television

television / Thursday / Twitter / video — Comments Off on Making it through the week
17
Sep 20

Making it through the week

Look, this is after work, before dinner and before a mountain stage of the Tour de France. Even on the DVR, skipping the commercials, I still have several hours of watching the best riders in the world move their feet in tiny circles. And it starts at …

The Tour is usually in July. That it’s happening at all this year is pretty incredible. And the race has been entertaining, with potential for a great finish. But right about here, as we’re beginning Stage 18, you feel like you’re in the race, too. They’re doing the riding, but this is an endurance event for everyone. And, when it runs in the summer, I at least have a regular work schedule. But the split days of the fall … it’s an endurance event all its own.

Life, as they say, is tough.

Not really, but I could do for some more sleep. They ride onto the Champs-Élysées this weekend.

So trying to get everything in leaves me feeling a little ragged just now, but, most importantly, it’s worth it to see the TV folks do their thing:

Here’s some of the Tuesday programming:

They’re just a week in, finding their sea legs, and things are already moving efficiently.

It’s going to be a great year in the studio.

More on Twitter, check me out on Instagram and more On Topic with IU podcasts as well.

IU / photo / television / Thursday — Comments Off on Show – show – show, here we go!‬
3
Sep 20

Show – show – show, here we go!‬

‪In the spring, IUSTV’s production run was cut short by the university’s coronavirus shutdown. The last recording was with the sports crew, it was a March Thursday night. The outgoing sports director recorded a little monologue and then held a really touching meeting and he walked into the last weeks of his senior year and the first weeks of professional uncertainty. He, and every other senior, had such a scary, unenvious position just then. Some of them were starting to sign their first TV contracts at that moment. Others were doing job interviews. As far as I know and can tell, all of them, including that outgoing sports director, are working today. Almost all of them seem to be in jobs in their chosen flight path (including that departing sports director, who’s on-air at a hometown station) which is remarkable.

You couldn’t help but feel for those seniors, and all the underclassmen. When would we come back? What would that be like? And for our students in particular, you can’t thrive in Zoom meetings alone, which is what so much of those last weeks of spring became. The curriculum is so experiential, how would we deliver that?

Which brings us to the fall. We didn’t know, in March, what September and October and November would be like. We didn’t even know what April would look like. Maybe it’s still an open question, how the fall turns out, but I hope not. For all of the promise of technology, it brings some unique challenges, and pedagogical habits don’t, in fact, change overnight.

But, tonight — even amidst the unusual nature of these first few weeks, even as we don’t know how the semester will wind up — it’s developing in a familiar way for the TV crowd. The last show they recorded in the spring was sports, and so it’s fitting that the sports gang returned to the studio for the semester’s first production.‬

They don’t even have local sports, right now, but they were ready to be together, eager to be in a group, happy to do something. And, for a first production night, with new leadership (a solid, solid set) and some new members, and after an almost-six-month layoff, they did a fine job.

And it looks like the Big Ten may wind up reversing course to give them some sports content sometime in the next week or so, besides. Twenty, as the kids say, twenty.

When I left the building this evening:

This is the sunset view of choice around here. I’m not sure why. It is west. The fake ancient gates are behind me, but you’re just looking toward the downtown area. It seems like we could do better than this.

But we didn’t have to tonight. We didn’t have to tonight.

IU / podcast / television / Tuesday — Comments Off on How we’re trying to keep safe
25
Aug 20

How we’re trying to keep safe

Walked into the television studio for the first time today. Some things will be different this semester, but a lot of it feels the same. There’s a goodness to it, being in a room of potential, a space where people start to see their dreams come true, under lights where their skills begin to sharpen. It’s nice to be in a space like that, even if it’s just to study some of the new safety considerations.

But, in a few weeks, we’ll have students back in front of the camera. A different kind of recording today, though.

It isn’t every day you get to talk to a professor of pediatrics, who is also a medical school dean and the vice chair for health policy and outcomes research. Dr. Aaron Carroll wears a lot of titles. He’s also the director of the Center for Health Policy and Professionalism Research and is leading Indiana University’s arrival and surveillance testing for the 2020 return to classes.

He took time out of his busy schedule to talk about sending children back to school, and all of the work the IU campuses across the state are doing to help keep their communities safe.

It’s a good listen. Dr. Carroll is a great presenter. He’s built an ambitious program here, which is probably starting as one of the most ambitious programs on a college campus in the country. And, when it matures to his committee’s full plans will most definitely be at the top of the list.

Consider, when they implemented the re-entry tests for students IU returning to campus it became the biggest testing center in the state, virtually overnight. Some 100,000 students were tested in the last few days, and that was just to re-enroll. And it won’t stop with that one test that allows students to return. Pretty soon they’ll be running thousands of tests a week as a matter of course.

