October 10, 2008

If Dancers were Drummers

Preface: Although there’s been little discussion of it here in this blog, I teach Blues and Swing dance. I’ve been doing it on and off in an informal way for a couple years. For the last year, I’ve actually acknowledged what I’ve always wanted to be and now I call myself a Dance Teacher without any feeling of duplicity.

Read on:

If I were a music teacher, I’d probably compare teaching Dance to teaching percussion… mainly due to one observation.

A natural percussionist, can play soft or hard, slow or fast, but the way that they attack the drums is with a level of relaxation and precision that the unnatural percussionist probably can’t achieve. I don’t teach drums, and I don’t play drums all that often, but I watch drummers. I’m transfixed by their fluidity, the way their bodies move, not just their arms. The way they seem to be as lost in, yet connected to the music as I am during the best dances makes me feel that I have a kind of camaraderie with them. And like a dancer, the drummer does not just play alone, expecting to be followed by the instrumentalists; it’s a conversation in rhythm and time.

With the new or unnatural percussionist, and I’ve seen quite a few in my audio engineering days, there is an intensity and an intention. It’s almost like someone who lacks depth perception, watching the curb, the street and the grass with every step. There’s more inner turmoil and feedback going on between each beat as the mind tries to tell the body which drum to hit and the body tries to catch up to what the rhythm should be according to how the mind is tracking it. These drummers, even as they get better often develop a reputation of being “intense” drummers, but if a student of mine danced the way these drummers play, they’d probably shred their knees and hips within a year of hammering the dance-floor with their feet.

I would also say that this kind of drummer would be good at re-creating the same patterns over and over again, for their limited dexterity is borne purely out of memorization. It’s this way with new students as well. Teach them a combination in a class and they will do that same combination in that order out on the dance floor over and over again unless you force them to learn a new one. In which case, they think in terms of patterns that one can categorize and memorize, not sets of vocabulary that can be mixed up according to the conversation.

This realization is bolstered by a nugget I copied and pasted out of a blues discussion a few weeks ago.

[O]ne of the most key changes I see between intermediate and advanced dancers is that shift from tense and intellectual to relaxed and visceral. Intermediate dancers tend to be thinking and trying a lot. This isn’t a BAD thing, but it tends to get in the way of truly connecting with the music or their partner. Advanced dancers tend to be more relaxed into it, just going with the flow and letting things happen. There’s a certain “I don’t care” nature to very advanced dancers that makes everything look more raw and gritty, which is what I love about these kinds of dances.Now, I think of both of these things as states not stages. I think that, for a long time, dancers flow in between levels. In each night, or even in each 3 minute dance, a dancer within a certain proximity of the intermediate-advanced line will flow back and forth between the two. Eventually, they start spending more and more time in the advanced state.

(—The writer, I believe, is Liz Stone, who lives and teaches in San Francisco. )

For me… this state is easy to identify in myself and in others. I know when I’ve reached that relaxed state and when I can let the movement flow. I’ve heard writers speak of the same thing, of sitting down to write and having a story flow right out of them. But rarely does one reach that state on first effort, which is why so many people give up so quickly.

The question I wrestle with, is what to do with those who have that unnatural feel, the ones that you have to remind, “hit the floor on the down-beat.” I think the best math teachers are the ones who struggled with math as a kid, who had to develop tricks to figure it out, the ones who don’t just think in numbers. But can an unnatural dancer rise to a level to teach others of a similar persuasion? Or, can a naturally talented dancer communicate with the true neophyte in a way that speaks to their utter  incomprehension?

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October 8, 2008

Pathetic Musings and other Tagline Topics

I’ve been sitting here at the computer since 3:00. It’s now 7:38. Before that, I was at the computer from 11am till roughly a few minutes before 2pm when I went jogging for an hour. For every torturous minute I’ve been sitting here with the intention of writing a brilliant, revealing, amusing, intelligent, insightful, thought-provoking blog entry, all while checking email, catching up on the Presidential Debate Punditry and doing the requisite dance PR that leads me to the never-ending abyss of Facebook. So far, all I can muster is this self-referential micro-analysis of the moment. It’s like the novel about the frustrated novelist, the play within a play, but for the short-attention-span Sesame-Street/MTV/Internet Generation and less Shakespearian.

