Les escaliers

La complainte de la butte
Cora Vaucaire
Lyrics: Jean Renoir; music Georges Van Parys



En haut de la rue St-Vincent
Un poète et une inconnue
S'aimèrent l'espace d'un instant
Mais il ne l'a jamais revue

Cette chanson il composa
Espérant que son inconnue
Un matin de printemps l'entendra
Quelque part au coin d'une rue

La lune trop blême
Pose un diadème
Sur tes cheveux roux
La lune trop rousse
De gloire éclabousse
Ton jupon plein de trous

La lune trop pâle
Caresse l'opale
De tes yeux blasés
Princesse de la rue
Soit la bienvenue
Dans mon cœur blessé

Les escaliers de la butte sont durs aux miséreux
Les ailes des moulins protègent les amoureux

Petite mandigote
Je sens ta menotte
Qui cherche ma main
Je sens ta poitrine
Et ta taille fine
J'oublie mon chagrin

Je sens sur tes lèvres
Une odeur de fièvre
De gosse mal nourri
Et sous ta caresse
Je sens une ivresse
Qui m'anéantit

Les escaliers de la butte sont durs aux miséreux
Les ailes des moulins protègent les amoureux

Mais voilà qu'il flotte
La lune se trotte
La princesse aussi
Sous le ciel sans lune
Je pleure à la brune
Mon rêve évanoui

Patrick Bruel (feat. Francis Cabrel)

It's not me (it's you)

The ultimate I-don't-love-you-anymore album has just arrived.

Technical difficulties made it impossible to be released on February 14, so it was delayed until today. The 23rd of April is Saint George's day, which is Lover's Day in Catalonia (Sant Jordi).

1. Listen to your heart – Roxette
2. These boots are made for walking – Nancy Sinatra
3. 9 Crimes – Damien Rice
4. Every time we live together we die a bit more – Hooverphonic
5. 5 Years – Björk
6. Jeżeli kochasz to nie pamiętaj mnie – Anna Maria Jopek
7. I want to break free – Mónica Cervera
8. Fast car – Tracy Chapman
9. Sexed Up – Robbie Williams
10. Irreplaceable – Beyoncé
11. Sick and tired – Anastacia
12. You oughta know (acoustic) – Alanis Morissette
13. I will survive – Petra Magoni & Ferruccio Spinetti
14. Me voy – Julieta Venegas
15. Honestly – Annie Lennox
16. Happy ending – Mika
17. Ne me quitte pas – Faudel
18. When I'm over you – Perry Blake
    

If you click or here, you'll find the covers –front, back, both and inside– (remember to resize when printing) and tracks. You will also find the original album covers and the lyrics, which are also here.

I hope you enjoy it and Happy Catalan Lover's Day.

Note: I have updated the artwork, now it is in PDF and the right size.

------------Español-----------------

El álbum definitivo para decir "ya no te quiero" ha llegado.

Tras ser imposible su lanzamiento para el 14 de febrero por dificultades técnicas, ha side retrasado hasta hoy. El 23 de abril es San Jorge, que es el día de los enamorados en Catalunya (Sant Jordi).

1. Listen to your heart – Roxette
2. These boots are made for walking – Nancy Sinatra
3. 9 Crimes – Damien Rice
4. Every time we live together we die a bit more – Hooverphonic
5. 5 Years – Björk
6. Jeżeli kochasz to nie pamiętaj mnie – Anna Maria Jopek
7. I want to break free – Mónica Cervera
8. Fast car – Tracy Chapman
9. Sexed Up – Robbie Williams
10. Irreplaceable – Beyoncé
11. Sick and tired – Anastacia
12. You oughta know (acoustic) – Alanis Morissette
13. I will survive – Petra Magoni & Ferruccio Spinetti
14. Me voy – Julieta Venegas
15. Honestly – Annie Lennox
16. Happy ending – Mika
17. Ne me quitte pas – Faudel
18. When I'm over you – Perry Blake

Haciendo click en la imagen o aquí, encontrarás las cubiertas –frontal, trasera, ambas e interior– (recuerda cambiar el tamaño al imprimir) y las canciones. También puede encontrar las cubiertas originales y las letras, que también puede encontrar aquí.

