Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

After a long time, it got here quickly

My mind wanders better when I ride my bike on the road, as opposed to when my bike is mounted on the trainer indoors. I don’t know why that is. It seems like the opposite should be true. Indoors, I am in a small 8 x 10 light-blue room. There are a few windows showing the backyard, which is quite nice, but it remains a static condition. Lately 90 minutes is the extent of time I want to stay in that unchanging way, but the only thing my wanders to then is, “How much longer?” Where does my mind go the first 75 or 80 minutes?

It is an honest mystery, one that hasn’t occurred to me until after today’s hard-easy bike ride on roads and under sunny skies. Today, I spent about an hour pondering the nature of suddenness. It was 61 degrees and the world felt big with possibilities. This is finals week. Young people are graduating. Graduating? Already? Can that really be the case? So suddenly? People are saying so long, or see you next fall.

How did we get here so suddenly? This feels rapid.

Coming to realize that this is May — that the term is ending, that summer will soon begin, that my schedule can simplify itself, that the weather is maybe finally growing consistently nice, that these are things to be enjoyed and savored, and they are here before me, now — is a small elation. Remember the feeling, as a kid, you had when you thought you were getting away with something? It feels like that kind of giddy.

And how can that be the case? Why, just the other day was spring break, and that felt exactly the same way. Where did this semester, this year, the last three of them, go?

You almost don’t even notice the little voice saying, “Finally … :

I thought on this for most of my ride, but came up with no real answers. You’d think, riding on open roads, you’d spend time concentrating on other things. The wind, your lungs, the sound of your tires on asphalt, how that black Audi deliberately executed a dangerous close pass. But, no, it was the nature of the notion of time. Except for the places where I was riding through curves and turns, and passed that one farm that was a little light on the fragrance of nature, today. Does the livestock know what time of year it is?

Anyway, shadow selfie.

And, later in the evening, having realized how my conscious wandering mind acts on the road versus on the trainer, I have to wonder why. I asked the shadow. He was characteristically zen about the whole thing. Maybe that’s by design, too.

Time to dive back into the music for the Re-Listening project. It’s all of my old CDs, in their order of acquisition. And this is one I listened to twice before I started writing about it here, because there are no rules or expectations here, and I like this record. We journey back to the early fall of 1998 and the third major label release by Better Than Ezra, “How Does Your Garden Grow?” They got dropped by their label right after this record, where they parked two songs in the top 40, again proving the ridiculousness of the music industry.

“At the Stars” made it to 17 on the Modern Rock chart. If you had time for another 1,500 words on this, I’d argue it’s a part of a long-running trilogy-plus arc throughout the band’s catalog. Or you could just imagine all the rom-coms this could have featured in, or the dates it played a part of in 1998 and 1999.

Tom Drummond was experimenting, a lot, with his bass guitars, and the sounds were peppy and eclectic throughout.

Kevin Griffin, in addition to fronting this band for three-plus decades now, has a prolific second career as a songwriter for other acts. I like to think this was the song where he figured out he’d do that.

There’s a line in there, after the bridge, that I told a girl when she broke up with me the next year. It was a direct ripoff, sure, but it also applied. She caught the reference, but not its meaning.

If you had time for a further 2,000-3,000 words on this, I could make a convincing argument that if the producer got really selective, they could re-release the greatest concept EP of all time from just a few of the tracks on this record.

They re-released this record a few years ago in 5.1 stereo. YouTube’s compressions aren’t an improvement on the original mix by any means. But I wonder …

Griffin said:

It’s our most sonically adventurous album. At that time there was some great music happening — not just alternative rock, but an explosion of electronic music like Chemical Brothers, DJ Shadow and the experimental Björk albums, like Post, and Radiohead’s OK Computer. So we made this grand sweeping album with a lot of electronic flourishes and a big orchestral string section. We really went for it and the original recordings had a great sonic character, but got a very compressed, late ’90s mix. So a lot of the textures and nuances were lost in the original stereo release. Richard LaBonté [of Music Valet, the 5.1 remix specialty label that spearheaded the project] was the catalyst for the remix. When he approached us, we were thrilled. The album was initially unappreciated. It probably got us dropped from Elektra Records, because we’d made two very commercial albums before that, and then went down the rabbit hole creatively. But it’s our fans’ favorite album.

Should I start buying things in Dolby 5.1 now? Would I notice the difference?

Anyway, the last time I saw BTE was in 2018. They were celebrating the 25th anniversary of their major label debut that year, on the road with Barenaked Ladies who were, themselves, celebrating a 30th anniversary that same year. These are the acts I like now, I guess. It was inevitable as it was obvious, I suppose. Better Than Ezra is apparently close to releasing a new album — possibly this year. And they’re doing limited dates this summer, though none of those shows are close by where I’ll be. If they were, though, I would be there.

