we don’t see so much lawn round here. concrete? yes. lawn? no.

I found this article via B who’s attention was caught by the article’s argument that walking 1-3 hours a week improved women’s breast cancer survival rate by 50%, but more specifically, B was interested in the (less excellent) results of chemotherapy. Go to B’s blog and read her discussion there.
But my attention was caught not only by this article (which I traced back to the full academic article), but by the zillions of others which were, essentially, saying nothing more than ‘if you get some exercise, you won’t die or get sick’. It worries me so much that we have come to the point where we must beg people to walk just 1-3 hours a day so they don’t die or get ill. I mean, 1-3 hours, what’s that?
– walking half an hour every day. That might mean (as I do), choosing to walk to a further-away bus stop in the morning (let alone the afternoon!)
– saying to your partner “let’s walk to the video shop to return this DVD – it’s only 15minutes each way” and then doing it, and holding hands while you tell each other about your day
– walking to the park to look at the soccer doods running about. Or to watch the cricketers doing… whatever it is that actually happens in cricket. Manipulating those odds, I guess.
– walking about in a shopping center, aimlessly without buying anything. Or walking up the road to look at the awesome easter lights in the neighbourhood.
I know it sounds insane, but for many people, driving a car means not doing these little things. They drive to the video shop. They drive to the supermarket. They drive to the ice cream shop. They drive everywhere, even if it’s only a 10 minute bike ride or a 20 minute walk, just because they have a car. And because they think of walking as something you get in a car to go do in a park. Or are too unfit to find any pleasure in.
I know I’m lucky enough to live in a walk-friendly suburb, but riding my bike around (horrible) Reservoir, I’ve noticed far fewer pedestrians. Brunswick has a lot of nannas – and you see them wandering around the neighbourhood. In Reservoir, at what would be prime-wandering time? Nothing. I don’t know if it’s a cultural thing, or because people are busy hiding in their houses, or perhaps a bit frightened of being exposed out there on those huge expanses of lawn*, but really. What are they doing in there?
Since I’ve stopped having a car (ie, since I moved to Melbourne, six years ago), and since I discovered that having a nice bike encourages you to ride about, I’ve noticed that the way I think about my neighbourhood, the way I think about getting to places has changed. I found those first few weeks of teaching so tiring because I was just getting on the bus, then getting off – I wasn’t doing enough exercise. But since I decided to start the whole ‘walk half an hour to the bus rather than 15 minutes’ thing, and the ‘ride your bike to the train, then train, then ride to the uni and then vice versa on the way home’ thing, I’ve had so much more energy, and I feel so much better.
I’m hardly a super athelete cyclist. I ride very slowly, I’m afraid of hills (though FUCK you should have SEEN ME TODAY!!!! I flew up that Melville Road hill that dips down to the Merri Creek! I was AMAZING!), I don’t like to spend more than an hour on the bike at any one time (actually, half an hour’s about where I draw the line these days), I have no interest in developing any training routine or any of that bullshit.
I just toodle along on the thing. That is how I get around my neighbourhood – I ride to the shops to do the groceries (and lug the bastards home), I ride to the city to go dancing, or to see a film, or to go to the dentist, I ride to the GP (though riding home + pap smear = not great fun), to the pub, to get ice cream at 10pm on a warm spring night.
And it’s enough – think of all those lovely hormones being stimulated (that seems to be the crux of the breast cancer thing – you’re more likely to benefit if your breast cancer is hormone respondant; type 2 diabetes is directly related to not getting enough exercise, and insulin is a hormone, as we all know). Not to mention the way it triggers those sweet, sweet endorphines. I might be covered in sweat, with aching legs, a runny nose and coughing up a gut, but dang I feel good when I get to the university in the morning!
So, really, there’s no point to this post other than to point out how sad it is that we have to push people to do so little exercise. We’re not saying ‘join a gym and WORK IT’, we’re saying ‘go have a nice wander round your neighbourhood to steal lemons from the alley one street up’ or ‘take half an hour to hold hands with someone you love in the outdoors’ or ‘take that silly argument about which Buffy episode is best to the streets’. When you build that bit of exercise into your life – when you do the extra bit of walking to the tram, or leave the car at home when you go to get ice cream after dinner – you make so great a difference to your health that it would mean living or dying to someone with breast cancer. Imagine that – so little effort for such an amazing effect!
And we haven’t even talked environmental benefits yet!
But I cannot over-emphasise how important riding a bike is to my lifestyle. That’s how I get to the pub on Saturday. That’s how I get to the city to go dancing. That’s how I (now – yay!) get to the university (in part). That’s how I get to the shops to do my grocery shopping. And I’m not a super athlete – I am a little, round person who gets very pink, sweats a lot and is a bit afraid of large trucks. Imagine if you were a super athlete!
Imagine if we all rode our bikes to work every single day! Or even just to the train station!
… and have I mentioned how wonderful it is to have a shouty conversation while riding a bike home from the cinema? It’s the best.
*I live in Brunswick, ok? We don’t see so much lawn round here. Concrete? Yes. Lawn? No.

