fauxklore

Don’t Analyze This Dream: I was sharing a condo with the friends I play Codenames with several times a week. For some reason, one of them had set up some sort of puzzle / game / competition in the public areas of the condo (i.e. everywhere except the bedrooms and bathrooms). This involved various figurines and plushies, e.g. a ceramic snake with a tiny little Winnie the Pooh nest to it. One of these arrangements had a note suggesting that the contest would start in April.

The Devil’s Tree: There is consensus among my friends that the particular source of the vast clouds of pollen irritating all of us right now is that insidious monstrosity known as the Bradford Pear. These invasive trees are pure evil for other reasons - crowding out native plants, creating vast thickets of thorns, hosting non-native insects, and having weak branches prone to breaking off and obstructing paths and roads. But their greatest evil is their insistence on having sex outdoors, releasing highly allergenic pollen which, not coincidentally, smells like semen. Oddly, almost all of us who are allergic to this substance find it especially troublesome in our left eyes. Nobody has been able to explain this particular phenomenon. Weird but true.


Purim: Among the things I didn’t get around to writing about was Purim, which fell on Saint Patrick’s Day this year, leading to two excuses for drunkenness. (One of the things we do on Purim is get so drunk we can’t tell Haman - the villain - from Mordechai, the hero.) I actually limited myself to a couple of shots of amarula. I did also tune in to a virtual Purim Party but on by Jewish Gen, with a genealogy themed game of Family Feud, which featured a lot of confusion over the actual rules of the game. Even more fun was the Purim Cabaret put on by the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, hosted by the always adorable Adam B. Shapiro and with a wide range of Yiddish songs and skits, plus the recipe for a special cocktail, the Hava Tequila, which is essentially a Tequila Sunrise with Manischevitz wine instead of grenadine.


Written in Stone: This is a set of four operas which I saw at the Kennedy Center last Monday. The first one was Chantal by Alicia Hall Moran and Jason Moran. That had to do with a surveyor assessing the condition of a monument and reflecting on what monuments are. I have to admit that this piece didn’t work at all for me. The libretto felt repetitive and I didn't care for the music.

The second opera was Rise with music by Kamala Sankaram and Libretto by A.M. Homes. The story involves a young girl who gets lost in the Capital Rotunda. There’s some humor as she searches for a bathroom and is aided by a powerful woman who is more interested in showing her the sites than addressing that need. After that situation is resolved, she reflects on the lack of any statues that resemble her, which leads, eventually, to the Portrait Monument of three women involved in the fight for women’s suffrage.

The third opera was, by far, my favorite. it all falls down has music by Carlos Simon and a libretto by Marc Bamuthi Joseph. I loved the music and I thought the story of a young man, slated to take over leadership of a black church from his father, who reveals that he is gay, resulting in division between the church members (including his father) and culminating in the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage was interesting and thoughtful.


The final piece was The Rift with music by Huang Ruo and libretto by David Henry Hwang, who is, of course, famous for his plays, including M. Butterfly. This had to do with the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial and the controversies about its design. I thought it was most effective when it dealt with the effect of the finished monument on visitors to it. Including Robert McNamara as a character (as well as architect and monument designer Maya Lin) was also interesting. But I wasn’t crazy about most of the music.


Overall, this wasn’t particularly my sort of thing, but I was glad I saw it and I would look out for other work by Carlos Simon.


Michael Tilson Thomas: I was back at the Kennedy Center on Friday night to see Michael Tilson Thomas conduct the National Symphony Orchestra. I think I’d only seen him conduct the orchestra for the San Francisco Ballet previously, and I particularly enjoyed his introductions to the three pieces the orchestra performed. Those were interesting and informative and I felt that they really enhanced the performances for me.

First up was Angels by Carl Ruggles. This is a short piece (about 4 minutes long) and MTT talked about Ruggles, who was not a likeable man and about angels more generally. He pointed out that classical paintings show hell at the bottom and heaven, with angels, at the top, with musicians at all levels. However, the musicians at the top have the most pained expressions because they have discovered that G-d likes dissonance. And, indeed, the piece was fairly dissonant, but still interesting.

The second piece was MTT’s own composition, Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind. This is based on a poem by Carl Sandburg, which MTT described as “a honky-tonk Ozyymandias. He read the poem during his introduction. There were also supertitles for the parts of the composition during which the poem was sung. And those were interesting for the use of fonts to enhance the words. I found this piece enthralling.


The final piece was the most familiar one - Aaron Copeland’s Appalachian Spring. Even here, there was something new, as MTT included a section that is usually omitted, in which a fire and brimstone preacher appears to caution a young couple about what lies ahead for them. That section definitely put a different tone to the piece as it returns to the variations on the Shaker hymn Simple Gifts.


