I’ve had dreams of a full scale swing news site, but now more than ever, I’m certain such a thing would require full time involvement of at least one person, maybe more. Even an army of volunteers would require someone to keep on top of them all. Anyone interested in stepping up?
So with all that in mind, here are a few selected highlights from this past year.
BMJB Mobtown 061
Since the dance videos will take awhile, I’ll start off by giving you a little mix tape for 2012. In picking out these performances I realized that I am heavily biased towards those I experienced in person. Video isn’t a completely fair representation of a performance, especially since live audio recording has yet to catch up with the leaps and bounds that video recording has made in the last few years. However, it’s still good enough to relive moments, or at least get a taste for those that you missed.
Note: This post compliments my previous compilations of dance blogs done in 2009 and 2011. I know a lot of people who don’t like blogs on principle. I have quite a few friends who don’t like dance blogs in particular. I usually just nod and smile because I don’t need to ask them why. After all, I see most of them on a daily basis. Notice I don’t say “read.” There are a ton of them not counting my non-dancing related reading, and there just isn’t enough time in the day to keep up with them all.
For quite some time, my standard answer for how long I’ve been dancing has been “about 10 years.” It’s getting to a point where I need to re-evaluate that answer. I took my first Lindy Hop class in January of 1999, almost 13 years ago, from a woman who still inspires me to this day.
I feel like I’m a broken record in saying how many great videos and performances there were this year. It’s part of the reason why I broke up the video selections like I did. I would have had no problem sharing all the other videos, but that would have been a long frickin’ post. (Not that I usually have a problem with that) I really enjoyed all the videos that have been posted so far, but I reserved this post to highlight stuff that somehow fell through the cracks for whatever reason. A lot of them are from earlier this year, and just didn’t meet the metric standards of the earlier posts based on this blog's Facebook Page simply because of sheer numbers. However, it’s still all quality stuff.
I was distinctly unproductive on this blog this year, so I’m going to make up for it by commenting on (almost) everything in one shot. In looking up all the videos and blog links on this blog’s Facebook Page for other posts I noticed some things and was reminded of a few more. Obviously, this can’t be a comprehensive recap of the entire Lindy Hop scene, but I think it’s still pretty amazing that all this information is in relatively easy reach.
This list is different from the Most Popular Lindy Hop Videos of 2011 post from last week in that it is a compilation of videos that were popular with the visitors of the Wandering & Pondering Facebook Page. In putting this list together, I ran into the same problems as I did in selecting blog posts to feature in the Wandering & Pondering’s Lindy Blogging Highlights of 2011. It’s a bit difficult trying to determine what was more popular than others based on all the different data available, both objective and anecdotal. In the end I just took everything that got pretty good numbers in one category or another, but didn’t do any sort of ranking other than selecting the main video out of each category to highlight at the beginning of each category.
Because there really wasn’t much happening on this blog. Fortunately, the lindy blogging community exploded like a hippo after a trip to a state fair chili cook off. I talked about this extraordinary growth earlier this year on this blog, and it’s been good to see it continue. I mentioned in my first year anniversary post that I started this blog mostly because I wasn’t seeing much in depth conversation about dancing. I like to pretend that my lack of production is reflected in the fact that so many other people are posting interesting stuff.
This post is the part where I decided to do a not very easy search for the most viewed Lindy Hop related videos on YouTube. It wasn’t easy because the search filter on YouTube doesn’t allow you to search a specific date range. Plus, people like tagging their random crap with the words “Lindy Hop.” I have a feeling that is how stuff gets tons of views because users will tag their videos with all kinds of unrelated words to get suckers like me to pull them up in searches.
But you probably don’t care about details, so here’s the list. More details after.
People come to this dance for all kinds of reasons. A common one is often escapism; dancing as a chance to get away from it all. Modern life can be filled with a lot of superficial interactions both online and in person. Social dance gives you an opportunity to for a kind of real and intimate one on one interaction that you can’t find almost anywhere else-at least not without getting tested before or after.
