Wandering & Pondering on J.S.Almonte productions

Welcome to the new home for Wandering & Pondering!

I created this site as a central repository for all my projects and interests.

I’m a little bit more discriminating in terms of what I blog about these days, so most of the action happens on the Facebook page for this site where I post links and videos daily. If you haven't "liked" it on Facebook, just click on the box to the right.

In the mean time, it has been brought to my attention that not as many people are aware that I’ve written quite a bit about Lindy Hop and its sister dances, not to mention a number of other sundry topics such as music, event planning, and living in DC. Then there are all the posts by guest contributors.

Below is a handy guide to some notable past posts. One of the nice things about writing about an older dance like Lindy Hop is that lot of observations don’t go out of style, or at the very least, have some sort of curious historical value for our ever growing and changing dance community.

Since I brought this blog over from the Wordpress site, not everything imported cleanly. I'm fixing as much as I can, but it’ll be a long term work in progress.

I have some new posts in the works, and of course we just had the International Lindy Hop Championships, so there will be some activity soon enough. In the mean time, take a look around and make yourself at home. Don’t forget to subscribe or follow my multitude of social platforms to get updates on my propaganda machine.

Generally speaking, I will use this blog to write about my projects and endeavors, but I won’t abandon what got it the most notoriety, which is my commentary about the continuing development of the modern Lindy Hop community alongside its siblings in Balboa and Blues Dance.

If you are looking to learn about how the dance got to where it is today, then start with Artistry In Rhythm which is a 16 part look at how a social dance community communicates ideas through the lens of the Lindy Hop communityof the late 1990’s through 2007.

You can see the story continue to unfold every year for the past four years since I started this blog in 2009, I’ve made it an oddly compulsive habit of listing all the notable blogs, articles and video related to vernacular jazz dancing since then. Will this year be five? Only time will tell.

Once you’re done with that you can wade through the rest of my Dance Commentary which is listed below with posts that compliment Artistry In Rhythm and the subsequent yearly round ups first. That's followed by a complete chronological list of all the other dance posts.

I also have quite a bit to say about music in terms of live performances, DJing, and album and song reviews. I’ve done both of us a favor by breaking these out individually at the end of this post.

I’ve had a number of guest writers over the years that have contributed to this overall story of Lindy Hop. Dr. Karen Turman gave us a detailed personal history behind all the choices she and Andrew made for the important dance performances they “quoted” in their legendary Evolution of Lindy Hop routine. Skye Humphries shared his extensive answers about the dance and his life in a previously unpublished interview, and Ramona Staffeld occasionally chimes in with remembrances of growing up dancing Lindy Hop.

I’m my own harshest critic. The epic Frankie95 Review is actually the inspiration for me starting this blog. It’s a sort of self-therapeutic breakdown of the biggest Lindy Hop event to date, and includes a lot of behind the scenes insiderness about the event and the Lindy Hop community at large.

I continue to do extensie debriefs of the event I work on currently, The International Lindy Hop Championships which started back in 2008. Although, the recap of the last ILHC was in video form on the video show I co-host with Bobby White, A Word on Swing.

My Event Commentary about other events tends to be a mixture of observations about the dance and music in general as well as nitpicks about planning and coordinating an event. Somewhere in there are also recaps about the events themselves like the grand opening of the now infamous Mobtown Ballroom.

It does help to have the Facebook page for this blog to keep track of what people talk and care about. Before that, I did it the old fashioned way and listed everything on my blog. In your darkest days, you can indulge in your madness by exploring the archives of those Video and Link Highlights. Be warned: there may be no coming back.

As you can see, most of my writings mainly deal with the world of dance, but on occasion I will rant about random pop cultureness, and get a little personal, albeit very rarely. I also talk up things I see around the city I live in, and if you’re ever in town, think about talking the epic DC in 24 Hours challenge and tell me about it because I’m probably not going to do it any time soon.

Dance Commentary

History

The Chronological List

Music Commentary

Updates to the Wandering & Pondering-verse

Although it doesn’t seem like there’s much going on here on this blog, I’m relatively busy updating across “platforms” as the kids like to say these days. This is quick run down of what I’m up to around the ether

"Morning Blues" with Julie Brown, a new "A Word on Swing," and learning how to do them

I’ve learned a lot about film making in the last almost year. One of the things that I’ve been grateful for learning to dance is that it helped me refine my ability to learn in general. More importantly, the ability to be creative and improvise is born out of knowing what you want to accomplish to begin with and how to do it. When life throws you a curve, you can adjust and while keeping your eyes on the prize.

