2006

I must confess that I love Spanglish in a kitschy, campy, and yet honest kind of way.

It all started with Molotov and their ¿Dónde jugarán las niñas? album of my early adolescence. I loved their mongrel insults (”fuck you puto baboso!”) and their Voto Latino song:

More recently, a song by Yolanda Perez (featuring “Don Cheto”), Estoy Enamorada, has brought it all back to me:

Akwid, a recently famous group from Los Angeles, is a slightly different matter. Their music itself, for one thing, is something both truly different —mixing Mexican Pacific brass band with hip-hop— and truly good —the tuba “burping along like a nimble elephant.” But they don’t really speak Spanglish. It’s mostly just Spanish, but a different one from mine. One even more imbued with American influence.

They have a song called Pobre Compa in which the singer tells about a romantic triangle between him, his best friend and a girl. There’s a voice-over at the middle of the song in which the singer addresses the girl. One hears knocking, a door opening, and the following brief dialogue:

You can’t tell by the text, but the girl speaks her 5 words with a distinct accent that I love: crisp Spanish with an English cadence —which, btw, is completely different to gringo Spanish: broken Spanish with no cadence at all; an English tongue trying to mimic, unsuccessfully, Spanish sounds. And there was something else, beyond the accent, that I found interesting and appealing but couldn’t precisely pinpoint. I know now: it’s that “pienso que si”; a perfectly valid Spanish sentence, of course, but it feels somewhat unnatural to my Spanish sensibilities. “Pienso que si” mimics the English “I think so” where I would have more naturally said “creo que si” (“I believe so”).

It’s similar to the phrase “dulce para mi ojo” in their Taquito de Ojo song. That’s a quintessentially English phrase, “eye candy”, translated to Spanish inside a song with a quintessentially Spanish phrase as its title: “taquito de ojo” (“eye taco”). I like that.

Truth is, I love this blending whatever the language involved, I “delight in mélange.” Just to give an example, yesterday, via Diana, I found about a French Canadian group called K’maro and I was thrilled. They have true talent for Franglais, just look at this gem:

Or think about how “weekend” is now a French word. It’s much more natural to French cadence that the clunky “fin de semaine”.

With the above text, Richard Feynman gave rise in 1974 to the concept of cargo cult science: pseudoscience in which only the trappings of science are cultivated. He makes a beautiful point through it and you should read that speech of his, it’s really good. In today’s yoga class, as my mind strayed during a ridiculously protracted baloney preaching, I chanced upon an interesting twist to it.

First, let me confess that I fell in love with yoga since my first class. I love the elegance, the gracefulness, the relaxation, the concentration, the self-awareness, the girl in green (a classmate), the austerity (only your body and a towel), the small daily improvements, the personal challenge of the perfect asana, the beauty and harmony of many postures, the sensuality of some, the ascetism of others, the breathing, the exhilaration that follows a class. I’m painfully stiff but I know I will get better. I want to. But this love only makes me loathe more the other, dark side of yoga: the mystical b.s., the astrology/chakra/aura/spirit/numerology/energy mumbo-jumbo.

Today I endured a particularly severe sermon (~40 min.) in which almost every esoteric subject save alien abductions was broached. When I decided I had had enough—and, believe me, I can be patient when listening to cranks—I stood up and prepared to leave. The teacher understood, laughed somewhat sarcastically, and wrapped the class with the closing posture. I thanked her for the class and left.

I knew that yoga carried such baloney baggage before I entered, of course, but I enrolled despite it. As much as the pundits (yogis) say they’re an inseparable whole, they aren’t, and I’m only interested in the exercise, the secular part. The funny thought that crossed my mind today was that, in a way, what I want is a cargo cult yoga.

Click to see full-size.

Isn’t the “simply have a bit of human contact” part surprising?

(Parental Advisory: Some barely concealed nipples ahead.)

...so please let me write this and sleep afterwards:

Siempre me gusto que Mafalda festejara la llegada de la primavera. Nunca esta de mas un motivo para alegrarse. Llego la primavera, Chés!

