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We are still kind of high after the Minnesota Feis. This was my first competition as an Irish dance parent supporting a dancer and I can tell you I never predicted I’d be part of the Irish dance scene. In fact, a wise adviser of mine warned me never to get my kids involved in dancing or I would face a long and expensive career at recitals silently combating other dance parents. I’m happy to report that the Irish dance community isn’t like that. It felt great when everyone pitched in at the end to take down the stages and clean up.

We have been driving all over the upper midwest recently for performances and Maggie has built up some good experience dancing at churches, Pow-wows, bars, and fairs. She attended the beginner practices while most of the performance team goes to the “Novice” practices. To graduate to “Novice”, she has to place first, second or third in her dances in the advanced beginner category. Going into the Feis, I had no notion of the level of competition she would face. I know she gets fairly strict instruction at Scoil Na dTri. To our amazement, she got two first places and a second in the advanced beginner category and a first place in the first feis category.
here are the results:
Hornpipe:
http://feisworx.com/compresult.php?feis=386&comp=310HP
Reel
http://feisworx.com/compresult.php?feis=386&comp=310RL
Slip Jig
http://feisworx.com/compresult.php?feis=386&comp=310SJ

I know how to put on the wig and pin the crown in place, but there is one aspect that I will never help with and that is makeup. I’m talking about lots and lots of makeup that makes 11 year old kids look 40. Yes, Maggie will eventually learn to think that she needs makeup but she’ll have to be the motivator, executor and funder of all makeup activities. I saw one girl applying spray on tan before her event. Didn’t she see Little Miss Sunshine?

Mo: “Some kids who don’t go to our school came and fired my favorite playground stuff”

Pioneer Press Link

The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes = The Invisible Republic by Greil Marcus


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I saw Greil Marcus come and speak to promote the release of this book. It was fascinating. He’s been studying the Basement Tapes since before they were commercially released and he has a lot of ideas and suspicious connections to talk about. As some random guy in a coffee shop told me when he saw me reading this book, “I’ll bet my friends and I can come up with a book full of iffy connections about any double album, but that doesn’t mean we’d publish it when we sobered up.”

In spite of this, it is a great book and I never listened to Bob Dylan, much less the Basement Tapes the same way again. The book largely concerns itself with Anthology of American Folk Music, a box set of recordings that partly formed the basis of Bob Dylan’s tastes. Marcus claims that The Basement Tapes were Bob Dylan’s answer to that anthology.

He succeeds in convincing the reader that there is indeed a secret American parallel history that we know nothing about and that is absolutely gone from the earth. He also succeeds in showing how the Basement Tapes and Anthology of American Folk Music are points of entry into this secret past. He doesn’t succeed in telling the stories memorably, or without seeming a little to possessive and nerdy about them.
as A.J. Weberman said in the 70s, “Greil Marcus hordes his basement tapes”. Too True.

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