theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
Chuck Almdale assembles a mini-handbook for field trip leaders on how to help others find the bird you’re looking at.
In an open area, twelve o’clock is always straight ahead, six is directly behind, three and nine are 90 degrees right and left, respectively. Other hours fall in between. For a vertical object such as a tree, twelve is the top, three is ½ way down on the right side, and so on. …12 o’clock is not simply the direction in which you happen to be looking at that moment.
A very late start, but good weather conditions, for my stroll along the (recently restored) Glade for the Great Backyard Bird Count. Fifteen species, including a briefly-heard Red-shouldered Hawk. The only slight surprise was a Common Grackle (Quiscalus quiscula). Bonus mammal for the walk (seen and smelled) was a very well-fed-looking fox.
The use of a prison setting for the recital of familiar material is well-known for its effect in theater, from Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good, set in colonial Australia, to the legendary production of Waiting for Godot by the San Francisco Actors Workshop at San Quentin. And here it works again, in the powerful Oedipus El Rey by Luis Alfaro, an ensemble retelling of the myth from Sophocles and the Greeks by tattooed inmates of a correctional facility in southern California.
In Alfaro’s version, Oedipus (the flexible Andres Munar) is born to a Latino drug kingpin in Los Angeles and spends his exile in North Kern State Prison; on his release, he follows the fated steps of killing his father Laius (David Anzuelo, an onstage character added from the Sophocles version) in a road-rage incident, taking over the family narcotics business from Creon (the intense Jose Joaquin Perez), and marrying his mother Jocasta (the fearless Romi Diaz).
Classical and contemporary elements blend well in this piece. A runway thrust stage (designed by Misha Kachman) ends upstage with a pair of industrial doors that evoke the devices in Greek theater, traditionally sliding away to reveal the results of bloodshed offstage—but here the sex and violence is front and center. The blinding of Oedipus is especially well-done: terrifying without making us fear for the safety of the actor. Choral work by Mando Alvarado and Jaime Robert Carillo is short, sharp, and sometimes funny, rather than rhapsodic; we liked the Coro’s remarks that explain the cruelty of Laius’s abandonment of Oedipus as “fathers sometimes do that.” Yoga, doo-wop, tai chi—all the pieces come together. While there are few passages of monologue, there is at times in the writing a gritty lyricism, as when Jocasta likens her tears to the Los Angeles River, usually dry and channeled, but gushing when in flood.
Robert Coover oversteps a bit when he writes in The Public Burning of Time magazine, personified in his novel as the national poet laureate,
Time in any case has kept his father’s counsel, pursuing those stylistic infatuations that bedizened his earliest work and have been ever since the only passion he’s ever known: the puns and quips, inverted sentences, occupational titles, Homeric epithets and rhythms, … and Time‘s own personal idioglossary of word-coinages, inventions like “kudos” and “pundits” and “tycoons” and hundreds more which have passed into the national lexicon. (ch. 18, p. 326)
Not quite on the coinages. The magazine may have popularized their use, but Oxford gives several 19th-century cites for kudos, pundit, and tycoon; in the case of the first two, definitely the modern senses. The 1987 supplement does give Time a cite (from 1959) for pundit as a verb. Stronger is the case for Henry Luce (in Coover, the mother of Time) and Briton Hadden’s (the father) introduction of the current sense of tycoon as “business magnate,” adapting a 19th century word used by Westerners for a Japanese official. The sense evolved from a nickname for Abraham Lincoln:
1861 J. Hay Diary 25 Apr. in Lincoln & Civil War (1939) 12 Gen. Butler has sent an imploring request to the President to be allowed to bag the whole nest of traitorous Maryland Legislators. This the Tycoon… forbade. 1886 Outing (U.S.) IX. 164/1 The tycoon of the baggage car objected to handling the boat. 1926 Time 14 June 32/3 Married. Fred W. Fitch, 56, rich hair-tonic tycoon.
I knocked off my first book in the year-long Chunkster Challenge, Robert Coover’s The Public Burning. I picked up my copy from Encore Books in Philadelphia. (Encore was a chain somewhat like our failed Crown Books here, trafficking in new releases, overstocks and remainders, and other castoffs. My copy, originally retailing new at $13, sold as a recycled library book for $1.98.) The last time I started the book, I bailed out at page 44, and marked my place with a phone directory listing notice from Bell of Pennsylvania.
Some time later in the next eleven months, after I finish class reading and everything else on my shelf, I am slated for Apollo’s Angels, Watership Down, and The Annotated Origin, Charles Darwin annotated by James T. Costa.
Stuff that’s just fun to say:
How do we define where an urban space is, what its edges are, without making those edges into barriers? That is one of city planners’ problems that we explored in our first field trip for my land use principles class, led by our instructor Katherine Nelson through the Central Business District of Silver Spring, We were joined by Reemberto Rodríguez, Director of the Silver Spring Regional Center, who proved to be a government executive blessed with equal parts of pragmatism, sardonic wit, and visionary enthusiasm. For Rodríguez, Silver Spring in all its diversity “is America”—nay, it is “the center of the universe.”
