First past the post

So the reblogging game is to name your favorite films by these indie auteurs of the 30 years or so: the Coen Brothers, Wes Anderson, Hal Ashby, Kevin Smith, and Quentin Tarantino. kottke.org adds Stanley Kubrick, P.T. Anderson, and Errol Morris to the list. All well and good, but a few of of these guys worked only one seam, and if this is to be a revealing personality test we need some directors with a wider range of material. Offhand, I can think of Woody Allen, Robert Altman, and Steven Soderbergh. So here’s my list:

  • Coens: Blood Simple
  • W. Anderson: Bottle Rocket
  • Ashby: none (Harold and Maude is for adolescents)
  • Smith: Dogma edges out Clerks
  • Tarantino: Reservoir Dogs, also by a slight margin
  • Kubrick: 2001: A Space Odyssey
  • P.T. Anderson: Magnolia
  • Morris: Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control
  • Allen: Hannah and Her Sisters
  • Altman: Nashville
  • Soderbergh: sex, lies, and videotape

Some links: 31

Christopher Dykton is directing and choreographing Follies for The Arlington Players. In anticipation of auditions later this month, he is blogging his preparation and the backstory of the characters of the play—in formidably articulate detail.

Because music and dance are basically mathematical, the first step in choreographing is a rather dry one. You count. The song begins with counts and ends with counts. There are a limited number of counts to a song, and movement needs to fit to these counts. How much time a movement takes needs to be calibrated and it must fit the counts. Choreographers count and demand that their dancers count, and if you do not count it like the choreographer, you will be corrected. As a choreographer teaching a dance, you count my counts. It’s my way or the highway. I have the counts—you have to learn them. I don’t need interpretation—I need you to dance my counts. But if you do count it right and practice it over and over and over again, it may perhaps transcend to something that’s art and dance.

But first you count.

Two into one

Via The Economist, recent research published by Evan Preisser and Joseph Elkinton yields an interesting result to those concerned with the conservation of Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) trees. From Virginia to Connecticut, the species has been getting clobbered by an invasive hemipteran, Hemlock Woolly Adelgid (Adelges tsugae), native to Asia. However, comes another sap-sucker, Elongate Hemlock Scale (Fiorinia externa), also invasive, to feed on the hemlock. According to the paper, in experimental infestations, trees inoculated with both bug species fare better than those inoculated with just the adelgid.

A solar-powered bicycle tour?

Via ArtsJournal, Steven McElroy reports from the launch of Broadway Goes Green, an effort sponsored by the New York mayor’s office and the Natural Resources Defense Council to reduce waste (paper, electricity, etc.) in the professional theater and promote a sustainable stage. Turns out that the effort is already underway.

The mayor’s office approached the Broadway League in March about working with theater owners to study the efficiency of their buildings and to find ways to decrease the load on the overburdened electrical grid of Midtown. “They were very surprised to learn that all of our theater owners were already in the middle of doing things on their own,” Charlotte St. Martin, executive director of the Broadway League, said of the city representatives.

Appalachian whiskey

The Scots-Irish seemed little moved by the magnificence of the Great Forest. The Germans were just as brutal to the land, only neater and more law-abiding about it. The English had already swept away coastal pineries to build tobacco plantations run by slaves. They all took from the forest without thinking of anything but their own desires, certainly not thinking that there might be anything sacred there. In this the new Americans were solidly in the mainstream of Western thought. What is distinctive about Appalachia is not how it differed from the rest of the country, but how it distilled the American experience to moonshine clarity. And how long the hangover is lasting.

—Chris Bolgiano, The Appalachian Forest: A Search for Roots and Renewal

Changes, again

Well, I can’t say that I’m overwhelmed by the changes to the profile system provided by Six Apart. What was a TypeKey Profile is now a TypePad Profile.

The profile page is burdened with upsell messages. The shrouded e-mail address feature is gone. Despite what the instructions say, URLs in the About Me section are not auto-linked. And URLs in the Around the Web section don’t render nicely under Safari (woof! it looks even worse under Win/IE7!). Other than that, it does the same job for me that the old system did.

Or, How a mistake by the fabrication shop became a design element

Via The Morning News, Paul Shaw tells “The (Mostly) True Story of Helvetica and the New York City Subway” in a deliciously-illustrated nine-page essay, which includes digressions into the history of the system map, the Chrystie Street Connection snafu, and a refresher on 1970’s-era type technology.

