Thursday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Thursday

adventures / history / photo / Rowan / Thursday / video — Comments Off
18
Sep 25

The goal is the goal

It was a busy day on campus. In my Criticism class we watched a documentary about the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. It’s titled “Fists of Freedom.” You can find it in a few places online, including on the HBO app, but here’s a little tease from the night the doc won a Peabody.

Watching it took the full class. Tuesday we’ll talk about it, both the story they told, but also the craft of documentaries. We’ll watch a lot of documentaries in this class, and for these first two we’ll talk a tiny bit about the filmmaking as a format of criticism, too. I have worked diligently to create a wildly varied menu of documentaries. This one is historical and about track and field. (Good as it is, Bob Beamon’s world record long jump is my favorite part of that film.) The next one is contemporary and about tennis. We’ll look at an unconventional documentary centering on a diver after that.

In org comm today we discussed the overarching concept of the uniqueness of sport communication. Anyone that comes back next week will get to laugh at a lot of commercials as we talk about branding.

My godniece-in-law (just go with it) is a high school senior and playing some of her last field hockey games. So we went to see one of them this evening. Her little sister, my other godniece-in-law (again, go with it) played in a JV game, so we got to see both.

Now, I’d hoped to take a few photos of the senior, thinking maybe I could get one or two of her to share with her. The problem is I know nothing about field hockey. I’ve been to, I think, three or four games, and it’s still largely inscrutable to me. Fortunately, one of my students is a field hockey star. She gave me some tips today.

So we went to the games, I followed the suggestions of my field hockey folk hero. The game is played on the school’s football field, which serves quadruple duty as football field, soccer pitch, field hockey pitch and some of their field events for track. The field has a play turf surface, which feels like it’d be fun to run on.

I can say that because I set up shot behind the cage, which sits under the mobile soccer goal, which rests under the football field goal. The game is getting underway, I sneak back there. Sneak by walking at a normal pace. And as I’m fiddling with the settings on my camera, my godniece-in-law scores a goal. Missed it.

At the start of the second half the two teams swapped sides, so I walked over to stand behind the other goal. And back there, was this, which covers the high jump pad. For some reason, they’re really quite serious about staying away from this cover, which is just all kinds of dangerous.

Soon after, a gentleman walked over and told me to leave. So I walked back over to the stands, properly chagrined. It was the first time I’ve gotten in not-trouble at a high school in decades. Such a rule breaker am I.

Leaning against the post of the soccer goal felt comfortable. I haven’t done that since I was 20 or so. And, from back there, watching the game come toward me, I understood what was going on much better than the side-view you get from the bleachers. I have been assured by the people I’ve asked — including a chat tonight with my godniece-in-law’s grandfather, who is my godfather-in-law (just go with it) — that there many rules about what you can and can’t do in field hockey. They mysterious and inscrutable rules to us mere fans, but grounded in safety. He was a field hockey coach for 20 years. He’d know the rules, right? He did not tell me all of the rules. I’ve come to conclude they’re meant to be secret.

Most importantly, the home team won both games.

adventures / music / photo / Rowan / Thursday / video — Comments Off
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.

cycling / football / links / photo / Rowan / Thursday — Comments Off
4
Sep 25

From here to there, to space and back

Here’s a photo I shot in the backyard tonight. The bright one, low and just between the tree crowns, is Jupiter. The second largest thing in our solar system, itself larger than what our puny little brains can contemplate — and pretty small itself, in the larger scheme of things — is just hanging right there. It’s bright enough to be captured by a cell phone camera, even as a little smear of light.

You know that big red spot on Jupiter? That’s a storm. It’s been raging away, a single storm, for at least almost 200 years.
This is the view when Voyager approached in 1979.

That was just two years after Voyager 1 launched. And now, 46 years later, the probe is the thing we’ve cast farthest into the night. Voyager 1 began the summer 15.5 billion miles from home. Scientists predict it will be one light day from Earth in November of next year. If distance is success, it is more successful than anything that we’ll launch in our lifetimes.

Sometime, in the next 10 years, for any one of a variety of reasons, we’ll lose contact and control of Voyager 1 forever.

Which is a lot to think about, when you’re just standing out back. What is far away? And what is farther than that?

I wrote something on Tuesday and we published it on Tuesday and I haven’t mentioned it here at all. Shame on me. This was a quick look at what ChatGPT thought of the first weekend of college football.

It immediately tried to tell me that Ohio State and The Most Definitely Back Longhorns are archrivals. I don’t expect a distributor of ones and zeros to know this, but five games played across 20 years does not an arch rivalry make.

Incidentally, Google’s Gemini got that right. The preceding is a sentence seldom uttered or typed.

ChatGPT goes on, trying to summarize a key point from random games. I didn’t ask for specifics, so it is guessing that I’d care about Michigan’s big day rushing against New Mexico. Justice Haynes tallied 159 rushing yards and three scores against the Lobos, a team that was 126th in rushing defense last year. It presumes I also had a peculiar interest on Nebraska’s Dylan Raiola. It tells me he threw two TD passes against UTEP. But…the Cornhuskers played Cincinnati, not UTEP. (UTEP fell to Utah State.) Dylan Raiola is a QB at Lincoln, and he did throw two TDs, though. ChatGPT mentions Purdue’s 31-0 “statement win.” That was a 31-0 trouncing of Ball State. If that’s a statement in West Lafayette this year, the Boilermakers are in for another horribly long season.

The point I’d like to make here is that I randomly picked three of the bullets ChatGPT offered me. One is wrong on the face of it; another is lacking any of the nuance your football hating relative could have brought to the conversation. Also, I spent three minutes Googling all of that to check its work.

