Tango @ 33 Portland Place

[Update 25/01/10: The milonga at this venue is CANCELLED, probably permanently - it's looking for a new one]

This milonga is on Sunday evenings, generally from 8 till midnight, at 33 Portland Place, five minutes from Oxford Circus. I've been there a few times recently, and realised my review needed updating. Be aware that it's normally closed for the whole of August [Correction: Naomi emails to say it will be open for August 2009 with a slightly different format, check the website for details. Apparently a jacuzzi is involved.] They also have a practica on Thursdays at the moment, check the website (plays music!) for details.

The Class: I didn't take the class. People seem to find it safe-and-friendly and to stick around afterwards. There are comments about it on my previous review.

Layout and Atmosphere: Beautiful. The venue is stupendous, I've described it before but it's an eighteenth-century private house next door to the Chinese consulate. It currently belongs to Lord Edward Davenport, or at least a company managed by him, and they courteously hire it out to 'οι πολλοι on Sunday evenings.

You push open the huge front door with the little notice on it, and you come into a hallway that feels a little like the hallways of a million fine old London houses butchered into awkward flats, except that it's much bigger and much finer and hasn't been butchered. The person at the desk always seems tiny, partly because it's often Alex or Naomi, and they're both actually quite small, but mainly because the desk is huge and the room is the same as many you've seen, but on a bigger scale. The first time I went there I felt it could probably do with a dozen or so million in restoration; I now have the impression that some of this has been spent and there are plans for more. The history page on the house's website suggests the same thing, that gradual restoration is in progress.

They normally have the two beautiful rooms upstairs which are connected to each other in an L-shape and have glorious pink, green, and white plaster ceilings. Some people treat the two as seperate dancefloors - usual when it's crowded - or when there's room some people navigate between them. The carpets you see on the house's website get rolled up out of the way. Then they have either one or two rooms downstairs, the one at the far end with the skylight, or the one at the front, or sometimes both if there is going to be a performance. All of them are lovely and you can sit on a beautiful battered gilt velvet chaise longue or a lovely little gilt blue chair. When you go in, just follow the music through any door that's open.

Now, because this is an eighteenth century house, the people who built it took light seriously, and on a summer evening, all the rooms are full of evening sky. There is a light-well down the centre of the building and there are magnificent floor-to-ceiling sash windows onto the street and onto the lightwell. Be careful not to trip over and fall out of the window. Chairs are placed in the way to prevent your decease. When the windows onto the street are open you can cool off on the balcony with the music coming out behind you, smiling at curious passers-by and looking like the cool guys.

The floors are good old wood, but not up to the punishment of regular tango. Take care, they're uneven, with sticky bits and little holes and dips and even a few splinters. I gather there are plans to repair or replace them all, starting this August. In the meantime, you might avoid your newest or spikiest shoes. If you find yourself reflecting that the floor is a bit dodgy, just look up at the ceiling. But the staircase is stone, and well-worn, so if you're going to admire the plasterwork above you there, stand still and hold the handrail while you do so.

The crowd tends to reflect the organisers and be on the younger side, which I like. I also like the chaises-longues and sofas upstairs, which I find make it very easy to start conversations.

Hospitality: Good. Plastic cups, and a marker to write your name on them. Help yourself to lots of water, some wine and some lemonade, crisps and nuts. More than enough coat racks with more than enough hangers. The Ladies', downstairs, is rather spectacular, always perfectly clean and well supplied, and in keeping with the house. The only problem with it is that the Twentieth-Century-Stupid design of the sinks tends to splash water all over the floor, and on this occasion it made it difficult to dry my hands. Don't lean on the sinks. Careful with your choice of shoes; the floor, pre-repair, is uneven, with some small holes, larger dips, and even the odd splinter, and if anyone has an argument with the sink they could get wet.

Anyone or anything interesting that turned up or happened: Nothing, thank heavens. Not a sausage. No performance, nothing. I had uninterrupted dancing, and it was lovely.