The next album in the Re-Listening project is “Appetite for Destruction.” I bought it as part of a bulk deal. I never had it in another format, and picking this up was really just feeling a need to acknowledge something that was important to rock ‘n’ roll from 1987-1989. The singles, except “Nightrain” all hold up. The rest is just kinda … there, but that’s likely just because I have no strong association with the CD. Plus, after 30 million units sold, it’s challenging to write anything new here. And, these days, it is impossible to listen to this and not picture Slash in a Capital One commercial. The first single is about heroin addiction, and now there’s banking spots. We’re mere days away from reverse mortgage promos and Muzak at this point. I guess i just don’t have … an appetite for it.

music / tabs / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
02
May 23

Weirdest disco ever

“It looks like a discotheque in here.”

I was at the dentist, for the I visited the dentist for the routine visit. I had a new, different, more emphatic dental hygienist this morning. She was plenty nice, and she has figured out not to ask too many questions at the wrong time, but she does not yet know how little I want someone’s hands in my face. That’s the part of the dentist’s office — the constantly remind myself not to clinch my hands too tight — visit that is a conscious effort for me.

In a way, it was a relief. With the original lady, who I guess I’ve visited for five years or so, always talked about TV. For the last month I’ve been more particular about flossing, and trying to recall if I’d been watching anything that might match what I know about her interests. We also talk about travel, the OG hygienist and I. Problem is, I’ve only visited two new places since I saw her last, and we don’t have a new trip planned just now. Shame on me.

Also, the dentist’s office has recently finished an expansion. This morning I was on the new side. Everyone there agreed they liked having the work finally done. Finally, no more loud, chaotic noises. No scraping, drilling or machine whining. I don’t think they found this as funny as I did.

For whatever reason, this little room had LED lights in small sockets in the ceiling. These are unrelated to the fluorescents and the work lights, and you only notice them when the Chair of Mild Discomfiture is in the recline position. The one to my right was a green light. The one to the left was an orang-yellow light. That one was blinking. It was flashing almost in time to the music, a pop channel on Sirius XM that, quite obviously, was a little too aggressive for this sort of work space.

A bit later the dentist stopped by. Nice fellow. Easy smile, always interested in what you’re interested in. Interested in you. Of course I see him for about eight minutes a year, so I wonder what it is like to know him at greater length, but he’s probably perfectly pleasant.

This is the first time, since I’ve been paying attention, that he hasn’t tried to upsell me on something. I guess that office expansion is off the books.

I guess he hasn’t noticed that light is on the fritz.

The rest of the day was pretty normal. Someone turned in a key. I did regular office stuff and talked the regular amount to the usual few people. And then, at 5:06, just as I was ready to leave, came in the emails of things to do later this week.

Sure, I could those emails until tomorrow, but then I’d wonder about them all night. Best to resolve them now. Which was an extra half hour. But, humble as it was, I did my part in those projects, and then to the house, where I sat in my recliner in my lovely bride’s home office and talked with her, and then went into the kitchen to talk with her some more. And then we had dinner, and now this.

The first Tuesday evening I’ve had at home since January. It’s always a jarring, pleasant transition. There will be a few more of those as the semester gets put to bed this week.

We haven’t had a Tuesday of tabs in a while, and wouldn’t you know it, I’ve been stockpiling them. These are things that are interesting, that I don’t need to keep, don’t always need to bookmark, but would like to memorialize. It’s the easiest spring cleaning I can do.

This Judas Priest, Roxette, Van Halen, Winger mash-up is the greatest number one single from the ’80s that never was

Here’s the deal: for his latest fiendishly-accessible creation, McClintock has smashed together Judas Priest’s The Sentinel and Screaming for Vengeance with Roxette’s power-pop hit The Look, and bolted on guitar solos from Winger (Seventeen) and Van Halen (Mean Street) for good measure.

The result? An ultra-hooky slice of ’80s-flavoured pop-rock that sounds like the greatest ’80s number one that never was.

Put enough hooky songs together, you’ll eventually find something amazing. Having a hard time picturing it? Press the play button.

There’s a lot of useful things to think about here, but, really, you find yourself thinking “Just tell me what to plant.” How to design an ever-blooming perennial garden:

Your goal for an ever-blooming perennial garden is to have a third each of early-blooming plants, mid-season bloomers, and late-season color. Within each of those categories, split the list into categories based on height (tall, medium, short). Finally, group your plants in each list by color.

