Monday, August 10th, 2009
I love me a B Boy. Of all the crazy stuff you see people doing in the streets to try and make money, B Boys crap all over everyone. If you come across the right crew, you are in for some pure entertainment. Sure, I’m sure none of them are paying for penthouses with what they make bustin’ a move in the street, but hey, everyone suffers for their art, right?
Given my love of the B Boy, I will always stop and watch a crew I see throwing down on a street corner. Sadly, the one crew I see on a regular basis here in Toronto need a masterclass in the art of hustling STAT. Can we get some New York breakers up here to show them how it should really be done?
In Dundas Square (Toronto’s version of Times Square, supposedly), there’s always a crew of B Boys (actually ‘crew’ may not be the right word. There’s 3 dudes). I cycle past them every night on my way home from work. They have music blaring, some cardboard thrown down on the ground, the only thing missing is someone actually doing some break dancing. I have stood there for minutes at a time, waiting for someone to do something, anything and yet nothing seems to happen.
There’s always a small crowd of maybe five or six people standing around them, equally as bemused as I. One of the three ‘B Boys’ is walking around the area with a sign that says ‘Donations Make Us Dance.’
Um, excuse me? Come again?
I think not bitches! How about you throw down, do a few windmills, an electric boogaloo and the robot and if I’m suitably impressed, I may make a donation. What kind of nonsense is that?!
No wonder I never see them actually dancing. I haven’t seen one person make a donation to their cause yet. You would think that would make them switch up their game plan a little and actually dance for people.
Don’t make me challenge you to a dance off people!
Tags: B Boys, beat street, dancing, lame Toronto hustlers
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Thursday, May 14th, 2009
I’ve discussed the unfortunate body spasms (AKA dance skills) of white people before, yet the epidemic still spreads.
Nowhere is it more evident than in the Ellen Degeneres Show audience. It’s like a microcosm of no rhythm.
I am convinced that before you are granted tickets to the show, you have to answer a series of questions:
Can you dance? No.
Do you have rhythm? No.
Do you have any ability to clap in time with a beat? No.
When you dance, do people think you’re having a seizure? Yes.
Good. You’re in.
Observe for yourself above. It’s a complete clusterfuck in there. It’s a room full of the aunts and uncles you don’t want to invite to your wedding for fear that this will occur on the dance floor.
By the way, none of this applies to Ellen herself, because she can get down. The woman’s 50 and rocks it out better than anyone in there. She must be apprehensive as she grooves through the audience. At any second, someone could get taken down. They must have paramedics on standby. You can’t have that many white people together in a room with music playing and not expect a medical emergency to happen.
Tags: cease and desist, dancing, seizures, white people
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Tuesday, March 17th, 2009
Happy St Patrick’s Day bitches. Some may be surprised to know, I’ve never been big on this celebration. I celebrate my Irishness daily, I don’t need a special event. Plus, this day is mainly for ‘Irish Americans’, the majority of whom have never been to Ireland and think that our entire culture revolves around drinking yourself into oblivion. Bitch please. Anyhoo, my own way of celebrating today will be to share a little story from my youth.
Being that my mother is from Dublin, I’ve been to Ireland more time than I can count. Where I grew up in England, my community was pretty Irish, with a lot of my school friends mothers’ having also grown up on those shores. It was a kind of a bond we all had. I always looked forward to our trips to Ireland to see my grandmother and hear everyone speaking with my mum’s lovely accent. Dun Laoghaire will always feel homely to me as a result.
But nothing stamps the Irish into you like having to learn Irish dancing.
Randomly one day at primary school, the option came up to have Irish dancing classes on Thursday nights. A shit load of girls signed up for it (probably because all our mothers were Irish). This was pre-Riverdance, so we didn’t really know what to expect, but I remember being very excited for the first class.
Our teacher’s name was Lisa. She was a pale skinned, long haired Irish beauty with legs like tree trunks. Her mother (a mass of wrinkles with a wig and pencilled on eyebrows) was in charge of the tape player and shouting at us. We learned a few basic jigs in that first class. It was all so fun and new and the traditional music was great. We were having a blast….until the last half an hour.
If we had wondered at the beginning of the class why Lisa’s legs were like tree trunks, we found out at the end. She made us stand in a row and repeat this particular step from the jig over and over, non stop, for half an hour. If someone got tired and stopped, they got screamed at and we all had to start over. We called it ‘Murder Minutes’. And that wasn’t just the first class. That’s how Lisa chose to end every class. It’s a wonder any of us went back. We had to kick our legs up to a certain height, keep our toes pointed, control our breathing, make sure our jumps didn’t wane. It was like some sort of Irish jig boot camp. If we were going to do this, Lisa wanted to make sure we did it right. She was hardcore.
After a couple of months of lessons, came the term ‘Feis’ - an Irish dancing competition. It all started to click. Lisa was being a hard ass because she wanted us to compete. A few of us who were better at it (and yes, that included me. I can rock a jig like you wouldn’t believe), signed up and entered the Feis circuit.
