dogpossum

i’m home again.
early morning arrival yesterday, though the plane was delayed in heathrow for 3 hours we made incredible time and were only about an hour late in to melbourne.
the flight was ok: quite empty as the delay had stuffed up people’s connecting with us. i scored a three seater to myself on the second leg from singapore, and slept a bit.
melbourne was a chilly, wet shock. we retired to bed as soon as we got home and though we’d only intended a quick nap, i slept until 5pm. then up for a couple of hours and back to bed by 9pm.
i don’t mind this jetlag thing: i beat it with hardcore sleeping.
today i was awake by 6am. i hassled The Squeeze until he sent me off to get some stuff for breakfast.
i am much less tired than he is, i think.
today we rode to smith street where i purchased replacement dance shoes. $25 for fancy arse keds. new, improved padding and support. a wider toe. rockin’. then dropped them in at the shoe man for sueding. he’s upped his prices from $20 to $35, but that still works out at $55 for brand new dance shoes. not bad, considering they hardly last a year (and the last ones only lasted 9 months).
priorities, huh? ah well. we also had a lovely lunch at a cafe on brunswick street. hoorah for excellent sandwiches.

i think i’m over my jetlag, now. i don’t mind those massive flights, either. it made it heaps better to have a less-full plane.
i’m really glad to be back in the land of good food. i couldn’t hack that english cuisine much longer. The Squeeze is certainly iron wok brunswick: how lovely to be presented with gorgeous stir fry last night.

in my absense the university has gone insane. i have about a million irritating forms to fill out. seems the rgso couldn’t figure out that my ‘o’ form really did mean that i was away on field work and wouldn’t be able to do my progress report. despite my follow up emails to the uni, there was still a little drama. gotta sort that out tomorrow. and i have to add up all my receipts from my trip.
sigh.

it was certainly worth it, though. i will write more about that later…

and i didn’t have time or opportunity to blog much while i was away. certainly not while i was in herrang. tooo busy. tooo tired.

it’s good to be home, but i really liked travelling. and i like travelling on my own, as well. though it’s certainly good to be back.

now i need to chase down a phsyio/podiatrist. my poor feet….

how goes it?
oh, same old.

Continue reading “work?”

p>why yes, that is a broken template you see before you.
seems i’m not happy with a blog unless it’s goddamn BROKEN.

i am fiddling with dogpossum. it may or may not ever get fixed.
fukked if i know what happened.

and the comments on the recent entry have made me think perhaps i should respond in greater detail.

and then i got to making pumpkin bread and putting up dj profiles on FSP – check them out there on the right hand column.
this interests me for a number of reasons. i think it’s important to promote live swinging jazz to swing dancers in melbourne as part of an effort to Keep It Real, to keep us connected to the musicians. but i also think it’s important to hang on to the vast wealth of music produced in the 30s and 40s and beyond and before these decades. i mean, you could dj every night for a year and never ever play all the amazing swing danceable music recorded. this stuff was KILLER good (i almost typed killer-diller, but held myself back).
despite this cornucopia of goodness available, there’s an awfully big load of shit being djed in melbourne these days.
i am a purist when it comes to my lindy hopping music. if i’m going out to dance ‘swing’ dances – to lindy hop or whatever – i like the music to swing. sure, it’s fun to dance to other stuff, but i can hear that shit anywhere. there are so few places available for me to go hear some good swinging jazz and dance some good swinging dance on a decent floor with a crowd of fellow devotees.
i do also believe that the music you dance to informs the way you dance. so if you’re dancing to un-swing, your dancing won’t swing. etc etc.

i think that we need not only to teach new dancers ‘moves’ and body stuff and the history of the dance (i think we need to remember the afro-american history of this dance. it’s the scariest type of appropriation otherwise), but also about the music. swinging jazz isn’t popular music any more. young people especially don’t hear it much any more. they don’t know artists or styles or song names. they don’t know the difference between ‘cool’ and ‘hot’ jazz, they don’t know who count basie was and how important he was not only to jazz but also to jazz dancers.
so i think teachers should play swinging jazz in dance classes.
this helps dancers develop not only a knowledge about swinging jazz and ‘dance’ music, but also their own particular tastes.
this is important because one of the defences i’ve heard for playing bullshit unswing carp music at dance nights, is that the ‘new’ dancers want to hear stuff they ‘know’.

