Who am I? Take 2: I am a father.

One of the things we did to celebrate my birthday yesterday was go to a local library to celebrate the completion of our having logged 1000 books read to DH. It took a few takes, but his picture in now hanging in the "Hall of Fame" of Mashpee's kids' section. Pretty great.

We went out for dinner as well to celebrate yesterday evening. What we order is, in part, a strategic hedge on what DH will eat himself for dinner--though it turns out he was all about those salty chicken fingers after all. And those fries. Oh dear.

I have 1000 pictures I would love to share with you.

But I feel more and more ambivalent about posting any of them. Still, every now and then, I can't help myself. But maybe not tonight.

Tonight: though I actually got home from school with the sun still up, the post-nap snack routine kept us from getting out the door until the sun was well down. But no matter--we were swinging at the canal, inky night or no inky night. Alas, no evening canal traffic for us...but we got to visit all the giants on 6A as we meandered home.

We are SO lucky to have "Dom" in our life. So so lucky.

Blessed? Sure. OK.

Blessed.

Who am I? Take 1: I am 47.

Thought experiment to jump-start the blog, therefore to jump-start 2016 writing: on my birthday (and on through finals for the next two weeks or so), I ask myself to self-define.

So to start: today I am 47 years old. As I said to L tonight at dinner, unless I live for a loooooong time, I've most likely seen more than half my life played out already. The proverbial "back nine." Which is odd, but not disorienting. Another good reason to keep questioning how I live out my priorities in life--because it's finite. Not that I'm feeling morbid or overly mortal: just trying to be real.

Last year, we were on the verge of leaving for Kaunas. Five years ago, DH was an idea. Ten years ago I was in my last year @IU, and we had just accepted a tenure-track position half-way across the country. Fifteen years ago, we were in Vilnius doing dissertation work and broadcasting for the state radio. Twenty years ago, I'd never yet been to Lithuania before--just finished my MA, and was pondering my next move, seeing as it wasn't going to be NYU. Twenty-five years ago, I was going into my last semester @Gustavus. Thirty years ago, I was a high school junior: tennis team, Assorted Images, OSLC youth group.

47 years seems like a long time. It IS a long time. But at least in some ways, I can close my eyes and I'm right back to these other places and times. (In others, my life pre-DH seems like a haze--I know I did SOMETHING or other, and I guess it was pretty darn important, but whatever.)

I'm older at this point than my parents were when we moved from Wisconsin to Arizona. I think I'm older than my mom's mom when she died.

I thought I would feel wiser by now. Maybe this is as good as it gets.

Top 5 reasons to love Eisenstein

Eisenstein and Chaplin
ham it up! No Photoshop! 

 One of the things I'm going to try this summer as I blog along with my Film History students is post different "Top 5" lists [with all apologies to both David Letterman and Chris Rock] as a way of guiding students to go deeper into a particular area of study... Batting lead-off: Sergei Eisenstein!

1. The editing. In my graduate work, we developed a class called "Production as Criticism," where each year the instructor would bring their own "problematic" to the table (e.g. police procedurals, music videos, Dogme95). I like to imagine what an editing class dedicated to playing with Soviet montage might entail. I suppose this is more "film school" than what we do at BSU. Still...

2. The writing. I vividly remember first being confronted with Eisenstein's theoretical writing about his different types of montage, of how he was trying to bring elements of kabuki theater, iconic painting, circus, and God-knows what all else into his work. Check out his book The Film Form for starters.

3. The posters. Soviet constructivism is in full effect--not only in the frame composition in shot after shot within the films, but in the promotional materials as well. Completely of-the-moment, and so, paradoxically, timeless.

4. The hair. I mean: come on! Can't you see him leaning over his Movieola, running his hands through his hair for the umpteenth time, as he tries to make the cut just so?

"So now if the baby carriage
is rolling down and to the right..."

5. The YouTube availability. Go ahead: run a search. Just about everything of his is available now for streaming for free. After Potemkin, maybe try October? Another example of the Internet as an incredibly rich archive for film historians. This kind of access is something we could only dream about 20-30 years ago. Is this the golden age of "doing film history"?

Sergei Eisenstein was born in Rīga (Latvia) during the Czarist era, and his father was a well-revered architect of the art nouveau style. Check out some of these buildings!

How to stumble into a new replay project

In the past few years, I've done my share of Googling Strat-O-Matic Baseball, APBA Baseball, and Status-Pro Baseball. I'd even searched out "replay" for seasons like 1967, 1982, and 1991 for obvious reasons (if you know what I mean and I think you do).

