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Showing posts with the label Taverna

Oi Papatzides // The Swindlers

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This one came up in my feed just yesterday; it is pretty darn fantastic. Be forewarned, it is a long clip.  The first part seems to be a crap game that goes bad, ending in a brawl and a thrown stool that injures a man who will soon be doing some wonderful dancing.  If you have a plane to catch, if you are discretely watching this in your high school physics class, or if you have seen (or participated in) enough crap games gone bad, you can skip this part and start at 1:57 when the scene shifts to the taverna, or you could skip all the way to 2:45 when the band is featured. For fans of wild and inspired Zembetiko dancing, the fun starts at 4:08 when a sailor pays the band and does a fine job spinning and hoofing  (and doing a nice roll) before dusting himself off and nonchalantly sitting down with his friends.  The true highlight of the video is towards the end at 7:58  when our friend who was the recipient of the flying stool gets up and does his bit to upstage the sailor.  This dan

In Piraeus -- Yiannis Poulopoulos & Eleni Kladis

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 This video starts with a delightful shot of the legs of a dancer -- as is often the case, I am jealous of this fellows shimmying skills as well as his awesome black and white shoes -- they simply don't seem to have shoes like this in my neighborhood shoe shop. We met Yiannis (or Giannis) Poulopoulos a few posts ago in a taverna that may have been the most joyless space in all of Greece.  Here we get to see him in a happier mode and singing with the delightful Elena Kladis.  As in so many of these videos, there is a bit of drama going on -- this time it is a drunken and loathsome character who joins the boogying and ends up doing some plate-smashing (although, for all I know, he is the likable hero of the film who is on a spree).   From the 1966 Movie "The Four Legged Man".  Here is a Google translated plot summary from greek-movies.com: A provincial cafe owner (Kostas Hatzichristos) hopes to conquer one of the village girls. After some strange turn of events, he starts t