Author: David Gorsline

Chicagoland architecture 2023

I assembled a three-legged trip for this year’s birthday excursion, stopping in Chicago to see my long-missed friend Janet in Chicago, and then on to Sacramento for a memorial service for Mom, hanging out with my cousin and her family, and exploring a few natural areas.

In Chicago, I stayed in the amenable Hotel Blake, one of the Loop hotels that has been repurposed from (usually historic) office buildings. My architecture focus was on older buildings—I love me some International Style and Brutalism, but Chicago’s earlier buildings are something extra special.

I took a lovely guided/audio tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and studio in Oak Park and a sampling of his houses on Forest Avenue.

finally processed throughAlso a quick run up to Evanston to make sure all of the buildings I remember are still there (true, with one exception), taking a walk with Alice in the development office. The Weber Arch post-dates me, so this was my opportunity to make a procession of one through it.

monadnock 1My target building in the Loop was the Monadnock Block. I fell in lurve with this structure when I saw photos of it for an art history course, but to the best of my recollection, this is the first time that I’ve seen it in the stone. It’s just inside the El’s Loop, as you can see from the structures in the foreground.

white hatStreet level businesses are hanging on, including a sandwich shop and a rather smart bistro.

exit stairsstone towerGotta snap the fire escapes. And, oh, those delicious Chicago bay windows.

here we arereliance towerNoted in my AIA guide was the Reliance Building, now a Staypineapple hotel.

don't fall outAccording to Janet, some people back in the day found the nearly floor-to-ceiling windows a bit vertiginous.

permanentSome street furniture: engraved street name signs for Michigan Avenue at Van Buren Street,

nouveau 1nouveau 2and a cheeky Art Nouveau station entrance marker for Metra.

and other jobsThe Hotel Blake is south of Ida B. Wells Drive, in the semi-revived neighborhood of Printers’ Row.

clock tower completeclock tower topThe end of Dearborn Street is anchored by the old Dearborn Station. No more trains, and not much else happening in this building, alas.

semi-intentional selfieWe looked through my Flickr feed during Japanese class (“what did you do on vacation?” prompts). My classmate Kathy remarked, “There are no pictures of people.” So here’s a picture of me, just for Kathy.

nice backgroundI enjoyed a little time in Millennium Park, but I gravitated to old school Grant Park (to honor those who marched) and Buckingham Fountain. Nice shiny-shiny towers in the background.

Clifton Institute bioblitz August 2023

looking more or less northAlmost perfect weather yesterday for traipsing and documenting. We surveyed a farm up on the Piedmont of western Fauquier County that is being converted from cattle pasture to a more native plant-based flora.

low flowgetting the shotquarryThe farm backs on to an upper reach of the Rappahannock River, this summer not running with much water due to our moderate drought. But Bert Harris and helpers managed to net a Largemouth Bass (Micropterus salmoides) for observation and release.

After I chased an Eastern Wood-Pewee (Contopus virens) for half an hour, it settled down to sally from a perch, giving me some excellent, well-lighted looks. I’m not fond of Box Elder (Acer negundo) as a rule, but some of the trees in the river bottom are delightfully gnarly and chonky.

It’s a bioblitz, so everything counts, including Pokeweed (Phytolacca americana) and Bottlebrush Grass (Elymus hystrix) and Eastern Gray Squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis). This one caught our attention because it was loudly gnawing on a bone.

After sifting out the out-of-focus shots and doing my best to color-correct the greenish cast given off by the mercury vapor lamp, I was able to contribute 49 observations to the project.

At the end of the day, as we started to drift back towards the cars, someone gave up a shout, because a female Eastern Hercules Beetle (Dynastes tityus) had come to the light.

Parting words from Clint Maroon

“I could show you this country’s gone a long ways in the last fifty sixty years. I don’t mean machinery and education and that. I mean folks’ rights. They’ve clamped down on fellows like me who damn near ruined this country….

