And probably never will:
- E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
- Forrest Gump (1994)
- Alien (1979)
- Titanic (1997)
- When Harry Met Sally… (1989)
Seneca Creek Greenway Trail, northern section
Today’s hike was a leisurely 8 miles (though we had expected 6) up the Seneca Creek Greenway Trail, organized by ANS and led by Bob Pickett. We began where Seneca Creek crosses Brink Road and worked our way upstream, then climbed out of that watershed to follow the Magruder Branch up to its crossing of Valley Park Drive, just south of Damascus in upper Montgomery County, Maryland.
The hiking is easy, with just a little elevation change. There is one slippery crossing of Magruder Branch which we all managed to varying degrees of dryness. The upper reaches of the trail we followed, above Log House Road, lie within Damascus Recreational Park, and consist of accessible asphalt and boardwalk.
Bob’s strength is the green stuff, so we botanized great and small, including this huge White Oak (Quercus alba). We found some individuals of another as-yet-unidentified oak species, something resembling Shingle Oak (Q. imbricaria); one of its saplings is visible in the image, between Bob and the big tree. Among the wildflowers blooming in late June, Bob pointed out a yarrow, Water Hemlock, Fringed Loosestrife, Deptford Pink (I gotta learn how to do macro with my point and shoot). The wet bottomlands yield half a dozen species of ferns. I learned that the green case of an immature Mockernut Hickory (Carya tomentosa), when scratched, smells wonderful.
Our destination species, if you will , was found in several patches north of Log House Road. Wavyleaf Basketgrass (Oplismenus hirtellus ssp. undulatifolius) is a new invasive of particular concern in Maryland. Perennial, shade indifferent, and propagated by seeds that can attach themselves to passing mammals, the plant has a lot of weapons at its disposal. The patch in this image was recently treated with a herbicide, but we found another untreated patch nearby.
A colloquy of nuthatches met to discuss our lunch break. Acadian Flycatchers and Wood Thrushes were numerous, if not easy to spot.
On the Green Line
Artomatic 2009 once again takes place in an unbuilt-out office building, this time a new structure atop the enlarged Navy Yard Metro station. There’s a certain regularity to the eight-floor exhibition space, and we miss the rough-and-tumble of some of the funkier spaces in years gone by.
But the art keeps getting better, year over year. Representation by artists outside the immediate metro area continues to grow, especially artists from Sunderland in the U.K. There are many good photographers working with D.C. as their subject, coming from just as many perspectives. A standout is Angela Kleis, who showed “…There’s been a terrible accident,” high-angle images of a dead body lying artfully posed in the setting of various local landmarks.
Yes, there are a number of immature pieces in the show, some of them rather naively priced. But then there is a set of three accomplished abstractions on canvas by Jacqui Crocetta; or consider the lightly textured sculptures of heads by Anthony J. Ouellette. I generally don’t pause for video work, but Tracey Salaway’s “Seed Heads” caught me up short. It’s a long tracking shot through a patch of weeds, a beetle’s-eye-view of a dandelion in which its globe of seeds fills the screen.
No mistake
Forty years after an attention-grabbing fire, Christopher Maag gives a progress report on the cleanup of the Cuyahoga River. We’re getting there, after $3.5 billion spent to reduce pollution, $5 billion on upgrades to the wastewater system, along with dam removals and other restoration projects.
“This didn’t happen because a bunch of wild-haired hippies protested down the street,” [John] Perrecone [manager for Great Lakes programs at the Environmental Protection Agency] said. “This happened because a lot of citizens up and down the watershed worked hard for 40 years to improve the river.”
The recorders
HAMLET. Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. ‘Sblood, do you think I am easier to be play’d on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you fret me, yet you cannot play upon me.
Act III, sc. ii
At the park: 31
Last weekend, I did a spot check of the last two nest boxes, and was gratified that both were successful. Box #2 (at left) hatched out eight Hooded Merganser eggs, and box #68 (at right) hatched eight Wood Duck eggs, with one unhatched. For the season, our totals are down a little bit from last year, which had seen a big spike in Wood Duck activity. In 2009, we had four Hooded Merganser nests, three of which hatched out: 39 eggs laid, 29 hatched. We had five Wood Duck nests, all of which hatched out: 61 eggs laid, 59 hatched. Park staffer Dave Lawlor reports one successful nest in the boxes he is monitoring, with nine baby mergs.
The park is a green blast of primary production. Bird activity is subsiding, with only one lazy egret to accent the landscape. I saw a family of Mallards; a Red-shouldered Hawk was screaming an important message to someone. Chris IDs the large-leaved plants in the right image as Spatterdock (Nuphar lutea).
Set off by the green is the bright orange of a drift of Dodder (Cuscuta spp.), a parasitic vine that I find absolutely fascinating.
Some links: 38
Siteworx is co-sponsoring one of the D.C. events in support of the U.N. children’s health initiative against malaria, Nothing But Nets.
All My Sons: a coda
From the TMN archives: Kevin Guilfoyle’s “Surrey with the Syringe on Top,” concerning the scandal in the swirl of disclosures that Great American playwrights had been doping:
[Arthur] Miller is quick to point out that it wasn’t always this way, and when the conversation turns to his early days, he becomes nostalgic. You should have seen me when I was writing Death of a Salesman. I had pecs the size of Iroquois saddlebags and my glutes were so rock-hard I could have sat on Joe McCarthy’s head and popped it like a rotten beet.’
