Category: raves

& faves

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raves

Kids are AMAZING: Part One

Young family band “Bound By Time” last Saturday in Oxford’s Cornmarket Street

This post is a tribute to the inventiveness of today’s kids. Equipped with musical instruments, video cameras, editing software and the Web these guys are doing such amazing stuff that frankly, it’s a wonder that they still need adult musicians, writers and film-makers to entertain them. Maybe they don’t. Maybe all they need is a bit of inspiration.

Today I’m featuring young band ‘Bound By Time’ and my friend Alice, young cartoonist, artist and stop-motion movie proto-genius.

I’ve seen Bound By Time twice now, on one of their visits to the streets of Oxford. My little daughter aged 5 really loves them and won’t leave until we’ve heard several songs. Last Saturday we heard them play “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”, “Don’t Look back in Anger” among several others, plus a couple of their own compositions (I liked ‘Easy Does It’). They play and sing rather well, with good vocal harmonies. Big brother Alex has a lovely tenor voice and the girls all look fabulously cool, grungy and unbothered by everything. I asked Alex if he wanted to be a pop singer and he answered “I just want to keep doing this, making our music with the band…”

Crumbs, what a professional answer…

My friend Alice (aged 15) has a collection of the funniest mobile phone films I’ve ever seen. I keep on at her to put them on Youtube but there’s some formatting or editing issue… They are stop motion animations of some cuddly toys, starting with a murder mystery solved by the walrus ‘Dr. Glen’ and then finally being more or less the (mis)adventures of Dr. Glen, whose entire dialogue (interpreted by Alice and my teenage daughter in voice-over) consists of the word WUH.

(As in WUH-WUH-WUH WUH, WUH!: What’s that Dr. Glen? You’ve just reached the check-in desk and realised that your passport has expired? Trust me it’s funny when you see it…)

I can’t show you Dr. Glen, shame, but I can show you this lovely song-vid which Alice put on her Facebook. It’ll make you ache for the long summers of your teens. Unless you are still a youngster, and then it will make you look forward to them.

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=17827723360

(My daughter is the one eating sugared jelly Iberia lollies on the airplane with Alice…)

You need a FaceBook account to see it. I’m assuming we’re all living in the 21st century here.

Categories
cuba salsa

Daiquiri en La Floridita


MG with a classic Daiquiri
Originally uploaded by mgharris

Finally, I get to have my daiquiri en La Floridita*.

In honour of…oh who needs a reason…we went to celebrate, dinner & dancing with friends at London’s La Floridita.

It’s a fancy restaurant/bar/dance club that features the finest examples of Cuban music, and a big variety of rum-based cocktails, including my favourite, the delicious daiquiri. I tried three different ones and they were pretty, pretty, pretty good.

The band was El Guayabero, an excellent son group from Holguin on the eastern side of the island. They played 30-min sets of up-tempo son numbers with some boleros and cha-cha-chas mixed in. No one danced for the first two sets – maybe the people at the bar were shy? Others like us were scoffing down food yummier and more luxurious than you’ll find anywhere but in the very fanciest restaurants in Cuba.

The first time we ever went to Floridita was in January, for my friend Becs’s birthday. That was before we’d been to Cuba (Becs had been many times), before we realised that Floridita is like an idealised, fantasy version of Cuba. In reality I didn’t see anywhere in Cuba that looked anything like this. It’s the levels of consumption – no-where we went in Cuba looked this fancy, certainly not the type of places bands like this play (excluding Varadero – the tourist-only enclave, which I didn’t visit.) In our experience bands like Guayabero play to sweltering, smoky rooms with ineffective celing fans, and the dance floor heaves with expert Cuba couples and salsa tourists being taken for a spin by their Cuban insrtuctors.

During the third set, when we were moved off the table (you only get a 2-hour sitting on busy nights) and back to the bar, we decided to go for it on the dance floor. One couple had just taken the floor. Within seconds of us joining them the dance floor filled. The musicians looked utterly delighted. It must be a drag for a dance band to play to a motionless audience.

However, salseros, whilst the music and atmosphere are romantic and evocative (if not authentic), the drinks are wonderful and the food delish, it is not a cheap night out… And like us, you will probably still need to factor in a visit to a salsa club for a proper dance fix.

We went on to Salsa Republic@Club Colosseum, where the music of Maikel Blanco, Manolito, Issac Delgado, Adalberto and Los Van Van was as ever, wall-to-wall and sizzling hot.

P.S. Inexplicably, a photo of Becs and I dancing at the Manolito concert has rapidly risen to become one of my most viewed photos on Flickr. Is this blog to blame?

Let’s do the experiment. Here’s another MG & Becs dancing salsa photo – better quality, taken last night at Club Colosseum.