Silver Spring’s CBD, designated by the state as an arts and entertainment district, has seen a massive amount of redevelopment in the past decade, and for the most part that redevelopment has been successful. But there are many projects in the planners’ books that are still empty lots, like this block scheduled for high-density housing just north of the new civic building at Veterans Plaza. The gradual relocation of light industrial businesses and low-density in the Fenton Village and Ripley districts, to be replaced with intensive development with FARs around 4, is also yet to come.
Preservation of Silver Spring’s historic heritage, in whole or metonymically, was another theme of our walk. While the entire Silver Spring post office and a (currently rundown) tile-roofed building that was the birthplace of dry cleaning are protected complete, it is only the facades of the Silver Spring Shopping Center and Canada Dry bottling plant that have been retained.
Pathways (narrow and broad) and open space are always fruitful topics of analysis when it comes to a place like downtown Silver Spring, situated as it is at the conjunction of three major arterials (Maryland 410, East-West Highway; U.S. 29, Colesville Road; and Maryland 97, Georgia Avenue), a passenger and freight rail line, Metro’s Red Line, and the future light-rail Purple Line. We looked at mandated public use spaces that worked, like a sliver of land attached to a condo block on Fenton Street (occupied by two residents even on this blustery cold February day), and a gateway space for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; and those that were less successful, like the fenced and gated garden at Discovery Communications. I’ve walked that block of Wayne Avenue many times and I wasn’t aware that the space in front of the building was open to the public.
Honest-to-Fox green space, at present, is mostly pushed to the margins of the CBD, like Jesup Blair Park and this forlorn bit of space along Fenton Street. Jesup Blair was deserted on this unfriendly Saturday, but the soccer fields showed evidence of heavy use.
Katherine led us down down several alleys along the walk, cutting across the twisted grain of the street grid, where the strong diagonals of the District line and railroad contend with the natural inclination of north-to-south. Numerous signs directed us to nearby bike paths that didn’t quite penetrate the CBD’s core. We looked at the edge-and-barrier problem along Cedar Street, where single-family homes are converted by special exception to light office uses like lawyers and clinics, and cut-through vehicle traffic is inhibited by turn restrictions.
Both Katherine and Reemberto pointed out the strength of small design details and amenities: a newly-built sidewalk bulb-out at Georgia and Bonifant, the banners (for money reasons, no longer maintained) that once identified the district, some distinctive brick and metalwork along Fenton Street. I noticed the mosaic and mural Silver Pass, a valiant effort to dress up the pedestrian underpass (all right, tunnel) that carries walkers along Georgia Avenue under the rail tracks.
And along East-West Highway, we even found, in a somewhat shabby state, the original Silver Spring. Not to mention the cryptically named Roger Miller Restaurant.
I came away from the field trip, a visit to an area that I thought I knew well, with a generous handful of places to come back and explore fully: the scrappy new Bonifant Theatre Space, the historical society in the original train depot, jazz at Vicino, the shiny performing arts venue at Montgomery College, Silver Spring Books (also on Bonifant).
Via DCist, Ann Scott Tyson (for Dr. Gridlock) explains those shiny clear plastic domes that have been appearing over the smart card targets on Metro fare gates. According to spokesperson Angela Gates,
The domes are intended to allow the antenna of the SmarTrip card reader to be better positioned to communicate with the card…
Sometimes, in radio communications, 1 centimeter makes all the difference.
Oh, my: a retrospective of Alfred Hitchcock’s pre-Hollywood work at AFI Silver Theatre. (Link via DCist, again.)
Aaron Morrissey visits WMATA HQ and finds an omnibus sign with all of the known and planned Metro stations. I have an old D.C. map from about 1980 that shows the planned station at Chillum (which decamped to West Hyattsville) and maybe I’ve seen a reference to Federal City College (which became UDC). The unpaired Franconia station name tells me that the sign was made before the split tail of the Blue/Yellow lines was conjoined into the single terminus of Franconia-Springfield. But the planned then deleted Oklahoma Avenue station does not appear.
Passive clauses are explained, defended by Geoffrey K. Pullum.
Composer of the avant garde Milton Babbitt has died at the age of 94. I dabbled in Babbitt in my salad days but I never quite became a fan. Audio clips of many of his pieces and a video interview from 2001 (in which he favorably compares art music composition to microbrewing) are at NewMusicBox.
13 June 2002
This evening on the subway I saw a man reading a comb-bound book with a green cover. From the side I could see diagrams, small circles arranged in orderly polygons. I reasoned that I was seeing diagrams of aromatic molecules. Perhaps this man was a medical student on his way to a class at GWU.
The I read the phrases “four couples…,” “partner…,” “in a circle or a square…” The book was a manual of square dance patterns, hundreds of them.
In the man’s hand I could see a walkman and a bandanna, folded, printed with stars and stripes.
RE: Your Cosmic Assistance Most Urgently Needed, by Zachary Martin.
I want you and I to make a fortune out of a situation that I am obviously left with no better option. The issue I am presenting is that my sun was recently destroyed in a supernova that obliterated most life on my planet…
Via wood s lot comes news of the passing last week of Milton Rogovin, social documentary photographer based in Buffalo, N.Y. Claire O’Neill has assembled a slideshow of some of Rogovin’s images of “the forgotten ones,” and links to a 2003 interview with Scott Simon. Once blacklisted as the “top Communist in Buffalo,” Rogovin’s archives are now with the Library of Congress.