Mile Zero
no matter where you go, there you are
Nov 30, 2009
You know, once I get this b-boy thing under control, parkour is next.
Nov 25, 2009
I miss a lot of things about college--the classes, the sense of intellectual engagement, the unreasonably late hour I could roll out of bed in the morning--but one of the things I miss most is the opportunity for obsession that comes from a flexible schedule. The more I work on learning breaking and popping, the more evident it becomes that I just don't have time to vaccuum up skills at the same rate that I did as an undergraduate.
I tell this story a lot, but I started learning to play bass around the end of my junior year, and I was completely obsessed with it. I spent three or four hours every day practicing. I took it to class. I played along with my roommate's awful techno music. I drilled the same basic riffs--Flea's slap routine for "Higher Ground" and his solo during "Aeroplane," Commerford's simpler runs in Rage Against the Machine, every song from Stop Making Sense--and simple scale exercises over and over again. I got blisters, put superglue on my fingers as prosthetic calluses, eventually grew thick skin on the first two fingers of my right hand from plucking the strings.
I was, in short, pretty hardcore about my practice routine. The result is that while I claim no particularly exceptional skill as a bass player, I'm pretty sure I'll be able to play the instrument at some level until the day I die. It's totally-engrained muscle memory at this point. But looking back on it now, I'm pretty sure that there's no way I could have learned to play at the same depth--even allowing for a slower pace--if I were to start today. I just wouldn't be able to make the time, or the intensity. And when it comes to the speed at which I'm learning to b-boy, that's a hard mental adjustment to make, because I unconsciously expect to improve at the same rate.
Clearly, it's just a symptom of adult life. I work an 8-hour day with two hours of commute, so I don't have blocks of time between classes or shifts that I can devote to hobbies. Since the CQ purchase and resulting transition shakeup, I've gotten a few extra responsibilities (including some team management), and when I get home often the last thing I really want to do is sweat profusely in my apartment's laundry room. So at this point I practice popping and breaking two, maybe three times a week for around an hour at a time. Progress is slow, my footwork is still awful, and my shoulders are still way too stiff.
That said, what can you do? I enjoy my work, and don't have any desire to cut it short in any way. It's already hard enough to coordinate with Belle between my classes and the ones she teaches at the gym. And let's face it: my goal for dancing can't be (and isn't) to be the greatest, since I'm starting it late and from a very poor foundation. There's a lot to be said for aiming high--but just as much value in keeping excessive expectations from ruining the learning experience as it changes.
Sep 03, 2009
Breakin' 3: Thomas Breaks a Knee
Thanks to Jeff for the title.
Last Friday was the last lesson of my first breakdancing class (the next session starts in two weeks). If I could find my camera, I'd embarrass myself with a movie clip, but conveniently it seems to have gone missing. So what have I learned?
I've learned it's going to take a while for me to get up the nerve to enter an actual cipher with people I don't know. Which is good for me, honestly: in general I'm a quick learner, so I have a tendency to acquire new skills and then lose interest once I hit a basic level of competency. The hobbies I've maintained for longer periods--like bass, for example--required more sustained effort but are ultimately more rewarding. I think this could be one of those.
I've learned a lot about movement. I am not what you'd call light-footed: my normal gait is somewhere between a stalk and a strut. My favorite part of toprock is its constant motion, and its sense that the dancer is never really settling their weight. Although I need a lot more work before it's completely natural, I'm really having fun practicing those kinds of steps--it's a new way for me to move. The same goes for footwork and freezes: even if I'm terrible at them (and I am), they're entirely new movements for my body, and thus both a challenge and a kind of puzzle.
And technically, I've learned how to: sidestep, kickball change, hip twist, indian step, kick step, CC, six-step, four-step, three-step, helicopter, shoulder freeze, and backward roll. I may not be able to do them well, or to move from one to the other gracefully, but that's about twelve more dance moves than I've ever had before. I guess I'm all set to go be highly awkward at family weddings now.
Aug 18, 2009
Electric Boogaloo sold separately.
Who Can Roast The Most?: Lessons Learned
On Sunday, the "Who Can Roast The Most?" b-boy competition came to DC for the first time ever, and my dance teacher encouraged us to go. "You'll learn a lot," she said, and I did--not the least of which is how much I've got to learn. There were some seriously skilled dancers there.
My favorite part was seeing really smooth top-rockers. Floorwork, spins, and power moves may get the biggest reactions from the crowd, but they don't always match up with the beat. The really good top-rockers, being less worried about keeping their momentum up for acrobatics, could react to the music and play with the crowd. They had more stage presence, so to speak, and as a musician I thought their performances were a lot more fun to watch. The music was great, too--a mix of funk (James Brown, in particular) and old-school hip-hop (they opened, of course, with Black Star's "B Boys Will B Boys").
I only stayed through the end of the second round, but it was enough to get me excited about learning breakdancing all over again. I'm heading to an open class in DC tonight, and will try to be better about practicing at home from now on.
Something From Nothing: Youtube As Cultural Transmitter
One thing that's been really helpful for me has been the wealth of video tutorials available online for the basic steps. Some of them suffer from Sudden Jump In Difficulty Syndrome, where they go directly from doing basic steps to a mile-a-minute routine, but there's also some really good amateur lessons online. At the very least, it's good to be able to look up how things are supposed to look, or to refresh my memory of the steps involved, when my memory starts to fade a few days after Friday's class.
