We walked into the conference this morning just in time for this session where The Yankee was chairing and I was responding to the papers being presented. The presenters were graduate students, their scholarship quality.
One wrote a piece on the rhetoric of Photovoice, which is a particular photographic methodology. I found myself agreeing and disagreeing with the paper until I heard the author present. She’d written her master’s thesis with this method, but had now changed her mind on it. And that made a lot of sense.
Another was a look at the rhetoric of Blaxploitation films. The paper was good, though it isn’t anything I’d ever consider doing myself. But I did find myself quoting some of the movies he mentioned for the rest of the day.
A third paper on the panel was an analysis of some of the political segments on Saturday Night Live.
Somehow I managed to give my response without referencing this segment:
This one did come up:
I love those bits.
Which made the schema-relational-media theory paper look smarter than all of us, really. Always nice to learn new things, and that’s what happened for me in that paper.
We took in a session featuring some of the great political academics of the region, including our old professor Dr. Larry Powell. I love to hear him hold forth. He’ll sit back, cross his arms and tell you how this most recent campaign was like something Goldwater did. And how it was different, too. He’s just a walking education and a very nice man.
I dropped in on an undergrad presentation because one panelist was talking about the rhetoric of World War II posters, an art form I really admire. She talked about this one — essentially women were hard at work, but being “protected” or “held back” by their husbands. Note, too, the form-fitting overalls. On this poster she discussed the rhetoric of mid-century race relations. More gender roles and race rhetoric is found in this poster, she argued.
And then a young woman stood up to deliver her paper on the rhetorical analysis of photojournalism on Katrina coverage. It was more gripping when she discussed how she was an evacuee of that storm.
Later in the afternoon The Yankee delivered her paper on the Kay Hagan-Elizabeth Dole North Carolina senate race. She won top paper honors for this research. (She’s very good.) And then she took a picture of me taking a picture. (She’s so meta.)
We had dinner at Famous Dave’s, a barbecue place from whom we’ve been holding onto a gift card for years. We walked in and Ray Charles started playing on the speakers, so everything was just right. Good food, we just don’t have one around us. Being Friday, which is Pie Day, we had the pecan. (I like everything about pecan pie except for the pecans.)
I drove her past my old apartment, showed off a few things in town — but not my former station because, really, when you’ve seen one building you’ve seen them all.
And then back across the river to our hotel room, where I must prepare for tomorrow’s presentation.
A few people actually asked for this on Twitter — can you believe it? — and so I’ve compiled this list in Storify. It is found elsewhere on the site, but that just isn’t good enough. Your requested material should be everywhere. It started on Twitter, of course, but the biggest problem is that Twitter has a very temporary nature. Storify will, presumably, be more permanent. And I can edit it for later. So, then, here is the famous Twilight Twitter commentaries:
The Yankee tells me the next movie is set to underwhelm everyone 17-years-and-older this fall. I’m sure she’ll go. If so, I’ll go along to make fun of the thing on Twitter (I do it for you, Internet) and then put it there.
I’m beginning to like Storify. It makes sense, though I wish it would do a few more things, which would also make sense given what it is trying to be. But that’s the nature of things. I’ll take my mile now, you charming little free service.
Follow ups to things mentioned recently: The New York Times has have no interest in competing for digital-only dollars. Did I mention that in it’s present form the paywall is hardly daunting? I get my Times from Twitter, so it is free to me under this odd scheme. Meanwhile, USA Today is revamping. There’s promise and trouble there, I’d think. Their online presence will be the best part of their recently unveiled strategies.
The story here is that a guy stills a laptop from a young computer whiz. The guy then apparently recorded this video of himself and the victim tracked it all down through the power of cheese technology.
And finally, a guy I worked with in Little Rock years ago put this on Twitter today. Apparently that’s his great-uncle cutting Elvis’ hair. He says his grandfather swept it up. No word, yet, on whether anyone stashed it for the eventual creation of e-bay.
So, there, I have three degrees of separation from Elvis and my friend Grant Merrill has a really cool family story he’s probably heard all of his life. And Elvis hair, lots of Elvis hair. He’s just waiting until his daughter goes off to college, and then he’ll sell it off for tuition money. Grant’s a multimedia mogul now. Very impressive.
One day, when I need a loan, I’ll remind him of that time he crashed on my sofa.
This got me looking for an aircheck from the late, great Ray Lincoln who was simply one of the best people any of us ever worked with in radio. I only knew him at the end of his career when his health was failing, but his mind was razor sharp. In his prime he did a show where he performed two people, Ray and Ram, at once. And he did it well, I’ve heard snippets and the thing was amazing. Later I wrote a little copy for him and pitched to him as he did horse track picks. Lincoln was one of those guys who could do a lot of things well, and he was regarded as one of the best handicappers in the country. As was typical, he did that as a character, too. Sport Jackson was a no-nonsense personality and it was just inside the man. He was a method actor without a stage.
