theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
Melissa Block remembers the brilliant street photographer Helen Levitt, who left us this past weekend at the age of 95. Levitt proved to be a less than voluble interview subject.
I asked her why it was hard to talk about her photography.
“If it were easy to talk about, I’d be a writer,” she said.
So every evening I walk down New York Avenue to my subway station, and I see the queue of travelers with their rollage waiting for the BoltBus or the Megabus. These days the buses are using the parking lot that replaced the old convention center as a loading area. There is a cheap art space that the city set up on the site to try to relieve the double square block of pavement, with some inconsequential pavillions, and these provide a scrap of shelter for the waiting riders. And I thought, wouldn’t it be a great idea to provide a permanent structure, something like a bus depot, for these guys? And then I realized that the old Greyhound bus terminal is right across 11th Street N.W.
Amy Gardner gives a brief update on plans for the water control structure at Huntley Meadows Park, and visits with Harry Glasgow of the Friends group. She misrepresents a bit when she writes “King rail, hooded merganser and pied-billed grebes no longer breed…” The Hooded Mergansers are doing just fine.
When I was a kid, attending Saturday morning training to be confirmed in the faith as a Lutheran, we would take a break at mid-morning. The second year of this training was led by the pastor of this brassbound Missouri Synod congregation (someone else took the first year), and it was held on the site of the new church that was being built, farther out in the suburbs. (The new church building, which dwarfed the old building on Peach Orchard Avenue in Oakwood, was Orwellistically known as “the chapel.”) So pastor’s idea of taking a break was for us kids to scour the fields around the building site looking for small stones that would get in the way of groundskeeping. This was known, without euphemism, as “picking rock.”
I never finished confirmation, but how much this exercise had to do with my decision is hard to say.
Anyway, now I am an adult, and what do I do with my Sunday mornings, “for fun”? Pick trash out of the stream floodplain, and maybe look at some birds along the way.
We had a full team this morning, so I sent Myra and Jennifer on up to boxes #6 and #84 while I scrubbed the western bank of Barnyard Run as it opens up into the wetland. I pulled a small shopping bag of stuff out, mostly bottles and cans and broken bits of styrofoam, but also a very weary basketball. A lot of this is litter by thoughtless people, but much of it also is just escaped rubbish—an animal tears open a trash bag, for instance—from the housing subdivisions along South Kings Highway that finds its way downstream.
Not much new happening in the boxes yet: just #7, which is now incubating. Myra found a couple of Brown Thrashers and the first Tree Swallows of the season.
Our second and final field trip for class took us to southern Maryland to two wetlands, one salt and one fresh.
First stop was at a saltmarsh on St. George Island in St. Mary’s County. As Gary demonstrated by digging a sample, there’s no true mineral soil layer here, just an O horizon in two layers of decomposition, the upper oxygenated and the lower a bluish anoxic layer (up to 5 feet thick). As many of us found to our pain, one’s usual instincts for walking through a marsh don’t apply here. Lesson learned: if you see water, don’t step there, even if you’re wearing wellies.
The island is squeezed between the Potomac River to the southwest and the St. Mary’s River to the northeast. The view of this drainage inlet is from the St. Mary’s side of the island. The mats of vegetation are Saltmeadow Cordgrass (Spartina patens) and Smooth Cordgrass (S. alterniflora).
A few Osprey were in attendance. At our staging area at Piney Point, I picked up my lifer Long-tailed Duck (Clangula hyemalis) in a group of about four, in various stages of plumage transition.
We then crossed over the Maryland peninsula to Calvert County and the Battle Creek Cypress Swamp, site of the only stand of Bald Cypress (Taxodium distichum) in Maryland west of the Chesapeake Bay and the northernmost limit of this species’ natural range. This is a beautiful little preserve of only 100 acres.
Rob Kapilow deconstructs Stephen Sondheim’s war horse “Send in the Clowns.”
Sometimes the people we think we know best are the people we know least.
I really didn’t intend this to become the Facebook Sux Blog, but I have to spread the link karma to Matt Labash’s jeremiad (via Arts & Letters Daily) and Mike Booth’s video satire (via Gleeful Gecko).
I told him he was a very sad man, that collecting Facebook friends is the equivalent of being a catlady, collecting numerous Himalayans, which you have neither the time nor the inclination to feed. “You have obviously never been on Facebook,” he said. “It’s so much worse than collecting cats.”
So, David, enough already.
We took the first of two field trips that are part of Gary Evans’ Introduction to Ecology at the Graduate School, USDA. We visited two sites in Prince William Forest Park, the first a farmed-out agricultural area that is undergoing old field succession on its way to becoming deciduous forest, and the second an area that was apparently never farmed intensively.
The site of the old Taylor Farm homestead is mowed regularly, so the veg is largely panic grass and broom sedge, but nothing seems to be a match for this humungous eastern redcedar (Juniperus virginiana).
We spent a lot of time with the soil profiles of the two sites. This soil pit is from our second study site, in the drainage of the South Fork of Quantico Creek. Laid out in the spade, left to right, you can see the samples from the O horizon (organic material), the mineral-leached A horizon (cocoa brown), and the iron-enriched B horizon (ruddy orange). A Munsell color chart is visible in the right of the picture. The green sprigs of princess pine (Lycopodium clavatum) bespeak a sandier soil than at the farm site. Mountain laurel also appears here.
