Well this was a beautiful, warm September day. I managed to do everything mostly on time and, in the day’s best victory, I did not stain a suit coat or pair of slacks, as I did on Tuesday. A bit on the left sleeve at the wrist. A bit on the lower side of the left lapel. A big nasty splotch on the leg of the trousers. It was the sort of food-based accident that kept revealing more and more staining, the more I looked.
So I stopped looking.
Note to self, find a miracle-working dry cleaner.
This was the view on the drive in to campus.
Just a lovely day.
In my criticism class I wrapped up the lecture on the purpose and a bit of the how about media criticism. Comparing notes later with my recollection I realized I left out a few things. Some of them I meant to include! But I can work them all back into the conversation later this semester. We’ll start doing some actual critiquing on Tuesday.
One of the elements of the class is that I’ll have the students find some of the material we’ll study. One group found a piece which looks like it should be a lot of fun to unpack next Tuesday. I added one to the list, as well. I figure that, in a week or two, we’ll start bringing a bit more structure into the efforts. If they’ll go along with me, this could be a lot of fun.
I hope they’ll go along with me.
In org comm, we had a fantasy football draft today. The down side to organizational communication is that it isn’t the most fun class for everyone, though it is helpful and useful and the subject matter will be important to people later on. This is a class my lovely bride has been developing for a while now, and so I’m following her lead and turning the lessons and lectures into something that they can fold into and around their fantasy team. So on Tuesday they had to develop their teams, the colors, the mascots, the location, their target demographics. And today they had to pick their teams.
I wanted to take a high angle shot of the room, just like you see on draft day. But I have to tell you, there’s a good solid handful of people in the class that know each other already, and they were having a great time talking smack to one another today. There are six groups, so six student teams in the league, and I think the NFL could do something very interesting by bringing a few franchises into the same space on draft day, just to let us see what the interactions would look like.
I also drafted a team, a team designed to be beat. So most of my players are named Smith, but eventually you run out of Smiths — the one place you can run out of Smiths is the NFL it seems — and so I had to start picking some other people. But then a weird thing happened. This was a 16-round draft, and each team had two minutes to pick, so there was some time to think and, around round nine or so, I thought: I want to actually draft a team that is good.
But, no, the purpose of my team is to give everyone an automatic W when they face me. The purpose of their teams is to let them put into a classroom exercise the things that we talk about. The purpose of the league is to give a group or two the chance to have some bragging rights at the end of the semester. I don’t think that part will be a problem.
Last night at Radio City Music Hall I saw this mural, which is installed near the men’s restroom. It is titled “Men Without Women,” and all of this was oddly placed considering that women were joining the queue for the men’s room.
Anyway, the art was done by Stuart Davis (1892-1964) and we’re just going to have to again wrap our heads around the idea that 19th century people were forming the works that drove much of the 20th century. (People will look at Gen X and Millennials that way one day, too.) This is an oil-on-canvas, painted in 1932, and it is on loan from the Museum of Modern Art.
The little plaque next to it says:
Davis, a prominent 20th Century American artist and a pioneer of the Modern Movement, was commissioned by the architects of Radio City This abstract montage was named by the Rockefeller Center Art Committee after the story by Ernest Hemingway. The mural was planned to be executed in linoleum; however, the NYC Fire Department prohibited the use of this medium. Among the masculine imagery in the piece are smoking paraphernalia, barber poles, playing cards, a sailboat and a roadster convertible. The mural was removed from the lounge in 1975 and given to the Museum of Modern Art. It was returned to the Music Hall as a part of the 1999 restoration.
So it was in this place for 43 years, and it has been back for 26 years.
Davis was one of the first artists to apply for the Federal Art Project during the Great Depression. He loved jazz, and it shows. The same year he painted this, he lost his wife. Wikipedia tells me he liked neither where this work was installed or the name the committee gave it.
It was a bad year. Maybe he had happier ones after that.
If you’re on stage at Radio City Music Hall, this is your view.
It looks empty there because that was about 15 minutes before the show started and people continued to file in for the next three hours, which was the total run of the show. Apparently the thing to do at this place is just wander back and forth.
Anyway, here’s the Indigo Girls playing “Faye Tucker.” Lyris Hung makes even straightforward little violin pieces turn into something that will soar over a room and linger in the air before settling in your lap. It’s not a delicate thing, but that song is an in-your-face confrontation.
I won’t put up every song. I may put up two more, for the special appearances, but that’s probably it.