The preparation was pretty intense. We had to get a dress (and if you’ve ever had to wear an Irish dancing dress, you know those bad boys weigh about 20 pounds), the soft, lace-up shoes, the weird tube socks that damn near cut off the circulation in your legs. You’d wear your hair in rags overnight to ensure you had perfect ringlets come morning. And not to forget, ‘Murder Minutes’ with Lisa at every practice.
The first Feis I went to was in a dingy town hall. I went with my mother. We walked in and there was a sea of people. There were girls dancing up on stage and what seemed like a thousand people milling around. Mothers with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths, yelling at their daughters as they ripped rags out of their hair and perfected their curls. We even saw one mum slap her daughter as she came off stage, then tell her to stop crying. They were classic stage mothers. Up to this point, we’d all found Irish dancing quite enjoyable, but throw a competition in there and people lose their minds. My mother was horrified.
I put on my 20 pound dress, tube socks and soft shoes. I made my way to the stage, where someone pinned a number on me, cued up my music and I got to dancing in front of the judges. It was over fairly quickly. I won a medal. But all of that was overshadowed by the fact that I couldn’t wait to get out of this smoky room full of nasty women.
My love for the jig died not long after that. I just didn’t want to do it if I had to do the competitions with those bitches. I went on to join a dance school, but the thing that sparked my love for dance was definitely Irish dancing.
And before Riverdance went and made it all Hollywood, it simply looked like this:
Tags: dancing, good Irish girl genes, the irish
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Monday, August 4th, 2008
I think it’s time we discussed a difficult topic for us paler skinned people: dancing.
*This doesn’t apply to me, because I can back it up with the best of them, but for all of you who struggle to bust a move, please take note*
What the hell are you doing?!
I don’t understand what happened with the rhythm gene and white people, but it seems to have bypassed a great many of us.
When I go to a club with mostly white people in it, I hesitate to get on the dance floor. It’s like heading right into the eye of a storm. Limbs flailing around here, there and everywhere – it’s a hot mess. I’ve had my toes stamped on, been burnt with cigarettes and almost had my eye gauged out by caucasians lost in the groove. It’s murder on the dance floor, literally.
White girls basically think they’re strippers when they hit the club. Legs akimbo, they’ll roll their hips, shimmy their boobs and feel themselves up like they’re trying to pay college tuition. All of this is, naturally, completely out of time with the music and oblivious to the style of music being played. Given that most of them are in a drunken stupor, that alluring sex kitten look they’re going for is way off point and they end up looking like, well, a drunk girl trying to look sexy. So, mission accomplished, I guess.
White dudes don’t know what the hell is up. They don’t seem to be able to dance with a girl in any way, shape or form. Step 1: hold girl’s hips. Step 2: move in time to the music. There’s not that much room for error there, but a white guy can demolish even the simplest of moves. On the rare occasions a white guy does actually attempt to dance with me at a club, I take a moment to pray to Jesus, Mary and Joseph to bless the dance floor with the power of the Holy Ghost. He’ll grab you and gyrate uncontrollably. I have, on more than one occasion, been on the verge of calling in a medic, convinced that the guy was having some sort of epileptic fit. When all else fails, White Guy will return to the dance moves of yore and bust out a little ‘twist’, ‘mash potato’ or such like, or some kind of partner dance where his dumb ass has you doing the tango to Lil Wayne.
So white people, I don’t know what to suggest. Those of us who were blessed with rhythm and some hot dance stylings have been picking up the slack for you long enough. I’d say a good place to start would be not thinking of music as some sort of instructional video. When House of Pain tells you to ‘Jump Around’, you don’t literally have to do it. If that Flo Rider dude says to ‘Get Low’, you don’t actually have to. And when Usher talks about ‘bending over to the front and touching your toes’, well, I think I speak for everyone when I say, for the love of Christ, please don’t.
Everyone take a breath. Chill out. Try to feel the groove, rather than defecating all over it. And remember, the dance floor was only ever a battle ground in Beat Street.
Tags: dancing, white people
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Thursday, July 17th, 2008
A few weeks ago, I wrote my life list.
So, I figured, I better get cracking on some of this stuff.
This week’s challenge was number ten on my list: Get back into dance and perform.
I’m not quite at the performance stage just yet, but I took my first jazz class in over 3 years and frankly, I rocked it.
I was a little apprehensive as I stepped into the large studio space into a room full of serious looking leotard-donned people (I opted for the track pants/tank top casual dance ensemble). I sat down and did some random stretches, hoping the basic warm-up techniques would come back to me.
The teacher arrived and did the first half of the warm up on the floor. I stretched and got loose to the sounds of Janet Jackson and followed along quite nicely. The second half of the warm up was a whole bunch of ballet, which caught me off guard. I tried to blend in, but most likely looked like someone who just got off the ‘special bus’.
Then came the ‘routine’ portion of the class. Mid way through, I needed CPR, but I battled through to the end. And as my toes pointed and my arms stretched and my body twisted, turned and leaped, I realised, I’ve missed this. So much. I wanted the beat to keep playing and my body to just keep moving.