Hamp & slow-mid range swing

hamp.gifMy love for Lionel Hampton continues in an unnatural way*. Unnatural in that I have not only abandoned my qualms about DJing jump blues for lindy hoppers for Hamp’s sake, but in that I have also decided that boogie woogie is Fun. I have also (quite unashamedly) overplayed my favourite Hamp songs (eventually, I guess, I will tire of songs like Drinkin’ Wine spo-de-oh-doh, Hey ba-ba-re-bop! and Lavender Coffin (yes, despite all evidence to the contrary, they are actually different songs)) and will continue to do so.
I think my love for Benny Goodman’s small groups is in part (perhaps a large part) owing to my love of the Hamp.
Right now, I am declaring a love for Don’t be that way (you can hear it here). I have already played it far too many times, and will continue to do so. I just love the way it chuggs along. And you get the feeling that there’s some joking going on in the band there. I love the saucy brass with the brruurp brruurp trombone underneath. I love the twinkly vibes. I love the chunky beat (bass, guitar esp). I even love the sax (and really, who could love sax?). I love the restrained, but kind of bursting-at-the-seams feeling of momentum building. It’s only 137bpm, but it feels like it’s going somewhere.** It feels like… like… like bounce feels – like energy stored in your body, that might bust out any old how.
This brings me to a comment another dancer made the other day. After I’d just played a set of old scratchies that were all between 120 and 167 at a sedate after-class gig.
The comment involved these points:
– I wish that guitar would move away from the microphone. It’s so dull – clunk, clunk, clunk
– that older clunky music sucks when it’s under 180 – it’s really boring.
I didn’t really lay much value on these observations.But it made me think a lot about the issue (of course). And here are the things I came up with:
– that slower stuff sounds dull if you’re looking for tinkly, complex melodies and delayed timing, a la Oscar Peterson. But if you’re into combining moves, and working with phrases as the markers for your complexity (ie, working on a larger scale), or perhaps looking at the layers of sound only a big band can offer, and which are clear markers of that earlier, late 30s sound, then this stuff is quite interesting. It begs a combination of moves and a use of lateral or horizontal space, rather than micro-movements on the spot. It says ‘think of each note or each beat or each chunk of rhythm as part of a bigger pattern’ not ‘think of each note or beat or chunk of rhythm as something you have to echo in your body exactly’.
The free-er, riff-based and improvisation-heavy nature of Kansas City jazz (in particular) encourages musicians to think of how they can combine improvisations and solos within a looser musical framework. For dancers, that approach encourages contributions to the rhythms going on, rather than a strict representation of what they can hear. So, for example, a Swede would add a bit of syncopated footwork at the end of an 8 to add rhythm to the song, rather than simply making flesh exactly what they can hear. They would also make greater use of a dynamic, lateral energy rather than just a restrained, micro-movement and energy-contained.
So, really, this stuff is actually very interesting and challenging for dancing. Even at slower tempos. I actually feel that slower tempos can offer greater scope for improvisation and interest – you have time to add stuff in. When you’re moving to 200bpm, you don’t have time to add in extras – you pare down the movement to basic moves simply because you don’t have time. It’s about combinations of moves rather than individual movements.
When you’re working at a slower tempo, you can add in all the interesting visual ‘commentaries’ and social interaction that faster tempos prevent. And if you’re working with the more open, improvised connection of a Swedish or old skool swingout, for example, both partners can happily add in variations and jazz steps, breaking out into open to do ‘solo’ stuff as well. And all that in addition to the combinations of moves and use of lateral space that says ‘hey, I can hear more of this song than just the three or four notes in my immediate vicinity’.
I also find that phrasing becomes more important with this sort of music – you work in combinations of 8s rather than within an 8 for variation and interpretation and improvisation.
So my love of the mid/slower tempo chunk-chunk songs by people like Lionel Hampton run in the face of arguments challenging their aural interest. But I must admit – 120 is the lowest I’ll go in that style, and really, it’s better if it hits 140.
*a love that will never be realised as this fan’s was here
**a lot like the slower version of Flying Home that’s about – it builds to a frenzy of almost-fastness. It’s at least 20bpm slower than the version most dancers know.

spam ON!

Is all this spam about diet pills trying to tell me something?
And this stuff:

How many times did you get unhappy after noticing you keep ordering pizza after pizza?

would carry greater weight (tee hee) if I hadn’t recently rediscovered Crust (the seafood pizza was more wonderful than words can describe – and all this for a Brunswick girl who Knows Pizza).
Though I suppose I could be tempted by offers as exciting as these:

Feel yourself more powerful and confident with [deleted name] [tool of the patriarchy] enlargement pills.

