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IU / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
8
Nov 17

The beautiful trouble of autumn, Part IV

Two weeks ago I wrote:

It seems like that time of year where you try to catalog the changing of the leaves, because they’re pretty, but because you want them to stay.

So I’m doing that this week, which feels like the peak of the leaf turn. Here are two more examples from campus.

This is the newly renamed Francis Morgan Swain Student Building:

Before women could vote, Francis Morgan Swain was making waves on the IU campus. She lobbied the university for a space meant for female students. She was in school here for two years, from 1889 to 1891. During that time she raised $6,500 from alumni and members of the community — that’s about $200,000 today. Her husband, Joseph, a math professor, was the ninth president of the university. They stayed on to lead the university for nine years. She came back in 1904 for the groundbreaking, laid a cornerstone and she was here again when the building was formally opened in 1906. In September of last year the university rededicated the building in her honor.

And this is the side of our building, Franklin Hall, the brand new 110-year-old, $26 million dollar renovation, featuring all the bells and whistles journalism and broadcast and video game majors and comm scholars could ask for.

My office is somewhere behind that tree.

IU / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
7
Nov 17

The beautiful trouble of autumn, Part III

About two weeks ago I wrote:

It seems like that time of year where you try to catalog the changing of the leaves, because they’re pretty, but because you want them to stay.

Well, this is most definitely that week. So let’s do that this week, let’s document autumn. These are all on campus, in the Dunn’s Woods, which was a 20-acre tract of land the university purchased in 1883 from Moses Fell Dunn, a local lawyer and landowner:

As the university shifted from its seminary roots to a liberal arts college, it was important to keep the original atmosphere. So campus officials were intent on keeping much of the woods. They used the phrase “preserving the sylvan nature” a lot in their campus plans. Because of that, a walk on campus shows a great abundance of native flora.

That was a good choice.

history / IU / Monday / photo — Comments Off
6
Nov 17

The beautiful trouble of autumn, Part II

About two weeks ago I wrote:

It seems like that time of year where you try to catalog the changing of the leaves, because they’re pretty, but because you want them to stay.

Well, this is most definitely that week. So let’s do that this week, let’s document autumn. These are all on campus, and in the Old Crescent:

Franklin Hall, where I work:

The Rose Well House:

Used to be the big thing, you’d take your date to the Well House and get a kiss at midnight. The fronts and ornamental stone fixtures from the Old College Building were built into this structure in 1907 and 1908. It’s named after Theodore F. Rose, class of 1875, who chaired the project and paid for it in honor of his graduating class. He was a lawyer, but made his money in natural gas, after which he became one of those people who sits on the board of this and is the president of that, including the university’s board of trustees, over which he presided. He died in 1919, while working toward the university’s centennial. I’ve been reading about him in an alumni magazine of that year, an almost-100-year-old magazine. We’re going to celebrate the bicentennial soon, and I have the good fortune to work with some of the people in that office in a very small way. From the other side of the Well House:

In the background, you can see Maxwell Hall, which is an administration building.

The Richardsonian Romanesque-style building was built in 1890 and later named after Dr. David Maxwell, who is considered the father of the university. He was a physician and a lawmaker, and another president of the university board. We’re surrounded by history in the Old Crescent. And beautiful trees, too.

IU / photo / television / Thursday — Comments Off
2
Nov 17

The wig that split

Well, this is just about the oddest thing you can expect on a one-block walk between the parking deck and the office:

This evening we were shooting sports shows. It is that time of year when we’re still talking about college football, the start of the wrestling season, the beginning of basketball, the men’s soccer team’s postseason run and more. Lydia and Austin are holding it all down:

After the night in the studio, I walked back by that hydrant. It seemed weird, but not really weird, the wig was gone when I walked back by.

Who picks up that wig? Was it the original owner? Why did they leave it to start with? Who needed a new wig, and happened upon this one? What if they didn’t have the right complexion?

memories / photo / television / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
1
Nov 17

Sometimes the best camera is the one you don’t have

These photos are just a reminder to me to carry and use my real camera more.

Oh sure, my phone is a fantastic piece of technology. It does many interesting and useful and cool things. Plus it is a phone! And has games! But if I had been carrying my DSLR when I left the building for a chilly lunchtime hour I wouldn’t have had to fake the depth of field here:

And I could have taken a proper macro. And the picture, despite my having to pull out the media card and plug it into a reader and plug that into the computer, would look better.

…

Excuse me. I got distracted. You see, being the first of the month, that means I had to create a new subdirectory on the site for these photos. And that reminded me that I needed to do the monthly cleaning of the desktop of my laptop. And that takes some time. There’s the unstacking, the reminiscing, the categorizing, filing and trashing. It takes a while.

What? You don’t clean your desktop regularly? Or are you saying monthly is too long to go in-between?

Yes, I always clean mine at the beginning of the month. And then, a few days from now, I’ll do the routine, monthly backing up of my phone. Unless I forget again, for something like the fourth time in a row.

I recently discovered the Chris Gethard show. And I was so glad to see Tig Notaro, who is absolutely brilliant, appear on this episode:

Here’s a cool backgrounder on that show:

And from there you can go down the rabbit hole at your leisure. But before you do … I was sitting on the sofa this evening, having one of those moments where the feeling is just right. This was that moment that you want to hang on to because the memory is the kind you’d like to retrieve from time to time, when you need to remember that you can find contentment in nothing.

The Yankee was doing something in the kitchen and listening to Pandora and Jay Farrar was singing and it reminded me of May 1, 1998.

Twenty-ish years ago @AmyRay came on stage at Midtown, having just watched @sonvoltmusic. "God bless those guys," she said.

Tonight, @JayFarrarMusic is drifting in from the other room.

She was right then, she's right now.

— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith) November 1, 2017

I had to look it up, that was May 1, 1998. Tonight’s moment was a moment populated by the memory of one sentence, said as an aside, into a microphone 19-and-a-half years ago, to the day.