playlist - 1/14/2010

first set of the year for me... and also following up what was probably my biggest gap in dancing since i started. (most of a month!)

Ya Gotta See Baby Tonight - Louis Prima 146
Do The Hucklebuck - Gunhild Carling And Her Swing Band 150
Mahzel (Means Good Luck) - Benny Goodman 153
Jazz O' Jazz - Adrian Rollini 173
Hallelujah Joe Ain't Preachin' No More - Harlem Hamfats 166
Who Threw The Whiskey In The Well - Lucky Millinder 160
Touch And Go - Wynona Carr 162
Bogg’s Boogie - Spade Cooley 188
Back to Tennessee - Christabel and the Jons 131
Saint James Infirmary - Gérard Messonnier And The Hot Kings 94
Don't Be That Way - Lionel Hampton 140
Bearcat Shuffle - Andy Kirk And His Twelve Clouds Of Joy, Mary Lou Williams 158
East St. Louis Toodle-O - Hot Owls 162
Celery Stalks No. 2 - Will Bradley/Ray McKinley 170
Are You Hep To The Jive? - Cab Calloway 158
In The Mood - Oscar Aleman 175
Sing An Old Fashioned Song (To A Young Sophisticated Lady) - Fats Waller 163
See No Evil Hear No Evil Speak No Evil - Don Redman All Stars 186
Balti Nights In Birmingham - Bob Hunt's Duke Ellington Orchestra 193

i kept the tempos fairly mellow and stuck to a bigger-than-usual of proportion of familiar over unfamiliar. honestly, that was the dancing mood i was in... trying to feel my way back into my feet, not up for any huge challenges... and with exception of a few folks who'd been to lindy focus or glen echo over the holidays, i figured a lot of the group might've been in the same boat. i got one request for "a balboa" towards the end, but mostly the floor seemed pretty down with comfortable.

while i was in tennessee, i borrowed my dad's car to go see a few friends. for whatever reason, when you plug my mp3 player into my dad's car sound system, it plays files in the order they were put on the player. (it took me a while to find all the recently loaded podcasts first-go-round while driving to knoxville.) rollini's "jazz o' jazz" happened to be the track that came up first all the time... and thus got listened to pretty much EVERY time i made a short enough drive not to mess with it. it's been tending to get stuck in my head at random ever since.

new site

black friday, there was a really nice sale going on at dreamhost, so i bought myself some web space... i'm playing a little with php, and i thought it'd be fun to have someplace.

i wasn't doing much fit for public consumption, so i installed wordpress just to play with that too.

so now there's a blog at kaitmahar.com (i know, the domain name originality is STUNNING)... formatting around it's not so pretty yet, but i'll be playing. since i seem to have a mix of lindy hoppers and not coming by here, and since i now have a gratuitous number of blogs, i think i'm going to keep this one for the lindy and jazz stuff, and move the not-so-lindy to the other. except i'm lazy, so i won't be moving the archives. subscribe to one or both as you like.

august-september - the organized overview

once again, it's been long enough since posting here that i can't figure out how to attack. so here's the quick, organized, chronological version of things since the last time i wrote here, with memory supplemented by google calendar and twitter feed:

• camp hollywood in l.a.
• development of obsession with farmer's market and random food experiments
• entering the heart of hurricane season, which is thus far mild but still features enough flooding for a little adventure and further development of my heavy rain phobia
  
• international lindy hop championships in d.c.
  
• bike stolen
• half marathon survived
  
• new folding bike!

upcoming excitement:

• dirt cheap blues (ok, so i'm not much into blues and therefore not that excited, but i am looking forward to seeing people and need to clean up the apartment TONIGHT so we can host, so i'd better work on the enthusiasm.)
  
• jesse gets 2 weeks off for minor surgery?
• new phone - what should i choose?
  
• CSA subscription starts!
• further adventures to NYC on the chinatown bus

and on to the omnidirectional rambling. maybe. (and maybe i should split it up into a few posts.)

last night's set

at the attucks. lee DJed the first half hour, then i took over, then jeff. it's suddenly gotten to be a very different crowd -- lots of college kids. some of them are ODU, some are home from the summer from other places. they all seem to like the neo/rockabilly/jump blues/otherwise-rock-influenced stuff more than i do. as i realized that, my set got a lot more r&b/crunchy/kansas city than i'd really prepped for. still, got to try out some fun stuff, and the floor was relatively unkillable.

