1001 Disco Days

Plum forgot

Off for all Saints Day. So got my first dance in a while.All of it to Thievery Corporation a band I am discovering new depth. Within.

A day off, for Feast of St. Francis day. So I go to "parents as learning partners". Then I put on the new Caspar Babypants album and dance. The Bubble Rap. It is so good. It's been too long since I've walked this way. I want to put out that not only does an incredible edible better the experience of the dance, 10 fold, but it also ENABLES it. Edibles enable an incredible dance and more than double the day.

At this rate I'm not going to get to 1001. But who cares. Each dance is well worth it for its own sake. This one super super subtle, as I tried to occupy myself during lunchroom duty, 45 minutes of walking around the lunch room of St. Francis Prep. Most teachers hate it. So how to make it fun? Start up a big band in my head. Bass first. Then start to sway a bit, walk to the beat, with dance moves so slight 400 kids do not notice you are dancing. But you are dancing. S St. Francis walked down the road banging sticks together and singing. People called him a lunatic. Yes, yes, he was. Viva la luna.

One of the best days of my life. And a life with many great days. First to teach Coleridge and Whitman all day, alone. Pure bliss. And then to have dinner with your wife and daughters. Jurf bliss. Then to go to the globe of the actual name of your local bar, for open mic night, and your electrician is the opening band, your hamdyman, and then the lowers play, your friends, for the out of the velvet underground sunnyside experiment, named after the older kids section of Sunnyside Gardens, the lowers. playing all talking heads covers. And bringing the punk back to David Byrne. Jumping around like a 17-year-old pure energy. And then you're ugly and so their players is strange keyboard a febrile Prog. End on la Bamba.

David Byrne on the American Utopia tour with Sunnyside people and in-laws. Trying to follow Byrnes iconic dance moves. 

QUIP #2 We dreamed it up, made it happen, for the whole block to hear, a perfect line up of bands this year, a perfectly curated day and evening of live music, by yours truly. A success! Danced up a storm.

Pixies and Weezer concert in Denver. Danced like a madman.

With Melissa Ivy, Jenna and Steve Nickson at the bandshell museum in Prospect Park, Brooklyn dancing hard to 22 piece world more sic band, Antibalas. Perfect NY night. Hipster heaven.

Walking west through the cathedral-like tunnel under the 7 train, cars streaming by on either side, looking like rivers of fire in the sun. But it's delightfully cool here in the shade, a light breeze carrying the intoxicating smell of Bounce fabric softener, floral & chemical. I am listening in my airwalks and grooving to the Sun Records singles compilation, the single best singles compilation ever made, probably, (it's all about the perfect inspired mistake, the feel, the voodoo. I've been slowly reading Peter Guaralneck's bio on Sam Phillips, a lightning rod for the gospel of rocking roll, and it's enlightening.) I just got a haircut at Juan's on 41st and Queens. The barber barely paid attention to the cut as we all watched France vs. Peru in the World Cup. We talked about the standings, the upsets, and how you can see the personality of the countries reflected in the teams, à la cinderella stories Senegal and Japan, and we talked about how hard it is, in

This circle in the midst of 4 directional trees. In doughboy part, sacred geometry. And looking up from the center the trees all overlap but leave a heart of space. Sun in the center. In doughboy part, sacred geometry. And looking up from the center, the trees all overlap but leave a heart of space. Perfect dance floor on a blessèd day. Also I think I found my old bike. Couldn't find owner to try to buy it back. Listening to Caspar Banypants brilliant kids' album Rise and Shine.

Talking Heads into Rolling Stones jam at Astoria Studio. We called it the Head Stones. But maybe better The Talking Stones. Anyway I danced pretty hard there for a minute, and sober too, somehow. 

Took my students to see black panther on Monday. Then we talked about it for an hour on Wednesday. And we started the semester by reading a review in Rolling Stone of the soundtrack. Such a great moment for black lives matter, following on the heels of the Obama presidency. I danced hard this morning with the Queen of Wakanda. Oprah, was that you?

I forget, but it happened.  Probably to Kendrick or Gambino.  Still counts. But not as much.

Ran this morning through Calvary Cemetery, which I learned this weekend is the largest cemetery in the world. New green. Walking by a Robin, saying hello, thinking of the Robin in that great book "The Secret Garden", remembering that the girls call this cemetery the secret garden (because we once ate from secret tomato plants growing by the back wall) thinking about how rich that connection is.  Then watching a red-tailed hawk in an open field pick apart a squirrel for lunch. Wild wild life, right here in Queens. The soundtrack was the transcendent, effervescent, brilliant new album by Meshell Ndegeocello, "Ventriloquism." Gets better with every listen.  Also, of note, there was a weird moment where I was almost hit by a bicyclist who wasn't paying attention. I could have sworn it was Shia LaBeouf, though it doesn't make that much sense that he would be biking through Queens, so I doubt my eyes. But he gave me the same half-crazed with joy look LaBeouf has,

Amazing experience watching the weird Flintstone movie with the girls. The credits are a 15 minute long mash-up of different styles, and we have had incredible dance, flying around the room, getting wild, banging heads and being so caught up in the moment that we just kept on going through the pain. Flintstones, heads hard as rubble. Yabba dabba doo, we'll have a gay old time.  Featuring B52s, liz Taylor as Fred's mean mother in law and Halle Berry as Eartha Kitt as the good bad secretary of Fred's boss. 

