“recommendations”

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.

Not, of course, that it needs any. But if you insist on one, what better answer than to let metaphor defend itself?

A JS library JS’s first great app? Indeed. jQuery is the shit. It makes JavaScript, and particularly the intersection between JS and HTML, more fun than you thought it could be. It is one big lump of syntactic sugar, sweet as only truly elegant thinking can be. It is crossbrowser, lightweight (~20kb, compressed), and it leverages your CSS knowledge. jQuery + FireBug is raw sex. You’ll find yourself traversing the DOM just to feel the wind on your face.

Las caricaturas de atras del Ocio, Pupa y Lavinia, de un humor neurotico y feminista (muy a la Maitena^{WP, IY}) que me fascina, son de ella y su trabajo de diseño tambien es muy chido.

No se por que me dio un gusto raro saber que es tapatía, ojala algun dia pueda conocerla (creo que anda por Canada). Bueno, el punto es que es mucho muy buena. Leanla. ^_^

It’s because they’re so bad.

Some days ago I bought my first manga^WP on a whim (Kare Kano^{WP, IH} and Furuba^{WP, IH}). I couldn’t believe my eyes reading them. They were so bad, so unlike any other comic I had seen.

They were black and white, with extremely simple, sketchy, cartoonish drawing—much of it seemingly left undone, symbols almost. Text was everywhere, sometimes in sketchy balloons, often not, often pointing (pointing!) cutely at things in tiny, jokey blurbs. Personal, painfully amateurish messages from the author were interspersed along the text (“As I’m writing this, I’ve been cutting my hand on the paper a lot.”). There were patterns instead of scenery, when there was any scenery at all. Long shots took entire panels, empty and mood-setting. Panels felt like paragraphs instead of pigeonholes and drawings flowed in and out of them, below and atop. By far, most panels were filled with people interacting, their faces and expressions. Closeups were everywhere. Everything was just so loose, so personal, so free, so bad.

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.

That multimedia brings subjects “alive” is a painfully false cliche these days. For me at least. Maybe I’m just disappointed by the yawning gap between promise and (often gratuitous) delivery. Maybe I’m still too word-centric.

Thus my surprise with this animation of that most famous embroidered account of the 1066 Norman invasion of England (→), the Bayeaux Tapestry^WP. It’s so simple and yet so stunningly effective. (Though of course I have a sweet spot for animated tapestries…)

I can’t watch it without wondering what its weavers at the turn of the first millennium would say if they could look at their creations now.

(via Very Short List, which neatly sums up the work with a Venn diagram—as is their intriguing custom—, )

The recent (April 16) revamping of TED.com around their famous talks provides the perfect excuse for me to finally write about them. And what I want to say boils down to one thing: watch them. They’re free. They’re one of the most exciting things content-wise to happen to the web of late. They have a cumulative effect. The audio and video quality are superb. They are raw, distilled passion. Their speakers are truly among the world’s most talented, most inspiring people (passion begets passion).

And if you only have time for one talk, let it be Eva Vertes’s—probably the best video I’ve seen, ever. Not only does she (very convincingly) puts forth a fascinating (and, oddly, satisfying) theory of cancer in less than 19 minutes, making it all seem as the simplest, most logical thing in the world, she also does it with a naive, youthful spunk that disarms you right away. I swear if I had seen this in high school I might have thrown it all away and study medicine. She’s that good. Now I’ll settle to try to convince my brilliant med-studying sister to tackle cancer. She too is that good.

Also not to be missed are…

I don’t even remember how it was that last Thursday morning I ended up reading Sutherland’s classic article. But I’m glad I did. It was exactly what I needed. Thank you Mr Sutherland.