A Lindy Hop Pentathlon

So it seems my last post got quite the audience in Finland of all places so Tervetuloa!

I spent this weekend watching the ESDC live feed (and getting drunk on Twitter) and it got me thinking about competitions. Specifically some sort of multi-division contest designed to really pick out the best of the best.

What better model than the Modern Pentathlon - with it's mix of running, swimming, shooting, fencing and show jumping. (well okay, perhaps not such a good model - but whatever I like the number 5)

So what should this Lindy Hop Pentathlon contain. Here's my ideas:

• Social dance/improvisation - Lindy Hop is a street dance and the social dancing is a huge part of the scene and what many competition divisions attempt to replicate. Improvisation (it's a jazz dance) is critical in this.
• Choreography - Though it is a street dance Lindy Hop achieved fame through iconic choreography like the Hellzapoppin' routine. The ability to choreograph routines is part of what makes someone a great Lindy hopper. 
• Solo dance - Dogpossum has convinced me that solo dancing is really important if you really want mad skillz. It's also a big part of our current scene and historically important too.
• Role switching - If you can't do both roles I don't think you can call yourself an advanced dancer. 
• Icons of Lindy Hop - I also reckon that a Lindy Pentathlon needs some spice, something added to the usual comp divisions, something that represents the Lindy Hop and something that really gets the crowd fired up.
• A Team Event - though it does have it's individual elements, at the end of the day Lindy Hop needs a team of two people to work. The pentathlon should be entered by a couple.

And what should be out:

• Other dance styles - No Balboa, No Blues, No Shag. This is about being the greatest Lindy Hop couple, not the greatest vernacular jazz dance couple. So these other styles are out.
• A separate event - this should be taking place at an existing competition
• Gimmicks - dance marathons, jazz alphabets, memorisation of routines etc. Yeah I know it's a fine line between gimmicks and icons, but this shouldn't be too silly.

So with all that in mind here's my list of events for a Lindy Hop Pentathlon:

The Partnered Contests (in at least one of these events the couple should switch roles for the entirety of the event):

• Strictly Lindy - improvised with partner, to unknown music
• Jack and Jill - improvised with random partner, to unknown music
• Showcase/Classic - choreographed routine to music selected by couple

 The Mad Skillz Contests:

• Solo dance - charleston, authentic jazz it's all good
• Huge Air - this is the addition, something to up the stakes and get the crowd pumping. Here's how it goes down. Four eights, thirty two bars, one chorus to pull the craziest most-crowd-pleasing air step(s) possible. To be judged by audience acclamation. For fairness the same chorus could be used for everyone.

Competitors would be judged as a couple with their individual scores in the solo dance and J&J contests would be added to their score as a team. Each event would be equally weighted. To raise the stakes the scores could be tallied and tabled before the Huge Air contest - so the audience knows where everyone is placed going into the last round. This could also be held in conjunction with other events - only those entering all 5 would go into the pentathlon.

So there's my idea. Would it ever make it into an event? Probably not and I'm not really advocating that it should - this is more of a thought experiment than anything else.

Jazz Music Shops for Swing DJs

One of the things I've been working on of late is a crowd sourced map of jazz music stores. When I travel I like to visit music stores and check out their selection - hopefully I can snap up something that's out of print or heavily discounted.

The map is for those swing DJs who like to travel and who like to buy their music in hard copy.

Here's the map:
If anyone has any additions please let me know in the comments. I'd rather avoid adding chain stores, unless they have a particularly good selection.

10 Lindy Hop Videos Everyone Should Watch

Well I've been slack with the postings as of late (I've been working on some other projects - and am starting my PhD - besides am I ever not slack with posting stuff here) - heck I'm always slack, but here's 10 important videos about Lindy Hop. There's no real criteria for inclusion - I've picked some that are great examples of things, others that are important for our modern scene in various ways and others because I like them. Enjoy!

1 - After Seben 1929
Baring the uncovering of some archival footage (which is possible, film shot at the 1928 Harlem dance marathon - where Lindy was supposedly invented - exists in a vault in South Carolina) this film from 1929 is the earliest example we have of Lindy Hop and features the legendary 'Shorty' George Snowden. With comments from Bobby White:

2 - Hellzapoppin - 1941
The most famous Lindy Hop routine on film. You can also watch the full movie here.I like this version with the musical introduction featuring the genius of Slim and Slam which illustrates the call and response features of jazz.

3 - The Spirit Moves
The most important video documentary of African American vernacular dance. Mura Dehn filmed a bunch of the greats from the Savoy, including Al Minns and Leon James, amongst many other dancers tracing the changes in dance styles across the 20th century. This is just a preview of the DVD (if you're serious about this shit you should buy yourself a copy). There's videos on youtube of various lindy hop related scenes that you can search out as well.