What I thought of the DJing: They play mostly traditional music both upstairs and down, but downstairs gets a bit more modern later in the evening. They know what's popular and makes people want to dance. If you like a lot of variety and adventure it may not satisfy you, but it contents me. On this night all my favourite milongas were included, and there's always an adequate dose of vals.

Getting in: £8 on this occasion. The front door can lock accidentally when people go outside to smoke, in which case you might have to knock to attract the attention of the person at the desk. Check it isn't August before doing so. It's closed in August. [Correction: it's open in August 2009.]

Getting there and getting home: Take exit 4 from Oxford Circus and walk up Regent St. towards Broadcasting House and the round portico of All Souls' Church. Continue on the same side of the road as it curves round the Langham Hotel and keep going till you get to 33, which is next door to the Chinese Consulate and just after a conspicuous sign for number 27. Careful getting home, because it's Sunday; the last Tube is half an hour before the milonga closes. Leave at 23:00 or get a bus from Oxford Street. Be warned that some night buses don't start till an hour later. Plan your homeward journey with the Journey Planner; the house's postcode is W1B 1QE.

The website: www.tangoat33.co.uk. Pretty. You have to wait for the Flash to load, and it plays music with no Mute button while that's happening, but once it's loaded all the information you actually need is right there in front of you - what's on, what time, and how much it is to get in. There's also a Facebook Group.

How it went: I had such a nice evening I had to update my review. I stood on the balcony with the music coming out behind me, feeling like the cool guys. Danced fun dances with fun regulars and plenty of space. I wish I could go there more often (I have to work on Mondays). I'd definitely suggest this one to visitors to London, especially in summer, and maybe as a place to bring a non-dancing friend as the venue is so special and the music is reliably all right. Because no matter how your dances go - and they're about as likely to go well here as anywhere - you don't often get the chance to inhabit a house like this.

The Dancing Flower does Libertango

This week in Tango Silliness, Libertango. Piazzolla was really interested in tango as concert music, and didn't particularly write or play for dancers, but this particular piece is very driving and does make me want to dance. All his works, like classical music in general, tend to be known by his name rather than by who plays them.



There are lots of versions of Libertango but this is the only one I have, played by Quinteto La Camorra. I think the flower's reaction to the dynamics at about 2 minutes and 3 minutes is nice.

Renaissance Nerd

Captain Jep just told me it was nice to know someone who was a Renaissance Nerd.

I like that. I am not really a focused person, except where rather short-term and straightforward tasks like passing exams are concerned, but I think 'Renaissance Nerd' is something to be proud of.

Remembering that it might be an idea to eat some food, drink some coffee, and take two paracetamol for the headache didn't hurt either. You'd think I would have worked that out by my age.

I'm very sorry if I prickled you this morning.

Summer storm

The sound of rain on broadleaved trees in full leaf.

I love it.

The thunder is almost continuous.

Café de los Maestros and Tanguarda

My eyes are propped open with matchsticks today so this is just a mess of disconnected thoughts. I'm making mistakes all over the place and there will probably be typos too.

In some ways the Café de los Maestros concert was a bit disappointing. Now I know nothing whatsoever about soundsystems, amplification, or concert halls, and the playing was, as far as I could tell, fabulous; but the sound seemed really flat for the first number. And it was generally not great for the entire first half; Juan Carlos Godoy in particular seemed overamplified to me, in a very loud, harsh way, so that I just couldn't tell if he was still good or not. It was better when he held the microphone further from his mouth. I couldn't hear the piano or the guitar at all well except in solos.

Alberto Podestá didn't turn up. Apparently he does that sometimes. It was a pity, as several people I met were there specifically to see him and were disappointed. One of them had met him recently in Argentina. But he is very elderly; I hope he's not sick.

Nina Miranda, who we were told made her debut in 1940, was great and sounded wonderful. She reminded me vividly of Dawn Hampton. I also really enjoyed the solos of Anibal Arias (guitar) and Osvaldo Montes, who plays the bandoneón with remarkable economy of motion.

