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The delta comes to campus

I have a very musical sense about things. I know this: One day, many decades hence, before they put me in the cold ground, there’s going to be a ragtime band playing a few tunes. Some of it might sound like this:

The Preservation Hall Jazz Band and the great Allen Toussaint are touring together — they’ve never done that before, somehow — and they played Samford tonight. It was a terrific show. Toussaint has 20 records, two Grammy nominations and the National Medal of Arts award. The band goes back 50 years with a rotating cast of members. Some of the current iteration have been onboard for decades. Seeing them all on one stage feels like you’re reaching elbow deep into the hopes, history, irreverence and dreams of Americana. To see great talent like those men playing together is to, perhaps, get a small inkling of jazz as the American art form. Within it all there are discordant notes and spaces and wandering musicians and multiple instruments and it all comes back together again. Americana. They all count their time in music and New Orleans in generations.

Charlie Gabriel, for example, is 81 and has been playing music for at least 67 years. He has four generations of New Orleans musicians behind him and three generations playing below him.

Also, if someone can book a singer that sounds like Charlie Gabriel for that day many decades hence, that’d be splendid.

They did play St. James Infirmary, two versions in fact. One of them was perhaps the happiest tune about death you could imagine. The other was very angry, as it should be. Part of that is in the clip above.

Things to read … because there are clips below, too.

Supremely well said, Open Letter to the Auburn Family.

Also, if you were there, you got to see a Medal of Honor winner:

Student assaulted, accused of recording Ferguson protest meeting:

A University of Missouri-St. Louis student who uses an online platform to live-stream protests in Ferguson was hospitalized last week after five or six people threw him out of a church, where protesters had gathered to strategize, and beat him.

The student, Chris Schaefer, began live streaming Ferguson protests and interviews on Oct. 23. But during the protest strategy meeting at St. Mark’s Family Church on Nov. 6, he was not recording, he said in a video from a hospital bed.

[…]

Schaefer told police five or six people assaulted him at the meeting because they believed he was recording the meeting, said Sgt. Brian Schellman, a St. Louis County Police Department spokesman. Schaefer ran out of the church to a Walgreens about a half mile from the church, where police responded to a 911 call, Schellman said. Police are looking for the suspects.

Russia is changing their media laws, and so … CNN To End Russian Broadcast By Year’s End

Here’s another demonstration of the need for multiple platform idea Millennials Spend 18 Hours a Day Consuming Media — And It’s Mostly Content Created By Peers:

New research by social-influence marketing platform Crowdtap indicates that individuals ages 18 to 36 spend an average of 17.8 hours a day with different types of media.

Those hours represent a total across multiple media sources, some of which are consumed simultaneously.

We all need to develop effective (meaning, sometimes, different) messages across platforms within our unifying themes. It is starting to sound like jazz, no?

journalism / links / memories / music / photo / Samford / things to read / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
21
Oct 14

I will, in fact, run to wait

Looking forward to tomorrow. Our student journalists have a big story coming out. It is complex and sensitive and it is well done, a compliment to the people who’ve worked on it. I read it tonight — which is unusual, as an adviser I do not interfere with their editorial decisions, meaning I generally see everything as a regular consumer — and I’m proud of the work they’re doing.

This is a fun, loud, sharp, sarcastic group. They do their work throughout the week and they put their newspaper to bed early on Tuesday nights. But not this week. Tonight was a late night with lots of copy and good quotes and ink on hands. There was plenty of layout experiments and squibble marks and bleary-eyed readings of federal definitions.

The work is good. It is honest and fair and thorough. Our editor-in-chief has spent a lot of time writing it. She’s proven why the job is hers and is proving why she can handle the investigative work. I think she’s going to be proud of it all, after she has put the story to bed and steps away from it for a minute or two.

In the copy room … I’m making copies. I had to re-load the machine with paper. No one ever considers the humble wrapping paper that holds the copy paper together. Maybe we should:

But I always like jam with my paper.

International Paper, under their Hammermill brand, has a program with St. Jude. One of their patients drew the fish.

Now I want to copy more things, to see what is on the next ream of paper.

Things to read … because someone put it on paper. Or a server.

Getting the truly geeky out of the way first: How A/B testing became publishers’ go-to traffic builder.