People that like hummingbirds really like hummingbirds, and if that’s you, this is for you. Keep your yard safe from hummingbird predators:

Long, narrow gardens allow hummingbirds to approach flowers from either side while keeping an eye out for predators. Trellis-trained vertical vines and hanging baskets containing nectar flowers keep feeding hummingbirds away from ground predators. Thorny shrubs near the garden provide a safe space.

Hummingbirds will line their nests with soft plant fibers, such as lamb’s ear, the plumes of ornamental grasses, and fuzzy seed heads from clematis and milkweed. They’ll also use spider silk to bind and anchor their nests. If you notice webs in your yard during breeding season, keep an eye out for any entangled hummingbirds, and gently remove them.

One more set of yard tips for you … Use cheap LED and solar lights for pro-quality landscape lighting:

In daylight, my garden is a beacon of color and texture, but when the sun sets, the yard becomes a black hole. Delivery drivers struggle to see the house numbers or find the footpath, and I hold my phone flashlight awkwardly to avoid tripping as I take out the trash. Sure, lighting would help, but I didn’t have in-ground electricity already wired, and I’m not about to put it in. I was also skeptical of investing in solar lights, since all previous efforts had been cheap but ineffective, but I recently decided to give it another shot—and I was delighted with what I discovered.

I know what I’m not doing this weekend. 1,851km Zwift session rider says he lost 5% of his body weight and damaged his organs:

“Riding up to 1,800km, I was clearly being very damaged, so going on to 2,000km was looking unrealistic,” he says. “With the window by my side I could see my physical profile had been destroyed. My thighs had lost a lot of mass and [were] far narrower than at the beginning. Cupping my buttock, I could feel a huge amount of it had gone – it was no wonder why my saddle comfort had changed.”

That’s something like 1,150 miles in 60 hours. That guy does a lot of endurance efforts, and he’d planned and trained this one for months. Even still, he paid a real physical price. After he lists the impacts, he said he “didn’t do any strenuous exercise for a week after and my walking had a strange gait to it.”

A few hours at a time is plenty, thanks. There will be a bit of that tomorrow, outside even!

cycling / Monday / music / photo / Re-Listening / video — Comments Off
01
May 23

Happy (cold) start to May

On March 1st I wrote “The final trick of winter is upon us.” I know this, because I just looked it up. I was writing about the first blooms of the year then. It is, I maintain, a part of a cruel meteorological and botanical pattern.

And here we are, two months later, and the high was … 52 degrees. Honestly, that temperature felt like a sympathetic sop. It felt much colder. Gray throughout, and 40 mile per hour wind gusts.

May 1st. What a joke.

Enough grousing. Let’s get to the site’s most popular weekly feature, the Monday look at the cats. Phoebe, as I write this, is sleeping on a big, comfy blanket. But the other day, she was sitting in the morning sun. She seems to be willing me to take her toys out of that basket, but it looked artistic, to me.

Poseidon, as usual, is judging everything.

So the cats are doing great, but they, too, would like it to be a little warmer, even though they’re unburdened by their inability to read a calendar.

I saw this on a classroom white board. I don’t know what the purpose of the exercise was, or why the notes stayed on the board …

… but it is kind of fun to try to make sense of it all. Whatever it was, I was encouraged to see several variations of being supportive got listed.

Also, the colors tell some other story, I’m sure.

I had a ride Friday night, and then another on Saturday. Part of the Saturday ride was spent in virtual Scotland. This is a short, stiff stage called City and the Sgurr. Sgurr, I just learned, is Gaelic for “high sharp-pointed hill.” I believe it.

And then there was the fever dream that is part of the Neokyo course. What is that thing?

I could not bring myself to get in the saddle yesterday. The sofa was too comfortable, basically. But I did get in 27 miles this afternoon.

And since we just wrapped up another month, let’s check on the mileage chart. The purple line is what I’ve done.

That horizontal part marks the two weeks A.) we were out of town, and B.) I was fighting off a cold. So a light March — despite five consecutive days of pedaling — but I’m still ahead of all of my humble little projections.

This isn’t a lot of mileage, not really, but it’s a lot to me.

We return to the Re-Listening project, and we return to the summer of 1998. The Spice Girls became a foursome, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston started dating, Mulan was released, and so was Win 98. But I was listening to Shawn Mullins. “Soul’s Core,” a bit overwrought as a title, is the fourth studio album. (The title stems from a lyric which we’ll get to in a moment.) This is the one that had “Lullaby,” which you probably liked, until you didn’t. It made it to the top of the Adult Top 40 chart and peaked at ninth on the Modern Rock chart. Shimmer also cracked the top 30 on the Adult Top 40. The albums went platinum.

Here’s the lead-off track, with an entirely different instrumentation.

