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Early entry for show of the year

Today’s joke is the ice and snow and weather. Periodically throughout the day, I’ve dropped a random observation about it in the middle of conversation. I look around soberly. No one is watching, but this part of the performance is for me, a half-trained method actor, so that I may immerse myself in the role, as Stanislavski would want.

And then, with a fixed look upon my face, and in a sincere, likeable, confidential tone, I interject, “This snow and ice is never going to melt.”

Because it is never going to melt.

I’m also doing this out of the blue.

It’s not a funny joke the first time, but after three or four rounds it started hitting every time. And I can do this bit for a while, because it is never going to melt. Oh some of it may disappear this weekend, if the long range forecast is to be believed. It has been suggested in a tantalizing display of numbers, that we might enjoy something like almost 48 consecutive hours above freezing. I don’t believe it, and, yes, I have some method acting about that, too.

We talked about the Super Bowl in Rituals and Traditions today. Talked about the game for a few moments, but we watched the opening vignette and I tried to get them to think about what the production was trying to tell us here.

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Then we talked about the halftime show for about 25 minutes. And then we discussed the postgame show, and it occurred to me: I never had a class like this, and while the productions back then aren’t as epic as they are today, I wish I had a had class where we walked in and talked about stuff like this.

We talked about interesting and important things, but this was a Tuesday lecture, and how fun is that?

Finally, I brought it back to the halftime show. Some 120-130 million people (the solid numbers should be out tomorrow) watched. Why did the NFL book Bad Bunny?

It’s good business, of course. We have here the world’s most successful musician — 16 Grammy nominations, six wins, 17 Latin Grammy Awards, 113 songs in the Billboard Hot 100, 41 in the top 40 and 12 in the top 10, while having also been the most heavily streamed artist in four of the last six years — playing to one of the world’s largest television audiences. And the NFL wants to expand it’s audience. They’re playing nine games overseas next year. Bad Bunny, meanwhile, was just recently the most heavily streamed musician in China. Plus, younger audiences, women, there’s plenty of crossover to explore.

Someone said: controversy. And, sure, controversy sells. We’d been talking symbolism and messaging for a half hour or so by then. I put this on the screen. Isn’t it something, I said, when this is controversial?

In today’s installment of the criticism class, we discussed a story that was, I thought, one of the more interesting pieces from 2024. I wanted the class to see the mechanics of how the writer wrote about the mechanics of deaf soccer. I played when I was a kid, and when I first saw this story I thought, “How do they do that?” Soccer is basically played, and communicated, from behind you. But if no one can hear …

Soccer — and life — through the eyes of the U.S. deaf women’s national team

The first thing to know about deaf soccer is that it is soccer, and a match looks the same as at any level of the sport.

Instead of a loud, profanity-laced pregame speech from the most extroverted leader on the team, players gather in a circle and execute a synchronized movement of quick fist bumps and back-of-hand slaps. During the game, the center official raises a flag in addition to blowing their whistle for fouls and stoppages of play, and games are typically quieter than the average match that features more verbal communication.

From a technical standpoint, players must have hearing loss of at least 55 decibels in their “better ear” to qualify to play deaf soccer and, crucially, hearing aids are not allowed in games, ensuring all players are on a level playing field.

On a hearing team, communication often comes from the back. The goalkeeper and defenders see everything in front of them and can direct their teammates accordingly — and verbally.

“For us, that’s not possible, that’s not realistic,” Andrews says.

The process is more about inherent understanding and movement as a team. If a forward pushes high to chase a ball, everyone behind her must follow. Halftime or injury breaks become more important, Andrews says, because they represent rare opportunities to look at each other as a group.

We also discussed this piece on the NWSL’s sexual abuse settlement. I find it somewhere between a process piece and a rote recap from someone, Meg Linehan, who’s been all over the story for a long while now. It’s a straightforward news story, and we need a lot of those. In this case, it allowed us to discuss how you can make that determination from the first three paragraphs.

The NWSL will create a $5 million player compensation fund as part of a settlement regarding its role in widespread allegations of abuse.

The settlement, announced on Wednesday, ends a joint investigation by the attorneys general (AGs) of the District of Columbia, Illinois and New York concerning systemic abuse across the league and potential violations of state and local human rights laws.

The three offices, as with the investigation by former U.S. Attorney General Sally Yates and the joint investigation by the NWSL and its players association that came before them, focused on “pervasive sexual harassment and abuse by coaches against players” and systematic failures by the league to “exercise adequate insight, institute workplace antidiscrimination policies, or appropriately respond to complaints,” as listed in the settlement agreement.

Then we talked about what’s not there. And we talked about the visuals included with the story. I had a different perspective on the photos than they did. I need to make a more distinctive point about that the next time it comes up.

And here’s the sun going down, from our 6th floor almost-corner office.