Oh Babe - Lucky Millinder 170
Bearcat Shuffle - Andy Kirk And His Twelve Clouds Of Joy, Mary Lou Williams 158
Fiddle Diddle - Lionel Hampton 142
'Tain't No Use - Benny Goodman 155
8, 9 And 10 - Slim Gaillard 181
Up Above My Head I Hear Music In The Air - Sister Rosetta Tharpe
Ostrich Walk - Kenny Ball and His Jazzmen 174
All That Meat And No Potatoes - Will Bradley/Ray McKinley 137 (this one was prob'ly the roughest going of the evening... pretty likely to just stick to the fats version from here on out.)
Drop Me Off In Harlem - Mills Blue Rhythm Band 143
Ta-Hu-Wa-Hu-Wai (Hawaiian War Chant) - Andrew Aiona 186
Why Do Hawaiians Sing Aloha? - Fats Waller 147
Sing Me A Swing Song - Benny Goodman 188
Go Down Moses - Louis Armstrong 107
Come On Over To My House - Jay McShann 141
Teardrops from my eyes - Ruth Brown 145
Rag Mop - Joe Liggins And The Honeydrippers 154
Swing, Brother, Swing - Billie Holiday 151
Moten Swing - Kansas City Soundtrack 156 (why didn't i remember that i have the KC band's "king porter stomp" instead?)
Sweet Sue,Just You - Jimmie Lunceford 158
Southland Shuffle - Ella Fitzgerald 192 (listening to this one again now... and wow, i love the piano player! whole album, as recommended by allen kerr on lindybloggers, is awesome.)

resolution

i've (mostly*) sworn off lindy travel that involves missing days at work. it struck me the other day that i haven't been out of the country since 2002... this is pitiful. i don't want to buy a transatlantic or further ticket without two weeks to make it worthwhile, therefore i'm weekends-only for a while. expect to see me a lot in d.c... remind me of this when my resolve starts to crumble.

* i AM going to use that free plane ticket voucher collected on the way back after new year's! not sure where yet, but that one won't go to waste.

this weekend was particularly and unexpectedly nice. jesse was on fast cruise, so i was halfway expecting to spend the whole time at home. instead, friday night, i went to see avenue q with victor and jay, then rode up to d.c. on saturday with jay. we hung out around the smithsonian for several hours, then met up with my college pals jill and carboni (i hadn't previously known that jill calls him "jack"... needless to say, nobody had trouble remembering their names). our attempts to start a singalong on the subway did not work, but at least they made us laugh a lot. dinner with them and another 6 or 7 lindy hoppers at an irish pub took a very long time -- the place was packed, and we were a big party. we missed more than half the dance, but i had a fantastic time socializing with everybody at dinner and can't really say i regret it. plus, coming in that late, i was able to have an awesomely intense awesome hour of dancing. afterwards, we went to a diner and drank milkshakes and danced to oldies... we crashed at samantha's, didn't get up 'til late, then made our way back to hampton roads. very good times.

save the glen echo dance ranger

most of the lindy hoppers who've traveled to washington, d.c., for a dance event in the last several years have danced in the glen echo park, either in its spanish ballroom or its bumper car pavilion. it's really an incredible venue -- the ballroom is restored to its 1930s-era luster and comfortably holds something like 600 dancers. it's usually one of the main venues for DCLX, and we sweated our way to near-total dehydration there during a mid-june heatwave for jam cellar's big big event this year. if you add in regular saturday night dances with live music, it's really a big part of what's probably the largest swing dance community east of the mississippi.

recently, there's been a flurry of e-mails and a facebook group, all upset because park ranger stan fowler's been reassigned after 30+ years of service in glen echo. mr. fowler, it turns out, has been a driving force behind a lot of the restoration work there, and he's been instrumental in bringing the dance communities out to it. the washington post just put out an article that makes it pretty clear how much we owe stan... and clarifies that he still had things he wanted to do there in the few years he has left 'til retirement and didn't want the transfer (i'd wondered!).

so here's hoping! if you're interested in working with the d.c. dancers who're trying to get the decision reversed, look for the facebook group "Saving Glen Echo Dance Ranger" or join the yahoo group DanceRanger.

klx

this year's knoxville lindy exchange was a lot of fun, or at least the friday-saturday portions of it were.

my first time riding the greyhound was not the least bit traumatic. nor were 7 hours in the car with adrienne. we made good time, successfully found the starbucks when we needed it, and got to knoxville in time for dinner.

friday night didn't feel like klx to me... i finally figured out that it was less about what was going on in the dance venues than about ME -- the fact that i wasn't in host mode, wasn't going around making sure everyone knew what was going on, wasn't trying that hard to meet everyone i didn't know. of course it didn't feel like klx as i've known it! the streamliners were in good form (if a little loud!), though, and everything seemed to run pretty smoothly.

