what happened to veronica?

So I’m watching Veronica Mars, right? I’m on about the third disc of the first season. I have some questions.
1. Where did the indy-kid Veronica go?
2. Where did the hardcore class commentary go?
3. What is the deal with her assault? This is the bit that worries me the most. In the first episode, some time is spent on the fact that she was assaulted at a party after her drink was spiked with some sort of drug. She makes it clear that she was raped, though I can’t remember the exact language. We don’t know who he was – it could have been any of the male characters at the party, including her ex-boyfriend, her boyfriends’s friends or her best friend’s boyfriend. This is an interesting narrative angle. Veronica is a clever, assertive, articulate, witty and sarcastic badass (though she’s mellowing as the season continues).
The implication is that she turned her back on vapid barbiedom after her best friend was killed, she was assaulted and the rest of the barbies demoted her from supercool to indy kid. Before the best friend (who was her boyfriend’s sister) was killed, Veronica was a renowned ‘virgin’. Her reputation is currently ‘bad’ – she is scored 14/100 for purity by her schoolmates.
She’s currently single and much is made of her celibacy. There are more and more comments about her being a virgin. Nothing has been said about her assault in quite a few episodes. Veronica didn’t tell anyone she was assaulted except the nasty sheriff, and he told her she was full of shit. I’m not sure if the current sheriff/deputy (I’m not sure who he is) – who replaced Veronica’s dad – is meant to be the same character who gave Veronica such a hard time. He’s mellowed quite a bit.
Here’s the general scene: the nasty characters have been mellowed. The badass, subversive characters have been mellowed. Veronica’s assault has disappeared.
What I want to know is: is all this talk about Veronica being a virgin a fairly progressive suggestion that her assault wasn’t sex, but was violence or an attack? I’m not sure this TV show is actually that progressive. I’m thinking they’ve simply made Veronica’s assault disappear. This worries me a bit. It’s dodgy to sweep past story elements under the rug. But it’s even more worrying to think that they’ve changed her character so abruptly.
WAIT! She’s just announced “Last time I crashed an 0-9’er party I got ridiculed, roofied and woke up missing my underwear.” But still… no talk about assault. Just implication.

jam session photography

Remember I was all interested in magazines and their interest in ‘all-star’ shows and bands? Well, I’ve been reading* about Gjon Mili, who directed ‘Jammin’ the Blues’:

(I think this version is edited down… but I’m not sure)
Seen that one? Maybe you haven’t seen this one:

Here’s the blurb from the youtube site:

Life Magazine photographer Gjon Mili joined with jazz producer and Verve-label owner Norman Granz to produce the short film “Jammin’ the Blues” in 1944 with Lester Young, Red Callendar, Harry Edison, “Big” Sid Catlett, Illinois Jacquet, Barney Kessel, Jo Jones and Marie Bryant. The film was nominated for Best Short Subject at the 1945 Academy Awards, but didn’t win.
The pair came together again in 1950 to shoot footage of leading jazz artists of the day, but when funding dried up, the film ceased production and sat on shelves for 50 years (except for a few snippets which found their way onto bootlegs).
Blues For Greasy is one of those pieces shot by Gjon Mili and Norman Granz, using musicians from his Jazz at the Philharmonic tour.
Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison: trumpet
Lester Young: Tenor Sax
Flip Phillips: Tenor Sax
Bill Harris: Trombone
Hank Jones: Piano
Ray Brown: Bass
Buddy Rich: Drums
Ella Fitzgerald: Vocals

