely chosen, he will recognize during rehearsal weeks that many are superfluous and will happily cut them away.”

Lafayette trip report: 2

lunch breakTuesday morning our bus departed at 6:00 for Iberia Parish and the coastal wetland habitat of Lake Fausse (pronounced like the choreographer) Pointe State Park, followed by a visit to Avery Island, the site of a managed heron rookery (lots of puffball Great Egret chicks) and the McIlhenny family’s Tabasco sauce plant. I picked up my first lifer for the trip, Swallow-tailed Kite (Elanoides forficatus) while most of the bus was checking out the gift shop. Also feeding young, on the water, were a pair of Common Moorhen (Gallinula chloropus). Prothonotary Warbler (Protonotaria citrea) is a regional specialty, and we got up close and personal looks both on Tuesday and Thursday.

One of the things a convention is meant to do is charge you up to continue doing what you’ve been doing, and the workshops on Wednesday by Andy Farnsworth and Brian Sullivan, both with the ornithology lab at Cornell, did just that. Brian’s presentation on technology and birding touched on some of the cool gadgets that we birders with too much disposable income can play with (the Zeiss integrated spotting scope and digital camera is so tempting), and then segued into sources of information on the web (more in a later post) and eBird, Cornell’s web-powered bird observation listing application. eBird’s not-so-hidden agenda is data collection for research purposes, and I left with a mild resolution to start using it to record my Huntley Meadows visits, in the same way that I report nest box activity with the allied app for cavity nesting. But the app is lacking the capacity to export trip reports as URLs (although Brian told me that there’s interest in adding this feature); once Cornell does this, they’ll join the ranks of other players in the social software arena.

Andy Farnsworth covered two areas of his research, monitoring bird migrations using WSR-88D weather radar and by recording flight calls. He talked about all the things that can show up on radars that are neither weather nor birds, like “aerial plankton” (dust, smoke, insects) and sunset, which at the right time of day looks like back-scattered radiation. I found his segment on flight calls particularly interesting, because it was the first time I’d taken the time to look at a sound spectrogram while I’m listening to a vocalization. And since flight calls are briefer (as short as 0.02 sec) and simpler in structure, it’s easier to match sight and sound. Andy indicated that you want to look at the strong central trace of a spectrogram and discount the fainter overtones above and below it (on the other hand, the Eastern Bluebird chip that he played seemed to get its melodic character from the fainter traces in the spectrogram). A buzzy call will show regular variation in the frequency domain, perhaps 1kHz up and down each 1-5 msec. These are the calls we like to call “zeeps”, while the “seeps” stay on one pitch.

Thursday’s field trip took us past the oil refineries, chemical plants, and paper mills of Baton Rouge, up Highway 61, into West Feliciana Parish and the Tunica Hills, glacier-formed uplands (we stopped before we got to Angola and the state pen). We alighted at Oakley Plantation, once a home of John J. Audubon, and Mary Ann Brown Preserve, a Nature Conservancy property. Oakley was particularly pleasant, still cool and dripping from the cold front that blew through Wednesday bringing thunderstorms. Off by myself while most of us scattered to take the house tour or check out the gardens, I got a good look at a Red-headed Woodpecker and all too quick a look at a gray-over-yellow warbler that I couldn’t ID. Similarly, at Brown Preserve, the group saw a waterthrush that our leader ID’d as Louisiana, but I didn’t feel like I’d seen enough of the field marks to tick it. The last planned stop of the trip at Sherburne WMA was nearly a complete washout, as poor scouting on someone’s part left our motor coach unable to get over a steep railroad grade crossing.

Lafayette trip report: 1

Greetings from Lafayette, Miss., in the heart of Cajun country, where I am attending the 2007 American Birding Association convention (while Leta house sits back home).

I made the drive down from Reston on Sunday and Monday, with little in the way of mishap. The only construction delays that I encountered came in the vicinity of Cleveland, Tenn., and I noticed something happening there that you never see back home. The merge down to one lane was out of sight, over a couple of hills and around a curve, but no sign was posted to let us know which lane was going to be dropped. Yet all of us politely started lining up in the left lane: some of us, the locals, must have known which lane was closed, while we long-distance travelers figured, “everyone else knows to get in the left lane, so I will, too.” There was no pushing ahead to the merge point, with a line forming for last-minute move-overs. (I say, “all of us,” but there were a few exceptions, including an impatient Greyhound bus.)

Two smells along the drive, both of them overpowering: first, in a couple of stretches in the Shenandoah Valley, the stench of dairy farms (I’ll remember this stink the next time I’m in the butter-and-egg aisle in the supermarket); second, from Laurel, Miss. southward, blasts of perfume from a white-flowering shrub that is in full bloom here already. (There seems to be some confusion about how to identify this plant, which smells like honeysuckle: one trip leader has named it Rough-leaf Dogwood, Cornus drummondii.) (Update: Privet (genus Ligustrum) is probably the correct ID, based on the fragrance match. Trip leader Virginia, who has lived down here, loathes the smell.)

The verges were carpeted with a number of unfamiliar wildflowers, purple, blue, golden, masses of something cloverish with a maroon flower.

