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.

    – – –

    Dear Rory and Wren,

    First, I want to thank you for being so patient over the past few weeks — for putting up with the long car ride, and for wearing dresses and uncomfortable shoes, and for being polite to all of these people who you barely know. We’ve had to say goodbye to a couple cats and a horse over the years, but this is the first time you’ve lost someone who loved you. 

    This is what we do when someone dies.

    We get in the car, and we put on dresses and jackets and uncomfortable shoes. And we hug the people who shared our love for the person we’ve lost. These rituals are important. They really are. After grandpa died, a friend sent me a card that said, “When a parent dies, the world is diminished.” I love the simple wisdom of that. “Diminished” means to be made smaller, or somehow less than it used to be. That’s why we’re here this weekend. Everyone gathered around you right now is trying to make sense of this new world we’re all living in, a world that has become diminished because grandpa is no longer in it.

    The silver lining, I guess, is that we had an excuse to bring you to Carlyle, the town where grandma grew up and where Aunt Laura and I spent so many happy weeks during summer and Christmas vacations when we were your age. If you thought yesterday was bad, the trip from Maryland took 14 hours. We’d usually leave in the evening and drive through the night. Laura and I would stretch out in sleeping bags in the back of the station wagon. No car seats. No seat belts. Just pillows and bags of candy. It was like a traveling sleepover.

    Usually when I woke up during those long drives, grandpa would be listening to jazz at really low volumes, trying to keep himself awake without disturbing us. I have to remind myself that grandpa was 10 years younger then than I am now — just one more husband and father doing his best and trying to figure it all out. When I remind myself of how young grandpa was, it actually changes my memories of him slightly. I’m so glad you were both able to spend time with him after he and grandma moved to Knoxville. But I’m sure the last few weeks with him, after he got so sick, were a little scary. I’d love to replace those memories with other images of grandpa.

    He grew up about 200 miles west of here, in a tiny town called Dixon. I haven’t been there for 25 years but I can still picture it clearly. He, Aunt Alice, and their older sister, Glennis, lived on the main street that runs through town. When Laura and I were little, we’d all walk a couple blocks from the house to a little dime store and get candy, hamburgers, and milkshakes. It looked like it was from another era, even then — the kind of place you might see in those old black-and-white movies I always watch.

    Dixon made a deep impression on grandpa. I don’t know if this will make sense, but I think his imagination was fixed to that place. He never quite escaped it in some ways. His dad — Benny, my grandpa — ran the Western Auto, which was like a much smaller version of Home Depot. He liked to hunt and tinker with tractors and, in his later years, play bluegrass music and make instruments like the violin we have at our house. I don’t remember Grandpa’s mom, Bertha. She also died from cancer, when I was younger than you are now, Wren. I’ve heard that Bertha wished she’d been born a gypsy and could have traveled and seen more of the world. Instead, she spent nearly all of her life in the Ozark mountains of Missouri.

    I often wonder what Benny and Bertha made of Grandpa, who was, by his own description, a textbook, straight-outta-central-casting geek. When he was your age, Grandpa became obsessed with electronic equipment, music with big chords, and, most of all, trains. The Frisco railway line ran through Dixon, close enough that Grandpa could feel the rumble from his bedroom. Seventy years later, as you know, he still loved electronic equipment (Facebook replaced his old HAM radios), he still loved music with big chords, and he still loved trains.

    I think you’ve seen pictures of grandpa as a kid. He looks so tiny in them, and cute, with thick glasses and a crooked smile. It couldn’t have been easy for him, growing up a small, awkward kid in a mountain town in the 1940s and ‘50s. He was picked on a lot — so much so that at least once Benny had to chase bullies away from the house. A couple years ago, around their 50th wedding anniversary, I asked grandma and grandpa to answer a couple questions about their lives, and grandpa’s memories of those days were so vivid. He told me dozens of stories — about boy scouts and mowing lawns and science fairs and doing chores with Alice on Saturday mornings in exchange for 25 cents from Bertha, which was enough for a movie ticket, popcorn, and a Coke.

    Grandpa prided himself on being a good worker. (I’d like to think that’s something I inherited from him.) He went from mowing lawns, to working at the Western Auto, to finishing college and moving to St. Louis, where he got his first professional job. That’s also where he met Grandma, who was a young nursing student at the time — only seven or eight years older than you are now, Rory. Imagine that!

    I keep mentioning ages because that’s another important ritual of grieving: death reminds us not only of that old cliche, the cycle of life; it also reminds us that we’re all walking time machines, bundles of accumulated experience. I’m 49 today, eulogizing my father. And I’m 42, dropping Rory off for her first day of kindergarten. I’m 21, holding Joanna’s hand for the first time. And I’m 9, lying awake in a tent, annoyed with my dad who is snoring so loudly beside me.

    When they got married, Grandma and Grandpa surprised their families by announcing they were moving to Maryland — the real start of their big adventure. They bought a house in the woods, where Laura and I were raised, and where we lived as happily as anyone could reasonably hope to live. We stayed busy with church activities and swim meets and soccer games and piano lessons. You both know how much I love music, and I’m sure one reason is because when I played piano or showed interest in some record Grandpa was listening to, I’d get his undivided attention.

    It’s like the time machine has fast-forward and reverse buttons. I’m 19, playing “Take Five” with Grandpa and one of his big bands. I’m 14, standing at the top of the Eifel Tower. I’m 40, showing off my newborn daughter, Wren. I’m 15, finishing my first shift making sandwiches at Subway. If I press pause on a memory, he’s always there.