Isn’t Youtube wonderful?
But then, Google is pretty good too:
Gjon Mili was actually a photographer, who did lots of work with magazines like Life. He also did some work for Esquire, including a ‘Jam Session’ shoot at his studio. And because the internets is truly freakin’ awesome, I had a little look at the Life photos on Google and found this freakin amazing collection of photos.
What’s so great about this series? Lots of things. The sheer calibre of stars, all together in one room, playing jazz. Duke Ellington, Dizzie Gillespie, Gene Krupa, Billie Holiday, Eddie Condon… there are just so many amazing musicians in there together. One of the other important things to note about this session is the fact that this is a group of mixed race musicians, playing and photographed together. That was still pretty amazing in 1943.
This is my favourite one:
linky
I like it because it’s Billie Holiday singing ‘Fine and Mellow’ with Cozy Cole on drums. I’m sure someone with a better eye could identify the others. This isn’t the famous 1957 television performance I’ve posted before, though.
I also quite like this one:
linky
It’s a group of people from vogue magazine at the same photo shoot.
You know what I’m thinking.
*Knight, Arthur, “Jammin’ the Blues: or the Sight of Jazz, 1944”. Representing Jazz, ed. Krin Gabbard. Duke U Press: Durham and London, 1995. 11-53.

omg: jazz oral histories!

Reading yet another article (Peretti’s “Oral Histories of Jazz Musicians: the NEA transcripts as texts in context”), I found a reference to the Jazz Oral History Project, which is a collection of interviews with jazz musicians. The collection includes both oral and transcript records. The paper is centrally concerned with the challenges of working with oral histories (which of course is related to the idea of the ‘history’ and telling the history of jazz).
The JOHP was begun in 1968 by the National Endowment for the Arts, run by the Smithsonian, and after 1979 by the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. Many of the musicians were not applying for or receiving financial support from the NEA, so it developed the interview project as a way of ensuring older jazz performers received money. Each subject was paid $2000 for a minimum of five hours speaking. The project’s funding was cut by two thirds by the Reagan government in 1983. Musicians were chosen from a range of groups, and were both big names and smaller sidemen(and women). Elderly or unwell musicians were targeted in particular. Almost fifty of the 123 subjects had died by the end of 1991.

The JOHP’s main goal was to capture the reminiscences of older jazz musicians in substantial and serious interviews (Peretti 120)

I’m particularly interested in this process of interviewing older musicians because of the importance of older dancers in the swing dance community. Dancers such as Frankie Manning (who passed away a couple of weeks ago, and who is deeply mourned by thousands of dancers) have been an essential part of contemporary swing dance culture. Not only as a source of story and recollection, but as a dance teacher and as a cross-generational mentor and role model for younger dancers.
But back to the JOHP. As soon as I read that there were audio records, I thought ‘Oh baby, this has to be on the internet! How fully sick would that be?!’ So I gave it a good google, and found the Institute of Jazz Studies’ JOHP site. If you follow the links, you can listen to some sample audio files or read some transcripts. My initial reaction is: where are the rest of them?! There are heaps, according to the Peretti article. The site says:

The condition of the original reel-to-reel and cassette tapes and some of the service copies had deteriorated to the point where the Institute could no longer offer access to large parts of the collection. With recent funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, all 120 interviews have now been preserved in digital format. The digital versions of the interviews are currently stored in various media forms, including multiple sets of CD’s for archival purposes as well as for client access at the Institute. The digital versions of the interviews are also being ingested into a new digital library repository (RUCORE) under development as part of the Rutgers University Libraries new digital library initiative, which will provide another form of archiving as well as enhanced means for access by users.

I’ll investigate and see what I can find.
*This institute was founded in 1950 by Marshall Stearns, John Hammond George Avakian. Stearns was the author of Jazz Dance (which he cowrote with his wife Jean), and he also conducted some very famous interviews with Al and Leon. John Hammond was, of course, the famous jazz promoter (who was also involved with the Newport Jazz Festival) and George Avakian was a promoter and music producer. His son is a lindy hopper and DJ.
Peretti, Burton W. “Oral Histories of Jazz Musicians: the NEA transcripts as texts in context” Jazz Among the Discourses. Duke U Press, Durham and London 1995. 117-133.
Related projects:

more pakour

Watching this (occasionally annoying) video about pakour/freerunning, I was struck by the similarities between these jumps and lindy hop.