“Another quarter century of grabbers like us and there wouldn’t have been a decent stretch of forest or soil or waterway that hadn’t been divided among us. Museums and paintings and libraries—that’s was our way of trying to make peace with our conscience. I’m the last of the crowd that had all four feet in the trough and nothing to stop ’em. We’re getting along toward a real democracy now and don’t let anybody tell you different. These will be known as the good new days and those were the bad old days. The time’s coming when there’ll be no such thing as a multi-millionaire in America, and no such thing as a pauper. You’ll live to see it but I won’t. That’ll be a real democracy.”

—Edna Ferber, Saratoga Trunk (1941) (pp. 350-351)

Clifton Institute NABA Butterfly Count 2023

I stepped into the role of sector co-leader for this year’s Clifton count. I did some scouting on Thursday, if anything to start to make sense of the maze of mown paths in the Woodcock tract and elsewhere.

lunchtimeVery pleasant weather on Saturday. Not outstanding numbers, but everybody had fun. Our less experienced team members found all the good stuff: Question Mark (Polygonia interrogationis), Dun Skipper (Euphyes vestris), Least Skipper (Ancyloxypha numitor).

At the park: 143

Wrapping up reporting for the 2023 nesting season.

OK, with the last results coming in from far-flung precincts, I can total up results for our nesting season.

For our Wood Ducks, 7 nests started, 1 nest lost to predation, 2 nests abandoned for unknown reasons, 4 nests fledged; 76 eggs laid, 53 ducklings fledged. For our Hooded Mergansers, 4 nests started, 4 nests fledged; 47 eggs laid, 45 ducklings fledged. Good absolute numbers for WODU, but a much better fledging rate for HOME….

Once again, thank you, monitors and staff!

Wood Duck and Hooded Merganser trend chart

Update 24 June 2024: It appears that Google has finally turned off chart.apis.google.com, as well as chart.googleapis.com. Weird: a forum post says that the service was going away in 2019, but the above chart was still working in July 2023. I’ll look into retrofitting this chart with Google Charts.

Contemporary American Theater Festival 2023: 3

The strongest piece in this year’s festival, José Rivera’s Your Name Means Dream, returns to some of the themes explored by 2014’s Uncanny Valley by Thomas Gibbons, Jordan Harrison’s Marjorie Prime, and Spike Jonze’s Her. Before we’re even quite settled, there’s a nice nod to Philip K. Dick.

Here, the android is Stacy (role created by the acrobatic Sara Koviak), fitted out as an emotional support robot and housekeeper for the titular Aislin (Anne O’Sullivan), an irascible New Yorker who’s been deserted by a string of hired human helpers, all of them frustrated by her stubbornness. Although there are sparks of HAL-like murderous behavior from Stacy (she’s only a prototype, subject to flaws in the machine), this play focuses more on whether Stacy has achieved what we would call empathy and the ability to recognize beauty—more to the point, to recognize the quality of beauty.

Stacy’s technology enables her to physically personify someone on the other end of a telephone (sic?) call with Aislin, in this case her loutish son Roberto. She can do a mean Joe Pesci. And her spectacular aria comes when Stacy performs a factory reset.

Here’s a question for your book group: Stacy encourages (browbeats) Aislin into eating healthy, exercising, enjoying herself, all in the service of prolonging her life. Yet Stacy’s program dictates that she expires when Aislin does. How does Stacy’s behavior qualitatively differ from ours, when we encourage (browbeat) a loved one to get off the couch, schedule a colonoscopy, or stay on prescribed medications?

Playwrights will no doubt be exploring new aspects of general artificial intelligence in years to come. Soon I expect to see something with a role explicitly written for a bot (no steelface, in other words). Perhaps a murder mystery featuring the lovelorn Sydney?

We in the audience are always intrigued by set dressing: we so missed the opportunity to see Aislin and Stacy play a round of Monopoly.