    I have to admit there were many times over the years when I wished Grandpa had been — how should I put this? — a bit less nerdy? More of man’s man? He and I talked a couple months ago about how, in some ways, his diagnosis was a blessing because it gave him time to meditate on death. That bullied kid had built up a lot of defenses, and I think cancer finally broke some of them down. His ego seemed to soften. I certainly felt myself soften toward him. The last lesson I took from him while he was alive was to be grateful to have had a father who modeled a more generous kind of manliness.

    Here’s the full extent of my wisdom, girls. This is all I’ve got. 

    I’ve gradually come to understand that those of us who are basically good and decent people? We love each other the very best we’re able. We do. The trick, though — the thing that makes this life so complicated and maddening at times, but also so miraculous — is that we can never love any one person in all the ways that he or she needs to be loved.

    So, here are my three wishes for you . . .

    First, I want you to never doubt for even a second how ferociously you’ve been loved since the moment you were born — by me and mama and grandma and grandpa, and by all the people sitting around you today. That particular kind of love is a tremendous gift. As you get older, you’ll meet people — you might even love people — who have been denied that gift through no fault of their own. Please show them grace and kindness. They’ve suffered a real cruelty.

    Second, I hope you will learn, sooner rather than later, how to forgive the people in your life — including me! — for not being able to love you in all the particular ways you need to be loved. Life is such a messy thing. This world is teeming with souls who are doing their very best and trying so hard to figure it all out. And failing and trying again and failing and trying again. Be patient. Show us grace and kindness, too.

    Finally, I want you to also love ferociously. To take risks. Don’t fear a broken heart. Surround yourself with family, friends, partners, mentors — with people who, collectively, will be able to love you in all the ways you need to be loved.

    How this advice worked its way into a eulogy for Grandpa, I’m not quite sure. I suppose it’s simply because I’m so grateful for this messy, complicated, magnificent life I’ve been given, and for the part he played in it.

  • Anticipating IFFR 2018

    Anticipating IFFR 2018

    I’m making my first trip to Rotterdam since 2014, covering the festival this time for Filmmaker. It’s a massive program, with nearly 600 features, mid-length films, shorts, installations, and events. I plan to catch up with a few acclaimed films I’ve missed this year and dig into some of the curated programs: A History of Shadows, House on Fire, and Regained.

    Photo: Only Yesterday (John M. Stahl, 1933), which is screening in 35mm as part of A History of Shadows.

    Saturday 1/27

    Sunday 1/28

    Monday 1/29

    Tuesday 1/30

    Wednesday 1/31

    Thursday 2/1

    Friday 2/2

  • Version 13

    Version 13

    Or, A Study in Parenthetical Asides

    I was in my twenties when I built the first version of Long Pauses. In a move that still gives me occasional pangs of regret, I’d decided a few months earlier to give up my graduate research fellowship and take a full-time job as a multimedia developer and instructional designer, figuring that a steady paycheck and a boring day job would bring some stability to our lives while also keeping me motivated to study for my comprehensive exams. I must have been under the spell of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who managed, miraculously, to write quite a few good stories after tolling away all day at the Custom House.

    Long Pauses was intended to be a workspace for testing out ideas, both as a writer and a web developer. Looking back over the hundreds of posts contained within it today, as I’ve done in recent months preparing for this relaunch, I think it’s met that goal. A quick scroll through the various design iterations is a useful snapshot of web design trends over the past decade – from table layouts and FONT tags to javascript, cascading stylesheets, and database-driven content management. (I’ll always remember 2002-2006 as the days of 11px Verdana.) Technically, the word “blog” predates Long Pauses by a year, but I’d certainly never heard it when I was poring over my copy of The Quickstart Guide to HTML. (I didn’t move to Blogger until Version 5 and didn’t add commenting until Version 7.) My writing has evolved, too, though not as impressively as I would’ve liked. It’s still too precious, too littered with em-dashes, and too reliant on pseudo-intellectual space-fillers. (I hereby promise to retire the word “defamiliarize” and, instead, make a greater effort to describe, specifically, how a particular work of art defamiliarizes the world.)

    I shelved Long Pauses in 2010, soon after my daughter was born, because, frankly, the web had become boring. Like everyone else, I’d made the move to Facebook and Twitter, both of which facilitate the kind of small talk I hate so much (and am so very, very bad at) in real life. This relaunch is an effort to steal back those hours of my life, to rediscover silence and the hard work of writing, and to stop giving a shit whether that person I haven’t spoken to in twenty years likes my latest photo of Rory. On a more practical level, I also want to reclaim ownership of my content and to file it away in a searchable, logical, movable archive.

    Launching a blog in 2012 is nothing like I experienced eleven years ago. I remember sitting at my little cubicle at work back then, exchanging emails with Pascual Espiritu, whose website, Strictly Film School, was one of the very few places outside of usenet groups and discussion forums where I could read about contemporary foreign cinema on the Internet. I ate up her advice and mimicked as best as I could her design aesthetic for Version 1 of Long Pauses. I discovered just a few days ago, even, that longpauses.com was still associated with the antiquated domain registration service she recommended to me then.