I’m most interested in the landings, and in the way momentum or velocity are managed. I don’t know a whole lot about the science of this stuff, so my comments are purely ill-informed conjecture.
When this guy lands, he tends to land with his feet shoulder width apart and his knees bent. This makes for stable landings – this distance between your feet is optimal for a nice, stable landing. The bent knees are also very stable – straight legs are unsteady and tend to lift your centre. When your centre is lower, you have more stability. But you don’t want to be too low – it’s harder to recover from a very low pose. The bent knees function a bit like springs or suspension on a car – they absorb the energy of your fall, but they also allow you to store the energy to use it again for another movement. Landing with straight legs and close together feet makes for a) jarring and b) instability.
These are all things that are really important in lindy hop. Because lindy (in the old school sense) is fast, and, essentially, like playing a basketball game within a two meter square space, you need to be able to move quickly, to make quick turns, to not lose your momentum. This makes bent knees and shoulder-width apart feet very useful. Old school lindy hoppers like Frankie Manning, who was known for his air steps, would also lean forward, bending at the hips and putting their hips back. This added ‘hinge’ gives greater stability and also adds another layer of ‘stored energy’. It also requires your activating the layers of muscles in your torso that keep you stable and also allow you to respond quickly with turns and twists.
Here, have a look a this iconic footage (Manning is in the overalls):

I’m interested in the way these practical mechanics have been translated into bodily aesthetics. The straight leg and pointed toe are classic markers of ballet and of feminine beauty – the longer-seeming leg, the tinier foot.
It’s also interesting to watch the first clip and see how this guy uses the energy from a drop or jump to move immediately into another jump (so it looks like he’s springing up), or how he translates that energy into a roll. How are his feet positioned then?
Of course, all this contrasts really nicely with yoga, where you move between poses very slowly – you don’t bleed off momentum with bounces or other movements. Your muscles have to be strong enough to move you through poses (and to hold you in them) without losing energy. And you hold poses for a longer time.
NB I think the reason I’m so aware of this stuff is that quite a few leads have a tendency to stop the follow during a faster dance. When you’re moving at speed, it’s less work to maintain the momentum than to stop and have to start again. This means that sequences of moves which use larger movements are easier on the follow than a combination of (for example) swing outs and (to be ridiculous) body rolls. It’s also a reason why it’s important to not stop your swingout half way through (on ‘4’ or so); you want to keep the movement happening.

video in the desert; youtube in the cities

As you probably know if you’ve read some of my earlier posts, I’m fascinated by indigenous media use as a model for community media practice. Whatever that means. So I was struck by this bit of a book I’m reading at the moment:

It was costly and difficult to bring hired videotapes almost 300 kilometres from Alice Springs to Yuendumu and to stop them from being scratched or damaged in the sandy desert camps and few commercial videos in the video shops in Alice Springs were attractive for the Warlpiri to hire. So the community came up with the idea of connecting all the video recorders in the camp a low-frequency, low-powered community television ‘station’ and using it to distribute a single videotape to all the sets in the community (Bell 80)