saturday felt more like home. i started the day by almost losing shannon's dog for her (i got mixed up about which one is reliable and likely to come back if you let him out...), got to know some of my fellow guests at the casa de shannon and jewel over doughnuts, and headed to the afternoon dance. after that, i skipped the lindy feast and, with davenne, took shannon out for a belated birthday dinner at sitar's. good times. the villains ball went off with plenty of costuming, and christabel and the jons gave the dancing the warm feel that goes with them. michael gamble kicked the late-night off right by playing a kickin' dixieland set in the "blues room" -- i have to admit, that was one of the weekend highlights for me. i got to trade three-song sets with D.C.'s mike marcotte for the 3-5 a.m. shift, and that was another weekend highlight; i really enjoy that format, and mike's a top-notch DJ.

unfortunately, i'm still figuring out the linux DJing, and i forgot to save my playlist. i'll post my best guess at a reconstruction as soon as i get a little time with my laptop, along with playlists from thursday and last night.

i wish we could've stuck around for the afternoon dance, but making it back to richmond in time to have dinner all together before adrienne handed me off to jesse was nice.

i wound up taking yesterday off too... i had asked for it in case travel plans necessitated it. i was defeated by the combination of having the option, needing to catch up on sleep, having the boyfriend with the day off, and finding the world outside my bed much too cold to deal with. i'll probably miss the day of pay, but it totally felt worth it.

really tired rambling

ilhc was intense. maybe more on that when i'm not so tired that my speech is slurry. illustrations necessary.

frustrated and ready to quit forever sunday morning became stopping by skye and marie's class became remembering that dancing's really freakin' fun and tying on my dance shoes. me = a wee bit moody, i guess.

i had to be dragged away from the soul party sunday evening. that's a new one.

sleeping on the way home didn't happen. oops. abi kept jesse awake enough to drive, as intended, but i wound up engaged by the conversation too. much good dance geekage.

the person who's charged with helping me figure out what i'm doing was back from vacation today. yay guidance! and yay, she's really cool!

after work, a police officer was hovering around my car when i got to it. window smashed, gps gone, mp3 player too crappy to bother with, thankful my computer wasn't in there. too tired to deal. i'll clean up the glass tomorrow. jesse helped saran wrap it for now since it's supposed to rain. made it home without getting lost, hurrah.

new fountain pen in the mail!

i need sleep.

roadtrip!

totally last-minute! david, jesse, and i will be hitting bal night in d.c. tonight, then driving to philly for a workshop with sharon davis and kevin st. lauren, then to nearby pottstown, pennsylvania, to dance to the boilermaker jazz band.

jesse and i survived teaching the intermediate lindy class together last night -- we're kind of a disaster since we approach dancing from such very different perspectives, but i think the final result, complete with last-minute compromises, actually went very well. so everything's sunny, and i need to pack!

lines

i want better lines.

i'm not really sure how to go about getting 'em. best guesses = grab a private with someone who looks great, and get over it and start using video more to get instant feedback on what i look like. a lot of photos i see of myself these days have this slightly awkward look that makes me cringe a little, and i want to get rid of it. here, i'd say it's mostly just too much turnout and stiff looking arms? and i keep seeing weird amounts of tension around the neck, too. but anyway. yet another set of stuff to work on. (forget looking fat or making weird faces in photos... dancing's given me a whole new set of things to pick at myself for!)

any good tips out there?

btw, this one's from the swing dance competition in williamsburg on saturday. jesse and i came in third. the whole weekend was an awesome time -- if this was a mini-exchange, i can't wait to see vblx. the photo was taken by andy nishida.

unemployment: week 1

last tuesday was my last day of work.

i've been enjoying the leisure -- it's been a long time since i've had a period this long to just be at home. or a period this long off work at all, really. i'm packing some and wrapping up my knoxville existence, but i haven't been able to resist putting some time into staying out later than i normally would with friends, to studying chinese, to jogging in the sunshine, to watching movies... the boyfriend came down to help me pack over the weekend, and that's been the biggest chunk of real work done yet. it's about time to get myself in gear, though.

tonight, i'm teaching my last class for the KSDA. following something of a tradition, it's kinda freeform, featuring things i consider my specialty. problem is, i can't really figure out what that might be. the thing i get asked about most is swivels... i'm still a little hesitant to teach those since i screwed up the rest of my dancing so much for a while when i was learning them, but perhaps tonight's the night. that or pirouette spins... guess i'll see if joey has anything more fun for the guys to play with too.