4 - Mad Dog 2002
Badass! was a quality missing during the neo-swing and groove phases that contemporary lindy hop went through - but it's not missing in this routine. It's was pretty influential (I wasn't around then, but those who were still talk about it) and a great example of a throw down everything balls-to-the-wall jam.

5 - Max and Thomas 2007
Max and Thomas of the Ninjammerz showing us how it's done. This routine is actually a parody of a routine done originally by Carla Heiney and Kevin St. Laurent which you can watch here.

6 - Skye and Frida "24 Robbers" - 2007
No list of lindy hop videos is complete without a performance from the power couple of Frida Segerdahl and Skye Humphries. This is one of their more iconic routines (and one of my personal favourites).
Jerry Almonte has a lengthy post about this routine that is well worth reading - in fact if you really want to get yourself schooled on the recent history of lindy hop (and have some time to kill - it's about 70 pages long) check out his Artistry in Rhythm series.

7 - I Charleston Japan - 2009
You've probably seen an I Charleston video (there's more than 40 now) but this one started them all.

8 - The Last Bounce - 2010
Lindy Hop in an arena spectacular? Where else but Sweden of course. The Harlem Hotshots wow the audience in this section of The Last Bounce.

9 - Black Coffee - 2011
There's now a bunch of Lindy Hop videos made by Lindy Hoppers which have rather high production values. This was one of the first I saw and remains a favourite:

10 - What is Lindy Hop? - 2013

It only took 8 years but there's finally a video on You Tube that actually explains what Lindy Hop is (aside from the misleading references to newspaper headlines). Put together by Yehoodi for this year's live broadcast of ILHC it's something you can send to relos and non-dancing friends.

Bonus - Evolution of Lindy Hop - 2010
Karen Turman and Andrew Thigpen's ILHC routine references a tonne of choreography from classic Lindy Hop videos. You can read about the thought process behind it in a series of guest posts (again on Jerry's blog), Ben Yau has an analysis of all the videos and there's also a compilation here.

2013 Federal Election: Minor Parties Take 2

Well we're a week out and for those considering voting below the line I've already covered most of the minor parties (and Antony Green has an excellent guide to below the line voting here) However there's a whole bunch of single issue parties to add to the menagerie of minor parties running on the NSW senate ballot.

As a sample we've got Bullet Train for Australia;

The Help End Marijuana Prohibition (HEMP) Party;

The No Carbon Tax Climate Sceptics;

And the Smoker's Rights Party:

I thought I'd have a crack at trying to get these parties onto the Vote Compass too. Being single issue parties makes them rather difficult to to properly plot them on the metric. I've developed vote compass scores by adding up the scores of all the parties they've preferenced inversely proportional to the rank that party group has been given. This means I can now chart everyone who submitted a group voting ticket (apologies for the crammed labels).

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Most of the minor parties wind up where you would expect them, although there's been a bit of movement around the place for those I've previously analysed. Senator Online, out of all the single issue parties appears (on this metric) to have the claim to the most non-partisan preferencing allocation. The Socialist Equality Party is more centrist than their idealogical position because of their frankly bizarre group voting ticket (they submitted 3 tickets with Labor, Liberal and Green getting the number 2 spot and the the remainder numbered in the order they appear on the ballot, presumably reading up on the way senate preferences work is too bourgeois - the buck doesn't necessarily stop with one of the big three).

This brings us to another problem. If you're an above the line voter chances are your vote ain't going to your number 1 box. There's really only about 15 or so parties on the NSW ballot paper who have even an outside chance of being elected (though there's some scenarios where others could get up with a vanishingly small primary vote thanks to the craziness of preference harvesting). People selecting the preferences for their party know this too, they really only need to be careful about their positioning of these major parties who could attract. So I've repeated the above analysis, but this time only considering the preferences allocated to these 15 larger parties.

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There's quite a bit of movement here for many of the players. Wikileaks is dragged to the right and Senator Online even more so (demolishing their so-called non-partisan claim). Interestingly the Australian Fishing and Lifestyle party winds up with the exact same spot as the Shooters and Fishers. You could accuse them of being a front but in all other aspects (party registration, history etc.) they're not.

Is this a decent simulation of a party's preferencing position? Not really. It doesn't take into account which party the vote is likely to help elect - that would require some decent polling of minor party senate voting intention, which doesn't exist (at least in the public domain). If we had some polling we could combine that with the preferencing information to run some Monte Carlo simulations and work out not only the probability of various parties being elected to the senate, but which could also tell you the probability of your vote for a particular candidate helping elect another candidate (for example it might be able to tell you that your vote for Wikileaks has a 2% chance of electing a Wikileaks candidate, a 34% chance of electing the Shooters and Fishers party and a 53% of electing The Greens). But we don't have any polling data, so it can't be done.