All in all, this was a wonderful evening of American music and was definitely worth going to.


Crafts Fair: On Saturday, I went to the Capital Arts and Crafts Festival at the Dulles Expo Center with two friends. They were both designated as shopping discouragers and the only non-consumable I bought was a pin, which I insist was to honor the memory of Madeline Albright. I also bought some chocolate and some honey. And it was fun browsing and discussing potential purchases with both of them.


Still to Come: I still need to write up the Women’s Storytelling Festival and my trip to Boston (which was in between the two visits to the Kennedy Center). And I am behind on various other things.

I found the camera bag (which also had my solar binoculars in it, which is good given that this trip involves an annular eclipse). And the toiletries bag. And my microfiber travel towel. The headlamp, alas, appears to be vacationing in another dimension so I bought another one. That gave me an excuse to go to REI, where I also bought a lifestraw water filter, which is a good move towards trying to reduce my use of plastic bottles.


I also had to go to two supermarkets to get the Sunday New York Times, which I wanted for the annual puzzle supplement. Not that I will manage to actually do the puzzles until I am retired and/or on a cruise. Anyway, the shopping was tiring enough that I decided I needed to nap yesterday afternoon, instead of going to the Jewish Genealogy Society meeting. I did get up for my condo complex holiday party, which didn't seem particularly well attended. They had lots of tasty hors d'oeuvres and desserts. And it was nice to talk with a few people who I know. I didn't stay long because I wanted to get to putting away laundry.


As for earlier in the weekend, I went with a friend to see 63 Up on Friday night. If you are a fan of the 7 Up series, you will want to see this. If you haven't seen the earlier ones, I am not sure what it would be like to jump in this far down the road. (I started seeing them with 28 Up). There was a Q&A with Michael Apted after the movie and, frankly, he's not a very good speaker. For one thing, he had trouble remembering to talk into the microphone. For another, he got rather hung up on one question and didn't recognize that the next questioner was asking something entirely unrelated. I don't think the showing cost any more because of the Q&A, so it wasn't a huge disappointment.


Also, Saturday night was the monthly Voices in the Glen story swap. There was reasonably good turnout, including a couple of people who hadn't been there before. All in all, a fun evening.


Tomorrow morning I am leaving for a couple of weeks. I am not sure what the internet access situation will be (probably okay until Saturday and questionable after that)so I doubt I will post much if at all while I am gone.

I’ll apologize up front for the length of this, but I have lots of things to catch up on. As I have said before, if you have more than two interests in life, you are doomed.

Celebrity Death Watch: Reubin Askew was a progressive governor of Florida, back in the days when such a thing was possible. Fred Phelps headed the Westboro Baptist Church, known for anti-gay bigotry. James R. Schlesinger held a number of government positions throughout his career, most notably as CIA director and as Secretary of Defense (and, later, Secretary of Energy.) After his government career, he was chairman of the board of Mitre. From my personal standpoint, his most notable position was as chair of the Position, Navigation and Timing board (which oversees GPS) and I have drafted at least a few white papers dealing with his recommendations.

Gene Feist founded the Roundabout Theatre Company, which has produced many notable performances, particularly revivals of musicals. David Brenner was a Canadian comedian. And Mitch Leigh wrote Man of La Mancha. His musical failures include Home Sweet Homer. He also wrote the Sara Lee jingle. Nobody doesn’t like Mitch Leigh. (Whose birth name was, by the way, Irwin Michnick, but that scans even worse.)

Non-celebrity Obituary: Kevin Brooks passed away last week. He was a storyteller who had a Ph.D. from MIT (via the Media lab) and worked at Motorola. I only met him briefly,, but I saw his dedication to storytelling and to Laura Packer, his widow. He was a bright, creative, and kind man and his loss will be sorely felt in both Boston and Kansas City.

Loveland: Loveland is Ann Randolph’s one-woman (plus an off-stage male voice) show, currently at Arena Stage. She plays Frannie Potts, whose talent is facial gesturing to sounds. Frannie is on a plane trip from California to her home town in Ohio and the story is a mixture of incidents on the plane with flashbacks involving Frannie’s relationship with her mother. This was billed as a comedy and it did have some funny moments. Unfortunately, most of the humor was a lot cruder than I’d prefer and I suspect thinner-skinned people would find a lot of the show remarkably offensive. I am sure Randolph knows this and is doing it deliberately. Or, at least, I hope anybody who would include a bit in which someone plays the harmonium to nursing home residents while singing, "listen to the drone, it will help you die," is being shocking intentionally. (I will admit I laughed at that bit. Then I went home and took three consecutive showers.) I didn’t stay for Randolph’s brief writing workshop after the show because her material was too far from anything I’d ever want to do.