    Over the next few years, the film blogosphere slowly evolved, thanks in large part to free, user-friendly services like LiveJournal, TypePad, and Blogger, and along with it came a new community of writers, many of whom have since become friends. Revisiting those days has made me all kinds of nostalgic. For good and bad, the early bloggers were creating a new and vital communications medium. (I was notified a year or two ago by a graduate researcher that I’ve been credited officially with coining the term “blogathon.” My name and Showgirls are forever linked, apparently – and in the most wonderfully esoteric way!) When I mentioned on Twitter that I was rebuilding Long Pauses, one friend wondered how we had ever found the time to write so much, and my off-hand answer was that we blogged instead of pissing our efforts into the social networking ether. That’s at least partly true, I suspect. Just as likely a culprit is the exponential growth – the goddam deluge – of content that now threatens to drown us all. There’s too much to digest and reflect upon, so we skim it all and retain little more than trivia. (Cue the Portlandia “Did you read?” sketch.)

    Generally speaking, what remains of the original filmblog dialogue has relocated to Twitter and to sites that grew out of the blogosphere but now more closely resemble traditional publications with editors and teams of contributors – places like Indiewire, Mubi, Slant, the AV Club, and Fandor. Don’t get me wrong: film blogs still exist in large numbers, but the discussion has moved (or evolved, or in some cases atrophied). Girish’s site is one of the few living monuments to a kind of conversation that was once more common and that I now miss. (I love that Girish still uses his original Blogger template. He told me once that he briefly considered changing it but decided that it’s become too essential to the voice of his blog.)

    None of that is news, really. But what surprised me as I combed through the Long Pauses archive is that vast swaths of the original blogosphere are gone. Many of the sites I once included on my blogroll of “daily reads” have been deleted entirely, and the authors have vanished right along with them. Presumably, they’ve settled into new phases of their lives – like me, they’re now raising children or managing greater responsibilities in their professional lives; like me, they’re in their forties – while others simply lost interest after a short-lived burst of blogging enthusiasm. The Wayback Machine salvages bits and pieces of the wreckage, but the Internet, it turns out, is an ephemeral place. Moreso than I’d imagined. (I was disappointed to discover a few days ago that someone has beaten me to the punch: Internet Archaeology is already a thing.) Our virtual world is indeed a palimpsest.

    This gone-tomorrow-ness of the Internet is another of my motivations for relaunching Long Pauses. For archival purposes (and at the risk of offending friends and editors) I’ve added essays and interviews to this site that were originally published elsewhere, and I’ve noted them as such. I can control my database; others are a fickle business. I’ve also made the move to WordPress and have tagged and categorized every single post, giving Long Pauses its first-ever relational structure, along with a slightly more usable main menu. (The term “Debris” comes from my long-standing habit of creating hodgepodge posts called “Miscellaneous Debris.” “Debris” includes all posts not categorized as “film,” “music,” or “words.” Two other recurring themes from the archive — Songs of the Moment and Mix Tapes — have also found their way into the navigation.)

    And one final word on Version 13: This is the first iteration of Long Pauses that I didn’t design by hand. It’s a modded version of Slate from Okay Themes. Why did I buy a template? I’m not a web designer. Not really. I was supposed to be a professor, after all. I stumbled backwards into this career and have only in recent months worked my way, finally, into a job title that more accurately describes what I’m good at: communications director. I plan to build my first responsive design this fall, and I’m beginning to know my way around the WordPress functions.php file. But for the time being I’m content to benefit from others’ talent and devote my efforts, instead, to learning how to be a writer again.

    As always, thanks for reading.

  • 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 with an amazing group of bloggers, filmmakers, writers, and fellow travelers. I’ve started and abandoned a doctoral dissertation, cried in anger and shame over the actions of my country, and felt occasional but startling moments of pride and patriotism. I’ve left the church and found my faith. I’ve celebrated nine of my fourteen wedding anniversaries, suffered the loss of two people I loved dearly, and, as of Tuesday, April 27 at 4:09 pm, become a father. And it’s all documented here in this strange archive of my life. I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished here at this site and am even more proud of the man I’ve become in the process.

    I’d been thinking about shuttering this iteration of Long Pauses for quite some time, but the timeline was accelerated by Blogger’s decision to end their FTP service. When I finish this post and click “publish,” the last bits of content will be pushed to longpauses.com/blog, where it will stay, in this form, for as long as I decide it belongs there. I’ve archived it all and might eventually drop it into another format, but for now I’m content to let it stand as a document of this stage in my life.

    I’m not sure how long — or even if — commenting will work. I’d hoped to post this a few days ago to leave more time for that kind of thing, but my daughter’s early arrival threw a wrench — a wonderful, beautiful wrench — into the works. You can find me on Twitter and Facebook, and I suspect you’ll eventually see me back here at Long Pauses.

    Until then, thanks for reading.

  • 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

    On October 1st I left my job as the University of Tennessee’s lead web designer and moved across campus to Alumni Affairs, where I’m now serving as Communications Manager. When I interviewed for the position, we talked generally about the rapidly evolving world of electronic communications, and I used my friends in the film blog-o-sphere as an example of what most excites me about the field right now. Although we see each other only once a year in Toronto, on any given day we exchange emails, pass notes in Facebook, comment on each other’s sites, chirp in Twitter, text message, discuss ideas on forums, listen in on podcasts, instant message, and, occasionally, when the mood strikes us, we even call each other on the phone.