I used a live version of “Anchored in You” because I really wanted to use the live version of “Gulf of Mexico.” I wanted to see if he’s still singing it as Gu’f.

He does, in places.

There are two conditions where Shawn Mullins absolutely excels. One is in a big harmony, which will come up in a future installment of the Re-Listening project, and the other is when he’s just playing his guitar. The guy figured out the singer-songwriter thing and he’s sticking with it.

But that song is a good illustration of something said to me in passing once. I wish I could remember who it was, but it was obviously someone that I respected a bit. He found Shawn Mullins pretentious, and I found that deflating. And then I think about that lyric there, “I hear a voice from my soul’s core saying freedom’s just a metaphor you got nowhere to go … ” and I get it. There is a something there that’s a bit much. But we sometimes glaze over the awkward for the good. This one is really, really good, even if you don’t know the predictably tragic tale of Richard Brautigan.

He’s writing a lot of character studies, but he’s doing so without a larger thread. It’s both a shame and a relief.

Here’s a fun game to play with your friends. Ask them what musical characters they want to have sequels or updates on. They’re probably not going to understand, so make up something about Jack and Diane. Whatever happened to those two crazy kids? Shouldn’t we have another look in on them? Your friends will understand, and then Jack and Diane are disqualified from the game.

I want to know what became of this character. And, also, how in the world he was able to cram so much color in a three-minute song.

For a while, this CD was a vocal warm up. I would drive into the studio in the very, very dark pre-dawn hours and hum and sing along to a few of these songs. It was a good way to get the instrument working at 3:00 a.m., and, I always hoped, it would lower my voice just a tiny bit. You want your voice to sound authoritative in your first live hit at 4:30. That was the idea, any way.

If you’re now wondering what became of him, Shawn Mullins is another one of those guys who got his fame accidentally, who isn’t in it for stardom.

But, in 2018, to mark the 20th anniversary of his major label debut, he re-released the record with new musical arrangements. That was his most recent studio album. Mullins is doing some limited shows this summer. I’ve seen him a few times over the years. I once took a date to see his show in Atlanta. It was a good show, and everyone had a nice time, even if he wasn’t really her taste.

cycling / Friday / IU — Comments Off
28
Apr 23

Semester, wrapped

Today we wrapped up a production project that started, improbably, in the summer of 2021. The last day of the shoot was in one of our new studios, Studio 9. (The last shoot of the year for IUSTV was simultaneously taking place one floor down, in Studio 7.) In 9 we had faculty from the School of Public Health talking about their work.

Each person that came through was even better than the last, with their titles and dual appointments and achievement. Almost all of them would much rather be doing their work than talking into a camera about it. So, today and these last few weeks, we’ve been coaxing performances from these seriously impressive people.

A few of them have done some on-camera work. Some were able to accept the contrived nature of a video production with ease. But a few, a few of them were extremely trepidatious about the prospect. These are the ones that are actually a lot of fun. If they can just get through 10 minutes of this, they can stop dreading this thing they’ve been ducking for a while, and get on to their weekend and finals, to summer and research. They’re also the ones that take the best coaching.

One woman just raced through her mic check, like she was an air traffic controller who just finished her auctioneering course. I said straightaway, I can already tell, you’re going to want to slow down. She raced through her first take. I pointed it out. She slowed down for the casual parts of her second take, but again raced through the names and titles and terminologies. She tried once more and I stood next to the camera, just nodded my head along to her script, and she slipped into that rhythm. It was good fun.

One woman was so complimentary of our work with her, because of the coaching that we offered, the encouragement from our ace production students who were crewing the project, and how painless they made it. After one of her takes, I said to her, “I don’t know if you noticed it, but there was a place in there, an exact syllable, where you relaxed and everything slipped into place.”

One of the guys was very expressive. Someone said he was using his face well, and we decided he should keep using his face. Somehow, I have to work that into regular usage.

Anyway, next week I can take this project of the tote board. I figured, we’ve been slowly marching to this moment since June of 2021, I can stretch out the feeling of achievement for one more day.

Late this evening I took a bike ride, ticking one more Makuri Island stage off the list. It was just 27 miles, but it was late at night and I was moving fast. I set three new Strava PRs. I finished sixth on the first sprint, had the third-best time on the second and third sprints, and won a green jersey on the fourth sprint. (I am not a sprinter.)

Also, this was a scenic route. I could ride on roads like this all day, even if they’re just virtual.

There’s a charming little village to breeze through. If you go through at night the lanterns give off a great ambiance.

And then, just as soon as you leave that little digital village, you round a curve, and there’s a Mount Fuji facsimile.

The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 103 routes down, 26 to go.

history / IU / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
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.