Along the line, I stumbled upon One For Five magazine more than once. At first, it might have been a result of a failed attempt to track down whether or not Elysian Fields Quarterly was still publishing. But looking for online writing about baseball boardgames brought me back to their website again and again.

It actually seems to be the case that One For Five began as a labor-of-love blog (oneforfive.com), and has become a magazine thing as well. And one of the beautiful things about 2015 is being able to order said magazine despite being in Lithuania... The PDF travels light! (This nudged me into getting an electronic subscription to Sight And Sound this summer as well, but that's another topic for another time.)

It turns out that the magazine covers more than baseball--this issue reviewed a number of hockey games (yeah, I'm pondering a Strat tourney that will hopefully end with Bobby Orr soaring over the crease), and even provided a lead for a friend looking for Formula 1 fodder.

But the big bonus for me was the extended interview with Greg Sovan, who has created a number of different baseball games over the years. This was absolutely fascinating to me: hearing him talk through his ideas of how these games differentiated...and why.

Part of the coolness of picking up Strat for the '67 replay was to grapple with another way to convert a season's worth of stats into a fun, playful board game. Having grown up with Status-Pro, that was always THE way to do it... but of course it's remarkable to see how other folks do it. And to hear them TALK about how and why they chose to do this or that... well, to quote my little boy, "That's so cool!"

Another bonus with the magazine was a sampler from Sovan's Lineup Card Baseball, with all necessary rules & charts, along with tables for the 1975 Reds & Red Sox. Instant '75 WS replay potential!!!

And so yes, now that the semester here is over, and before the online summer session course kicks in, I am indulging in revisiting 1975. More to follow on this game vis-a-vis Strat and Status-Pro, the 1975-ness of it all, and such... But for now I am happy to report that Louis Tiant notched 13 strikeouts for Boston en route to a 4-2 victory in Game 1.

An auspicious start...

Seeing as the 1967 Strat-O-Matic Baseball tournament is on Fulbright rain delay (with the Cardinals dangling precariously close to elimination at the hands of the shockingly hot White Sox), we're filling the, erm, void in Kaunas with a replay of the 1975 World Series...

...And I've got to say, Red Sox fans: you've gotten a rather auspicious start to the proceedings, with Dwight Evans going deep to lead off the Bottom of the 1st. After two innings in Game 1, Boston leads Cincinnati 1-0.

But let's back up a bit: that's the first home run EVER for me using this new game called Roster Card Baseball...and that was the first Red Sox batter EVER for me with the game. How great is that?

I remember playing a few warm-up games between the 1967 Red Sox and Yankees as I tried to sort out Strat-O-Matic... not only did Boston refuse to beat New York (twice, in fact--a preview of coming attractions in the tournament, it turns out), but it was good old Mickey Mantle who hit my first-ever Strat homer.

Sadly, my first Status-Pro Baseball home run has been lost to history. I can only say that the most famous homer was Willy Randolph (1979) hitting a walk-off homer for me with "HIS ONLY HOME RUN NUMBER! HIS ONLY HOME RUN NUMBER!" I wish I could remember the circumstances.

If I can get a little blogging momentum, I promise more to follow on how I came across this new Roster Card Baseball game, as well as how my writing about baseball board games resurfaced this spring @VMU...

Catching up with old 'friends'

One of the simple pleasures of being back in Lithuania is revisiting old stomping grounds (Vilnius Old Town still has the magic), listening to local radio (M1+ is streaming as I write this), and even reconnecting with old reads like The Vilnius Review.

Formerly available in a kiosk next to the Vilnius bus station (among other places),
several years' worth of The Vilnius Review can now be downloaded for free!

This is a literary journal along the lines of Granta or The Paris Review, but of course with a local/national slant. Along with the now-defunct daily program "Radio Vilnius" and the still-kicking Baltic Times, Vilnius (as it was called in the 1990s) was another English-language "way in" to Lithuanian news and culture, invaluable to an eager student looking for material.

If you've ever visited (or lived) in Lithuania and/or have a stake in world literature, have a look.

Click here to access free download options for back issues of The Vilnius Review!

Chernobyl... and Ignalina

Things finally seem like they're setting down. The apartment search, the visas quest, filing taxes abroad, the Kraków conference, the V2 presentation: all sorted. The funny thing is that now we've less than three weeks of classes left, and then final exams. If we hadn't carved out the extra time, we'd be on the brink of returning already. Unreal.