And I was charmed by the visual effect of the several young women playing violin and cello in the back row, on a platform raised by a few feet; when not actually required to play, they turned their heads, stretched their necks, and watched the soloists with attentive admiration, like a row of angels at the back of a Victorian painting, approving some scene of Patriarchs. The violinist on the left even applauded at one point, and the cellist on the right was as fascinated as I was by Osvaldo Montes' right hand on the bandoneón.

They improved the sound a lot in the interval and it was much better for the second half. I still couldn't really hear the guitar or the piano, and couldn't tell at all where the sounds of solos were coming from except by watching. I have no clue what was wrong, but it wasn't working for me and I longed to cut off the electricity (except to the lights on the sheet music) and hear the instruments on their own terms.

Tanguarda played on the free stage beforehand, but it was such a beautiful evening I couldn't bear to be indoors just then, and sat on the terrace with friends. Afterwards they were at Carablanca, and played a concert set as well as a dance set. The concert set, mostly Piazzolla, was wonderful and I really valued the chance to sit upstairs for a while and listen properly. The band has to be excellent for this kind of thing, but Tanguarda are excellent, and the pianist had a ball with the Bösendorfer piano.

I like to have live music, and I like to have my expectations raised about its quality. Getting people used to really good live music increases the returns for the musicians on being good. It also makes people dance better because they have to switch the autopilot off.

I think some people went to Negracha instead when they realised Tanguarda's first set would be a concert, not for dancing. But that's ok with me; I appreciated having the choice, I daresay they did too, and that's the upside of having two milongas on a Friday so close together. They can compete on quality as well as on offering people what they want. And there were non-dancers who turned up for the concert, which I think is nice. I also appreciated the fact that Carablanca have started serving snacks since I was last there. They seem to have sorted the lighting out too.

I do think Tanguarda were overamplified, though. A bandoneón, as far as I understand it, is a brilliant German instrument maker's response to the functional requirement "I want to play Bach on something that fits in my suitcase". A Bösendorfer piano is a Bösendorfer piano, built specifically for the purpose of filling a concert hall with sound by people who really know what they are doing. A double bass and a violin don't require any electricity beyond what is provided by the human nervous system. Conway hall was built specifically for the purpose of lectures and concerts of classical music without amplification. I don't think these instruments or players need mikes or speakers, and if the space, for some reason I don't know about, means that there have to be mikes, I would have assumed in my ignorance that the goal was for the mikes to sound as though they aren't there. All the amplification does for me is make the whole thing sound as though it's coming out of a CD player with the volume too high.

I'd love to hear both these bands unplugged.

But I was up till 03:30, I got up at 8 today, it's hot, the thunder has started, and soon there will be my favourite sound in the world - the sound of rain on trees in full leaf. Now I need to put some sports commentary on the radio or something and lie down.

[Update: after 10 hours sleep, changed the Bach link for a much, much better one. And for Google robots: the concerts reviewed, or rather described, in this post were at the Barbican Hall and Conway Hall/Carablanca respectively.]

Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Sex and Suits

Yesterday my sister took me to see Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (the musical), because she had some tix and knows that I like Very Silly Things. We enjoyed it a lot. She thought the script was clichéd, I thought it was brilliant. She's the one with the degree in English Literature.

I hadn't seen the film, so all I knew about it was that it was about drag queens on a bus in the Australian desert. I won't trouble you with the plot, which was rather touching.

But I was fascinated by the three main characters, or at least, by their choice of clothes, which is what it's all about. They all wear women's clothes at least some of the time, but in very distinct, individual ways. I found myself thinking about what function the clothes performed for each of them. Not why each of them wanted that job done - motivations are unknowable, and and I don't think it really makes sense to try to explain them - but what job the clothes were doing. And how their decisions when they put on women's clothing might be similar to, or different from, my decisions when, being a woman, I simply get dressed.

None of this stuff is explained in the musical, and I don't suppose for a moment it is in the movie. It's three characters doing what they do. This is just what turned up in my head while I was watching it.