The university sent out two masks to each person on campus. Masks are required. That was a $600,000 expenditure. As Dr. Carroll says in the interview, this is entire exercise on the university’s part is about money and will. The university has had the will to build out, at some considerable expense, a robust system designed to help try to keep us safe.

It won’t be perfect, no. Nothing will be, and I think we acknowledge that here, but there’s something to the effort, and Dr. Carroll is a capable person, surrounded by similarly talented folks. That just has to filter down to the rest of us. A lot of this will come down to individual choices. Mine, yours, and everyone else’s.

Friday / music / television / video — Comments Off on 750 quick words on Trek
26
Jun 20

750 quick words on Trek

I’ve lately been idly listening to Star Trek while doing other things. Today we met the Klingons for the first time again, which means we’re on episode 26, a third of the way through the run of the original series … and it’s just about ready to get good, I guess. They had a narrow window through which to reach out and impact the world, when you think about it.

The third season is almost universally panned, the first 10 or 12 episodes of the series have a few interesting moments, but once you remember that this is the series that bred continuity into the zeitgeist, it was woefully inconsistent. And that’s even after allowing for the production values of the day and the new genre they were helping to pioneer. It’s all over the place.

This is how you met the universe’s running baddies on a Thursday in mid-March of 1967:

And the next week, this episode plays itself out. Kirk and Spock beam down to head off the enemy threat. The locals aren’t bothered at all and perceive no threat. (It’s an allegory, you see.) The threat appears, and John Colicos is warm and real and full and does a lot with a little, to be honest. Now the good guys are trying to blend in with the locals to subvert the threat. This goes poorly, and Spock told you so, what with his cool calculations and his odds.

There’s a fanfic out there somewhere that reveals he was just making up numbers, and, when confronted by this charge, he runs away crying. There has to be. After all, one of the dramatic devices they routinely revisit is Spock telling everyone who will listen just how bad the odds are. And, of course, they emerge from the problem relatively unscathed, minus a few red shirts. No one ever calls him on this. Ever.

So Kirk and Spock, having failed to talk the backward and humble-looking Organians into coming under their protection, try to take matters into their own hands, but then then Organians stop all of this by making both the Federation members and the Klingons hot. Ow!

Because, I guess, having people mimic a warm stove eye was as inexpensive a special effect as the show runners could pull off.

Someone out there has compiled some of the original shots next to the 2009 remastering, which is what I’m watching on Netflix. This is a fine and fun bit of side-by-side video.

Note how George Takei is playing Sulu when they first come under attack. Note how Colicos is almost licking his lips, “A shame, Capitan. It would have been glorious.” It’s a moment at the end of the episode that’s so beautifully, rhythmically paced that it sets the whole mood for the ever-changing archenemy-cum-tense-ally. It’s a shame it took 30 years to get him back into the franchise.

And, too, note how not every update is a good one. Specifically, when the humble Organians return to their natural form. In the original it is a brilliant white light. In the reworked version they take on the lighting effects of a bad rave.

It was good for it’s time, this episode, I’m sure. It’s hailed as a classic, and it holds an 8.6 rating on IMDb. But today its interest is purely historic. This one sequence goes a long way toward guiding the rest of the entire franchise:

It also sets up the biggest plot hole in the entire Trek universe. If the energy beings abhor conflict and can stop it this quickly, the Federation should have drawn any number of enemies to this planet, playing this out over and over, creating new allies across the quadrant. Or the galaxy. Or whatever they called it that week. (They were really loose with the language in the early days. It’s amazing that fans found it in their hearts to forgive the show for that.)

Also, this episode figures into one of the big musical hits of the late 1980s.

And a segue like that lets us wrap this up with our favorite game, The Passage of Time. That episode originally aired in 1967. That song was a hit in 1988. We’re (much) farther removed from that song than they were from that episode.

Within the franchise, the time between us and the debut of Deep Space Nine is greater than the time between the Deep Space Nine’s beginning and the episode above. Deep Space Nine debuted in 1993.

Remember, this was an allegory then, but what is it today?

Bloomington / Friday / history / IU / journalism / television — Comments Off on Let’s go back in time, but only a little
17
Apr 20

Let’s go back in time, but only a little

Last night I held another IUZoomington meeting with a true television legend, Rick Karle. The man won 24 Emmy awards in sports and then decided he’d go over and try some news. There’s more to it than that, there always is. But he’s one of those people students need to hear from. He’s been doing it longer than they’ve been alive, after all.

I told the story about the first time I met him was on the phone, when I was in undergrad. I was calling in scores from a women’s volleyball or basketball game or something. It was a big deal. An OMG, Rick Karle, kind of deal. But, then, he’s from a place where, as a colleague of ours put it, the people on the local news are among the community’s celebrities. And it’s true. Also, the guy’s just good at what he does. Always has been.

So it was nice to see him last night. He talked about what he sees from interns and new reporters coming into the business, and what our gang should be doing to show off the right sorts of things.