I have a lot of things in mind to download here--I hope I have (or take) the opportunity in the coming weeks and months to do so. I think this desire to say NOTHING when things sort of go off the rails has led to a lot of... circumspection these past three (six? eighteen?) months. And that's probably all for the best.

But it's time to write again. To blog, but to also do some academic writing: something bigger. It's time, isn't it?

We shall see.

But tonight, let me just touch briefly on a documentary film that LTV just screened call A Different Chernobyl (Ukraine, 2011). The film wasn't interested in going over the 1986 tragedy one more time--rather, it wanted to paint a portrait of the town and its inhabitants...

And you couldn't help but think about Ignalina and its Chernobyl-style reactor--how it could have just as easily been Lithuanian Aukštaitija that suffered the worst of a reactor meltdown. Loreta's dad's home village of Dysna is easily within 30km of Ignalina (the range of the Zone).

Like the crackdown on the Maidan pointed to an alternative history for Lithuania, so too this disaster could have been even more a part of Lithuanian history instead. I'm convinced: there is much for Baltic scholars to learn from the experience of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people.

The film shows people going back once a year--May 9th, or V-E Day (per the USSR and then Russia). Once a year, for a day (more than that is unsafe)--to remember and celebrate what was.

Interested readers need to seek out Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (1997)--harrowing, heartbreaking, and absolutely vital.

Kovo 11-a & Ukraine

Wednesday was the 25th anniversary of the 1990 declaration of a (re)independent Lithuania--but it was an anniversary under the cloud of continued strife in and around the Ukraine.

In the last few weeks we've seen the odd theater of the Minsk cease-fire conference (and its bloody aftermath); we've seen a key Russian opposition leader gunned down days before a Moscow rally; and we've seen Lithuania jump-start a plan to reinstate a type of military draft in order to get troop numbers up to believable levels.

This wasn't the script for how the quarter-century of independence was supposed to feel. This wasn't the script for how "Europe" was supposed to be in 2015.

In fact, sometimes it feels a lot like how I imagine 1938 or 1939.

Transitions Online has been running a series of short opinion pieces from key Ukrainian voices on the ongoing crisis--CLICK HERE for the latest installment.

Surfing the shortwaves

One of the luxuries of this semester has been having time to read some magazines cover-to-cover--for instance, the most recent issue of Baltic Worlds (free for the taking from the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies [CBEES] @Södertörn University, home of the 2011 Baltic Studies in Europe conference)!

The article in particular that's prompting me to write is a short piece by Thomas Lundén on shortwave radio listening during the Cold War. It made me think of being in Šeduva and listening to shortwave in the late-90s...

As a conversational English teacher, I didn't have much of anything to sort in terms of grading--and a week's course prep could be adapted to the full range of ability levels. So... there was a lot of time for other things! And though I didn't have a TV, I didn't really miss it--I had my cassette/radio player.

I can remember going regularly to the BBC, but also searching around for random things... Hearing broadcasts meant for troops in the Persian Gulf was something--and hearing coded bursts of numbers and letters was something else. (This was echoed by the 2011 Wired piece discussing a curious Russian station.)



Of course, there was also "Radio Vilnius," the half-hour English-language daily broadcast on the Lithuanian state radio... That was an access point to local news and culture, as much or more than The Baltic Times. And my interest in that show was parlayed into actually working for the program in 2000-2001, but that's another post for another time...

I wonder if Mr. Lundén is on Facebook?

Click here for a set of archived recordings of "Radio Vilnius" from 1990-1991!

Kaunas chronicles: baby steps

We've been in Kaunas for a month now--the time has absolutely flown by. Now that we finally have our own apartment, it feels like something of a "reset" for the Fulbright... It was incredibly gracious of my father-in-law to help us by letting us stay w/ him in February, but it's just got to be better for everyone involved to have our own space again.

I'm teaching two classes at the moment... I'm co-teaching a Creative Nonfiction course (which is moving from print-based feature writing to a more transmedia storytelling approach), as well as an Innovations and Technologies course that's all mine. Both of those are undergrad courses, but I will be taking the 2nd half of a grad seminar on Visual Culture, bringing a production component to bear on their theoretical base.

It's at least a whole other blog post, but it's immediately striking how large the undergrad classes are--over 150 each! Here's my tease: How in the world do you facilitate the practice of writing in a lecture hall setting?!

So it's baby steps here in Kaunas--figuratively and literally. Did I mention DH is walking!!?!?!?!

By necessity, life slows down...if only for a day

Thankfully, the power is back on. We were without for only about five hours this morning. But the blizzard still rages--and Juno is supposed to be with us on into tonight.