Transsexual Bernadette wears women's clothes all the time, and very elegant clothes, too. Perhaps rather formal and old-fashioned; and always specifically, positively, unambiguously female. Whether she actually "is" a woman seems like a question too big, or perhaps too trivial, to answer. It seemed to me that the function of the clothes was to give other people the cue to treat and perceive her as female, and my instinctive reaction to the character is to respect that wish, at least to the extent of using female pronouns.

Wearing clothes as Bernadette does, with close attention to both their social meaning and their visual unity, is how you get elegance. I can only do this by keeping it very simple, because I don't spend enough time or money on it or treat it as a high enough priority to do anything complex. I try, now and then, but I'd never do it all the time like she does.

Bisexual (or maybe just straight) Tick wears women's clothes as an artistic medium. He's a drag artist, and that's it. When he's not on stage, he mostly dresses like a fashionable man; he doesn't wear women's clothes to walk down the street. Nor does he look much like a woman when he wears them on stage. The job being done seems to be artistic. I wondered if in, say, 1708, when everyone's clothes included more elaboration, the same artistic ambition could have been fulfilled without cross-dressing at all. But I'm not sure about this.

Wearing clothes for their artistic effect is something I do from time to time, just not very well, because I haven't got the trained visual sense. Again, success at it requires effort and time and genuine interest. It really is an artistic endeavour beyond just going for what feels right. I can see that cross-dressing is a fascinating artistic thing to do, if that's what inspires you, and of course fashion designers, and women putting together their own outfits, borrow masculine details all the time for visual effect. I have a very smart coat with a masculine cut and militaresque epaulettes; it looks great on me.

The third character, indifferently called Adam or Felicia, was more of a puzzle to me. He's a homosexual man and has no interest in women at all, not even artistically that I could see. He dresses, more or less, like a glamour model; a female one when on stage, or when up to what he considers mischief, and a male one off. My strongest impression was of artificiality, some sort of doubleness I couldn't see the shape of. His stage clothes have all sorts of female accoutrements but don't actually look in any way female; as can happen with haute couture. He doesn't wish, aspire, or pretend for a moment to be anything but male. That, I was sure, was not what the clothes were doing.

So I wasn't sure what they actually were doing. Maybe nothing more than appealing to someone whose taste I don't share. But a detail that struck me was that when, in dressing for a night out, he wishes to be a little naughtier than usual, he expresses that by putting on a bra. I've occasionally expressed the same feeling by leaving off the bra. The bra is a physical necessity for neither of us: I am about equally comfortable with or without. Therefore, both of us must be wearing one, or not, for its social meaning and visual effect, not for any physical job it performs; essentially for the same reason, but with opposite starting points and opposite conclusions.

I think it was that bit that really fried my brain for the evening.

What is it that makes clothes male or female?

If I were to take a large piece of cloth, fasten it at each shoulder, and tie a girdle round the middle, I would be wearing something that would be regarded as female clothing anywhere in western Europe at any time in the last thousand years. I wouldn't necessarily be well, or fully, dressed; but I would not be cross-dressing - certainly not if I took another piece and wrapped it around head and shoulders as a shawl.

If I were a man and wrapped myself in the same two pieces of cloth in the same way, the same would not be true, or at least not clearly, unless we went back at least another five hundred years. I would be not just eccentrically dressed, but additionally disguised as a woman.

Why?

What would a Martian make of all this?

Luckily, Anne Hollander has written a rather good book about that very subject - at least the history of the why, if not the Martian - called Sex and Suits. She argues from the history of European art and dress that men's clothing is creative, dynamic, and modern, whereas women's clothing is extremely conservative and has only approached modernity in very recent years. Along the way she gives us the exceedingly interesting history of the male suit, which I now see in a new light and with far more appreciative eyes. I think I'll have to read it again. She also curated Fabric of Vision - dress and drapery in painting, which was fascinating but sadly is no longer on the National Gallery's website. I wish she would do a lecture or something about Priscilla and put it on the web.