I conducted a blog analysis yesterday. In my insane hierarchy of bookmarks, I’ve tucked away links to about oh… 75 or 100 blogs. Somehow, I’ve managed to maintain this collection of bookmarks since I worked at Wells Fargo in 1997. How did I do that? Through the careful maintenance of a bookmarks.html file that I copied from floppy disk to zip drive and eventually emailed to myself before I quit that job.

Nevermind that… the point is, as I clicked through each bookmark I noticed a few things:
1) 80% of the blogs I bookmarked no longer exist. In some cases, what obviously was in previous iterations someone’s daily diary, is now a blog-style marketplace for shoes, furniture, purses. I guess that’s part of the new economy, taking over defunct blogs and selling crap. Does anyone actually fall for this and purchase the schlock?
2) The overwhelming majority of the surviving blogs (and many of the ones out there that I bump into but don’t bookmark) contain what I call the self-effacing tag line. Usually the writer has no specific focus. The one exception is politics. People who are into politics, but who aren’t truly politically savvy and the general unfocused populace all use the same tag-line formula:

• “the ramblings of another internet blogger”
• “ruminations of an average person”
• “the ponderings of a pathetic person”
• “the mindless meanderings of a hapless misanthrope”
• “the musings of an internet wastoid”
• “the pesterings of someone who has nothing better to do:
• “useless minutia as recorded by an idiot”
• “stuff I think about that doesn’t really matter to anyone else”

If you search for the phrase “the musings of” you will find 170,000 results when paired with the word “blog.” Now, not all of these entries are a blog with this tagline, but I’d bet a few googleadwords that at least half of them are.

According to ProBlogger.com (a site which I only visited today for the first time ever and do not endorse or use), “I strongly urge every blogger to use a tagline on your blog. It can give your blog that little extra edge of clarification or intrigue that could prevent a first-time reader from leaving your site, due to not seeing any personal relevance.”

So… for all you misanthropic musers who like to pester the internet with your ponderings, consider saving yourself a trip to the Thesaurus and just tag your blog, “Another blog by an idiot.” This will ensure that I won’t waste my time reading it.

It is only fair though, that I mention that I did bookmark a site with the tag-line, “The Musings of the Mad Biologist” which contained some actual discussion of something specific and scientific, and I found “The Musings of an Opinionated Sod” to be an especially entertaining exception to my tag-line complaint.

That said, this scathing criticism requires that I amp up not only the quality of my own blog, but of my tag-line, which right now is non-existent.

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October 6, 2008

Ramble On

Leaves are fallin’ all around.
Time I was on my way
Thanks to you I’m much obliged
Such a pleasant stay
But now it’s time for me to go
The autumn moon lights my way
But now I smell the rain
And with it pain,
And it’s headin’ my way.
-Led Zeppelin

It was three Septembers ago, that I bid goodbye to Nathaniel, who had so kindly (along with his parents) hosted in me in one of the oldest houses I’d ever visited in in the woods of Vermont. That fall snap hit the air and as I watched the early maple on his dirt driveway signal the onset of fall, I began to feel an urgency to get on the road one more. It was a kind of urgency that  hadn’t nagged me in the heat of a southern summer, through warm New York City nights or even as I’d navigated the incomprehensible highways of Canada.

There was something so bittersweet about that parting; I had made a friend with bright shining eyes, a sharp mind and a penchant for adventure. For a few weeks we trundled through woods picking blackberries, hiked along mountain streams through tiny caves, read by the fireplace, and danced in the city hall of a tiny town that had never seen the likes of us.

My heart ached as I rumbled down the dirt drive for the last time, for the friendship, for the fall and for the loss of summer. I didn’t know what I was heading towards… just driving blindly into the future with little but a point on a map, a few phone numbers of friends of a friend and the transient’s glimpse into other people’s lives, the imagination of possibility. Vermont with its crumbling barns, fields of sweet white corn and tiny brown and green highway signs had captured the part of me that New York City had failed to reach.

I shed my tears, cranked up the stereo and wound through the twisting mountain roads and into the Adirondacks for several days, pulling over to photograph the finger-like lakes and marvel at the mist over the water, enshrouding tiny islands. I made my camp in the woods in the remotest spot I could find, wondering if at this late date in the season my will and my vehicle, a 1988 Ford Camper Van that I named Steinbeck, would carry me across the Dakotas and into the beast that is the Rockies… if I’d summit those peaks and tumble down into the hills and valleys of the West Coast, and find a home in Seattle.