KTHV, when Lincoln died a few years back, did the best obit piece you’ve ever read, mostly because the man was one of those people you could imagine has existed anyway:
In January of 2000, deteriorating health forced Lincoln to quit full-time radio. His condition would worsen until he was forced to enter a Dallas hospital in 2003. “They cut me open and did six bypasses. They were gonna do five and I found out if they do six, you get the cell phone and the Internet and the dish.” His condition would deteriorate until he was forced to enter a Dallas hospital in 2003. He suffered six strokes which left him incapacitated and he was in dire need of a heart transplant. Lincoln was kept alive by a machine called an l-Vad. Eventually though, his family was faced with a decision. Lincoln explained in 2005, “It was not looking good. So, we had decided on Thursday, come Sunday, we’ll just turn this machine off.” Suddenly, there was a donor heart available that was a match for Lincoln. “This kid, his name was Dwayne Compton, 26 years old. He was killed in an automobile accident December 11th and the next day, I got his heart,” Lincoln says. “And his heart is in my chest right now.”
And they included quotes that probably are more in keeping with the character Ray Lincoln conveyed on air:
“The radio business is a cruel and shallow money trench. A long, plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”
“Do I get credit for using those words? Look at my contract. I get a 50 cent bonus for large polysyllabic words that are obscure and seldom used except for people who are erudite and urbane.”
I didn’t know him especially well, but he was always a decent guy and a great talent. Sadly, there isn’t any audio of his to be found on the Internet. This is an oversight.
We’re going to Little Rock this weekend for a conference. I must resist the urge to try and remember stories to tell. I was only there for a year, after all. But I certainly met some characters.
If you left it to some media outlets you’d think the South was still living in the 1960s.
But no one talks much about Worcy Crawford, who died in July at age 90, leaving a graveyard of decaying buses behind his house on the outskirts of Birmingham.
His private coaches, all of them tended by Mr. Crawford almost until the day he died, do not have the panache of the city buses that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. refused to ride. But they have significance nonetheless.
With their cracked windows and rusting engines thick with brambles, they are remnants of something that was quite rare in the South: a bus company owned by an African-American.
Mr. Crawford’s work was simple. He kept a segregated population moving. Any Birmingham child who needed a ride to school, a football game or a Girl Scout outing during the Jim Crow era and beyond most likely rode one.
That’s a neat piece, don’t misunderstand. But let’s also be clear: the latest development in that particular story is Crawford’s death, last July. Everything else dates back two generations.
The reporter certainly has her share of accolades, but she’s from California and Alaska, so maybe that’s the problem. Every time you send another person South they have to gain some sort of institutional history and the Civil Rights Era is one place to start. Certainly this is a worthy era, but it discounts more than a little about what has happened in this region, you know, in more recent decades.
Just off the top of my head there’s biomedical research, medicine in general, automotive growth, the transition from heavy industry to service industry (which would be a nice follow up after the typical Civil Rights, five decades-old reporting), more corruption and governmental unscrupulousness than you can cram in a newshole and so on.
None of these things will ever be covered by that particular newsroom. Doesn’t fit the narrative.
One more journalism note. I foudn these three headlines grouped together. Google calls it an algorithm. Really, this is irony:
Arianna And AOL CEO Tim Armstrong Teach Journalism Class At Brooklyn Middle School.
AOL to De-emphasize Journalism, Focus On Brand.
Huffpo Claims Its Bloggers Aren’t Writers. Is That True?
So I guess my one recent visit to HuffPo might be my last. We’ve seen AOL brand things before, and this is just going to get unfortunate, I’m afraid. Shame, too, they have been massing together a lot of resources and talent, but if the point is just to get the logo on my browser, I’m going to be less and less interested.
Meanwhile, from the Middle East, comes a fascinating insight into life in Syria:
Syria recently gained the unpalatable title of being the most restrictive Middle Eastern country for internet censorship, formally held by Tunisia. Syria blocked (and still blocks) a number of sites ranging from pornography to Kurdish websites. These restrictions however are not uniform and inconsistencies such as blocking Hotmail but not YahooMail are not uncommon.
More or less every internet cafe I visited (albeit these were in the more touristy areas) already had the settings changed so that a proxy computer, usually in Saudi Arabia, was used so the public were free to browse banned sites at their leisure. There were even computer programmes that people would pass around to find a new proxy number should one stop working. Sometimes I had to ask for the proxy to be put in which the staff would do without a bat of the eye.
