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There are a lot of articles about contra dancing at this Country Dance and Song Society page.

A series of article about some classic standards is at “Cracking Chestnuts.”

And here’s one called Spontaneous Waltzing in Public Places. About a concept called “flash dance,” a variant on the flash mob idea.

Smoosh – Find a Way

My 2nd issue of CMJ New Music arrived in the P.O. Box and I forced myself to listen to the included CD while driving the car. I didn’t really care for anything on the first one. Some songs I can pretty well dispose of in 10 seconds, so I’m lucky I ever heard this one since nothing much happens for the first 25 seconds, but then the gorgeous chorus comes in. It’s been on repeat for a while.

You can hear it and find out more about the 12 and 14 year old sisters from Seattle, Chloe and Asya, at their mySpace page or their label. I am amazed.

I love it when I have a new song to love.

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‘

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“you know a lot about it.”
ron and hermione looked at each other. “petrificus totalus!”
ron, who might once have found the necessity of these detours excuse for
jealousy rather than hilarity, simply roared with laughter about it all.
although harry much preferred this new laughing, joking ron to the moody,
aggressive model he had been enduring for the last few weeks, the improved
ron came at a heavy price. firstly, harry had to put up with the frequent
presence of lavender brown, who seemed to regard any moment that she was not
kissing ron as a moment wasted; and secondly, harry found himself once more
the best friend of two people who seemed unlikely ever to speak to each
other again. m2

American Country Dances On Line
Michael Dyck’s Country Dance Index – (all the codes that start with “w” are links to dances)
Contra Dances by Cary Ravitz
Notes on Choreography for Duple Minor Improper Contra Dances
Variations on a Swing
and wow Contra Dance Designer

more later.

After hearing the new song, “John the Revelator” by Depeche Mode, I needed to refresh my memory as to how the original went. I got out my CD box set of “The Anthology of American Folk Music” and looking at the cloth-covered LP size box, I was struck by how old it looked. At some point, some water had been spilled on it and the streaks add to the effect. The CDs came out in 1997. Harry Smith put out the LPs in 1952. At this point, the collection is legendary and revered.

It is a sacred canon of sorts. 84 tracks were included. Obviously, many other songs were left out. This is similar to the process by which the Bible came to be revered from antiquity. The efforts of Marcion of Sinope c. 150, Irenaeus of Lyons c. 185, and the Synod of Laodicea c. 363, to codify exactly which books constituted “The Bible” were questioned as late as the time of Martin Luther, who pressed to exclude Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation from the official canon. (And what would our modern evangelicals do without Revelation?) OMG.

Depeche Mode expands on the song quite a bit, but it’s surprisingly similar in feeling to the Blind Willie Johnson version.

I was so impressed with the Effie’s Club Follies show Thursday, May 25, 2006 at the Georgia Theatre that I did a little research (google) on burlesque. I found out about Lydia Thompson and Ralph Allen and lots of stuff I never knew before.

I seem to remember a discussion recently about the origin of the term “blue laws” though I can’t recall the exact context.

Anyway, here is a possible origin of that term:

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Blue Material — Crude jokes or other material using graphic sexual or toilet references or profanity. The term comes from the days when E.F. Albee, of the massive Keith-Albee vaudeville circuit, insisted that performers stick to strict standards of propriety. Sophie Tucker, in her biography “Some of These Days,” wrote “Between the (Monday) matinee and the night show the blue envelopes began to appear in the performers mailboxes backstage … Inside would be a curt order to cut out a blue line of a song, or piece of business. … There was no arguing about the orders in the blue envelopes. They were final. You obeyed them or quit. And if you quit, you got a black mark against your name in the head office and you didn’t work on the Keith Circuit anymore. During my early years on the Keith Circuit, I took my orders from my blue envelope and — no matter what I said or did backstage (and it was plenty) — when I went on for the Monday night show, I was careful to keep within bounds.” The tint of those envelopes gave “blue material” its name.

But for all those would-be contra dance callers out there, here’s some quality links:

An incredibly concise calling tutorial
http://heiner39.gmxhome.de/inflatio.pdf

About Ralph Page, the “dean of the contra dance callers”
http://www.izaak.unh.edu/dlp/NorthernJunket/pages/index.htm

And more contradances than you’ll ever know
http://www.cambridgefolk.org.uk/contra/dances/index.html

There’s a charming little song called “We’re from Barcelona” by a Swedish group called “I’m from Barcelona.” Don’t let the singular pronoun fool you – there’s a dozen or two members. Lots of hand-clapping and la-lalas! The video is here.

‘

I’m gonna sing this song with all of my freinds,
And we’re all from Barcelona.
Love is a feeling that we don’t understand,
But we’re gonna give it to ya.
We’re late for the stars, we’re late for your heart, when the night comes.
And we’ll bring you love. You’ll be one of us, when the night comes.