man. and these people call themselves a business? do they know nothing about creating markets for products?

so, i think – as well as playing decent music in classes – we also need to publicly discuss and demonstrate the importance of music and musical discourse through our attention to djs and djing practice. we should ask questions about how djs work, the music they play, their working conditions and levels of ‘professionalism’. we should value our djs and the work they do, encourage them to explore music and how to play it, value their own contribution and take their role in the community seriously.
and we should do this by talking about djing.

i also think it’s important for dancers to get critical about the music they listen to. they should start asking for djs to research music and seek out new material, to get historical relevency up them, as well as exploring contemporary works.

so i’m doing my bit through promoting local melbourne djs on my website. maybe providing a list of djs in melbourne as i do bands and venues.

i also have lots of ideas about fostering new djing talent in the community. about how to encourage women into djing, and how to make djing accessible for people without the funds to buy big on cds.
just ask me.

Thanks so much for making me read this, zot. sure, it’s a good looking site, but…

“I’m glad,” I told him, “that people like you and Bob Santamaria were around to fight against communism.”

Now, i wouldn’t mock this young man’s love for his grandfather, and i empathise with his loss, but this comment is laughable for so many reasons.

And it’s followed by:

A few months earlier weÂ’d had another conversation, where I told him how IÂ’d changed my mind about socialism, that IÂ’d realised how its proponents didnÂ’t tolerate dissent. He was so weakened by illness that our conversation couldnÂ’t last long enough for me to tell him that it was also because I finally realised that government interference in economic matters was inconsistent with my uncompromising insistence on maximum personal freedom (provided that oneÂ’s actions do not infringe anotherÂ’s right to self-determination). I didnÂ’t get to tell him how a colleagueÂ’s argument that to achieve socialism (a thing this colleague desires) we would have to abolish individual subjectivity, fills me with horror.

Again, not to mock his obvious grief for his grandfather, or his love for this man. But hell, i am mocking his politics. And i’m certainly mocking his turn of phrase, his knowledge of cultural studies and ‘knowledge’ of film. In the stupidest blog entry ever he writes in a review of the film japanese story (which i didn’t much care for either, but that’s not really the point):

The rest of the film, which is about an encounter between an East Asian man and an Australian woman, has little to recommend it. My first grievance, which I commonly hold against Australian films, is that it indulges in a view of Australia that is dominated by the outback. Since the majority of our population lives in state capital cities and their suburbs, this prevents such films from accurately representing Australian life even as they use farms or ‘the red centre’ to visually signify their Australian-ness.

This imbecile is teaching at unimelb?
Check his IQ: top zillion percentile. Says so right there, under ‘skills’ in his resume. I want to marry this guy.

No wonder unimelb shat me. I have only this to say:

Australian films which do not feature the outback (that i can remember):
‘Death in Brunswick’
‘strictly ballroom’
‘dark city’
‘ghosts of the civil dead’
‘children of the revolution’

i could go on and on and on… and i’d like to say to this misinformed fool: you need to get some australian cinema up you, cultural studies boy.

