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i have been doing so much computery stuff lately i have a really sore right hand and wrist. i’ve had to request absolutely-no-wrist-holds from leads out dancing. including the squeeze, who had to be reminded a few times. unlike every other dance partner.

so anyhoo i’m doing the lefthanded mouse thing. i learnt to mouse with my left hand (using a south paw’s computer). but those skills are now long gone.

i like using this tiny laptop. it’s nice. a nice alternative to the pc, which is more hassle. i especially like supernerding it up and setting them up next to each other.

i’m also the dullest blogger in the entire universe.

i can’t help it. i don’t have time to write interesting things. i’m too busy fussing over free swing press. well, i would if i had time. i’m too busy with this lecture. or else i’m too busy with my thesis.
i’m very boring these days.

ok, so i’ve just seen my first australian ad for moist toilet wipes.like, literally, toilet wipes. i’d discovered these things in the uk.
gross.
they really puzzled me when i was in the uk. i couldn’t figure out where the toilet paper was. and then, later, i figured out that you were supposed to use these wipe things. gross.
not to mention environmental terrorism.

so now, here they are. in australia. fucking unethical. and gross.

i am feeling very tough today. yesterday i went to the gym and did my program again and managed to do the whole thing (minus 1 set of pushups – i’m working up to 3 sets of 12 but am only capable of 2 sets of 8. don’t tell max). i am SO tough. by the time i got to the stretches, i was flying on my endorphine rush (a little reward for toughing it out) and really enjoying myself.
it’s crazy, isn’t it?

then lamby had to go and bring me down to earth with
a) a little talk about how weights are bad and all you need’s your own body weight to really work out;
b) declaring that pushing yourself past your pain limit is the only way to really get the most out of your routine, and
c) flipping me around his waiste in a curb-side demonstration of the lamp post aerial, so i could not only feel his iron-hard muscley body 360 degrees in under 3 seconds, but also experience a demonstration of how effective working with your own body weight is in increasing strength.

now, i cleverly countered his point a) with my points
i) where i argued that yes, i know that about the body weight thing – that’s why i do yoga and
ii) where i declared that i like using the weights and machines and things because it’s a safe, supervised way for me to learn proper weight lifting technique, show off my ‘muscles’ and get away from the thesis. i followed with
iii), arguing that it also prevents me from doing silly things like working out til i pass out as did certain thai chi masters who have recently flipped around their favourite hamface.

i then followed up with a refute to his point b) with my points
i) that working to the point of pain seems dangerous and injury-causing, esp when you’re just a baby,
ii) that i want to enjoy going to the gym, so i’ll go back and
iii) max told me not to.

there was no response for point c) rather than to suddenly develop a counter-intuitive and somewhat disturbing enthusiasm for learning aerials as a follow. wrong, wrong, wrong, i know, but still. he’s very strong and it’s very exciting.

you might wonder what lamby and i were doing playing ‘mine’s bigger than yours’ on the side of the road after midnight on a thursday night.

well, it seems The Squeeze’s little sister had broken down on vic parade. i say ‘little’ because she really is – only up to my breast bone and she’s younger than he is. she’s also the other fittest person i know, who teaches aerobics (recent title holder for the ’13 classes in 7 days’ … title), was the ‘best of the best’ winner year before last, where she scared the pants off us with incredible aerials, and demonstrated that being little, a former gymnast and very good at scrunching your center is actually useful.

so we were waiting on the side of the road after dancing at cbd, lamby and i one-upping each other with feats of physical prowess (i got up on the trunk of his car using only my bare hands), The Squeeze presenting his little sister with a very sexy new – and very little – digital camera. just right for her little hand, and the RACV man on his way to give us a lecture about dissy’s.

this is not the first time lamby and i have waited on the side of the road with a friend while their car fussed and acted broke. i remember lamby and i working on the bows for our swingouts in carlton one night while cammy wrestled with his temperamental station wagon.
it seems that my learning to lead has sparked a degree of competitiveness in lamby, and in myself. a sort of productive, spurring-us-on-to-excellence competitiveness, rather than an eye-scratching, pushing-yourself-past-your-pain-barrier sort of competitiveness.

it’s all to our benefit, anyways, as, when i declared ‘i’ll learn how to do aerials and then i’ll throw you around, ok?’, lamby promised:’yeah, and i’ll let you’. we are agreed.

it’s lucky he’s not only incredibly taut, but also little.

