Author Archives: dogpossum

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…

Hot Lips Page’s Jump for Joy


Hot Lips Page’s Jump for Joy!
I’m not sure how I feel about this album. I have been a bit keen on Hot Lips Page playing with Billie Holiday in the Olden Days of Scratch, but this album is an overview of his career ranging from 1937 to 1950 and the later stuff really isn’t that amazing. I quite like a couple of the tracks for novelty’s sake – The Hucklebuck is a cutey, I like the melody/vocal line of I’ve got an uncle in Harlem, but the rest of the band is kind of annoying…
There is a nice, higher tempo version of St James Infirmary which clocks in at 122bpm, as opposed to the <100bpms of most versions other than the Cab Calloway 1930 version which is 125bpm and my current favourite). Nothing like a little necrophiliac blues to kick start your evening, huh? But the Count Basie Story CD is still winning – it’s a great band doing great music.

a partial reckoning

We have returned from SLX.
Injuries acquired:

  • sore ear from my cold (and flying with ear infection – never have I felt such pain. Ever. I cried like a baby and people stared. But I didn’t care, because having blocked ears is like closing your eyes – no one can see you)
  • sore groin from doing stunts at a late night party (The Cheese regrets his spontaneity)
  • sore thigh from lawn bowls (The Squeeze does not regret learning to bowl)
  • a big bag of regrets (I wish I had been well enough to acquire injuries like The Squeeze’s – but I did a lot of sitting about and talking shit. It seems that Sydneysiders do not fall for long lines of bullshit as do our Southern Cousins from Tasmania. But I tried)