At the park: 22

farther downstreamWe mustered out this morning to do some finish work on a stream restoration project at Huntley Meadows Park, under the direction of Park Manager Kevin Munroe. The watercourse is East Barnyard Run, which is thought to rise from a spring near the park boundary. Nonetheless, it also drains nearby subdivisions and flows downstream into the main wetland of the park. The streambed is almost fenceline-straight; perhaps it follows the path of an old drainage ditch. In any case, the objective of the restoration project, performed by contractors, is to add some obstacles to the water to calm its flow: an old log, a vein of small boulders, a little island to make a traffic circle.

plantingOur work was to finish some shrub plantings that had been started a couple of weeks ago: elderberry, buttonbush, Viburnum species including Arrowwood (Viburnum dentatum) and Blackhaw (V. prunifolium). Last time out we also planted plugs of Virginia Wildrye (Elymus virginicus), a member of the grasses, and some asters, as I remember. The point of the plantings is to establish a root system to hold the clay of the streambed in place, lest it wash downstream as silt, choking the crayfish and other watery denizens of the marsh.

tree protectorsMuch of today’s work was installing anti-deer tree protectors around our shrub plantings. Rather than the familiar plastic tubes, we used a biodegradable gadget made of thin stakes (of cedar?) lashed together and closed around the stem with a bead-and-loop gizmo. It’s sort of like macramé for naturalists. None of what we planted is taller than the protectors yet, so what you see now in the photo is just a grove of stakes. We also surrounded each shrub with a ring of matting to discourage competing plant life.

The island of stakes is easy to find: from just north of the main parking lot, follow the sanitary sewer easement northwest about 150m to the stream, then go downstream about 50m. I will check back in the spring to see what has leafed out.

Boom

How did we get here? How we know for sure? And most importantly, how do we tell the story of how we got here? These are the questions explored in Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s thought-provoking Boom, a highly theatrical science-fiction riff on one culture’s creation story.

Thomas Kamm’s set design for the show does its darnedest to treat Woolly Mammoth’s proscenium-shaped space like a black box. A basement biology research lab with attached living quarters is pushed forward into the auditorium, removing the first three rows of seats; while an upper-level playing space is extended to wrap around to the balcony seating: the effect is a little like the bowl of an operating theater.

In the lab, mysteriously fortified like a bunker, Jules (ever-endearing Aubrey Deeker) and Jo (tough chick Kimberly Gilbert) meet up for a few drinks and some premeditated casual sex—or perhaps the poorly socialized marine biologist Jules has other plans for the two of them. Deeker finds a way to reveal Jules’s unique geekiness without sliding into stereotype. The action is punctuated by loud Kubrickian movie music and louder timpani rolls from Barbara (infra-manic Sarah Marshall), up in the gallery. Jules and Jo don’t seem to be aware of her, although Jo gets a migraine every time Barbara hits the drums, but Barbara seems to be following their story as if she were reading a score.

When disaster strikes, Jules is prepared, more or less; Jo lodges herself somewhere between the denial and anger stages of grief; and Barbara seems to have it all under control.

The piece has some lyrical, positive moments. Jules explains that “biology is optimistic” (somehow I feel like I’ve heard that somewhere before) and that even mass extinctions result in the favorable outcome of new life: the radiation of the mammals from shrews, for instance. And there are some quite funny bits: we all loved the story of the “Halliburton Shale.”

Are there gaps in the narrative? Perhaps. Does the quality of Jules and Jo’s sexual history make sense? Not really. But then there are “gaps in the fossil record,” too.

It all comes unravelled in the end, of course. Jules holds the keys to new life, but doesn’t know it. And as for Barbara, well, imagine Zardoz in charge of the Creation Museum.

  • Boom, by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, directed by John Vreeke, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Field trip

Then she happened across a large tunnel burrowed into the side of a wave. “Oh my God!” she cried. “A groundhog hole!”

…Ms. Lin laughed and then paused, reflecting, “I think we’ll cover it up?” But within moments she had changed her mind. “I think you have to let it be what it’s going to be,” she said.

Maya Lin visits her earthwork Wave Field, to be opened to the public at Storm King Art Center next spring.