I left sweaty, tired and blissfully happy.
Then came the next day. I woke up with that satisfied feeling, you know the one, where your body feels a little fatigued because you put it through its paces. The bike ride to work wasn’t too bad. Over the course of the day, I noticed that when I’d get up from my desk, my legs weren’t cooperating with the program with their usual ease. The pace of my walk slowed down somewhat and a dull ache spread throughout my entire body, to the point that lifting my pen felt like championship weightlifting.
As you’ve probably guessed, the bike ride home was not pretty. Come home time, my legs were in full on failure. The pedals on Clooney felt like giant rocks that I was trying to push up hill. ‘Are those….muscles?’ I asked myself, looking down at my shaky legs as they attempted to get me home. The harder I tried to pedal, the more I appeared to be going in slow motion. I had to stop midway up a hill and wave the cars around me as I caught my breath (and it wasn’t even really a hill, more of a ‘slight incline’, I just thought ‘hill’ would make it sound better).
As I sit here now, I’m not sure if I’ll ever regain full use of my legs, my right shoulder and I think I have sustained permanent damage to my pinky toe, but I can’t wait for next week’s class.
Bring it bitches, bring it all on!
Tags: bikes, Clooney., dancing, pain
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Tuesday, June 10th, 2008
On friday night, after my shiteous week, I decided it was high time I went out and shivered me timbers (that’s ‘danced’, for those of you that don’t know). I called up my main gay and we put a plan together for a stonkin’ good time.
The heat wave hit on friday and the humidity was pretty much unbearable. I was getting ready, but it was too hot to sit around in my glad rags. So I had my hair and make up done and my heels on, but I just lay naked, spreadeagled on my bed to try and stay cool. What? Oh, don’t act like you don’t wander round your house naked in heels.
At midnight, I threw my dress on and was out the door. My outfit was a big hit with the tranny prostitutes on my street. I told them all they looked sexy too, which I’ll just classify as a white lie, for now.
We went to a few bars, boogied down, scoped out hot boys and by the end of the night, I had picked up a gaggle of gays.
We decided to round the night off with a coffee. As we were walking down the street, we saw a woman in a rather extravagant outfit. She was dressed like she was on her way to the carnival in Rio; big feather head dress, sequined one piece with a thong. When she turned around, I realised it was my landlady. And about two seconds after that, I realised that my landlady is actually a ‘landman’.
She was so excited to see me. I found it difficult to stay focused on the conversation without glancing down at her crotch region, where there is much more going on than there is on your average woman. There had been some tucking, but not enough. The game was up. But she’s damn good! I’ve had many conversations with this woman and not once did I ever realise she’s actually a pre-op transexual. She’s had a boob job, collagen lip injections and a very impressive booty. If you see her in regular clothes, you’d never know. But a sequined one piece is unforgiving on even the most womanly of women.
She was out there doing magic tricks involving a condom, which I won’t go into, but they were truly very impressive.
And there you have it. Yep – just another day in the neighbourhood.
Tags: dancing, dude looks like a lady, landlady becomes landman, the gays
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Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
Stripping! Yeah, that’s right.
Well, more specifically, pole dancing. A couple of weeks ago, me and my girls took a pole dancing class. Technically, there was no removal of clothing, but it was still a good time. (Come to think of it, if people actually are removing clothes in that class, I may have to go for some sort of medical screening).
I was a little apprehensive before the class, but it’s amazing what a pole and some cheesy 80s rock classics will make you do. Sure, having to give my girl a lap dance was a little uncomfortable (especially when she didn’t pay me at the end of it), but other than that…
I’m not sure if this is a good or a bad thing, but I’m actually a damn good pole dancer. About 20 minutes into the class, I was finding the twists and twirls around the pole pretty easy. By the half hour mark, I was just pissed off that I hadn’t been doing it for the past few years. Damnit, I coulda been making serious money!
If only my pesky morals didn’t get in the way. They always ruin a good time. Mind you, I could just don a blonde wig, change my name to Natasha, work the pole and no one would be any the wiser (Natasha is a total stripper name to me).
And now to issues overseas
The other day I was watching the *ahem* really informative CNN news, to see what the crack was with the cyclone devastation in Burma. (And here lies issue number one: it’s called Burma, not Myanmar, CNN. Seriously, get with the program.)
The overly made-up studio anchor is talking to the correspondent overseas in the midst of the devastation. One of the first questions was (I kid you not): ‘How will this affect the rice shortage back here in the States?’
Jesus America! Again with the rice?! Fucking let it go already. Never mind the fact that hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives in the cyclone, newly orphaned children are roaming the streets trying to figure out how to survive, and the estimated death toll could rise to over a million without the provision of clean water and sanitation. Yes, forget all that and lets talk about how all that will affect a few million obese douchebags going without a couple of grains of rice for a while back in America.
CNN, get your head out of your ass and get over yourself.
Tags: dancing, Stripping, the US of A
Posted in life | 3 Comments »