Camp Jitterbug is THE most important Lindy Hop event in the Western Hemisphere right now. The killer instructor line up; great live and DJ'd music, uber high level contests, and the one of a kind Jump Session Show. I’ve never been actually, but it’s significance is such that it cannot and should not be ignored. This roundup almost a month late, but fortunately a lot of people have been talking it up. It feels like the Lindy Sphere-o-blogs is becoming more and more active. Check out Mary Freitag’s experiences on her blog Art and Dancing, a Canadian perspective on Hamfats.ca, and Mikey Pedroza’s ongoing series of reactions on his blog.
Humility
Benny Powell passed away this weekend just at a time when I’ve been considering the concept of humility quite a bit lately. Benny played trombone for Count Basie through much of the New Testament period of that orchestra. I had the pleasure of meeting him while working on Frankie95 last year. He was one of the more prolific musicians during the weekend. He co-led the band for Frankie’s memorial service. Then the next night my man just showed up to play when he didn't have to. He confused the heck out of everyone because we thought he just got his nights mixed up since he was scheduled to play with Wycliff Gordon and Art Baron on Monday night. But he heard of the three big bands playing on Saturday, and just wanted to be there.
Jump Session Videos
Not very many things surprise me these days in relation to Lindy Hop, but I’m more than a little shocked to see Jump Session videos online now. Many of them by the event promoter, Tonya Morris. It’s surprising because the Jump Session Show was the last major hold out of must see Lindy Hop performances that wasn’t previously available for free online. Between Tonya, Shesha Marvin, and The Killer Dillers’ YouTube pages, it looks like the whole show will be online soon.
I’ve been putting off a full event overview for awhile, but this gives me some motivation to get it done. I didn’t go, but there’s a ton buzz from the Lindy blogosphere about the event. I’ll try to put something together for next week. In the meantime I’ll leave you this weekend with a couple videos from the show.
A Year's Worth of Wandering & Pondering in One Post
When I started my blog I read all kinds of nifty tips to make it awesome and get lots of people to read it. Oddly enough, all of them fail to advise you to post something actually interesting. This may sound a bit conceited, but I think most of the stuff I post here is pretty interesting to read. Maybe not all of it. Just 98%, give or take a couple percentage points. I should know—I read it all the time, and I never get tired of me.
One fun tip talked about summarizing your blog’s content every once in awhile, so for all of you new readers here who keep searching for Skye’s non existent website or information on a certain convicted lindy hopper’s sentence*, here’s a handy dandy guide to all the other stuff you're missing. Or if you’ve already read them, here’s your opportunity to go back and relive the pain and/or the glory.
A Year of Wandering and Pondering
. . . more or less. I started this blog because I wanted something interesting to read. Seriously, there’s probably no one else out there that reads my blog more than I do. Trust me, I see the statistics. That's right, I'm one of those self centered jerks that writes just so I can see what I wrote. Besides, being a terrible editor, this is the only way I catch my mistakes, of which there can be many in any given post.
Until a year ago I was one of those people who always talked about having a blog, but never got around to starting one until Frankie95. I posted a 30+ page overview/rant of the whole experience on Facebook and before I was done, I decided that writing on a semi-regular basis wasn’t as impossible as I thought it would be.
Weekend Video Highlights: Sylvia Sykes Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!
As you can see, Sylvia has been all kinds of awesome for a long time. She still has it too, which is how she still gets to teach and perform with the best out there. Life is rough sometimes.
ILHC 2010 Update
I met with ILHC co-director Tena Morales a couple of weeks ago who was in town too nail down some details for this rapidly approaching event. Just being in the hotel with the rest of the DC based ILHC staff was enough to get me psyched for August. I visited the hotel for the first time a couple of months ago and this place is so nice that I had to call Tena to make sure I was in the right place. This place is swanky. From the artsy clock in the foyer to the pimp board room where we met. Honestly, it almost feels a little too nice for a Lindy Hop event, but never let it be said that we don’t at least try to class up the proceedings.
Weekly Video Highlights: The Eye of the Beholder
It's been awhile. It's not for lack of videos. In fact I feel a little bad because a lot of good stuff has come out in the past couple of months. I've just been a little busy between my real job work and my pretend job helping with The Big Big Benefit in July and ILHC in August. In fact, expect an ILHC update this week right here on this very blog. Really. I haven't done a Random Links post in awhile too, but I did want to highlight this post by Madeline of the blog "Behind The Madness." I hope to talk about it in depth in a future post, but I just want to say that I agree wholeheartedly.
Body Roles: Lindy Hop Gender Statistics Magnified
Looking at all the numbers I compiled for my statistical pornography post , I noticed something rather peculiar about the numbers when broken down by gender.
Event Data
This is a simple list of all the events I surveyed to come up with the numbers I used in my statistical pornography post.* I noticed a couple of interesting things in terms of scheduling. July is a pretty dead month in terms of big. There are a few small ones, but Herrang is the 5000 pound gorilla that draws everyone that’s anyone in the community. Even people who don’t teach there or are too advanced to take classes plan time to be there if only to have the opportunity to hang out. December is also another slow month until the year end events like Lindy Focus and The Snowball.