Strange bedfellows

Kenneth T. Cuccinelli, II has pulled some bonehead plays in his short tenure as Attorney General of my Commonwealth, generally managing to push himself onto the national stage. It’s not for nothing that he has earned the nickname “The Cooch” from DCist. But when he’s right, I have to acknowledge it: citing First Amendment concerns, Cuccinelli has chosen not to climb on the bandwagon with other states in filing an amicus brief on behalf of the family of Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder. Effectively, this puts the AG on the side of the reprehensible Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church organization. But, as foul as Phelps and his family may be in their invective, their right to say it is protected, within reason, and must continue to be protected. From the press release:

…Snyder v. Phelps… could set a precedent that could severely curtail certain valid exercises of free speech. If protestors—whether political, civil rights, pro-life, or environmental—said something that offended the object of the protest to the point where that person felt damaged, the protestors could be sued…. We do not think that regulation of speech through vague common law torts like intentional infliction of emotional distress strikes the proper balance between free speech and avoiding the unconscionable disruption of funerals.

To the extent that Cuccinelli is sincere in his reasoning, I agree with him. There is, perhaps, more to this story…

Gruesome Playground Injuries

We might be forgiven for wondering why Woolly Mammoth, having built its fabulous proscenium-styled performance space, enables its directors and designers to reconfigure it variously, as in the recent Full Circle and Clybourne Park. Nonetheless, the seating shifts are worth it. For the current production, the interesting two-hander Gruesome Playground Injuries, the audience is arranged arena style around the remains of a hockey rink. Scenes skip forward and backward at five-year intervals in the lives of Doug and Kayleen, as they age from 8 to 38; a relationship evolves between them that perhaps is never sexual (a particular scene ends ambiguously) but is often more intimate. The exchange of (other) body fluids, as well as scars (visible and otherwise), become their emotional currency. The excellent Tim Getman plays accident-prone Doug as one long goofy lope through life, while Gabriela Fernandez-Coffey’s Kayleen always holds something mysteriously in reserve.

  • Gruesome Playground Injuries, by Rajiv Joseph, directed by John Vreeke, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Drop by drop

Good special report from The Economist on the state of the world’s fresh water demand and supply. Not surprisingly, the report stresses the point that water is woefully underpriced:

[Chris] Perry, the irrigation economist, says water is typically priced at 10-50% of the costs of operating and maintaining the system, and that in turn is only 10-50% of what water is worth in terms of agricultural productivity. So to bring supply and demand into equilibrium the price would have to rise by 4-100 times.

Unfortunately, water access and pricing is a hot, hot political issue; the report concludes that a mixture of regulation, property rights, pricing, and small-community management (a farmers’ co-op in India’s Andhra Pradesh state is visited) may be the only way to go. One thinks of the acequias of the American Southwest as described by Stanley Crawford in The River in Winter and Mayordomo.

Ready for Maker Faire

Antique Trades Dept.: As A.G. Sulzberger reports, blacksmiths for New York’s parks department still hand-build hoops for the city’s basketball courts. The dare-we-say artisan rims are sturdy, and hence cost-effective.

They have survived endless rounds of slam dunks, and occasionally served as chin-up bars and, for the especially nimble, even as spectator seating. Once, the blacksmiths strung a cable around a rim inside the workshop, which they used to tow a van halfway off the ground.

Aperçu

When he thought of his youth he could scarcely believe that his memories had anything at all to do with the absurd life he was now living, an observation, he knew, that was far from original. Somehow, he had thought that his old age would miraculously produce finer, subtler notions of—what?—life? But he was no better, no cleverer, no more insightful than any shuffling old bastard in the street, absurdly bundled against the slightest breeze.

—Gilbert Sorrentino, The Abyss of Human Illusion, VI (p. 7)

Ellroy decoded

James Ellroy’s editors let him down a few times in the early chapters of American Tabloid. HUAC refers to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, not the “House Committee on Un-American Activists” (ch. 4, p. 42). Chapter 8 is set on 11 December 1958, a couple years before Interstate 95 saw any traffic in Florida, and yet Kemper Boyd drives I-95 out of Miami. And Lenny Sands drives north out of Chicago in chapter 12 (on Sheridan Road? on a yet-to-be-built freeway?) “past Glencoe, Evanston, and Wilmette” (p. 100) on the way to Winnetka. The correct south-to-north ordering of these north shore suburbs (with a few others in between) is Evanston, Wilmette, Winnetka, Glencoe.

Ellroy does use an interesting slang term (twice) whose meaning is not immediately obvious from context.

