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history / IU / photo / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
12
Apr 17

Today was a lesson in knowing things

One of those days that you don’t look out of the window until it is almost too late:

Isn’t that some kind of problem to have, not looking because you don’t know better — especially when you know better. Life teaches you so many things, and some of them you are just determined to learn over and over again. Until you finally do. Know better, that is.

Anyway, that’s the side of the newly christened Frances Morgan Swain Student Building as seen from the Media School. Swain became the wife of the ninth president of the university. She was also a math student, a suffragist and an advocate for more prominent roles and facilities for women on campus, including that one. She seems like an impressive woman.

In the next building over then, our building, tonight:

Sometimes, I have the chance to say something that I know to be true. In those rare moments, like one tonight, I realize I have learned basic things, earnest and true and important things. And sometimes you get to share those things, as advice, because you see the chance. Occasionally you do know.

It is a sports night:

We have less than 10 tapings left on the term. Time moves faster. You’d think it might ought to slow down, with the rest of us. But you know better.

adventures / Monday / photo — Comments Off
10
Apr 17

Conference over, it is back to campus, then

I got to chair one of the last sessions of the conference last weekend:

On Saturday, we had the opportunity to spend part of a beautiful spring day in a nice Greenville, South Carolina park:

Spring, it seems, has appeared everywhere. Or the places which matter, which is to say the place I am at the moment:

We hung out at a waterfall:

We temporarily also solved a running problem:

And that means a delicious sandwich, the likes of which you just can’t do in Bloomington:

A friend of ours in Bloomington is from Georgia. He’s a big Publix guy, he knows our pain and he has assured us there is no reasonable substitute. That didn’t matter this weekend, though, because we got to have a picnic.

Back to it today, though. I rode my bike to work, because weather and my schedule conspired to work together for a change. (Usually I have to stay past dark or it is raining or too cold or whatever. But, finally, a 5 p.m. Monday and nice weather mean I could spend my commute turning small circles with my feet. And I saw this:

They were pouring concrete. They were still on that site when I went back by later this evening. I imagine they got a lot done today. You better when you have a big concrete boom like that out there, I suppose.

It is surprising you can’t really hear them. But, according to the legend I’m making up as I type, under a quiet, full moon you can hear the muffled screams in the concrete beams.

Friday / friends / IU / photo / video — Comments Off
7
Apr 17

At the conference

Had a few presentations to take part in today at the Southern States Communication Association’s annual conference. This one was with all of my political communication scholar friends:

It is humbling to be at the end of the table with a group like that, let me just say.

At the end, after we had speculated on the Trump campaign and not enough on the Clinton campaign, and after the question and answer period, someone asked if all of these Smiths are related. Someone said that there were the two pairs. And Larry Powell there said he was to blame for two of us. The Yankee and I had met in the graduate school program he chaired, and solidified the start of our friendship in one of his classes and now, seemingly moments later, here we are.

And, later, I got to take part in this really cool presentation:

I showed a lot of clips of shows and class exercises. Most of the shows I’ve embedded in this space, previously. One of the film professors sent me to the conference with this mini-documentary.

My Grandpa’s Garage was the final project in a documentary filmmaking class, which introduces students to a variety of styles, approaches, and techniques, like personal essay, stop-motion, use of archival materials and so on. One of this group’s biggest challenges, as you’ll see, was curating the volume of information. There was a lot to search through and consider, there were varying production formats to consider, and to find a way to the path that leads to a well-woven, engaging story. And it is that. It is specific. It is quite personal — and yet there are universal elements and themes here for viewers:

My Grandpa's Garage from Adrienne Grace Wagner on Vimeo.

Adrienne Wagner directed the project, working with two other students: Cadence Baugh and Blake Phelps. It was featured at the Heartland Film Festival, and was one of five finalist in the Cine Golden Eagle Competition. Other finalists were films from NYU, Berkeley and Syracuse, so the implication is that it stands next to traditionally outstanding peers.