Espero que lo disfrutéis y Feliz Día Catalán de los Enamorados.

Nota: He arreglado las cubiertas; ahora están en la medida adecuada.

Club Kidz

Desde hace unas semanas me sacan a pasear. Una amiga me lleva de fiesta todos los sábados. La verdad es que el primer día me pareció genial, pues no salía, en el sentido amplio del término, desde hacía bastante.

Un inciso en el relato para explicar que 'antaño' solía salir muchísimo. Vivo en un pueblo en el que nada triunfa: hicieron un puerto deportivo con un montón de pufs pero ahora están casi todos cerrados. Así que solimos ir de fiesta a Tarragona. Hace unos años, entre mis 18 y 21, solía salir todos los fines de semana, jueves, viernes y sábado. Incluso viví a un tiro de piedra de la zona de fiesta. Los años han pasado, me fui del país, me emparejé y, al desemparejarme, no he sabido volver a el night-life ritual de caza. No sé ligar (en caso de que tuviese la intención) y cuando salgo a bailar voy a eso, pues, a bailar.
El caso es que estos últimos días de fiesta me he empezado a sentir súper viejo. Oui, bien, tengo veinticinco, pero me sentía viejo. Cuando yo salía habían dos locales que tenían algo de ambiente. Ahora hay varios locales que tienen algo de hetero. Pero el problema no está ahí porque, tras mi etapa transgresora (en la que me teñía el pelo, llevaba ropa extravagante y me adornaba un poco más) y tras haber vivido en el extranjero, ya me da igual si la gente me mira cuando bailo (encima del pódium – para tener espacio). El problema es que todos los chavalines que había por ahí eran eso, chavalines de 18. Además, mucha bollera. Cuando yo salía de ambiente no "habían" tantas (y eso que en mi grupo habían un montón). Que conste que me encantan las maribollis, que eso es bueno.
Como de costumbre me desvío del tema y luego no hay quien lo retome.
Decía que me sentía viejo porque todos en el local tenían una edad casi infrarroja. Siempre he ido con gente mayor que yo. Siempre he sido el "pequeño" o de los más jóvenes. De repente me encuentro entre gente (también la que conocemos) que tiene varios años menos que yo. Mi amiga sólo uno menos (bueno, meses) pero el resto bastantes.
Y les veo, con sus camisetas ajustadas y que lo único que hacen es un show off increíble para buscar un rollete. No quiero ir de super maduro ni nada de nada, pero es que, quizás lamentablemente, yo ya estoy de vuelta de eso. Me gusta bailar (sorry, only techno, minimal, electronic) pero bailo para mí, no para que me vean.
Es extraño, sentirse viejo a los 25. Pero es que, me pregunto, ¿adónde van los maricas de más de 25?

He de decir que los camareros, aunque parezca raro, sí que tenían 25+. Habían dos chicos y una chica. Los tres re-guapos. A uno de los chicos le clareaba el pelo (como al menda) y tenía barba (como el menda) y el otro me recordaba muchísimo a Hugo. Así que no me sentía del todos solo.
Pero sigo pensando, una cena en un buen restaurante, un paseo por el río/playa, una copita en una terraza y una buena conversación. Eso sí que es un plan.

Os dejo con un vídeo de la peli "Party Monster" con una canción que me encanta.

I definitely am a language freak

~The target player loses two cards~

There were this two mountains of cards. There were thousands of them. One pile had cards in Spanish, the other one in Russian. I never played roleplaying games, but know a bit about it. I said "Give me one of them", he said "Choose the one you like". I took a wad from the pile in Russian, handed it to him and said "You choose". This is the one he gave me. It shines. It's not beautiful. It shows how freak I am.