By the time I’d reached Chicago, the choked expressways, the neat rows of bungalows, the expanse of water— I was too tired to go on. A few days perched in a high-rise above Lake Michigan and I was ready to stop moving. Allowing myself one last hurrah, at the urging of friends I drove to St. Louis to reunite with dance and dancers. By the end of the week-end, I had a place to stay back in Chicago, so I turned my rig around and on October 1st, through a beating rain, drove towards my new home.

Now each year, as the leaves turn, the morning air bites my toes when my feet hit the floor and I cozy up with a cup of tea, I hold a little celebration for my haphazard decision to land in a City that until that last week in September I had never seen, knew little of and had never even considered. That ramblin’ part of me settles in for the winter.

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October 5, 2008

I am a Terrible Blogger

Top 10 reasons why I am a terrible blogger:
1) Because I write well and I’m wasting my talent by not practicing.
2) Because I have installed three versions of wordpress and yet have not consistently used any as a publishing platform in the last three years.
3) Because I love reading good writers and talking about good writers, but I won’t allow myself to become one.
4) I hate the word “blog”; it sounds like “blob.”
5) I have a box of business cards that names my profession as “Writer.” I have not given any of them to anyone except as an example of my stellar graphic design skills. The card is really pretty neat looking though. Really.
6) Every teacher I’ve had since the second grade has said that I should be a writer.
7) I spend an inordinate amount of time spicing up and copyediting Craigslist ads and dance forum posts, a true example of my misplaced energies.
8) I abhor poor writing. I can rant extensively and specifically on this topic. People like L. Ron Hubbard win a place in my “worst writers of all time” hall of fame because as an ex termed it, “He writes like the way he thinks smart people would write.”
9) I actually enjoy reading books about syntax, grammar and essay construction.
10) I can wield a pen or pencil with both hands.

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July 15, 2008

Breaking the Pattern: I’m Writing Again

I figure an entry on writing, or why I haven’t done much of it as of late is a good way to re-launch this blog. I’ve been publishing my writings (if you can call spontaneous post card meanderings, or a collection of letters to corporations like, Lego, for example, “writing”) online since the mid-90’s when I worked for the Hardware Order Desk at Wells Fargo and taught myself HTML between support calls.

In the last two years, I’ve had the good, but thwarted intentions to re-start my blog just about every day, or every other day. The latest design of my blog looms in my mind for a while. I imagine how I can populate it with interesting photos, and recipes of my favorite chocolate soufflé, my musings on the use of the term “elite” in the Presidential Race, as well as observations I have about adults who don’t know how to move their hips.

I also remember that in my mid-twenties I put the pen down for a while. I decided to give up on writing The Great American Novel at least till I turned 40, because as I reasoned, I hadn’t had enough life experience to really warrant anything worthy of publication. The only things I’ve written in the past 10 years or so have included:
1) numerous unpublished and half-finished rants on various topics
2) A few journal entries marking the beginnings and ends of several trips to the UK
3) A number of either comical or to the point craigslist ads
4) The occasional scathing letter to a corporation who tries to overbill me for services un-rendered
5) The first 25,000 words of an un-finished novel.

As for the self-reflection, the critical analysis, the philosophical musings… they spin unfettered in my brain. I can’t make much sense of them and I think of Didion who wrote, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking.” Of course Didion was also claiming in that same paragraph because, had she been blessed to even limited access to her own mind, she wouldn’t have to begun writing in the first place.

It’s not that I lack the access to my mind, or the talent to put the myriad of thoughts, feelings and furies to paper. It’s just that I lack either the motivation or the pressure.

Probably the last great writing I did was in my English Comp class in College. How I labored over those papers. Some of them may even be publication worthy, as I railed against the No Child Left Behind Act and the link between Faith Based Initiatives and the ‘doctrine’ of Intelligent Design as it was being debated in Kansas and Ohio.

But in that case I was writing for an attentive audience; an English Teacher whose job it was not only to grade me, but to give critical feedback on my essays.

Isn’t that the truth? The noun evokes the verb. In French you ‘essay’ when you must try. An essay then is the result of great effort, in the way that Kung Fu means “hard work.”

But more than the effort, writing is a lonely proposition. One must forcefully reject the inputs of society in order to achieve anything more than an ad selling a pair of skis or an evite to a fabulous hat party, or a letter of appeal to a body that has just fired you.

