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The lead story here pretty much took up all of the day for some reason:
I’ve covered presidents in fixed positions, arriving presidents, more than a few hostage situations and a couple of violent protests. All of which were more ado about something than this. But this is the way of things.
The good news is: everyone that wanted to be heard spoke or shouted in one way or another and no one was hurt in the process. So victory all the way around.
Had a few presentations to take part in today at the Southern States Communication Association’s annual conference. This one was with all of my political communication scholar friends:
It is humbling to be at the end of the table with a group like that, let me just say.
At the end, after we had speculated on the Trump campaign and not enough on the Clinton campaign, and after the question and answer period, someone asked if all of these Smiths are related. Someone said that there were the two pairs. And Larry Powell there said he was to blame for two of us. The Yankee and I had met in the graduate school program he chaired, and solidified the start of our friendship in one of his classes and now, seemingly moments later, here we are.
And, later, I got to take part in this really cool presentation:
I showed a lot of clips of shows and class exercises. Most of the shows I’ve embedded in this space, previously. One of the film professors sent me to the conference with this mini-documentary.
My Grandpa’s Garage was the final project in a documentary filmmaking class, which introduces students to a variety of styles, approaches, and techniques, like personal essay, stop-motion, use of archival materials and so on. One of this group’s biggest challenges, as you’ll see, was curating the volume of information. There was a lot to search through and consider, there were varying production formats to consider, and to find a way to the path that leads to a well-woven, engaging story. And it is that. It is specific. It is quite personal — and yet there are universal elements and themes here for viewers:
My Grandpa's Garage from Adrienne Grace Wagner on Vimeo.
Adrienne Wagner directed the project, working with two other students: Cadence Baugh and Blake Phelps. It was featured at the Heartland Film Festival, and was one of five finalist in the Cine Golden Eagle Competition. Other finalists were films from NYU, Berkeley and Syracuse, so the implication is that it stands next to traditionally outstanding peers.
Most of the IU students do. It is so neat to be around such talented people, and a treat to show off their work.
So you’re going to drive about eight hours, as we intended to do yesterday. A good thing to do is to have an almost-violent flat tire in the first hour of your trip, things change.
So there I was, side of the highway, tiny little shoulder, inches from trucks whirring by as I pulled off an empty case of vulcanized rubber and put on a smaller tube of air. Sometimes the trucks move over. Sometimes they can’t, because there’s someone in the left lane. Sometimes you could look down the road and see they were going to be so close I’d simply stand up and move away. I’m used to cars and trucks not leaving me any room on the road, but on the highway it seemed a bit much.
Anyway, to another rental car office, where they could not give us a new sedan. Finally, after the three staffers tried for a long time to reconcile our route and their other stores along the way, they gave us a Dodge Ram pickup:
And you’ll forgive me, but I didn’t take a photo of the first rental car. Why would you? Anyway, it was an Altima, a few years newer than mine, but there is virtue in renting a car with which you are familiar. This was one of the reasons I wasn’t interested in a pickup. I don’t normally drive a truck and I’m not interested in parking one all weekend and gas mileage and so on.
Also, the big, bad Dodge Ram doesn’t have a gear shift. It has a knob:
Odds are pretty decent, you’d like to think, that Sam Elliott didn’t know about that when he signed on to do the voiceover work in their TV spots. He might have. He probably didn’t care, but it fits the idea in your mind, doesn’t it?
So we drove the Dodge for about an hour yesterday, which was the plan, to another rental car shop, where the crew would have either a sedan or a small SUV waiting for us. So we got this:
I moved the luggage in the first part of the rain while The Yankee handled the paperwork. We got into the Liberty and realized it didn’t have a USB port. She wanted a USB port. So we changed to this Mitsubishi:
If you’re keeping track, that’s four rentals in a few hours. And through part of Kentucky and all of Tennessee we drove in the big storms and learned that the Mitsubishi is not an especially fun thing to drive. Crosswinds were pushing us all over the lane. I would have looked like a DUI if there were any police on the road, but they were probably off stopping floods or something. The storm was intense, but hey, the Mitsubishi did well with standing water and hydroplaning.
We may try to swap this one out this weekend. How can we get to rental car number six and seven if we don’t get number five, first?
Crossing over the Ohio River to Louisville, just before the traffic and the storms turned this eight hour journey into a 12-hour odyssey.
Which made this morning’s panel no less fun.
Hey, we’re here now — and the subject matter improves, too. There were storms and almost everyone had a tough time getting in, but we’re all here, from Texas and Mississippi and Indiana and the fun and friends and scholarly talk can begin.
Two of our television shows made the front page of the paper today. You can read the story here.
Good morning, Hoosiers! Pick up a copy of today's issue on stands or read it here: https://t.co/Uk5SHygIpN pic.twitter.com/69G3blFXiO
— IndianaDailyStudent (@idsnews) March 30, 2017
And I didn’t spend the night in the studio, which is also nice. Thursday evenings usually means a night shoot, but they did two shows last night. Here’s one of them now:
That dual-shoot meant the last thing I’d have to do today was a meeting at 6:30. But that meeting got canceled just before my 4:30 meeting, so I got to go home at 6 p.m. And that meant my 12-hour day was cut to nine. Because I also had the good fortune to attend a meeting at 9 a.m. Sometimes you work 12-hour days, sometimes they don’t materialize. And rather wonder over how the 12s happen, you just enjoy when they don’t. So when you work a full day and you still get home hours before you usually do, why it feels like the weekend starts early.
So fortunate was I that the rain held off until I got back to my office after my last meeting and stopped just in time for me to get in the car and drive home, in the gray daylight.
Would have been better if the skies were blue. But, hey, we might see the sun by the weekend.
I got to spend part of this morning in a conversation with the dean, my boss, and New York Times columnist Roger Cohen:
The dean is the gentleman on the left. He hosts a podcast where he talks with campus researchers, newsmakers and various guests. Cohen has a small role on campus and is visiting this week in fulfilling some of those responsibilities, so he stopped in for a chat. He always seems like a kind man in interviews and today was no different. He’s also quite thoughtful, as you might imagine for a columnist. It was a fine way to spend part of your morning.
I also sat in on some student leadership interviews today, taught someone how to use a phone and watched the production of a news show. Those are always fun. I especially enjoy when they add new elements to their programming. Here’s a new interview segment, which concentrates on student entrpreneurs:
