BUNNY!

Being caught between Valentine's Day and Easter and in the middle of the seemingly endless gray skies that are common to my part of the Midwest during this season, I found an appropriate piece of sheet music.

I can't help thinking that the Bunny Hug must have been a dance - especially with it being "The Craze of the Day". Personally, I can't help thinking it sounds like a euphemism for sex, "They went down to Lover's Lane and he gave her the old bunny hug..." Afterward there would be tittering and murmured innuendos. Google turned up a Wikipedia article but the abundance of 'citation needed' statements (along with the fact it's Wikipedia) drum up suspicion about all the claims contained there – though it is notable that much of the same information is contained on StreetSwing.com. The StreetSwing article contains a quote from a 1938 issue of Stage Magazine that I like (because it shows the sentiment of the times).

"We hear the Two-step and an outrageously indecent display called the Bunny Hug are gaining favor with the younger element. Let them watch their steps, these young sensationalists. The time will come when they will tire of this eternal jogging and jerking, and find more surcease in the grace and restful beauty of the Valse".

The "valse", by the way, is a mid-nineteenth century term for the waltz. That might say a lot about the people who shared the opinion that the Bunny Hop and its anthropomorphic brethren were a sure sign of Satan's cloven hoof stepping onto the dance floor. The thing that springs to mind for me is – jeesh, it was 1938 and people were trying to use the language of 1838 to describe moral imperatives? To have actually danced the 'valse' when it was called the 'valse' and have had any reasonable understanding of the dance beyond it being 'what mommy and daddy do on Saturday night', the guy who wrote that criticisim would have been about 120 years old! Talk about not letting it go! Imagine the state of the world if we ran around applying the morals of 1910 to all our dealings. All I can say is get the stick out of your butt, it's obviously causing some irritation!

The cover's simple enough – Mr. And Mrs. Bunny dancing away in front of the mindless bunny legions. I believe they're dancing somewhere in limbo or a fog bank because they seem to be surrounded by limitless, gray nothingness. The lines are nice and clean and the image is generally pleasing if a little uninspired. It fit the season so I had to cart it out!

The Skate!

Sometimes I feel sorry for my dear wife – putting up with my sense of humor can't be easy, especially when dumb luck conspires to set up a perfect situation. Just yesterday evening, during dance practice, she showed me a new WCS move she's working on called 'the skater turn'. It, as you probably can guess, looks like you're skating, complete with hands folded behind the back. Since I don't skate all this was okay but she could have been showing me the 'falling from an airplane without a parachute' because I would have had just as much basis for comparison. Anyway, during my usual web trawling for old ads and sheet music covers I happened to come upon this little gem.

Apparently, back in the forsaken part of the 60's when Madison Avenue was desperately trying to pet the Mod market, Career Club (manufacturer of Nerd-ware) decided they wanted to get hip to the frug. Of course, since this ad comes from 1967, they'd pretty much missed the entire psychedelic/mod thing and were stumbling blindly into the Disco Era. Ah, the days before Madison Avenue defined youth culture…weren't they grand?

To be honest the steps of this 'dance' read like a vision summoned from some dank church basement after passing around the wafer box one too many times. Note that boy and girl never touch. To me this smacks of the covert moral cops of the 1950's trying to control the misguided youth they begot. Funny that a generation which grew up on songs like Cab Calloway's Reefer Man and danced jive and bop would be so intent on the whole 'no touchie' thing.

As for the fashion – the blog from which I filched this ad made the point that all fashion is relative and I agree to an extent. It's impossible and unwise to attempt to judge what was stylish back in '67 with the sensibilities of the new millennium. I will say this guy's belt makes it look like his plaid undershirt has come un-tucked and it looks like dorkopotamus stole his hair from one of the members of Devo. I also find it interesting that the pose our hip young couple is styling in the ad doesn't match any of the described steps of the dance. I guess you can't capture true dweebdom on film – it's like a UFO or vampire or something.

Oh, and I should mention, Kelly's skater manuver looks nothing like the WASPercising shown in the ad. It's just unlucky enough to share the name!

A Signal from Mars

This might be my favorite cover art from any piece of sheet music! A Signal from Mars published way back in 1901 and composed by Raymond Taylor and arranged by Edward Taylor Paull. It's a ragtime march – not sure if that's particularly Martian – and the tune has a lovely simplicity about it that the cover's complex, sci-fi look doesn't reflect in the least.

Edward Taylor Paull grew up in pre-Civil War Virginia and worked selling organs (instruments, not kidneys). Mr. Paull and I have a strange, Kevin Bacon-esque connection – recently I've been travelling to VA on business, specifically a placed called Middletown which is near Strasburg, VA. The snippet from The Music Critic and Trade Show (February 20, 1882) shows the our connection:

"MARTINSBURG, W. VA., February 9, 1882

I have nothing special to report to you from this section of the country, as far as musical entertainments are concerned.