Anyway, I came home with the feeling that there were great mysteries in everyday things, and that the contents of my wardrobe and drawers were suddenly written in Linear A. I have no idea what they mean any more. The force of habit should tide me over until my illusions come back.

The Truth and Michael Schumacher

From the drafts file. I agreed with Mike Atherton:

"Those who line up to crucify Hamilton are doing so not because he has failed to live up to his own standards but because he has failed to live up to the expectations of others that have been created for him by a pushy father, an agency keen to milk the holy cow for all it is worth and a Formula One team for whom disappointment is measured in millions of dollars rather than the tarnishing of an image. Everything that Hamilton has done on the racetrack has projected a different image, so the reaction to the events in Australia says more about our gullibility than it does about him. "

In a previous life I wrote an internet column about F1 racing, which included a sort-of race report and a sort-of field guide to the drivers of the time (this was for a few years from 1997.) I was young, I was bored, I had finished my education and was wondering what I was meant to do next. I was exploring the concept of actually daring to have a real opinion on something rather than just go along with the essay-writing game. I'd also made a curious discovery; if you write down the bleeding obvious, and you write it well, people laugh.

Being profoundly ignorant of engineering - though it awes and delights me - I largely stuck to the human side.

My approach was very simple. I watched the race on television, and usually the qualifying, rather carefully. I watched the press conferences and grid interviews. I also referred, for a bit of extra colour, to Italian, German, and occasionally French magazines and newspapers.

I almost ignored the British press. I might look at what they said, but not until after I'd written at least the first or second draft. As a consequence, their specific mythological world-view didn't influence me much, while I made good use of the equally deranged but, crucially, foreign insights of the magnificently bonkers Gazzetta dello Sport and the Not Safe For Work Bild. (Which has toned down its internet front page a lot since those days. The last time I looked, they only had a video of the woman who jumped into the polar bear enclosure at Berlin Zoo, and she was fully clothed - though admittedly sopping wet, ample of figure, tenuously suspended on a rope, screaming, and in imminent danger of being eaten by polar bears under the eyes of a fascinated audience.)

I then wrote down and published whatever I was fairly sure sure was both true and funny. I sometimes wrote what wasn't funny, but I carefully deleted anything that, on reflection, I didn't really think was true. Especially if it was also funny, because that way lies Bullshit. And there is enough Bullshit.

At that time, the approach of the humorous writers was to write witty falsehoods, which in my opinion fails because they're always less funny than the truth. The approach of the newspapers and magazines was to elaborate on prevailing mythology without reference to facts. Which makes you refer to Michael Schumacher's blue eyes.

I read about Michael Schumacher's blue eyes many, many times in English and at least once in Italian. A glance at any photo shows that they were - and presumably, still are - hazel. You might say a rather greyish hazel, in certain lights; but not blue. It's simply not possible that any writer who wrote this had in fact looked at the colour of Schumacher's eyes and concluded that they were blue. Now, it is possible that some writers, themselves uninterested in Schumacher's admittedly-plain face, had heard someone else make the same reference and repeated it without asking themselves whether it was literally true. And perhaps it's even possible that their professional editors made the same mistake. But it's more likely they were referring to blue eyes in a non-literal sense which I didn't think then, and don't think now, bears very close examination.

Which kind of drivel do you prefer? I found it hard to decide between them, and preferred to make my own.

Quite a few of my small pool of readers - perhaps a hundred regular readers at the peak - were at least briefly convinced that I was an insider. I was told that one of them guessed I was Becky Herbert.

In fact, I only ever even went to about two races (I enjoyed the experience, but I was young, and alone, and it's terribly expensive). Apart from not being entirely ignorant of two or three languages taught in English schools, I had no access to any information that hadn't been seen by everyone who watched on TV. All I had to do to obtain a loyal following of regular, chatty, and congenial readers was say different things, that had some evidence in their favour and nothing obvious against, and sounded (to me, at least, and perhaps to others) as though they might be true. That was all. I made one of the dearest friends I will ever have in my life out of it.

I don't know why people don't try it more often. Perhaps they don't have time.