[…]
Speaking to my friend recently he told me people are still frightened because although these sites are now allowed, the internet is still heavily monitored and the rules may change at any time. As there has been no official announcement of the ban being lifted, predicting the mood of the regime is difficult.
The full piece is definitely worth a quick read.
More baseball today as the Tigers looked for revenge against the visiting Arkansas Razorbacks. The bases were loaded, Kevin Patterson had been in a mini-slump, but he’d been hacking away like someone kicked his puppy. And then the pitcher grooved one which wound up behind him, about 385 feet in his bullpen. That grand slam helped the Tigers win 9-5.
Also, they had fireworks.
(That’s from last night, but they go better with a grand slam story than an extra-innings loss.) If you’ll watch the video there’s something a little different in the second half.
I made a video of our visit to the farmers market this morning. Enjoy.
The most important thing about this video is not that I shot it on my phone, but I edited it in the car on the ride home. After that the iMovie app offered an update. The description sounds promising. Can’t wait to see it in action.
I promised you two stories yesterday.
Here’s the first: My longtime friend and radio mentor, Chadd Scott, lost his job at an Atlanta sports talker this week. He was stuck in St. Louis, stranded by Delta and weather. He tweeted about it, Delta took offense and, being sponsors of his station, put a lot of pressure on his employer. So they fired him.
This is regrettable, but everyone in the business pretty much understands the tough spot the station was in. Less excusable was Delta’s overreaction. Here’s why. He tweeted about it on Tuesday and the power of the Internet took over.
He started that day with about 800 followers, and now has almost 1,200 as of this writing, but that’s not what is important. I collected his original tweets, minus one, which he deleted for his former employer, and the next nine hours of original tweets and posted them on Storify.
If you don’t read the entire thing, I ended with the important part. The last 50 tweets mentioning @chaddscott and thus, Delta, had (at that point) reached 19,113 potential airline customers, creating 22,711 impressions.
So this is unfortunate for Chadd, but he’s the kind of guy that lands on his feet. You don’t build the fastest growing syndicated show in the country as he did a few years ago or work at ESPN for two of their top shows as he has done without being the kind of talented person capable of landing on your feet. While no time is good to be out of a job, now especially so, Chadd’s going to move on to bigger things.
But poor thin-skinned, corporate Delta. The guy had a few jokes, sound observations, really, and a few people online saw it. Now he’s going on television, thousands and thousands and thousands of people saw this and, apparently, are making travel decisions around it. (And as soon as my already-booked next Delta trip is up, I’ll be sure to figure this into my personal calculus.) If they can’t figure out when to have deicer at which airport they might not be worth my money, either. Also, they did my friend wrong.
Here’s the second story: I went to a local bookstore last night, a Hastings. We don’t seem to have another one around (that isn’t attached to the university). I remember when this Hastings arrived, when I was in college. it was a novel thing, then, because they had books and music and movies. But only mildly novel. They had some of all of those things, but other places had more of any one given thing.
The writing was almost upon the wall then, but there’s no mistaking what it says now. These stores are dying, at least the ones that aren’t dead. It was like strolling through a video store — Can you still do that in your town? — the only thing you need is the preservative fluids.
Finally found the biography section. Two entire sets of shelves. Amazon has a few more selections.
Not much of a story, but Hastings, I learned, has used books. Then again, so does Amazon. I hope the place makes it. Towns need bookstores. College towns should have more than one. Several people work there and they have at least three chairs for sitting and reading. Also, they have free coffee, so if you need a fix, that might be a good place to try.
I don’t drink coffee, so I couldn’t say.
Worked on what will become a new section of the site. I’ll give you a hint:
Give up? That’s from an old 4th grade science book. It was published in 1940. It belonged to my grandfather. I have a few of his old books and I’m scanning the fun pictures for a small extra section of the site. Not in this book so much, but in one of his high school literature books, there are notes in the margins. I get the impression that he was a funny kid.
I’ll try and trot out part of that section next week.
(Someone overheard me say that today and was apparently offended (or surprised). That was the one sentence I uttered, so they were offended without context, which is always amusing.)
So today we had breakfast at Barbecue House, where we could not yesterday. The place was more than slow late this morning. There were more people behind the counter than dining. But that’s Spring Break. The food is not taking off. Delicious as always.
The cable people had to come back out today. Last night we discovered a lot of pixelated programming had been recorded. There was a Les Mis special on PBS that The Yankee wanted to see and that was mangled so badly it hurt to watch. Shame, too, because what you could hear sounded great. And, then, the straw that broke the camel’s back was a ruined episode of 19 Kids and Counting. And you just don’t mess with the Duggars or they will show up and make you babysit.