I'm curious how--or indeed, if--it changes the process of cultural propagation, when it's mediated this way. And that's not just for breakdancing, obviously: I learned to play bass at least partially via online communities and resources. I learned harmonica in much the same way (thanks, HARP-L!) in high school. Eventually, I found communities both on- and offline for playing music, but it was certainly a modern twist on "self-taught" skills.
One of the interesting tidbits from my classes so far has been the way that a lot of breakdancing moves have multiple names, depending on which part of the country (or world) you're in. They're often named after the crew that invented them, or at least got the credit for introducing them in an area. Will that kind of idiosyncracy survive a transition from geographic identification to something more nebulous?
There's a paragraph from Jeff Chang's collection Total Chaos, in the section written by South African hip-hop students Shaheen Ariefdien and Nazli Abrahams, where they compare hip-hop to alchemy:
We don't mean this only in the old-school mystical chemistry way. We see hip-hop as the resilience of the human spirit, that process of transforming yourself and your environment, kinda like Common's observation that under the FUBU is a guru untapped. Imagine the oppressive conditions caused by the barbarism of Ronald Reagan's neoliberal economic strategies. The youth of South and West Bronx had little resources, were systematically marginalized and alienated, but filled with an audacity and inner capacity to want to rock the planet. No musical equipment? Well, then beatbox! We've heard many heads equate hip-hop with producing something out of nothing. We disagree. Hip-hop is about seeing the something in what we are often told is nothing.
It is, no doubt, lazy tech-utopian thinking to say something like "YouTube could influence hip-hop"--or to act like a bunch of largely middle-class kids uploading videos means anything about the direction of a culture I'm largely unqualified to comment on (like, I read a couple of books and took a class, so I'm an expert now, right?). It might be more accurate to say that the reverse is true--that YouTube's untidy mix of professional content, cultural detritus, and amateur-authored mementos sounds very much like the spirit that Ariefdien and Abrahams identified for hip-hop (even down to the critics who dismiss said content as nothing but valueless narcissism). Something to think about.
Aug 07, 2009
Tonight I'm attending the second of five Intro to Breakdancing classes in Bethesda. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I'd been reading Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation and watching Planet B-Boy on Netflix. And I've always had trouble A) dancing and B) exercising, so why not learn to do both?
It didn't surprise me that I'm a bit short on the coordination necessary to be a natural breakdancer, or that my hip-hop attitude is somewhere between Don Draper and Michael Bolton. It shouldn't have surprised me how out of shape I am, especially given how athletic a style of dancing it is, but for some reason it did. I'm hardly able to switch feet during basic floorwork, much less perform something like a chair freeze. I'll probably be able to manage a decent top-rock (dancing from a standing position) by the end of the classes, but the rest is anyone's guess.
Belle has been very gracious about all this. She snuck me into one of the gyms where she's an aerobics instructor so I could use the mirrored room, and did some practicing of her own in the other corner. I know she feels like she could be in better shape herself, but she's capable of jumping around (while simultaneously shouting directions) for one-hour classes multiple times a week, while I do about thirty seconds of indian steps and then stagger around the room gasping for air. "You looked good," she says, perhaps on the principle that the last words I hear before my atrophied lungs give out should be encouraging ones.
I'll get through this class if it kills me. But let's hope it doesn't come to that.
Jun 07, 2005
Could there be anything more horrifying than yours truly, earnestly tempting to gyrate his way through a salsa dance class? I submit to you that there is not. The Nerdlet may do her best to tell you that it was endearing, perhaps adorable. But make no mistake--there's a reason this white boy is usually found playing funky music instead of dancing to it.
I had a fun time, much to my surprise. The instructor at the Clarendon Grill was funny and good at disarming the crowd. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves, even at their most awkward. The only real problem I had was the same problem that I have with all dance classes: there's a bit of a jump from the basic step (which even the least coordinated caperer can learn) and the more advanced spins and swings. I managed to competently massacre these slightly-better-than-basic moves during the class part of the evening, but when it came time to actually make use of them on the dance floor I drew a complete and utter blank. I'm sure the resulting cognitive chaos bore some resemblance to a thorazine-addled octopus.
Although I am no expert, I will say this right off: for a rock musician, latin-based dance is a very odd beast. The dance takes place on an 8-count, kind of an 8/4 time, I guess. This gives enough time for moves by the male and female in turn. What complicates matters, for me, is that almost everything takes place on the 1-2-3 or the 5-6-7, with a rest on the 4 and the 8. I'm a 1 and 3 kinda guy, myself, although I certainly know the value of a 2 and 4. 1 and 5 as the initial steps in your crazy triplet structure? That's a sure solution for a confused rock bassist, particularly since the actual bass of the songs is much more straightforward. How do you play a rhythm instrument like that when the dancers are marching to a different drummer?
I want to try playing and writing some latin-influenced music, after last night. Let's put it this way: I'm kinda eyeing Salsa across the room, she seems cute enough. But I've been seeing Rock for a while now, and although we've got a pretty open relationship I just don't know if I can adapt to someone new. Besides, Rock's older sister (the Blues) would kill me if she found out.
