theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
Research by Marc Barthelemy, as reported by Sarah Fecht, reveals that large subway systems, no matter how they came to be, share a few common topological and geometrical properties.
…an average of 20 percent of the stations in the core link two or more subway lines, allowing people to make transfers.
Pretty much every show you attend on Broadway these days ends with people jumping to their feet and beating their flippers together like captive sea lions whose zookeeper has arrived with a bucket of fish.
Leta and I, between us, saw four fine shows on and off-Broadway last week. And we kept our seats for the applause for all of them. Messrs. Hoffman and Pryce could hear us just as well.
A new insurance product, one that I wish there was no need for: A grantor of a conservation easement sells his property. The new owner (usually one with deep pockets, because conservation land trusts don’t use easements to protect economically valueless land) decides to do what he likes with the property, contracts be damned. The volunteer-run, cash-strapped trust (if it weren’t poorly funded, it would have bought the land outright) has to take the new owner to court, and that gets expensive.
Now, as Felicity Barringer reports, a new non-profit insurance company, Terra Firma, is there to offer a policy to the trust to mitigate the legal fees needed to defend the easement.
Land trusts usually win in court — though many cases are settled, according to alliance records. One common denominator: the wealth of the property owners challenging restrictions.
Mike Nichols keeps the opening moments of Death of a Salesman quiet, soft, and slow, all the better to set off the fireworks to come. The performances here set a reference standard for Arthur Miller’s iconic work, though we do miss the scrim effects specified by the text. Andrew Garfield gives us a grittier, more street-wise Biff Loman; Molly Price does comic va-va-va-voom as The Woman. Philip Seymour Hoffman is grounded, stolid as Willy Loman as his American dream breaks apart under his feet. He is a bear at bay—until his closing beat, when he sprints to escape.
With one arguable exception, the underscoring by Alex North and Glen Kelly works very well here, giving the piece a bit of Tennessee Williams flavor. The compact set by Jo Mielziner keeps the playing spaces contained; for once, the Lomans’ kitchen is the size of a real kitchen for a house built in 1920.
What resonates with today’s audiences, evidenced by sympathetic chuckles, is the play’s critique of postwar consumption-driven economics; planned obsolescence is planned obsolescence, whether it’s a refrigerator that wears out just as the last installment payment is made, or today’s electronic gadgets with their forced upgrades. Willy Loman’s boss Howard (the wired-up gearhead Remy Auberjonois) would be less reprehensible were he pushing paperwork in his interview with Willy, rather than futzing with his new wire recorder.
I kid you not, this building is at the end of the block of Degraw Street where my no-frills European-style hotel was located.
As evidenced by the newly-established hotel, Park Slope and Boerum Hill are encroaching on this industrial neighborhood of Gowanus. We passed a shiny new condo block on the west side of 4th Avenue. Degraw and Sackett Streets are painted with bike lanes.
I took a vacation day Monday, before my training classes midweek, to explore some offbeat places in New York. I’d never been to Roosevelt Island before, so I got that tram ticket punched. The park at the southern tip of the island was closed, but the views across the East River from just outside are just as good.
At the northern point is a lovely, tiny lighthouse, dwarfing the Triborough Bridge in this perspective.
Back on the “mainland” of Manhattan, a painted advertising sign persists on 2nd Avenue. I look at the sloped lettering of PORTOVAULT and now I understand where Ben Katchor’s signs come from
Harold Pinter is perhaps at his most Beckettian in The Caretaker, particularly in the character of the shabby, smelly old man Davies (Jonathan Pryce, approaching statesman status). Director Christopher Morahan pushes the comedy as far as it will go, with a who’s-got-the-bag sequence that owes a little to Chuck Jones. Alex Hasselll as Mick delivers Pinter’s signature brooding menace, while Alan Cox gives us an understated gem of a monologue for damaged Aston, lit by an exquisitely gradually tightening pool of light designed by Colin Grenfell.
Extra-live acoustics in the work-in-progress BAM Harvey Theater at times rendered Pryce’s dialect too murky.