Z to A

Last August I talked about the movie "יוסי וג'אגר" ("Yossi & Jagger"), an Israeli movie. I don't remember if I ever talked about "يد إلهية" ("Yadon ilaheyya" or "Divine Intervention"), an Israeli-Palestinian film. But certainly, those are two movies that have become quite important for me, for different reasons.

The other day I posted the עברי לידר (Ivri Lider) version of the song "The Man I Love", certainly my favourite of his, but not the only one I like, because I love "אוב" ("Bo" or "Let's" aka "Come" [just found this English version]) and I also love "דרפס" ("Sfarad" or "Spain").
A couple of weeks ago I met this Israeli guy and I had so many questions for him. It was very interesting, very educative.
Last night I went to watch "Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam". It is a German movie that talks about the golem, a mythological Jewish creature. I have to say that the movie was great, very interesting indeed and I'd like to watch it again but with someone who would explain every reference I see. The movie is silent, but last night it was accompanied by the improvisation of 2UT's experimental, New-Age music. I loved the evening. Thank you Sister for taking me. (Unfortunately, in this town, cultural events like this one do not succeed, plus it was pouring rain).
And, if you remember, I love the song "Wędrowni sztukmistrzowie", by Justyna Steczkowska (Album "AlkimJa"). [BTW, the lyrics of this song tell of how God is amused by clowns and magicians. Many things that happen in last night's movie reminded me so much of this album and, especially, this song.]
Also, I have talked few times about Тату (t.A.T.u.) and used Cyrillic and Greek alphabets (OMG, I am such a freak).

So all this to "justify my love" to the Hebrew/Jewish, Arab and Russian culture. And, last night's movie, made me to decide myself to write this post, which I have had in mind for a while.
All the languages that I speak use the Latin alphabet. English uses it plainly, without any "special" characters. Spanish and Catalan have different characters such as the ñ and the ç as well as diacritics such as the accents (àá) or the Catalan interpunct (l·l). But those characters are mostly found in any computer. In high school I studied ancient Greek and it was a mess when I wanted to write something with the computer. But also I have tried to learn Polish which uses other diacritics and characters such as ł or ż. This are not that easily found and even in their computers the have to use the AltGr key (for the Spanish-French-Galician-Portuguese-Catalan characters we use a separate key for characters and the combination of two keys for diacritics, i.e. ´ + o = ó), so it appears to be quite uncomfortable, but at least it is just few different characters.
If you try to search, say, caña in many search engines such as Google or Flickr, you'll see how it becomes "cana", which is a different word in Spanish (if you place inverted commas before and after the word, it will work in Google). So España has become Espana. I am "Espanol". When I was a child I envied my sister for having an acute in her name (such a geek I am, you see); now I am happy I don't, because if English-speaking people have trouble pronouncing my name (so I have to let them call me with its translation), imagine if it was something that they didn't know and if it had a little line on top. I'd be mad all the time I saw my name written.

Now, imagine if your language uses a writing system totally different to English. Imagine that you write right to left, or top to bottom. Imagine that the characters you use mix to become different characters (something similar to æ). And imagine that the "future" (i.e. computers, Internet and informatics science) does not make it easy for you to use your language.
This is what millions of people deal with every single day.
I love my languages and I really love English. I know I always say how great is this language. I know I am absolutely fine with the fact that this is the language used as lingua franca (my good friend LG, who is English-speaking, dislikes that). But also, I must say how unfair it is for those whose language cannot fit in this World Wide thing. We, users of Latin alphabet (with extensions), can cope with it, with the centralisation of the Internet by English Language.
Some day, all those languages will start using this letters I am using now. I don't mean just in the Internet, to go by with it, I mean as standard. Macedonian people are already using it (not widely though).
Linguists say that in a century from now there will only be 3 languages around the world: English, Spanish and Mandarin. I think Arabic will be there too (and I hope so because I want to learn it), but I also am sure that the last two will be using the Latin alphabet.
I know it is going to seem very incoherent, but I am fine with the usage of only this alphabet. Relations would be much easier, indeed. I don't speak Flemish, but at least I can read it (somehow), distinguish words and find streets. I don't speak Arabic and I can't do any of the previous things. With Hebrew and Cyrillic it is easier, but still.

