Month: June 2007

Categories
cuba salsa

Timba and the challenges of escapist music

While researching the Orishas of the Santeria religion I came across this fascinating academic article about the origins and social impact of timba music.

One of the things that I find intriguing about the popularity of Afro-Cuban music and dance in the non-Spanish-speaking world is that the music and rhythms clearly have the power to transcend the language barrier. Watching people dancing away I sometimes wonder – do people have a clue what the lyrics are saying? Does it matter? Are they somehow getting the ache (the spirit) of the song without understanding the lyric?

If you’ve ever wondered, I highly recommend this article, which

“makes the case of timba as a type of non-engaged music which, while presenting itself as emphatically escapist, during the 1990s has in fact become intensely political in the way it has articulated a discourse challenging dominant views on race, class, gender and nation.”

http://www.sibetrans.com/trans/trans9/perna.htm

Categories
cuba salsa

That’s what I’M talking about…

Just came across this Youtube video entitled, Reggaeton in Cuba, 3 hot girls dancing in a disco.

The first two girls dance about as well as I might hope to dance one day if I keep practicing 30 mins a day. (Oh let’s face it, I’m dreaming.)

The third girl, especially when she gets going, looks to me like a professional dancer. She is awesome!

The band is Charanga Habanera, timba geniuses, and according to the debate on Youtube, the dance is known as reparto. But it looks like what we in the UK refer to as reggaeton.

Dale reggaeton!

Categories
getting published Joshua Files writing

New Content? Did I say ‘New content’?

The comments on Joshua book 1 version 2.0 are in. After a lengthy meeting over fennel tea and swiss chocolates (aren’t we girly?), The Editor and I had a frank discussion of what still isn’t working as well as it could. And from this emerged, yesterday, my new draft of the plot for v3.0. The exciting part for me is that it calls for New Content.

Yesiree. Editing where you’re just cutting is no fun, not to me anyway. There’s a sort of masochistic pleasure to it. Ha! I’ll cut out my favourite chapter then, see if I care! That sort of thing. But adding in New Content is lovely. I wrote one new chapter for version 2.0 and writing that was the best bit.

But version 3.0 calls for the restoration – in suitable form – of two sequences which originally appeared in ‘Todd Garcia, Boy Archaeologist’, the oft-rejected ms which provided the central concept for ‘The Joshua Files’.

And they’re two really fun sequences, too. I’m relocating one to an even more evocative setting – originally set in a Cotswold village, it will now be set in Oxford’s-canal based neighbourhood, Jericho.

It’s my first experience of being edited, and I’m really impressed with the attention to detail in a second edit. Little things get picked up, like the consistency of a particular character’s diction.

I’m going to film myself writing one of these new chapters and put it on Youtube after the book is launched. I got the idea from my mate Noam, about whom I posted a few weeks back. I might even go to Jericho to write it, on my little red laptop.

Hmmmm.

(In an aside, Caitlin Moran writes in The Times Online:

“Big Brotherly love
Quick note to all those who are saying that they are “Not going to watch Big Brother this year, actually” – YOU ARE DELUSIONAL. Get out of denial and put the telly on.”

To which I say…Get behind me, Satan!

Oh help. It’s Friday night – eviction night. Must find salsa event to attend….)

Categories
nostalgia

I am becoming an airhead with the attention span of a five-year old

Actually, my five-year old daughter has a longer attention span than me.

Sometimes I wonder what on earth has become of me. I used to listen to Bach and Mozart and Palestrina and sing in choirs and have a season ticket to the orchestra and read a book a month at least, as well as a bunch of scientific papers, watch TV for hours at a stretch and have dinner parties where people tried to make intelligent conversation.

Well, stuff all that. Now it’s work, family and salsa.

My friend Nathan has the same issue. We did the middle-aged stuff in our twenties and now we live for our nights out on the town. My friend Dr. Rebecca too, who won the Gibbs prize for Biochemistry in our year at Uni – she’s out dancing 3 or 4 times a week, hooking up with Cuban hotties and whatnot…

I can’t watch TV for more than 30 mins without having to get up and see who’s on MSN. I prefer simultaneously to chat to my cousins on MSN, read blogs and post to my own, and watch Youtube videos than to watch TV. (I KNOW!!! What the heck?!)

And…gah…I haven’t finished reading a novel for ages. I can still read non-fiction, just.

I probably need a brain scan. I think the pod people have got me.

But you know what? I feel like Tom in that Tom&Jerry cartoon where Tom inherits a million dollars, on condition that he does no harm to a living creature, EVEN A MOUSE, and after struggling to restrain himself, he gives in and goes back to persecuting Jerry, saying “I’m throwing away a million dollars…BUT I’M HAPPY!”

Now. Who’s on MSN…?

Categories
writing

Left Brain, Right Brain

Beth, looking pretty much as she did 20 years ago… Full moon on the beach at Conil de la Frontera.

Well it’s a funny coincidence because after a discussion with an old friend last week during a moonlit, firelit beach party (with flamenco music) in Andalucia, the same topic came up in the latest Litopia podcast (005).

Beth, a Bostonian woman I hadn’t seen for 20 years since we briefly crossed paths at St Catz, Oxford, now works as the foreign media officer in a hospital in the US. She produces short movies about the hospitals healthcare offerings. She’d known me 20 years ago as a biochemist and was intrigued to hear that I was now going to be an author. “So you can do left brain stuff as well as right brain,” she said, fascinated.

I bet most of us can, although some scientists I know probably can’t. My brother-in-law, for example, who admits to ‘outsourcing’ all his emotions to my wonderfully sensitive, touchy-feely sister. (He won’t mind me saying this, but he might have to check with my sister if he’s supposed to be cross about it…)

I admitted to her that I have a very ‘left brain’ approach to writing, in that I’m massively structural. Beth seemed very surprised that it could work this way, so I explained.

Where did the ‘muse’ come into it, that’s what Beth wanted to know.

It’s an interesting question. I was reflecting with Agent Cox the other day that when I read back my writing, months later, I mean, I look at it in wonder and think, “Did I really write this?”

Not that I’m making a value judgement, just that all that time later, I can’t see what part of me those words came from. I’ve begun to think that some weird entity takes over me when I sit down to write. Now – the entity has its instructions – because the structure is all in place by the time I start to write. But aside from two or three lines dictating what must happen in the next 1500 words, the entity is free to get on with it, and it does, and I don’t seem to have a lot of conscious input. I guess that’s the right brain taking over. It’s verrrry strange.

Borges wrote this wonderful little essay ‘Borges and I’, in which he described how strange it felt to be the writer in this relationship with his famous self. There was the Borges who went and gave talks and was received over the world and lauded. Then there was he, Borges, who wrote the words that made that other Borges so famous. And the writer-Borges didn’t always feel that connected to the famous-Borges.

When I first thought about all this, I hadn’t thought of it in terms of left-brain/right-brain. (Well, duh, I am gradually becoming a hedonistic airhead, in case no-one had noticed). But I guess it kind of is.