Grim

Charles Ardai of Hard Case Crime sorts out the difference between “noir” and “hardboiled” for Matthew Baldwin.

A noir story can be grim and suspenseful or grim and melancholy or grim and paranoid or grim and fatalistic—but it’s pretty much always grim. Its antecedents in literature include Oedipus, King Lear, and the work of Thomas Hardy; ‘noir’ posits a world in which either there is no god and men are left to make their way in a universe that’s indifferent to justice and to their suffering or else a universe that is actively malign…

Another Sinner update

State's Attorney Robert CroweThe playing space at Silver Spring Stage is much more intimate than the CenterStage, where RCP performs. The first row of seats is only a few feet away, at eye level, and is usually well-lit by the spill from the stage lights. So we usually get a good look at all the humanity who come to see the show, and we’ve seen a number of specimens at Never the Sinner. There was the homeless guy who wandered in after the box office manager had closed up for the night. We wouldn’t have minded him at all, except that he started sorting through his shopping bags of bottles to be recycled, rattling the plastic bags and dropping the bottles on the floor. There was the community theater denizen who always rocks back and forth in his seat through the complete proceedings. The woman who brought her service dog with her wasn’t a problem, but the pooch got a little upset in scene 4 when Ryan and Sam start waltzing with each other, and started to bark. Everyone’s a dance critic. She got the dog calmed down for the rest of the show, but the curtain call—60 people banging their hands together—was too much, and the dog howled through it. There was the woman who seemed to be following along with a script. Maybe a WATCH judge who knocks off points for textual inaccuracies? Oh, and lest we forget, the helpful fellow at our preview performance who announced, as the lights and video projector finally went down after the announcement of the verdict, “That’s the end.”

For all the stem-winding bluster of the second act—the dueling counselors monologues—this is a show about sharp, tiny effects. Sam (Loeb) opens up his heart just a crack with a mournful, “I miss my mom,” and then he slams it shut again with, “Not that she deserves it, the stupid old cow.” Kevin, the sound designer, has built a sound plot that underscores nearly the entire play, but he drops it out to highlight Ryan’s (Leopold’s) killer speech, “to me he is like a hard, perfect gem.” Craig’s (Darrow’s) best moment is just one bitten-off word, and it comes in a passage where he tells us how horrible it will be to hang the killers: “I can see them falling through space and stopped by the rope around their necks.” Maybe the best thing about the role I’m portraying is the fabulous double-breasted suit that Eric found for me through his Washington Opera connections. Or perhaps the eye-roll and cheek-puff that I do when Robin (Germaine) goes off message for the third time during her testimony. But seriously, I think I’m doing a good job technically and using my instrument well, especially when I remember to breathe.

Buchanan in bronze

Candidates for a revised edition of Mondo DC, especially since the Squished Penny Museum has closed: Clay Risen visits ten of D.C.’s more obscure monuments.

Needless to say, the Cuban American Friendship Urn is not of recent vintage. Originally located in Havana in commemoration of the 266 U.S. sailors killed in the 1898 USS Maine explosion, a precipitating factor in the Spanish-American War, the marble urn (contents unknown) was moved to Washington after it was knocked over in a 1926 hurricane. At first it was placed in front of the Cuban embassy, but after Castro came to power—and the embassy was shut down—it was moved to its present location, an obscure corner of East Potomac Park, itself a relatively obscure spit of land running south from the Mall.

What year is this?

Wow. I reset the background color in my browser to something other than white, so that I could check that a GIF that a graphic artist had sent me actually had a transparent background. And now I find that at least two sites on my blogroll, as well as my bookmarking service Connotea, don’t bother to set white as the background color for their pages. Yuck!

Must try harder

Scott Rosenberg points out that Facebook’s categories of friendship are useful if you’re nineteen years old, but not so much if you’re a grownup. Here are the possible answers to “How do you know [this friend]?”

  • Lived together
  • Worked together
  • From an organization or team
  • Took a course together
  • From a summer / study abroad program
  • Went to school together
  • Traveled together
  • In my family
  • Through a friend
  • Through Facebook
  • Met randomly
  • We hooked up
  • We dated
  • I don’t even know this person

He’s absolutely right: a minute or two of doodling on my desk pad, and I came up with the following additional choices:

  • My neighbor
  • Through church/mosque/synagogue/temple/coven/…
  • We are in the same profession [we might be in the same “organization,” and we might not]
  • [This friend] is my lawyer/clergyman/doctor/accountant/child’s teacher/psychotherapist/taxidermist/…
  • I am [this friend’s] customer
  • [This friend] is my customer

And to be really useful, the information has to be even more specific than that. In my PDA Contacts app, I use one of the user-defined fields to keep track of what theater project I know somebody from. So that if I forget that I know Lori K. because she was the producer for Forum in 2001, my organizer won’t.

Bottle it up

Luís Gil explains why cork is a better choice for stoppering wine bottles than its synthetic alternatives. Some of his arguments are not persuasive, and amount to “we’ve always done it this way,” but consider:

6) Cork is a renewable resource and cork oak forests are one of the most sustainable natural systems, providing the habitat of several endangered species and supporting one of the highest levels of biodiversity among European forests. Cork comes from the bark of the cork oak [Quercus suber], and is harvested only once every nine or ten years, without detriment to the tree.

* * *

10) Cork production is based in poor rural areas where it provides much needed jobs. About 150,000 people around the world work with cork, and it is an important part of Southern Europe and North African economies.

* * *

13) Cork sequesters carbon from the atmosphere; a cork stopper sequesters about twice is weight of CO2; all the cork stoppers produced in one year represent the CO2 pollution of about 49,000 automobiles each year.

Granite kissed

in progress WhitmanStone masons are scribing a quotation from Walt Whitman’s “The Wound Dresser” into the Q Street N.W. entrance of the Dupont Circle Metro station. The complete stanza reads:

Thus in silence, in dream’s projections,
Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hos-
   pitals;
The hurt and the wounded I pacify with soothing hand,
I sit by the restless all the dark night—some are so
   young;
Some suffer so much—I recall the experience sweet
   and sad;
(Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have
   cross’d and rested,
Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips.)

Update: Via a DCist comment thread, WMATA’s press release on the project.