In Alice Munro’s story “Dulse” I read the following. Lydia is at an inn on an island off the coast of New Brunswick sitting at the kitchen table after dinner, playing cards with 3 workmen who are on the island installing telephone cable.

‘

Eugene permitted Vincent and Lawrence to tease him about losing at cards, about getting lost in St. John, about women he liked, about being French-Canadian. Lawrence’s teasing amounted to bullying. Lawrence wore a carefully good-natured expression, but he looked as if something hard and heavy had settled inside him – a load of self-esteem that weighed him down instead of bouying him up. Vincent had no such extra weight, and though he too was relentless in his teasing – he teased Lawrence as well as Eugene – there was no sense of cruelty or danger. You could see that his natural tone was one of rumbling, easy mockery. He was sharp and sly but not insistent; he would always be able to say the most pessimistic things and not sound unhappy.

Will Kemp was the gentleman’s name. I found this at a page called The History of Square Dancing

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There is a precious story of how a great Shakespearean jester, WILL KEMP, once danced all the way from London to Norwich (it is something like 80 miles (132 km) and it took him nine days) and of how, in one town, a lass came out and danced a mile with him to keep him company – bold wench. That was in 1580, as he made a bet, that he could do this in less than 10 days. As you know, he won the bet in what has since been known as “The Nine Daie’s wonder” or, to Morris Dancers, “Kemp’s Jig”.

The person called “bold wench” by the author would of course be called “sunshine girl” by me.

Also note the year is given as 1580 which is incorrect. Kemp wrote an account of his dancing journey addressed to Queen Elizabeth, which was printed and offered for sale in 1600. You can read said account here. Non-standard spelling and punctuation warning. Here’s a sample:

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[You will not] finde anyting but blunt mirth in a Morrice dauncer, especially such a one as Will Kemp , that hath spent his life in mad jigges and merry jestes. Three reasons moove me to make a publik [account of] this journey, one to reprove lying fooles I never knew: the other to comend loving friends, which by the way I daily found: the third to shew my duety to your honorable selfe…”

Another excerpt of beautiul writing from Alice Munro:

‘

All the time he was talking, Lydia was trying to think what his conversational style reminded her of. It didn’t remind her of any special person, though she might have had one or two teachers at college who talked like that. What it made her think of was a time when a few people,just a few people, had never concerned themselves with being democratic, or ingratiating, in their speech: they spoke in formal, well-thought-out, slightly self-congratulating sentences, though they lived in a country where their formality, their pedantry, could bring them nothing but mockery.

I’ve only seen morris dancing done twice – in New England. It seemed to be half-ritual, half-dance. The ladies danced holding handkerchiefs. The men had wooden staffs that they hit on the ground and used like swords and sets of bells strapped to their shins. Apparently, morris dancing is an ancient country tradition in England harkening back to days when all the holidays related to the cycles of planting and harvesting. The tradition had nearly died out in the late 19th-century due to the Industrial Revolution, but was revived by folksong collector Cecil Sharp at the turn of the 20th-century. His book “A HISTORY OF MORRIS DANCING WITH A DESCRIPTION OF ELEVEN DANCES AS PERFORMED BY THE MORRIS-MEN OF ENGLAND” is reproduced here by Project Gutenberg.

“The English Dancing Master” by John Playford (1651) is a prime resource for contradance information.

The illustration is a woodcut depicting “Kemp” – whose first name I could not determine and who was an actor in Shakespeare’s company – who danced the Morris all the way from London to Norwich in 1599. His performance is called “The Nine-day Wonder” – so I guess that was a whole lotta dancing.

Bob Hay & the Jolly Beggars have made a video for one of the tracks on their new CD. To watch it, click here.

My effort at quotidian posting, at this point, must resort to a top 5 list.

1. S.O.S. by Rihanna
2. The Greatest by Cat Power
3. La Boulette by Diams
4. Mambo (radio mix) by Elena Paparizou
5. We’re from Barcelona by I’m from Barcelona

You can probably find them all at Yahoo! Music. Diams is at Yahoo! Music France.

I read a story and just can’t stop thinking about it for days. (This is continued from the yesterday’s post. Blogging is kinda upside-down that way.) Rose is waiting for her lover, but he never shows up.

‘

The most mortifying thing of all was simply hope, which burrows so decietfully at first, masks itself cunningly, but not for long. In a week’s time it can be out trilling and twittering and singing songs at heaven’s gate. And it was busy even now, telling her that Simon might be turning into her driveway at this very moment.

And how she finally broke the spell:

‘

She thought how love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it’s going well as when it’s going badly. This shouldn’t have been, and wasn’t a surprise to her; the surprise was that she so much wanted, required, everything to be there for her, thick and plain as ice-cream dishes, so that it seemed to her it might not be the disappointment, the losses, the dissolution, she had been running from, any more than the opposite of those things: the celebration and shock of love, the dazzling alteration. Even if that was safe, she couldn’t accept it. Either way you were robbed of something – a private balance spring, a little dry kernel of probity. So she thought.

