Uninspired to think of a title

October 25, 2007

Liam was a surprise show once again. It was doubly amusing for me because I had been talking about him with Sergio earlier – I had predicted that he would not show up so much.

Some of the songs played by Haihan were Fuego A La Jicotea (Marvin Santiago – Steph asked Haihan and me about this song), Juana Pena (Willie Colon – I mistook it initially for Jazzy, which is the song preceding Juana Pena in the album El Juicio), Merecumbe (Los Titanes version), Usted Abuso (new-ish version with vibes and two vocalists – it might be Son Boricua but this is a complete guess), Clave Mambo (Joe Cuba Sextet), No Critiques (Manny Oquendo – when I tried to play this last year, it wasn’t particularly popular… now it looks popular enough with people staying behind late), a Chivirico Davila song (I don't think it was Cuando Tu Quieras), Pico Swing (New Swing Sextet), Contigo (Cache). Earlier in the evening, Sally played Periodico De Ayer (Hector Lavoe – not exactly a fast song in normal situation with bpm of 187-195 but slowed down by over 3% for the early crowd) and La Llave (Grupo Latin Vibe) among others. No big complaints on the music aspect of the evening.

For me it was another underwhelming Thursday, which is becoming something of a habit. It has been difficult to get into the groove because stringing together several dances in a row at high level has not been possible. Some people have been scarce as has been the case for few weeks while some others did not look interested. It’s a minor problem if someone doesn’t dance with me in particular (it affects only 2 people), but it’s worse if people don’t dance with pretty much everyone else too (they get into habit of not dancing and lose stamina for regular evenings as well as big parties and discourage others with trickle-down-effect affecting secondary and even tertiary people in degrees of separation). Maybe it always was like this except we have lost some people who really enjoy dancing for dancing's sake - like Mimi and like Nina.

Maybe I suck, and I don’t know what I could do so that I won’t suck as much.

No On2 except one Cha Cha. It has been like this for a while now. One On2 dance an evening is not without value but is far from enough – I can’t get myself to motivate myself for one when getting a good workout with On1 seems so difficult.