DCLX to ATLX

dclx was a lot of fun. as predicted, the music was fantabulous. kathy, our host for the weekend, was great... beyond the usual sleep-space and showers, she fed us home-cooked meals, took us around to see the cherry blossoms and monuments, and was generally just outstandingly nice to talk to.

i quickly learned that while i may lead a bit around here, i really don't have the traffic control skills to lead on a crowded exchange floor. that's ok, it's something to work towards. the crowds weren't nearly as intimidating as they were two years ago... knowing lots of dancers from other exchanges does a lot to transform an undifferentiated mass of people who're (in my head!) too amazing to want to have anything to do with me back into the friendly, lovely people they actually are.

all the bands were excellent, but saturday late-night was when i really hit my stride and had some of my best dances for the weekend. i really, really hope the cangelosi cards get a CD out sometime soon, because i desperately want to share them with people who haven't gotten a chance to travel around as much. besides being generally fun and danceable, they do some especially exquisite trading back and forth between vocals and instruments with blends that sometimes sound like entirely new instruments... love it.

the floor sunday night was really sticky -- i hate that for the organizers, because i'm sure it wasn't when they checked it out. (having more warm bodies in the room, a recent rebuffing or lack thereof, warm temperatures, drinks being served... it can severely alter floor conditions.) it's hard not to dance when the boilermakers are playing, so i did anyway, but i wish i'd remembered sooner that i had a pair of peds in my purse for just such occasions... if suede won't slide, sometimes putting peds on over the shoes is the solution. in this case, it didn't result in super-slick, but it was enough to seriously improve my mood for the last four or five songs the boilermakers did (including the only jam i saw all weekend! dclx with all the silver shadows out of town is a little different...) and for the rest of the night. i caught a ride from dance to diner to airport with the atlanta folks for our early-morning flights... i got home around 10 a.m. and slept through most of what was left of monday.

and... tonight it's off to atlx!

DCLX!

despite a little terror about dancing in D.C. based on going to events there very early in my lindy career, the bands pulled me in this year. and now i'm pretty freaking excited about it!

why the terror? during events, anyway, it tends to be very follow-heavy, and the events are big and overwhelming... plus, it's easy to get shuffled to the side of the floor where all super-jerky-armed leads are. (i truly don't mind dancing with beginners, even get outright delighted when they're having a good time, but i found DC to have more of the painful variety than a lot of places!) plus, last time i was there, i hadn't quite learned to appreciate fast lindy yet... (average D.C. dance tempo is about 150% ours, i'd say. or it was. knoxville's sped up a little lately.) so, last time around (about 2 years ago), i spent most of my time there being too shy to ask people to dance, and having a not-so-wonderful time when i was dancing... basically, doing the slow crumple-into-heap thing that happens when a dance night goes poorly.

now, though, i solo dance or lead when i can't find a lead... and i get really excited about boilermakers and jazz vipers and cangelosi cards and gordon webster and... well, more or less everyone who's playing! whee!

and, um, i made some coffee with a french press earlier, forgot about it for about 20 minutes, and then drank it anyway... i think the caffeine's hitting my system, and i really shouldn't be attempting to write anymore because i'm getting a wee bit spastic. but yay for taking my last two vacation days, and if you're in D.C. this weekend, dance with me!!

pin curls

we get enough dress-up gigs where it's desirable to look at least a little vintage 1940s-ish that i'm finally admitting it: i ought to get better at putting the look together when necessary.

so beyond shopping for the clothes, today i'm experimenting with pin curls. get hair damp, twirl pieces around finger, pin up. at the moment, i have little mounds of hair and pins sticking every which way. i can't even pass the look off as bad wedding hair -- i need a kerchief to go out today. i'm usually a wash and wear girl, not so good at doing complex stuff with my hair. we'll see how it turns out.

time to find that kerchief and go buy some hairspray...

heels

i'm trying to make myself learn to like dancing in heels. not even super-high ones, just these.

project had been put on hold, as i recently sueded a pair of green keds that make me really happy, but a couple dress-up sorts of dances in the last week made me get them back out. i wore them to the monday night dance last night, just for a little more practice.

i know my dancing is less comfortable in these shoes, but i'm trying to understand exactly why. predictably, the biggest is in distance of heel from ground... i rarely dance flat-footed anyway, but i think i tend to pulse from both knees and ankles. wearing heels limits the latter -- my heel is stuck at close to its usual maximum height above the floor, so it feels like there's less bounce and elasticity in my steps. suppose that's a matter of learning to use the rest of my leg more. and i am -- i think that's how a lot of the styling winds up feeling like it's a lot more in the knees and hips when i'm wearing these. my quadriceps get really tired. it looks different, it feels different, but i'm starting to enjoy having the option.