House of Blue Leaves: I saw tickets on Goldstar for a production by the Providence Players of House of Blue Leaves, a play I remembered enjoying the previous time I saw it. They did a good job, with notable performances by Adam Downs as Artie and (especially) by Jayne Victor as Bunny. The play is a bit dated in some ways, but it is still an interesting dark comedy. I’m uncomfortable with the treatment of mental illness in it, but I recognize that one is supposed to be uncomfortable with that.

Chavurah Movie and Dinner Night: My chavurah had an outing to the Northern Virginia Jewish Film Festival. We saw a movie called Under the Same Sun, which I will write about as part of a movie wrap-up in a day or so. Afterwards we had dinner at Noodles and Company, which isn’t really the most congenial atmosphere for mingling and conversation, though I do like their Indonesian peanut noodle sauté (which I get with tofu).

MIT Summer Intern Reception: The annual reception for MIT summer interns who are interested in the blend of technology and policy is always interesting. Unfortunately, none of this year’s crop of interns was interested in space, so I don’t think I was very helpful to them. There were a couple who expressed an interest in energy, but the overwhelming majority this year were interested in health care. That’s not surprising, but it is disappointing. Still, there was a lot of intelligent conversation (including some with fellow alumni) so was worth going to.

Corcoran Tour and Reception: The MIT Club of Washington had a reception at the Corcoran Gallery and a tour of the collection. The reception was quite lush, with things like smoked salmon and chocolate truffles. Interestingly, they serve only white wine to minimize risk of damage to the artwork. The museum highlights tour was excellent. Our docent was both informative and entertaining. My favorite piece was a sort of pastiche of Van Gogh painted by Robert Colescott. That probably says more about my tastes (dark humor and modernism) than it does about the collection, which is heavy on 19th century American art.

Minor Yarn Frenzy: A friend cleared out her stash and gave me 15 pounds of yarn she didn’t want. In exchange, I gave her old towels to donate to the animal shelter she sometimes volunteers at. About half of the yarn was stuff I could use. The rest of the yarn included rather more novelty yarns (ribbon yarn, pompon, muppet fur, etc.) than I would do anything with, but I know other yarnoholics and most of it has been distributed to grateful crafters. I have someone to send the rest to, but need time to package it and mail it off.

Baltimore Rock Opera Society: Friday night, I went to see the Baltimore Rock Opera Society production of Grundelhammer at the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria. Because it is easy (and free) to get to Old Town from my office, I had some time to shop beforehand. Shops along King Street include both a used bookstore and a yarn store, so you can imagine what happened. I also stopped at Mischa’s, because I had been running low on coffee. I am now restocked with some of Sulawesi’s finest. I also had time for dinner at Eammon’s, which has excellent fish and chips.

As for the show, it was somewhat over the top, but quite entertaining. The premise was a sort of medieval society where battle is fought with guitar riffs. The young son of the true king, Benedon, has to defeat the evil king, Lothario, who secures his power by feeding enemies to a monster (The Grundle). That way Benedon can save the kingdom (and, of course, get the girl). I’ll note the performance of Christopher Krysztifiak as Benedon, who showed a surprisingly wide range for this type of thing. This was also a complicated show technically, with elaborate puppetry (including some very amusing shadow puppets). The downside is that the scene changes took forever. Since they started almost a half hour late and the scene changes probably added up to an hour total, it made for a very late night.

Better Said Than Done – Into the Woods: I was part of a storytelling show on Saturday night. I told a story about our annual summer camp raft trip down the Delaware River. While I had told the story before, I reworked it a lot, which ate up a lot of my mental energy for a couple of weeks. One of the people I used to work on stories with used the phrase "kill your darlings" to refer to the need to cut out material that may be good but just doesn’t belong in that story. It was good advice to keep in mind and I was reasonably happy with how the story turned out. The audience reacted well, too.

I should also note that it was an excellent show, overall. It’s always interesting to me how many different ways a general theme can be interpreted and what a wide range of material and styles there are.

Folklife Festival: I went down to the Mall to catch part of the Folklife Festival on Friday. I heard some of the "stories in song" presentation at the Story Circle in the Wales area, then wandered over to Giving Voice (the section on African-American oral tradition). Onawumi Jean Moss was particularly funny in relating her personal experiences with hair dressing, as well as telling a folk tale. Diane Ferlatte told a wonderful version of "The Talking Eggs." I also enjoyed Valerie Tutson's telling of a story from Trinidad, which is closely related to "Philamadre" (without some of the creepier aspects of the latter). The overall highlight for me was Phyllis Stickney's story about saving her sister from vampires.