I must admit – if this stuff could really make me feel more powerful and confident, well…
Sounds like they’re promising me a shot at superherodom. Here is your cape, here is your super power, and here is your confidence.
And then, there’s the spam from people who’re actually reading my site, but seem… shall we say, a little less than informed? I mean, maybe it’s just me, but I really hadn’t pegged 4 Corners as

onesided, sensationalized journalism

But then, what would I know?
I think I’m going to call myself Italian Sausage Calzone Girl.

i don’t love him just by accident, you know

The other week when we were flying up to Sydney, I’d packed a few nutbars and things to eat on the plane – to tide us over between going straight from work and going straight to the dance.
The Squeeze took great delight in declaring “Snacks on a PLANE!” whenever I offered him something.

round up

I have about 45 minutes before I have to leave for apppointment #2 with the dentist, and I’m surprisingly unscared. I slept like a baby, weighted down by a million blankets because we’ve gone from 30-odd degrees during the day to having to wear fleecy pajamas at night in the space of 24 hours. Ah, Melbourne. But if I continue to write about it, I’m sure I’ll start getting scared.
I spent a very productive weekend, after a week of incredibly poor teaching on my part. Having the surprise root canal on Monday made for interesting lecturing on Tuesday, what with my numb lips and tongue and post traumatic stress syndrome. Tutoring Wednesday, Thursday and Friday was equally ordinary, though Wednesday was spectacularly bad. Thursday was ok, and by Friday I was back to being tired and an ordinary teacher. A run in with a particularly difficult student did not help (thank you for those public, in-class accusations of incompetency. And enjoy your future marks*).
This week, though, I did ride into the university, using a combination of bike (15minutes on a terrifying road to Northcote station), train (10 minutes in blessed airconditioning), 20minutes riding the terrifying streets of Reservoir (say ‘res-ev-or’ not ‘res-ev-oir’) and then a delicious 5 minutes swoop downhill through the uni. I tried riding back that way, but was frightened by the traffic (dang, those suburban types are completely un-bike-aware. And terrifying).
I also tried riding through the university to the next train line over, to Macleod station, which was a very lovely ride. Except for the bit where I got lost about 5 times and had to ask for directions at least 3 times. But even that wasn’t so bad – it was a lovely day, I love my bike, and I was having a lovely time in our quite lovely campus (which is very bushy and has lots of wild life, including some bulllying magpies). But I got to zoom down a very very steep hill, through very lovely tree-ey suburban streets (they have GIANT eucalypts out there). And then I caught the train in to the city. It was zone 2, but I dealt with that.
So, riding to work: great fun. But good for sweat-making, which isn’t so cool when you forget to bring a change of clothes and have to squash into an overcrowded tutorial room with a bunch of fairly prissy teenagers (unlike dancers, who really don’t mind about sweat at all).
It’s also a nice option because I’ve discovered that catching the Macleod line train to Westgarth rocks, because the Westgarth cinema (here is a link to the site, but because it uses frames you’ll have to click away til you find the Westgarth, but you can read about it on wikipedia as well) has reopened. Admittedly, now owned by a megacinema group (oh, how I miss the insane amount of independent cinemas in Brisvegas), but still quite stunningly beautiful inside and out. So I will be dropping in there to see fillums quite regularly I think (especially as it’s about a 15/20 minute bike ride from our house (about the same on the bus), where you ride along the Merri Creek bike path, which winds along the Merri Creek**. Could there be a more perfect way to spend an afternoon?
On a like note, we saw A Prairie Home Companion last week at the Kino, and we LOVED IT. It’s just like the Muppets, but with bluegrass/country music. Same sight gags, though.
MLX6 planning continues, and I finally had a chance to get all caught up and up to date with my responsibilities this weekend (I do long for a whole 2 days in a row where I can just sit about and do nothing, or do things like ride to the Westgarth for a fillum). It is looking scarily huge, with a crazy amount of internationals and interstaters booked in. I hope our venues are big enough.
Brian has continued with another podcast (Fat Lotta Radio, fyi), to which you can subscribe by popping this url: http://mlx6.com/index.xml into your itunes or podcast reader. This is the sort of thing that makes MLX so much fun.
…ok, I have to ping ding, chicken wings – got some stuff to do. Think of me at about 11am, will you?
*That was a joke. I have of course handed over this student’s marking to course coordinator.
**Which locals think is great, but if you are from one of those lovely cities with lots of stunning parks and greenery (eg the Brisvegas river-side rides), this will look kind of lame. But you know, when you live in concrete-land, you don’t sniff at a bit of green.

no, it’s not stealing. it’s copyright terrorism.