DH is sick: either a reaction to immunization yesterday, or that flu bug certainly floating around our pediatricians' office. (Why didn't I ask to wait on this appointment until we're back?)

So now I am in his room as he sleeps. Braškė is catching up on her sleep--I was up and watching earlier last night, and then she was "on duty" later in the night / early morning.

Finished my Havel book. Drinking coffee, watching the trees whip in the snowy wind. Monitoring his breathing. Making sure we still have power.

There's nowhere to go today--and we can't even shovel until the wind abates. No push to pack or clean--at least not until he's healthier.

No: today is, ironically, a luxury. Life has slowed down.

Revisiting the "Glory Years"

It may not be Ice Bowl II, but it's going to be chilly tomorrow when the Cowboys come to Green Bay for their divisional playoff. And when we start talking Ice Bowl, I start thinking about a record I checked out from the city library so many times I could recite chunks of it by heart...


The Packer Glory Years features radio commentary from the three-year run of NFL championships, culminating with Bart Starr's quarterback sneak to win the Ice Bowl against Dallas. It all happened before I was born, but throughout the perpetually 4-8 1970s (at least that's how I remember them), the Packer legacy was imprinted on me--largely through this record. And thanks to the glory of YouTube, I go back and listen to it again about once a year.

We played our share of pickup football, and I'm sure it had something to do with my concurrent fascination with tabletop football games. And there is the curious case of recording the play-by-play of a couple Super Bowls that HAS to be on a cassette somewhere or other still--with Troy Wiegand doing color commentary!

This was the match-up I was hoping for this week--Packers/Cowboys has been a great rivalry well beyond the Ice Bowl, after all. In particular, I'm thinking about the 1990s when Green Bay seemed like they just couldn't get past Dallas. Texas was a cruddy place to be a Packer fan in the early-to-mid 90s, though the emergence of the sports bar helped to mitigate greatly (and was a nice way for a grad student to blow steam before hitting the books again)...

I remember being at Adam & Yael's wedding reception in Boston, stealing updates at the bar during a particularly brutal Packer loss in Dallas during the 1996 playoffs. It became clear that GB needed home-field advantage, and it made every game of the 1996 season matter--which was extra fun, because I was back home in Arizona that fall, saving up for my first trip to Lithuania. Dad and I would go to a sports bar on the west side of town after church--it was our thing. I could wax poetic about that year's Super Bowl win--against who? oh yes, the Patriots!--but let's double back to this weekend's game with the Cowboys.

In the greater scheme of things, football means a lot less to me than it did 20, 30, or 40 years ago. Still, tomorrow's game takes me back to elementary school in Manitowoc: playing football, playing football board games, listening to records of football games. As DH drags our chairs around the living room, and I'm washing dishes listening to this recording, it all comes back.

How can I not smile?

This week, my 229ers wrote on a particular track for a "sound & semiotics" paper... here's the Spotify playlist!

 

The brave new world of Intersession

It's Opening Day today for the university's (relatively) new offering: two-week Intersession classes, wedged between New Year's Day and MLK Day. I'm teaching Foundations of Media Studies (COMM 229) online, a class I feel most comfortable trying out in this accelerated format.

"Accelerated" is kind of under-selling it. I mean, I prefer to spread out my summer classes across both sessions, for a 10-week class. This way, it's a little more rapid than the 14-week semester, but not as condensed as the 5-week flavor.

But now take each of those ten summer school weeks of COMM 229, and make each of them a day. Now put the petal to the metal for ten days, and you've got yourself an Intersession class.

Dear Lord.

Inevitably, some things need to change--for instance, weekly (would-be daily) screenings have been sacrificed in favor of recommending we talk about Boyhood (2014) as something of a case-study of key concepts. And besides, it's kind of fun to make a pedagogical bet that this one will win the Best Picture Oscar this spring... 

Gusties (and other fellow travelers) are familiar with the January Term ("J-Term"!) in which you'd take a single class for the month--the idea being that you could explore something outside your major while having a different kind of rhythm on campus. By definition, J-Term classes could not count towards other requirements--it was its own requirement, as I remember. So when several friends and I took Television Criticism, it was because it seemed like a cool idea--not a way to chip away at the dreaded Speech-Comm major. Of course, a lot of people thought it was a lark to be able to watch TV for college credit...until they really got their heads around the readings and such.

So let's see how this works--maybe in 25 years' time, someone will think back on this class, the way I'm remembering Gustavus in January 1988...