War Horse is a masterful piece of ensemble theatricality. This simple story of a boy and his horse Joey is told with live actors and bunraku-inspired puppets, augmented by a series of projections against a screen that resembles a torn scrap of paper.
The trials of Joey, acquired by the English army for service in the last major war in which cavalry was used (the so-called Great War), are our entry into an account of the inhumanity of that war — hence, as told here, this is not a piece that younger attendees will have the patience for.
This is the sort of puppetry that works because you’re always aware of the machinery, so a change to the fabric covering the horses’ bodies tells us all that we need to know about their condition.
If the acting and the musical underscoring are at times melodramatic, the work knows that its most touching effects are the simplest ones: a paddock established by four actors holding staffs; fallen bodies on a battleground transformed into a graveyard’s mounds by the arrival of the women they left behind, in chorus; the twitch of a horse’s ear or the heave of a foal’s chest; wagon ruts established by rumpled scraps of cloth laid on the deck. Perhaps most dramatic is the death of Joey’s rival-turned-compatriot, the horse Topthorn. When Topthorn goes down, the puppeteers detach themselves from his armature and back offstage quickly, his departing life force briefly become personified.
Shameful witness stacking continues in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, as Ben Pershing reports. Buttinsky Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) refused an opportunity for Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) to testify on legislation that directly affects her constituents in the District of Columbia, contrary to traditional House practice. Franks represents an extrusion-shaped district in the Phoenix suburbs.
D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) remarked sarcastically that if Franks feels strongly about how the city is run, “I would invite him to become a candidate for D.C. Council.”
Hugh Powell reminds us of the connection between wine bottle closures and the preservation of biodiversity. Cork prices are crashing, which threatens cork oak plantations on the Iberian peninsula.
Cork trees live for about 250 years, growing in open groves interspersed with meadows of tawny grasses and diverse wildflowers. Once a decade, skilled workers with hatchets carefully slice off an inch-thick jacket of bark, leaving the tree to grow it back. There are cork farmers right now slicing cork from the same trees that their great, great, great grandparents harvested. In all, some 13 billion corks are produced each year, slightly more than half of them in Portugal and the rest in Spain, France, Italy, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. It’s a $2 billion industry.
The skilled labor pays well, and the farmers can also keep livestock on the land. While they’re at it, the farmers keep a delicate balance in their forests, avoiding overgrazing but keeping shrubs from taking over, setting controlled fires and putting out fierce ones.
Among conservationists there’s a real fear that as cork prices fall, the cork oak forests will deteriorate or be converted into eucalyptus plantations or Mediterranean resorts.
Another generous review of August: Osage County, this time from Katie Elizabeth Quinn.
Teddy Wayne’s piece is long but worth checking out.
When I was a sprout, I was taught to supple up the bindings of my new hardback schoolbooks the way that Malorie Brooke reminds us. And I did it, when my teachers were watching. But I don’t think I’ve done it on my own since sixth grade.
Mind you, the practice or lack thereof doesn’t explain why all our scripts of August: Osage County from Dramatists have fallen apart.
The Bodleian Library has launched a pilot project to generate metadata for a collection of 64 boxes of sheet music from the mid-Victorian period. The project looks to crowdsource the extraction of key signature, tempo, genre, and other information about the scores, most of which are for piano.
Morgan and Rego challenge the claims by Reichheld and crew that Net Promoter Score is the single customer satisfaction metric necessary to explain business performance. While their peer-reviewed work does identify measures (e.g., Top 2 Box Satisfaction) that do correlate with short- and long-term success (Tobin’s Q, market share, etc.), their computation of “net promoters” is flawed: it is only a rough approximation of the ratio promulgated by Bain and Satmetrix, based on the “how likely to recommend” 0-10 scale. This shortcoming in the work is pointed out by Timothy L. Keiningham et al. Nevertheless, that follow-up note says
Despite the problems with the Net Promoter and Number of Recommendations metrics, Morgan and Rego (2006) have provided valuable insight regarding the relationship between business performance and other commonly used customer metrics…. We are unaware of another longitudinal study that examines the predictive value of satisfaction and loyalty metrics in such a comprehensive way.
And five years after the publication of The Ultimate Question, I’m waiting to see independent research that backs up its claims.