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19
Apr 23

Two days until spring

It was cloudy and 66 today. This is, apparently, the perfect seasonal average for the day according to the National Weather Service’s almanac. So we’re continuing apace to the official beginning of the locally recognized spring, the Little 500 bike races on Friday and Saturday. Tomorrow it will be much warmer, and sunny. Friday, it will be chilly, with rain all day. Saturday will be more of that.

This spring-at-the-race theory is something I seized on during our first “spring” in Bloomington. At the women’s bike race, that Friday, I took a rain coat to meet the forecast, but the rain stayed away. There was a moment during the Saturday race that I realized spring showed up. It was as demonstrable a moment as pleasant weather can offer, and it was discernible.

Every year since — the bike race was canceled in 2020, and thus not included in these observations, meteorologically speaking — the Little 500 bike races have marked the arrival of spring. This year looks to be the exception that proves the rule.

In a few weeks, Evan will graduate from IU. He’s been at IUSTV the whole of his four years on campus.

Most students come in quietly. It’s a lot: an organization that has its own rhythms, juniors and seniors to look up to, and what do all of these buttons do, anyway?

Before the end of his freshman year, everyone knew about Evan’s energy. Everyone understand the passion he carries. And we all quickly learned how infectious that was.

In those early years he worked his way through the ranks as a beat reporter, and ultimately became a co-director of the sports division as a junior and senior. He cheered on his peers and, as he advanced, he helped the younger students. It’s the way we’ve designed this model to work and, in many ways, Evan has personified that. He’s one of those people at the front of the room, one of those people with the loud, encouraging voice, one of those people with the sort of positive attitude you want to work alongside.

During the spring term of his sophomore year, he also began hosting the sports talk show, The Toss Up, which had been one of his longterm goals. He signed off this week after his 50th episode, his last time to sit in the big chair.

Evan and I recently had a great conversation in the studio. He laughed and pointed to another part of the room and said, “Three or four years ago, we stood right over there and talked about these same things.” That, too, is how we’ve designed this model, so that people who want to go into broadcasting can come through here, practice what they’re learning in class, sharpen their skills and go out and get the high quality internships and, ultimately, great jobs.

He will soon join KNWA-TV and Fox 24 News in Fayetteville, and also appear on KARK 4 in Little Rock, as a sports reporter and anchor. Those are great markets; viewers in The Natural State are getting an extremely talented young man full of great potential. I am excited to see him working in the SEC, and I can’t wait to watch him call the Hogs.

He will work hard, smile a lot, and he’ll soon become a pro’s pro. My friend Evan Kamikow will always be a big, big part of what we’re doing at IUSTV, and I’m incredibly proud to see him continue to grow.

As will these ladies. Between them, Brianna Ballog, Samantha Condra and Audrey Hausberger have covered just about every sport under the sun here, often in multiple capacities, in multiple outlets at IU. Most importantly, they’ve done no less than help create a lasting culture at IUSTV Sports.

They’re all graduating this term. They’ve all got broadcast jobs — not all of which have been publicly discussed yet, so let us stay circumspect for now — and I’ve no doubt that over the course of their careers they’re going to do more for women in sports media than I can possibly imagine. No doubt.

And then there’s Griffin Epstein, one of the hardest working, quietly humble people you could have the pleasure to work with. His achievements around here could, like the women above, go on for quite a while. He’s been the sports director at the radio station. He’s been a beat reporter, a member of the production crew and a longtime panelist at IUSTV. He’s calling one of the big bike races this weekend. He’s about ready to start his play-by-play career. We’re building out a pipeline for that, too.

Which brings me to Jack Edwards, seen here still getting taller than me. He probably walked onto campus as the expert in global soccer, and in four years no one has even come close to threatening him for the crown. He started for IUSTV as a beat reporter for soccer. In his college career, he’s risen through the ranks of all of the sports media outlets here.

Jack will soon be headed down to Florida to call soccer games, a full-time play-by-play man. It’s a perfect place for him to begin, and it’s just the beginning.

Two others are going to be graduating soon, too. One in the summer, a brilliant and kind young woman who will be much in demand for her incredible production skills, and a young man who will probably have a job about 15 minutes after an incredible vacation he’s presently planning.

I’m not sure what I’m more jealous of, the great futures ahead of all of them, or that vacation — it’s a great one. But, then, so are the talents and potential of all of these graduating seniors. They’re all bound for great things. That’s what we produce now, not sports or news or experiential opportunities, but people bound for great things.

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18
Apr 23

Three days until spring

We’re counting down, because it seems a fun thing to do this week really, and I noticed an unusual thing today.

