Author Archives: Kris

14 Feb

Happy Valentine’s Day

It’s Valentines Day–a perfect day to get out and dance for your heart’s sake! Maybe the square dancing community should start doing some promos around Valentine’s Day.

Checking out “EditThisPage” sites, and came across one with a link to iSyndicate, which allows one to have updated news on one’s site all the time. From there, it was a quick hop over to ask eHow how to square dance. However, eHow doesn’t know how (yet). They’d be happy to send me a link once it’s written, if I’d just leave them my email address. Better bet for learning how: find a local class. Or check out GeoMotion.

13 Feb

Nerds and Square Dancing

I found it: one of my favorite passages about square dancing. I think this comes the closest to describing what I find so appealing about the activity. It’s from a 1993 book, Up the Infinite Corridor by Fred Hapgood.

But while we’re on the subject of descriptions of square dancing, this page is linked to from almost everywhere. It’s basically a rehash of the CALLERLAB “New Song and Dance” brochure of a few years ago. I wish we could get brochure with pictures showing people in regular clothes. Or maybe some pictures from Tech Squares.

And then there was the description of challenge dancing from Rolling Stone (by Julian Dibbell, August 21, 1997, p. 76):

Hot Geek Scene: Challenge Square Dancing

Square dancing at the challenge level is more like a fast-moving game of chess than a hoedown. The attire is running shoes and shorts; the locale is typically urban (with lively scenes near high-tech academic centers like Stanford and MIT); the music could be anything from Broadway to techno; and the aim is to perform mind-bogglingly complex maneuvers on cue, following the rapid-fire instructions of the designated “caller.” When nobody’s screwing up, the choreography can mesmerize – like a Rubik’s Cube in graceful motion. “Challenge dancing is square dancing taken to its puzzle-solving extreme,” wrote longtime caller Lynette Bellini on her Web page. She recommends the activity to anyone with “a bent for algorithmic thinking and problem solving,” and notes that about 75 to 80 percent of challenge dancers have high-tech backgrounds. Not that everyone who challenge-dances crunches algorithms for a living, of course. But then, not everyone who discoed in the ’70s was a gay man, nor was every ’80s break dancer an inner-city teen.


Another thing from Tech Squares; you have to know your square dancing really well for this puzzle.

I’ve been websurfing today…there are 512 sites on the Square and Round Dancing Web Ring. Boy howdy, there are some ugly sites out there. What’s with red type? Do people think it makes their sites easier to read?

I also found out that the sd-callers mailing list, which is probably the main internet discussion area for square dance callers, is not officially archived anywhere. Too bad; stuff goes through there that really shouldn’t be lost.

12 Feb

Music

Does anyone wonder why we need yet another version of Mr. Sandman? I just finished ordering from my February Hanhurst tape, and it seems like more and more, I already have the songs on the tape. Maybe there’s a 10 year cycle, and all the (good) songs get redone once a decade.

Here are the records I ordered:

  • LBJ/Aries 19 (GMP 504): I like the honky-tonk feel of these old tunes.
  • Do Wacka Do (Royal 1005): I’ll probably use this for patter. It’s got that Royal sound, that always seems to be a hit with the dancers.
  • Rasputin (ABC 12): I bought a Boney M CD this year because a European caller mentioned calling to their music (I still am having a hard time imagining being able to be heard over the vocals…) and because a square dancer told me how much she liked listening to Mary’s Boy Child on the radio. I loved the song Rasputin…and then I found out that ABC was releasing a singing call version. So I’ve been waiting ever since. The segment on the tape didn’t disappoint, and I’m looking forward to using the record.
  • Blue Bayou (GMP 929): I’ve always liked this song, ever since I first heard Linda Ronstadt do it, and then heard Roy Orbison’s original. But it has a helluva range and I don’t know whether I’ll be able to carry it off or not. Global Music usually does a good job with the music.
  • Mr McGoo/So Glad (MR 5019): A two-sided patter. I tend to like highly melodic interesting patter records. These are not. But I think they’ll work for my daytime dancers, who tend to prefer heavy rhythm without a lot of melody, at least on the patter.
  • Hotel California (S2K 2002): I think I’ll end up buying all Jack O’Leary’s S2K releases, if only to encourage record producers to give us more modern sounding music. Yes, I got the Backstreet Boys one (I had to look up the song on the web to even know who the original artists were…that’s how out of it I am). At least with Hotel California, I remember the original song by the Eagles. And I like the line, “some dance to remember, some dance to forget”.
  • Palisades Park (SSR 118): My one golden oldie, in both senses of the term…it’s an old square dance release, and it’s a tune from the fabulous early ’60’s.

That’s it. I considered a few of the other patters (there were a lot on this tape). I considered the Jack Lasry rerelease, if only because when I first started learning to call, I spent a lot of time listening to his review records for Mainstream and Plus. I considered the Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy rerelease, but I already have a version, and both versions have the problem of figuring out how to slow down a 170 bpm original to 128 bpm square dance speed.

11 Feb

First Try: SDBLOG

There are no square dance sites out there that I feel any need to check daily. There’s just not enough change going on, and I don’t know of any sites that are updated on a daily basis. Vic Ceder’s probably comes closest…I know he’s in the process of building additional tools, so I check back to see what he’s done.

10 Feb

What’s in a Name?

Ever wondered who’s got the good square dance domain names? You could go off and do the research, but here’s a start:

    Square Dance Sites with Good Domain Names:

  • SquareDancing: This site is trying to be all things square dance. It has an events database, with about 113 listings. It offers subdomain hosting: you can be www.squaredancing.com/yourname. It’s working on a vendor area. It has a database of callers with about 112 records, an organization database (37 records), and a club database with 177 records.
  • SquareDance: This name is owned by someone in Fort Collins, Colorado. It’s parked at a site hosting service, but has no active pages. What a shame!
  • Square-Dancing: Note the hyphen. Looks like they’re in the business of selling website hosting; they have square-dancing and square-dance for all three toplevel domains(.com, .org, and .net).
  • Dosado: This site was started by Rob French, a caller in northern California. Rob got involved in an internet startup and Bill Heyman, owner of Supreme Audio has recently taken over. So it’s being updated frequently, and Bill is soliciting new and updated listings. It’s got the modern e-commerce look: blue and green, left-hand-links, two content columns.
  • Dosido: American Square Dance magazine’s website. This is the general purpose national square dance magazine. It takes a few clicks, but one can find links to clubs, callers, organizations, and other sites.
  • CircleLeft: They’re hoping to become the “ultimate destination for square dancers,” but they’re still under construction. What they have going for them is very modern internet design: teal, purple, and a whorl in the logo.
  • SquareThru: A local site for the Houston Square and Round Dance Council. Pretty skimpy links, but they will send you off to Western Square Dancing (aka Dosado).
  • SwingThru is owned by a container loading system named (what else?) Swing Thru.
  • Swing is, of course, a hardcore site.
  • YellowRock is a computer system for optometrists and opticians.
  • Caller is owned by the Corpus Christi Caller Times, a daily newspaper.
  • SquareDanceCaller is owned by Bruce Simpers, a caller in Maryland. No links.
  • SDCaller is owned by someone in Japan. It goes to a blank page.