things that have happened lately:
– we buy a breadmaker. i know, i know, it’s almost like we want to be mocked, but hell. i had some cash, the squeeze eats more bread than a dutchie and the p’s were in town and we all know what the p’s are good at. yes. shopping. so we did. we could have done with a larder to put all kitchen shit in, but it was not to be.
– i make lovely multigrain bread.
– i burn my left forefinger on the breadmaker badly. enough to make me take pain killers and sit up to watch an extra hour or two of battlestar galactica until it was waaay past my bedtime. it makes typing hurt.
– the p’s visit, we go see cirque de soleil, we go out to eat a lot.
– we go (with the ladies) to eat roti at the amazing roti joint on sydney rd (east side, south of melville rd but north of albion). we eat muuuucho. food = excellent. joint specialises in malaysian, indonesian, indian and singaporean food. clientele reflect this. except for squeeze, crin and i: 100% skip. will return. especially as it was chhhheeeeaaaap and ‘just like home’*.
– i work on freeswingpress but really amn’t very good at it. the more i learn, the higher my ambitions. the less done it gets. i get cranky.
– i ignore dogpossum.org.
– i go nuts for yoga at the rathdowne yoga room. i love it. the gym is abandoned. utterly.
– i learn to do the waggling swivelly foot thingy in 20s charleston. despite having ‘learnt’ the dance about 4 years ago, i haven’t learnt the proper feet before. i have no excuse but laziness. but now i can.
– i teach a couple of chicks the ‘swivels in 60 seconds’ technique (a la bill borghida, current teaching idol) at a dance night and see one do the most amazing swivel i’ve ever seen, ever. truly amazingly amazing. the other huzzahs and adds it to her lesson plans for next week. thank you bill borghida: bringing de lindy hop in all it’s technical goodness to dancers everywhere.
– we barbeque a lot. the xmas bbq is thoroughly worked. cancer seems ineveitable.
– i make amazing salad. virgin olive oil or macadamia nut oil = A1.
– the squeeze gets into tango in a big way.
– i lose interest in tango owing to extreme tedium of following at total beginner level and lead-heavy numbers making leading in classes frustrating. i don’t go to tango classes and the squeeze, guilt-ridden begs me to come so teacher will have students. i fob him off with ready-made excuse about yoga obsession.
– i miss out on seeing the lovely grace at tango (back from europe).
– i plan a hair cut.
– i put photo of self on front page of freeswingpress and wonder if it’s wrong. but secretly admire self dancing with lovely zee-from-singapore.
– redefine meaning of secretly
– i admire self with short hair and long for hairdresser appointment.
– i write two chapters in a fortnight and gloat.
– i do no uni work for a week and find it difficult to get back into work.
– i procrastinate. to the degree of writing on blog after extended hiatus.

*D says

For those of you who’ve been worrying, i’m actually ok.
the chapter is ok (well the first chapter of the Chapter That Is Now Two Chapters, anyway). sure, it made me cry. but i’m not crying now, am i? no!

i’ve done some work on freeswingpress, so, while it now has a psychadelic colour scheme, it also has a far fancier layout. i suggest you check out the navmenus. i made them MYSELF.

we have nice things in the garden at hte moment. cherry tomatoes growing out of the concrete and producing enough tomatoes to turn my tongue to furr. herbs like crazy. beans. the passionfruit vine is doing well (ah, nostalgia). and we have these AMAZING peas!!! they look just like snow peas, except for the fact that they’re a delicious shade of mulberry. absolutely fantastic and wonderful. i have photographed them, but can’t find my card reader for this computer, so you’ll have to wait. but they are truly very special and wonderous things. i go look at them everyday just to see how they’re going.

yesterday was the sydney road festival, and what began as a trip to yoga and then brunch at a cafe became an all-day visit to the markets. i’m not sure many people from brunswick were there, but it sure was fun. we gathered up the Ladies and watched chinese ribbon and plate spinning, bands galore and ate a lot of things. it was sweet. we also looked inside the church hall where i do tango, the brunswick town hall and the mechanics institute. all on sydney rd, and the last two ones i’ve always wanted to look into. the town and church halls look like fantabulous dance spaces. the mechanics insitute a cute little performance space. i don’t know why there aren’t more dance things put on in brunswick. we could have the whole goddamn exchange on one street, where people wander in and out of all those different venues, as well as the streets.
sigh.

the brunswick lindy exchange is only a matter of time.

the gym no longer pleases me. it’s kind of exercise without a clear purpose.
i like yoga, but have found it tricky to find just the right class.
but tonight i will try the rathdowne yoga room’s drop-in beginner class.

i am doing so little exercise, i’m really getting stiff and sore. and that contributes to … wrrrritter’s blooock.

iyengar yoga = A1

the rathdowne yoga room is lovely, and you have to love an instructor called frank who wears purple bike pants. and recognises my overly-turned-out right hip/knee straight off. very reassuring. though of course it meant i had to work extra hard to keep that side of me sitting properly.

thesis? hmmm. maybe. poor worklog. neglected.