Both Alabama and Louisiana’s respective transportation departments should be persuaded to pick a different shield design to designate their state highways. They currently use modifications of the state’s map outlines, with crummy-looking results. Louisiana simplifies the outline by cutting off all the wiggly bits along the Gulf Coast, so we’re left with what looks like a fabricator’s mistake. Alabama’s crime against design is to stretch the outline horizontally to accommodate 3-digit route numbers: Washington state with a burst appendix. And while we’re at it, both Alabama and Mississippi use the state outline for their buckle-up signs, and since the outlines are close to mirror images, it looks like one engineer copied off another’s exam bluebook.

If you would drive cross-country, you would do well to develop a taste for country music, classic rock, and contemporary Christian (which combines the worst features of both). But I did find a couple of fresh college stations around Charlottesville and Baton Rouge, and a great R&B station in Hattiesburg, in what they call the Pine Belt.

(Since I’m reading Agee and Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, I was expecting to see long and wide stretches of cotton farms as I rolled south. Instead, I found mile on mile of pine plantations. Generally, the forestry company is smart and leaves a buffer of uncut pine and hardwood understory between the road and the patch that has just been logged. Much better PR than rubbing our noses in the clearcut.)

Anyway, FM radio with Dead Kennedys, obscurer Janis Joplin, and Elvis Costello singing Little Feat with Alain Toussaint: it doesn’t get much better than that.

I’m not sure when I’m going to get to post this, because our hotel’s idea of “available Wi-Fi” means “available for $10 a day.” I may be stuck trying to look up local businesses the old school way, with The Phone Book.

The Pillowman

“Don’t believe everything you read in the papers,” is perhaps our take-away from Martin McDonagh’s bitter-bitter black comedy of a fairy tale. It concerns Katurian (the indomitable Tom Story), a writer of bleak children’s stories (nearly all of them for his trunk), who is taken into custody by a pair of brutal Kafkaesque detectives when incidents in his tales begin, lethally, to come true. Most, but not all, of the ensuing violence happens in the mind or offstage. In the end, to protect his addled brother Michal (the engaging Aaron Muñoz), Katurian makes sacrifices of several kinds.

The grim outcome of this play is never much in doubt, and the work’s themes— the writer’s responsibility to his audience (Katurian tries vainly to convince that his stories are just that, that they don’t say anything), the tension between autobiography and creative invention, the preservation of his words after his death—are laid on a bit heavily at times. But the performances of Hugh Nees and Denis Arndt as the two policemen, a Lum and Abner of the Stasi set, are delectable. Nees, as the torturer Ariel, exchanges his customary teddy bear persona for one of clean-shaven malevolence; Arndt, as the so-called “good cop” Tupolski, squeezes out a deadpan sarcasm over a grit sandwich. Tupolski says, “I don’t have a world view. I think the world’s a pile of shit.”

Two of Katurian’s stories are reenacted with Taymoreseque wit by an ensemble of four, while he narrates, and after the second, we begin to think, enough with the stories, back to the plot. But Arndt/Tupolski redeems the trope with his own story, a drowned shaggy dog of a fourth-grade math problem he calls, “The Story of the Little Deaf Boy on the Big Long Railroad Tracks. In China.”

And unlike the best dark tales of Grimm, Lang, or Goose, the play leaves several loose ends. What significance does Katurian’s double name have for us? And why does Michal give Katurian the information that he does?

  • The Pillowman, by Martin McDonagh, directed by Joy Zinoman, The Studio Theatre, Washington

Crime and Punishment

Campbell and Columbus strip Dostoyevsky’s novel to its bones, producing 90 minutes of strong theater that zeroes in on the question of human redemption. Using just three actors in a production that recalls RHT’s similarly minimal two-person The Turn of the Screw, it remixes the story of feckless student Raskolnikov—who kills the crabbed pawnbroker Alyona, buries his robber’s booty, and ultimately confesses his crime— into a fractured narrative, one fitted around the biblical story of resurrected Lazarus. Roskolnikov cannot explain the reason for this crime to his friend, the prostitute Sonya, not even to himself, and that is perhaps his defining tragedy. Whether he can step from the grave of his crime into salvation is a question left for us to answer in the lobby.

The production is well-served by Robin Stapley’s set, a tilted disc threatening to spill its one set piece (a perilously trapezoidal chair) forward into the house, like some bleak Cezanne tabletop; the disc is surrounded along its upstage half with irregular lucite panels, slightly reflecting: the whole effect suggests a Hadean hockey rink of the soul. Likewise the show’s music, provided by the Bergonzi String Quartet, establishes the right mood of tension and introspection.

Aubrey Deeker’s shabby übermensch Raskolnikov (he is a stripling Napoleon in a long dirty coat, a Russian Dylan Klebold) evokes the right mix of emotions: sufficient disgust that we might question whether he deserves rebirth, mixed with enough pity that his saving can feel appropriate. The deft mind games played by Mitchell Hébert’s detective Porfiry Petrovich suggest a 19th-century Frank Pembleton. And RHT newcomer Tonya Beckman Ross manages her transitions from confessor Sonya to rebarbative Alyona to slightly daft Lizaveta with grace.

  • Crime and Punishment, adapted by Marilyn Campbell and Curt Columbus from the novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, directed by Blake Robison, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Md.