dogpossum

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.

a bit of googling offers some following resources…

Continue reading “and more….”

i’m back working. it’s not so great. it’s not so bad. but it’s not so great.

i am having trouble getting concentrating. thesis? wuh? well, today is better than yesterday. at least today i’m writing things. and i do sort of have a proper thesis hypothesis thing. well, a thing that will lead to a hypothesis.

the research trip to europe was good. it was great. thing is, it was like a holiday. and i was so physically wrecked it was very difficult to do any work while i was away. especially in herrang. oh well.

i do have ideas for a chapter using my experience at camp savoy and herrang. a chapter on camps and exchanges and the importance of travel in swing. oh, and looking at the management of labour in swing. and all of this under the broad (thesis thing) of performing fandom in swing communities.

if only today was a cleverer day.