Everything went green. Bright, wavy green in a big, big way all of a sudden. This is a blurry view of the trees from my campus office. Blurry because, I don’t know why, but I like it.

And this is the same tree, just a few moments later, in focus, and from beneath it’s now bountiful limbs.

But that’s different. This is the same tree, roughly from the same angle as the blurry one, though the linear distance is different.

So that’s three photos of the same tree. Forgive me. It’s all so bright and new still, here in the third week of April, and it will take a few more days for the foliage to feel familiar. It’s like the shock of the seasons. There is that indistinct time where you stand at the door and mentally prepare yourself for one condition outside — hot, mild or cold — but then get something different. It is, in fact, the shock of the season.

Three days until the local, officially recognized beginning of spring. Since 2017 it has always arrived the weekend of the Little 500, the two big bike races.

Ha! I just looked at the weather. Friday, the day of the women’s race, the forecast calls for rain, with a high of 58 and a low of 44. The men’s race on Saturday will be under partly cloudy skies. The high is projected at 54, with a low of 34 degrees. Tomorrow, which has no bearing on this whole spring-arrives-with-the-bike-race phenomenon, the high is 82. Weird year.

Anyway, here’s another photo. A different tree. It just looked cool.

Cool, I say.

I was in the studio this evening with the news team, the penultimate news show of the year. It’s a wonderful feeling when a semester winds down, more so when it’s the end of an academic year, but bittersweetly so. For the news crew in particular, we’ll see a few key people graduate, but there’s a whole platoon of freshmen who have this year gained incredible experience for next year. The news side, I am happy to see, will continue to make good strides, having built a nice pipeline, evenly balanced between older and younger students. Now, they’re always growing and growing, helping each other grow, and I pitch in on the little things.

Tomorrow will be another night in the studio, with the sports gang, and that may be their last taping of the year. Bittersweetly so.

It seems we’re always playing catchup on the Re-Listening project, and that’s what we’re doing today. We’re doing that with Alanis Morissette’s “Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie.” The album was released in November of 1998, but I picked it up in early 1999. It was another freebie, and, through the Re-Listening project I have discerned a pattern. I didn’t always fall in love with the freebies I picked up way back when.

From this remove, my time with Alanis Morissette feels like a stream of consciousness ple goes like this: Jagged Little Pill has been everywhere for two years, no need to buy that. Also my roommate has a copy, so … Dave Coulier!? The next one, I’ll get the next one. Oh, there it is on the giveaway table (probably) so put that in the pile.

The album debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200 and set a record for the highest first-week sales by a female artist, a record she held for two years. It stayed on the Billboard 200 for a solid six months, and has moved millions of units … but, because it is the music industry, being triple platinum after “Jagged Little Pill” was 16-times platinum in the US, this was underwhelming. (The music industry is weird.) And I’m going to gloss over all of it.

I’ve listened to it. I tried to dive into it. I paid attention to every track this time through. There are 17 tracks here, the runtime is almost 72 minutes. It’s a long record, one which has never resonated with me. I find that odd, since we all watched her grow up. Grew up at the same time, whatever. The woman has lived her entire life in front of the public eye, all of the stages and phases a person goes through, we’ve seen them. For 1998, this was fine, but watching an artist’s march through life leaves a different sort of longitudinal vulnerability. Some of this feels dated now, though, that I finally figured out what always troubled me here. It’s the background tracks. There’s just too much nasally, head voice harmony on here.

Anyway, the stream of consciousness takes us far beyond this 1998 record, end with the best song, the best performance, I’ve ever heard Morissette do. This was July of 2020, just the right mood during that first Covid summer. Sadly, NBC has taken the original video down. Here’s a taste of it.

It was a perfect performance: a poignant song, a new record, eight years since the last and a full family in her orbit. This is the Alanis Morissette my stream of consciousness is most interested in now, not the 24-year-old from “Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie” but the confident, multitasking woman at a new kind of peak of her powers. That’s the one worth re-listening to.

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10
Apr 23

75 miles later

Happy Monday from the cats. Phoebe is enjoying the sun. We’ve had our share of clear skies the last few days and they’re both taking full advantage. A sun-warmed furry cat sits in her own realm of indulgence.

Poseidon also wishes you a Happy Monday. And he would like you to know that, for all of the times I tell him I outwit him because I am bigger and smarter, he is now taller than me. Way, way taller than me.

He’ll rub it in for days.

So the cats are doing great, thanks.

We went out for a bike ride this weekend. Twice, actually. Two of my three weekend rides, were outside.