Unmistaken Child: Since I was already in the city, I walked over to the E Street Cinema to see Unmistaken Child, an Israeli documentary about a monk searching for the reincarnation of his master. The filmmakers had amazing access to the whole journey and the process of confirming the child as a reincarnated lama, making for an interesting film. The issue of asking the child's parents to give him up to the monastery was handled particularly well.

Used Books: I ran over to McKay this morning and got rid of 27 books, picking up 11 in exchange. I intended to take the rejects over to Hole in the Wall, but they were closed for the 4th of July. I might get over there tomorrow. It was important to get this chore done this weekend, since I'm going to Baltimore next weekend for the NPL con and plan to bring a box to The Book Thing.

Shopping: I also went to the Leesburg Corner outlet mall. My usual reason for going to outlet malls is to stock up on pantyhose and so I did. I also bought underwear (because the Jockey store had a sale and Jockey for Her French cut briefs are one of the best reasons not to live in earlier eras), a pair of shoes (because the Ecco store had something I liked at a very good price) and a couple of cordial glasses because I've been whining for some time about not having any clear cordial glasses. The organic sheets from Pottery Barn are still overpriced even at half their retail cost, however.

Red Sox: You can get M&M's with a Red Sox logo. Unfortunately, they still have the same unimpressive chocolate that regular M&M's have. The Red Sox themed Mr. Potato Head is, however, tempting.

I know I am the last person in North America who uses film. I do have a digital camera, but I travel with 2 cameras because the film is still higher resolution. Also, it is against my fundamental nature to give up on anything that works.

What that means is that I sometimes have need to get film developed. In this case, 5 rolls of film. (I also took about the same number of pictures with the digital camera, by the way. And I will dig out the USB cable and download them Real Soon Now.)

There is a "one hour photo" place in the Crystal City underground. But they did a so-so job the one time I used them and they're pricier than Ritz Camera (who have done a better job in the past). I did think of the convenience of them being just a gerbil trail away but when I stopped in on my way between my offices the other day, their machine was down and they told me they couldn't develop the film that day. So Ritz Camera it would be.

Today after work I finally got around to going over to Ritz Camera over at the Pentagon City mall. The "one hour" part there apparently applies only to single rolls of film. And, of course, since I am the only person in North America who still uses film, I couldn't be so snarky as to ask them what happens if they have more than one customer an hour. They told me to come back in an hour and a half or two hours.

So I kill time at the mall, browsing and speculating on who might ever actually purchase a mango pitter and mentally kvetching about how Nordstrom's no longer has cute cotton pajamas with pictures of cats on them and how I really would enjoy shopping ever so much more if I had a time machine and so on. I go back to Ritz Camera ... and the clerk starts talking to some other clerk about "hey, isn't that the one you had a hard time making a CD of?" and the other clerk has no idea what he's talking about. Eventually they figure out that: 1) they actually did have more than one customer who had actual film and they had some problem with the other woman's CD and 2) their machine was not working properly so they hadn't actually finished and I need to come back tomorrow.

This is an interesting definition of "one hour photo." It's all the more interesting since I have used this very same branch of Ritz Camera at least three times a year for the past few years without any of this drama.
I'll run over at lunch time tomorrow and try to talk them into giving me a discount for my inconvenience.

In theory, I don't believe in buying new clothes for vacations.

In practice, vacations are good excuses to buy things I've been meaning to buy anyway. So, after running some other essential errands (dropping off the vacation hold authorization at the post office, getting the car inspected, and buying a nail brush to replace the one I lost months ago), I ran over to REI.

And discovered that there is a tax holiday in Virginia. From 1-3 August you can buy clothes and shoes under $100 (and school supplies) without paying sales tax. So, not only did I finally get the Keen water shoes I've been eyeing for months, I also bought two pairs of convertible pants. The pants were on sale, too, so I saved even more money.

I did still have to pay sales tax on the insect repellant. I've been contemplating buying a steripen, but decided that a six buck bottle of iodine tablets was good enough for now. Maybe for the next trip ...

By the way, I didn't mention another vacation related purchase earlier in the week. I went over to Olsson's to buy a crossword puzzle book. Usually the choice is difficult, but they made it much easier by having exactly one in stock. I figure a NY Times collection (in this case, Expand Your Mind Crosswords, edited by Will Shortz) is always safe. If I ruled the world, all airport newsstands would be required to sell decent puzzle magazines (that is, not collections entirely of sudoku, word searches, and easy crosswords).