Long Pauses

Category: Debris

  • This is what we do when someone dies.

    This is what we do when someone dies.

    I delivered this eulogy for my dad on May 29, 2021, two months after he died from cancer. I wrote it in the form of a letter to my daughters, who were 11 and 8 at the time.

  • Anticipating IFFR 2018

    Anticipating IFFR 2018

    My first attempt at navigating a path through Rotterdam’s 590-film schedule.

  • Version 13

    Version 13

    I shelved Long Pauses in 2010, soon after my daughter was born, because, frankly, the web had become boring.

  • Happy Birthday, Rory

    Happy Birthday, Rory

    An Easter-time photo of my now two-year-old daughter.

  • Joanna at Work

    Joanna at Work

    The next issue of UT’s alumni magazine, The Torchbearer, will feature Joanna, so I used the photo shoot as an excuse to play with our new Panasonic GH2.

  • To be continued . . .

    To be continued . . .

    In the nine years since I first read Denise Levertov’s poem “Making Peace” and pulled the words “long pauses . . .” from it, I’ve bought and sold two houses, changed jobs three times, and launched a freelance business. I’ve attended nearly a dozen film festivals, interviewed several of my heroes, and developed lifelong friendships […]

  • Rory Greer Hughes

    Rory Greer Hughes

    6 lbs. 5 oz. 20.5 inches. Born at 4:09 pm on April 27, 2010.

  • Long Pauses Version 11

    The variety of communications tools would be overwhelming but for the fact that my friends and I are engaged in what is essentially a single, extended conversation. It’s all come to feel perfectly natural.

  • Ramshackle Knoxville

    Reading Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree last year changed my relationship with Knoxville. There’s more poetry here now, and more grime and ash. Suttree’s one of the main reasons I no longer blink before calling Knoxville my home town, even though I’ve only lived here for just over a decade.

  • When Smart People Talk Dumb

    And, seriously, she really needs to stop using “elite” as a pejorative — first because it degrades language (if “elite” doesn’t necessarily describe the most powerful office in the world, then it no longer means “elite”), and second because SHE LIVED IN THE WHITE HOUSE FOR EIGHT YEARS. Her efforts to exclude herself from “the elite” is an embarrassment to her intelligence and experience.

  • Migrant Daughter, 1936

    Migrant Daughter, 1936

    Oh, how I love Shorpy, “The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog.” The photo above was taken by Dorothy Lange for the Farm Security Administration in November 1936. The caption reads: “Daughter of migrant Tennessee coal miner. Living in American River camp near Sacramento, California.” I need to learn more about Lange. How did photos like this happen? How much posing and staging was involved? What kind of camera and film did she use?

  • Rocky Top Rowdies

    To carry this silly analogy a bit further — and to indulge for a second in my other current obsession, The Wire — I gotta say that University of Tennessee basketball coach Bruce Pearl has got the best “package” right now.

  • Quite the View

    Quite the View

    We’re having some crazy weather here today. The wind started blowing just before noon, and the rains came around 2. Ever since, the sky has been yellow, which is apparently the perfect recipe for rainbows. I laughed like a six-year-old when I saw this through our bedroom window.

  • Coolest Wife Ever (part 18)

    On Wednesday morning, Joanna and I are headed up to Washington, D.C., where she’ll spend a week at the Smithsonian, reconstructing the faces of two of the original Jamestown settlers.

  • Recent Developments

    Today is August 16th, which means an entire month has passed since my last post here. I believe that’s a first in the six-year history of Long Pauses.

  • Can I Go Home Now?

    Watching this video it occurs to me that, instead of the presidency, this guy would have been much happier if he’d inherited a West Texas Chrysler dealership. I have to admit that I more or less supported Bush’s immigration plan. It’s the first time in six-and-a-half years I’ve been able to say that about a White House policy.

  • Mine’s Pretty, Too

    Mine’s Pretty, Too

    No staging was involved. My desk really is that neat, much to the chagrin of my coworkers, who stop in from time to time to shake their heads and to joke about leaving bits of scrap paper behind.

  • The Day Job (Part 2)

    Redesigning the UT Knoxville front page was the first step in an on-going overhaul of the university’s web presence. Step two went into effect today, when I officially released the design template for all colleges, departments, and units. Conceptually, this design was actually the greater challenge — much to my surprise.

  • March Madness Pick ‘Em

    I’ve created a group at Yahoo Sports (the “Dziga Vertov Group,” naturally) and invite all interested parties to join the fun. Fill out your bracket, then test your mettle against other film bloggers and Long Pauses readers. If you want to play, leave your email address in the comments or drop me a private note, and I’ll send you the group number and password.

  • Coolest Wife Ever (part 17)

    And, yes, these were taken on the set of the Phillip Fulmer, Bruce Pearl, and Pat Summitt shows.

  • Why Hillary Ain’t on My Short List

    Have you learned that it’s not okay to allow fear — including fear for your career in politics — to herd you along with the crowd.

  • Why It’s Been So Quiet Around Here

    My office at work is fairly small. Windowless. Tidy. Lit by three underpowered lamps. Spartan. The back wall is dominated by a large dry-erase board that, for the past four months, has been covered in brown scribbles, which is a kind way to describe my handwriting. Sometime back in the fall I wrote myself a long to-do list on the board, and in the weeks since I have slowly but steadily crossed off each item. A brown stroke through each brown scribble. On Wednesday morning, just before 7 am, I erased the board.

  • YouTube (Instead of) Memory

    Here’s an odd clip I just stumbled upon. I witnessed that exact event after stepping out of a film at TIFF this year. It was in the Paramount Theater, at the top of the long escalators. And now I no longer need to remember it. My memory has been captured, uploaded, tagged with metadata, and stored safely away, where it can be retrieved immediately — by anyone. And I played no part in the process.

  • I Think I’m in Love

    Jim Webb during his first hearing with the Armed Services Committee . . .

  • Happy Thanksgiving

    We had our annual Thanksgiving pot luck dinner last night. Along with the traditional turkey, stuffing, cranberry relish, and pumpkin pie, we had Polish mushroom rolls and potato salad, smoked salmon sushi, Mexican bread pudding, and two Taiwanese dishes: a sweet bean dessert and beef viscera.

  • Good Eats: Salmon and Mediterranean Rice

    When I visited Seattle a couple weeks ago, I had what was quite possibly the most satisfying meal of my life.

  • Looking at Photographs

    Szarkowski’s response to Laughlin’s The Language of Light is my favorite passage — it struck me immediately as a perfect Long Pause — but every page is a new discovery.

  • North by Northwest

    This is my first visit to Seattle, so any recommendations would be much appreciated. After a nap, a shower, and a cup of coffee yesterday afternoon, I walked to Wild Ginger, a restaurant that was recommended by a local friend.

  • Version 9.0

    I had two main goals this time out. First, I wanted to return to the conventional blog format. As I said in my announcement of the last redesign, the widescreen format was an experiment — a usability study, really. And what I discovered was . . . it wasn’t as usable. Second, and more importantly, I wanted to stretch my CSS skills a bit.

  • I’ve Been Meme’d

    Girish tagged me.