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football / IU / Tuesday / video — Comments Off on Some things to watch
26
Sep 17

Some things to watch

I spent the evening in the television studio. What did you do with your evening?

Two shows were put in the can tonight. The news show there and this helpful little program which keeps you up-to-date on current events and pop culture:

Here’s another great segment of television that is worth watching this week:

This topic is going to get stretched and twisted in nine different ways in the next few weeks, but this is important.

Friday / IU / photo / video — Comments Off on Happens all the time
22
Sep 17

Happens all the time

I like the way the sun comes into our television studio. I only spend one morning a week in there, but when the clouds don’t interfere you can get some real fun light tricks. But you have to shoot in sequence or the light doesn’t make sense. The onward march of time and all of that. If, that, is, you understand how the building is oriented to the passing sun. But who cares, look at that backlight!

That particular shot is in a corner of the studio. We have four chairs around the corner, so in two seats you can get the nice angelic backlighting effect. And in the other two you get a nice wall treatment. You can see it all here. This is the morning show they shot today:

And we are on the road once more. We’re taking an overnight trip down to Louisville. So we’ll have some barbecue, see a few people, do a few things and then be back it even sets in that we’ve gone somewhere. It takes no time, and it takes a lot of time. And after that, time really flies.

Happens all the time.

history / IU / photo / Thursday / video — Comments Off on So your standard Thursday night, then
21
Sep 17

So your standard Thursday night, then

And now, a nice little sports show you can watch to catch up on all of the local sporting news:

I saw this print in a restaurant last weekend:

We have a running question about whether it is true that Marilyn Monroe came home from that USO tour to her new husband and said “It was so wonderful, Joe. You never heard such cheering.”

“Yes,” Joe DiMaggio said, “I have.”

It’s a great line, because Joe DiMaggio. But it was apparently first written in a Gay Talese essay, so it almost seems too perfect. The nature of quotes is a fickle thing sometimes, but if we will them into being we can sometimes will disbelief into submission.

I don’t know. I wasn’t there. It’s interesting to think that it happened, because it says so much about Marilyn Monroe. But to think that it is just a manufactured line, that she would know better, would say an awful lot more. Which is why I like to think it didn’t happen, that that wasn’t the exchange between an aging ball player and a young starlet.

I do know this. She’s just glowing in pretty much the entire photo collection, and she’s got that little dress on, in Korean, in the winter. All of the troopers are bundled up. It is February and some 30 degrees, at best. But there she was, soaking in that adoration and lust. A shot of home in a place very much not.

And of course I see this photo on the side wall of a hallway heading to a restroom.

You know, it isn’t as easy to track down the photographer of a 63-year-old photo as you might imagine. Surely the rights to that photo belong to an agency by now, but they’re all buying each other up and none of that helps gets you back to the actual photo zapper.

I think she’s singing Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend in that shot. You can see the same gesture here:

And if you watch the whole thing you might have to re-think everything you know about the 1950s.

I don’t really have a way to end this piece. I’ve looked for loops to repeat and curious, out-of-this-world trivia hooks that you wouldn’t believe. But everyone in the story is from somewhere else, or did other things. But I’ve watched that video a few times and I imagine Joe DiMaggio had a … different sort of adoring crowd.

IU / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on The problem with amorphous sayings
20
Sep 17

The problem with amorphous sayings

We have this large classroom with stadium-style seating. And in the back of the room they built in a magic box that connects the room to the television control room. Take a few cameras up there, plug them into the magic box and then you can use the shots to make a show, record a lecture or whatever. We’re going to do that soon, perhaps for the first time. (We’ve only been in the building for a year, after all.)

So today we lugged a few cameras up to the third floor, and we carried a few armfuls of cables up there and plugged them all in to make sure it worked. And it worked, mostly. We now know what works and what we need to get the engineers to fine tune. And fine tune it, they will.

Anyway, in the back of that room next to that magic box there is a window with a nice view:

That’s the Student Building, which was recently renamed the Frances Morgan Swain Student Building. They picked a good name. Swain graduated from IU, married a man who would later become the school’s ninth president and she raised gobs of money for that building. (And even after they left for other roles at other schools, the Swains kept donating money to various IU funds and memorials.) That was originally to be the women’s building, but then a Rockefeller donation came through to make it the Student Building. All of this in a time when Swain was both an advocate for women in higher education and places for them to actually, you know, live.

When the Swains were at IU the population increased from 524 to 1,285 students. Today there are just over 49,000. He passed away in 1927 and she died in 1936. I wonder what they’d think of the place today.

The Yankee and I visited a bookstore today and I saw this:

The saying has always bothered me. I think, mostly, as a pragmatist. If I have the option to shoot for the moon or shoot for the stars, wouldn’t the latter be the more ambitious? Why do you see it as a consolation prize? I mean, sure, I could go visit the barren rock in orbit around us, or I could go see some other fusion-fission space phenomena, and maybe check out any planets moving around it.

But that’s the one part of it. And it occurred to me today what has always been off about the sentiment: “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss you can use its gravity to go deeper into the solar system and we can still chat, until loss of signal, because you’re probably going to run out of battery power before you make it to another star, anyway.”

Now put that on a pencil tote and send the kids off to school with it.

We had a great dinner tonight:

I hope you did, too.

adventures / IU / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off on Oh my!
19
Sep 17

Oh my!

We had a big night of it this evening. The Yankee and I went to the Japanese steakhouse for dinner where the second best show was being seated with people who have never been to a Japanese steakhouse before. The third best, of course, was the gentleman who made our food.

The best show of the night, though, was back on campus. We went to see George Takei take part in a lecture series. He had a full house, as you can see from our near-the-back-of-the-auditorium seats:

He talked Trek, of course, but most of his lecture was about his activism, and his family history. He’s got that incredible story: internment camp as a kid, watching his father re-build his life as a teen, becoming an actor, becoming a politician and a activist and then his coming out and his continued activism. He’s funny, he’s poignant, he’s powerful and passionate. Like a true stage performer, he stayed in almost one spot the entire night. He must be a light tech’s dream, he never moves.

That’s why I could never be a stage performer. I’d hit my marks. And then I’d hit everyone else’s too. Also, the lines. I took some great improv classes in college — because the professor was energetic and it seemed like a good way to get ready for some less-interesting class — and I learned that I’d never do well with remembering my lines. And, lo, another performer’s career that wasn’t.

Also, I studied method acting, specifically, Stanislavski’s system, which seemed obvious and basic enough to not be real. And if you can’t experience the system that is trying to teach you to experience the role then you’re probably doing it wrong. I never could get past the part of the method where it wasn’t just a guy struggling to remember his lines and hit everyone’s marks.

I thought about that while enjoying ice cream cake tonight. It was a great experience.

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