theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
Last weekend was a time of watching things go very fast—the Baltimore Grand Prix, from our grandstand on Pratt Street. The people we saw on the office building roofs had the best vantage point. Leta was bemused by the sponsorship of Braille Battery.
And for watching things that go much slower, but not necessarily quieter. Pekoe’s purr has been known to approach the triple-digit decibel range.
Via DCist, images of jersey walls and other security barriers in the District of Columbia, signs of the pernicious growth of what Tom Sherwood called “securicrat” culture. But, writes Sherwood,
Look up beyond the barricaded doors and bomb-proof glass to see how many flagpoles sprout from private and government buildings. Take a moment to enjoy the sight of Old Glory waving in the wind. (We particularly like the big flag on Freedom Plaza, an aptly named space on Pennsylvania Avenue.)
Look at those flags that stand for freedom — and for a country that honors freedom and tries to export it to the world. That’s the America we want to see. And we want to see it with as few barriers as possible.
Pause on 9/11 to honor the victims of those horrible attacks, but don’t give in to fear. It would be downright un-American of you.
Metro map designers are floating the possibility that the line won’t be silver after all. The Post has the story and image of a draft transition map.
(Link via DCist.)
Two proper names in Babbitt, both of which the Library of America edition’s editors chose not to gloss (although the note on the Torrens system of registering land titles is quite helpful):
The customer joined him in the worship of machinery, and they came buoyantly up to the tenement and began that examination of plastic slate roof, kalamein doors, and seven-eighths-inch blind-nailed flooring, began those diplomacies of hurt surprise and readiness to be persuaded to do something they had already decided to do, which would some day result in a sale. (ch. VI)
Kalamein was used as a trade name for the sheet metal cladding on doors and windows, applied as a fireproofing measure in the absence of high-quality timber. As John M. Corbett writes,
A century ago, wood windows were first clad in zinc coated or zinc plated steel, with the object of making them fire resistant, and marketed under the trade name “Kalamein”. This name refers to calamine, the mineral which furnishes the ore from which zinc, the eighth metal known to man, is extracted…. While the trade name “Kalamein” seems no longer to be maintained, the terms “kalamein”, “kalamien” and “calamine” persist, referring to the general practice of cladding architectural elements in sheet metal of any composition.
The implication of the passage from the 1920s by Sinclair Lewis is that kalamein, like the plastic slate, offered an inexpensive, relatively safe dwelling. Somewhat paradoxically, Corbett, addressing architectural restoration, says that kalamein doors now are no longer cheap.
It turns out that I’ve already done the research for the second mystery name. Babbitt is stumping around the city’s ethnic neighborhoods for mayoral candidate Lucas Prout:
Crowded in his car, they came driving up to Turnverein Hall, South Zenith…
I found a Turnverein Hall in Sacramento last month.
A pleasant change, at least in this Helvetica skeptic’s eyes: the Central Park Conservancy is rolling out new signage parkwide, set in Titling Gothic. Very nice set of images by David W. Dunlap that capture the historical range of fonts and styles of signs in the park.
(Link via The Morning News.)
“Now you look here! The first thing you got to understand is that all this uplift and flipflop and settlement-work and recreation is nothing in God’s world but the entering wedge for socialism. The sooner a man learns that he isn’t going to be coddled, and he needn’t expect a lot of free grub and, uh, all these free classes and flipflop and doodads for his kids unless he earns ’em, why, the sooner he’ll get on the job and produce—produce—produce! That’s what the country needs, and not all this fancy stuff that just enfeebles the will-power of the working man and gives his kids a lot of notions above their class.”
—Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922), chap. II
At home, the quake left a little evidence of its passing. In the basement, some coffee cans of picture framing hardware spilled from the top of a high shelf, and a clock likewise fell.
Upstairs in the back bedroom a lamp tipped over and a lava lamp hit the deck. I am very grateful it fell on carpet and did not smash. Everything else looks just like I left it this morning. The various cracks in the walls, the result of the house’s settling ever since I started loading my belongings into it twenty years ago, are no worse than before.
Fulfilled my modest Chunkster Challenge for the year, so most of the pending titles are more slender. My to-read list includes a couple of borrows from Leta, new titles from my favorite A’s (Ali, Anne, Atkinson), some backlist items from Four Seasons Books in Shepherdstown. Towards the left end of the shelf, some art books to browse through during hockey intermissions.
So the last place you would probably expect a workshop on grasses identification to take place would be Great Falls Park. It turns out, however, that the park harbors some specialized habitat—globally rare, according to trip leader Cris Fleming—that is especially hospitable to Poaceae and the other graminoids.
The Potomac River’s periodic floods, every twenty or so years, is the key to the grasses’ success. Right along the edge of Mather Gorge, large trees don’t get a chance to establish a closed canopy which would shade the grasses out.
The result is tiny patches of specialized plant communities that otherwise you’d expect to see in the tallgrass prairie of the Great Plains. Tucked into the crags and clinging to the extremely thin soil are species like Big Bluestem (Andropogon gerardii), Little Bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium), and various Panicum species, like Switchgrass. Members of some other plant families like it here, too, like the flashy blue Dense Blazing Star (Liatris spicata), the diminutive Whorled Milkweed (Asclepias verticillata), and Wingstem (Verbesina alternifolia).
It should come as no surprise that grasses are a challenging photographic subject, especially when the photographer and gear are of the point-and-shoot variety. But I did manage to snap this image of Wild Oats (Chasmanthium latifolium) in a slightly shadier spot.
