Thursday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Thursday

errands / Thursday — Comments Off
7
Nov 19

I made do

I decided I would visit a few stores after work today, so I picked two stores that were seemingly at random.

Seemingly at random because you didn’t know where I was going or why. And seemingly at random because I haven’t told you they were both places I’ve been before — at least one of them frequently. And seemingly at random because you did not know, until this precise moment right here in which I am telling you this part that is very important to the overall story in absolutely no way, that both were between my office, where I spend a lot of time, and the house, where I spend the rest of my time.

I walked through several sections of the first store and found some things, but nothing I had to have. This was really just an excuse to be somewhere, you see. I get in these circumstances and begin to think OK, if you find one thing, two things more you sorta like, you can buy them all. There’s no logic or rationale for this. But if you have some things you’re thinking about getting but you don’t need in the moment, it is a good way to avoiding extraneous purchases. If, that is, you don’t put too much effort into your secondary rationalization skills. And, really, you shouldn’t, because you’ve already built up a credible argument for why you aren’t buying this thing. (e.g. It is only worth it if you find more things.)

So I went to the second store, where I did have a purchase. I needed to buy a picture frame. And not just any, but one that is a random size. It isn’t random, it’s just a standard that applies only to the continents of Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and most of South America. This is a real thing, and we, the Canadians and paper and photo connoisseurs of Mexico, Colombia, the Dominican Republic and the Philippines are the outliers.

And do you know how hard it is to find an internationally accepted frame size in a Hobby Lobby?

I found one. One. The guy was making his patient announcements that the store would close in 15 minutes, and so please bring your purchases to the front and thank you for shopping at Hobby Lobby, where the store will now close in 10 minutes … and don’t you know I waited until the last possible second to go to the register, because if that patient manager sort was going to make his staff work the full shift, I was going to do my part, for them, to see that he did too.

Hobby Lobby is a fascinating place, really. There’s all kinds of carefully distressed things that I would appreciate if they were authentic. But I’m afraid most of their offerings have more attention to the detail of manufactured shabbiness and not enough in overall quality. But it is hard to do much better than Hobby Lobby for a picture frame. Unless you need an A3. And if that’s the case you should go back to the collage frame section, where there is always a miraculous 50% off sale the day you are there, and hope you find something close.

I like the nomenclature of the international, or ISO 216, system. It is only odd if you’re not accustomed to it. But if you think about it. It is a standard defines the “A” and “B” series (and a secondary C series) of paper sizes, which are the most commonly available paper size worldwide. If you’ll round to millimeters, they all have the same aspect ratio. And, while this is more of a paper feature than a photo feature, if you cut or folded a page in half along the width, those halves also have the same aspect ratio. These are great for design elements. And the naming system is simplified. I’ll have an A3, please.

If you, like me, need a 16 1/2 inch by a 11 10/16 inch frame, you might be making do. I made do.

But here’s the thing. I found this frame that some frame maker designed would be great for a matted triptych of 5x7s. It was my only option, so I got it. I liked it a little, but I wasn’t wild about it. I got home, put the print inside the frame. It didn’t fit perfectly, I have a little under a quarter of an inch on both the left and right showing an extra black background, but it fit well enough.

And the look of the frame perfectly complements the print.

You can do worse than making do.

IU / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
31
Oct 19

This week we show color

For Halloween, this fall dressed as winter. It snowed today. Pretty much all afternoon and into the night. The Yankee, who says this is the earliest she’s ever been snowed on, is ready to plan spring break. Embrace the pain of the cold and the wind. There’s five months to go. Five months of this.

Where I’m from, those monster masks were too hot to wear on Halloween. Tonight was one of those never-warm-enough nights. Five more months of this.

Anyway, more foliage! We must enjoy them while we can. That’s what this week is about around here. After the wind and this cold snap, they’ll likely all be scurrying across the ground by the weekend.

All of these are on campus which is, to be sure, quite beautiful during the leaf turn.

Twigs are less beautiful. Oh, sure, they are important. Those leaves don’t just hang there. They don’t pull the nutrients out of the very air. They just don’t put on the same show as the leaves, no matter their color of the moment.

And we’ll have a long time to enjoy those poking up into the air. It isn’t the winter or the cold or even the snow or really the grey skies, you understand. OK, it is a little the grey skies. The immutable grey skies are a part of it. But the cold and the wind and the snow all have their place. I guess. And I can stay inside to avoid most of that, like a reasonable human being.

It’s that we won’t see any signs of spring until the first week of April. The sheer necessary endurance aspect of it all. Knowing that, sometimes just after Valentine’s Day I should see green things emerging, but instead, it’s another two months of twigs. That’s the unembraceable challenge.

Now if I had a spring break every month or so, some place warm, or, heck, even mild. That’d be OK. Alas.

Anyway, happy Halloween, and happy winter.

adventures / family / IU / movies / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
24
Oct 19

Just add music

Tonight was the annual Halloween concert at IU Auditorium. We watched the legendary Dennis James play a score to the 1925 classic The Lost World, an adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story.

The organ at the auditorium dates to 1889 and is a legend itself: 4,543 pipes, 109 stops and has been playing on campus since 1948. It was built for the Chicago fair, at a cost of $65,000. The Internet tells me that would be almost $2 million today. It came to IU after a restoration in Boston in 1944. The largest pipe is 32 feet, it takes two people to move the organ on station, and has more than 100 miles of electric wiring. Also, it sounds darned impressive.

James, meanwhile, is a graduate of IU. He started this particular gig when he was a college student, as a joke and an excuse to get to play the organ. Now he’s a world-renowned performer. He’s played everywhere and touched anything with keys worth operating. He comes back each fall, for 51 years now, to play a Halloween show. And the spirits are looking in.