Go ahead and subscribe to that newsletter. I’ve got an idea for another piece for next week.

Today on campus I had my second classes. Criticism and org comm — most of the students came back and some new ones came in. In criticism, we did our first high altitude pass of what media criticism is about, and started to speculate on why it is important. In org comm, we announced our fantasy football teams. We’re going to play football as part of our larger classroom experience. In groups of three or four they’ll all run a franchise and apply the things we learn across the semester. Some of these people are very eager to do this, which is great.

I gave both classes my second off-topic lecture. I do this three times a term. The first day, Tuesday, I talked about my hope of helping students discover the joy of learning. I do that by talking about a former student who is doing some really incredible things out in the world, simply because she wanted to take on new things.

Today, we talked about being safe around cyclists. We have a vested interest in this, of course. I told them about Johnny and Matthew Gaudreau, which was just a year ago last week. They know of it, being that they were local boys and Johnny was a big time hockey hero and Matthew was, to a different degree. But they don’t know the details. So I share a little of that, and then point out that in a few weeks my lovely bride and I will celebrate the third anniversary of her horrible accident after a tangle with a pickup truck. Three ribs, shoulder blade, destroyed collarbone, muscular damage and a concussion. It took her more than a year to get back to her normal quality of life.

I used to give this lecture, I told them, a bit differently. I used to tell students that I won’t say what color bike I ride, or what color my helmet is, because I want you to be safe around all the cyclists you might meet. And remember, I’d say to them, one of them might be me. And I have your grade in the palm of my hand.

I would do this with my very dry sense of humor, putting my right index finger in my left hand for syllabic emphasis. In the palm. Of my hand. At the end of one semester a young woman said to me that I got into her head with that, and it made her nervous every time she saw a cyclist. That wasn’t my goal, so now I explain the whole joke.

And now I’ll hope they give cyclists and others more room when they pass.

Next week I’ll start a class by saying “Who here drives a …” whatever car gets too close to be between now and then. I’ll drive this point home all term. I’m changing attitudes a few dozen people at a time. I wonder if they’d be willing to listen to me go on and on about Voyager 1.

Rowan / Thursday — Comments Off
28
Aug 25

A day long meeting

We had a faculty meeting today. The full department, reunited. The chair had put together a nine-page agenda. That’s a lot to get through! He’s masterful at pulling this together. He knew exactly where to put the lunch break on such a large document, and we got to that moment precisely at lunch time. He also honors the scheduled ends of his meetings. This one was slated to run from 9:30 to 2:30 p.m., and no matter what, you know you’re going to be done at 2:30.

Hitting a hard out on a five hour meeting with all of the sidebars and non-sequiturs that come with a bunch of professors is a bit of magic. The guy has mastered it.

Still and all, that’s a full day, especially after the optional social hour that followed.

Here was a little note card I found in the classroom we were in.

I wonder if that applies to all of us. Can I refer to that on a day when my class plans don’t come off as well as I’d hoped? “This was the best me today. I remembered that!”

Anything but work is the theme of the social hour, which of course devolves to pedagogy or theory because it’s a room full of people that think about that stuff incessantly.

There’s a school of thought that you should take part in these with great interest. See and be seen. Collegiality and all of that. Another good reason is that there are still people in this department I don’t know especially well. So today I learned all about one fellow’s vacation-slash-retirement home he’s working on in Mexico, and someone else’s recent hiking adventures.

We left in time to enjoy some of the evening daylight, so it truly was a full day on campus. (We’re not even working yet, and yet.)

Not too long after I got home I found a nice little headache, and so I spent the evening bumbling around, rather than being productive or otherwise exercising. There’s always tomorrow for one, or both of those things.

photo / Thursday — Comments Off
21
Aug 25

Nothing to it, really

I woke up precisely when the alarm went off. Ready to go. Awake. There are sometimes differences in how you wake up. Sometimes you’re awake, alert to the hum of the universe. Sometimes you can go right back to some deep stage of nocturnal coma without an effort.

Lately I’ve discovered a manner of waking up, fully aware of all of the works of poetry and physics man has devised and deciphered, my brain alert with the knowledge of all of it — at least that it exists, not that I have the capacity to retain it or understand it all, mind you. But, then, I turn over and go right back to sleep. All of that heft and conscious living going on in my brain and then, suddenly, it’s two hours later. Two hours later than you’d intended.

Nothing to it. You just roll over and close your eyes, but not too tightly.

Saw the neighbors. Feed the deer. Talked with a sweet old lady who is about to move. Her house goes on the market tomorrow. She has mixed feelings about it all. The neighborhood will miss her dearly. She’s one of the pillars, one of the stalwarts, a founding member of the officially unofficial neighborhood watch.

She told me today that when she started working they were so hard-pressed for teachers that they were putting people with two years of classroom experience into schools. She had colleagues that taught all day and then went to night school to complete their degree. This was the 1970s, and a decade or so into a population boom. There are a lot of stories in there, you can just tell.

Anyway, there’s not much else here, because I spent most of the day just staring at a screen, willing things to come into existence. Not a lot of luck on that front, unfortunately.

Nothing to that, either. You just sit there and wait, again, with your eyes not too tightly closed.

Here’s a little clump of weedy grass that found its way through the cement, and is enjoying some rain drops.

Mild gray day. Breezy. The sort of day that comes with its own charms, and as such deserves our attention. The sort we all need to be able to take in at the drop of a hat.

And instead of doing that, I spent it getting not enough work done.

Well, that’s why we have tomorrow. There will be something to that, surely.