A Word on Swing #3: On The Porch With Nina Gilkenson Part 2

And the next part of our interview with Nina Gilkenson. We have an interesting talk juxtaposing her fear of competing with her role as co-director of the biggest Lindy Hop competition in the world. Then we move on to what makes her tick creatively and why Baltimore is the perfect place for such a person.

A Word on Swing #3: On The Porch With Nina Gilkenson Part 1

Here is the long awaited interview with the lovely and lascivious Nina Gilkenson. Or at least the first part. Theoretically, if you follow this blog, you may already know who she is, but if you don't, this is a good way to get to know this self described "forth grade drop out."

DCLX+BMJB=TCB

This is a little project I did because I recently bought a new camera, and now I am basically teaching myself how to use it in addition to learning photography and videography from scratch. It’s been something that I’ve been wanting to get into for awhile now, and just decided to jump to it.

Other than being an unabashed fan of the Boilermaker Jazz Band, I did this mostly as an exercise in learning how to cut between multiple video angles. Btw, thanks to David Soltysik for letting me play with the original files of his recordings from that night. You can see his footage on his site.

I know it’s not close to perfect, but it was a good learning experience. Looking back, I may have been too much of a slave to include certain shots simply because I like looking at them. It was a great opportunity to catch the Boilermakers in rare form as they were on fire for most of that night as evidenced by your best set in the house shot of Rich tearing apart his drum set. Plus there was the energy of the DCLX crowd and the dancers in the circle.

Everything is in chronological order, other than two short shots, and starts with the end of the second encore song: the theme from Sanford & Son. This was a compromise from showing the whole thing, and I wanted some time to acknowledge the band and show off the fun little bits that happened in between the two songs. David cut out at the end of the song, and I was about to pack it in myself, but I kept rolling on a hunch—really a hope that they would play again and they did not disappoint.

In case you’re wondering, the camera next to the drummer, Rich is the new camera: a Panasonic Lumix GH2. I was on the opposite side of the stage recording with an old point and shoot camera, a Sony Cybershot W350. That one was an impromptu decision earlier in the evening when I realized that I had it with me and decided that if I’m going to do this, then I’m just going over the top with it. David is recording with his hand held video camera in the middle of the crowd.

For those of you trying to decide on your next camera purchase, this is actually a good opportunity to compare video between a point & shoot, a dedicated video cam, and an almost DSLR. Although, it should be noted that despite the fact that the Cybershot shoots in HD widescreen, the rendering settings I used to create the final video was not kind to that camera’s footage and made it worse than it was.

Enjoy this little love letter from me to the Boilermakers and everyone at DCLX. Comments and critiques would be appreciated.

Wandering & Pondering visits the GMU Swing Club

I did a thing for the George Mason University Swing Club a couple of weeks ago where they asked me to do a video presentation.

A Word on Swing #2

Presenting the wildly anticipated second episode of A Word on Swing.

This has been a pretty fun project for us. As you’ll see, it’s still a little rough around the edges (and a little bit on the inside). What you see here, is the sum total of my video editing experience as I’m treating this video blog as a learning opportunity.

A Word on Swing: Crisis on Infinite Blogs

Finally unleashing our sort of named joint Swungover and Wandering & Pondering mega blog crossover video podcast. This is a little project that Bobby White and I have been talking for almost a year now. We couldn't get it together because of scheduling issues and what we thought it would require more technical know how than we have. Then we just decided to throw caution to the wind a couple of weekends ago simply because we had some spare time at the Lone Star Championships and about 20 minutes of free space on my camera.

How Ya Like Me Now?

Announcing the next stage on my road to internet domination: the Wondering & Pondering official Facebook presence. Like it here.

It occurred to me that I keep amassing links and videos that I hope to post on this blog, but since I always want to do it up all fancy like, they just kinda languish in the ether.

So I'll use the Facebook page to pass along the articles and random videos of interest that I don't have time to discuss in depth here. And I'll also post links to new posts from here as well. It'll be like a secret club except everyone will know about it. Everyone.

It'll also be a good way for people to connect with me on FB. Honestly, I still feel a little weird accepting friend requests from people I've never met before. I know plenty of you read the blog, but I'd like to reserve my personal FB page for people I know directly. So if we're FB friends now, but we've never met, there's a good chance I may be cutting you loose soon. It's nothing personal, but . . . you know . . . there's just nothing personal between us. But then, you'll have this new Facebook page to Like and we can keep up that way.

I also realized that I spent an entire post describing my YouTube favoriting rationale, but forgot to link to my YouTube page.

That's this thing here: http://www.youtube.com/user/jalmon007

Feel free to subscribe. Or just hit refresh a lot, waiting for the next embarrassing old video to pop up.

Tell your friends.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tFFYnKxFss