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Hadn’t been so taken by painting since Klimt or Schiele. I love these self-portraits. The solid colors, the roughness, the sloppy daubs, the rawness, the sexuality, the odd angles, the sharp, geometrical lines, the intimacy, the posing, the light.

Another good thing that stemmed from High Fidelity was it’s introducing me to the first Bob Dylan song I actually liked: Most of the time (mp3, lyrics).

In an attempt to expand my melodic horizons I had previously downloaded his discography, planning to plod through it eventually. The going, though, proved sheer torture. I don’t like his voice nor his instruments, and all his songs seemed to blend into the same inane harmonica.

When I first listened to Most of the Time I thought an old black woman was singing. I liked the pace though, and I started listening. The structure revealed with a couple of lines and I was hooked. In its epistrophe^WP and nostalgia it reminds me a lot of Alberto Cortez’s Distancia (mp3, lyrics).

I started browsing around with more method (listening the intersection between his discography and Rolling Stone’s 500 greatest songs of all time). I “discovered” I want you, Like a Rolling Stone, Lay Lady Lay, Blowing in the wind, Mr. Tambourine man, Knocking on Heaven’s Door, and Visions of Johanna. Most I’d heard before, covered, but I’d never really listened to them. A masterful songwriter (he’s been nominated several times for a lit Nobel) with “unusual” voice and renditions, Dylan reminds me a lot of Jose Alfredo Jimenez^WP and Georges Moustaki^WP: they’re all acquired tastes, popularized by covers, appreciated only after attentive overexposure. All of which is fine by me, acquired tastes tend, oddly, to be the most rewarding.

May 10 yesterday was Mother’s day^WP here in Mexico and it was a messy affair, what with my now heart-wrenchingly weak grandfather back in our house and all the sad, crowded tension. Me, I put particular attention to the music. The undisputed classic poem for the day and inevitable tearbomb at elementary schools across the country is El brindis del bohemio (lyrics: “Sólo faltaba un brindis, el de Arturo, el del bohemio puro, de noble corazón y gran cabeza; aquel que sin ambages declaraba que sólo ambicionaba robarle inspiración a la tristeza.”), most famously declaimed by Juan Manuel Bernal. It is terribly cursi, pure schwarmerei and maudlin gesticulation, but at least it’s unabashedly so and good at it. That said, I’m glad we managed the day without it.

What surprised me yesterday was our reaction, my family’s and my cousins’, late at night and with some alcohol involved, to Denisse De Kalafe’s Señora, señora (lyrics). The song’s of course more than schmaltzy enough for the occasion but it is actually not that bad. And all of a sudden we all started singing it. We had all heard the song countless times and had been forced to learn the lyrics more than once for school recitals. It wasn’t this big emotional singing, at least not at first nor all along. It all started as some sort of joke but the song has a definite mood. And it was good to sing it.

Much less known (at least here in Mexico) is Los Churumbeles’ Cariño Verdad (lyrics), which, again, and this is perhaps inevitable, is guilty of sentimentalism, but it is all drown in some fantastic music. I didn’t even know what the song was about for a long time, always mesmerized by the tune alone.

Oh and one more song: Gloria Trevi’s^WP thankfully-breaking-the-maudlin-mood A la madre, which was actually quite an innovative, playful song back in the time.

btw, I came from the party with a cool CD Faby lent me: Rhythms del Mundo | Cuba. I had heard one of their songs thanks to Chef and it was very intriguing. The project describes itself as a “collaboration of Western artists and the Buena Vista Sound” (as if Latin America wasn’t Western) and the results are oddly arresting (Latin America appropriating the outside world!). It’s pop made salsa. It doesn’t always work wonders but it is always worth hearing. The two best tracks in my opinion are Coldplay’s Clocks and Maroon 5’s She’ll be loved. Check them out.

...one really do wonders what is the point—other than better displays—of that quaint anachronism that is the museum.

And don’t even get me started on DeviantArt.

I tried to cram myself with Stephen Wolfram trivia (there’s all you might want at his website) before seeing him live at the 2006 Summer Startup School but I wish I had read this brief correspondence he had with Feynman. I would have been in still more awe (which might had been counterproductive, I might no have had the courage to approach him and make a fool of myself).

