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Thursday

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4
May 23

Dodging other people’s pictures

For about two weeks or so each year, leading up to the spring term graduation, the Sample Gates become a a photographic centerpiece of the campus. Already, it is a bustling place. This is one of those places where town meets campus, there’s a busy bus stop there, a Starbucks is just across the street, and so on. But now, there are crowds there for photographs.

The Sample Gates are a signature image on the IU campus. The gates appear old, and indeed they are to the modern student. It only took 80 years or so to get them built. Students had raised money for them at the turn of the 20th century, but the board had the same plans, so the student-raised money went to another project. After that, the university put the gates on hold. Different plans for the gates came and went over the next few generations. Then, in the 1960s, there was a new move to build those gates, but loud criticism stalled the project. People said it a wasteful expenditure when the money could go to scholarships and financial aid. (Can you imagine?) That brings us to the 1980s. The man who ran financial aid for the university donated money for the gates we see today and named them in honor of his parents, and so we have the Sample Gates — the place where IU folks see it as much as a welcome to the world as a welcome to the campus. That’s been the icon since 1987.

And now, at graduation, young men and women show up in coat and tie and nice dresses and caps and gowns and take their photographs. It ramps up and, by today, there are small crowds patiently waiting their turns, and graduates wasting cheap bottles of sparkling white wine for photographs.

Yesterday, someone had dragged out a professional photographer. They’d brought reflectors and the whole set up. Someone else, in the brightest part of the day, had dragged out a ring light for some reason. Someone else brought their full length mirror.

I have never understood why the university doesn’t close this to foot traffic for the week. Let the IU Student Foundation run things. A few bucks here for a few moments with a clean background. None of these other people in your shots. Or, for a few more bucks you get a few moments and a few professional shots with a photographer they provide. Sure, there are some instagram pros out there, but if you’ve ever asked someone to take a group photograph for you, you know that not everyone is a natural shutterbug. And the graduation pose is definitely one of those moments you don’t want to be cropped at the shins.

We return to the Re-Listening project, where we are listening to all of my old CDs, and in the order that I acquired them. I’m chronologically in late 1998 (or very early 1999) here, and we’re talking about Texas blues, and a 1995 posthumous greatest hits release from Stevie Ray Vaughan’s catalog.

I have the glimpse of a recollection of some news coverage after he and three others were killed, in 1990, in a helicopter crash. It was foggy and the helicopter was living a concert and crashed into a nearby ski hill. The news featured him, or him in Double Trouble, reducing small venue stages to ash, and then one of his contemporaries, I forget who, discussing how it seemed unfair that here you had one of the most talented guitarists in all of the world, he’d finally put his drug use behind him, only to die at the peak of his powers. He was 35.

He would have been 40 years old when people put this on for the first time.

Every song on here I know. I think almost every song on here I knew at the time, somehow, despite this not being my main genre, but sometimes the virtuoso goes mainstream. Indeed, SRV and Double Trouble dominated MTV in the early days. Also, every song on this record absolutely cooks. But you need to see him live. Thankfully, someone invented video and, later, YouTube, where you can see the man play his machine behind his back.

This song is also on the record, though this performance is from Austin City Limits, looking for all the world like the velvet bulldozer, Albert King.

For whatever reason, I don’t really associate a lot of memories with this CD — that’s one of the main points of the Re-Listening project — but the music is absolutely amazing, which is the other, more important, point.

Musically, SRV is critical to resetting the genre of pop and rock stations. He helped kill the synth-pop, and took some wind out of the hair metal scene. Most importantly, his cords held open the door for people like Robert Cray and Walter Trout, and maybe even the renaissance of John Lee Hooker a few years later.

In the next installment of the Re-Listening project we’ll have a debut album, something I came to a decade too late. Also, it’ll be really, really good.

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27
Apr 23

Some notes from Franklin Hall

This evening was my last late night on campus this semester. Students were producing a comedy show. The main character had a psychotic break of some sort. There was hypnosis, which didn’t work, and so they proceeded directly to lobotomy.

This is how the universe provides inspiration. The lobotomy bit was a simple go-home gag. Someone had a first aid kit, and produced some gauze.

I was sitting in another part of the studio typing away on this or that and I heard someone say “If only we had some blood, or a blood-like substance.”

