More Music

The little last.fm player thingie (down on the right if you want to try it yourself - the square in the bottom right corner pops it up so you can wander away from here and keep it playing) [Edit: now moved here] has just played me "Nobleza de Arrabal".

You can play the track directly at last.fm - not sure if that will work outside the UK.

I love it. Doesn't it sound like Ennio Morricone tango? It just sings "Clint Eastwood" to me. And you can dance to it! You don't have to just sit there.

I also love the Hugo Diaz mouth-organ spectacular. How could anyone sit still listening to that?

While I'm on insane virtuosity, I haven't listened to Spem in Alium for a while. Thomas Tallis - he knew all about the pauses.

Conversation

This is a real conversation that happened to me about 2/3 of the way through a dance that was going really, really well.

Leader (very dreamily, as though reciting poetry): Do not fight meeee ... I am older and stronger than you .... and I will always win.
Hedgehog (very, very quietly, right down the ear canal): Do not instruct me ... I am here to dance ... and I can fight back. [Thinks: what exactly are you accusing me of, and what makes you think it makes sense to issue physical threats to a woman who's dancing with you?]
Leader: Only joking.
Hedgehog : [Thinks: It's supposed to be funny to point out that you could phyiscally hurt me if you chose? Well, I'll cream you when it comes to brains, but I don't point that out as a 'joke'. Shut up and dance.]

The rest of the dance was even better than it started, if anything. He was really good. And I got lots more dances from everyone who was watching us. He just had really weird ideas about what it makes sense to say to a lady.

Bizarre.

Bonsoir

Pourquoi les Francophones lisent-ils msHedgehog? Ce sont les fans des excellents Veronique et Marek qui me faisent visite?

Soyez les bienvenus :)

dancetango @ The Crypt

*** UPDATE (Spring 2013) - Now closed. ***

When and Where
There are two milongas at the Crypt. There's a milonga at the Crypt in Farringdon every Saturday, but the organisers alternate - Nikki and friends of dancetango.co.uk one week, and Paul and Michiko of El Once the next. You can check the schedule on either website; last night it was dancetango and that's the one I'm talking about here, although the space is the same of course. Nikki also helps organise other events around London, look at dancetango.co.uk or check the tango-uk mailing list for details. [Update 14th Aug: added search terms to tango-uk link.] Either way, there's an absolute beginners' class at 7:30, followed by an intermediate class, and then social dancing from about 21:30 till around half past twelve.

The Class
I skipped the class. Most of the intermediate classes on dancetango's nights are given by guest teachers, so it's a good place to go regularly if you want to vary your ideas; check the schedule, but also check the El Once schedule for the alternate weeks. Last night's was Jill Barrett on vals and a little cha-cha ornament for leader and follower.

Layout and atmosphere
I've been there many times and the atmosphere is always welcoming and friendly. I've seen Nikki take particular care of strangers, such as a couple of ladies from Edinburgh who wanted to know the local customs about who asks who to dance (yes, ladies can ask, and yes, they can dance together, of course). It's a rather beautiful brick-built space, with two doors to the outside, and windows high in the walls. The windows open with a long pole like they used to have at my school, and there is a door that opens to the outside so you can cool off if you need to. Presumably it is or was once the crypt of the church above, but I've never seen any dead christians wandering around. The room is large, and is gently divided by the layout of tables into 2/3 dancefloor and 1/3 seating; there's quite a long smooth slope to the floor, which I never notice, but some people do. I like the way Nikki and her assistants lay out the tables. I think it works well, it's easy to circulate, sit down, and get a dance, or rest. There are rails and plenty of hangers to put your coat on. A projector in a curious cage thing high on the back wall makes pictures on the other wall, and I often get distracted by the interesting shadows. Nikki uses lots of coloured lights, and even has a smoke machine, which makes a dreamy atmosphere, but a very surprising farting noise.

HospitalityVery good. As much water from the jug as you need. Tea, coffee, cakes, soft drinks and bottled water from the cool box, are all very cheap. The wine is free. The loos are what you'd expect from a church hall - cramped and a little eccentric, but clean, dry, and working.

What I thought of the DJingNikki is very fond of milongas, which she has been known to play four in a row right next to the salsa interlude. It can be a little chaotic but the general style is classic, nothing adventurous or unusual. Good if you don't like cortinas but just want to keep dancing to whatever comes along.

Getting in
£8.50 or sometime £10.00 or a little more if there is a guest teacher; check the website.

Getting there and getting home
Out of Farringdon station, turn left and immediately left again, walk all the way along the street with the wall, and cross the main road at the crossing to your right at the end, outside the busy nightclub. Opposite you and slightly to the right is the entrance to Clerkenwell Green, and once you there look up to see the spire of the church just off the square on the other side, with the clock on it. Go there and go in by the left hand gate, up four steps. The entrance is down the stairs. Or take a 55 bus to Clerkenwell Green. Lasts trains from Farringdon are at about half past midnight, and here is the local Night Bus Map.

