My Blue Heaven

Zouk Lambada

I’ve recently started learning a new amazingly beautiful dance from Brazil called Zouk-Lambada (a bit different from the old 80’s lambada). I’ve only been taking classes fora month but I think I’ve fallen in love with the beauty, passion and grace of this dance. It is different from salsa in many ways, and IMO, physically and technically more challenging.

Below is a video recently taken at my dance teacher’s birthday celebration performing a birthday dance with her husband (who is also a Lambada teacher). They look so amazing together!

She is my inspiration in this beautiful art form and as you watch her dance, I think you’ll see why!

(Btw notice the shiny new video player I’m using? I’ve decided to start hosting my own videos.. it’s only a bit of extra work after the video editing – flv compression and incorporating a flash video player into my blog… but seeing as I have the tools and the know-how… Perchè No! Why not!)

Snow Day in London

On 2nd February 2009, London saw it’s heaviest snowfall in 18 years… and I actually made it into work! I’m glad I did though, because we had the most epic snowball fight EVAH! The vlog below documents this epicness, as well as some pretty snowy scenery along the way.

Blogalicious

Don’t ask me why I decided on that title for this post. It just sprung up in my brain and wouldn’t leave. Anyway.. it’s been a while since I’ve blogged and I don’t want this blog to completely die, having been around for all of 6 years, 11 months, 3 weeks and 3 days (you won’t believe how long it took me to figure that out).

So I’ve recently been trying to resurrect some of my online presences. Since I’m just not going to be able to vlog very regularly (it’s just too time-consuming!), I’ll have to fall back to the good ol mediums of text and image. I’ve even resurrected Kazzart Cam! Albeit using a new web 2.0 service called Daily Booth. The whole concept suits me to a tee (once they get their rss feed fixed of course) afterall, it’s exactly what I used to do with my webcam.. except manually.. without all this new-fangled web 2.0 rss, social networking, technological flash webcam schtuff.

I recently had a look at my blog as it was “back in the day” using this really cool tool on Internet Archive called The Wayback Machine. Basically it is an archive of the internet! From as far back as 1996! Of course it doesn’t contain *everything* but there is a lot there.. and I found a few archived versions of kazzart.com from 2003 to 2005. Was rather amusing to take a glimpse back in time.. *sighs*

I’d forgotten what I used to do with my blog.. how on top of my blog entries, I also kept this “Meme” sidebar regularly updated (manually!) – it contained a latest snapshot from my webcam that I kept at work, my current mood, a timestamp, what I was listening to, what I was reading, what I was eating & drinking, what I was wearing, what I was doing, what I was thinking, and upcoming tasks to do! I also had a separate box for my current “wishlist” of shopping items, and another for upcoming events! Basically, it was pretty much Facebook, Twitter & DailyBooth rolled into one… manually kept up-to-date. Gee it’s no wonder I’ve “hit the ground running” so to speak.. and taken to the sites mentioned above like a fish to water. It’s exactly what I used to do.. but made easier! *ruminates over the memories*

I have also recently found my webcam archives which I thought I’d lost! I’ll add those pages to this website at some point too. But that might take a while coz I’d created them using tables for the layout… *eek*! Yeh.. I’m so glad I’ve moved on from those dark days…

Epic Greatness

I had the pleasure of going to see the great jazz legend Herbie Hancock performing live in London last weekend. He played at the Royal Festival Hall in Southbank as part of the London Jazz Festival. It was very awesome and quite intense. An experience I won’t forget for a while. Being able to see such epic greatness in person (I was 3rd row from the front, in direct line of the piano!) was really.. inspiring. Don’t quite know how to describe it.. but it kinda changed the way I percieved music and my own piano playing efforts.

They ended their set (pre-encore) with this old famous tune, Cantaloupe Island. I was very happy.

(Sorry for the incredibly dodgy shaky hidden camera work. I had to hide my camera under my scarf the whole time which, as you can imagine, made it rather difficult to keep things steady and in shot. Especially as I wasn’t able to look at the camera screen very often to check the video frame was ok. But the audio is clear and not distorted, so that’s all that matters.)

Kazz’Art

Look what google alerts fetched me today. My very own street art on the streets of Palermo, Italy.

Photo taken by Micheleska.