Well. Earlier that same day, there had been an end-of-the-semester party in the commons. Wings for sports bros. Someone did a halfhearted job cleaning up afterward and there was a table loaded down with those ketchup packets. Someone went to grab a few of those, and suddenly there were special effects and makeup.

I hope someone added that to their LinkedIn.

Earlier this week I went into what I think is the one public space of our building I’ve never visited. I had a chance encounter with a delivery man. He had a shipment of paper. On the paperwork was a name no one recognized. Someone assumed this mysterious man might somehow work with the Board of Trustees. On the top floor of our building the Board of Trustees have a small set of offices. So I went up there to ask if anyone there knew the name.

They did not know the name. But they did have a few nice photos of the building. This is the laying of the cornerstone of Franklin Hall, originally the campus library, circa 1906.

The university’s archives say John William Cravens is at center wearing a bow tie and skimmer. Cravens founded a newspaper at 20 years old. He moved to Bloomington at 21, became a school superintendent, clerk of the circuit court, founded and ran for 13 years, a local paper, The Bloomington World, which is the ancestor of the current struggling rag. While he was doing some of these things he was also going to college, and was named university Registrar, as a student. (Different times, I tell ya.) He stayed on as Registrar for 41 years. In the background, hatless and wearing a white shirt is famed classical historian Harold Whetstone Johnston. Six years later, he killed himself on a train. William Lowe Bryan is standing at the right corner of the building wearing a skimmer.

Bryan is important. He finished his bachelor degree in 1884 and named an English instructor. A few months later, he joined the faculty of the Greek Department. The next year, he was named an associate professor. (Different times, I tell ya.) In the next few years, he became renowned for his work on the study of children, and was a charter member of the American Psychological Association. He became a VP of the university and then, in 1902, just 18 years after graduating, he was named president of IU. He was at the helm for 35 years, boom times, when he oversaw the beginning of the schools of medicine, education, nursing, business, music, and dentistry, many graduate programs and several satellite campuses, and, of course, this building, the library.

The Board’s office also has this print on the wall. This is just before the original construction was completed, so 1907. The archives hold this photo as a donation from the photograph albums of Floy Underwood, which I believe is a woman named Flora Underwood. I can’t find out much more about her, though.

If you follow the building into the background you can see the area where my office would eventually appear. If you want to see more Franklin Hall, here are the archives, which features some of those early days, a mid-century renovation, the fire in the 1960s, a few postcards and background shots. And then, just at that moment in history when cameras became ubiquitous and digital photography got cheap … the collection ends in 2003. Nothing about this, the third version of Franklin Hall’s life, which is wild. If you want, then, to see the promotional video we produced at the beginning of this incarnation of the building, go here.

I’ll be back there tomorrow, the last day of classes of the spring term. I’ll have two different productions running in two different studios. One of them will wrap up a multi-year project. The other will wrap IUSTV’s production run for the year. Big Friday.

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20
Apr 23

Spring begins here tomorrow

I visited Chick-fil-A drive-through for lunch yesterday. The local Chick-fil-A now has multiple touch points along the drive-through path. It eats up half of their small parking lot, but they are incentivizing drive-through customers if you’re using their app. We use the app for our regular Saturday lunch run.

It’s hopping at noon on Saturdays, of course, so you roll down the window and talk to three people along the way. First there’s the person getting the order. Then there’s the first merge point, three lanes to two, and the a second person who is controlling the order of traffic. Someone else confirms the order, usually after the second merge point which pulls the two lanes into one line, just before you reach the window. Three or four crew members in that little space, and then two people outside of the window that actually hand you your food. On Saturdays, we briefly interact with four people to get our sandwiches; who knows how many people are in the back doing the actual food work.

The point of having all of those people isn’t to speed up the process, but to control the flow. Your wait isn’t at the window, but in the line, with the slow illusion of progress via motion. The other virtue of the setup is that they can put people outside, or pull them in, based on customer rush.

Take yesterday, which is the point of mentioning this anyway. The early lunch crowd on a Wednesday isn’t particularly busy, so I only talked with two people between entering the parking lot, and making the window.

At the window, a guy was leaning out, waiting for me. Big smile on his face. Gregarious, ready to have a chat. (It stands out here.) My food wasn’t ready he said, so he leaned into the little easy chitchat. He loved this, and he leaned in by leaning out of the window. He asked me how my day was and complimented my pocket square.