He told us how music worked in cinema before they put sound to film. It’s a fascinating process, one we’ve all forgotten to think or ask about. Turns out most movies just sent a basic system of sound cues and the resident organist would fill in the spaces based on their interpretation and their own personal libraries. James reeled off a bunch of the music we’d hear in his performance, but I was too lost in trying to imagine how any movie would have as many personalities as it would performers to jot many of the titles down.

The Bat Signal!

The movie was state of the art stop-motion animation. You can find the full film, and various different edits, on YouTube, but it’s just not the same as being there feeling the music coming from everywhere around you.

By the way, this was the first movie to be shown as an in-flight movie. (Which was dangerous in a lot of ways in 1925.) And it was lost for about 80 years, James said, because an order came down from the movie company to destroy the prints, and so most of them were burned. The copy you can enjoy today was held by a private collector and “discovered” in 2003. I’m sure there’s a good story, there. Anyway, the movie!

So no one in England, Jolly Old, believes this one professor who says he’s found dinosaurs living in contemporary Brazil. It’s always the jungle, you see. And so he creates a team to go bring back proof, and find the missing member of his original team. So we follow the adventures of this intrepid bunch — including a famous big game hunter, a young journalist, the daughter of the missing man and a few others — into the Amazon. They find the dinosaurs and a whole lot more. And the dinosaurs are some pretty impressive work, giving the state of the film-making art of the time.

Watterson R. Rothacker, whose name you see on the title card, was the owner of one of the early film processing laboratories. The Industrial Motion Picture Company opened in 1909 and Rothacker and his partners made industrial films that were used for advertising companies, and produced newsreel footage. From what I’ve read, he was keenly interested in using film to educate the masses. Our man was running one of the largest laboratories in silent film on a strip of land in North Chicago where Northwestern is today. By 1914 IMP could put seven cameras in the field at once. And then came The Lost World, which was apparently the firm’s biggest popular project. First National Pictures, which brought you this lovely movie, would ultimately fall under Warner Brother’s control.

And it turns out, in addition to our musical accompaniment being a world-class professional, he is a total ham.

The show was great. It’s one part organ concert, which was our purpose for being there — my step-father loves the pipe organ and this was the first opportunity he’s had to enjoy the old Roosevelt machine — and one part classic theater. During the intermission we all agreed that it was easy to forget the one and concentrate on the other. The film was a lovely 1920s romp. I found myself suspending disbelief about the idea of dinosaurs, but not about the geography required to have a volcano on top of a mesa. And how the volcano is only a bit part, meant to showcase some action. There were plot holes, is what I’m saying. But there was good action! It’s a romp for kids, and we all felt like kids again seeing it. No one moreso, perhaps, than James. I shot this from the hip, but isn’t it interesting how the mask is the part that comes into focus …

Tis the season for spooky things.

photo / Thursday — Comments Off
17
Oct 19

If the joke weren’t on sail I’d be walking the plank

Question: How much did the pirate pay for his peg and hook?

Think about it for a second. You’ll want to get this right.

It’s OK, we’ve got time. I’ll be here when you’re done. I don’t mind.

No, really. It’s Thursday evening and this is important. So make sure you get it right.

Got it? Are you sure?

Good! OK, give it a shot. How much did the pirate pay for his peg and hook?

An arm and a leg.

Sometime over the summer I found myself in one of those pernicious little traps of the online retail world. If I spent beyond a certain threshold I would get free shipping on my entire order of high end, but now clearance priced polos. I had already placed the items I wanted and needed in my cart. And I still had to pump something like 12 bucks or so into the thing to save the 15 dollars. Fifty bucks gets you there! You know the phenomenon.

Problem was, there wasn’t much else I wanted or needed. And the retailer, while having decent clearance prices from time to time, skips over middle-of-the-road retail prices and heads directly to a you-better-have-a-lucrative-and-hopefully-legal-side-hustle price category.

But! I found socks! Lots of nice socks. Finely darned things, too. And on clearance! So I picked up four pair, just enough to hit the free shipping threshold. ($51.96, thank you very much.)

Good thing, too. This happened at TV tonight:

You’ll forgive the lines in the foreground. This is a picture of the monitor on the jib, which overlays the rule of thirds grid for composition purposes. The point is, look at those guys. I have to step up my sock game. Next week, it is on.

So thank you, silly retail customer psychology trick. You’re going to put me back in the sock game.

Someone remind me to follow up on this.

And though it’ll be close to Halloween, I promise I won’t wear the pirate socks.

You know …

…

… the Arrrrrgyle.

Thursday — Comments Off
10
Oct 19

ˈvɛltʃmɛːts

Ahhh, Thursday. It may be Thursday to you, but I’m taking tomorrow off. It is Friday to me. Why, I saw someone around mid-day today and told them to have a great weekend and that was a wonderful feeling. Of course he was leaving to return to his sabbatical at the time.

Maybe I’ll start telling people on Monday to have a great weekend. It’s aspirational for all of us.

It was just a work day. We all have them. It wasn’t a terribly bad one. It wasn’t a terribly good one. I talked to some people on the phone and went to see what a room in another building looked like. I did have a nice lunch though. Also, I ran the email gauntlet a few times, and marveled at how some people are really good at that life skill and some aren’t.

I spent two hours in the television studio and marveled at all the young people who are becoming very good at the skills required of them there. It was a sports night, and I’m sure the crew from IUSTV’s Award-Winning ^TM sports department will have those shows up tomorrow.

Tomorrow, I will sleep in, and perhaps do some other things.