Camila-besame (video oficial)

Lyrics courtesy of lyricsmania.com

Bésame
ya es tiempo
sin piedad
y en silencio

Bésame
frena el tiempo
haz crecer
lo que siento

Bésame
como si el mundo
se acabara despúes

Bésame
y beso a beso
pon el cielo al revés

Bésame
sin razón
porque quiere el corazón

Bésame

Sienteme
en el viento
mientras yo
muero lento

Bésame
sin motivos
y estaré
siempre contigo.

Bésame
como si el mundo
se acabara despúes

Bésame
y beso a beso
pon el cielo al revés

Bésame
sin razón
porque quiere el corazón

Bésame

Bésame
como si el mundo
se acabara despúes

Bésame
y beso a beso
pon el cielo al revés

Bésame
sin razón
porque quiere el corazón

Bésame

Bésame, asi sin compasión
quedate en mi sin condición
dame tan solo un motivo

....y me quedo yo (4x)

Now where did I leave that sense of humor?

You're probably sick to death of reading about my quest to improve my very rudimentary Spanish. I'm leaving for Mexico July 1, and I've been approaching it all oh-so-seriously. For example, when it became apparent that I couldn't just pluck out all the Italian words I knew and replace them with Spanish, leaving the grammatical structures intact in my brain, I sprang into action.

I cancelled my subscription to RAI-TV.

I stopped buying Corriere and Gazetta dello Sport.

I stopped flipping through the latest issue of L'Espresso in a hot bubble bath.

I've missed the news from Rome and all the latest episodes of Inspector Montalbano, I don't have any idea what's going on in the Amanda Knox appeal, and I haven't seen any funny Berlusconi plastic surgery photos for weeks. Consequently, I've become very grumpy. And not only has my Spanish not improved, but I've regressed so quickly in Italian that when a friend greeted me with the usual Ciao bella, come stai?, I completely froze and finally blurted out, Muy bene, gracias, e tu? Eh? My dreams of code-switching are rapidly going up in smoke!

So Wednesday when I was having my weekly conversation in Spanish with my friend Fernando from Staten Island, I was becoming increasingly frustrated as I struggled to express myself. I couldn't get out a full sentence without backtracking and correcting myself, and about half of what I said was still in Italian. If you know me, you'll be shaking your head here because you know that when I'm upset, my voice goes up several octaves and gets squeakier and squeakier. Finally Fernando put a gentle hand on my arm and said, "Dios mio! That's who you remind me of! Eres Piolin!!!! Hahahahahahahahaha!"

Piolin ! Tweety Bird! I stared at him dismayed for about a minute before I realized what a perfect ass I've been the last few weeks. Why the hell have I been stressing out and aiming for perfection? It's taken all the fun out something I love. Finally, I busted up laughing and vowed then to leave my evil twin, Type A Loony Tunes, home this summer. I'll just have to depend to some extent on the kindness of strangers.

Mexican pop music is still playing in the background as I clean house and surf the net, but instead of taking notes and running to the dictionary every two minutes, I'm singing along at the top of my lungs (sorry, neighbors). And now that I've relaxed into the language, I'm feeling more receptive and able to communicate, on a basic level, anyway. So you'll excuse me now while Mr. Bubble and I run a hot bath and indulge in a little gossip about the Vatican!

Lila Downs: censura, mujer y el indigenismo en Oaxaca

photo via liladowns.com


I love Lila Downs. I first saw her about three years ago when my colleague invited me over to her loft on the Lower East Side for dinner and this lovely woman with long braids and a Mexican blouse over jeans came out the front door. My colleague waved and then said to me sotto voce, "That's Lila. She's very sad because she and her husband really want to start a family."

What she didn't mention in her haste to pass along some gossip was that Lila Downs is a wonderful singer from Oaxaca, a fact I discovered last summer when I heard her music while I was in Mexico and bought several of the CD's which I then played constantly at work last fall. This went on for weeks before my colleague asked me if I remembered meeting Lila. It took me a minute to realize that the singer and the young woman who wanted to start a family were one and the same person. My colleague went on to regale me with the news of her adoption of a young boy, how she hears Lila and her husband Paul rehearsing with the band when they are infrequently in New York City, how she gets free tickets to the NYC concerts but never goes because she's too busy, etc., etc., etc., with me open-mouthed all the while.

In addition to Spanish and English, Lila Downs often sings in the indigenous languages of Mexico. I was anxious to see her when she had a two-night gig in New York in March but unfortunately was out of town those days. She's just finished up a stint in Mexico and apparently will be in Europe this summer, so I won't be able to see her in Oaxaca, either. But I've got four or five of her CD's on my iPod, and she's one of the singers I listen to for help with Spanish.