Firstly, I thought, ‘This is Youtube – this is what Youtube does for dancers.’ Before Youtube, dancers would distribute edited bits of archival film (featuring dance, of course) via video, and later as digital clips on CDs. Then Youtube happened, and suddenly all those locally distributed clips were online, available to everyone. Previous networks of exchange and the associated hierachies of knowledge and supply were dismantled. Everyone could watch archival clips, could see the original lindy hoppers (and balboa dancers and blues dancers and charlestoners and black bottomers and…) and experiment with the movements they saw. In my thesis I wrote about the way this upset hiearchies of knowledge in the local Melbourne scene, and how it had the potential to disrupt the commodification of dance (and knowledge) by dance schools and teachers.
Of course, the results weren’t quite so radical. Learning moves from grainy, downloaded Youtube clips is difficult, and many people would much rather just be taught the moves by some dood in a class. Many people don’t know where to begin when searching for archival clips online – you need to know terms (black bottom, lindy hop, charleston, Al Minns, Frankie Manning…) before you can search effectively. And of course, dance classes serve a range of functions beyond the transfer of dance knowledge – they socialise new dancers, they provide peer groups for the lonely, fellow addicts for the junkies and so on.
But Youtube is fascinating for the way it changed how dancers acquire and watch archival footage. Within a year, things I’d written about in my thesis were changed, utterly. And in the last year, Faceplant has changed things again. The most important part of faceplant for this particular community is the way it’s integrated and conglomerated a host of different media. Audio files, youtube clips, online discussion, blogs, newsletters, event notices, email: all of them centralised in one site. Facebook, though it is effectively a gated community* has also suddenly connected thousands and thousands of dancers all over the world. And in a very public, collaborative way. I’ve been fascinated by the way ‘being friends’ with a few key, well-traveled dancers can connect you up to a host of international scenes.
This was proved most clearly in the recent passing of Frankie Manning, just a few weeks before his 95th birthday. I’d like to write more about that, but I don’t feel up to it, really. And I think Frankie deserves more than one poorly written post on my blog; I’d like to write something properly. But this one event illustrated most clearly the connectedness and sheer speed of communications within the online swing dance community. It has also pointed out, thoroughly, that my ideas about localised communities are still very important: we might all be online, but we are still thoroughly grounded, embodied and localised by dance.
Of course, we can still make the point that this sort of media use – as with the Yuendumu example – is not like traditional broadcast media. The difference is not so much that we aren’t really working with the ‘few-to-many’ model of distribution, but that these are smaller groups taking up ‘new’ media and adapting them to their own particular circumstances. Wether those circumstances require dealing with dust or a way of seeing elders.**
*Thanks for that term, D4E.
**And of course, here is where parallels between Yuendumu and swing dancers arise again: the Warlpiri media collective has been very concerned with filming and then distributing the filmed image of elders. Just as swing dancers have been focussed on distributing filmed images of elders – swing era dancers. Both, of course, are managed by extensive social and pedagogic networks. And both rework ‘pedagogy’ for their particular contexts.
Bell, Wendy. A Remote Possibility: the Battle for Imparja Television IAD Press: Alice Springs, 2008.

