Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge

Fighting off a case of the flu, I took an overnight trip with Leta to Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge on the Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay to see the eagles. The weather was fine for our morning field trip. We got a quick look at a group of Delmarva Fox Squirrels (Sciurus niger cinereus) in the tall, sparse pines traversed by the Woods Trail. As for birds, we ticked 20+ species, including three species of raptors, a stock-still Hermit Thrush and, far out on the water, a cluster of about 15 American White Pelicans (Pelecanus erythrorhynchos). Alas, we were too late in the season for easy looks at Snow Geese. Since the last time that I visited, the refuge has added a second story to the visitor center, with spotting scopes trained on the eagles’ resting snags. This new space has good interpretative material and some nice mounted specimens of ducks and raptors.

Fox Farm-Snead Farm Loops

TrailsideI took a quick holiday hike on the Blue Ridge: Hike #1 in PATC’s Circuit Hikes in Shenandoah National Park: two loops joined at the middle, descending into Fox Hollow and climbing Dickey Hill. The air was chilly (although warm for the season), especially starting out, with a little wind behind it, so I took the 5.0 miles at a brisk 2-hour pace. My altimeter showed the elevation change to be an easy 750 feet, not the 1000 feet cited in the Guide. The footing was a little slick in places, due to recent rains on the autumn’s leaf litter. Nothing out of the ordinary for bird life: winter mixed flocks of chickadees, nuthatches, titmice, small woodpeckers, cardinals; a cluster of juncos taking the waters at an intermittent stream draining Snead Farm; and an occasionally-heard Pileated Woodpecker. And perhaps the best part of the trip: the trailhead is less than 90 minutes by car from my front door.

My notes from a September, 1999 field trip record a Ruffed Grouse along the power line cut that is Snead Farm Road.

The Skriker

Nanna Ingvarsson executes a star turn in the title role of one of Caryl Churchill’s more demanding texts, The Skriker. The Skriker is “a shapeshifter and death portent, ancient and damaged,” and she is accompanied by all manner of denizens from the underworld of British folk tales—spriggans, kelpies, brownies—in this story set in modern England, originally produced in 1994. The Skriker carries off one, perhaps two, young working-class women (the effective Katie Atkinson and Lindsay Haynes) to the deeps below a no-longer green and pleasant Britain. The narrative, although ultimately unsatisfying in its perfunctory conclusion, carries echoes of the Persephone myth as well.

The Skriker speaks a slippery, allusive, punning speech with a logic of its own that brings to mind Monty Python’s Word Association Football sketch rewritten by James Joyce, and Ingvarsson and director Kathleen Akerley deserve high marks for making the words, at times impenetrable on the page, meaningful and accessible. Here’s a fragment from the punishing opening monologue:

Out of her pinkle lippety loppety, out of her mouthtrap, out came my secreted garden flower of my youth and beauty and the beast is six six six o’clock in the morning becomes electric stormy petrel bomb.

If the no-frills production doesn’t always manage the scene transitions well, it should be credited with finding a use for the Warehouse’s door to the back parking lot (a kind of Hades itself) that opens directly into the auditorium. Many of the folklore characters will be unknown to American audiences (who, at best, might know who the Green Man is), so it’s too bad that Churchill doesn’t give us more time and text to get to know the excellently-named demon Rawheadandbloodybones.

  • The Skriker, by Caryl Churchill, directed by Kathleen Akerley, Forum Theatre & Dance, Warehouse Theater, Washington

All that is left is the schlepping

One of the items on my checklist for the break was to clean up some of the piles of useless crap in the basement and generally make room for more crap. My goal is to end up with marginally less stuff than when the gift-exchanging season began, and I think I’m gonna make it.

My company had a toys for tots box in the lobby, so the bag of leftover toys and party favors that I bought as cast and crew gifts for Goodnight Desdemona eight years ago finally got disposed of. There were a couple of nice (albeit vintage) items in there, like a Wishbone as Romeo and Juliet play set. I also let go of the plastic shopping bags from the Hy-Vee supermark chain that a friend of Leta’s (Clive? Colin?) brought back from Iowa to use as props for Independence. Somehow I was convinced that we were going to revive the show and that the bags would be needed.

I sifted through three boxes overflowing with theater memorabilia, possibly reusable props and costume pieces (you never know when a pair of those geezer sunglasses that look useful only to Geordi will come in handy), desk toys, and miscellaneous junk and reduced the storage footprint to two boxes. I filled a small container with trash, but my super-secret plan is to bring a box of the white elephants to the office and leave it in the break room with a “free to a good home” sign on it. Somebody will want the Harry Potter toothbrush and the transistor radio in the shape of a cartoon pig.

I pulled out one boxful of novels from the shelf to be donated to the library. Leta got first dibs and scored herself paperbacks of Rose Macaulay and Cold Comfort Farm. Except for the Anne Rice, perhaps, no used bookstore will take what’s left. There’s also a couple of books that I in turn bought from a library table to be used as props when I played the psychiatrist in Nuts. One of the titles is rather alarming: a translation from the Russian of a 1959 monograph by G. Y. Malis on mental illness. Chapter Two is titled, “The Effect of the Blood of Patients with Schizophrenia on the Development of the Larvae of Rana temporaria.”