i went and did my program yesterday and it nearly killed me. i’m still suffering from (yet another) chest cold thingy, plus i spent a week with only one incidence of exercise: a night of dancing.
and oh baby did i suffer for it yesterday. i had to do a cut-down version of my program so i wouldn’t faint.
MAN i need to do excercise regularly.
i was also feeling pretty crappy on the monday when i went dancing: all that time in the car driving round tasmania and no exercise. i was the stiffest, least creative and flexible dancer you’ve ever seen on monday night.

with the arrival of The Squeeze’s imac a few weeks ago (that’s a neat little wireless internet-enabled palm pilot, everyone), i have discovered a new addiction.
patience.
i’m totally addicted. i can regularly win on the palm pilot. i brought a deck of cards with me to tasmania and finally figured out how to win at least a few times in every sitting (where a sitting is a few hours worth of back-episodes of angel).
i also explored patience on the little laptop – spider solitaire. oh yeah. beating that too.

i am insanely addicted. i don’t know why. and i’ve found that the more i play, the more aware of patterns and strategies i am. the better i get.

i am so hooked.

i love games. not games of chance or role-playing games. but strategy games. strategy as in scrabble which involves some sort of manipulation of the odds.

is this leading me to a gambling problem?

i don’t dare go looking for the game on my pc. it would make the already-difficult task of getting back into my thesis impossible.

well, i’m going great guns on thesis. went back and re-read Floating Lives, and goddamn, i had a goddamn revelation. this stuff just didn’t stick with me last time i read it.
but now… it’s just a really nice way to hook all the shit i’ve been writing and thinking about together: global media and diasporas are a nice way to bring together the way the international and local swing communities use media and are related.

i’m thinking of them as a community of interest, to use somebody’s term… i forget whose. i’ll look it up…no, that was my word. gay hawkins used the term ‘communities of taste’ which i can’t really remember her writing…. i think i need to follow it up. it’s from her article “SBS: Minority television” in Culture and Policy 1.1 (1996): 45 – 63.

that’s what i’ll be chasing tomorrow at uni.

as well as having a bit of a love-in with that book, i’ve also had a bash at blocking out the chapter on video/AV use in swing communities. i didn’t mean to – i was just jotting notes. but it turned into coherent writing, so i figured, why lose that?
i’ve also wacked together a dodgy overview of the thesis, drawing together all my theory/approaches.

it’s still all a big mess, but at least now i know what i have to read (and re-read).

i do like my thesis. very much. in fact, my feelings for my thesis would prompt my less mature readers to exclaim ‘if you love it so much, then why don’t you marry it?’ and i retort: “baby, if i could, i would”. but i don’t think this will be a long-term relationship. 3 years only… unless i decide to make it my postdoc work…

i am actually considering that. i’d like to do follow-up work, looking at the asian swing communities. which is actually kind of a stupid thing to write: there’s a fair fuck load of difference between the singaporean (see this link or this link) and the tokyo swing scenes… and there are swing scenes in okinawa and yokahama, but the links are nasty for one (urky angelfire with horrid popups) and the other’s not in english at all). and then there’s also lindy hop in korea – staaacks of it in seoul as this site suggests.

it seems that lindy was mostly spread to japan and korea via american dancers (and it’s kind of ironic that an american army guy was involved in seoul – seeing as how the american GIs in WW2 were blamed for its coming here… which i’m a bit curious about…).

so i’d be kind of interested in doing some postdoc work on asian swing dance communities. i know quite a few singaporean dancers, but haven’t met any korean dancers. i know one guy from japan, and one american guy who lives in korea…

could be interesting….

when there’s nothing on your blog page…
i’ve updated that there sidebar, there (over on the left), complete with lame-arse weatherpixie. i’m learning about blog tech stuff for free swing press, so i’m practicing on dogpossum.

isn’t that a sad thing? dogpossum is no longer alpha. it’s beta. the beta blog.

i still need to sort out the titles over on that left side there…. i was going to draw them. but they looked crap. so i didn’t. but then i got all caught up in fsp, so i didn’t think about this blog again…

i just don’t think i’m the journal type…

and i pretty much decided blogging was bad for my health when jon told me that talking to me was like reading my blog. so i nipped that in the bud by stopping with the bloggage.
drastic? au, contraire. healthy.

i guess i’ll really only need to worry when my thesis sounds like my blog.
but really, i’m holding onto quite a few writing styles here – hardcore swingdancing nerd over on swingtalk, concise swing journalist on freeswingpress, clever-cloggs phd person in my thesis work, annoying blogger on dogpossum.
then there’s all the email-talk.

ah well. if it’s only the blog that suffers, i guess i’m doing ok.

