At the park: 10

Plans are firming up for a $2 million project to restore the main wetland at Huntley Meadows Park, reports Frederick Kunkle. The scheme calls for a 300-foot wide earthen dam across Barnyard Run, 3 feet high and somewhat downstream of the main observation tower—about where the most prominent beaver dam has been the past few seasons. Revegetating with native species to fight invasives and non-natives like cattails and rice cutgrass is also planned. The site plan will be presented at a public meeting on September 21 (details here).

I think it’s the gravel access road that will be built to the dam that concerns me the most: it could be the most disruptive change. Also, that section of Barnyard Run has seen the most nesting activity for both Wood Ducks and mergansers; I suspect that they and the beavers will move elsewhere. My colleague Paul points out that this patch of land has been under human alteration for hundreds of years (it’s been farmland, it’s been a test bed for ashpalt pavement), so restoring the wetland is the right thing to do. I just hope he’s correct.

Perfectly good

Paul Graham realizes some things about stuff:

Another way to resist acquiring stuff is to think of the overall cost of owning it. The purchase price is just the beginning. You’re going to have to think about that thing for years—perhaps for the rest of your life. Every thing you own takes energy away from you. Some give more than they take. Those are the only things worth having.

Upcoming: 5

Big Sit! birding events are scheduled for October 7 at Huntley Meadows Park, sponsored by the Northern Virginia Bird Club (see the August edition of the newsletter for details), and for October 14 at the National Wildlife Visitor Center at Patuxent Research Refuge in Laurel, Md (more info at the Refuge’s events page). In contrast to more active birding events,

Some people have called it a “tailgate party for birders….” The simplicity of the concept makes The Big Sit! so appealing. Find a good spot for bird watching—preferably one with good views of a variety of habitats and lots of birds. Next you create a real or imaginary circle 17 feet in diameter and sit inside the circle for 24 hours, counting all the bird species you see or hear. That’s it. Find a spot, sit in it, have fun.

THE BIG SIT! is like a Big Day, or a bird-a-thon in that the object is to tally as many bird species as can be seen or heard within 24 hours. The difference lies in the area limitation from which you can observe. THIS FREE EVENT is OPEN to every person and club in any country!

33 Variations

Moisés Kaufman interweaves the musical mystery of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations for solo piano with the story of Katherine Brandt, current-day musicologist entranced by the enigma of how the piece came to be: why did Beethoven, solicited in 1819 by music publisher Anton Diabelli to contribute a variation on a 32-bar waltz of Diabelli’s for an omnibus publication, initially reject the commission, and then, over the course of four years, write not one but 33 variations on the inconsequential theme?

The play lies in the sweet spot of Kaufman’s writing: short, episodic scenes and monologues shifting back and forth in time (pace The Laramie Project), under a pall of sickness. For just as Beethoven (the maestoso Graeme Malcolm) completes his slide into deafness in the 1820’s, the crusty Dr. Brandt succumbs to ALS, otherwise known as “Lou Gehrig’s disease.” In the course of the play, she achieves a rapprochement with her daughter Clara (Laura Odeh), a costume designer (with some lovely dresses by Janice Pytel to prove it) who is still finding her way in life. And yet, Kaufman cannot quite make good on his promise that “this play is not a reconstruction of a historical event; rather, it’s a series of variations on a moment in a life.” Whose life? Beethoven’s or Brandt’s? And which moment?

Mary Beth Piel manages the slow debilitation of Dr. Brandt, but in the early passages her playing seems strained and unfocussed. Greg Keller does better as “just Mike” Clark, Dr. Brandt’s nurse (not doctor), as well as eventual love interest for Clara. Mike is a nerdy but sensitive caregiver, more adept in the examining room than in the dating scene.

There are some magical moments in the show, especially Dr. Brandt’s initial descent into the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, where many of his manuscripts are housed. The archive is represented as enormous walls of shelving, each holding a stack of storage cases lit with individual pinlights focussed downward, and the effect is celestial. And there is a point late in the second act where the “Kyrie” from Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis (another work from this late period of his career) is sung movingly by four characters from the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries (Kaufman works the intercentury territory staked out by Tom Stoppard in Arcadia). Most important is the multi-media impact of projected images from the Beethoven MSS, explained by Dr. Gertie Ladenborger (the equally crusty Susan Kellermann)—if perhaps explained at excessive length—and played live by the masterful Diane Walsh. The play succeeds in leaving us wanting to hear all 55 minutes of the complete composition, one that is not as widely available as other works by the maestro. It’s a “big, craggy thing,” in the words of Walsh, “kind of forbidding, but at the same time there’s playfulness and joy and eccentricity and satire.”