the other biggie is balance. i've worn them enough now that most normal steps are fine, and i think (hope!) i've quit going super-heavy from arm tension due to fear of falling over at any moment, but my body still hasn't figured out exactly how to compensate for the difference in foot angle on some of the fancier spins and such. guess that means logging more hours in them until those things feel right...

bumper car pavilion

for fans of the d.c. lindy exchange... i'm pretty sure that the photo featured here, from 1924, is of the same bumper car pavilion where they hold dances now. the new orleans jazz vipers will be playing there friday evening this year. and yes, i'm registered to go. not 100% certain i can get there, but registered.

jazz dance! online!

the stearns' classic jazz dance: the story of american vernacular dance is partially up on google books. this book gets referenced A LOT among those who're interested in vintage jazz dance; whether they're citing it or arguing with it, those who research tend to mention it. it's missing lots of pages (including the chapter on the savoy ballroom, alas), but that leaves big swaths of the book present. dance geek joy.

i owe my running across it to emily, one of our up-and-comers, for asking a good question during the practice session last night. the idea was for students to show up and get mini-privates and individual attention from the local instructors. the crowd wound up being two students to six teachers, so we all worked on each other, and it was awesome. (hopefully, next time we'll get the word out better.) around the time we adjourned to a nearby bar and grill, emily asked, "what's with itches? where do they come from?" (itches = a "move" in which one mimics scratching oneself, usually changing into different contortions with the rhythm.) the teacher-folk were all perfectly sure it is a vintage move, passed down with all the historical authority it takes to convince new dancers to do something that looks pretty silly, but nobody could think of a vintage clip showing them. i still haven't found an appropriate video, but searching on the internet turned up this page from stearns discussing itches and their persistence through years and years of vernacular dancing.

teaching solo charleston

way back last monday night, davenne and i taught a little solo charleston routine for the intermediate class. i've been meaning to post something up here about it ever since. it was my first time (co-!)choreographing anything, and it was amazingly fun.

however, there's a video that ought to go with the blog entry. i was surprised and really, really happy when the class was up for taking the routine into the gym (where we have our monday night dances after lessons) to show everybody. and since youtube and i haven't been getting along during the few times this week that i've been at home and at the computer (and, er, not obsessing over making audiobooks from the public library work with my mp3 player), the video of them performing the routine isn't up. bah. i'll try again this weekend.

first off, i'm a huge fan of solo dancing. people have even mentioned that it's the easiest way to tell strangers how to find me at a dance -- i'm the one in the corner doing solo charleston. it's great for working on body movement without having to have a partner, and taking a song or two to play by myself usually makes me feel more centered and creative. more than that, though, it gives me a little more control of my happiness at a dance. if i'm not getting asked to dance much (frequent lately -- we've been pretty follow-heavy here in knoxville) and/or if i'm feeling a little shy about hunting people down to ask THEM to dance, it's easy to retreat into a grumpy huddle in the corner... which makes getting asked that much more unlikely. if i stay on the floor, though, and involved with the music, it's much easier to get back out there. and every now and then it coalesces into a full circle of people jamming out solo with me, which is all the cooler. (future goal for keeping myself on the floor -- learn to lead better!)

rambling about why choreography's neat, how much i prefer smaller rooms to gyms for teaching, etc. to be continued sometime when it's not the end of my lunchbreak...

pulse

yesterday, i started asking people the following question:

if you were to graph vertical position of your center vs. time as measured in beats when pulsing in your vanilla-est of vanilla lindy hop style, what would the graph look like? (no triple-steps necessary!)

i'm loving the geeky conversations this leads to. honestly, dancing my way past a mirror at a relatively steady velocity with a dry erase marker held at waist level worked well enough to convince me of graph shape... but the details of how the graph ideally lines up with the beats? that quickly leads to getting pretty deep into how to dance with swing music.

hopefully i'll remember to write up some conclusions when i get tired of interrogating people...

sing, sing, sing!

thanks to swingdjs, i know that it's the 70th anniversary of benny goodman's famous 1938 carnegie hall concert.

i happen to be DJing our swing dance tonight.

i'm currently trying to decide whether playing the full 12-minute version of "sing, sing, sing" will get me murdered.

(i have to pack for a crazy early flight to L.A. tomorrow, so i wasn't planning to drag out the end of the dance, but this one might be worth sticking around a little into the "off-duty" time after 10 p.m...)