the importance of dancing charleston...

humor me, i'm thinking out an argument i plan to make tonight. if you don't dance, you might want to skip it.

the ksda has its teachers meetings about once a semester to hash out the schedule and discuss any major changes to make. last time, we went to a schedule where a typical month of beginner lessons is one week lindy hop (1.5-hr lesson), two weeks six-count (45 min), and one week charleston (45 min).

last time around, i voted against going to this schedule -- our previous incarnation was two weeks charleston, two weeks lindy hop, two weeks six-count, all beginner lessons at 45 min. i mostly regretted the disappearance of 1/4 of the intermediate lessons. but based on what's happened, i now have totally different reasons for wanting something different.

as a teacher, i'm not too attached to any particular schedule. not having two weeks in a row to reinforce lindy hop has meant that almost none of the beginners attempt it on the floor, and i can't see that the 1.5-hr lessons are making enough difference to justify not having an intermediate lesson on those nights. those are reasons too, but the huge problem for me is this: the scene's getting slower!

first off, i love to dance fast. especially fast lindy. while a lot of swing dancing is as much social as skill, and while i can find ways to challenge myself artistically at every speed, fast lindy is absolutely exhilarating -- it's the one place where i get seriously mentally and physically challenged, where i'm forcing myself to work simply by choosing to dance.

as a DJ, i adore playing nights we teach charleston. all of a sudden, people who had never danced a step can keep up with 180 bpm no problem, and pushing it even beyond that won't make too many people sit down. otherwise, in knoxville, sometimes, depending on the crowd, it's hard to get much beyond 150 bpm without losing most of the dancers. and once there are only two couples on the floor, i can't very well play the even FASTER song i had lined up!

now, theoretically, six-count single step (=east coast swing=ECS for my purposes...) does the same thing. not even theoretically -- anybody remember the late 90s? however, while six-count triple step and charleston and lindy hop all blend easily together, ECS does not. thus, whereas if you get a floor full of beginners and beginner intermediates capable of quick ECS, they'll likely stay in ECS... whereas the ones trying charleston at a higher speed might -- just might -- throw in a couple swingouts. which is how one builds up the capacity to do fast lindy -- by doing it!

so teaching more charleston and less six-count swing in beginner classes serves my personal interest of wanting more people who can dance fast in a more complicated manner. it serves a public health interest; if lindy hoppers like me are skipping the gym to make time to dance, we ought to get a fine workout. it's not going to hurt the social scene -- people seemed to get just as much kick out of it when we were teaching equal parts charleston and six-count. (i got tickled pink when i hurt my right shoulder last summer and had a beginner shrug and say, "at least it wasn't your left!" he was thinking of side-by-side charleston as THE basic, thereby entailing more left-hand involvement than right for the follow.) plus, it gives the DJs more freedom to rove the range of tempos and play diverse music, and that ought to keep even the most advanced of advanced dancers more entertained.

i've tried the argument out on mats and dan. unfortunately, they agree with me, so no real testing of the reasoning. fingers crossed, and heading off to the meeting... (ideally, i'd like to try every other week rotating a 1-hr intro to either charleston or lindy... but my chances of getting that are pretty nil!)

plane tickets!

i have plane tickets! and plane tickets make the anticipation real, tangible -- getting tickets = i'm really going.

well, actually, i have reservations, and i need to go to the airport and finalize the ticketing. vouchers are fun that way, and i'm accustomed to being thoroughly spoiled by e-ticketing. however, united was super-nice on this one -- i had a minor travel delay back in october, and they gave me a voucher for roundtrip tickets to anywhere CONUS. i'm using them to get to l.a. and san diego for the weekend before new year's through new year's day--not a cheap itinerary! i get to meet some of the boyfriend's family, then we're heading down to rhythmic arts.

i also have plane tickets to albany for christmas weekend. we're going touristing in nyc.

TWO sets of tickets make me officially double-dose over-the-top happy and excited. two weekends in a row with the too-seldom-seen boyfriend ramps that up to somewhere around ecstatic.

layz-ah-NEE-mah-nyaks...

dear goodness.

my friend shafi sent me this video:


i can understand that one, mostly. but because i'm a bit of a language geek, and because youtube links associated videos, i've spent the last twenty minutes seeing how various countries' tv people have modified the not-so-word "animaniacs" to make it fit their languages. i think my favorite is the russian... sorta "ah-NEE-MAHT-see-ya" - анимашки if anybody can make a better approximation from the cyrillic.

oh, and has anybody else found afghans speaking english to have just a touch of a midwestern twang? i've now finished two audiobooks by afghan authors read by natives... probably not natives with particularly strong accents, of course, but still. i found it fascinating that both had this little touch of it on certain vowels. i don't know enough to be sure whether they were originally pashto speakers or natives of another regional language, but i wonder about the factors that lead to a particular "accent"...

scary... but merry xmas!

(i bought my plane tickets and made the nyc hotel reservation last night; now that the expensive part of the planning is out of the way, it's time to get really excited about the holidays!)

istanbul was constantinople...

my generation knows the song "istanbul" from the 1990 they might be giants version; an awful lot of us gained first exposure to tmbg through the tiny toons cartoon set to it.

last night, i was flipping around emusic in pursuit of something completely unrelated (fwiw, ray anthony's version of the dragnet theme....) and ran across a 1953 song called "istanbul." i click, it's the song. i had no idea the version i grew up with was a cover.

wikipedia lists a bunch of other remakes. before i ran out of my monthly download quota, i grabbed three. (caterina valente's is the most likely to show up at a dance soon!)

coincidentally, since reading a few passages about life among the russian emigrés in constantinople just after WWI in the orientalist, i've been doing occasional google searches to see what i can find about jazz there during the era just before it became istanbul. no luck yet, but reiss mentioned an african american jazz club, and i'm curious.

quick lunchbreak rambling

i started following julian baggini's blog when my friend heather was having trouble tracking down a book on atheism by him that her class was using as a textbook... google search -> oh, interesting, he's got a blog. anyway, as an american who's recently been name-called a bit for negativity and change resistance, i found this article on cultural attitudes toward success pretty fascinating. (and yes, of course i think of myself as practical... change can be great, just think it through properly and implement it sensibly. fine, fine, so maybe i'm a little demanding...)

in other news, my company has brought in physical trainers for a trial week, working on setting up an even more comprehensive fitness program. (for what it's worth, the existing health program is one of my favorite things about the company anyway -- fruit in the breakrooms, gym memberships, tolerance for longer lunchbreaks if you're using them to work out.) i went to a "walking clinic" today expecting not to break a sweat. it hurt. this is awesome.

from reading this blog, one might easily think i never read anything but the nytimes.com website.

not true. but prob'ly a little closer to true than it ought to be. but it's interesting.

among other discoveries on a very quiet thanksgiving weekend, this article by a psychiatrist who got pulled into partnering with effexor reps to give talks about the drugs. one of the more bizarre rules in the household when i was a kid was a prohibition against tv commercials -- i could watch any show i wanted, i just had to request it ahead of time so mom could tape it and fast-forward through the commercials. midway through the story, i started laughing out loud, because i found myself suddenly (20 or so years later) agreeing that it was a durned good idea.