The pebble not the stream

Via Robot Wisdom auxiliary: an excellent introduction to the works of Stephen Sondheim, illustrated with video clips (the clip from a concert version of Sweeney Todd is not to be missed, especially since the song is mostly cut from the Tim Burton movie). The article divides the works into starters, intermediates, and shows (like Pacific Overtures) for advanced devotees. And it’s not afraid to identify some weaknesses:

One knock against Sondheim’s career is that his influence on musical theater has been either non-existent or pernicious. (Oddly enough, the best example of Sondheim influence on popular culture may be Alan Menken and Howard Ashman’s score for Disney’s Beauty And The Beast.) Performers love to sing his songs—”So-and-so sings Sondheim” remains a popular cabaret attraction—but the composers who’ve emerged in his wake have lacked his skill at deconstruction and reconstruction. The decades since Company have seen a lot of overtly complicated shows in which the songs are either straight, shallow pop (without Sondheim’s wit or transcendence), or just tuneless prattle. And frankly, Sondheim at his most “difficult” can himself sound a lot like the latter.

You see the difficulty

cascadeI took a quick walk on the first mile and a half of the Cross County Trail, following Difficult Run down to the beach at the Potomac River. The track was quite muddy in a few places, thanks to this weekend’s rain. This section of the trail lies mostly in Great Falls National Park, and is not posted or blazed save for one sign, but the way is easy to find (just follow the run downstream, how hard is that?). Far from a midwinter chill, the air was quite mild and most of the time I didn’t need my gloves. A smattering of Christmas Eve strollers, a pair on horseback. Still, it’s generally a popular spot, and I saw more trash than I like to see.

The Second Shepherds’ Play

The Folger Consort and director Mary Hall Surface’s reconstruction of this pre-Shakespearean mystery play is a marvel for the Christmas holiday season. Indeed, the genesis of this play is one of its mysteries. At one time it was attributed to “the Wakefield master,” as the manuscript had been bound with a cycle of 32 plays once thought to be performed in the town of Wakefield. (And yes, the apostrophe is in the right place, for there is also a First Shepherds’ Play in the codex.)

Despite our uncertainty of who wrote it, or even what century it was written it, the play presents a simple, engaging farce of three shepherds beset by a sheep-rustler Mak (our friend Andy Brownstein) who are visited by a heavenly presence announcing good news in the darkest time of the year. The Consort and Surface have built on the bones of the one-act script (perhaps the most richly characterized of the cycle) with period music, fun puppetry to manage scene changes, and a spot of sprightly dance to make a full evening’s entertainment. To aid our understanding, pronunciation follows Modern, not Middle, English, and vocabulary has been modernized, except for a few bits spoken by Mak in a “southern tooth,” like “Ich” for “I.”

We particularly enjoyed the blue streamers and mechanical whistler that evoke the wintry blasts of wind confronting the pastoralists. And the appearance of the angel from the Folger theater’s gallery level is a gem of low-tech theatricality. The shepherds’ offerings to the Christ child—a bunch of cherries, a bird, and a ball—are quite touching.

The three shepherds are played by Bob McDonald, Aaron Cromie, and Chris Wilson, and their comic skills are matched by their vocal musicianship. Of course, the highlight of a Folger Consort production is the array of old-fashioned instruments, and this one does not disappoint: we see and hear a slide trumpet, shawms, viols, lutes, and a hurdy-gurdy. The Consort restricted its music choices to tunes from England of the 16th century or earlier. Fortunately this means the inclusion of the stirring call-and-response “Nova, Nova,” a showcase “Gabriel fram heven-kinge” for Kate Vetter Cain, a surprising multi-voiced setting of “Sumer is icumen in,” and the haunting “Coventry Carol.”

What grace we have found.
Come, now are we unbound.
Let’s make a glad sound,
    And sing it not soft.

Go birding

Via Via Negativa: Peaceful Societies reports on the unexpected popularity of birding among the Amish of eastern Ohio, especially the Christmas Bird Count (CBC).

The center of the Amish birding activity is Holmes County, where [Bruce] Glick indicates that “the list of rare birds … is amazing.” The Holmes County list includes such unusual species such as the swallow-tailed kite, long-billed curlew, groove-billed ani, violet-green swallow, Harris’s sparrow, and golden eagle.

* * *

Glick points out that while many birding groups focus on rare and unusual sightings, an even more important aspect of the Ohio Amish counting is the fact that they record many more individual birds than most other counts. The Amish CBCs have recorded the most numbers of individual birds for 20 different species in the state of Ohio. Very common woodland birds such as downy woodpeckers, white-crowned sparrows, golden-crowned kinglets, tufted titmouses, pileated woodpeckers, and red-bellied woodpeckers are recorded more often in the Amish counts than anywhere else in the state.

