“transcriptions”

Yey! A playlist serendipity has brought me back Roy Vedas’s wonderfully weird Fragments of Life (its weirdness is a fact). If I remember correctly it was Pako who first showed it to me, late nineties, and I hadn’t heard it in years (old, how past starts to pile up). Anyway, it’s definitely one of my favorite songs. Here, enjoy.

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”.

Jorge Wagensberg tiene un libro delgado y delicioso (119 paginas) que me fascina. Se llama Si la naturaleza es la respuesta, ¿Cuál era la pregunta? y consiste de alrededor de quinientos aforismos sobre la incertidumbre (y su definición de incertidumbre es una de las muchas joyas de este libro). Para mi, que tanto me gustan las definiciones y La Forma, este libro es un manjar. Vaya, le sale tan bien eso de hilvanar aforismos que hasta pareciera que se ha inventado un nuevo género literario.

Pienso transcribir el libro entero e irlo subiendo, poco a poco, en este post. Iba a empezar hoy con 20 frases pero me avorace y ya casi me echo medio libro.

Actualización 27/Octubre/2006: ¡Termine por fin de transcribir el libro!

Spielberg^{WP, IMDB}’s Munich^{AM, IMDB, WP} is a great film; there’s not a scene I would change in this 164-minute movie. On the other hand, the man’s starting to scare me, I mean, how can he be so talented? Every film of his I’ve seen is a masterpiece, to the point that it seems almost unfair that someone should hoard so much talent. He embodies that Gap Paul Graham talked about in much of Hackers and Painters:

More to the point, Eric Bana^{WP, IMDB} and Ayelet Zorer^IMDB (sometimes called Ayelet Zu’rer or Ayelet Zurer) were the two Munich actors that impressed me most, and my favorite scene from the movie was the sex scene between their characters, Avner and Daphna. It is remarkable both for the long-during, extreme closeup on Daphna, and for the fact that she’s visibly pregnant all along. Closeups are one of the wonders of film, something unthinkable in theater, and this is one of the best ones I’ve seen: for over 30 seconds there’s only Daphna—beautiful and breathy and rhythmic and smelly and sweaty and lusty and doe-eyed and blushing and nubile. As for the visible pregnancy… well, I’m somewhat disturbed to find that very arousing, but I guess it’s all part of being a male homo sapiens at a reproductive age.

I couldn’t find any screenshots of this particular scene on the web—I seem to have very refined tastes—so I had to download the movie and take screenshots myself. Here they are:

I don’t think it needs much context but this conversation takes place inside some sort of virtual reality where dozens of people are voluntary trapped watching an endless film. A favorite quote of mine. I had to transcribe it myself because it’s nowhere to be found around the web. Weird, that.

Amen.

Good ole Tetris is a wonderful example of those possibilities, of that unreality, and so is Photoshop. For a more recent, fascinating example look no further than the Namekuji game (but be warned, by clicking this link you therewith relinquish the next couple of hours).