weekend « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

weekend

friends / journalism / photo / Samford / weekend — Comments Off
28
Feb 15

Home at last

We are back from the conference.

The above picture is from one of the three panels I sat in today. One was, basically, on student media troubleshooting. This one was about the difficulties student media are having at Tennessee State and Delta State. At TSU they’re getting stonewalled by their administration, at DSU, the entire program has been cut. These are bad scenes. I also sat in on a sports media panel, which was a lot of fun.

I’m exhausted. I ended up judging four categories, which cuts into your sleeping time. I think I’ve had 17 hours of sleep since Wednesday morning. So when I looked at the time and thought I’ll be asleep before 9 p.m. I was fine with that.

These guys are awesome:

That was the funny pose, of course, from Friday night. We left Atlanta this afternoon after receiving awards in the Onsite Journalism Championships:

Page Layout Championship: Honorable mention – Emily Featherston
Copy Editing Championship: 3rd place – Halley Smith
Sports Photojournalism Championship: 1st place – Sydney Cromwell

Hey, I’ve got the laundry started and I’ve had dinner. If you’re not exhausted, you’re doing it wrong.

photo / weekend — Comments Off
22
Feb 15

Catching up

The weekly weekend post with extra pictures.

Do you really mean it!? “Tell us what makes you happy and you could win tomato ketchup.”

I did not realize there are new griddles at Waffle House. We should go to more to see how many places have the new gear:

This is called SkyView Atlanta. You get nine to 15 minutes or 4 complete rotations per ride. That’ll run you $13.50 for adults and $8.50 for kids. A lady I met over there said it was pricey, yeah, but you got good views.

We had steaks the other night. You missed out on me almost over-cooking them:

Allie is very possessive of her chair, and she has no problem letting you know about it.

Of course she’s possessive about all of her seats, which leave precious little room for anyone else …

Auburn / baseball / photo / weekend — Comments Off
21
Feb 15

Radford at Auburn

Slept in a bit this morning. We picked up sandwiches at the deli. We dressed warmly and headed to the ballpark. They canceled the game last night. Too cold, it seems.

I asked the visiting coach Joe Raccuia how this works. I’m guessing, purely guessing, that postponing the Friday game must be an agreement by the two coaches. He just turned and made the zipped lips motion. “I’m just the coach from Radford,” was all he said.

This was on the lineup board:

I think they got a bad batch of markers, because the weather was not bad today:

They played a doubleheader. Auburn won both games, one in 10 innings and then the other in the regular nine frames. They’ll try to get in the third game around rain tomorrow. Aubie is ready:

We had dinner with friends and then, somehow, magically, wonderfully, it almost seemed like bedtime.

And that was the entirety of my Saturday. How was yours?

memories / music / video / weekend — Comments Off
15
Feb 15

Guster

Here are a few clips from the Friday night rock ‘n’ roll concert with Guster in Atlanta.

They do not play Airport Song anymore. Haven’t done it in years, despite the people throwing ping pong balls. A friend saw their show in Birmingham and sent me the set list. I kept asking about Airport, but he just glossed over it, ignoring my question. So, I convinced myself, it must be a surprise in the encore or something, but no.

This seems a bit odd. Airport Song was their first break into the mainstream, if you will. And 99X in Atlanta (then WNNX, now WWWQ) basically willed that song into being a hit. I’m sure it got a lot of play elsewhere, the single climbed to #35 on the Billboard Modern Rock Chart. I listened to a lot of 99X streaming over the web when I was in my internship in 1998. That song played a lot. The Clinton scandal, 99X and learning more and more about Photoshop were among the basic highlights of the year. Hearing intern jokes at work, listening to that compressed-but-streaming over RealPlayer ping pong game (and a ton of Harvey Danger) while studying pixels took up some time.

The video, as all videos must be in retrospect, was weird and underwhelming:

I have four or five Guster albums on my phone, they come up a lot when I’m running. And yet, still, I was surprised by how easy it is to forget how much you enjoy some people’s live shows. Adam talked in between songs about how the fans have stayed with the group as they have gone from a three-piece acoustic based group to this slightly more trippy electronica thing they’re doing now. And he also said they’ve been noticing that for a long time their audiences stayed the same age, young, but, lately, the audiences were now their age again. So maybe a lot of people are figuring that out.

Anyway, good show, great fun, go see ’em.

adventures / music / video / weekend — Comments Off
14
Feb 15

Kishi Bashi

Last night we were at The Tabernacle in Atlanta to cash in on my Christmas present. The Yankee got us tickets to see Guster play. I fell in with the band on their second album almost 20 years ago. Her god-sisters are also Guster fans, probably from college too, but, somehow, my wife never caught onto the band.

She knows about three of their singles with something more than a passing familiarity, but she may be converted after this, her first show. It was my first Guster show in years — you can forget how much you enjoy a specific band if you don’t see them often, I realized.

It was my introduction to this guy, Kishi Bashi:

He’s doing a one-man show, looping vocals, beat boxing and his violin and running it through a sample-loop device at his feet. This just works better to see it. Here’s a sample:

Each song takes a bit to build up because he has to build the layers — and how you keep that in your mind must be a fairly impressive feat, I’d think. Some of these are very pre-determined, but he’s also just experimenting, as well. It is all very happy — there’s a song serenading a particularly tasty cut of steak — and it probably helps that we were surrounded by Kishi Bashi fans. It occurs to me that if the guy isn’t from the future his art is a bit futuristic. Who needs a band anymore if you can make a full sound right there on stage, all by yourself?

He’s playing, with his full band, on the Letterman show next week, by the way. Go see Kishi Bashi.

Also last night, of course, was the featured act: Guster.

I’ll have a few clips from them tomorrow.