The weirdest sound woke me up this morning. Apparently it was the heater. We turned that on last night. Maybe we didn’t exactly need it. OK, sure, it was chilly. There was a frost warning. But we could have made do with a space heater. But this seemed wise. This is a good week to give it a test. Having toured the house in April and moved in in the summer, this was the first time we’ve had need to try it out and all that.
On the one hand, you want to know the heater is working. On the other hand, we turned the heater on in October. On the third hand, we’ll have temperatures in the 70s for the next week, and it should hit 80 on Saturday. On the fourth hand, this other hand business is getting out of … hand control.
So the heater works. Also, it’s noticeable. There’s an air intake vent in the bedroom and it sounds just different enough from the other noises we’re growing accustomed to.
The things you don’t think about when you move: where all of your stuff will go, not the obvious big stuff, but the endless small things; why one closet set up is better than another; which stairs will creak in the night; if all the light switches are logically arranged and what every new sound will sound like.
My bedroom, when I was a little boy, was on the corner of the house, which was on the corner of the residential road and a busier county stretch. I laid awake enough nights in there to learn where all of the lights came from, I could tell the difference between truck lights and car lights, and learned the directions they all went, from each direction. It was watching those lights and listening to the road noise that I first came to understand the Doppler effect. I had enough nights watching those lights that I’ve compared every bedroom since to how those lights played on the walls. Ten bedrooms since, by my count, none of them have the right lights. My current bedroom is almost perfectly dark. It’s great. No street lights. But we do have this nice rumbling heater.
If we ran it and the overly ambitious ceiling fan simultaneously we could start a real weather event.
Had a nice easy bike ride this evening. My Garmin was dead. My lovely bride’s Garmin wasn’t far behind. So we just turned right and pedaled until we ran out of road.
There is a bit of video. Just a few shots from before the shadows got too long and muted everything. I’m going to find a style out of this, eventually. Just think, you’ll be here to see it evolve.
Down at the other end of the road, just after we turned around and headed back, the setting sun was making a show over our shoulders.
She dropped me not too long after that, I guess. And then I caught back up and we raced to the finish. I couldn’t get around her, but managed to stay locked right there beside her, determined to sprint longer than she did. And I did, but only barely. She said her power meter showed 588 watts during our prolonged kick, putting her in the 80th percentile. Considering she never practices sprints, that’s an impressive output.
Mine was … almost not bad.
We got back just in time to see the neighborhood’s balding tree.
Every day, that leafover grows less and less convincing. When you get right down to it, some trees are just fooling themselves.
Would that they fooled us the year ’round.
Since I mentioned it yesterday, in case you were wondering what the new Gritty phone wallpaper looks like, it looks like this.
If you like it, just right click, download this version and enjoy.
You just have to say “It’s Gritty o’clock” at the top of every hour.
memories / photo / Rowan / Thursday / video — Comments Off on Bringing sound in sight; breaking down stories in commercials 19 Oct 23
What a beautiful day today! Gloriously warm in the sunshine. Nice and mild in the shade. Everything you want in a day you weren’t expecting.
I don’t think I even looked at the forecast yesterday. Too busy doing other things. After getting set a new driver’s license I had to take the garbage to the inconvenience center, a trip so unremarkable that I spent the rest of the evening, and today, trying to convince myself that I had, in fact, taken a garbage can, a giant bin of recyclables and three big bags of weeds to the drop off spot.
Yes, I did that yesterday. And it was a lovely afternoon, too. That’s two days in a row! I spent the rest of yesterday afternoon, though, doing class prep.
Thursdays I’m on campus all day. Today, all day meant six hours or so. In class we started talking about audio, which was fun for me. Easy prep, and a good two weeks of complexities. Luckily for the students, or unluckily, I happen to know a thing or two about sound.
We’ve also been talking about commercials, since they are working on spots of their own as an assignment. This let me do my Bud spot exercise. I show the class this 2014 Super Bowl ad.
Then I do a 7:52 second breakdown of all of the shots and angles. Made a special, timed, edit and everything. Matching text and shots. The first year I did this the class applauded, which only encouraged me. When I did it for the second class today they took an entirely different approach, making me think I should rethink the spot I use for this exercise.
They found the commercial … lacking. Emotionally exploitive. Without purpose. I asked them why they thought so, and they explained it somewhat, making some good points along the way. It is some of those things. Curious, as this was one of the best received ads of that particular Super Bowl. It made wonder if commercial tastes are changing, and could they change in just a decade. Either way, they’re thinking critically, those students, and that’s a great thing.