    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. I suppose some tools (forums, long-form blogs) are more suitable for, say, serious debate than others, while Twitter is obviously more immediate and superficial. And Facebook — wonderful, addictive Facebook — is so damn good at social networking that it’s changed the way I use the Internet (despite my long-held resistance to it). Perhaps we could draw an analogy between these tools and the various types of conversations we have with local friends when we go out together for a long dinner, sit side-by-side at a book club meeting, or run into each other at the grocery store.

    Long Pauses version 11 is a snapshot of how I’m currently using the Internet. It’s almost literally divided down the middle, with frequently updated microposts on the left and occasional, more thoughtful bits of content on the right. Feel free to interact with it however you like. Here’s a breakdown of the web apps (all of them free) I’ve stitched together for this strange patchwork of a site:

    Blogger
    Because Long Pauses predates blogging, I jumped on the first free, viable tool that didn’t require a locally-hosted database. Seven years later, I have nearly a 1,000 posts in Blogger and, both out of familiarity and laziness, have resisted moving to a more robust CMS like WordPress or Expression Engine. Frankly, I kind of enjoy solving the problems associated with building an entire site from a single template.

    Haloscan
    Early iterations of Blogger didn’t include a commenting feature, so my first add-on was Haloscan. Again, by the time Blogger caught up, I had a deep archive of comments that I was hesitant to abandon. Until now. Because Haloscan uses a pop-up window, the advent of tabbed browsing has made it a major pain in the ass. I’ve officially made the switch to Blogger comments, which will hopefully prove to be more user-friendly and readable. However, the old archive still exists. At the bottom of each post, you’ll notice a small, grayed-out discussion icon. For a trip down memory lane, click that icon on old posts to read past comments.

    Twitter
    I resisted Twitter until the Facebook addiction kicked in. Once I figured out how to synch Twitter with my Facebook status, it was all over. I’m hooked.

    Tumblr
    The front page of Long Pauses version 10 was actually built from two Blogger blogs — Long Pauses and Miscellaneous Debris. It was an ugly and unsatisfying hack involving a PHP include, but it was the best solution I could come up with at the time. And then I found Tumblr and its embed javascript. Miscellaneous Debris has become a kind of Siamese Twin — a separate blog with a unique purpose (collecting random oddities from the web) but still joined at the hip of Long Pauses. You can leave comments there and subscribe to its feed. The ten most recent bits of debris will display on every page of the main site.

    Disqus
    Tumblr doesn’t yet have a built-in commenting feature, but Disqus can be added by copying and pasting two lines of code into a Tumblr template. Added bonus: Disqus publishes an rss feed.

    Let me know if you find anything broken.

  • 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. Local historian, hopeless nostalgist, and drinker-of-PBR Jack Neely went digging around at the Tennessee Valley Authority and unearthed some documents that were collected during a post-New Deal-era survey of local rivers. He writes:

    The shore of the river, at the foot of the bluffs, was cheap property, unclaimed for other purposes, in large part because the wild river often flooded. Down there was some legitimate business, especially barge-oriented industry, but no one spent much money on construction there because next spring’s flood might ruin it. In between the wharves and the flotsam of an industrial river town were places where human beings lived in a gray zone between abject homelessness and mere poverty. Squatters, mostly, some lived in jury-rigged cliff dwellings, some on sand-bar islands, some in beached houseboats, many of them fashioned from the tin roof of a lost barn, an old billboard, or a portion of a wrecked barge.

    The surveyor’s diary is fascinating, but it’s the photos that kill me. They’ll look shockingly familiar to anyone who’s ever read Suttree with an active imagination.

  • When Smart People Talk Dumb

    Hillary Clinton is a brilliant woman with total command of domestic and foreign policy, which is why it’s been particularly painful over the past two months watching her pander to poll-tested issues like this stupid gas tax holiday. 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. She’s starting to sound an awful lot like a Republican.

  • 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

    When I was in the fifth grade, I could name the starting lineups of the Baltimore Orioles and the Washington Redskins (favorite players? Al Bumbry and Charlie Brown). It was a great time to be a kid in Annapolis, Maryland. Both were world champions that year, and both remain my all-time favorite teams. I think every adult sports fan probably spends the rest of his or her life trying to recapture the joy and excitement of that first crush. The cliche works: being a fan is like an addiction, and each new fix pales in comparison to nostalgic memories.

    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. The Vols are 24-2 (their best record ever), ranked #2 in the polls (highest ranking ever), and they’re playing a ridiculous brand of high-energy basketball — “controlled chaos,” Pearl calls it. And this Saturday, at 9 pm on ESPN, we’re playing the undefeated, top-ranked, and much-loathed Memphis Tigers in what will be, without question, the biggest game of hoops ever played in the Volunteer state.

    For the first time in my life, I can name the top twelve players in a basketball team’s rotation. (And “rotation” is the right word here: Pearl substitutes players like line shifts in hockey. Eleven of the twelve average more than ten minutes per game.) When I learned yesterday afternoon that last night’s game with Auburn wasn’t televised, I walked across the street to the arena and bought one of the few remaining tickets. When I run into players on campus, I feel starstruck. When I read ESPN’s profile of Tyler Smith one day at work, I worried that someone might walk into my office to find me choking back tears. I’m so hooked.

    Last year I came in dead last in the first annual Long Pauses March Madness Pick’Em. Counting the days . . .

  • 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. How cool is that? It’s one of several reasons I’m feeling especially proud of her right now. She’s also featured in Bill Bass’s latest book, Beyond the Body Farm, and was spotlighted in yesterday’s edition of the Knox News-Sentinel. Mostly, though, I’m proud of her for telling her story. (That’ll make more sense after you read the article.) She’s an amazing woman.

  • 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. My blogging time has, instead, been spent over at my other site, 1st Thursday, where are a bunch of us are breathlessly anticipating what is shaping up to be a ridiculous film festival. Despite the fact that I’ll be in Toronto for 11 days with a Festival Pass that allows me to see as many as 50 films, I’m slowly coming to realize that I’ll still have to pass on a lot of great movies. It’s an embarrassment of riches, really.

    In other news:

    I’ve finally joined the 20th century and gotten a cell phone. Because I’m a whore to Steve Jobs I bought an iPhone, and it is, indeed, awesome. I can’t stop touching it. Here’s my first custom wallpaper.

    I’ve almost completely stopped buying DVDs, but after watching Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People and Leopard Man recently, I happily sent $39.71 to Deep Discount for the Val Lewton Horror Collection. It’s quickly proving to be my favorite film experience of the year.

    A word of advice: Think twice before buying a 30-year-old home. 30 years seems to be the exact timespan required to exhaust a home’s infrastructure — things like, say, air conditioning units. Ours died on a day when the heat index here hit 105. Good times. Another word of advice: When the contractor says it’ll take 2-3 weeks to relandscape and get the pool working again, he really means, “You might see me and my ‘crew’ a couple times over the next two months, but don’t worry, we’ll stop by often enough to totally destroy your yard. Oh, and I hope you weren’t planning to swim at all this year. Because you won’t.”

    Because I spend 9-10 hours a day hunched over a computer in a windowless office, I’m always on the lookout for things to keep my mind occupied, and my latest obsession is the Charlie Rose archive. Granted, Rose is a bit of a tool, and he frequently commits the Great Sins of Interviewing — not listening to guests and interrupting them — but his archive is really deep. And his site allows the sharing of videos. Let’s see if this works:

  • 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

    Top 10 Multi Display Mac Setups

    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. Pinned to my bulletin board are two pages of a Tennessee Alumnus article about Joanna.

  • 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. Our priorities went something like this:

    1. Carry through the same brand identity that was established with the front page redesign, but do so in a way that draws subtle but significant distinctions between the two web spheres.
    2. Aspire for full web standards compliance, while acknowledging — and even embracing — the fact that we’ll never be able to properly “police” the code. As I wrote in the documentation, “I’m betting that it will take less than three weeks before we find a live template page that has been completely rebuilt with nested tables.” And I’m okay with that.
    3. Strike a deliberate balance between consistency (of design, brand, and navigation) and freedom. UT has eleven colleges and more than 300 degree programs, not to mention the hundreds of academic institutes, administrative offices, outreach centers, research initiatives, and support units. Each has a unique audience and unique goals; each should look like it contributes directly to the university’s overarching mission.
    4. Make this transition as painless as possible for the community of web developers across campus who will have this template dropped in their laps. Inheriting someone else’s code always sucks. I did my best to streamline it, to predict and prepare for eventual problems, and to comment the heck out of the code. We also decided to provide developers with a toolbox of menus and design ideas. If, in the process, we also manage to foster a more collegial attitude among campus web professionals, so much the better.

  • March Madness Pick ‘Em

    Andy beat me to the punch by a couple days, but for those of you who spend too much time alone in dark rooms watching moving pictures, let me remind you that the next three weeks are the most exciting of the year for many American sports fans. It’s league championship week, followed immediately by the High Holy days of the NCAA tournament.

    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.

    Note: Not by coincidence, the question mark at the center of this bracket is Tennessee orange. I don’t really expect them to win it all, but the Volunteers will be in the Sweet Sixteen. (I’m saving my National Championship prediction for next year.)

    Update: We already have nine players in our group. The more the merrier. Selection Sunday is March 11. Registration ends on March 15, before the start of the first game.

  • Coolest Wife Ever (part 17)

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

    Joanna Hughes

    Joanna Hughes

  • Why Hillary Ain’t on My Short List

    I’m in a quoting/linking mood today. From a great post at Daily Kos:

    The question, Senator Clinton, is have you learned anything? Have you learned that to authorize war is always a last resort, not a first, or seventh, or seven times seventh. 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. Have you learned that good judgment isn’t just avoiding error. It’s acknowledging that an error has been made and working promptly to correct it.

  • Why It’s Been So Quiet Around Here

    Before & After

    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.

    Or maybe this is a better way to begin . . .

    Back in July, when I attended the Seattle Web Design World conference, a woman with whom I was having a nice enough conversation, gave me the most pitiable look when I told her why I was there.

    “I was just asked to redesign the University of Tennessee homepage, and I’m looking for any help I can get.”

    “Really? [pitiable look] I’m so sorry. [pause] Good luck with that.”

    Most high-traffic websites serve a very specific function. No matter how much it continues to evolve, for example, Amazon still sells things, and so its chief concern is getting its users as quickly as possible to that thing they want to buy, while also showing them other things along the way that they didn’t know they wanted to buy. A university homepage is a design nightmare because it must simultaneously address the distinct (and often competing) purposes of its many and varied audiences. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll divide them into two camps: those within the institution (administrators, faculty, staff, and students) and those outside of it (prospective students and their parents, alumni and donors, legislators, people in the surrounding community, sports fans, business and research partners, journalists and media, other educators and scientists and institutions, people with an interest in culture and the arts, job-seekers and employers, and the list goes on and on). The site must also be navigable, which, relatively speaking, is the easy part.