1. Given a sufficiently complete Beatles discography, every song will include at least one song from the Beatles among its best-acoustic-match recommendations.

(Read more on the wonderful Predixis Mixer.)

Platicaba antier con Adolfo en el Starbucks cerca del TEC y como enseguida tenia el una conferencia sobre la pobreza, decidi acompañarlo. Me dio mucho gusto ver que la conferencia la organizaba y conducia Lalo, uno de los mejores maestros de mi prepa, pero la conferencia en si fue perfectamente olvidable: los mismos lugares comunes de siempre, el mismo rollo, el mismo izquierdismo self-righteous, los mismos rezagos ancestrales, las mismas discusiones bizantinas (Cuantos tipos de pobreza hay? Son mejores los programas universalistas que los focalizados? Como definimos indigena? Cuantos angeles caben en la cabeza de un alfiler?).

En medio del choro mareador de uno de los ponentes oi la gastadisima frase “inequidad en la distribucion de la riqueza” y alguna minuscula sinapsis debio unir a dos neuronas olvidadas, pues vi de repente la concepcion (en mi opinion erronea) de la riqueza que esa oracion implicaba. Ya en mi casa repase los ensayos de Paul Graham y, efectivamente, es un ensayo suyo, Mind The Gap, el que maravillosamente desenmascara y desacredita esta concepcion (que el llama el Modelo Papi de la Riqueza):

En fin, se lo comente a Adolfo (rayandole su cuaderno) y el me contesto con su ya famoso “Ashh…”©, pero aun asi me motivo a hacerles el comentario a los ponentes (darle valor a otra gente es la cosa mas facil del mundo). Cuando (dei gratia) acabo la conferencia y llego la hora de las preguntas, dije lo siguiente (o algo muy parecido, el original quedo escrito en la libreta de Adolfo):

Silencio. Mi corazon golpeteaba y yo solo agradecia no haber tartamudeado severamente. Creo que oi un “Uhhhhhh” de “Tomen eso!” de alguien del auditorio. Adolfo dice que oyo un aplauso aislado. Mas silencio. Lalo interviene, levantando por fin su mirada de mi y llevandola al punto de fuga, “Alguien mas tiene otra pregunta?”.

I’ve been walking a lot lately, walking and driving, and I’ve seen more people in the last 2 weeks than in the past 2 months. What never fails to surprise me every time I pay attention is the multiplicity of their circumstances. What troubles that sad woman in the car behind me? That man right there is obviously cheating her wife. The father on the coffetable at my side talks to his daughter and son about graduation trips, money, leisure, the future, whatnot. That well-off lady over there, the one sipping her coffee and chatting with her friends, doesn’t know her two tweens are being stabbed to death right now by the ex-boyfriend of her eldest daughter.

I read somewhere, Savater I guess, about a dying old lady who, confined to bed, comforted herself thinking that, somewhere, someone was making love at that very moment. I couldn’t find that particular quote (there go 3 hours), but my quest wasn’t entirely fruitless. I chanced upon the same thought carried to the extreme: a (looong) list of right-now happenings. It’s often quite tacky (cursi)—Andrea’d love it—but surprisingly original at times (specially at its many gay moments).

En ficcion, el primer paso para crear destruccion digna de ese nombre es describir algo tan bello que duela destruirlo. Si quieres un divorcio realmente tragico y amargo, muestra primero lo feliz e idilico que fue el noviazgo. Para que que duela la caida, vuela alto. No duele el vacio, duele el recuerdo de lo que alguna vez hubo, la superposicion.

Es por eso que creo que el prefijo “des” (y su equivalente en otros diomas) es la forma suprema del lenguaje para expresar destruccion. Sad no lastima, no puede, lo mismo que unhappy, que insinua felicidad solo para arrebatarla. Existe algo mas triste que el desamor, la desesperanza, el desencanto, la desilusion, el desamparo?