These were rides two and three outdoors this year. Still low enough to count, and a late start owing to a combination of weather, my schedule(s) and my lovely bride working her way back into riding outside. These were her second and third rides on the road since her horrific crash last September.

So rare and novel, it still feels like going outside is getting away with something.

I remember, just after her surgery at the end of September, after a week of zero sleep for either of us, the surgeon came out to tell me she did well. He taught me a new word and said they’d send for me when I could go back to sit with her. While I waited, I called my mother-in-law, giving the good news, trying to reassure, being chipper. I called my mom, too. Both of them, being thoughtful moms, asked me how I was doing. I told her mom I was great: all systems go, taking care of your daughter, looking forward to seeing you soon. To my mother, I heard myself, a bit more candidly, say that, after a week of worry and sympathetic grimacing and no sleep and a fair amount of stress that “I could really use a bike ride.” Seemed selfish then, and in retrospect. My mom took the ‘You have to take care of yourself too,’ approach, which was welcome.

That was on September 29th of last year. I spent the next two weeks and change hovering over the convalescing patient. Three-and-a-half weeks after her crash I got on my bike again — riding part of the same route she’d been on — which wasn’t spooky at all. Between the rest of October and November, recovery, catching up on stuff and so on, I got in four more road rides before the weather turned. (I looked that up on the app and I am surprised the count was that high.)

Last month, on a picturesque weekend day, she wanted to ride outside. We pedaled around the neighborhood for a few minutes, going slowly, averaging just 10 miles per hour. A tentative toe in tepid water.

Saturday, after months of rehab — her ribs and shoulder blade are much better and her collarbone is finally starting to heal six months later — she decided to try riding on asphalt again. I can speak to this firsthand. As much as the physical, it’s a mental progression from riding on a trainer to dealing with wind and noise and cars and bumps. It takes a while to feel like yourself, and some more time after that to approach comfortable. She’s right on schedule, which is to say her schedule.

So Saturday, after I’d already spun out 33 miles on the trainer, we went out for a rambling 17-mile ride around the neighborhood. This is odd, because she always knows where she’s riding, but it was great, because there’s something magically freeing about riding aimlessly. No timers, no zones, no watts, just a bike ride.

Then, yesterday, another beautiful afternoon, we rode the winery route, doing four circuits of the 6.6 mile lap. It’s a quiet set of roads, loosely rectangular, with the interstate running alongside. It’s a good place to stretch out your legs. I asked her, after the first lap, how she was doing. She knew I was asking how it felt and how comfortable she was. She said she was doing OK. There weren’t a lot of cars around to bother us, just as we’d hoped, so she could concentrate on all of the rest of it. So she was concentrating on how her legs were feeling. She was frustrated, feeling sluggish, despite riding on her trainer all winter.

Reaching for an explanation, I said “You rode yesterday. And you know it’s always a little different, going from the trainer to the road. Plus this wind is everywhere.”

There’s a windmill at the top end of that route, and I watched it go around and around each time we went by. We were in a cross-head-cross-wind all the way around.

Then, for a few moments on the second lap, she found her legs. Her form straightened out, her legs took on the familiar form, the one that tells me I have to chase. And so I did, setting a two-lap PR for my efforts.

And now my legs are a bit tired.

I am now three CDs behind on the Re-Listening project. We’ve just worked our way through a stretch of really good jazz, and this next little bit is a comparative step down. An embarrassing step down, perhaps. Let’s just grin and get it over with it.

These guys got discovered in Australia at 15. Their five studio albums have moved more than 10 million units over the years. Their second record got a lot of play on MTV and alt radio, and Neon Ballroom is their third release, at the ripe old age of … 19. It topped the chart in Australia, where it went platinum three times. It also went to number one on the UK rock and metal chart. It climbed all the way to the 50th slot on the Billboard Hot 200 here, and is certified gold. It is one of those efforts that defines a little slice of 1999.

Also, and again, they were 19.

The very pointy tip of the millennial angst spear, we just didn’t think about them in marketing terms at the time.

I’m not sure I ever listened to this much, for whatever reason. A lot of it still feels new, even if it is a little dated two decades later.

Those guys went through some stuff, sadly unsurprising, perhaps, considering the attention they earned so young. They released two more records in the next seven years. After some on-again, off-again the guys split up for good in 2011.

And then there’s Sugar Ray, which was a station giveaway. I never listened to this thing. It was … not for me when I got it, and I was glad it was a freebie. That the three singles got nearly maximum plays across 1999 didn’t help.

Though this track did feature KRS-One.