In the end, we’re no more knowledgeable about the reason for Beethoven’s change of mind that seemed to lead to obsessive deconstruction and reassembly of Diabelli’s ditty, and perhaps that’s Kaufman’s point. Dr. Brandt, in extremis, is reminded that the waltz is something to be danced, and the play closes on this tender note.

  • 33 Variations, written and directed by Moisés Kaufman, Arena Stage in co-production with Tectonic Theater Project, Washington

Arctic Symposium 2007

As a sort of chaser to Thursday’s post, I want to applaud the ecumenical convocation of world-wide religious leaders at the foot of a melting glacier in Greenland, as reported by ABC News and Reuters. Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Christians of several stripes, and indigenous people united in a silent “prayer for the planet” as part of an effort to withstand global climate change. The event was part of a weeklong symposium sponsored by Religion, Science, and the Environment, an NGO based in Greece.

Thinking globally, eating locally

Via kottke.org: the question of whether eating locally is better for the environment isn’t quite settled, argues Sarah Murray, writing for the Financial Times (a publication, admittedly, with its own slant on things), in support of her recent book. She points to recent studies that indicate that shipped food performs as well as local food in terms of environmental impact.

Keep in mind that Murray is writing for a British publication, and food shipped into the U.K. needs must travel over water (often by efficient container ship) while food that travels within the U.S. and North America more likely came by truck. And her quoting a study by New Zealand’s Lincoln University that New Zealand lamb is more efficiently produced than its British equivalent, even after accounting for shipping, is disingenuous.

Nevertheless, Murray makes the good point that transportation may not be the most important environmental factor in the production of a lamb and boiled potato dinner. And

the environmental trade-offs can be perplexing. While water conservationists point out that pressurised sprayers and drip irrigation systems distribute water to crops more efficiently than traditional gravity-based methods, they require mechanical pumping and therefore consume more energy.

Along with the carbon dioxide emissions generated by agriculture come other, more potent, greenhouse gases. Animal manure, soil management and heavy use of synthetic nitrogen fertilisers in crop production all contribute to an increase in nitrous oxide emissions, which are up to 300 times more effective at heating the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.

On the other hand, whether a locally-produced piece of fruit, picked and carried a short distance to a farmers market, just plain tastes better than one engineered for long-distance travel, harvested green, wrapped in plastic, and shipped thousands of miles is a question that Murray doesn’t pick up in this article.

It’s not working

Okay, it’s against my better judgement, but I’ll bite—I don’t normally respond to goads from creationists, because what results is not dialogue but mutual sniping, but I am rising to the bait from Robert Bowie Johnson Jr., who proposes the expression “Slime-Snake-Monkey-People” to refer to adherents of “Darwinism, a closed-minded, anti-Creator mindset which compels them to ignore or deny any evidence which tends to validate the Book of Genesis.” Supposedly, as the press release suggests, skeptics will be shamed by such a risible epithet. Oh, yes, and “since Slime-Snake-Monkey-People insist they evolved over millions of years through a countless series of random mutations, Christians should also refer to them as ‘mutants.'”

Online, at least, Johnson doesn’t seem to be getting much traction with his intended audience. Most of the current search results point to blogs unsympathetic to his cause. It might have something to do with his unconventional thesis that Greek art recapitulates the stories in Genesis.

International Rock-Flipping Day

trashI had just a little time yesterday morning, before we scurried off to the theater, to get out for the first International Rock-Flipping Day, so I poked around in the wooded strip between my townhouse cluster and the middle school grounds. As a result, it turned into one of my quasi-periodic Clear the Trash jaunts. I picked up a grocery bag’s worth of rubbish, a serviceable basketball, and (alas) a seventh-grader’s lab book for Understanding Our Environment.

cricketsI turned up a couple of candidate rocks, but nothing more than a retiring earthworm, so I fudged a bit and flipped some bits of wood (unwanted leftovers, probably, from some neighbor’s woodpile). I found a couple of what I make to be Gryllus sp., Field Cricket. Borror and White offer this helpful distinction:

The House Cricket, Acheta domesticus (Linn.), is a species introduced from Europe that often enters houses; it differs from field crickets in having the head light-colored with dark crossbands.