Journalists’ obituaries are usually a bit self indulgent, but this is a good one about an important figure in the industry: Ben Bradlee, legendary Washington Post editor, dies at 93:

See? Ben Bradlee and ‘the best damn job in the world’.

Few ever think about the importance of Barber, just north of Birmingham, but that place is important: Motorsports museum’s economic impact far reaching.

I’m not going to think about racing for at least a week, but here’s one last important economic story: Talladega Superspeedway impact transcends the track.

In a random musical moment I wondered: Whatever happened to Live?

Turns out they have a new album, their first in something like eight years, coming out next week. Here’s one of the new tracks:

But that’s not Ed Kowalczyk. He’s not been with the band in years. (Apparently it was not an amicable breakup.) He has a solo album out. And, in this just-released video, he smiles. This seems unnerving, somehow:

That’s what happens when you wonder about things from 15 years ago.

Here’s a thought exercise: Isn’t it interesting how things are so different for you than they were 15 years ago? Isn’t it even more interesting how things are so similar? Discuss.

history / music / video / weekend — Comments Off
9
Aug 14

Nixon on the subway

I was raised in a suburban and exurban lifestyle. It was grand. And, like so many Americans, that involved cars. Many cars. A lot of miles. A great deal of time on interstates and highways.

So, when I was however old I was, when I spent time on a mass transit bus and subway systems I noticed something. Everyone on board the thing would rather be somewhere else. Anywhere else. It is an energy-sapping experience and you can see it on everyone’s faces.

I make the joke, which my beautiful wife hates, that it is like “Lord of the Flies.” She hates it because she’s spent plenty of times on the subway, so she always rolls her eyes, which means the jokes continue until someone inevitably brings up the conch shell.

Well. I’m going to take this video as a piece of evidence for my side of the joke. The Broadway cast from “The Lion King” delivered a performance on the subway. Watch the commuters:

In contrast, when the Australian cast did it earlier this year, people actually enjoyed themselves. And they were on a plane:

Which brings up a good idea. If you’re organizing a flash mob — and why are you doing that, again? — you might want to have four or five people who have the very important job of acting shocked and amazed.

If you’re organizing a flash mob, be sure you top this one, which is perhaps the best one ever:

OK, one more video. This was 40 years ago, today, Richard Nixon had resigned amid the Watergate investigations, and was addressing the White House staff. It remains a fine speech lost in all of the important things that were happening.

He was wrong about one thing, well a few things, in that speech. There was a book written about his mother.

I wonder if Nixon would have liked The Lion King. I wonder what he would have been like on the the subway.

Something like this. Thanks, Internet.

family / music — Comments Off
2
Aug 14

Bonnie and Clem

With all lowliness and meekness, with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love;

Ephesians 4:2

And above all these things put on charity, which is the bond of perfectness.

Colossians 3:14

family / music — 1 Comment
1
Aug 14

GrandBonnie

I’ve made every phone call, some three pages of names and numbers of friends and family and churches.

We’ve taken care of all the details that anyone can think of and dozens more.

I’ve vacuumed floors twice and scrubbed hardwoods on my hands and knees more than once.

I’ve made slideshows and PowerPoints and created alternate file formats and backups and hidden Plans C and D, two Plan Es and a Plan F.

I’ve run out of things to do and I’m dizzy and sick about it.

This has gone on for so long, and moved by so fast. But we’re in one of those places where time doesn’t mean a lot, I suppose. The only time that matters is the time you don’t get, the time to hug a little tighter and hold a little longer.

My heart is broken for my grandfather and the little tiny shards that are left are shaved off into dust for my mother and my uncle and after that there are just the particles that won’t form any cohesive bond for this amazing, profound, fathomless grief.

I see the woman who pretty much hung the moon in every corner of her home. I hear her laugh in my head and I’ve been listening to the tone of the nuances of her voice in my imagination. I walk into rooms in her home and turn on a light and expect to see her there. She. Should. Be. Right. There.

And this is all very personal, and I’m sorry, but, just for a while, do me this favor, please: Send a little thought for my folks for some peace and rest and that little bit of human grace we have to always remember the wonderful things we’ve known. It helps fill up the cracks that don’t mend.

And then, for yourself: Hug and kiss and annoy and harass the people that you love just a bit more than you normally do. Tell them one of the stories you share that always makes them laugh. Put on a mischievous smile, break your diet and have dessert with them. Let the words you say to them today be the really important ones.