Of the fescue tribe of the grass family, we looked at Elymus virginicus, Virginia Wild Rye (not related to the domesticated rye), with its aggresively long awns; Bottle-brush Grass (E. hystrix), looking like a herringbone; Purple-top (Tridens flavum), also known as Greasegrass: it feels more tacky than greasy. North of the visitor center, in the bed of the Potowmack Canal, we saw two Leersia species, including Rice Cutgrass. My old posts suggest that this native plant is a problem at Huntley Meadows Park, but we saw just a small patch here. It does resemble the violently aggressive Stilt-grass (Microstegium vimineum), but its leaf lacks the silvery pale midrib.
We also found some nice examples of non-grasses, a nice sedge (Cyperus strigosus) and a rush all in fruit (Juncus tenuis) ekeing out life on the towpath. Elsewhere, the Black Gums (Nyssa sylvatica) are starting to go red in the leaves. Black Vultures (Coragyps atratus) were kettling and generally hanging out with the more numerous Turkey Vultures.
Bill Keller proposes that the current occupants of the Capitol would benefit from a little poetry:
Poetry is no substitute for courage or competence, but properly applied, it is a challenge to self-certainty, which we currently have in excess. Poetry serves as a spur to creative thinking, a rebuke to dogma and habit, an antidote to the current fashion for pledge signing.
He quotes from William Carlos Williams (somehow I had remembered these lines as coming from Whitman): “It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there.”
His colleague David Orr suggests some works that might serve as antidotes to the paralysis. I think Kay Ryan’s “All You Did” is especially pertinent.
Via DCist, The average color of the Washington D.C. sky, updated every 5 minutes.
Longacre Lea makes good on its promise of “physical productions of cerebral works” with this year’s Something Past in Front of the Light, an articulate, allusive, provoking examination of the nature of faith in the divine: whose promises can you trust?
Alexander Strain is stunning as a young man who presents himself to Christopher Henley’s documentary filmmaker with a once-in-a-lifetime proposition. Strain’s character, so he says, is The Devil—Beelzebub himself—and the wants Henley to tell the story of his life. He can provide some home movie clips to fill in the details.
Whoever he is, Satan, or “Stan” as he comes to be known, is not of this world. He inhabits Strain’s body like one of David Byrne’s big suits; the voice is overloud and the social niceties ignored, as if he were somewhere in the midband of the autism spectrum; a barefoot, awkward gait recalls Shaw’s hoofed demon in Man and Superman. When Stan chooses to participate in a conversation, he speaks in koans—or are they midrashim? The easy sentiments of a pop love song, as well as the rare display of integrity of character, are equally likely to spin him into a collapse to the floor.
Kathleen Akerley’s script places this personification of negativity in a pop/classical culture context. Stan imagines the Crucifixion as a stage-managed cinematic event; a catfight on a strangely reflexive television reality program echoes the postures of Laocoön and his sons. A second-act encounter with Stan’s nemesis, his Other, is somewhat unsatisfying, suggesting as it does an audience with Bokonon over closed-circuit TV. But then, it was Satan who arranged this meeting. Double bluff?
Missy Frederick welcomes a half dozen new theater company startups in the area.
Via Greater Greater Washington, John Hendel links to videos produced by Metro’s Brian Anderson demonstrating the gear and techniques used for track maintenance.
The first thing to know about visiting Bodie State Historic Park is to plan extra time, both because this busted gold mining town is much bigger than you would expect and because the drive in will take more time than you’ve planned for. At first, I planned on driving in on Cottonwood Canyon Road from CA 167, but a sign promised “very rough road” and the prospect of covering 10 miles in 30 minutes. I had abused my rental enough already, so I backtracked to U.S. 395 and CA 270.
The good news about CA 270 is that the Caltrans has an active repaving project for the state highway-numbered section of the road. This is also the bad news, because you will sit for a good period of time waiting for a pilot car to escort you through the one-lane work zone. The bad news is that, once you get out of the work zone, the pavement is very rough in multiple patches. The bad bad news is that CA 270 only designates the first ten miles of the road into Bodie: the last three miles lose the highway number and the pavement.
What strikes me about Bodie is that it comes from an era where land was cheap and sanitation was not. There is a lot of empty space between buildings (although the interpretive brochure, $2 at the entrance station and a bargain, says that only a small fraction of the town’s original buildings are standing). Nevertheless, I noticed that only the hydro plant and the firehouse are located close to Bodie Creek—good idea to give the freshwater supply plenty of room. Very few buildings are two stories, not even all of the hotels. However, the schoolhouse has two floors. And the buildings are not crowded together, beetling over one main street, like they would be in a Hollywood movie set.
There is a museum to tour, and when we look in the windows of some of the structures, we see some artifacts have been positioned to give us the sense that someone might still be living here. But the dusty roads and the whine of the high mountain (elevation 8,379 feet) wind in the wires are authentic. Since most of the structures are wood, and built all at about the same time (the town housed about 10,000 people in 1879), most of the structures are at the same state of crumble. There are some brick structures (like the post office in the left image, and the remains of the vault for the first bank). The sawmill (right image) is one of the more decrepit buildings.
The mill area (the gray-blue structures at the left of the image) is off-limits to casual touring, but I did see a guide leading small groups through it.
The interpretive brochure simply describes this as Dog-face George’s house. It’s on Green Street, on the way out of town up the ridge heading southeast. Too bad we don’t know more of George’s story, but at least his nickname and his house are remembered.
Bonus birding: a couple of looks at Sage Thrasher (Oreoscoptes montanus) on the drive out of town back to U.S. 395.