Just outside my class there’s a large hydrangea busily giving up the ghost. Even in this vulnerable moment, it has a deep, handsome beauty to it.
Our drive home was at the perfect time of the evening. There seems to be something special about the autumnal sunsets here. Maybe it’s because I haven’t seen a lot of them in the last several years, or at least it seems that way. But, as I showed you yesterday, my home office windows face west, and there’s just one house and trees across the way. It gives me a nice view. If, however, you can catch the sunset out in the open, it’s a spectacular time of year for these lovely views.
Looks like I should turn this one into a painting, or something.
But not tonight. It’s been a full day, and there’s baseball and football on, but no notable commercials.
Cool. Coolish. Coolish and gray. Except for the parts that are bright and sunny. That’s today and maybe all week. But we’ll have a change of pace on Friday and Saturday, when we have a lot of rain in the forecast. And on Sunday, looks like wind. On all of this, the seasons will change. Summer ran long and autumn will be the less for it. Or summer ran right on schedule. I’ve no idea how it works here.
And it’s all so variable, anyway, right? You enjoy the pleasant days, marveling at your good fortune, and try not to think too holistically about what it all means. Or you think about what it all means and try to enjoy the day.
All of which is confusing. For a Monday.
Not to worry! We’ll have all week to ponder this, and other mysteries of our time.
So many mysteries of our time. That’s why I’m taking a social media sabbatical. I decided this just last night.
Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets, reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?””
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”
I’ve felt that. Felt it off and on for a long time. And while Carr is talking about other, slightly older elements of the web itself, social media has only exacerbated the problems. I asked my students if they have experienced these same things, and a general now that you mention it consensus emerged.
So, I figured, time to experiment. World events are making it a little easier, too.
How’s it going? Going great so far, thanks for asking. Early observations: I know less. Maybe that’s good. I’m skimming less. That’ll help. The habit of reaching for some platform or another in down times will fade — probably. I’ll get a lot of time back. Like, a lot. My thumb has enjoyed the break. I wonder how long it will last.
Tonight, I’m going to read (part of) a book.
We went for a bike ride just after noon. Warmest part of the day. Just mild enough to wear a gilet. Warm enough to feel like I could take it off. Not that any of that mattered, slow as I wound up riding. Difficult to get overheated when you don’t work too hard.
But the views!
Also, I’m tinkering with new video ideas. It’ll come to nothing, of course, but it changes things up a little bit, maybe.
Problem is, you need those lovely bike photos to prove it all. Usually your bike is leaned up against something, the scenery in the background must be picturesque. The lighting just so. Maybe I should just concentrate on the ride. This was a 21-mile route and I didn’t have to take my feet out of the clips the first time, which is the ideal experience — except for the being slow part.
We went to campus later in the afternoon for a faculty meeting. Faculty met. Information was conveyed. Questions were asked and questions were answered. The meeting ending early, which might be a faculty meeting first. Some people lingered to chat, which was lovely.
Before long it was time to get ready for class. Imagine having to teach opposite the hometown baseball team in the playoffs.
Some may say, Hey, you’re teaching a media class. That’s media! And that’s true, but entirely. We were talking about groups — activists, hate groups and group dynamics — tonight, so if the fans somehow won the game, maybe we can dive into that next time.
The best part was that I got them out of class in time for them to watch most of the game. I’m sure they appreciated that; the good guys were winning. There’s nothing quite like the energy of a local pennant chase.
Dates only stand out to me when I have something big scheduled for the day. I’m a day-of-the-week sort. I don’t think I always was. Once, in the dimly lit and fuzzy-around-the-edges Before Times, I might have been the sort that operated by dates. But if I know anything about a schedule now it’s because I have routinely reminded myself what day of the week it is, or looked at a screen which can tell me definitively.
I don’t believe this has hurt me in any way. Not a lot of missed meetings or anything like that. But I just don’t think much about the dates. And so it was late, today, before I even realized it was the 13th. Which is odd, because I had a pretty strong, I mean celestially strong, fix on Thursday being the 12th.
Who can say why these things are the way they are. You might argue that it’s an avoidance of something or other, but I think of it as an acceptance of what is. And what it is, at this moment, is the weekend. For this knowledge I thank the egg timer in my head that is forever counting the days of the week, and not simply “the dates.”