He wasn’t prepared for what happened next. Instead of having to ask me two or four easy throwaway questions, I started asking questions of him. You could tell this doesn’t happen to him a lot in that job. We talked about the weather and naps and his other job. He works for DoorDash, and I wanted to know if he got to meet a lot of people that way. I asked him if they took care of him there, and how far he drove. And then my food was ready, in my car and I was on my way.

I’d like to think that he somehow took the exchange forward, and was even more enthusiastic with the next several guests.

I once again find myself behind in the Re-Listening project. Somehow a few days go by, and a few more CDs get played and now you have to power through whatever I write about it all here. The point of the exercise being to listen to all of my old CDs, in the order that I acquired them. The secondary point being to write about them here. They aren’t reviews, or the dreaded re-reviews, just an excuse to go down memory lane, and to post a few videos for you.

Which brings us to the only reason most people bought this particular album in the mid 90s.

New Zealand’s OMC released this, their only record, in 1996. I got it as a freebie in 1998. It made it to number 40 on the Billboard 200. On the strength of this song, and three other singles you probably don’t recall, it was certified gold.

How do things catch on half a world away, I wonder. It’d be easier today, sure, but getting airplay from around the globe … it had to be MTV. Whatever it was, the critics liked it.

There is a certain infectiousness to the songs. This was the second single.

This is the third single, and the track that sticks with me whenever I listen to this CD, which is admittedly rare. This is also the first track you hear if you play the whole album and, I like to think, this is why critics struggled to label the record. In 1996, this was a unique collection of sounds.

I bet you never thought of New Zealand hip hop, Urban Pasifika is is called, as influencing the global sound — and that’s OK, I hadn’t put that together before now, either — but here we are, hearing the strains of OMC in other people’s work, and OMC itself enjoying a resurgence on TikTok of all places.

OMC only produced the one record, mostly because of record label disputes. Pauly Fuemana was diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder and died in 2010, just 40 years old.

Which brings us to New American Shame. This was released in March of 1999. Didn’t like it then, and I never, ever listened to it. I am so unfamiliar with it that when the first song began in my CD player — it’s always a question of what comes next in the Re-Listening project — I wasn’t sure what AC/DC ripoff I had picked up somewhere. Kiss without the appeal. Buckcherry without the adhesive backing removed. (There’s nothing to stick to here, is what I’m saying.) It’s a power slop dirty rock ‘n’ roll sound that doesn’t appeal to me, with rote mixing and mastering on the production side. This is the first track, which was remixed when the band signed a major label deal, and released as a single. It hit 35 on the Mainstream Rock Chart and, unless this was your genre, I’d be surprised if you’ve ever heard it.

The rest of the record sounds a lot like that. It has its place, I guess. It’s all the sort of thing you’d heard from the annoying pontoon boat just upstream that ruins your day.

I don’t want to play any more of it here, for fear of that very thing.

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13
Apr 23

The one where he complains about spring for a change

The apple tree is abloom. You would be forgiven for thinking that we are in spring. But, alas, I know better. I know better because, now in my seventh April here, I know better. And, also, I can read the forecast. It might break 45 degrees on Saturday.

Spring will not begin here until next weekend, the running of the Little 500 bike races mark the official recognition of the seasons changing here. Our first year it happened during the actual race — a soft, subtle, two hour transition that you could actually feel if you were sitting there attentively, desperate.

Even as I note that spring does not begin until the third week of April, I should note that this has been a mild winter. But! There’s still a week-and-a-half to go …

I had a nice, brisk ride this evening. My lovely bride was sitting in the backyard, enjoying the weather and reading, I was sweating, going up a virtual hill on Zwift. But I had, on this stage, three of my favorite visuals on the game. The windmill, the mountain which creates its own weather system and an empty road.

At times, this route was fast, at times it was slow. So like every other ride, really. But I got in 33 miles, and that’s not bad for a Thursday, even if, just at the end, right about at 90 minutes, I started getting bored. I think it has something to do with being indoors on a nice weather day.

I am reading John Dower’s Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. I am 11 percent in, the stage is set, the context is in place, and the truly memorable anecdotes are now appearing.

That repeal was just three weeks before the American occupation ended. Despite some advocates, daylight saving time has never been restored in that nation. If the author puts a half-paragraph into something like that, you’re going to get a lot in the coming pages. And there are a lot of pages, a lot to cover, socially, politically, economically, culturally. But, at least, we know how they felt about springing the clocks forward.

