& faves
I asked my husband David to swing by Cowley and take a photo of a monument that we call the ‘Oxford Stargate’ on his BlackBerry.
But lookie what he made me instead!!!
Is that not awesooooome? Ooh, I want to go to M35-117…
Also my Brazilian visa arrived today. It is a proper full-page visa valid for 5 years. Yay!
Ah, the bliss of a return to Cuban salsa after many weeks, oh really far too long without a proper session. Last night’s Buena Vista Club in Oxford offered the bonus of a rare appearance by a total salsa diva, Cuban dancer Yanet Fuentes.
Watching her performance, I said to my friend Becs, “Is it just me, or would you give up all your education and job and talent in exchange for being able to dance like Yanet.” Becs considered. “I’d pretty much sell my soul to be able to dance like that.”
It would be a very reasonable deal. Yanet is extraordinarily good and has trained since being a little girl with top dancers in Havana. And she’s risen to be the best of the lot!
Now if Mephistopheles happens to be around, let’s talk. It would be the end of the adventure stories, probably. But look at what I would gain…
It was that or a 45 min drive to the cutesy Cotswold town of Bourton-On-The-Water to sample the delights of the perfumery, the bottled sweet shop and the rock shop where our little daughter loves to fill a bag of polished stones from the ‘scratch tub’. But the weather! So we stayed in Oxford.
Any excuse to mosey around in the National History Museum of Oxford – full to bursting with children aged 3-8 making dinosaur things under the T-Rex skeleton, hand puppets in the adjacent Pitt Rivers Museum and slightly older kids gazing with wonder at armour and weapons such as Robin’s bow from the TV show and Captain Sparrow’s sword from Pirates of the Caribbean (pictured above).
The National History Museum consists mainly of one large gallery with everything pretty much chucked in together – geology to your right(ish), dinosaurs all over the place, mammals to the left, other creatures wherever they can squeeze in. The Pitt Rivers Museum of Ethnography, behind the Nat History, is a deliciously pokey collection of artefacts and weird stuff from all over the world, collected according to type of object, with the original hand-written labels from yeh-ears ago.
I took the photos above with my BlackBerry. Clockwise from the right: main gallery of the National History Museum; a chuck of iron pyrite; the T-Rex skeleton; spooky figures from the ‘Anthropologists’ Collector Fund’ in the Pitt Rivers; a rotating 3D model of DNA; Jack Sparrow’s sword.
My personal favourites from the top gallery of the Pitt Rivers are the suits of armour made from fish scales, buffalo horn and coconut fibre, a helmet made from a big, spiky shell, and the Japanese Noh Theatre masks.
At last Saturday night’s Clave Club I bumped into a long-time salsa aquaintance, Danielle who told me that she’d been reading my blog. It reminded me that it’s been a while since I blogged anything about salsa or Cuba or anything…and there’s a link to my blog from the Cubanisimo regular email newsletter. So maybe it’s time that I did.
My favourite new song from a Cuban band is the brilliant rock/african/funk/salsa fusion track Asere que vola?, by Spain-based Cubans, Habana Abierta.
It’s jazzy, rock and funk, but you sure can dance to it – salsa and reggaeton. ‘Asere que vola?’ translates roughly as ‘Mate, what’s going on?’, but as usual in the translation of colourful street slan, it loses all the sparkle.
The lyrics tell of the news a guy receives from his Cuban mates all over the world – as he asks them via chat, email etc – ‘Asere, que vola?’. It’s cheerful, joyful, ironic, full of wonder at the outside world (I heard that in Denmark it’s brutally cold!) that these lucky young Cubans find themselves in…because most Cubans can only dream of seeing the rest of the world. But as always with Cubans outside Cuba, there’s sorrow and homesickness for the island.
According to that repository of urban hipness, The Spectator, New York street lingo for ‘cool’ is now ‘book’. It comes from predictive text of the T9 type, which often offers ‘book’ when you type in 2665 (which also spells ‘cool’).
No, I didn’t believe it either, because, hello, Speccie telling me something about street life as opposed which boutique hotel in Estonia I should be staying at or whether to buy dresses of the Diane Von Furstenberg or ISSA variety, or telling me how to manage the diplomatic fallout caused by an as-yet-unwritten thank you letter for a lunch six months ago…?
But I checked it out on Google and it seems to be true.
Steve Jobs reckons that nobody reads books anymore, or so I heard. But if the word ‘book’ itself is, yanno, book, then that itself is pretty book… innit?