She gave an interview to a Michoacan newspaper last week and spoke about the three issues that concern her most: censorship of the press and artists, women's rights, and the problems faced by indigenous people in Oaxaca. The article's in Spanish, so I am excited that I was able to read the whole thing without resorting to my dictionary or Google Translate. I plan to translate it word-for-word as an exercise, but the gist of the interview is as follows:

She speaks about growing up Mexican-American and not being in tune with her heritage, even rejecting her indigenous identity and feeling no sympathy for her mother and grandmother who both spoke indigenous languages. Through music, she came to embrace the Mexican half of her heritage, and she incorporates many traditions and languages in her performances.

She notes that although statistically things seem to be better in Oaxaca for journalists and artists than they were a decade ago, there are still groups like organized crime, a government who can act with impunity, and brutal military and police who have a vested interest in oppressing any kind of dissent.

Indigenous people make up a third of the population of Oaxaca state, and of those, half live in Oaxaca city while the rest live in some of the poorest and most marginalized communities in Mexico. Life is especially hard for women, who are victims of centuries of machismo, and consequently for their children, who suffer from high rates of malnutrition, sickness, and, if they live to be old enough, eventual illiteracy.

Many of the concerts she gave in Mexico were with the Oaxacan band Tierra Mojada to benefit the scholarship fund of Guadalupe Musalem (more on them in the next post) to help young Oaxacan women continue their education.

So that's my very basic understanding of what she was saying. If you want to read a more accurate version in Spanish, click on the link below:

Lila Downs: censura, mujer y el indigenismo en Oaxaca: "Lila Downs: censura, mujer y el indigenismo en Oaxaca, Lila Downs habla de la censura, la mujer y el problema de indigenismo en Oaxaca."

Guey, donde esta mi carro?

My Mexican friends tell me that, besides Mande?, the most important word I need to add to my vocabulary is guey (rhymes with "way"). It's considered vulgar but seems to be so more in the sense that it's informal and that its roots lie in the word for a castrated bull than that it's vulgar like the word chingado.

Today's song for improving my Spanish is by a Mexican-influenced group in New Orleans called The Iguanas. This song was featured in last week's season opener for "Treme" and is also on Doctors, Professors, Kings & Queens: The Big Ol' Box of New Orleans:

Simpler life

I've come to the conclusion that while I may have been fairly fluent in Spanish as a child, I was too quick to get rid of my low-level Spanish books. The intermediate books I've got now are great for practicing reading, but there are so many holes in my memory of basic grammar -- irregular past participles, idiomatic constructions, day-to-day vocabulary -- that I need to get on the internet and do some backpedaling.

In the meantime, I'm still listening to Spanish pop songs every day. Today's song -- Vida Mas Simple -- is by a young Cuban-American singer named Nil Lara. As soon as I finish my final projects for my classes this week, I'll start getting down to reading and preparing for the Oaxaca trip.

Me dedique a perderte

"Maybe memory is overrated. Maybe forgetting is better. (Show me the Proust of forgetting, and I'll read him tomorrow.) Sometimes it's like juggling a thousand crystal balls in the air all at once, trying to keep all these memories going. Every time one falls to the floor and shatters into dust, another crevice cracks open inside me, through which another chunk of who we were disappears forever."
Francisco Goldman Say Her Name

This morning I was channel surfing for the Speed Network so that I could watch the replay of the Shanghai Grand Prix -- my favorite driver, Mark Webber, came in 3rd -- when I ended up in the 1000's and found that FIOS includes hundreds of radio stations with a great variety of music. As luck would have it, I was on the station that plays Mexican romantic ballads, most muy triste. This fit my mood perfectly as I finished Say Her Name this morning, and the weather out here is chilly and foggy, and I have a doctor's appointment this afternoon which promises to be somewhat nerve-wracking, and I'm still feeling the post-trip nostalgia for New Orleans.

So I'm finding Luis Miguel, Marisela, Emmanuel and Alejandro Fernandez very soothing.

Why, yes, I do know what ch*&#ado means in Spanish

image via savagechickens.com


I began my quest to become more fluent in Spanish as spoken in Mexico by surfing the Net using the phrase "Mexican Spanish." I found a funny blog entry from which I learned that it's impolite to say, "Que?" if you don't understand something and better to say, "Mande?". I'm sure I'll be needing that one a lot.