    Previous incarnations of the University of Tennessee website were very efficient, particularly in regards to navigation, but they didn’t “tell the UT story.” Taking that as our cue, we looked to the standard university menu buttons — Future Students, Faculty & Staff, Academics, etc. — as themes or chapters in an anthology. Rather than simply compiling lists of links, we’re now using those pages to spotlight people, events, and resources from the university community. I kept imagining a user who knew little about the university — a high school junior taking her first peek into college life, a researcher in China mulling over his post-doc options, a new Knoxvillian trying to figure out where we’ve hidden all the culture — and my hope was that, by clicking on each of those main menu buttons and watching the spotlights rotate through, he or she would get a good sense of what the university has to offer.

    There were other design challenges particular to UT Knoxville, the most significant of which is this:

    which I toned down slightly:

    and which, in predictable web 2.0 fashion, soon became:

    Accepting a web design position at a university means surrendering whole swaths of the color palette. For those of you not acquainted with college athletics in the States, the University of Tennessee Volunteers are also known as “The Big Orange.” Orange is not just our signature color; it’s our only color. To make matters even more complicated, the blues and purples that naturally compliment orange are completely off-limits. Why? I bet the sports fans know. Mixing orange with light blue makes us look like Florida; dark blue drifts into Auburn territory; and purple is Clemson’s secondary color. So orange it is. And a lot of it. We settled on a “blue sky” campus photo for the header, which is a bit of cheat, but an effective one, I think.

    Another significant complication was the UT wordmark, which was a mandated element of the university system’s larger branding initiative:

    It’s an elegant and traditional wordmark that employs an elegant and traditional serif font (Goudy Old Style). It looks great on business cards, letterhead, and signage. It doesn’t looks so good on the web, where the delicate vertical and horizontal lines in each letter inevitably bleed and lose their contrast. With a limited palette to work with (“Did you try setting it against an orange background? I bet that would make it really pop!”), I settled on gradiated shades of grey. It was the best of several less-than-satisfying options.

    Some of the other major changes:

    • The site is web standards-compliant and displays properly in IE 6. (Thanks to Jason for all of the debugging help.)
    • We’ve integrated a campus events calendar into the site and are using it to create and broadcast audience-targeted RSS feeds.
    • Using tracking data, I’ve restructured the subpage navigation to give greater prominence to the most popular links (Quick Links) and to bury the least popular (see the “expand the full list” link near the bottom of the Current Students page, for example).

    All in all, I have to say I’m pretty damn proud of it.

  • YouTube (Instead of) Memory

    I hope to have a real post up in the next day or two, but until then 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:

    I also want to say something about my longtime friend, Senator McCain’s comments when he was talking about the consequences of pulling out of Iraq and in your statement, Secretary Gates, you list some of these as an emboldened and strengthened Iran, a base of operations for jihadist networks in the heart of the Middle East, an undermining of the credibility of the United States.

    In many ways, quite frankly, those have been the results of the invasion and occupation. There’s really nothing that’s occurred since the invasion and occupation that was not predictable and in fact, most of it was predicted. It was predicted in many cases by people with long backgrounds in national security…and in many cases there were people who saw their military careers destroyed and who were personally demeaned by people who opposed them on the issues, including members of this administration. And they are people in my judgement, who will be remembered in history as having had a moral conscience.

  • 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. (Andrew, who brought the viscera, had been warned by his friends that no Americans would be willing to try it, and he seemed genuinely pleased when we proved them wrong.)

    Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

  • 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. 94 Stewart is a small, family-run place a block or two north of the Pike Street Market. “It made Food and Wine‘s Best New Wines Lists of 2006,” a saleswoman had told me earlier that afternoon. That was all she knew about the place, but she’d heard good things, so I gave it a shot.

    Since I was alone, and because the dining room only seats about 30, I was given a place at the bar, where I was soon greeted by my server, who also happened to be the wine steward. I gave a quick look at the menu (it all looked good), then told her that I would eat and drink whatever she decided to put in front of me. Being that I live in Tennessee and that I was at the time sitting a few yards from one of the most famous fish markets in the world, my only preference, I told her, was for seafood.

    “Do you like salmon?”
    “I love salmon.”
    “Do you drink red wines?”
    “I love red wine.”
    “Okay.”

    After a bowl of her mother’s white bean soup — her mother is the head chef — I was brought a plate of sockeye salmon served with rice and a fresh garden salsa. The salmon was local and in-season, perfectly fresh, perfectly cooked. But great salmon is great salmon. What made the meal was the rice and the wine. I was on my third or fourth bite before I recognized the taste of the rice. It was called “jasmine rice,” as I recall, but it tasted like an open bed of dolmades, or stuffed grape leaves. Such a simple but brilliant idea, and it paired perfectly with the fish. The wine was Big Fire, a fruity and acidic pinot noir from the R. Stuart and Co. winery in Oregon.

