Field and Floor

MEDIA MATTERS (FINALLY)

Drum Corps World editor Vickers among
2007 Drum Corps International
Hall of Fame inductees

I could not be more pleased, at the end of this week, to report that Steve Vickers, quarter century editor of Drum Corps World, the activity's only independent print publication, will be inducted into the DCI Hall of Fame this year. Finally.

Finally, for the man who has persevered.
Finally, for the publication that has endured.
Finally, FINALLY organizational recognition of the role of a "media" outside itself.

While documenting the drum and bugle corps activity, and making a living, he has offered broad shoulders to the activity as chairman of championships in his hometown Madison multiple times, has served on the board of the Madison Scouts for years, in addition to working with DCI on many of its printed pieces over the years. The latest: a history of the pre-DCI years is in the making.

Congratulations, Steve. And thank you for being the guy who finally got a drum corps "media" recognized. Might "Reliable Rondo" be next ... finally?

MIGHT YOU RSVP AND ATTEND?

You are cordially invited to cyber-attend,
Monday, April 16, 2007

Curated by color guard's memory-makers

Your personal docent-led tour will be followed by the announcement of the
2007 Field&Floor Top 32 Color Guards of the Year

COUNTDOWN TO CHAMPIONSHIPS

In Dayton, and right here

The long range weather forecast for central Ohio calls for flurries, then sun, with temps in the 40s/20s; undoubtedly Spring will not have sprung when we all begin arriving in Dayton for the thirtieth round of color guard championships. Praise for indoor pageantry!

Call me Keith Olbermann because here it is (actually for the second time, so the fanfare is a bit muted), my personal countdown to ColorGuard360: The 2007 edition.

6. Sunday, April 1: No Fooling, the end of the season and the end of 30 years, three decades, is upon us. The 30 indoor color guard shows that defined WGI's 30 years, begins today by looking at numbers 30-21.

5. Monday, April 2: I'll move to the middle of the pack, with numbers 20-11.

4. Tuesday, April 3: The top ten begins today, with numbers 10-6.

3. Wednesday, April 4: Have you chosen your top five by now? See how close you think I got to selecting the five color guard shows the defined the idiom for its first 30 years.

2. Thursday, April 5: As exciting, and fun, it is to talk about the shows and performances, there are, more importantly, color guard programs and organizations that have led the activity and the organization for 30 years. Here they (mostly) STILL are.

1. Friday, April 6: Good heavens, it's Friday. And here's the VERY Good Floor of 64 for this season 30/2007. Which units have a lead going into Dayton and from the historical view of Field&Floor?

HAPPY WGI WEEK! April 9-14: Looking forward to seeing old friends and new in Dayton. Please do say "hello;" I'd love to meet you.

-1. Sunday, April 15: On my way back to Birmingham from this big Big BIG Dance, I'll offer "The Best of the Rest," those guards that, while they did not make the Top 32, nonetheless offered memorable moments.

-2. Monday, April 16: Field&Floor's 2007 Top 32 Guards are named, but not before everyone RSVP's to attend "PEARLS: A 30-year winter guard retrospective" VirtualVerbiage Gallery Showing right here.

-3. Tuesday, April 17: The Sweet 16 are lifted up.

-4. Wednesday, April 18: The Elite 8 color guards of the year are winners all.

-5. Thursday, April 19: The business of the industry gets its own spotlight today, with "Box 5" caption award nominees.

-6. Friday, April 20: It's all over but the shouting, as The Final 4 get their due.

-7. Saturday, April 21: The 2007 Field&Floor Guard of the Year, Runner-up, are named, with the reasons why all 32 guards made this year's list.

-8. Sunday, April 22: I'll break down the winners of "Box 5" Awards, before

-9. Monday, April 23: and The Field&Floor Grid: the season is distilled to a single square.

-10. Tuesday, April 24: A nap will be in order.

GETTING IT WRONG: WHAT IS RIGHT?

Impropriety within the ranks of organized religion has come to roost in Birmingham. Today's front page trumpets an evangelical ministry "suspended" for a "moral and spiritual indiscretion." Another one.

When this rash of humanness among spiritual leaders first broke out, the stories were train-wreck viewing; but at this juncture, they have, for me at least, become an ethical puzzlement, if not a dumb-founding religious dilemma.