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6
Apr 23

Some days peak early

Eaaaarly this morning there was a car chase in Los Angeles, where it was still late in the evening. All of the local television stations put their helicopters in the air. The want was for a stolen car, suspect armed and dangerous. The driver stayed on the surface streets, stayed within an eight-block-or-so radius.

Car chases come with a set of truisms. The person involved isn’t making their best choices. And they are all amazing drivers, until they aren’t. Sometimes, these things are amazing advertisements for the durability of cars. And they can be oddly, voyeuristically entertaining, until they sometimes become terrifying. Which is why all of those media sorts were orbiting this guy.

The driver paused, and two people emerged. The passengers skittering away under the police chopper’s big light. They ran spike strips out in front of the car, those big metal set ups that are designed to be driven over, top puncture the tires of the stolen car, and then an officer yanks them away so that the tires of his colleagues’ cruisers are unscathed. To do this, you have to know where the driver is going, the road has to be open, and you’ve got to get there with the gear before the driver, and get him to actually drive over the giant metal spike strips. Sometimes the driver is wise to this, and swerves around them, but, also, see the first truism above.

This guy got spike strips at least three times, which meant he was utterly predictable, and that he couldn’t figure this out. See, again, the first truism.

The first two people who got out of the car, one of them was apprehended right away. The other a short time later, as the chase continued. After a time, the driver paused and another person exited the car. That person gave themselves up quickly as the driver sped on. More laps, more helicopters, more cruisers, more spike strips.

When the tires flatten, you can still drive. The car is noisy, and difficult to control. Now the driver is fishtailing. The driver can’t hold a straight line, because he’s lost three tires. And, eventually, the wasted rubber of the tires gives away, and the car, still going, but slower, has even less control, because the car is down to the rims.

And this guy was going Back to the Future.

Finally, he stopped. And, as is often the case, the stop seemed both delayed and abrupt. It was entirely unsurprising and, like so many of these things, anticlimactic.

The ones that have a climactic ending really, really make you question why you’re watching.

Why I watch is because of these poor news anchors and the interactions with the long-suffering helicopter reporters, how loose and rigid they are with their language and ideals, how there is seldom any followup, even if they’ve ginned up any given chase into something compelling, and how they prove, like me, to be poor play-by-play commentators.

Whoever was on the desk of the station I was watching tonight had a great way of rephrasing, without at all reframing, what had just been said by her colleagues not 45 seconds earlier. The whole thing is parody not beyond satire.

So there I was — watching this not good driver, make not-the-best choices, as the driver and a fifth person were taken into custody — wondering why I was watching this eaaaarly this morning while it was still late in the evening in Los Angeles.

I’ll watch the next one too.

Ron Burgundy knew what he was doing.

More music, because that’s the theme around here as we labor to catch up on the Re-Listening project. It’s every CD I own, in the order in which I picked them up. These aren’t reviews, anything but!

Imagine, in your early post-adolescence, discovering Keb’ Mo’. Invite some friends over, you put on “Just Like You”, his third album, for which he won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album — an honor he’s won twice more, and been nominated for seven times, total — and you are suddenly musically erudite. (From jazz to contemporary blues within one page of this book of CDs!)

He released this in the summer of 1994. I got my copy in … let’s say the end of 1998 or the very beginning of 1999. Someone gave this to me, or it was a work freebie, or something like that. I don’t have the liner notes, never did. But I have that drum and that harmonica, starting off a whole record. Musically erudite, I tell you.

Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt, two people who shape all of modern blues-pop if you ask me, appear on the title track. You can’t do better than that for supporting vocals.

This record just cracked the U.S. Billboard 200 in 1997, staying on that chart for just one week.

Is there a Robert Johnson cover? There is a Robert Johnson cover.

How the man that influenced everything ever done in blues (and most of rock ‘n’ roll post-1961) did it.

Also in 1997, Keb’ Mo’ portrayed Robert Johnson in a documentary.

Never mind that Johnson died at 27 and Keb’ Mo’ was 45 or 46 at the time. Keb’ Mo’ has 19 records out there now, with all of those Grammy awards, and he’s still touring at 71. He has two shows next week in Australia, and then begins a 25-date U.S. tour later this month.

And we are now just two (much less musically erudite) CDs behind on the Re-Listening project.