Categories
cuba salsa

"Too Much Salsa and You Could Die"

That’s what Cuban salsa dance teacher Osbanis Tejedo said at breakfast on Sunday morning to the DJ. He was asking him to stir up the music a bit, some bachata, some merengue, some reggaeton.

Well, despite those words, I remember last night being mostly salsa…and the night before and the night before. I think I may in fact be dying from too much salsa. I feel as though I’ve been out on a drinking bender, absolutely shattered. And in the past three days I’ve had no more than one glass of wine.

It must be dehydration. Let me weigh myself…nope, no change there.

Salsa is definitely like a drug. It makes you feel amazing, you forget all your troubles while it lasts. Then you come back down to earth and realise that your problems haven’t gone away, for goodness sakes. They’re right there waiting to be dealt with, how dare they! And what do you turn to for a solution…?

More salsa.

It was great to be with a hundred or so like-minded addicts. How we sweated to get our rumba moves right, to move like the African spirits, the Orishas, how we strove to follow the tiny-but-fiery Damarys in her energetic and outrageously sexy reggaeton routine, how we concentrated on Kerry Ribchester’s wonderful body-movement techniques to move ribcages for Cuban son, and laughed at Leo and Osbanis’s flirty rueda moves.

Last night, you saw it all pouring out on the dance floor. Salsa with rumba, orishas, reggaeton, son, all mixed up. Okay, most people there were Northern European (and I was raised here, so I too started off stiff-as-a-board), but we were beginning to get there.

But man, am I exhausted.

Now, when’s the next salsa thing…?

Categories
cuba salsa

Fiesta de Los Rumberos


Fiesta de Los Rumberos
Originally uploaded by mgharris

Rafael del Busto (in the cap) takes everyone through some moves in a warm-up Rueda de casino.

I felt sorry for non-salsa guests at the Arora hotel, Crawley. The music from the party went on until 2am at least and was easily audible in our room on the 2nd floor – enough to sing along with the lyrics.

MG – why were you trying to sleep when there was Cuban salsa? Well for one thing, 3 consecutive very late nights is beyond me. We wanted to be fresh for a long day of workshops beginning with Ariel teaching Cuban son.

Tonight though, we’ll stay until the end. Some friends are kindly taking care of our little daughter so it’s that VERY rare event for parents- a night off!

Just as well. I bet the hotel will get complaints from other guests. But tonight…I want that salsa played LOUD.

Emailed from my BlackBerry®

Categories
jaguar's realm movies other books writing

God help me I’ve got writer’s block again…

Actually yes, I DO think that three days running of not being able to write clocks in as an Officially Recognised Bout Of WB.

Things I have done in the past three days rather than write the next, challenging chapter of Jaguar’s Realm.

(I mean, things I’m prepared to admit to in a blog)

1. Read emails about and from staff at the school where I’m a governor. Read them again, and again and again.

2. Phone people about the school where I’m a governor.
(yes I HAD to do those things but believe me, I lingered)

3. Browse for, choose and buy salsa dancing clothes and shoes from ebay.

4. Try on said salsa dancing clothes and shoes, gloat and marvel at how finally I’ve found an outfit that works for me and how light-as-a-feather the shoes are and wonder why I haven’t invested in specialist kit for my main hobby before.

5. Jump on any email from my editor about the ms for Joshua book 1.

6. Join Facebook and spend an entire day mooching around on it, looking people up, customising my content.

7. Shop at Primark to make myself feel frugal.

8. Drag my husband out for breakfast, lunch, coffee, long walks.

9. Pester my neighbour Gabby to gossip with me; he was only trying to watch the tennis but would I let him, no.

10. Practice my reggaeton moves until my insides hurt from excess abdominal wiggling.

Don’t even think that I’m running out of stuff to do. There’s still Litopia, browsing salsa music on iTunes, reading Caitlin Moran’s column in The Times (today I found out that there’s a Facebook group called ‘I Want To Be/Have Sex With Caitlin Moran When I Grow Up’, which I won’t join because she’s actually on it herself and as you’ll know if you read this blog regular-like, Caitlin is trying to exert pressure, by remote, on Big Brother quitters like me who’ve gone cold turkey and are trying to pretend BB isn’t on this year), baking chocolate cake.

I wish I could put movies, books or TV on that list but in truth they take just too much concentration. Don’t you think that if I could concentrate that hard I’d actually tackle this chapter head-on???

That said, here’s a list of movies I’m looking forward to failing to get in to see:

Tell No One (still haven’t managed to catch it)
Harry Potter 5
Transformers
Buy It Now
The Simpsons Movie
The Bourne Ultimatum (LOVE the Bourne!)

Categories
nostalgia raves

Dotcom daftness again? Or is it real?

It’s the sort of idea that we used to talk about breathlessly in innovation centre coffee meetings with other Internet entrepreneurs, swapping stories of the latest daft idea to get a squillion dollars of funding. Not that the ideas we had weren’t daft too. My best conversations were with then Oxford graduate student Alex Straub, of the splendidly daft mondus.com (hey, I too was a believer once), who probably personally made a few million from Italian investors Seat Pagine Gialle before mondus went belly-up. Back in 1999 Alex and I would go all googly-eyed at crazy Internet ideas, the madder the better.

So here’s the idea – and it comes from a DPhil Biochemistry student at Oxford. (Hurrah for the biochemistry training – it’s so darned versatile!)

A website where you buy moments in time. Your first kiss, it’s suggested, or perhaps the moment you were offered a book deal. For $1 per minute you get to baggsy that moment and upload content which will be hosted in perpetuity, to share and share again with everyone in the world.

Thomas Whitfield apparently pitched this to Dan Wagner, himself a wily Internet entrepeneur, the guy behind the business information service M.A.I.D and then Dialog…and now the investment fund Bright Station Ventures, at a competition run by the Oxford Entrepreneurs. Instead of giving the £5,000 prize, Dan Wagner offered Whitfield and his associates access to the whole $100 million fund to develop and idea that I’m guessing they think will be the new Youtube. Wagner thinks that Designthetime (now known as miomi) captures the whole zeitgeist of the Internet.

Except…Youtube, Facebook, MySpace and all those sites on which we all frantically upload content to our hearts content…are free. What’s to stop Yahoo or Google setting up something like this, and not charging?

When the whole dotcom thing collapsed it did so largely because most of the new businesses had non-existent revenue streams, and were spending money much, much faster than they could possibly make it. The smart money flew away and settled on the few safer bets, like Google and Yahoo. So respect is due to these guys for building in a user-driven revenue stream from the beginning. But will people pay for this frivolity? It will be interesting to see.

I can’t see how this won’t be imitated. For one thing, what will I do when I discover that my special moment has been nabbed? Will I upload content for my second favourite moment? Or will I go to a rival site, one that’s quite possibly free?

I like being all sceptical, but deep down I really hope it works. It was a great feeling, the belief that a graduate student could spin a yarn and end up running a multi-million dollar business. I Googled Alex recently – he looks to be doing pretty, pretty fine.

Categories
raves

Strange Fruit


Strange Fruit
Originally uploaded by
mgharris

Our friends in Brighton have a garden filled with fruit trees. This one has lovely soft plum-like fruit that tastes something between a pear and a peach. Anyone know what it is?

Emailed from my BlackBerry®