I bought a book by Alice Munro – “Selected Stories”. In it there is a series of four stories, spanning pages 117-208 in which the main character is Rose, the store-keeper’s daughter from Hanratty, Ontario. By the end, she is a character actor in a sucessful TV series, but that has very little to do with the stories. Along the way we learn that Rose “had a considerable longing to be somebody’s object. Pounded, pleasured, reduced, exhausted.” – ooh girl you’re hot! – and Alice explores with her usual uncommon insight the progress of Rose’s courtship and marriage to a rich fella, which ends in divorce. This is followed by an incredible section on the obsessiveness of love:

‘

She was so delighted she cried out, “Oh, Simon, you idiot, you’re the man for my life!” Such was the privledge, the widespread sunlight of the moment, that she did not reflect that saying this might be unwise.

And later, when the lady from the store visited when she was expecting Simon:

‘

The mistake was in buying the wine, she thought, and the sheets and the cheese and the cherries. Preperations court disaster. She hadn’t realized till she opened the door and the commotion of her heart turned from merriment to dismay, the sound of a tower full of bells turned comically (but not for Rose) into a rusty foghorn.

Also in one of the stories she uses the sentence “If you think… you’ve got another think coming.” which I always thought was “another thing coming” but it make a lot more sense her way.

I’ve been listening to 95.5 The Beat (Atlanta’s new number 1 for hip hop) while driving lately. Although several songs will make me switch it off (e.g. Laffy Taffy and some of the frantic ones with a lot of yelling), there are a couple of songs that are great to listen to. My fave right now is Rihanna’s “S.O.S.” Another new one is LL Cool J’s “Control Myself,” a very listenable production, which is similar to “My Humps” both in that it is a humorous dialog and that provokes an initial incredulity. Poor LL, he’s struggling mightly with temptation.

Off the Beat, but still on music, after locating “Control Myself” on Yahoo, I had a whim to visit Yahoo Music France and was pleased to find “La Boulette” by Diams is number 2 there. It’s got a great hip hop beat and those French dipthongs make for an interesting flow. It also features lovely whistling, but what is best of all is the insistent though unobtrusive piano.

Canadian writer Alice Munro’s short stories are among the most beuatifully written and insightful pieces in contemporary literature. She appears quite often in the New Yorker but good luck finding them there. Here’s a trick that will unearth a treasure trove: go to Google and type “site:newyorker.com munro” and when the results come up, click on the cache version.

So far I’ve read:

• The View from Castle Rock
• What is Remembered
• Chance
• Wenlock Edge
• Passion

Here’s a particularly good excerpt from the later which shows how she can paint a detailed picture with a minimum of words:

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Then she knew. What else could it be? A bootlegger’s place. She thought of the bootlegger in the town where her aunt and uncle lived—a raddled, skinny old man, morose and suspicious. He sat on his front step with a shotgun on Halloween night. And he painted numbers on the sticks of firewood stacked by his door so he’d know if any were stolen. She thought of him—or this one—dozing in the heat, in his dirty but tidy room (she knew that it would be that way by the mended patches in the screen), getting up from his creaky cot or couch, covered with a stained quilt that some woman related to him, some woman now dead, had made long ago.

“Lonely Hearts Still Beat the Same” by The Research, a band from Wakefield, England (which I heard ‘thanks to hillary‘ – not like that’s never been written on a blog before) is a charming little song. You can see the video here, but close your eyes and listen to it once before you watch. (The video is OK – best in the middle-8 – but the medical setting is not what I first pictured hearing the song, and seems a rather easily clever knock-off on “hearts beat”.)

The toy keyboard, played by (the by some accounts eccentric) Russell “The Disaster” Searle, provides harmonic structure packaged with a pleasing level of grimy noise. Georgia Lashbrook is the bass player, as well as the singer of this song and “star” of the video, and she plays very well – nimble is the word. Sarah Williams’ two-piece drumming is perfect. Writers have mentioned the Beach Boys and the Ronettes to describe the sound. It reminds me a little of The Glands. The aesthetic is The B-52’s gone twee.

The high fun level of the song contrasts with the melancholy vocals, but it re-inforces the brave defiance of heartbreak expressed in the title refrain. The booty-shaking quotient on this song is not that high, but you can really shake your shoulders to it, and that’s something tense urbanites need to do.

It ends with a measure of a cappella Beach Boys-like multi-vocals and when it ends you want it to start up the chorus again so badly that it starts playing in your head and keeps playing for days. A real gem.

I don’t remember saying this, but I will admit it’s true.

Perhaps it’s a loose paraphrase of a line from Bobby Burns.

‘

Greem grow the rushes O
Green grow the rushes O
The sweetest hours that e’er I spent
Were spent among the lasses O