The job that took the longest, surprisingly, was wading through seven years of Interview to clip the passing “what’s up with Laurie Anderson this month?” story or Robin Tunney profile and to pulp the rest. There’s nothing better for re-establishing perspective than to flip through a 90s-era Rose McGowan piece and then drop it into the recycle bin.

Paul Taylor Dance Company

The company presents two new, quite disparate works, framed by two older pieces set on music by G. F. Handel.

If Taylor’s Promethean Fire (2002) is read as a bold, optimistic response to the events of 9/11, his Banquet of Vultures (2005) is a grim, darkly pessimistic reaction to the prosecution of hostilities ever since those attacks. In murky, just-liminal light provided by Jennifer Tipton, dancers in olive drab jumpsuits cross the stage in headlong runs that suggest the Hoarders and Wasters of Dante’s Inferno. Three men struggle in a pool of light, with ever-shifting support, while another writhes in another pool of light stippled with blackness. MIchael Trusnovec, dressed in a black suit and red tie, hunches his shoulders like Tricky Dick and jerks about, barely in control of the situation: he’s Death in a power suit. This piece showcases the Taylor men with steps that remind one of Cloven Kingdom.

Offsetting this dance is the brief, comic Troilus and Cressida (reduced) (2006), featuring Taylor’s go-to girl for clowning, Lisa Viola. A travesty of classical conventions, set on Ponchielli’s Dance of the Hours (yes, the one with the dancing pachyderms), the piece gets mileage out of Viola’s big visible effort in her jumps that lifts her at most three inches off the deck. She is matched by Robert Kleinendorst, who has to partner her while she climbs over his shoulder and back down his back, all the while his harem pants having fallen to his ankles. Subtle is not the word for it.

Rounding out the evening are the measured, stately Airs from 1978 and the very early Aureole (1962), featuring big straight arms that whirl like pinwheels. It’s a light, lovely piece, like spring clouds scudding about.

  • Paul Taylor Dance Company, Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater, Washington

One of the simple joys of visiting the Kennedy Center is the coconut-scented liquid soap in the washrooms.

AI = audience interface

Ten more things computers (and their users) do in the movies that they don’t in real life.

9. You’ve Got Mail is Always Good News

In the movies, checking your mail is a matter of picking out the one or two messages that are important to the plot. No information pollution or swamp of spam. No ever-changing client requests in the face of impending deadlines. And you never overlook information because a message’s subject line violated the email usability guidelines.

Getting to the end

Eighteen years after its hardcover publication date, and the year that it arrived on my doorstep from the Book of the Month Club (probably the last thing that I ever bought from them), and fiteen years after a false start, I have finished reading my copy of The Twenty-Seventh City, Jonathan Franzen’s first novel. I. Have. Finished. The Twenty-Seventh City. I feel that more of a burden has been lifted from me than when I finished In Search of Lost Time.

I never meant for it to go this long. In 1991, I read about fifty pages of this political thriller/social satire set in St. Louis in the middle of the Reagan-Thatcher years. And I was interested, but I put the book aside for some reason. And one month became two and became twelve, and then it was a case of starting over because I’d forgotten who S. Jammu and Martin Probst were. And if you’re starting over, then there are so many other enticements on the “read me” shelf, fresher choices. I let Franzen’s second novel go by, and then I read and enjoyed his third, The Corrections, five years ago. And still the bridesmaid, The Twenty-Seventh City remained on the shelf.

Then, finally, I dug back into it the day before Thanksgiving. It was worth the wait. I think it’s a stronger book than the other, certainly more ambitious, with themes of gentrification and coming of age and cultural assimilation, and what it means to have built something without designing it (Probst is the fictional general contractor who has built the Gateway Arch). And Probst’s antagonists are among the most chillingly manipulative that I’ve met in print. There are good lyrical passages, a little history of urban planning and development, and compelling plot. Oh! and a map!

I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself. The next most-senior book on the shelf is Angela Carter’s final novel, Wise Children, which went with me on vacation to the Outer Banks in the early 1990s and was never finished.

Digital Holga

My mother bought me one of these toy digital cameras for Christmas. The packaging disingenuously suggests a retail price of $39.95, but I hope she didn’t pay more than the $10 that seems to be the going rate at Walgreen’s. I’m reluctant to install software drivers from such a flimsy-looking product on my already delicate Windows laptop, so the thing will probably remain in its blister pack until I can do a junk purge.

To Mom’s credit, she found one nice gift: a reprint-house collection of Superman comics from the WWII era.

(Link via robot wisdom.)

Backpacker citizen science

Plans are underway to establish the Applalachian Trail Mega-Transect, “a long-term collaborative project to comprehensively monitor changes in the mountain and valley environments” the the famous trail from Maine to Georgia traverses.

“The Appalachian Trail’s 2,174 miles are the spine of the world’s longest publicly owned greenway, a protected home for thousands of special species and for the legacies of the eastern mountains. Downwind and downstream is perhaps one-third of the U.S. population. What happens to the Trail environment soon will happen to that environment,” notes [David N.] Startzell…. “We have a long history of engaging citizens for public benefit, and this seems an ideal way to provide many more opportunities to a broader spectrum of the public.”