And they covered a Steve Miller classic.

I’d entirely forgotten that track was on here until I played this disc the other day. As I said, I never listened to this.

Up next in the Re-Listening project, something I actually purchased, and enjoyed!

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24
Mar 23

‘Here we go again now, here we go again now’

I’m beginning to feel more and more like myself. With every phlegmy cough it feels like the end is around the corner. Except for the coughs that feel like, somehow, the respiratory restrictions in my torso will force the collapse of all known gravity in the universe.

It’s all for show. I do feel a great deal better.

Here are a few more photographs from the Val d’Incles in Andorra. I think you’ll come to lichen them, as I do.

It seems that a good slate roof can last a century. I wonder what all of this weighs. Pity the person who had to lug all that up on top of the building as an apprentice.

Also in that valley, some green stuff growing on the stones that line the single-track road.

If I ever have a long driveway — ours is about 1.25 lengths of a car, which is ideal for snow purposes — I would do a lot of research on how to move in stones and promote moss and lichen growth.

It’d be nice to walk past that on the way to the mailbox, is all.

This, I think, would promote a slow, lingering walk, as opposed to the long, fast strides to and from the mailbox I take right now.

Speak of moving quickly, I am well behind on the Re-Listening project. This, you’ll recall, is the game where I am playing CDs in my car in the order in which I acquired them. These aren’t reviews, but a chance to enjoy some music, think fondly on memories and put some of that there.

Only I’m several CDs behind now, so we’ll be playing a bit of catch up over the next several days.

Today, it is the second and final record from The Refreshments. They were an Arizona bar band who signed a deal, got alt radio and MTV airplay and grew bigger, faster, than probably they wanted. Back in the studio, they found themselves butting heads with their label, and a bit with each other. Roger Clyne and the rest of the guys disliked all of this so much they disbanded after “The Bottle & Fresh Horses.” Shame, too, The Refreshments were great and this album is a lot of fun, even still, 26 years later. I got this as a hand-me-down from the campus radio station in the fall of 1997.

It’s funny, the instrumentation is clever and earnest and all of it was forgotten too fast. But we’re Re-Listening. I’m singing along.

In some ways, the whole thing feels like a continuation of Fizzy, Fuzzy. Even the characters narrative arcs were familiar.

And the jangly guitars got dustier and, more … southwestern … somehow.

This character actually is referencing the first record.

I think this is the song where the band decided they didn’t like the label meddling in their work. It just feels off, and the intensity is a little different. This song, or something else, that was an important catalyst in the band calling it quits.

This one is a referential sequel to something from the other album. This was, I think, the first time I’d ever had that happen from one record to the next. It was so novel — still is, I suppose — and gratifying and welcomed.

I remember reading some trade magazine, an article I will never ever find again in our digital age, about this song and how they overlapped. I was sitting in a burger joint, killing time between this and that, and found myself thinking that if I didn’t like them already, I would have had no choice but to appreciate The Refreshments after that.

No one thinks about things like this, but I wonder what would make up the best three-song series to close out a forgotten record. I’m putting these three tacks up for nomination.

They run the gamut in three songs. Just one of the reasons I was sad to hear of the band’s demise soon after. They went from a local opener in 1993 to a headliner in about a year. About a year later they were signed, but they were defunct by 1998. Clyne and Naffah have been playing in a full band as Roger Clyne & The Peacemakers since then, but I still think of The Refreshments first. They’re touring right now. They’re in the Midwest this spring, in fact, but still too far away.

Anyway, after this rush job on the Re-Listening project, I think I am five or six CDs behind. So guess what we’ll spend some time on next week!?

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21
Mar 23

Andorran snowmelt

Still sickly. Now measuring my movements by asking myself, Is it worth it?

This morning I literally thought to myself, Is it worth the energy required to roll my eyes in jest right here?

It was, or so I thought. But, really, I wish I’d saved the energy. Also, I am in day four of having the medicine mouth taste. Everything is shaped by the zinc stuff and the cough drops and the Nyquil and whatever else I’m trying. Food all tastes weird. Mostly like the zinc stuff and the cough drops and the Nyquil and whatever else I’ve been trying. Tomorrow will be better, or this is my new lot in life. One of the two.

Anyway, here’s some snowmelt, runoff we happened upon simply by accident last week in Andorra. Side of the road, into the woods behind a scenic overlook sort of thing. Oh, look, the Americans are in the ditch again, stuff.

Seeing it here, today, makes me realize something very important.

Just as soon as I feel better, I will be ready for my next vacation.

Just as soon as I stop coughing.