Categories
raves

Gorgeous Things

Jane Sehmi of Sehmi Precious Jewels

Out on the town with my BlackBerry again, I dropped in on my good pal Jane Sehmi (pictured above). We’ve been friends for ages, since learning how to do drug-free childbirth down at the local NCT. Well, giggling and drinking coffee more like…

Jane went and splashed out one day on some gorgeous gorgeous beads and her high-powered IT executive husband took one look at the (allegedly extravagant) haul and shrewdly suggested she start a business making and selling handmade jewellery…

So she did! It’s called Sehmi Precious Jewellry and if you’re one of Jane’s mates you get the occasional invite to her lovely home, treated to tea or coffee and a viewing of the jewels.

I went over to inspect the goods and catch up with Jane, with whom I like to compare and contrast adventures of our too-fabulous-for-their-own-good teenage daughters.

The news is that they are both still far too fabulous and not quite the earnest, studious girls we hoped to raise, being far too glamorous to be seen in the company of their sad old parents, at least that’s my daughter. Jane’s may be more merciful than mine…

Meanwhile Jane displayed her jewellery in some truly imaginative and stylish ways – see photos below. I was going to buy presents for friends, but couldn’t resist. I’m keeping every single thing I bought for myself.

Lookee here…

Categories
raves

A Night with Imps

My good pal DB yesterday dragged us out blinking to discover that the world has more to offer by way of entertainment than salsa music and dancing, a fact that we’ve neglected for ooh, years.

“Maybe you’ll finally mention me on your blog” DB remarked. I pointed out that I recently devoted an entire post to her, with a photo and everything, that her comment showed just how little she reads it. “Well I’m very busy,” DB said carefully. But her tone said: I have responsibilities, people to see, places to go, millions of pounds to raise for Keble College, and I can’t be sitting on the Web all day fiffing and faffing.

Quite right too…

So on DB’s insistence we saw the University’s improvisational comedy troupe, known as the Oxford Imps. They play every Monday night in term-time, at the Wheatsheaf pub in Oxford. They improvise sketches and songs based on daft and random audience shout-outs.

For example, yesterday featured a rap set in the underworld of the Bodleian library stacks, a musical about ghostbusters (ending in a harmonised quartet), a musical about hats (including a murderous milliner who rhymed ‘milliner’ with ‘killin’ ‘er’), a really impressive feat of memory in which dialogue is improvised and then delivered forwards, backwards, inside out…and more; two hours worth of entertainment for £3! Bargain!

The troupe are amazingly professional, they know how to get laughs and impress the audience, how to get the whole room joining in, willing them along to succeed. The show is like the TV show “Whose Line Is It Anyway” with three times the energy and goodwill.

Improvisation comedy is a real test of acting and wit, in my opinion. The Oxford Imps are natural born entertainers and comedians.

Categories
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
nostalgia

MG and DB

Here’s my good friend DB, who I inherited from the one time in my life that I was ever in a Clique. It was at St Cross College, Oxford and for some reason the cool American grad students welcomed me into their urbane little set, who would always sit at the same table for lunch and watch as the Goddess Hoku opened her mail (often actually addressed to her as that…), and have cool nicknames for some of the more distinctive dons (we had a Panzer Fuhrer, a Yoda, Obi-Wan, and a Dingleberry). I’d always kind of admired the group from afar; when I eavesdropped their conversation it sounded like the Algonquin Round Table meets the Star Wars Fan Club.

I first got an ‘in’ with them when I overheard Hoku talking about my beloved PJ O’Rourke, whose book “Republican Party Reptile” I owned and loved, and whose new book “Holidays in Hell” was just out. Hoku and I became life-long friends following our walk to the bookstore to each buy a copy of HIH.

The group would meet in someone’s college room for video evenings to watch shows like “Sledge Hammer!” and “Rocky and Bullwinkle”, which were all new to me. We’d eat pizza and play with Legos. These were the type of people I’d never come across before at Oxford – right-leaning, funny, educated, witty and cosmopolitan American liberal-arts students. I was totally smitten.

This was back when there was still an Evil Empire and we had a gazillion Soviet nukes aimed at our heads, when the GDR was still cool in a grimly-socialist-black-and-white-movie sort of way – it wasn’t like being a neocon or anything. One of the group, Peter Schweizer, had spent time with Washington bigshots and had published a book entitled “Grinning with the Gipper: The Wit, Wisdom, and Wisecracks of Ronald Reagan”

But as people invariably do in Oxford, they left. Eventually only two local hangers-on were left: me and DB.

We didn’t really know each other at first. The group was big enough that we’d only chatted at the periphery. When we exchanged phone numbers at the farewell party of the last of the group to leave, I wondered vaguely if we’d ever meet again.

We did though, and I’m glad because DB has been one of my best friends for years, through thick and thin. She wrote weekly limericks to cheer me up through one gloomy bit of my life, I stripped wall-paper with her when she bought a cottage that needed EVERYTHING doing. I introduced DB to the concept of Murder Mystery parties and then DB expanded and improved upon the concept until they were a thing of minor legend, at least in Hertford College MCR.

DB tempted me out for tapas, cocktails and a movie last night. We saw “The Lives Of Others”, the winner of last year’s Best Foreign Film Oscar. I haven’t seen such a touching, beautifully constructed and performed film for a long time. Everything about the film is just brilliant.

Fundamentally it’s a story of unrequited love and how a dutiful state security official metamorphoses into a Good Man when he falls in love with someone who he can never have, but who through her plight opens his eyes to the wrongdoing in his own occupation. It’s a film which sticks rigidly to Robert McKee’s stern advice to screenwriters that MEANING produces EMOTION. (As opposed to loud explosions and car chases…)

Great movie – thanks DB!

Categories
nostalgia

19th Century Tradition Rules OK

The St Giles’ Fair is an old Oxford tradition that goes back to the 19th century, whereby a group of local fairground companies have use of one of the main streets of Oxford for the first two days in September, after St Giles Day. And the schoolchildren of Oxford can spend the last days of their school holiday being entertained in top carnie fashion.

My two daughters and I took the usual reccie this evening. Looking at the mixture of horrific sick-inducing machines and charming old kiddie fairground rides, my older daughter, 15, remarked sourly that she felt none of the usual excitement. She said the same thing at Disneyland Paris a couple of weeks ago. Yep, it happens; you grow up. But she hasn’t yet discovered how much fun St Giles’ Fair is when you visit in the evening and slightly tipsy. with a crowd of student pals…

Meanwhile our five-year old was cooing with delight. She wants to throw hoops around stuff and win cuddly toys, (she only has about 40 and there are places in her bedroom where you can still see the floor, so I guess that’s her rationale there…); to ride on the Waltzer under the influence of travel sickness pills, to eat huge fluffy balls of freshly spun cotton candy, hot doughnuts straight out of the oil, corn-on-the-cob roasted on a grill, to dip fudge, marshmallows and strawberries in a chocolate fountain, and then to ride the magnificent Carousel. You don’t actually get any younger, like with the one in Ray Bradbury’s novel ‘Something Wicked This way Comes’, but riding it, you might feel, for just a few moments, that you’ve turned into a little kid again.

It’s one of the great things about being a parent, living vicariously through all your children’s joyous discoveries in life. But tomorrow, after all those fairground treats and being whipped around on rides, I may need to swing by the vomitarium…