* the reference is to Hemingway’s habit of drinking “my daiquiri in La Floridita and my moijto in La Bodeguita” – two of Havana’s most famous bars. The line is quoted in one of Los Van Van’s most popular songs, “Tim Pop con Birdland“, a timba riff on the 1970s jazz classic “Birdland”. For those who are interested in such things, I reckon “Tim Pop con Birdland” may well be my keeper on a Desert island Disc selection…

Categories
raves

The Brilliance of Professor Pete Simpson

When I’m privileged enough to hook up with my late Mummy’s old flame and good pal Pete Simpson, moral philosopher, Aristotelophile and Monty Python fan, I like to play Devil’s Advocate and ask him all those tricky questions that the brightest of my atheist friends ask me when we’re up late drinking and they start on at me about believing in God.

Here’s Peter’s answer to this old bugbear:

But how can any religion be true if each one says it’s the one true religion?

Well, that rather depends on whether truth is important in religion.

If you believe that religion is simply a cultural phenomenon, that we are chosen for any religion simply because of our circumstances and ethnic background, then whether any one is more true than another does not matter; religion, in this scenario, is merely a preference, like a cultural preference for vanilla ice cream. And so what does it matter? Why get involved, why comment, why bother, if the truth of any religion doesn’t actually matter?

But if you believe that truth IS important, well then you have a problem because you can’t simply dismiss any religion; before you dismiss it you have to work through the evidence, the historical and other claims made for each religion.

Contrary to popular belief, most believers don’t dismiss other religions. The truth has been revealed in many ways, to different people all over the world, has been understood in different ways but there is a huge area of commonality, the greatest one is probably this: we are answerable to something higher than ourselves for our conduct during our lives. Afterlife or no afterlife (and religions certainly don’t agree about the nature or existence of afterlife) – there will be reckoning.

I’m always amazed when atheists accuse the religious of using belief as a comfort. I’d take more comfort in knowing that I could misbehave ad infinitum with eternal impunity! And that’s another thing that amazes me about atheists. How come so many of them are so darn well-behaved, altruistic and generally lovely? (I wouldn’t be, I’m sure I’d be ever so wicked…)

As my Mexican grandfather, Agustin Reyes Ponce used to say, “Sea por Dios” (It’ll be God’s doing…)

Categories
Joshua Files nostalgia raves science

Weekend in Cornwall

Prussia Cove, Porth-en-Alls

taken with my BlackBerry

Some dear friends of ours from my days in the Nuffield Department of Medicine were over from Melbourne. (That’s where the UK bioscience brain drain has been for the past ten years, or so it seems to me; if I count up all my best friends from doctorate and post-doc years about half have ended up in Oz. Okay, most of those were originally Australian, but hey…)

They’d always talked about taking us to their favourite haunt in Cornwall, where they’d rent a cottage almost every year when they lived in the UK. We hadn’t seen them for years, so this it was wonderful that this time, we could join them there.

I’ve been to Cornwall once before, North Cornwall, which is gorgeous but this place was even better! It has the Lizard on one side and Lands End on the other (both far in the distance); old smugglers caves, gorgeous little coves as well as wide, sandy beaches with all the stuff kids like (e.g. rock pools, pebbles, shells), amazing clifftop walks with views out to St Michael’s Mount.

So after a gorgeous weekend eating Cornish pasties (veggie and yummy!), visiting ice-cream parlours and eating cake, I’ve probably gained a pound or three, despite the exercise of walking.

My friend Magda gave me a lovely scientist flashback moment when she went through the slides for a talk she gave last week at a conference in London; a fantastically effective new way to use nano-particles as part of a new vaccine for diseases like malaria. My very first research job was with a team developing one of the UK’s earliest candidates for an AIDS vaccine, so it was vaguely familiar territory. I’m so proud of Magda, of all my scientist friends she’s the first to be made a full Professor. Professor Magda!

In other news, someone is selling a bound proof of The Joshua Files: Invisible City on ebay. There are only a few hundred in circulation, I believe…

Only!

It should go for a very, very reasonable sum, i.e. cheap-as-chips, given that at this point in time i) almost no-one has heard of the title and ii) almost no-one has heard of the author…

Categories
cuba ice shock mexico nostalgia salsa videos

Nostalgia for…Beny More

I wasn’t alive in the days of Beny More (pronounced More-ray), the Cuban singer and band leader who went to live in Mexico and became a massive influence on all the Cuban salsa bands.

So why do I get these gorgeous pangs of nostalgia when I listen to Beny More? Why does it make me think of a Cuba and a Mexico I never even knew?

My theory is that as a tiny child I was exposed to this music. I do know that after my mother left my father, I spend a great deal of time with my two grandmothers. One, Abuelita Josefina (known to her old friends as ‘Pepa’) had a wonderful memory for lyrics and knew many of the songs of Beny More. Beny More often appeared in popular Mexican films, which went through a golden age in the 40s and 50s.

So maybe that’s it; maybe I was sat for hours in front of the TV while my grandmother knitted (she was mad for knitting). Maybe that’s where I acquired this overwhelming craving for gorgeous night clubs where Cuban bands play for beautiful people, sipping daiquiris between dancing the son, mambo and cha-cha-cha.

This Cuba does not exist anymore – I’ve been to look for it. It’s all timba and reggaeton now. That’s great, but, ah nostalgia. I once spent a whole afternoon lying next to a pool in Santiago de Cuba, listening to the piped music of Beny More. That’s as close as I got.