That was 5:37 p.m., proof that the days are getting longer. There’s some solace in that.

… This snow and ice is never going to melt.

We left at just about that time, because who wants to stay longer than that? Also, we had somewhere to be.

So we went over the river, and got to the arena just in time to see The Head and the Heart. I didn’t even know they were going to be there until they started playing this song while we were walking through the concourse, meaning we had to get to our seats.

That was a platinum single in 2011. And despite some early success — and a habit of getting songs on soundtracks — they’ve stuck to their indie Americana roots. Delightfully enthusiastic for their art, and quirky in their performance.

They make for an energetic opener, which was great, because backstage, Brandi Carlile was waiting for her turn. She was fresh off singing “America the Beautiful” at the Super Bowl and, this very night, beginning her first arena tour. While the curtain was up, they played Madonna through the PA. And then they lowered the lights, and light the stage and curtain like this.

At the right moment in that first song the curtain fell and there was the whole band and this circular shot of the singer before revealing to us that she was, in fact, eclipsing the sun.

That’d be a little much, but Brandi Carlile is an exceptional performer. Each song made for a different style of visual treatment on the stage screen. And, from this, I have inferred that we are returning to an era of 1990s liner notes, which also looked like an earlier era of vinyl art. Suits me just fine.

Early in the set they did request gimmick. Years ago, she said, they did a tour like this. So this should be no sweat. It’s a deep cut of a tune they recorded 20 years ago, and apparently haven’t played live in a long time. Not that you’d know. She was 24 when she recorded this. It sounds like it. Still works. Still a great song.

She also did a cover of a Linda Rondstadt classic. And then a bunch of her rock tunes and a lot of her Americana. She also covered an Alanis Morissette song and it was so good that, according to American and Canadian law, Morissette can’t sing it anymore, because it belongs to Brandi Carlile now.

Vanity Fair once wrote a review saying her voice is the eighth wonder of the world. If that’s overstating it, it isn’t overstating it by much. See her if you can. That was a fantastic show. I want to go back again right now.

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9
Feb 26

Right, back in the tundra

See? Very quick trip. We landed in the frozen and still not melted north before noon yesterday. Plenty of time to get some work done before the big game, and a lot of time to lament this just, ya know, still everywhere.

Maybe it’ll melt by next weekend, at which point we’ll be three weeks into this snow and ice.

It’s a little excessive, as all.

And very boring.

The wedding Saturday night was anything but. We planned leaving the hotel in time to get there and get a good seat. But you never know about traffic and it was nuts. The Uber driver said it was nuts. We agreed it was nuts. The ceremony was four miles from the hotel and you could have grow a peanut vine to maturity and harvest the peanuts in the amount of time it took to get there. And the drive mad some Herculean efforts. His second alternate route got us there, and got us there just in time. And so we saw the mother of the groom come down the aisle and heard everyone react to her dress, which was gorgeous.

She was the unmitigated star of the day, and everybody liked it that way, even her son. The ceremony was brief, but well done. The officiant had babysat the groom way back when. And the whole day was full of little circular little stories like that. The wedding cake was surrounded by the mother’s wedding skirts, which have become a family history as much as an heirloom. Everyone in their family gets their name embroidered in it when they get married. They called out the names of deceased family members during the service. There was a special table for photographs of those people. It was all quite lovely.

We were sat near the band. And when the food was done the band played. And they played for about three hours. A lot of fun. Near the end of the night, the horn section got one last moment in the lime light.

Sunday, we got up, finished packing and headed to the airport. In, out and up very quickly. An easy flight back, a little turbulence just before we landed. Out of the airport and into the 19 degree weather. It felt like 0 degrees. It felt like nothing. It felt cold. And it got about negative six degrees colder over night.

Today was about working on work stuff. Wrote my online class. Built up notes from the halftime show for a conversation tomorrow in Rituals and Traditions. I wonder if the students enjoyed the show. We’ll talk about a few stories in Criticism, and so I re-read those. Then I started lining up all of the things that need to get done in the next few weeks. It’s a lot, and at least its cold outside, so I can stay inside, and get some of it done.

And now, I have to spend the rest of the night in Qualtrics, to finish building a survey.

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15
Sep 25

‘Four years (prostrate) to the higher mind’ is doubly ironic

This is quick, because I am doing class prep. We’re reading two stories in Criticism tomorrow. In Org Comm we’ll be talking about the very important and incredibly interesting definitions of communication. It’ll probably be the slowest week in that class for the semester. You need baselines for everyone, though, because there are students from multiple majors and it’s important to make this approachable. Next week will be more fun, this week is definitions.

That’s what I’ll tell them tomorrow.

And there’s also my online class, which is new. Three new classes to wrangle, every week, between now and December. It seems like a lot to me, but I’m gamely going to try.

And that’s why this is quick.