All My Sons: a mystery
My third-act scene regularly generated chuckles, and I’m not sure why. I did take the scene rather briskly, and since it comes on the heels of the wrenching fight scene between Chris and Joe, perhaps some of the audience were looking for a release. Leta says that we’re willing to find humor in one’s admitted hypocrisy, but I’m not quite buying it. Here’s the passage (w/o stage directions) that almost always got a laugh:
JIM. What’d Joe do, tell him?
MOTHER. Tell him what?
JIM. Don’t be afraid, Kate, I know. I’ve always known.
MOTHER. How?
JIM. It occurred to me a long time ago.
MOTHER. I always had the feeling that in the back of his head, Chris… almost knew. I didn’t think it would be such a shock.
JIM. Chris would never know how to live with a thing like that. It takes a certain talent… for lying. You have it, and I do. But not him.
—Arthur Miller, All My Sons, Act III
Maybe it’s because I mislearned the penultimate sentence as “You have it, and I have it.”?
Fever/Dream
Fever/Dream is a manic comedy of ups and downs on the corporate ladder. In a way, the fortunes of its protagonist Segis (Daniel Eichner) reflect the wild swings of stock market prices and corporate health, as we say, In This Economy.
Segis, a customer service drudge literally chained to his desk (yes), one day is lifted by his hitherto unacknowledged father to a different desk, one in the executive suite. How he squanders that opportunity and falls back into his previous life (as if the changes were nothing but a dream), then finds a new way to the top is the engine of the play’s narrative. Playwright Sheila Callaghan has brought forward a four-century-old classic by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, La Vida es Sueño (Life is a Dream) and given it new life, while retaining most of its structure and themes—suppression of a child, succession to empire. The current play works as a corporate spoof, eager to let us see its own artifice, and as such brings to mind a meld of Urinetown, How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, and classical soliloquizing drama.
An ensemble of cubicle drones and bean counters, choreographed by Meisha Bosma, keep the scene transitions snappy. A massive set piece, running down right to up left, looking like a Madison Avenue skyscraper lying on its side, serves as projection screen for the vlogging chorus, and with its five doors, it provides the requisite insides and outsides. This high-rise screen also backdrops a juddering Bloomberg ticker and an early expository text message exchange between corporate plotters Stella Strong and Aston Marton (the always welcome Kate Eastwood Norris and KenYatta Rogers). Scenes set in Segis’s call center dungeon are less successful, as the lowering of the stage floor creates sightline problems for us in the orchestra.
In a parallel plot, Kimberly Gilbert’s Rose seeks the lover who has forsaken her, and she is accompanied in her quest by the dweeby figure of Claire, played by Jessica Francis Dukes. Known to us for her straight roles, Dukes’s superb turn as a comic dork is a revelation.
- Fever/Dream, by Sheila Callaghan, directed by Howard Shalwitz, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington
Treasure
Thomas Kinkade does a Tsukahara over the carcharhinid.
Rock ‘n’ Roll
Headbanging intellectuals! Joy Zinoman and her team bring to life Stoppard’s retrospective look at the last decades of Communism in Czechoslovakia, filtered through a haze of pot smoke and scored by the popular music of the time. Her coup is the casting of Stafford Clark-Price as the Czech dissident Jan, a stand-in for the playwright; Clark-Price’s uncanny resemblance to Sir Tom is matched by a nuanced performance, especially touching when emotions force a choked cry out of Jan. Also noteworthy is Lawrence Redmond’s scene as the flinty interior minister of this once-satellite of the Soviets.
Seeing the show late in the run, we noted an uncharacteristically squeaky floor on the set, as well as some perplexing costume and makeup choices. But the key challenges of this script rich in language (think of how many of Stoppard’s stories begin with a language lesson, often a translation) and steeped in Socialist history are met by this production, and the text’s burdens borne lightly.
- Rock ‘n’ Roll, by Tom Stoppard, directed by Joy Zinoman, The Studio Theatre, Washington
All My Sons: a gloss
MOTHER [KATE]. And now you’re going to listen to me, George. You had big principles, Eagle Scouts the three of you; so now I got a tree, and this one (Indicating CHRIS) when the weather gets bad he can’t stand on his feet; and that big dope, (Pointing to LYDIA’s [and FRANK’s] house) next door who never reads anything but Andy Gump has three children and his house paid off. Stop being a philosopher, and look after yourself.
—Arthur Miller, All My Sons, Act II
Pretty cool
Lawrence M. Hanks et al. have captured on video a Common Raven (Corvus corax) in Death Valley NP that has learned how to turn on a campground water spigot to get a drink.
On deck: 2
I rotated a couple of volumes to a backlog shelf to make room for some new fiction coming in. I’m reading my way through the Updike Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy about as fast as he published them. The Queneau is a re-read: someone pointed out that even though it’s published as a novel, it’s laid out like a play, or perhaps a screenplay, so I’m wondering whether it’s actually stageworthy.