Hopefully this might help you somewhat in your voting. Happy September 7! (and have a snag for me, I doubt the embassy in Geneva, where I'll be voting, will have a sausage sizzle)

2013 Federal Election: Minor Parties Vote Compass

The minor parties on offer on the NSW Senate Ticket (45 columns and 110 candidates) vary considerably.

We have the wingnut right represented by the Rise Up Australia Party:

The wingnut left represented by the Socialist Equality Party:

And the just plain wingnut represented by the Palmer United Party (sadly the tinfoil hat wearing Citizen's Electoral Council is not running in NSW):

Meanwhile One Nation and The Democrats are still here:

All this and some rather dodgy preference deals leaves a below the line voter, like myself, with a hard task ahead of me. Who do I preference first? Who do I preference last? How do I order everything in the middle?

So I've gone and run the minor parties through the ABC's Vote Compass website to see where they stand on a more numerical basis. Of all the groups and independents there are 25 who have a broad enough issue base (and websites to have a look at their policies) to work here. There's a bunch of single issue parties, which are easy enough to consider separately (although some, notably Stop the Greens and Smokers Rights, seem to be nothing more than fronts for the libertarian Liberal Democratic Party).

Firstly I'd like to say that the condition of policy information on parties' websites is woeful (the Socialist Equality Party's material isn't even on its own website - it sits on the site operated by the International Committee of the Fourth International, a global Trotskyist organisation). In most cases its poorly organised, badly written or strings of motherhood statements. Everyone could really lift their game. Nevertheless I managed to divine party positions on many of the Vote Compass questions using policy statements and other resources (such as media releases) on party websites.

Here's where they've all come out (I've used the Vote Compass rankings for the three major parties) - the scale is the same as vote compass - economic issues on the x axis and social issues on the y axis:

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Firstly the error bars on these are pretty large as many policy questions had to be answered with an "I don't know".

Secondly the set of questions, whilst relevant to current policy debates, hardly covers the full gamut of party policies. The answers also don't cover the full range of policy responses either. A different system produces different results.

For example Socialist Alliance should really be further to the left of the Greens (and the Socialist Equality Party further to the left still). They wind up being further right as they want to eliminate government assistance to big business (like car manufacturers) - by nationalising them (there's not really an appropriate answer for this on the question).

Similarly a number of the 'micro right' parties should really be further left on the economic scale given their position on protectionism, but slide right due to their opposition of a few labor government taxation policies.

Other have views that are a little bit over the shop on the traditional scales, e.g. protectionist of agriculture but deregulate small business or; against same sex marriage but supportive of euthanasia.

I also feel like the questions were designed to maximise the difference between the ALP and the Coalition (the reality is that there is much policy they share in common), so what are really fringe parties ideologically may sit much closer in to the main parties.

So take these rankings with a large grain of salt okay?

However this does allow us to put these parties into groups.

The 'Pick a policy from everywhere' Centrists
Hard to characterise as left or right in general, they pick issues from both sides.

• Palmer United Party
• Uniting Australia Party

The Big Government Christian Conservatives
Protectionist economics combined with conservative christian values.

• One Nation
• Christian Democrat Party
• Australia Voice
• Democratic Labor Party
• Katter's Australian Party

The Small Government Christian Conservatives
Small government (in terms of taxation, spending and regulation) and christian values.

• Family First
• Rise Up Australia Party
• Shooters and Fishers

The Nationalists
Very protectionist economics and conservative social values (though these take a lower priority)

• Australian Protectionist Party
• Australia First Party (though these guys are pretty extreme, they're more fascist - if you forgot about social issues they'd get on pretty well with the Socialist Equality Party)

The Libertarians
Small government (in terms of taxation, spending and regulation) and social freedoms.

• Liberal Democrat Party
• The Australian Republicans

The Moderate Progressives
Balanced regulation and taxation with limited social freedoms.

• Australian Independents
• Andrew Whalan (Group F)

The Social Progressives
Social freedoms and large (in terms of taxation, spending and regulation) but more accountable government.

• The Pirate Party
• The Future Party
• The Secular Party
• Australian Democrats

The Communists
Nationalise everything, workers rights and social freedoms. (Also keep an eye out for ex-communist party members - which has been deregistered - running as independents, such as Ron Poulsen in NSW)

• Socialist Alliance
• Socialist Equality Party

Want to find out more about the minor parties - read some excellent summaries here, here and most comprehensively here and here. Happy voting!