    I’ve been telling people about this meal for weeks now. But until just a few days ago, I’d been unable to track down a local bottle of Big Fire. After finding one, I decided to try to recreate the meal, and I have to say I did a damn fine job of it. Joanna, I’m pleased to announce, agrees. Here’s the recipe:

    Garden Salsa

    (I can’t remember what they served, exactly, so I improvised a kind of relish that we eat pretty often)

    Two roma tomatoes, diced
    Half an onion, diced
    Half a cucumber, diced
    1 Tablespoon olive oil
    1 Tablespoon red wine vinegar
    1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice

    Mix it all together, salt to taste, refrigerate. Serves two.

    Grilled Salmon

    1/2 pound filet of sockeye salmon per person
    1 Tablespoon olive oil
    1 Tablespoon soy sauce
    Salt and pepper to taste

    Rub salmon with salt and pepper, then grill on low-medium heat for 15 minutes (or until done), brushing with mixture of olive oil and soy sauce every 4-5 minutes.

    Rice

    After looking at 15 or 20 recipes of dolmades, I settled on a modified version of Tyler Florence‘s. I skipped the fennel, but, otherwise, followed exactly his recommended proportions. I also followed the first paragraph of his instructions. In order to serve the dolmades as a rice side dish, replace the last three paragraphs of Florence’s recipe with this:

    Prepare the grape leaves by trimming any remaining stems and tearing into small, bite-sized portions. Place the seasoned, al dente rice in a 3+ quart saucepan or stock pot, then add the grape leaves. Pour the remaining cup of broth, remaining olive oil, and the lemon juice into the pot, then simmer for 30 minutes (or until done).

    And that, my friend, is good eats.

  • Looking at Photographs

    The Language of Light

    The Language of Light, 1952
    by Clarence John Laughlin

    Many of Clarence John Laughlin’s Photographs actually show ghosts: transparent but nonetheless corporeal ladies draped in sheets or period nightgowns, appearing from behind stone monuments or Ionic columns or other decaying relics of the Old South. In other of Laughlin’s pictures, like the one shown here, the ghosts have fled, and only the pattern of their spell remains.

    Any child abed in lazy and luxurious convalescence from measles or chicken pox, half-drunk with tea and hot lemonade, learns that the space between the window shade and the casement is a magic place, populated by spirits that cast their shifting, liquid shadows on the screen and tap out their secret messages on the window frame. Once each of us was open to such dramas of the senses, revealed in terms that were trivial and ephemeral: the reflection of the hand mirror on the dressing table, slowly tracing its elliptical course across the ceiling.

    Many of us forget the existence of such experiences when we learn to measure the priorities of practical life; some of us remember their existence but find that in the light of day they have become as shy and evasive as the hermit thrush; a few, whom we call artists, maintain an easy intimacy with the wonders of simple perception. In this century many of these have been photographers, and the exploration of our fundamental sensory experience has been in large part their work. It is photography that has continued to teach us of the pleasure and the adventure of disinterested seeing.

    — John Szarkowski

    A month ago I stumbled upon a summer reading list from David Schonauer, editor-in-chief at American Photo. There he states his intent to reread the “best book on photography ever written,” a collection that had been passed down to him years earlier by the out-going founding editor of the magazine, Sean Callahan. “It’s been sitting on a bookcase shelf in my office for years and years, dog-eared and finger-smudged from constant referencing,” Schonaeur writes. “This summer I’m going to pick it up again and look at it closely, from beginning to end. It will be like discovering the magic of photography all over again.”

    Curious, I walked over to the library and checked out its copy of Looking At Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art by John Szarkowski. I’m not at all qualified to crown this book champion, but I’ve enjoyed every moment I’ve spent with it — as much for Szarkowski’s writing as for the photos. (I have since bought my own copy, framed eight of the prints, and hung them in my office. Amazon allows you to sample a few more pages.) 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

    I’m writing from the 22nd floor of the Sheraton hotel in downtown Seattle. Two weeks ago, in a flurry of end-of-the-fiscal-year spending, the director of our department popped her head into my office just long enough to tell me to book that trip to Web Design World, a conference I’d asked to attend some time earlier but that I’d assumed would be deemed too expensive by the Powers that Be. So, let’s hear it for the Powers that Be! Occasionally they still come through for the little guy!

    In a sure sign that leaving academia was for the best, this is the first time I’ve ever felt genuinely excited about the — what’s it called? — content of a conference. Of the fifteen or so academic gatherings in which I’ve participated over the years, I don’t recall ever attending more than two or three panels at any one of them. Folks from Microsoft and Google are here, of course, but I’m most excited about hearing talks and getting pointers from the design gurus and web standards experts: DL Bryon, Andy Clarke, Kelly Goto, Molly Holzschlag, Peter Merholz and Brandon Schauer, and Michael Ninness. A little over a week ago I was handed a massive design project — the largest and most prominent one I’m likely to ever get in this particular job, in fact — so I’m feeling motivated to learn. (That also helps to explain the recent silence here at Long Pauses.)

    Along with me for the trip are three new toys. After spending 45+ hours per week with OS X for the last two months, I could no longer stand to look at my 9-pound, glitchy, piece-o-crap Dell laptop. So I’ve replaced it with a new MacBook. It’s smaller, faster, and a hell of a lot sexier. Now that web design is officially my profession, rather than just a job, I’m totally indulging my tech geek fetishes. And along those lines, my second new toy came as a total surprise. When I placed the order for my MacBook, the kid at the university computer store asked, “So, um, do you want your free iPod with that?” I had no idea about the current promotion but was more than happy to grab a 2 Gig Nano.