I have plenty to blog about, mostly involving surprise dental surgery on Monday, giving a lecture the next day with tongue and lips still unrecovered from aneasthetic, figuring out a way to ride to the university that takes me only 45 minutes! when the bus takes me an hour and a half, having an infected ear with a (gross) pussy ear drum, discovering this and getting excited because it starts a couple of days after this, procrastinating with a ‘mini program’ for MLX6, getting the proper podcasting gear online for MLX6 podcasting (fat lotta radio will follow – when I made de page), adding two DJing sets to this already busy week and… well, other stuff.
But rather than write about all that boring rubbish, I will just steal some content from a blog I quite like:

5. Nora went to the doctor yesterday and she is finally THIRTY POUNDS. The big three oh! And it only took 44 months to get there! Better lay off the Fig Newtons, you tub of lard, or soon you’ll be waving bye-bye to the fifth percentile! I am joking, of course, but it does feel like a milestone. Nora explained away her recent weight gain by saying, “It makes sense, because I have been pretending to be a superhero for a while now.” You all can ditch your ‘roids and powders, because apparently the way to build mass is to wear a cape and run around the house striking poses and screaming CAPTAIN AMERICA! or INCREDIBLE HULK! I have tried to suggest that superheroes do more than scream out their own names (but do they really? Isn’t the entire superhero gestalt an ego-driven enterprise?), that they fight evil and such, but the concepts are too nebulous for Nora to grasp. Sometimes we play a game where she sits on the couch and I get ready to sit down, with elaborate yawning and “gosh, I’m beat” antics, and then I lean back on top of her and she yells OH NO! CAPTAIN AMERICA IS BEING SQUISHED! And then she struggles out from underneath with accompanying grunts of effort and triumphant shouts at the end. Maybe you missed the issue where Captain America is squashed on the couch by the buttocks of a five-foot-tall Midwestern editor and mother, but I hear it is a valuable collectors’ item, particularly in Japan where they probably have a fetish for that very thing. Check eBay.

This is the sort of thing that we approve of in our house – the amassing of mass and the declaration of superhero handles. We feel that asserting one’s professional identity in verbal form is important. While we were content with things like ‘The Ham approaches!’ and ‘The Cheese abides!’, I feel that we will now take it up a notch.
To full caps at the very least.

Katherine’s bag detail

Here is a very orange photo of a bag I made out of remnants for the friend who hosted us in Sydney (there is another photo on flickr there if you’re interested). Note the little button thingy there – it works as a fastener for the drawstring (which was also recycled – the ribbon from a box of chocolates). The floraly fabric was made into a skirt for a good friend in Canberra, and the lining is from… um… oh, it was supposed to line some wool trousers which turned out to be a big mistake – say no to check trousers.
The whole thing is actually far less orange in real life, but The Squeeze took the photo and he has colour issues, and I couldn’t be arsed fiddling with it in photoshop. But the bag turned out well, pleased the recipient, and took only a minute to make. Yay.

(It is of course, non-dancers, a shoe bag. Which I did fill with nice Tasmanian soapy things for presentation)

Henry ‘Red’ Allen’s World on a String


I have my eye on Henry Red Allen’s World on a String after reading about the version of St James Infirmary discussed on SwingDJs here. The song caught my ear while watching the ULHS finals (which I talked about here).
I don’t have any Red Allen, but I’m definitely interested.
As for my stalking yet another version of SJI, alls I can say, is that if obsessing about multiple versions of particuar songs is good enough for Jesse in his October show, it’s certainly good enough for me.
Although, on a side-note, one of my reasons for seeking out the older or ‘betterer’ versions of particular songs is motivated by the current musical clime in Melbourne lindy hop. There’s been a recent rash of new DJs in our town, which I do applaud. I am particularly happy about the fact that most of (if not all of) these noobs are women. But I do have a great deal of issue with the fact that they’re all into boring old groove, and that most of the Melbourne DJs playing this sort of action don’t actually own their music – they’ve ripped it off someone else. Which is problematic not only for the fact that they’re, well, ripping people off, but just as importantly for a community of dancers, it means that the same old music is being recycled through the speakers every night. We hear no music – only poor quality versions of ordinary songs someone’s downloaded illegally (in a shitty mp3) and then shared around.
So when I hear a particularly shitful version of a song, I’m immediately motivated to play a betterer version so people can hear that there is more to the jazz world than fucked up versions of goddamn Lou Rawls goddamn version of SJI!
Dang – I am SO on my high horse here!
…the thing of it is, though, that un-groove is out of style here in Melbourne town, and even if I do play a ‘better’ version, it’s unlikely that there’ll be any dancers there who’d value it in the same way I do!
argh.
So, yeah, I’m hot for that Red Allen album, but goddess knows when I’d get to play it for dancers. Guess I’ll just have to love it on my own. Like I loves de McKinney’s Cotton Pickers and early Cab on my own…