I’m working on another blog at the moment – it’s called FSP and it’s a guide to social swing dance in Melbourne.

Continue reading “FSP. exercise in narrowcasting”

tonight was a big snail night. it’s been raining for a while (so our roof is leaking. eeexcellent. but the plumber came today). but it’s a bit warmer.
so there were millions of snails on the bike path.

dilemma: i don’t like to deliberately run over them, but i like the scrunchy slush sound they make when they get squashed.

ok, enough about domestic violence and terrorism. and on to something much more interesting!
globalised media! yes, i’m back in the reading-stuff-for-the-thesis mode. and i’m enjoying “Floating Lives: the Media and Asian Diasporas” (ed Stuart Cunningham and John Sinclair) immensely. i know it’s nerdy to admit to loving work books, but i do. i just love this crew. it’s media/cultural studies in MY type of style. most of the people involved had something to do with UQ or the Australian Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy in Brisbane at some point. it seems UQ (or Brisbane, anyway) is THE place for me to be for my work. excellent. i move to Melbourne – the place to be for swing dancing – and what do i discover?

sheesh.

at any rate, these key centre people rock. i lubbs media policy studies, media studies and light-on cultural studies with a practical bent

but really, i do love this book. it’s just perfect for me: globalised media. diaspora. communities who’re defined not by geographic placement or nationhood, but by their own feelings of ‘belonging’ to a community that crosses countries. and looking at how they use media.

sound much like swingers? yes indeedy. but even better, sound like fans? oh yes.

Cunningham, Sinclair et al do take care to make the point that they’re not discussing being Asian as being somehow an ‘essential’ definer of identity or community in diasporas:

“every diaspora treated in this book is seen as a collocation of class, ethnic, origination, education, work and financial configurations, whose status as a ‘community’ is the product of strategic unities and alliances, sometimes engendered more from without than within, rather than ethnic ‘essences’” (Sinclair and Cunningham 13).

So they see community as being a more complex confluence of different factors, of which ‘being Asian’ is one. Their model (and this comment) is encouraging: I’m jumping off from here, using their methods for analysing media use by members of Asian diasporic communities in Australia. The key point, here, is that community membership is not designated by geographic location or by national boarders. I like to use this approach for discussing swing dancers.

Here, swingers around the world are part of a global community, membership of which is defined by interest and cultural practice. As well as media use. Though various swing communities in different countries are quite unique – localised – they are still part of a more global community, in that they share interests, customs – class, education, work, financial configurations – and their global community is shaped by strategic unities and alliances.
Swingers are, particularly, made a diaspora through their community’s being structured around shared cultural practices and ideology, ritual, tradition and ideology, despite geographic distance. They are diasporic in that they are also somehow outside, and looking ‘back’ to a specific ‘homeland’ from another ‘place’.

Sinclair and Cunningham discuss the ways in which diasporas are marked – to varying degrees – by their “fetishisation of the homeland” (Sinclair and Cunningham 20). Swingers are quite definitely involved in fetishisation of a ‘homeland’ in their attention to 1930s New York – Harlem. And then, perhaps, Australian swingers are also looking to a ‘homeland’ in their attention to contemporary Sweden or America (and their local swing dance communities).
Sinclair and Cunningham are referring to a ‘homeland’ – as a country – from which groups and families and individuals journeyed out to other countries to settle or work or escape. In swing culture, we can read Harlem as the ‘homeland’ from which all swing dance culture moved out into the rest of the world. It is also the homeland to which contemporary swingers journey in pilgrimage, to see historic sites (the Savoy Ballrooms former location), to learn from swing dance ‘gurus’.

Just as Sinclair and Cunningham frame ‘homelands’ as being as much an ideological construct or idealised ‘memory’, swingers construct a Harlem of a specific time and place, with attendant social and cultural milieu. The Harlem to which swing dancers journey, or harken to as homeland, is the Harlem of the 1930s, birthplace of lindy hop, swinging jazz and ‘swing culture’.

The ‘homeland’ – as an ideological construct – is also a site for various ideological contestations and discursive practices. Definitions of ‘homeland’ are marked by ideological disputes, or/and by markers of power and discursive influence.

So that’s what i’m reading for work at the moment. it raaaawks. so much so that i’m working on the weekend as well as mid-week. which breaks my cardinal rule.

Sinclair, John and Stuart Cunningham. “Diasporas and the Media.” Floating Lives: The Media and Asian Diasporas . Ed. Stuart Cunningham and John Sinclair. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2000. 1- 34.