There was recently (November 2006) an article in Nature about the famous Antikythera Mechanism^WP, a strange Greek contraption from the second century B.C.E. that with its gears and dials is considered by some the first (astrological) computer. Nothing like it is known in human history until a thousand years later (which prompted Professor Mike Edmunds, one of the article’s authors, to regard it as “more valuable than the Mona Lisa.”). Using new advanced imaging techniques the researchers were able to discover much previously hidden complexity in the device and established it was used to model the position of the moon and probably that of other planets. The article was all over the news (in 2002, another famous analysis was released and it was also broadly covered).

Then there’s Richard Feynman and his letters, gathered by her daughter and published in an also fairly recent (April 5, 2005) book titled Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From The Beaten Track^AM. And there’s one from Athens that mentions Feynman’s encounter with a funny little Greek mechanism. It’s a gem of a letter, full of wisdom about science, history, and modernity.

Something made me cry in Harriet Brown’s One Spoonful at a Time —a long, personal story on anorexia from last week’s New York Times. I’ve been unbelievably emotional these days but blame it rather on it being a superbly written account (“The rough days were predictable only in the sense that they kept coming.”) by an extremely intelligent, rational, and honest mother trying to cure her daughter’s anorexia —and that it manages to be a fairly deep, scientific intro into the eating disorder (“Anorexia is one of the deadliest psychiatric diseases; it’s estimated that up to 15 percent of anorexics die, from suicide or complications related to starvation. About a third may make some improvement but are still dominated by their obsession with food. Many become depressed or anxious, and some develop substance-abuse problems, like alcoholism. Almost half never marry.”) while still being punctuated at every paragraph with raw, emotional portraits of desperation (“I woke with my heart pounding, full of rage and hatred for Not-Kitty, the demon who lived on air, who wore my daughter’s face and spoke with her voice.”) and hope.

In what is to date my longest translation I’ve put the story into Spanish: Una Cucharada a la vez. Please pass it along to someone who might need to read it.

Hace unos dias ya que Ben me aviso que, justo despues de un roce con la muerte, Daniel Dennett^WP acababa de escribir una carta, Thank Goodness!, en la que respondia a sus amigos que le preguntaban si en algo se habia afectado su largamente publico ateismo.

La carta me impresiono muchisimo inmediatamente, porque atendia varias preguntas que me estaba haciendo en ese momento (recuerdo que ese mismo dia le decia a mi hermana Chepe en el cafe, medio en broma y medio no, que si realmente no queriamos morir por que no nos volviamos doctores (como Chemito!) y nos poniamos a investigar?) y porque me emociono tremendamente el estilo conciliador pero firme, tan brillantemente elegante, de Dennett. En cierta forma la carta es una buena y sosegada continuacion a la carta elegiaca^ELZR de Eliezer Yudkowsky a su fallecido hermano Yehuda—aquella carta que tanto me marco en su momento, que tanto ame por su cruda rabia y su descarnado optimismo, y que traduje al Español casi por reflejo (reflejo que fue muy gratamente reforzado cuando mi primo Paco me dijo que le llevo la traduccion a sus alumnos de prepa).

He traducido, tambien casi por reflejo, esta carta de Daniel Dennett y se encuentra disponible aqui, como una hoja aparte: Gracias al bien!. Fue una traduccion mucho mas dificil por aquellas oraciones increibles y barrocas de Dennett asi que por favor dejen un mensaje si se les ocurre cualquier forma de mejorar la traduccion. (Gracias, por cierto, a Chemito por asesoria medica en la traduccion.)

Ojala lo lean, ojala los haga pensar y ojala nos veamos en los proximos dias con sus opiniones. (Para ser escritas, las mias tendran que esperar todavia unos dias a que aterrice el desorden de ideas que traigo—esta carta de Dennet me condujo al movimiento de los brights^WP, a las ultimas ediciones de Wired, Time, y Newsweek, a los escritos de Dawkins, a Edge, a leer ciencia, a discusiones, coming-outs, y a muchos, muchos pequeños repensamientos propios).