We enjoyed a late afternoon bike, just an hour jaunt around the usual jaunty loop. For me, the main roads went like this: fine, then fast, and then slow, then falling-behind-bad, then the don’t-wait-for-me pronouncement which usually comes with falling behind. And then there was the road where I thought I put on a Herculean surge, but it wasn’t, not really. After that I got dropped again and decided to add seven or eight more miles, for fun. So I turned my hour or so into a 26 mile ride.
I have a new idea for a video I want to shoot on the bike, but I don’t feel comfortable enough to do it just now. My wrist still hurts a tiny bit from falling on it last weekend and I didn’t really want to contort it for the experiment.
But that meant I had plenty of time for shadow selfies. My shadow had a pretty decent ride.
During the last little bit, right through here, the sun started losing it’s punch. Between the weakening sun, the moisture on my skin and the breeze, you could tell that all of the changes are coming. Fight it, ignore it, acknowledge it, doesn’t matter. A rain system this weekend will be pushed through by a cold front and that’ll be that.
Which means sleeves and pants (and gloves!) on the bike, so I can still enjoy afternoons finding trees that hang out over roads for photos like this.
But not tomorrow. Not in the rain. Maybe on a partly sunny, breezy Sunday afternoon. Or a similar Monday. Highs approaching 59 degrees both days. Huzzah.
I kid, of course. I’m going to be optimistic about this winter. First time in many years! I have resolved it so. I am going to be optimistic about the winter so I can enjoy the autumn. I am resolved.
This is my resolve.
Here’s the last video from the Queen + Adam Lambert show. I got a good eight days of videos out of this, and so we’ll close the week with the full encore. “Ay-Oh,” “We Will Rock You,” “Radio Ga Ga” and We Are The Champions. Whereas there was someone sitting near us who was surprised and excited that they worked “Bohemian Rhapsody” into the main set, no one in the building was surprised by the encore. Pleased, sure. But you could almost hear people clicking through the catalog in their head. Everyone knows what’s coming here. Everyone knew they had gotten a great show, and they were pleased they’d heard so many of their favorites. (I only missed out on one song, but that’s understandable.)
None of the songs in the encore are among my favorites, but they can’t all be on your short list, and it was still great to see Roger Taylor and Brian May blast and bang their way through the standards. It’s fan service at it’s finest, and there’s nothing in the world wrong with that.
Queen + Adam Lambert have 17 U.S. dates remaining on this leg of their tour. It’s a great show. If you are so inclined, get tickets. You’ll have a fun time. You don’t need the $1,000 tickets, either, to sing along and have all of the Queen memories.
I turned off my alarm and went back to sleep this morning and that was not the plan. I figured I’d have one of those little peaceful moments and then get up and, wait a minute, my lovely bride is asking me if I’m going to get up today. Of course I am, it’s only been … 90 minutes since my alarm went off.
The good news is that my alarm was set well before I needed it today anyway. I had an apple, got dressed, finished pulling my things together and we went to campus, and arrived a few moments early, as it turns out.
I spent six hours in a classroom today. Most of that time talking about video editing software. I used these clips, just stuff I found in the yard yesterday, as examples.
That video isn’t what they saw, but those shots figured into the How To of it all. I think it went OK. Next time, maybe, I’ll do that differently. If for no other reason than I think I was beginning to talk myself silly the second time through. Things were shared. Things were learned. I got thanked a few times.
That was one of the views on the drive home, which currently takes place in that 20-minute window between daylight and the gloaming. It’s such a romantic moment, before the darkness creeps upon us. I think we were talking about sports or some silly policy or something. We were in the car, but it was still a moment, and we might have trampled it a bit.
Just three more Queen + Adam Lambert videos from last week’s Baltimore concert. I feel like I have an obligation to share the North American tour opener. Also, it’s earned me 52,000 page views in the last week … so, yeah, you milk that.
“Who Wants to Live Forever” comes out of the 1986, psuedo-soundtrack to the Highlander movie. The song peaked at No. 24 in the UK. Certified gold there, and in Italy, it never did anything here, except stick in the heads of people who liked that movie franchise.
And then there’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” I don’t know how many songs have been on charts around the world across four decades and in two centuries, but this is one of them. (Yes, the opera is the original band recording. They couldn’t figure out how to do it live way back when, and that’s stayed the traditional performance version.)
“Bohemian Rhapsody” is also the most streamed song from the 20th century and, in 2021, it was certified Diamond in the US for combined digital sales and streams equal to 10 million units.
I wonder how the rights holders will re-introduce it to new audiences once more in the 2040s and 2050s.