So I walked out of the room for a moment to put a dish away and when I came back she was on the phone with the cable people, who helpfully booked an appointment for this afternoon, lest the Duggars hear about it and come visit the cable office.
And they mean business. Two guys came out today. Charter has been here so much, though, that they’re having to recycle techs. One of them had been here before.
He plugged up his tricorder to the cable, pronounced the numbers flatlined and then went outside to jiggle the wires, call a friend and have a sandwich. Do you really know what they’re doing out there? A second guy is inside and I am insistent that he explain everything to me — but in analogies I can understand (“So it is like water in a pipe, then?”) — and have no idea what the first guy is doing outside.
He comes back in after a few minutes with a few pieces of hardware in his hand. He has replaced some splitters. We now have the industrial strength Cabletronic 4000s, which is a step up from the 3000 series Crash-A-Lot model. It seems that we have now exhausted all of the possibilities for diagnosis, repair and replacement inside the house (they’ve been here approaching a dozen times in the last several months) and if this continues a systems tech will be airlifted in to examine things at the hub.
It sounds so ominous, but really, we’re just keen on a signal that plays audio and video, displays the channels for which we’re overpaying and keep a consistent Internet connection. (Though, to be fair, that last one hasn’t lately been a problem.)
They’re nice guys, these guys. They tell jokes. They notice the cat. We comment on the larger company and they spin tales about some of their better calls. The first guy plugged his tricorder back into the cable stream and found everything to be much better. Now we shouldn’t have a problem.
But there’s all kinds of problems you can have. Today I learned that, in addition to signal load, competing tech demands of phone/cable/Internet, rainwater and what your neighbors are watching, another thing that contributes to data transmission rates is temperature. It seems that when it is cold the insulation on the cable shrinks. That means less cable can get in your home. When the weather turns warm the insulation expands, letting cable in. When July gets here we’ll suddenly get a rush of things that couldn’t make it through in December, I suppose.
Drove to the grocery store for a few items today. We walked last night for two, drove today for two bags worth and yet we must still make the HEAP BIG trip sometime later this week. We think, though, we have this down to a science: farmers market for produce, Sam’s for poultry, Meat Lab for beef, sausage, eggs and bacon and Publix for everything else.
We planned this. We’re planners.
Saw a new item I hadn’t noticed before. I gave it a “Where have you been all my life?” moment:
There is a coco version too, apparently, which just seems evil. Don’t ask why one is OK, but another is not. I enjoyed more than my share of kid’s cereal (and still do on occasion) but the chocolate ones always seemed a bit over the top. Except for Cookie Crisp. There’s nothing wrong with that cereal except for their odd character erasures.
Speaking of cereal being erased. I read recently that Cap’n Crunch was going to walk the plank. (And now, who knows? Sad as that is, they’re just pulling on your heartstrings with the old graphic treatments:
Went to the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art tonight to see the documentary Awake, My Soul, which is about the oldest surviving form of American music: Sacred Harp.
It is an intriguing thing, mostly southern and western — which makes a great deal of sense as spelled out in the documentary — but growing across the country and, in several other countries as well. Most everyone interviewed for the documentary lives in Alabama or Georgia, however. They’re all very passionate and it makes for a nice documentary.
Raymond Hamrick, the first gentleman you see in the trailer has a great story, and is a marvelous storyteller. Doesn’t hurt, then, that he has been a prolific composer in the genre. He’s still working, in his 90s, six days a week in a jewelry shop in Georgia.
The history, reaching back to pre-Revolutionary America, was nicely explained. It moves into the work and perception of those who brought it to this generation and then those who would be the prominent contemporary leaders. In the midst of all that are the lost bridge between the 19th Century and those very aged devotees. Somewhere in all of that nostalgia and hope and loss all mingle together, powered by this incredible, powerful sound.
Much of this documentary makes sense to me, or anyone that’s ever been to a primitive style church in the South. I’ve never been to a Sacred Harp singing and I don’t know these people, but I know these people. The documentary touched on the people in this singing community that had died before or during the recording. There was a shot or two that lingered on some old lady, and then a comment by an old gentleman who’d lost his wife and those just sat on the room for a while, until the next joke came along.
Matt Hinton, one of the filmmakers, was there for a Q&A. No one asked why he didn’t put a joke immediately after the most solemn moment of the film, but they should have. Instead, he fielded very intelligent questions for about half-an-hour. One of his central points is the participatory nature of this style, as compared to the performance-based styles of modern music. That becomes quickly evident in his film.
I came home to dinner, a baseball game (Auburn beat Alabama 2-1, in Montgomery’s Capitol City Classic) and two other anecdotes that I’m keeping for tomorrow. You have to come back now.