Next I found a site that gives Nahuatl Borrowings in Mexican Spanish Vocabulary, so I promptly printed it out and made notecards to study while I'm on the train to New Orleans next week.

But I think the most useful site will be The Alternative Spanish Dictionary. Because even if you don't use language like that yourself, it's always fun to know what everyone around you is saying! ;-)

Albondigas -- no te dije?

Photo via Flickr

In the 1950's, ALM -- the Audio Lingual Method -- was a popular theory of language instruction. Despite the fact that it was "discredited" by linguists like Noam Chomsky as early as 1959, it was still the method of choice at Slidell High School when I was a student there in the 1970's. My quest to learn Spanish began in 9th grade by memorizing a dialog I still remember today:

Hola, Isabel, como estas?
Estoy bien, gracias, y tu?
Bien gracias. Oye, quien es ese chico?
Es un amigo mio.
Como se llama?
Se llama Juan. Ven y te lo presento.

This was accomplished by Mrs. S presenting bits of phrases for us to repeat over and over the first week of class. We were not given a book nor allowed to see any of this in writing. The second week, we threaded the phrases into still-unintelligible sentences. The third week we repeated these sentences in unison with an LP that played through our antiquated headphones. If all this wasn't funny enough, the headphones were not synchronized, and some were off by as much as five seconds, resulting in mayhem dressed up in very bad Spanish accents.

One of the dialogs we memorized those first weeks took place in a school cafeteria and had one student declare to another, "Albondigas! No te dije?" Even then, we all knew that there would never come a time when we would have occasion to say, "Meatballs! Didn't I tell you?" It soon became a secret shorthand outside of class. Whenever an adult did something we thought silly or asinine, one of us would shake our heads sadly and sigh, "Albondigas! No te dije?" and the rest of us would laugh our heads off. This continued until a new student from Puerto Rico smirkingly informed us that we were screaming out a word that was slang for "testicles" in Spanish!

Before ALM, I'd always liked hearing foreign languages and often listened to Spanish and French language radio shows or broadcasts of Saturday evening mass in Latin. I even thought I wanted to major in languages in college and become a language professor, so you can imagine my dismay with the Spanish language. I couldn't understand why I hated it so much. If this was what majoring in a foreign language would be like, I wasn't having any of it. I decided I'd major in English Lit and become a writer instead. It wasn't until I became obsessed with Italy and all things Italian a few years later that I overcame my language phobia and changed my major to Comp Lit, but since then, my reading skills have always far surpassed my speaking skills whenever I've studied a language.

Last summer, people told me not to bother learning Spanish before I went to Mexico because if I spoke Italian, everyone would understand me. So I stumbled along and, thanks to the good will of the people I encountered, I was able to function on a very basic level. This summer, I'd like to do better, so I'm listening to CD's, watching Spanish-language tv, and taping notecards labeling everyday objects all over my house. But because I watch the news in Italian every night and follow several telenovellas, I'm now thoroughly confused with vocabulary. And to make matters worse, the few words I remember from high school are Castilian Spanish. I had a conversation with a Spanish-speaking friend today, and my end of it was an odd gibberish of half Spanish, half Italian. I said pee-shee-na but corrected myself to pee-see-na only to be told that in Mexico, a swimming pool is "alberca" anyway.

Albondigas, dammit!

Improve your Spanish already!

Image via amazon.com


The best thing about my sabbatical: I've started writing again.

The worst thing about my sabbatical: Besides the salary cut? I've started writing again.

I'm too obsessive to do things halfway, so I spend most days in my pajamas in my study working on pieces, some of which I started almost twenty years ago. The feeling of finally completing things is freeing. I've been blocked by the many projects I'd started and then abandoned. But it's necessary for me to stay completely focused and one-track, so I've been at my desk fourteen hours a day. It's the only way I can work. If that sounds awful, it's not. It's been great fun!

So, outside my trip to Rome, I've done no traveling, very little reading, and the bare minimum in studying Spanish. I haven't even seen the new Jane Eyre yet although I've been looking forward to it for ages.

And I need to address that imbalance somehow.

The Cramp

A quiet movie about a disaffected young Frenchman in a small Oaxacan village on the Pacific coast. It dragged in a few places but was ultimately very satisfying emotionally and visually. Sadly, there was very little dialog, and a lot of it was in French and English as well as Spanish, so I didn't get to practice my new skills in espanol. But it was a great choice for my birthday movie, and I ate the best mole verde I've had since Oaxaca at El Ranchito del Agave. BB didn't like her food or drink, but I will definitely go back there again.

Discovery of the night: There are delicious cupcakes in New York, and they're made by Mitchell London!