The demand for musical instruments here and throughout the valley of Virginia is becoming much better than it was heretofore. I do a good business with the Estey organ and Weber and Fischer pianos. I flatter myself that I sold the last piano that was sold in the year 1881. I sold it and closed the bargain just one hour and a half before New Year's day, or half past ten o'clock at night. The piano I sold was a J. & C. Fischer square, the purchaser being Mr. Phillip Rodes, of Strasburg, Va. There may have been a piano sold later in 1881, but I doubt it.

Yours, very respectfully, EDW. T. PAULL."

I'm going to try to look up the Mr. Phillip Rodes of Strasburg, VA mentioned in the letter in a census to see if I can find where he lived and then correlate Mr. Paull's account with some pictures of the address as it stands today. Wish me luck, as I know from being a fan of Lilkes work on his home town of Minneapolis, the present has a way of utterly obliterating the past! Another bizarre connection is that E.T. Paull's first piece was The Chariot Race or Ben Hur March which was based (of course) on the Lew Wallace novel Ben Hur – a Tale of the Christ. The connection with me? Here in Indianapolis, I attended IPS 107 Lew Wallace grade school. E.T. Paull was a very successful composer and his (extensive) biography is available on Perfessor Bill Edward's website.

Oddly enough, Raymond Taylor, the composer of A Signal from Mars, seems to have completely vanished into history. Maybe this was a one-off composition or maybe he composed later under another name. Whatever the case I find no evidence of him on the net (not that the net is the end-all-be-all of information sources – it's just the one I have available to me at the present moment). Hopefully, I'll turn up more information Mr. Taylor soon.

The sheet music artwork is absolutely striking. Glittering stars float on a blue-black background while in the foreground sits blood-red Mars. Two Martians (I suppose – actually they look like Greeks or maybe Bedouins) stare at a distant (and oddly longitudenized) globe, onto which they project their 'signal'. Apparently in 1901 folks figured we'd get our first evidence of extraterrestrial life via semaphore or Morse code flashed over navy-style signal lamps. Seems a little inefficient to me, what with all that distance and those atmospheres in the way and all, but then I'm no Mars expert. I think it's interesting that the Martian light illuminates the Americas while Asia and Europe languish in the dark.

The lettering on this piece makes me think of the great art nouveau posters by Mucha, where the message becomes a part of the aesthetic. The lettering would be art on its own but teamed with the graphic element they form a poetic rhyme. They belong together.

It's sad that this kind of aesthetic doesn't exist today. Advertizing is totally throwaway any more – 6o second sound and video bites that titillate or amuse can't really last. Nobody will be paging through the 22nd Century version of the Internet, listening to commercials for Walmart or Survivor because those commercials are so bland, banal, and empty of style their nearly forgotten while they're still on the air. The Signal from Mars march may not have stood the test of time or the Billboard charts, but the graphics and the genius that went into the creation are eternal.

Antisocial Social Dancing

Is it so wrong to be an antisocial social dancer? I mean, last night Kelly and I headed out for a Friday at Riolo with the Brickyard Boogie Dancers and when we got there the parking lot was noticeably empty. I counted heads two thirds of the way through the evening and got about 44 members in attendance. A small crowd, to be sure, but I have to say I liked it that way. The Riolo (I'm sure I've mentioned before) isn't a big place and when the whole club is in attendance the dance floor can be kind of tight. Toss in a few people with marginal floor manners and you're dodging elbows and knees all night long. Friday, even with me feeling tired after a tough week of work, I never really felt overwrought.

So I guess what I'm saying is that, every once in awhile it's not such a bad thing to have an empty house!

Don't Curb Your Enthusiasm

I absolutely love this YouTube grab. Usually I cruise around, looking for dance moves to attempt or tips on things I'm messing up but tonight I just sort of browsed about until I stumbled upon this little gem. It's a group of Japanese kids doing a little improv rockabilly in Yoyogi Park. A++ for effort and for not giving a damn about what anybody might think. Hey, that's what Rockabilly ought to be about, right?

The Flu Stinks

Big news, huh? Maybe it's a sign of my age or something but for the last two winters I've had sicknesses that impeded my ability to dance. 2008 was the worst. I had pneumonia after two back-to-back business trips to the Rockies. I just had time to get well before the third trip which let me hobble through some dancing in Salt Lake City. Now 2009 had rolled around and I'm stuck with a March flu. My head's filled with gunk and my balance is shot not to mention that I have the lung capacity of a ninety year old smoker. In sort, it stinks.