Contemporary American Theater Festival 2023: 2

The four-sided Marinoff is the de rigueur venue for one-on-one prison conversations (see 2017’s We Will Not Be Silent), not to mention rumbly room tone (David Remedios’ sound design), and hence Chisa Hutchinson’s Redeemed finds its place there. In this instance, Trevor (Doug Harris), a white man imprisoned for beating an Asian man to death, is up for parole; he also has a book proposal for agent Claire (Elizabeth Sun), who (it just so happens) is the sister of the man Trevor killed.

While Sun’s Claire makes some nonobvious points (very forcefully) about the power relationships between whites and Asians, it’s also the case that most would find it impossible to find common ground with someone so angry. The open-ended conclusion of the play is legitimate, so far as it goes, but the narrative’s final twists are a cop-out. Wouldn’t it be more interesting if Trevor were completely sincere?

Jeffrey Lieber’ s Fever Dreams (of Animals on the Verge of Extinction) inaugurates the friendly confines of the Shepherdstown Opera House as a CATF venue. The set, a cabin in the woods, fits well in the snug space (a small problem with masking for those of extreme house left). A three-hander with shades of Harold Pinter, the story is driven by withheld information and flirts with the possibility of alternate timelines. There’s a neat (and quite loud) cliffhanger to end the first act. The tidbits of biological research offered by Adele don’t resonate as much as the song that Miller remembers hearing when the three first met: Pat Benatar’s “Love Is a Battlefield.”

  • Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W. Va.
  • Redeemed, by Chisa Hutchinson, directed by marcus d. harvey
  • Fever Dreams (of Animals on the Verge of Extinction), by Jeffrey Lieber, directed by Susan V. Booth

Contemporary American Theater Festival 2023: 1

Orlandersmith’s monologue for Bronxite Virgil, a DJ who makes an unusual career change in mid life, is clearly a work in progress. At times working from a script, Virgil/Orlandersmith directly addresses the audience with a story of loss and life purpose found. Certain passages, like Virgil’s commutes on the subway, lack specificity, while others, such as Virgil’s apprenticeship, are quite graphic. A pronunciation issue briefly took me out of the story.

At the other end of the production values spectrum, Lynn Rosen brings The Overview Effect to the Frank Center’s well-outfitted stage. A maximalist fantasia on space exploration and modern entrepreneurship, with elements of a double sabotage mystery, the play isn’t coy about the models for its two spacefaring megalomaniacal antagonists: the program book interview identifies them as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. The feud between overwhelms the work’s throughline, the emotional journey of engineer-turned-private eye Dylan.

  • Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W. Va.
  • Spiritus/ Virgil’s Dance, written and performed by Dael Orlandersmith, directed by Neel Keeler
  • The Overview Effect, by Lynn Rosen, directed by Courtney Sale

Glossary:

Some links: 94

A milestone: 8

Seventeen years of A Honey of an Anklet, including 142 posts from Huntley Meadows Park:

  • 2006: We drove out to the Eastern Shore yesterday to say goodbye to Marlie…
  • 2007: Katherine Ellison looks at today’s carbon offset market.
  • 2008: Henry Phillips received a patent for his screwdriver and screws on this day in 1936…
  • 2009: The last play in August Wilson’s cycle of Pittsburgh plays, Radio Golf, is set in 1997…
  • 2010: Just a quick snap to mark my completion of the Fairfax Cross County Trail.
  • 2011: Five years of A Honey of an Anklet…
  • 2012: Hey, Leta, you’re on the TV!
  • 2013: Sand Box John keeps us up to date…
  • 2014: My 2014-2015 Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Stamps (Duck Stamps) arrived in the mail today.
  • 2015: Dave Taft offers a splendid 24-hours sampler of the wildlife to be found within New York City, be it animal, vegetable, or fungal; native or alien invasive.
  • 2016: 10 years, 2100+ posts.
  • 2017: O Gray Catbird, who have been tapping at your reflection in my window glass, maybe if I post your picture on the internet you’ll be embarrassed and cut it out.
  • 2018: My final report for the ducks and mergs team this season…
  • 2019: From my final weekly report from Huntley Meadows Park…
  • 2020: 51 murals promoting our 51st state.
  • 2021: After my annual scuffling with the Google chart API, I can post the summary graph of nesting activity for 2021.
  • 2022: As usual, that’s me in the back, the last one to get on whatever we’re looking at.