Full personal disclosure: Readers who know me well, or who have known me for the bulk of my life, are aware that I spent several years in my teens as a Methodist minister.

On the one hand, we have spiritual leaders who are naturally, humanly, flawed. On the other, their voices are quieted at the public discovery of that humanness.

As Miss Eudora Welty proposed it: "I may not have their brilliant mind ..." but wouldn't messages of spiritual and religious support be no more convincingly delivered than from people just like us all: flawed, failed, but in search of cleansing redemption?

Oh, that transparency word muscles in again.

I fear, however, that organized religion still has a way to go before the curtains are parted to reveal the reality of the wizards. There's too much money at stake to abandon moral finger-pointing, and the ensuing "give 'til you don't hurt," in favor of the guileless, "we are in this life together" ministry.

GETTING IT WRONG: RIGHTED.

In what may become something of a year-long personal vigil to prove that the *word* of 2007 is transparency, this.

Getting the story wrong was not the story, nor was publishing the wrong story. The story here -- a new media source incorrectly headlining that the recurrence of cancer in Elizabeth Edwards would lead to John Edwards' pulling out of the presidential race (and that multiple other media sources then picked up the story and continued to report it as truth) -- is that in what seems to be a new age of transparency, Politico.com , reported on how it got the story wrong. On its front page.

It became news across the nation. What I'm interested in here is what seems to be a budding trend towards openness -- transparency -- in politics (here), business, society. And from my view, it is clearly a good thing.

... to be continued. I hope.

MIDDAY UPDATE: Fascinating. Now everyone, including The Washington Post, seems to want to get in on the mea culpa action with this story. The mistake here? An incorrect headline on the paper's website for 51 seconds.

Tampa "trends" super: at WGI.org

With thanks for the invitation to attend, and cover, this past weekend's Power Regional in Tampa for Winter Guard International, here's a preview of what you are can read at WGI.org:

Trend-tracking, trying to find the next big industry thing is pretty trendy itself these days in marketing. While the process attempts to help business find where to go next in its industry, there is one contrarian, but strong and convincing voice that challenges marketing folks to look somewhere unexpected to find where to go: its current environment.

The color guard world seems to have listened to branding guru Tom Asacker. From the 9:30 a.m. opening unit, through the 9:30 p.m. final competing unit in Tampa’s University of South Florida Sun Dome, 74 color guards, representing every classification, laid flat-out best performances in this super Power Regional.

Again, the full recap of the regional is here.

THANKS FOR CLICKING OVER

Isn't the new WGI.org, the best?

If you clicked over from the WGI.org "Focus On" feature: Hello, nice to have you at Field&Floor, a pageantry blog that looks at the worlds of drum and bugle corps and indoor color guard. (For long-time readers and friends: I think even you will read something new in the WGI interview.)

I'm David Hill -- that uber grin on my ol' mug to your left is a recent photo. I do now have newer, hipper glasses, however.

Here are some simple operating instructions to have your best Field&Floor experience:

-- Why this kind of blog in the first place? Because I honor the idioms of drum and bugle corps and color guard.
-- How do I get around here? Even simpler directions for use and for feedback -- which is always welcomed!
-- Are you serious? Hardly.
-- Like what you read? Keep Field&Floor close by all the time.

Since we are mid-way through this diamond anniversary year for WGI -- three decades worth -- you can fully catch up on the last ten of those years by clicking on FLOOR, where every story about color guard is listed, chronologically, from the most recent to the beginnings of the blog.

And finally, if you're as *into* this season as am I, and just can't wait for the Big Dayton Dance, here's my part of keeping the spirit alive, from this moment all the way through a week AFTER championships!

Nice to meet you. Hope our paths cross on the pageantry roads ahead. Say "hello;" my pageantry acquaintances and friendships are among my most cherished in life.

PLAY-IN: UD ARENA

65th and 66th guards to muscle into Floor of 64

Sportswriters diss it; I think it's the very best part of March Madness: the NCAA Basketball Tournament "play-in game," LIVE from the University of Dayton Arena. It's special, at least to me, because it is the lead-in to WGI weeks in the Ohio city!

The game tipped-off the 2007 hoops countdown last night, with winner Niagra set to play number 1 seed Kansas this weekend. In a nod to the play-in game and theory, when I post this year's Floor of 64 on Good Friday, April 6, look for two more guards: "play-in units," criteria for inclusion to be determined by the final rankings list of the season.