The website
Recently tarted up. Simple, with the information you need. Image-driven, you need to switch them on. No noises. Click "Go To Map" for the location.

How it went
Rather well, last night. It was a bit thin - quite possibly a lot of people had done as I nearly did, and stayed at home to watch England v France in the 6 Nations - but I had some really good dances including some with regular partners, one with a talented beginner who I'll certainly dance with again, and one with someone I'd seen before, but not danced with, and hope to dance with many more times. We kept looking at each other with silly smiles between tracks. At the end of that it was close to my usual time for leaving, and I decided that was the dance I wanted to take home with me, so I went. There's always a good mix of levels and it is friendly to the inexperienced.

Zoë Jakes

I got this from a posting on Tango-L, one of the fascinating little tidbits that makes it worth wearing out your delete key on all the others. There's one regular poster on there who also does belly dancing and she says it's done wonders for her tango. This is a dancer she admires. Looking at this, I think even a little bit would do wonders for just about any kind of dance - but to get this good, you probably wouldn't be doing much else.



Talk about core stabiliy, axis and dissociation. Especially from 02:08. I mean, I can imagine how you get this to go like that and that to go like this - even quite fast, with practice - but all at once, and in three perpendicular directions? We should try some of that.

But also, I think this is a beautiful, expressive, and very musical performance, brilliantly put together.

Part of its relevance to the tango discussion was that this is not, of course, entirely classical "bellydance," but a style very much of the performer's own invention and expressing her own culture, sensibility and musical world as well as those of the sources her technique comes from.

Monochrome subjects in colour

I'm fond of black-and-white, especially for portraits and action shots, but I also find it satisfying to photograph in colour subjects that have very little.

In black-and-white it's all about the range of tones - black to white - light as a quantity. In colour it has a quality too.

This is one of my favourites; I took it some years ago on the Pacific coast of North America, near Seattle.

Some people feel this picture is improved if you cover up the surfer with your thumb; I prefer it with. But consider what the surfer with his yellow board would look like if this were a black-and-white picture. Try imagining-out the yellow, and see what happens.

The Stocking Problem

Warning: girlie post. Here I discuss the practical and aesthetic question of what to wear on your legs when dancing.

I have three pairs of dancing shoes, and two of them are open toed. I would have bought closed toe if I could have got them, but nobody sells tango shoes with closed toes. My Werner Kerns (designed for ballroom, and now my much-battered class shoes) are the only ones I can find, and they're nice, but a little bit dull. My experience with shoes designed for tango suggests that buying them on the internet is a bad idea, and I have very little time and inclination for offline shopping. Life's too short to fight your way around Covent Garden on a Saturday.

With an open-toed shoe, there are essentially three options. Option 1 is bare legs. As far as I'm concerned, polishing my legs or having them polished to that degree is just too much trouble most of the time. Option 2 is making a feature of the hosiery; a good option, and works well in winter with a bit of extra glitter, or with fishnets at any season. Option 3 is wearing the kind with unreinforced, invisible toes. That works out expensive, because in the absence of the usual reinforcement the chances of both toes lasting more than one evening of tango are small, and at £2.50 per leg for hold-ups that does get vexing. It's cheaper if you buy tights, but I personally don't like tights, except warm woolly ones in cold weather. If the purpose is mainly aesthetics - a smooth and unified appearance of the legs - rather than warmth, I prefer to let the air circulate. Stockings are a possibility, but they're rarely sold and you have to faff with the engineering.

My favourite solution are the skin-coloured fishnet hold-ups. They're as tough as opaques, and their visual noise conceals a thousand irregularities. The silicone grips are much better than they used to be, and very reliable these days, especially now I'm not quite so painfully thin as I was in the 90's. It's best to buy the same brand all the time so they're interchangeable - then you don't get orphaned legs when you accidentally heel yourself in class. But finding enough pairs of the the right sort can be a real problem - nobody ever seems to have more than two in the right size and style, or stock the same kind twice. And it's such a pain to fight your way through the crowds, not finding the thing you want.

But look! Someone has realised that for the grown-up woman, these things are commodities that are better bought online, just like disposable contact lenses. I've just ordered five pairs of my favourite kind - I'll let you know how I get on. Tights & More were the cheapest for the ones I wanted - there's also Stockings Direct and FigLeaves Hosiery if you want to have a go. I notice that Tights & More have a parent organisation, Stockings HQ, which is probably worth a look if you are exceptionally particular, or you are a bloke secretly reading all the way to the end of this post. Go on, make it a present for someone. They have the proper Forties style.