On the record

Something good has come of unfortunate, nonplussed Lauren Caitlin Upton’s on air meltdown: Geoffrey K. Pullum turns it into a teaching moment about the term of art used to distinguish proper names that do not use a definite article (Argentina, Sudan) and those that do (the Argentine, the Sudan, and, as Upton would have it, *the Iraq). They are, respectively, strong proper names and weak proper names.

A shining

Via ArtsJournal: Philip Kennicott produces an excellent piece about the art, science, theater, and politics of illuminating the monuments and other public buildings of the National Mall at night.

A recent revamp of the lighting of the Washington Monument, employing focusing technology used to light sports events, reduced the amount of wattage thrown on the structure as well as light pollution (what a lighting designer would call “spill”). Nevertheless, 24 kW goes into keeping the obelisk bright at night.

The structures on the Mall have a hierarchy that is replicated in the lighting scheme:

… as lighting designers who have worked on the Mall discover, that hierarchy is an informally acknowledged rule, not a written one.

Claude Engle, a lighting designer who has lit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Korean War Veterans Memorial and the [East Building] of the National Gallery, remembers a significant change over the years that he has been working in Washington. In the 1970s, when he lit the new [East Building] of the gallery, he just did it by feel, by instinct.

“We decided—and that was just us—that it should be less bright, maybe 80 percent as bright, as the Capitol dome,” he says.

And silly restrictions on information “for security reasons” extend to lighting the Capitol dome:

Eva Malecki, a spokeswoman for the architect of the Capitol, says that since 9/11, officials can’t even reveal what kind of light bulbs are used to light the structure.

“Any information regarding the current process for lighting the Dome,” she says by e-mail, “is security sensitive.”

Potomac to Occoquan

trail markerSince I’ve already walked, piecewise, some of the longer paved trails in the area—the W&OD, Mount Vernon, the two trails that connect them, and the Capital Crescent—I needed a new project to keep me motivated for outdoor exercise, so yesterday I started the traversal of Fairfax County’s Cross County Trail. The trail, recently completed, covers 40 miles, from Potomac River in Great Falls Park in the north to the Occoquan River in Occoquan Regional Park in the south. It connects with lots of other trails in the county, and shares a track with some in several stretches, and so I’ve already walked some of it without really taking note of the fact.

decomposersI started my recordkeeping with a section near to home, a segment of somewhat less than two miles from where the CCT splits from the W&OD and threads through Tamarack Park to an underpass at the Dulles Toll and Access Road. The trail dips in and out of the valley of Difficult Run and shares the Toll Road crossing with the run. Unfortunately if not unexpectedly, the most salient feature of this passage is the plentiful graffiti covering the support columns of the Toll Road. Fairfax County is not wilderness. There is some wildish habitat to be found along the trail, but you’ll also see your share of white-tailed deer munching backyard gardens. And I discovered that carrying a trash bag along with me would be a good idea. There is little elevation change in this section of the trail, but it can be tricky to find your way at times, especially where young pickles have effaced the marker posts.

The Hothouse

The Hothouse, by Harold Pinter, was written in 1958 (contemporary to his reputation-building The Dumb Waiter and The Birthday Party) but not produced and published until 1980. The play may look back to conventional British satire and sex farce, but it does so shaded with Harold Pinter’s signature coloring of offstage menace. We watch the staff of a sanatorium for mental illnesses bumble through the investigation of a mysterious birth by one of the patients. What ensues includes gratuitously painful electroshock therapy and mayhem that leaves many of the professional staff dead. Although Roote, the administrator of the deathly place (played by Michael John Casey as a marionette martinet who gradually comes unstrung), declares that the maintenance of Order is the most important thing to him, what he gets is anything but.

Each member of the cast incorporates a distinctive physical style into his or her character, and this serves to animate what can be at times a talky script (especially for Pinter, the poet of silences). Noteworthy among them are Jason Lott’s naive and pop-eyed Lamb, a night watchman who lives up to his Dickensian tag name, and Jonathon Church’s menacing, cat-like Lush, lithely negotiating the huge level changes in Elizabeth Jenkins McFadden’s practical set.

Kathleen Akerley, in a director’s note, suggests that the play offers the possibility of hope, its events occurring as they do on Christmas Day. But it’s a Christmas Day when the falling snow has turned to slush, and the closing scene shows us that this hope is misplaced.

  • The Hothouse, by Harold Pinter, directed by Kathleen Akerley, produced by Longacre Lea, Callan Theatre, Washington