SPRINGING FORWARD...

... but feeling as if I'm falling behind

It's "sick" - ological, I know, but I feel that lost hour of sleep. It's a spring preview morning here in the Deep South, but that darned early alarm for Daylight Savings Time has me dragging.

Hop to, Mr. Hill (urging myself to perk up)! The 2007 color guard season just got "Super" seriously entertaining, plus there's 30 years to re - view.

Here is how I plan to do just that.

FLOORBOARDS '07

A mid-season winter guard bracketology for Dayton

Before the Floor of 64, there's now mid-season FloorBoards, the units that look -- at this nanosecond in time -- to be best bets for finalist appearances in Dayton, and to possibly have dibs on the end-of-the-season lists here at Field&Floor. But don't count on it.

As promised, but reviled, here are this year's units, divided into their scholastic and independent ranks (but why?) in 5-layer groups; meaning, if all continues in lock-step scoring fashion through the Super Regionals, these guards will become finalists at Dayton's Dance in April. But don't count on it.

With vying-for-its-tenth championship in a row James Logan High School, and last year's Field&Floor winner Oracle (now Opus 10) out of the lists -- neither has yet to compete in a regional -- the top seeds here, at mid-season, are Avon High School and Fantasia.

FLOORBOARDS, slammed.

... the rest of the season, TBD.

What a delicious predicament; the mid-season view of winter guard's year 30, means even less than usual, nothing from nothing leaves nothing, and it's late.

A unit that is vying for a championship ten-spot, as well as last year's winner here (with a new collaboration and new name, yet) have not competed in a regional competition. Therefore neither James Logan High School nor Opus 10 (formerly Oracle) will be represented.

As a matter of fact, neither will any unit, until tomorrow. Guardbuzz is not posting until sometime tonight, reportedly, and I won't be able to crunch my numbers based on those numbers until tomorrow night. That's Tuesday.

See you then. NO Logan; you're kidding, right?

SUNDAY MORNING ON SUNDAY MORNING

Where do you turn to have your mind fed?

I turn, primarily, to books, with preference to journals and memoirs of artists. I turn to music, with the styles as varied as are the hours in a day. I turn to movies, often rewinding a director's oeuvre for context and balance to current offerings (see the next post, re: Martin Scorcese). I certainly turn to pageantry; for as in any medium, society is reflected in its specific context and idiomatic approach.

I even turn to, as my father used to say: "the boob tube." He meant not mammorial parts, rather what he perceived as a mental wasteland from the flickering screen. He died before the onslaught of reality television: thank goodness for his sake :-)

Television is both worse, and better, than ever these days, and CBS' long-running "Sunday Morning" is on my must-see list. Just this morning, reports on the John Pierpoint Morgan Library's renovation, the vision of "shock" photographer David LaChapelle, the curated fashion of New York socialist Nan Kempner, and even a surprisingly smart interview with cable television's legally blonde Southern bombshell, Nancy Grace, filled the always quick-moving 90 minutes. The program is at once both age-centric and ageless, if you've a mind for it.

At the bottom of my coffee pot now, my oft-considered, but heretofore untold, television viewing habits.

THE DEPARTED

Now that Martin Scorcese -- Marty, to industry insiders -- has received his competitive Oscar, it seemed a good time to look back through this filmography. "Taxi Driver," "Raging Bull," and all of those crime movies get the headlines, but last night I watched, again, one of my favorite Scorcese films, a musical, "New York, New York."

Robert DeNiro and Liza Minnelli star in the homage to 1940s movie musicals, that in its mid-70s theatrical release, was a face-down flop. But the story only begins there. If you have followed Mr. Scorcese's career at all, you know that he is a film historian as well as a film maker, and that his attention to detail is unsurpassed. After "New York, New York" had been summarily dismissed by critics and audiences, he went back into the editing studio and cut the film that he wanted to be seen.

The critics offered mea culpas and appropriately fawned over this most overlooked piece of his personal art. It's one spectacular set piece after another. See it.
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All of which got me thinking: which non-winning pageantry shows and performances from championship units stand that same test of time? Which ones do I like to revisit, and which ones would I recommend that you see again?