For some reason, even on a mild day, the irrigation systems out in the fields look refreshing. This was part of an easy 20 mile ride on Saturday afternoon. It was one of those days where I set out to go this way, got halfway there, and then went that way instead. It was a good day for that.

Sure, it was right out of the neighborhood and then a mile and a quarter down to the stop sign. There, instead of going straight, I turned left. We go this way sometimes, but I don’t do it often when I’m on my own. It’s an up and down thing, and then you cross a busy intersection — if you can catch the light — and go by the warehouses that they’ll never finish building or fill with inventory. Down to the river, and back up through some farm land and you can keep going down that road, where you’ll eventually run into a town, and the big river, and have to change directions, or you can turn early. This is what I did today. There are two or three roads that you can turn onto that will lead you back to another road that can point you home. But we rarely cut those short, and so it’s a guess: Is this a road that crosses over to the highway, or is this a road that dead ends in a corn field?

And so I’m going down this side road, hoping it is an in-between road, trying to remember if I remember it or not. The features don’t really help. It feels right, but not distinctively so.

Then, the road bends to the left, and forks to the right. This is where a white Cadillac decided to pass me in a slow and unsafe way. (Thanks for that, young person driving your grandparent’s Caddy … ) She went left. I went right, and I was rewarded with distinctive features. I was on the road I wanted, a double tree-lined affair that was quite and pleasant and demanded you sit up and go slow — which wasn’t a problem for me.

Eventually, I ran into this sign.

If you turn right, you’d go this way, and wind up down at the river, or someplace.

If you turn left, you wind your way to another tributary, but the highway which will take me back toward home.

I stood there and felt the sun and listened to the wind for a few pleasant, long minutes. It was the perfect time of day in a lovely little place and I had it all to myself, all of it. And maybe that’s the reason we should ride bikes.

OK, here’s the last clip from last week’s show. Four, from me, is a pretty decent amount of restraint. Anyway, because they’ve been at it for four decades now, the Indigo Girls obviously have to play the hits. And they’ve long established their most mainstream number as a regular big finish. It got a lot of people in the door, and those people won’t let you leave without it.

(I wonder how long a show would be if they played all of everyone’s favorites. We already wound up taking a late train out of town, and they didn’t play all of my favorites this time. They can’t play them all. They should play them all.)

Anyway, the regulars are counting songs and they know it’s about to come and OK, everybody sing along. And also here’s three-time Grammy Award winner, and holder of Four CMA awards, Jennifer Nettles, to help us out too.

I hope we get to see them again next year.

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12
Sep 25

Fire from the years

I wrote this out in outline form, went away and did some other stuff, and then came back to it. The first two notes were

Meetings.

Chairs.

I had meetings all morning. One of the meetings, no kidding, was about another meeting in a few weeks. At the end of meeting we discussed future dates for other meetings. It was run efficiently, and with good cheer. I took the notes. We ended right on time, having completed the full agenda which was, again, mostly about another meeting.

That other meeting will be a brief appearance. A few people from this meeting will attend that meeting and discuss what we do at these meetings.

There will be slides.

The next point on my list was “Chairs.” I have no idea what I meant to say there.

On today’s bike ride I tried out some new sunglasses. I needed to update my drip.

The frame better matches my helmet and the lenses are blue, though it doesn’t seem obvious there. The lenses are also bigger than any glasses I’ve worn before, but that’s the style, and aren’t we slaves to style?

The problem is right at the top, just above the bridge of the nose. It rubs right into the interior part of the helmet. It seems like there should be some space or flexible bend there or something, but alas.

The little Giro logo rubbed off the front of my helmet, I think from one day when I was working on a flat tire and leaning on the saddle. I’ll scrape it off eventually, but for now, it amuses me. It looks like bad video game faux text.

This was the sunset at the end of the ride.

We timed that up pretty well, but only because we were going fast. I had a few massive splits — well within the “fast” category. I can only do that for four or five miles at a time, though, and humility comes to me quickly, usually in the form of a headwind. Sometimes a small hill.

Here’s another shot from Radio City Music Hall’s iconic neon. We had a nice visit there on Wednesday to see Melissa Etheridge and the Indigo Girls. It was my third time seeing Etheridge and … I dunno … the 10th or 12th time I’ve seen Amy and Emily, but it was my first concert at Radio City.

And so here’s “Kid Fears,” with Etheridge singing Michael Stipe’s part. That song is now 36 years young, but all of the people that have come through to sing along keep it fresh. Listening to the crowd enjoy it is still a great deal of fun.

I think I’ll put one more clip up on Monday. They had another special guest at the end of the show, and it’s worth pointing out.

But that’s for Monday, and now it’s time for the weekend, which I will spend doing some work for next week’s classes. The life of glamor that I can tell you about …

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11
Sep 25

Today was draft day

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.