Pete saw the Chevy’s taillights. Fulo floored the gas and rammed them. The car swerved off the road, clipped some trees and stalled dead.

Fulo brodied in close. His headlights strafed Kirpaski—stumbling through a clearing thick with marsh grass. (ch. 7, p. 64)

Brody (n.) is glossed as “intentionally spinning in circles and sliding in an automobile” with related words doughnut and 360. Unfortunately, it’s a common surname so an online search for other appearances is difficult.

Deanwood

I joined a 90-minute walk along portions of the Greater Deanwood Heritage Trail, led by Kia Chatmon and organized by Cultural Tourism DC. The Deanwood neighborhood lies in that part of Northeast east of the Anacostia River (and now the expressway and railway lines); purists will insist on the tighter boundaries of Sheriff Road and Nannie Helen Burroughs and Division Avenues. Whatever your limits, the close-knit African-American community carries a strong history of self-reliance. Up through mid-century, residents of this suburb-in-the-city had enough land to grow their own vegetables and keep small livestock.

big chessIrving Parker, second-generation businessman and proprietor of Suburban Market, told our tour group some salty stories of clandestine horse races along Eastern Avenue that he participated in—the streets were not all paved yet, and people still kept horses even though Benning Racetrack had closed in the 1930s. Eugene Brown of the Big Chair Chess Club also spoke to the group about his organization’s emphasis on self-discipline and upholding tradition.

planetreeThe heritage trail crosses the troubled waters of Watts Branch, culvertized and subject to dumping, but at least it runs clear under Minnesota Avenue. Indeed, once you step away from Minnesota Avenue and its light-industrial flavor, Deanwood still shows its leafy, suburban soul. Robins and a mockingbird made their presence known during the walk. Planetrees planted along Sheriff Road rise to impressive heights.

Decimate clutter

Steve Offutt dares to challenge the security bollards that have popped up in the last decade all over the city like so many fruiting bodies of concrete fungus. They won’t work, and they’re anti-people.

By now, the totality of those barriers must cover scores of acres of valuable sidewalk real estate. They create an unwelcome atmosphere to pedestrians, forcing them to weave and sometimes wait for others to make room just to walk to and from their destinations. Most of them are unsightly at best and downright ugly at worst. They have degraded the open space and welcoming feel of virtually every outdoor space in the core of DC.

Complexity

Francis Lam takes on the canard of household spice rack turnover:

“Six months?” [Jane Daniels] Lear said, with a genteel indignation. “Some food Nazi probably made that rule up. Or someone from a spice company who just wants you to throw out all your spices twice a year.”

A comeback

Stephen Syphax gave an interesting presentation to the Friends of Dyke Marsh on the wetlands restoration work at Anacostia Park, the first and perhaps most successful being 1993’s 32-acre (13 ha) Kenilworth Marsh project. Syphax is Chief of the Resource Management Division for NPS’s National Capital Parks-East.

Early in the previous century, the tidal lagoons along the slow-moving Anacostia River were viewed as a problem to be rectified: the McMillan Plan captioned an image of the area as “malarial flats to be excavated.” So, wetlands that were home to abundant stands of wild rice (Zizania palustris) were displaced and the river straightened by the Army Corps of Engineers to make way for a golf course, landfill, power plant, and parking lots for RFK Stadium.

Restoration work began in 1991 with pilot-project containments, with the objective of identifying the optimal ground elevation (about 2 meters) for encouraging emergent vegetation. Syphax suggests that too much height promotes the growth of Phragmites australis. Hydraulic dredging (to minimize the suspension of potentially toxic sediments) began shortly thereafter—what Syphax called the arrival of “the big yellow machines.” Novel “water tubes” (think of Godzilla’s garden hose stretched across the marsh) were used as a temporary, low-impact means of containment of dredged-up material as it settled and consolidated. Then came planting of about fifteen species of native plants, 350,000 individuals in all, along with the arrival of another dozen volunteer species—including the invasive Purple Loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria). In retrospect, Syphax says it wasn’t necessary to plant as many different species as they did. Once the plants were established, another machine cut tidal guts into the reclaimed wetland.

A happy result of the restoration work was the sighting of Marsh Wren (Cistothorus palustris) in 1996. And the jewel of the rehab is the reappearance of American Lotus (Nelumbo lutea), which opens its pale yellow blooms over the water each July.

While this phase of the restoration work was quite successful, more recent work in the Kingman Lake area has been hampered by resident populations of Canada Goose (Branta canadensis). The geese saunter over from Langston Golf Course and treat the newly-planted veg as a “salad bar,” in Syphax’s apt phrasing.