Clifton Institute dragonfly/damselfly count 2023

A couple highlights (and a lowlight) from Sunday’s count.

At Silver Lake Regional Park, a new damsel for me, Blue-ringed Dancer (Argia sedula). At Leopold’s Preserve, nice images of Calico Pennants (Celithemis elisa), both male and female.

We got good looks (no pix) of a Comet Darner zipping across one of the ponds at Leopold’s.

And along Broad Run behind the houses adjacent to Leopold’s, my first encounter with Spotted Lanternfly (Lycorma delicatula) in life.

Since I knew the track at Silver Lake, I changed to my more comfortable shoes so that I could keep up with Larry until nearly 16:00.

ID corner: 2

This month we on the FCPA EDRR team are on the lookout for non-native invasive Java Water Dropwort (Oenanthe javanica). Based on information from Pennsylvania agencies, B and I thought that we had relocated some extensive populations in a creek floodplain in Herndon, and we documented as such (for example, 166611987). However, other Invader Detectives have identified our plants as Water-hemlock (Cicuta maculata), and I am tending to agree.

I reviewed the descriptions of the two plants in Flora of Virginia. Since they’re in different genera, there’s no straightforward dichotomous key for the pair.

One clue that we had the native C. maculata is that the plants were coming into flower on 10 June. The Flora has May to August for Water-hemlock and July to August for Java Water Dropwort—but that’s hardly definitive for a plant that’s just getting established in the Commonwealth and with voucher specimens for only Fairfax and Arlington Counties. There are some described differences between the two plants with regard to the inflorescence and fruit, but how do you catch the invasive before it flowers?

So we have to go back to descriptions of the stem and leaves. Here’s C. maculata:

Perennial 6-18 dm stout, erect, caulescent, branched, glabrous. Leaves 10-30 × 8-26 cm, 2 or 3 × pinnately compound, ovate in general outline; leaflets 2-12 × 0.6-3 cm, lanceolate, acute to acuminate; petioles 0.4-3 dm [4-30 cm], sheathing.

Comments: Stems often mottled below with purple. [emphasis added]

And here’s O. javanica:

Perennial with fibrous roots. Stems 3-12 dm, decumbent [reclining on the ground but with an erect or ascending tip], rooting at lower nodes. Leaves alternate, sometimes basal with petioles 5-10 cm, blades 3-20 cm long, ovate to triangular, 1 or 2 × pinnately compound, reduced upward, ultimately becoming sessile on expanded sheaths; leaflets 10-50 × 5-20 mm wide, ovate or rhombic-ovate, rounded, narrowed or tapered at base, serrate.

In other words, they’re both pretty typical members of the Carrot Family. Overall, the Water-hemlock is taller, with larger leaves, but there’s a lot of overlap.

Two things that we overlooked in our survey of the Herndon site:

  • O. javanica stems are decumbent, whereas the plants in our observations are erect.
  • “Brittle stems of java waterdropwort are jointed and hollow and can easily break off and take root.” I don’t believe that we checked our specimens for this character.

Since O. javanica is reported to be edible (it has common names like Water Celery and Vietnamese Parsley), it’s a good thing that we didn’t give our plants a taste!

BANO banding at Clifton Institute

out of the boxin the handClifton Institute technician Caylen Wolfer has her banding kit out again, this time for Barn Owl (Tyto alba) nestlings, just about ready to fledge. A few of us got to ride along.

There are five nestlings (a/k/a fluffballs) in this nest box, which replaced (as far as the owls were concerned) a barn that was pulled down in order to make room for a greenhouse.

Baicich and Harrison write that the owlets are flying after about 60 days in the nest.

I could spot one bird in the box before Caylen got her mitts on it, so this sighting is ABA countable. Yay!