Full elation worth documenting every time. g. First Alain Mehrab, Lebanese poet, discovered at Yoruba Park yesterday. Fully immersed in today. deep rhythm. Did a homophonic translation while  I danced. on elliptical machine in dolphin cove resort Anaheim. Then the following. See comment 

Another Radio Joelio mix, this time an episode of Gateway to the Weekend from September, 2017. Went hard. Arm weights again. This time I invented a throw-over-the-shoulder dance move to work out the tricepts, combined with curls and whirling helicopter arm lifts. I swear someone should be capitizing off of all this. Well, I suppose someone is! I've been taking cold showers the last few days, inspired by a Wim Hoff fanatic on YouTube. It is a thrill. I can't just jump in though, I have to slowly turn the water down and then step out just as it hits freezing. Such a rush.

January is shaping up beautifully, what with this magic hole in the teaching schedule. A portal to good dances. This morning for a work out I found a rare gem, a perfect dance mix. Here's the process I took to find it. First I listened to a lot of radio. Then I moved to Colorado and opened a music venue called the D Note. Then I listened to radio1190 in Bouder. There I heard Joel Davis on his world music show Terrasonic. I booked him to spin at the D Note and a good time was had by all. Much time passed and now, a decade later, I live in NY, but I still listen to Joel often, via satellites of love. I still haven't found a better DJ. (Though our mutual friend John Shaeffer, whom I also booked at the D Note, is in the same club.) This brings us to this morning, when I was looking for something to take the sleep slug away, to disperse the druthers, as they say. It wasn't easy. It rarely is. Sometimes there is not much that will work to get me going. But that's where a good

Today a dance to "Lotta Sea Lice" the collaborative album by Kurt Wile and Courtney Barnett. Like if Stephen Malkmus and Neko Case were having a lover's conversation in song around a campfire about songwriting itself. And though the songs are mostly slow, I concentrated on the drums and let that dictate the movements. More of a listen than a dance, but still worked up a sweat...

House dance to African pop. workaday dance, but some pizzazz for all that. (What word has more pizzazz than pizzazz?)

A good 45 minute dance mix by Jahsonic. Today I added weights and did a back and arm workout as I danced. It was a keeper. Fun to swing those barbells around to the music. Tgi A collage I made with the girls. Probably this picture will outlast it. Ditto this poster for our first kith and Kin reading from 3 years ago, designed by KC Trommer.

In a corner of my house, baby. Hard set to conduit number three by John Schaefer on mixcloud. Perfect Build to a full tilt.  So happy to be alive and healthy and dancing without limitation. still. 100 ideas this morning spontaneously flowed through my body to the music.

Today a full throttle, completely lost, in the flow dance to Joe Davis conduit set number one on mix cloud. Big props to that DJ. And these little trinkets from around the house.

Vermeer at National Gallery in Washington DC mirrored by Lily and Lucia at the Museum of New York City. That energy boomeranging into an electro swing dance in the living room.

Such an epic dance. Deva, Diandra, Melissa and Jen at the Mercury Café. First I played some music on stage with Melissa. Then we went upstairs and there was a blues swing night happening. The DJ was great. I soundhounded the song below as an example. Then a long dance walk afterward, through the empty streets of freezing Denver at 2 o'clock in the morning on a Wednesday night. The moon was everywhere even on this piece of concrete. Notice the two hearts upside down in shadow. I don't know what this mural says, but it was fun to try to say. The way it felt summed up.

Yawpers do Pulp Fiction Soundtrack at the Oriental. Hyped up psychedelic metal surf songs. Danced so hard we missed the countdown!  The mask above was from Orange Peel Moses' closet, tried on after a beautiful end of the year jam with Melissa Ivey.

The Reals playing for Steve Millin's back at Common Grounds Denver. Always great to get Reals

Brilliant Truck stop dance frisbee to quell a panic attack by a brother enroute back to CO after grandmas funeral in MO

It was an unexpected day. I want to write about it but I'm falling over. I got stuck in Atlanta. We had to evacuate as there was an electrical grid outage. Long walk out through dark corridors all the way to baggage claim, must've been a mile walking through dark terminals filled with electrical smoke. Surreal. People having panic attacks. One person had a seizure.  But then, amidst the chaos, in this one corridor, there was this beautiful art from Zimbabwe, stone sculptures, and I had stop and look. I couldn't not. I thought, if this hadn't happened I would have never seen this art, nor would it have meant as much. Finally got out of airport and into a hotel shuttle. We all got to talking in the van and I mentioned that I was going to miss my grandmother's funeral and there were warm sounds of sympathy all around. Then a grandmother said that she was going to miss her granddaughter's birth and that felt like poetic symmetry. Soon afterward this same woman had a