    My third companion is a copy of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, which, thanks to Michael, I’m determined to finish this summer. The Recognitions has been on my to-read list since the days of comprehensive exams, when my life was more or less consumed by to-read lists. At nearly 1,000 pages, though, I couldn’t justify the hours it would steal then. Instead, I dug up some reviews, memorized the names of a couple characters, and learned just enough about Gaddis to be able to write four or five cogent sentences — all one needs, really, to answer an ID question or to make a knowing reference in an essay. Sixty pages in, I’m really enjoying The Recognitions and am eager to spend a leisurely month or two reading (and blogging) it. Also, I hope to benefit from the wisdom of similar, past ventures.

    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. The menus (yes, plural) were large, impressive, intimidating even, so I took the advice of my server and ordered a salmon satay appetizer, a bowl of prawn wonton soup, and these amazing lettuce wraps stuffed with seared sea bass in a sauce of chilis, ginger, cinnamon, and lime. Everything was well-prepared and full of flavor. Great stuff. After dinner I walked over to the Egyptian Theatre, where I caught A Scanner Darkly. I like the film a lot more this morning than I did while I was watching it, which is always a good sign.

  • Version 9.0

    Welcome to Long Pauses 9.0. I’ve always added .0 to my version numbers out of some odd devotion to conventional, software-related naming conventions, but I suspect that this version might actually experience the occasional upgrade before the next full-blown redesign. Be on the lookout for 9.1.

    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. I did like having my links grouped together, and it all worked perfectly well on large, widescreen displays, but the scrolling-right got old. Also, I got tired of having the main content pressed to the left side of the screen. One reason I haven’t posted much lately is because, for the first time in nearly five years, I got tired of looking at Long Pauses.

    Second, and more importantly, I wanted to stretch my CSS skills a bit. It’s not perfect yet, but I’m fairly proud of the coding here. The buttons and the rollovers (including the Song of the Moment) are all controlled by CSS. And it all works perfectly in Explorer for Windows, even when the browser’s text size is set to “largest.” The only design element that is negatively affected by IE is the transparency of the Song of the Moment image.

  • I’ve Been Meme’d

    Girish tagged me:

    • I am, right now, enjoying my first quiet moment at this new job. Thirty-five minutes until my next meeting, so I better make the most of it.
    • I want to travel as much as possible. I want to wear out my passport and to ride trains and subways and buses and taxis in all of the great cities. I want to walk casually through museums and eat fantastic meals. And I want to do it all with good friends.
    • I wish I had more close friends in Knoxville.
    • I hate George W. Bush. I’m not just trying to be snarky here. Before his presidency I was a mostly unpolitical person. But after watching the Republicans run the Executive, Legislative, and a good chunk of the Judicial branches of the government for the last few years — in other words, after watching the Right recreate our government in its own grotesque image — I can barely choke down the bile.
    • I love hearing Joanna laugh, especially when we’re in different parts of the house.
    • I miss playing golf with my father-in-law. Like most guys on a golf course, we rarely talked about much other than the sad state of our game, but it meant a lot to me.
    • I fear late-night trips to the emergency room.
    • I hear Aretha Franklin. She’s singing “Dr. Feelgood” live at the Fillmore West.
    • I wonder what Long Pauses will look like five years from now. Twenty years? Sixty?
    • I regret never having had the opportunity to teach an upper-level film or literature course. I’d be good at it, I think. So far, this is my only regret about leaving academia.
    • I am not myself at large social gatherings. I’m never more awkward, unsocialized, and alone as when in a packed room, especially when it’s my responsibility to provoke small talk.
    • I dance badly, alone, in the basement, accompanied by really loud music. It’s one of my favorite stress-relievers. By the end of the summer, there’s a good chance I’ll also know how to waltz, cha-cha, and do a few other steps of “ballroom” dance. Consider this fair warning.
    • I sing badly, alone, in the basement, accompanied by really loud music. Also, I ocassionally sing at the piano or when strumming an acoustic guitar. I prefer that no one hears me doing any of this.
    • I cry quite often, actually. More than I used to, at least. And I think that’s a good thing.
    • I am not always listening to what you’re saying, even when I’m looking you directly in the eye and nodding my head in agreement. My mind tends to wander. Don’t take it personally.
    • I make with my hands, um, this is a tough one. I’m pretty good at replacing toilets and doing other minor plumbing projects. And I enjoy patching and painting walls. And I like to install light fixtures. Basic home repair — that’s what I make with my hands.
    • I write too seldom these days. It’s been nearly a year since I last wrote anything longer than 1,500 words or so, and I’m beginning to worry that the muscles have atrophied.
    • I confuse affect and effect. I’ve been taught the rules more times that I can count, but when I sit down to write I inevitably end up reaching for my dictionary. Or, as is more often the case, I bend over backwards to avoid using the damn words altogether.
    • I need to spend less time alone. Great books, films, music, and websites are no excuse for ignoring relationships.
    • I should eat better. Joanna and I eat out too much. And we’re lazy cooks. Also, I really like chips and dips and salsas and other salty, fatty snack foods. If I didn’t spend so much time on the treadmill I’d already be on cholesterol medicine. Damn you, genetics.
    • I start four times as many books as I finish.
    • I finish almost everything I begin. (Well, except books.) It’s one of my better qualities, I think.
    • I tag no one in particular.