adventures in babysitting: i was asked by my landlord to look after his son yesterday while he went to a friend's surprise birthday dinner. i didn't mind as i was going to be at home anyway. his son and i watched "finding nemo" and "james and the giant peach" (no CSI this time!) before i marched him up to bed. i helped him get into his jammies but managed to accidentally hurt his willy by pulling his jammy bottoms up too high. whoops! as a bedtime story he wanted me to read the leaflet from the "finding nemo" video cassette case (that's right people, we watched these movies on VHS!), which i found hilarious, then i read to him from a book about animals before he fell promptly asleep. i went back downstairs to watch more tv, secretly praying that he wouldn't wet the bed before his father got home.
i had forgotten how the "james and the giant peach" story went and when i watched the movie (it was the tim burton version) i was impressed by how creative and whimsical the story was. what imagination! it's sad that we lose that sort of imagination as adults, and the belief that things like huge flying peaches can exist in our time and our world. i mean, why not?
jewish rave, anyone?: a friend of mine came up from brighton to visit me and some other friends this weekend. after having lovely brunch and a lazy wander around camden market in the afternoon, i met up with him later on in the evening to go to a club/arts collective/whatever you want to call it - passing clouds - to see a world music group called balkan beat box. i can say with some authority that this was one of the more interesting evenings i've spent out in london.
a la sophia from the golden girls: picture it, london, england, febuary 2009. a winding road leads the group of us to a non-descript warehouse, used as a church on sundays (according to the banner hanging from the roof). after waiting in the line-up/queue for an age, we're finally ushered in to a cavernous room filled to the brim with hipsters in various states of boho chic, with an odd freak in ghost makeup thrown in to keep things spicy. suddenly the band starts playing and it's the oddest music i hear coming from their instruments - jewish klezmer music mixed with spanish beats of some sort, along with a bit that sounds like the soundtrack to "the godfather". and the music wasn't even the weird part (it was actually pretty good); the weird part were the people going absolutely APE SHIT for this music, dancing like their lives depended on it and practically bouncing off the cinder block walls. i've never seen people go nuts like that. it was all quite surreal. who knew an underground jewish wedding could garner this type of reaction?
night night,
CET :o)
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2 comments:
Ouch about the jammy bottoms!
Balkan Beat Box is seriously fun music to get trashed and spin around to. We caught them out our way shortly after I started tracking down various contemporary eastern European groups. While bands like BBB bring intriguing new "crossover" (whatever) elements to the music, often with the goal of making it groovier to shake your ass, the traditional stuff has been the fuel for major bashes (particularly weddings) for centuries. Remember, those events were often the highlights of people's entire lives not so long ago... Imagine entire villages forming chains and circles and streaming through the streets... Ah, how I miss Europe...
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