Most of the IU students do. It is so neat to be around such talented people, and a treat to show off their work.

adventures / IU / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
6
Apr 17

Finally, Greenville, South Carolina

So you’re going to drive about eight hours, as we intended to do yesterday. A good thing to do is to have an almost-violent flat tire in the first hour of your trip, things change.

So there I was, side of the highway, tiny little shoulder, inches from trucks whirring by as I pulled off an empty case of vulcanized rubber and put on a smaller tube of air. Sometimes the trucks move over. Sometimes they can’t, because there’s someone in the left lane. Sometimes you could look down the road and see they were going to be so close I’d simply stand up and move away. I’m used to cars and trucks not leaving me any room on the road, but on the highway it seemed a bit much.

Anyway, to another rental car office, where they could not give us a new sedan. Finally, after the three staffers tried for a long time to reconcile our route and their other stores along the way, they gave us a Dodge Ram pickup:

And you’ll forgive me, but I didn’t take a photo of the first rental car. Why would you? Anyway, it was an Altima, a few years newer than mine, but there is virtue in renting a car with which you are familiar. This was one of the reasons I wasn’t interested in a pickup. I don’t normally drive a truck and I’m not interested in parking one all weekend and gas mileage and so on.

Also, the big, bad Dodge Ram doesn’t have a gear shift. It has a knob:

Odds are pretty decent, you’d like to think, that Sam Elliott didn’t know about that when he signed on to do the voiceover work in their TV spots. He might have. He probably didn’t care, but it fits the idea in your mind, doesn’t it?

So we drove the Dodge for about an hour yesterday, which was the plan, to another rental car shop, where the crew would have either a sedan or a small SUV waiting for us. So we got this:

I moved the luggage in the first part of the rain while The Yankee handled the paperwork. We got into the Liberty and realized it didn’t have a USB port. She wanted a USB port. So we changed to this Mitsubishi:

If you’re keeping track, that’s four rentals in a few hours. And through part of Kentucky and all of Tennessee we drove in the big storms and learned that the Mitsubishi is not an especially fun thing to drive. Crosswinds were pushing us all over the lane. I would have looked like a DUI if there were any police on the road, but they were probably off stopping floods or something. The storm was intense, but hey, the Mitsubishi did well with standing water and hydroplaning.

We may try to swap this one out this weekend. How can we get to rental car number six and seven if we don’t get number five, first?

Crossing over the Ohio River to Louisville, just before the traffic and the storms turned this eight hour journey into a 12-hour odyssey.

Which made this morning’s panel no less fun.

Hey, we’re here now — and the subject matter improves, too. There were storms and almost everyone had a tough time getting in, but we’re all here, from Texas and Mississippi and Indiana and the fun and friends and scholarly talk can begin.

memories / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
5
Apr 17

Quick notes on the road

Out the door this afternoon and headed for the road. A usual song, but one I sing less these days, of course. Anyway, loaded up the car, opened the door, looked down:

Perhaps this is the week, then. Maybe it happened so gradually and suddenly that no one really noticed:

You know the “Remove all the pegs but one” game. The triangle shape of wood with 13 holes and the 12 tees. You take the tees off the board one by one, jumping to empty spots, jumping over tees as you would in checkers. The goal is to leave just one.

I have had a copy of this game for years, a long ago Christmas gift from my grandparents. As a kid, of course, I developed a sequence to leave one peg. I worked a good while on that. And it turns out that being able to do that took all of the fun out of the game. But I was the kid that figured out how to open safety gates rather than climb over them. I understood when Egon said, in Ghostbusters 2, that he had a Slinky once, but he straightened it. So, anyway, I have to try to remember to forget those steps to the peg game.

There’s another, unconventional, goal to the game. In this version you try to leave a tee in each corner. I don’t know if I’ve ever achieved that, mostly because by the time I had heard someone mentioned it I had learned not to create a series for it. I only play the game when it is on the table at a restaurant, anyway, which it was tonight. When I did this:

Leave five and you’re an “egg-no-ra-moose.” Leave six and you’re just no count, I suppose.

Tomorrow: Our actual drive, and other stuff.