snow at USC

Yes, near-blizzard conditions on campus today ...

created by a man with a hose.  When all the white stuff was piled up on the ground, there were USC students throwing snowballs at each other and, inevitably, being filmed.  Since when I saw this happening I was myself on the way to being filmed, I can't talk.  I was positioned, with five volunteer grad students of mine, in front of a Richard Farber self-portrait - an AIDS picture, with text explaining physiologically and pharmaceutically what was going on inside him (all that stuff one can't know from a portrait) - and told to run a seminar.  The students were brilliant - I think we all wished it was the real thing.  Three times over, different angles of shooting, different dialogue, for about 5 minutes at a time.  Better than yesterday, when I had to say "I love working at Dornsife [our College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences] " - and carry on - several times over ...

I don't think any of this had anything to do with snow - though last year's video Christmas card, in which I starred together with a sheep that strayed out of a Farquarson painting, etc., was on the theme of snow, and apparently won some silver medal (presumably for cheesy promotional videos). It was fascinating seeing the snow melt - it arrived in big blocks of ice, and then went down a little conveyor belt into a machine like a woodchipper - to be hosed out as snow.