I also appreciate that Dr. Evans discusses some of the economic aspects of the study of nature, for instance, pointing out that the tighter growth rings for oaks and chestnuts are what make these hardwoods valuable to furniture makers and handcraftsmen. He also noted that much of the public lands acquired in the Roosevelt New Deal era were the result of forced relocation of starving farmers who had nothing left but their patches of knackered land.
Just in case anyone is listening, the marker post for the Fairfax Cross County Trail on the south side of Silverbook Road at White Spruce Way is down. It’s especially hard for someone coming from the north side of Silverbook to pick up the trail, which continues unpaved and otherwise unmarked along the south side of the road. This trouble spot is about 100 yards from the place where the trail is informally rerouted around a closure of the trail for about 10 yards, right at the corner of the old prison facility.
Immediately behind me, as I made this image, is a rather birdy spot, considering the time and season. It’s waste ground in a little hollow, filled with tangled veg (and at least some rubbish). Flycatchers like the vantage point of the top of the old fence, at least where there is a rail for perching.
Ulrich stubbornly expanded on this point: “What one needs in life is merely the conviction that one’s business is doing better than one’s neighbor’s. Your pictures, my mathematics, somebody else’s wife and children—everything that can assure a person that he is in no way unusual but that in this way of being in no way unusual he will not so easily find his equal!”
—Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, chap. 54
Only a light frosting of snow this morning on the still-sleeping woods (the bigger dump is expected this evening). We welcomed three new volunteers to the nest box program, and those of us working the main pond got instant satisfaction, as old reliable box #7 already showed a clutch of six Hooded Merganser eggs. Green-winged Teal and Northern Pintail are lingering in the wetland. Paul reported a big flock of White-throated Sparrows.
Dollar for dollar, schaden for freude, watching the missteps of Facebook management is more fun than tracking the misadventures of a certain jailbird hotel heiress. Marshall Kilpatrick’s most recent post is titled, “Facebook Management Has Lost Its Grip on Reality,” and I’m inclined to agree.
Multiple company officials on the call today said that the controversy showed how much of a sense of ownership users have over Facebook and that they wanted a sense of participation in its governing…. We’d argue that it is pretty clear people have a sense of ownership instead over their content and want Facebook to keep its hands off. Ownership of content, not the lack of input on policy, was what people were upset about.
Facebook appears to forget that it’s just one of many ways people use the internet. It’s wildly popular today, but just as people have used other social networks in the past – they have other options for social networks to use in the future.
Elisabeth Rosenthal reports on the controversial findings of Joe Wright, a senior scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, that the rate of secondary rain forest formation (through abandonment of farms via urbanization, and other causes) is outpacing the rate of primary rain forest destruction. The arguments critical of Wright and those in his support tend to tangle together the function of rain forests as a carbon sink with their role as a refuge for biodiversity.
Regenerated forests in the tropics appear to be especially good at absorbing emissions of carbon, but that ability is based on location and rate of growth. A field abandoned in New York in 1900 will have trees shorter than those growing on a field here [in Central America] that was abandoned just 20 years ago.
For many biologists, a far bigger concern is whether new forests can support the riot of plant and animal species associated with rain forests. Part of the problem is that abandoned farmland is often distant from native rain forest. How does it help Amazonian species threatened by rain-forest destruction in Brazil if secondary forests grow on the outskirts of Panama City?
Here in the East, you can observe the results of old field succession by taking a short drive to the Blue Ridge. Much of the now-protected parkland in the Appalachians was once in agricultural production, as the evidence of a family cemetery in the woods will attest.
The designers for Round House Theatre’s production of Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice have produced a masterful solution to the challenge presented by this, shall we say, post-modern Romantic play. It’s a modern retelling of the myth of Orpheus (Adriano Gatto)—the skilled musician who loses his wife to death, goes to the Underworld to retrieve her, escorts her back to to life on condition that he not look at her, and loses her again—told this time largely from her point of view. What should you do when you are lost to someone you loved? Is is less painful to remember and regret, or to drown in the waters of forgetfulness?
Rather than precisely specify a ground plan and a look for her plays (think of the precision of Williams or Beckett), and rather than leave everything up to imagination (Shakespeare), Ruhl demands that the director and designers fill in the gaps with their own creativity. Consider, for instance, these stage directions from movement 2, scene 3:
The father creates a room out of string for Eurydice.
He makes four walls and a door out of string.
Time passes.
It takes time to build a room out of string.
Set designer Clint Ramos, lighting designer Colin K. Bills, sound designer Matthew M. Nelson, costume designer Kathleen Geldard, and movement coach Karin Abromaitis have collaborated to create a techno Hell to hold Eurydice (wide-eyed Jenna Sokolowski) and her father (Harry A. Winter, a petit bourgeois with quiet dignity): multiple playing levels on a grid of industrial scaffolding, a series of water effects that start very small and end up harrowing, punked-out kandy-kolored costumes for the Greek chorus of stones, Big Stone (KenYatta Rogers), Little Stone (Linden Taylor), and Loud Stone (Susan Lynskey). (In an inspired last-minute response to recent laryngitis, Lynskey is currently signing her part in ASL, no easy trick when you’re hanging off the side of that scaffolding.) Presiding, as it were, as the Nasty Interesting Man/Lord of the Underworld, is the always-fun-to-watch Mitchell Hébert.