Incidentally, it was the response to this recent letter of appeal that caused me to do a mental double-take. The dance company director who was taking me off her roster due mainly to a difference in my abilities and her recent choreographic changes wrote in her final letter to me, “You are a really talented and gifted writer.” The message was clear. Quit dancing. Start writing.

Yet I have always wondered if this talent of mine is really worth it. Will it garner me the attention I crave? Will people discuss my ideas? Will I change someone’s mind? Stacking my ideas in lines of prose, printed on reams of paper, bound and tucked away on a shelf next to thousands of other similarly packaged trains of thought is a tough way to gain an audience. People always seem to spend more time talking about Rock Bands and Serial TV Shows.

And then there’s the other thing. Writing is not doing. When you are writing, you are not dancing, or acting, or running for office, or creating news. I fear being trapped in my brain, because to be honest, it’s not always that pleasant of a place to be.

But perhaps I can find my way to those things through writing, perhaps a little more access to what it is I’m thinking. I’m not 40 yet. I’ve got a few years to hone my skills before I embark on the Great American Novel. Better get crackin’

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April 28, 2008

Something Hot and Dry as an Antidote to This Wet Cold Spring

It’s spring again… if you define Spring as a 44° degree day with cold rain soaking litter into the neighborhood and you have to heat the apartment with the oven because you turned off your heater two weeks ago on a chance 69° degree day.

It used to be that in San Francisco I complained because the weather never really ventured outside the limited scale of 50-68°. Now these temperatures seem tropical to me.

My boyfriend made a resolution a few weeks back that he would never ever discuss the weather again, because to him it’s an easy conversational cop-out. Weather gets discussed out here a lot more than in California… BECAUSE IT’S SO FREAKING INSANE! What is this? There are tulips outside and prospects of an overnight low of 32°. Woe to the person who planted something that might be killed by a frost.

But yes… here I am… discussing the weather with you. For me the weather dictates my internal state… or perhaps it’s more like a catalyst, it stirs certain chemicals in my internal state that result in (sometimes) new states of being.

For the last few weeks I’ve had these strange cravings for the southwest and my imaginings of the wild wild west. Then I remembered, that for several years, spring time was when I took off for a few weeks to drive through the southwest.

Yesterday, in my craving for hot dry twang, sun-bleached wood, parched air and a blistering silence punctuated only by the skitter of rattlesnakes, I searched on emusic for some music that would satisfy just a little bit of that craving.

I came across two delights.

 

 Brokeback: Running Scared [2:18m]: Play Now | Play in Popup

 

 Valley of the Giants: Waiting to Catch a Bullet [10:01m]: Play Now | Play in Popup

One: Brokeback. I discovered a later album, “Looks at the Bird” sometime last year and decided to go back for more… this time for a three track album that is thoughtful and innocuous. I mean this in the very best sense of the word. I sometimes need noise that does not draw me out of my thoughts, but provides just a colorful enough background to my current activities. It’s like mood-lighting. There are any number of noise distractions in my neighborhood that bear a necessity to be drowned out, but black-metal isn’t always the answer. Brokeback has a very thoughtful bass, probably something that resembles a guitar run through some effects and some other sounds that might be created by stringed instruments, such as a pedal-steel guitar, but I can’t be sure. There is definitely a satisfying amount of empty space interspersed by the faint rumble of a drum that simulates a far away approaching storm.

Two: Valley of the Giants
This is indeed a self-aggrandizing name to give to a supergroup… the members of whom also apparently belong to a bunch of other important Indie Rock bands. Since I have the pleasure of ignorance, I can only judge them on their current sound.

Anyone who uses an image of of Cathedral valley as their cover art is risking extreme scrutiny in my book. It’s almost hubris. It would be like a politician using Jesus as a mascot. To me, such landscape is holy land, meant to be preserved, appreciated and regarded with the awe it truly deserves.

The title of the album: “Morse Code In The Modern Age: Across The Americas” could easily be truncated to simply, “Across the Americas” because that’s the documentary that could accompany this blissful soundtrack.

I’ve only played the whole album through one or two times, but a few tracks are a meandering journey through an abandoned mining town, which is enough to satisfy me. There are other themes, other landscapes that seem to be evoked, making this indeed an interesting journey across America, and not just an abandoned roadtrip that expires in Death Valley through the fault of poor planning.

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