every day is blog amnesty day for me

…because I feel no shame, and publish every entry I begin. For which I apologise.
I was just thinking: why do I alway recognise an Ellington song? Is it the arrangements or the soloists? Ellington’s band carefully showcased each soloist with personally tailored and arranged solos/parts for specific people. So I guess it’s a combination: parts and whole.
Then I was thinking about my obsession with various jazz pianists. I thought I might do a post with little bios and pics of each one. Then I got distracted. But here are some I love:
Willie ‘the Lion’ Smith. Wasn’t a big band leader, but did a zillion songs with a zillion bands. One of my favourites is a song called ‘4,5, and 9’ with Leadbelly in 1946 from a CD my mum bought me at the Smithsonian in Washington. It’s (the song, not the Smithsonian) fairly sparse – piano, guitar, harmonica, male vocals. It has a rolling, rollicking rhythm that makes me want to roll and rolllick around the house. You can’t lindy hop to it. You can only roll or rollick.
Fats Waller Duh. Was a band leader. Died younger than we’d like, but not surprising considering his lifestyle. His band was famously loyal and stayed with him for a very long time. He began his career with bands like the McKinney Cotton Pickers in New York. I love his light, tinkly playing, his chunky left hand rhythms and his lovely lyrics. I love the combination of light-hearted humour and melancholy.
Mary Lou Williams You tend to find women in jazz bands at the piano or behind the microphone, mostly because they were considered ‘ladylike’ musical pursuits. No tubas here. Williams was in Andy Kirk’s band, and was important not only because she could play like a demon, but also because she was a badass arranger. She didn’t sing (that I know).
There are plenty more, but these are the ones I’m currently interested in.
I was going to write something else about something else, but I’ve forgotten what it was.
Oh, that’s right. I’ve been playing Flight Control on The Squeeze’s ipod touch. I’ve been getting quite high scores. I don’t like any of the other games. I don’t play computer games at all, usually.
I was hardcore into sourdough recently, but my interest has waned. I am now interested in … well, nothing much else, food-wise.
On other fronts, I’ve been doing an awful lot of reading about jazz, jazz history and jazz studies. Soon my brain will blow up. I think I’m procrastinating about another book I have to read and review for a journal. I’d better get onto that one quick-smart. But I just can’t be arsed – I know how it’ll end, it’s not hugely well written, and while the content is very interesting, I just can’t stick with it.
My foot has been much, much better. But yesterday and today it was a bit sore. Podiatrist in about a week for an update, and a verdict on whether or not there’ll be dancing again in my future, ever. Let’s cross our fingers, shall we?
There is a cafe on the main drag of Newtown called Funky which made me a freaking wonderful prawn raviolli the other night. It was home made pasta, in large sheets, folded around some perfectly prepared prawns, in a light, fresh tomato, tiny-bit-of-cream and smidge-of-butter sauce. It was simple and perfect. I was amazed. The manager is a lovey and always seats me carefully when I come in on my own every other Friday evening for a quick before-DJing dinner. It is a delight to eat there. Especially as the cafes on that strip can suck bums. But it’s really too nice to be called a cafe. And on the last few Fridays they’ve had a small, very excellent latin combo playing in their tiny restaurant. They had a double bass, guitar, bongos, vocals and … something else last Friday. They were so good I wished I could dance salsa. I didn’t even feel I needed to read my book, they were so nice to watch and listen to. And I do like a quiet sit-and-read on my own over a nice meal in a restaurant. I know it’s not cool, but it’s one of my greatest pleasures – eating alone in a restaurant.
That’s all I’ve got for now, I’m afraid.

hygiene – we haz it

I just made an awesome dinner that involved cooking some beef in some slop on the stove with a bunch of other things for an hour. I just had a look and found a bunch of tiny beetles floating in it. Who knows where they came from, but I’m suspecting a grotty unsealed bag of paprika. What was I thinking.
I picked out all the bugs.
Should I start again from scratch? They’re tiny bugs. But there are a lot of them. I think I got them all.
Ten years ago, when I had a crazy Brisbane organic herb garden, I used to just make sure I chopped the herbs really small so the inevitable bugs and caterpillars were smashed beyond recognition. But today I’m not so cool about bugs. All those years in Melbourne, land of no-bugs, has made me weak. Weak and squeamish.
….
I think we might eat it anyway. The Squeeze, king of picky eating, has declared it safe. But then, it’s big pieces of food he’s particular about. And these bugs are real small.

i can’t believe i’m posting this

But who the fuck cares about muffin tops, and also, what the fuck IS a muffin top?
This is the sort of fucked up shit I hate about the internet, women’s magazines and what I remember of high school (I’m trying to contract pattern-amnesia). JESUS CHRIST, sisters, just put on your goddamn clothes and get on your goddamn bike and FEEL THE ENDORPHINES! Then you don’t give one motherfucking shit about whether you’re… what? Alive? Having flesh upon your bones? Bringin’ the bounty, as what badass feministahs do?
The more time you spend worrying about whether or not you’re looking just some imaginary man would like you to look (or, more likely, looking the way some other woman with Issues is telling you you should look), the less time you can spend planning your next bike ride/website redesign/photography outing/sewing binge/crocheting craze/cooking fest/jazz routine/DJ set! I mean, come on – there aren’t really that many hours in the day – prioritise, people!
I can’t believe I followed that link. I can’t believe I read it! It’s a good thing there’re lolcats in the world.

Shoulda posted this earlier, I guess.