Referenced by the post: Glick, Bruce. 2007. “Christmas Bird Counts in Ohio’s Amish Country.” American Birds 61, The 107th Christmas Bird Count Issue: 26-29.

Some snaps

1959 Chevrolet ImpalaI moved the Mac that has the scanner attached to another place in the house, one more convenient, less underfoot. So of course to test it after relocation I did some scanning. My ostensible purpose was finding a new buddy icon. And that turned into a more general wading through all the family albums. This snap was taken in front of a duplex my grandfather owned and rented out to my mom for a year or two. It must have been after my mother’s fender bender, because you can see the crimp in the Chevrolet logo. I don’t think this image of me looks anything like other pictures of me at the time. Except for the extra cookies I’m carrying around.



cousinsThe two girls in back are my uncle’s first two daughters, Rita and Terri. Rita’s now a journalist in Sacramento, and I think Terri still lives in Germany. That’s my grandparents’ rancher in the background. We’re “sledding” in the open field/backyard of McMakens’ place. I don’t know why we didn’t go someplace with some vertical. The field (maybe an acre?) used to be empty, just some trees in the back, with a gravel drive along the edge. Then McMaken’s Scottish terrier died, and he buried Charlie in the field, with a big marker you could read through the picture window in my grandparents’ living room. I think my grandmother grew roses on that trellis that you can see between the shrubs. I remember learning that word as a kid. Trellis.



parentsMost of the photos in the albums are in pretty shabby shape, and I am not the Photoshop monkey that I used to be, so you’re seeing all the scratches and specks. Especially this overexposed image of my mother and father in Sacramento in about 1952. This must have been before they were married. Maybe it’s because they’re both smiling so broadly.



Williams family reunionI guess I wasn’t at this reunion—according to my notes, I would have been in graduate school by then—but I attended my share of them. The Williams family always met in Fountain Park (somewhat exotic for me, being on the other side of town from where I lived) and rented out the picnic room. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Helen and Wilson (see the image on Flickr for the callouts) were my maternal grandmother’s parents. To me, they were just generalized old relatives from the country. What I particularly like about this picture is that everyone is looking in a different direction. No retakes in 1978.



Easter suitAbout all that I remember of this place on Spring Street is that we had a neighbor named Myers. But in the local dialect, it sounded to me more like “Mars.” Must have been cool to have one of Ray Walston’s compadres living next door. I don’t remember that rabbit, and I certainly don’t remember that suit.

Is taste disinterested?

Via Arts & Letters Daily: Sam Anderson reviews Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk about Love, a study of Céline Dion, singer beloved by Ghanaian cabdrivers.

Overcoming a reflexive distaste for the Québecoise, Wilson “feels a twinge of critical conscience” and immerses himself in her work, delving into the nature of musical taste.

Wilson tends to side with the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who argues that taste is never disinterested: It’s a form of social currency, or “cultural capital,” that we use to stockpile prestige. Hating Céline is therefore not just an aesthetic choice, but an ethical one, a way to elevate yourself above her fans…

Although Wilson never grows to love Dion’s music, he’s also no longer comfortable with his former scorn. He acknowledges the merits of her work: “It deals with problems that don’t require leaps of imagination but require other efforts, like patience, or compromise”; although it is “lousy music to make aesthetic judgments to,” it “might be excellent for having a first kiss, or burying your grandma, or breaking down in tears.”

The year in review

Meme via Pondering Pikaia: the first sentence of the first post of each month from this blog:

  • January 4: Via things magazine, a museum of strange and rarely used HTML tags.
  • February 4: Charles Isherwood articulates why I was underwhelmed when I read Tom Stoppard’s trilogy The Coast of Utopia.
  • March 1: Arthur Lubow submits an instructive profile of aptly-named photographer Jeff Wall, whose lightbox-mounted transparencies are measured in feet, not inches.
  • April 1: After nearly a year of operating under dual and provisional corporate badges, we have a new company name, to be pronounced “vo-vee-see.”
  • May 1: Ruth La Ferla profiles designer Santo Loquasto.
  • June 3: I recorded Stuart Hart’s 1997 paper for Harvard Business Review, “Beyond Greening,” at the the studio yesterday, as part of a collection of articles on organization development.
  • July 2: Katherine Ellison looks at today’s carbon offset market.
  • August 1: Via The Morning News: Michael Bloomberg can’t be bothered to take the local IRT and change at 59th Street.
  • September 3: I 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.
  • October 2: Once again WordPress has reworked the category system.
  • November 2: Ben Schuman Stoler revisits the District boundary stones.
  • December 2: Rorschach Theatre turns in a gritty, muscular production of David Grimm’s tale of political intrigue and misplaced loyalty.

