I absolutely adore this performance. I love how she brings so much of her larger-than-everyone-else personality into a song that was written more than a hundred years ago. Who knew Carmen could be so much fun!

Cecilia Bartoli performs Bizet's Près des ramparts de Séville or the Séguedille from the opera, "Carmen", accompanied by Jean-Yves Thibaudet on the piano...

What is this about?!

Loving the nexus...

We danced a nifty sequence of moves to this particular song in my latest hip hop class. The steps were synchronized to a three-stepping boom-boom-boom beat that underlies the song, a kind of hip hoppy version of the waltz rhythm...



More accurately, others in the class danced while I gave up after the first two steps and just had fun goofing around. Turns out I got the true spirit of this song - relaxing at a spelling bee.

Take that, you overachievers-at-dance-class!

R.E.L.A.X

get this routine down


is the day I probably will get a tattoo. ;-)

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PS: (e:lauren), I am discovering all kinds of crazy hip hop music from the Verve connection. Not bad at all. :)

I see a whitish road and I want it painted black
No whiteness anymore I want them to turn black



(BTW, that is NOT Apocalyptica. It's the London Symphony Orchestra. I am amazed how anyone could NOT tell it is a full scale orchestra and not some dinky 3-cello metal band.)

Just when I was getting ready to launder my feather-shedding monster of a coat and dress down to a lighter coat, Buffalo has a whiteout and 10 inches of snow on the ground overnight. I am back to wearing multiple layers and the being covered with silly-looking feathers all the time.

Why can't the hideous Erie remain frozen till June?? It is so necessary to always be running around in freeze-thaw cycles and dumping undue amounts of snow on the city? My annoyance is even more intense because all this snow and ice totally cramps my style and forces me walk slow. There is nothing quite so unbearable to me as being forced to walk slow like a 90y old. Snow is tolerable but I HATE ice on the pavement. Go away. You are not welcome.

Talking of painting, the Buffalo Management Group, which owns the Mayflower building, recently painted the gorgeous wooden facade of the 1930s wood-and-mirrors elevators with tacky white paint. WHAT THE HELL?! Who paints over old beautiful wood!? It just looks so abysmally cheap now. It's time to write a protest email...

EDIT:
I wrote to Jeremy of the BMG and he wrote back:

"I do appreciate your ideas on this. The natural look does look nice but its not wood. Its metal. If we don't paint the doors it will rust. We will find the right colors for the doors. I am sure you will like what we do. Carpet on the floors will be installed soon."

I had no idea they were metal. They looked and sound as if they are wood... Hmmm... So they will change the ghastly white. I am intrigued about what colour they will pick next. I still can't believe those doors are metal. Maybe I need to go downstairs again and tap on them.

Okay, I am apparently clueless about what is metal and what is wood because Jeremy just wrote:

Yeah if you look closely at the door that hasn't been painted you can tell that its metal. The elevator doors and the trim are both metal on every floor.

!!! In any event, I am glad they won't be tacky white for long.

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PS: The italic tags don't seem to work...

I had a particularly unhinged nightmare yesterday. Among a zillion other uniquely boring pieces of randomness, only one crazy consistency stood out. I got out of 99% of the sticky situations by singing opera.

And not just any opera but this particular piece by Händel (that I believe was specifically designed to inflict the maximum damage to the singers' vocal cords. Note the baroque ornamentations, bordering on the insanely cruel, from 3:21 onwards).



Of course, only Cecila Bartoli can ever hope get out of this song alive and smiling. I woke up with a really nasty throat pain. It felt pretty real. I hope I wasn't bawling out in my toneless voice all night. I think its only logical to conclude the I need to take some voice training. If this ever happens again, I want to be prepared and at the very least be able to sing a very low key version of some simpler (waaaaaaaaay more simpler) opera in tune.

The Community Music School of Buffalo on Elmwood will be offering opera classes from April: It sounds loony now but I am starting to consider enrolling for some diva-training... The thought of being able to burst into opera at the grocery store seems strangely appealing. If I could also take ballet-lessons, then I could be my own musical theatre...

Let's see. How often have I kept writing whatever came into my mind? I would say, most of the times. How often have I not edited what I wrote? Never. So when (e:Paul) challenged me to translate my stream on consciousness here, I was a bit intimidated. I still am. Writing without editing is a luxury that only the most careless or the most devious can get away with. I don't think I am either. In fact, I fear that I will say something inappropriate here and be forced to hide the entry before too many people read it.

Nevertheless, I think the challenge is an interesting exercise in exploring what I am really thinking about...I am recalling the salsa class today. It was fun, but it was not so fun. We didn't have enough partners to rotate in intermediate class today and as a result I was dancing alone for a large portion of a complicated partner-oriented routine. The next time we switched partners, the routine had advanced to include even more moves. I didn't even have the basic moves down yet. And of course, my lack of clarity on what a proper frame means didn't help.

When I first started with the class back in November, Sarah and Sean rotated with the students in class. They somehow stopped rotating earlier this year. So I don't get to dance with them so much. Sometime Sarah dances with me to demonstrate moves to couples nearby but I miss November. I miss that first month of dance. I miss that feeling of floating on clouds. I miss it so much.

Today, when I was bald in class and dancing alone, I realized that the pain of getting cancer lies, perhaps, not in the disease itself but the pain it brings to your interactions with others. You interpret each little disappointment in the light of the disease. I think today, of all days, dancing a dance that was designed to accentuate everything that is right with me and this world, I felt so out of place and so completely in sync with what it is like to have cancer.

But I had fun when I was not dancing alone. I am so glad that Philip is in the class and is always so kind to rotten dancers like me. Today would rank as a complete disaster without him. I love salsa but I hate that it depends so much on partners. I doubt I will ever socially dance because it is painful to feel that you are not enough by yourself. It might be true but I don't like that feeling. Self-reliance is the key to happiness. If you can't have faith in yourself, you can't expect to enjoy life the way it is. Intermediate class leaves me feeling unhappy and feeling inadequate. I hate the feeling. I hate this stream of whiny consciousness. This is SO not making it to the publish button.

If you didn't know already, the awesome yoga place at Bryant and Elmwood (Hand to Heart) has a really wonderful deal going on today.

5 classes are for $15. You can get a maximum of 3 of these passes for yourself and gift some more to others.


(e:metalpeter), this is your chance! Maybe I will bring along tea cups so you can balance them on your head doing the urdhva dhanurasana. ;-)