Most of the people in the session tonight were sophomores and juniors, but they, and the seniors, all lost a lot in having their campus experience shut down in March. The next four or five weeks of TV would have been really valuable for them, so I’m trying to make it up to them some kind of way.

It’s really nice that so many of the people I know in the working media are so generous with their time to talk with them. (This is the third or fourth one of these I’ve done in the last few weeks, and some of my colleagues in the school are doing others, besides.) It’s a small business, and no one ever forgets where they came from, which is a nice perk.

Let’s look at the paper. We’re going back to this day 103 years ago, which seems apropos, in some respects given our particular moment in time. And this day 103 years ago, it was getting serious.

The sub chaser was the Smith, and it escaped the night. Sub chasers, I’ve just learned, were small, light and fast vessels. They built about 300 of them for U.S. service, and more for France. And there isn’t an easily found repository of what each did. But I did find one reference to the Smith, which sailed on an Alaskan patrol in 1923, so it survived the war.

The subhead of that story talked about the 20,000 Germans killed along the front at Rheims, 10,000 captured and 50,000 injured. Europe was about to enter the third year of this thing, and that’s the second item on the American story. It was a war brutal on a scale we can scarcely understand today. This would have probably been the beginning of the Second Battle of the Aisne, the Neville Offensive. This part was meant to be a 48-hour effort. It launched on April 16th, and lasted into the second week of May. The idea was an entire push across the lines in France, trying to knock back the Germans. Tactically successful, but without reaching its objectives. The Germans had something like 163,000 casualties from this push. The British, French and Russians had something like 350,000.

Of course no one could see that on April 17th, and certainly not from this far away. Across the way there was a message from President Wilson. War was coming. There was no escaping it now.

In between, a student got picked up, and written about in a way that would never happen today. Also, he wore his hair in a pompadour, which is really how you knew something was the matter with the guy.

There’s also a note that the high school was going to show a film, “How to Garden.” And the Republicans and the Democrats couldn’t get along in Indianapolis. There’s a note from a murder trial in a neighboring county, and a piece of propaganda about signing up for the Army and a railway man hurt his hand. But this brief talked about a really bad day.

On the second page there is finally a photograph. It’s showing you how they load lumber in Kentucky.

There are two fashion photos on that page. Then, as now, it probably only applied to a thin slice of the readership. There’s far too much worry about the war, about growing things, about how trains work, for people in their readership to spend time with handsome frocks of satin, georgette sleeves and satin collars and cuffs.

This is across the street from our building at campus.

In 1928 the Ritz Theatre was built in that spot. Later renamed the Von Lee, it had three screens. They played movies there until 2000. Now there are campus offices and a restaurant in the shell of the building. It is, quite literally, a facade.

Fred Bates Johnson did it all.

Really, all of it. He was a school superintendent, a journalist, a disgruntled journalist …

He felt this was still not enough and thought journalism was a “chancy” profession and that courses should be offered to train people in the field. He suggested to the late Dr. William Lowe Bryan, then president of Indiana University, that the university start a school of journalism.

After a faculty study of the proposal, Dr. Bryan asked Mr. Johnson to return to the I.U. campus to be the university’s first journalism professor.

Although a course in instruction in news gathering was taught in the English department for a short time during the 1890’s, Fred Bates Johnson succeeded in getting “The Course in Journalism” added to the curriculum of Indiana University during the year 1907-1908. Also at that time the university published a suggested four-year liberal program as a preparation for journalism.

So he became a journalism professor. Then a lawyer, a soldier, a judge advocate and a member of the Public Service Commission. So he basically started the journalism program that would, in 107 years or so, become The Media School. Thanks, ‘fessor.

And finally, remembering this is 1917 …

Two decades prior, the G.A.R. had hundreds of posts all over this state, and more than 400,000 members across the country. Three years after this notice Indianapolis hosted the national encampment, one of several Indy hosted, but the numbers were falling away fast. There were just 103,258 members remaining by 1920. In 1949, also in Indy, the G.A.R. held their last reunion.

Earlier in 1949 the last Hoosier soldier, 102-year-old John Christian Adams, passed away. (Adams was from West Virginia and moved to Indiana well after the war, but they count him.) The Harry Truman White House sent a wreath.

At that last encampment in 1949 six old men showed up, including James Hard and Albert Woolson. There was a parade. They reminisced. The Marine Corps Band played Retreat. Hard was the last combat soldier. He apparently fought at First Bull Run, Sharpsburg, Chancellorsville, and Fredericksburg. And it is said that he met Abraham Lincoln at a White House reception. Hard died in 1953. Woolson was a drummer boy, but his unit never saw action. He lived until 1956 and was briefly eulogized by Dwight Eisenhower.

You have to move forward a long way before the past is really the past. It’s always been that way, we’ve just never been really keen on accepting it.

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