Sciencedebate 2008

The world is a really, really complicated contraption, replete with moving parts that can malfunction at any time. You can make a pretty good case that the United States President, along with his science and technology advisers, is in a position of trust, responsible in part for keeping that contraption going. That’s why I support this week’s call for a debate among presidential candidates on technology and science issues. The open letter to the candidates has been signed by Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve, Steven Pinker of Harvard, and other notables. I don’t begrudge the candidates their sniping at one another over minor points of religious doctrine, as for instance, the Romney-Huckabee flap about Satan’s paternity (link via Wired). But people, please, let’s have a forum for the issues that affect our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren, living right here on earth.

The Green 500

Wu-Chun Feng and Kirk W. Cameron of Virginia Tech have initiated a new system of league tables for supercomputers based on energy efficiency, The Green500 List. They introduce the rankings in an article in the December, 2007 issue of Computer. The article abstract:

The performance-at-any-cost design mentality ignores supercomputers’ excessive power consumption and need for heat dissipation and will ultimately limit their performance. Without fundamental change in the design of supercomputing systems, the performance advances common over the past two decades won’t continue.

As the methodology is still new, and requires some apples-to-oranges comparisons, it’s not surprising that the listings are dominated by one vendor’s architecture. IBM’s Blue Gene takes the top 26 spots in the table, with energy consumption of 204 to 357 megaFLOPS per watt. Slot #500 comes in 2 orders of magnitude lower, at 3.65 megaFLOPS per watt.

False cognates

I am not that guy.

In my occasional ego-surfing, I have come across the following people with the same first and last name as me. If you’re looking for one of these guys, I’m not the one you’re looking for. I have not met any of them, and I’m sure that each one is a fine person in his own right. He’s just not me.

There’s no problem, no one is stalking me. I just like setting the record straight. Although, in truth, this pileup of David Gorslines will raise all sorts of heck with the primitive social/semantic web crawlers out there.

Day by day

Louis Menand reviews recently published diaries, reviews the rationales behind keeping a diary, and makes a distinction, in passing:

“Never discriminate, never omit” is one of the unstated rules of diary-keeping. The rule is perverse, because all writing is about control, and writing a diary is a way to control the day—to have, as it were, the last word. But diaries are composed under the fiction that the day is in control, that you are simply a passive recorder of circumstance, and so everything has to go in whether it mattered or not—as though deciding when it didn’t were somehow not your business. In a diary, the trivial and inconsequential—the “woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head” pieces—are not trivial and inconsequential at all; they are defining features of the genre. If it doesn’t contain a lot of dross, it’s not a diary. It’s something else—a journal, or a writer’s notebook, or a blog (blather is not the same as dross).

Time to go

I like to say that the D.C. metro area, up out of the floodplain at least, is optimal for avoiding natural disasters: hurricanes and tornadoes are infrequent, earthquakes almost nonexistent, heat, cold, and water are in moderation. Of course there’s that whole being a national capital and being a political target. Ah, well.

So I’ve been thinking again about disaster planning, sparked by Leta’s post and the unpleasantnesses in arid California this fall. We have a plan to drive west, over the mountains, to her father’s place. If the threat is coming from the west, or we don’t have time to meet up… well, we haven’t worked that one out. I guess we would take Alberta the Explorer, ’cause there’s room to sleep in the back if need be—unless access to fuel would be a problem.

I have a pretty good checklist for pulling things out of the house that we would need. It’s organized by room, so I’m not running up and downstairs a lot, and it’s got a rough priority ordering (the food and supplies bins and my passport go first, my briefcase and the carrier of hand tools are optional). And I’ve got some notes about things that would be good to pick up one of these days: two-way radios, a hand-cranked battery charger, fluorescent spray paint (this one suggested by the experience of Katrina). Fortunately I’m not dependent on medications that have to be kept cool. So I think I’m equipped to load up the car and be on the road with fifteen minutes’ notice.

And I wondered what I would take if I had one more trip that I could make back into the house. Nonessentials, but things I would want with me if the place was pancaked. And I settled on this short list:

  • the 20-odd books that are on my essential reading list; these are the ones that I would re-read multiple times if nothing else were available;
  • something to hang on the wall: a small box construction by Graceann Warn with a stylized painting of a blackbird;
  • a pot with one of the cuttings from a dracena that I’ve been growing for 20 years; Jenny hacked off a piece from a plant in the office back when I got my first apartment alone in Reston and gave it to me with a “here, you need a plant for your new place;” I stuck it in water and it rooted.

Everything else can be replaced. Like Roma says in Glengarry Glen Ross, “All it is is things that happen to you.”

Rogers Peet

Rogers Peet Co.I was rereading J.D. Salinger’s “Hapworth 16, 1924,” which Sally had graciously printed from her copy of the New Yorker archives (19 June 1965), and there on page 111 was further evidence of Sarah and Adelaide’s favorite haberdasher. Jeez Louise, if their idea of fashion on the mid-1960s was the “Eton-style cap of Arnel triacetate and cotton blend in Oxford weave” (the ugly helmet on the right), they deserved to go out of business.