When I uploaded the albums of Ivri Lider to my iTunes, I wrote the songs in Hebrew, in its Transliteration and in its translation to English. It was difficult because every time I was copy-paste-ing something, the order of characters were altered, i.e. since Hebrew writes right to left, it would mirror the word, so עברי לידר would become *רדיל ירבע.
That Israeli guy I met, told me that when using MSN or such, he had to keep shifting from Hebrew to English keyboard layout and that his conversations would appear on the right side even when writing in English (with question maks and such before the sentence, e.g. "?How are you").

I don't really know what is the point of all this. I don't know what I want to convey. What I know is that this is very unfair. If Internet had born in Morocco everything would be totally different: I think it would be easier for any other language.
Computers are the future, and computers are supposed to made our life easier. When is it going to start making everybody's life easy?

[Break news: now you can blog in Hindi.]

Transformation

Everyone in my family knows how to cook. That's why I have never had to worry about it. Recently I have discovered the pleasure of cooking, and what's more important, the pleaseure of baking. I still can't believe the transformation between this:

and this:

Change me

Lately we all have been talking about Ecology, Global Warming and the freaking End of the World. And you know what? I have had enough. It is pouring rain right now. Pretty common in April. Yeah, well, it was warmer last winter, so what?

I have already told you about those great documentaries about Europe. And watching them I arrived to a conclusion that was taking too long to be achieved. Something that was in my mind, something that was said, but never realised.
As per what I remember when I studied Latin, when I first learnt about the IndoEuropean people, there was a climate change some good four millennia ago. That climate change made those people move from the Siberian steppes on a diaspora around Europe; that ended up being the birth of over hundred languages around Europe and Asia. Since this is what I am interested in and what I want to study, I don't think that Climate Change was that bad, do you? There are theories of connections between languages in Europe and America that could have been done during that last glaciation 2M BC crossing over the ice. Also, the fact that Homo Sapiens was first born in Africa. How did they crossed to Europe? Was the Mediterranean sea dry at the time (since it has dried out several times)?
Also, the documentary tells of how the African tectonic plate is pushing towards Europe and some time in the future we will become one and only continent. Then, why not accepting the application of Morocco as an EU member state? Also, they explained how Europe has gone through different climates from North Pole Winter to Saharan Summers. This has happened ever since the Earth was formed.
Yeah, right, this time is different because of the impact of humans. I am just saying but, don't you think it is possible that that's not the actual reason? I am just saying, because we always tick-tack-talk theories of what has/would/should-happen/ed. Who the heck are we?
An acquittance of mine, who is a biologist, said to me once: If Mother Nature wanted to get rid of us, she'd do it on a blink! If She hasn't do so just yet, it is because either She does not want or She is just too bored to do so. It happened once with the dinosaurs, it can happen again.
I am not saying "Oh, well, then, we can't do anything wrong, let's built everything and kill every specie we don't like". I am just saying what if the the so-called Global Warming is "normal", what if it has to happen?

If so, England is going to grow on wine châteaux.

PS Once again, this is not all what I wanted to tell. The wetness of this country blurs my mind.

Me marcó

Bueno bueno... acabo de recibir un meme (¿por qué no lleva tilde? ¡yo digo memé!) de parte de Cvalda. Todo un honor, la verdad.
Como a mi predecesora en el testigo, también me cuesta mucho elegir. Ya voy poniendo lo que me va marcando poco a poco, por eso pongo aquí una versión de un all-time-classic; una canción de Gershwin que tiene más de ochenta años; una canción que han versionado montones de artistas. Hace poco intenté buscar la mejor "versión original" y no conseguí hallar una que pudiese desmarcar a las demás (sin contar la que sigue). Yo pongo la versión con la que la re-descubrí y de la que estoy profunadamenteenamorado. En esta ocasión, interpretada por עברי לידר (Ivri Lider) para la película "Ha-Buah".
Como esto tiene que seguir corriendo, le paso el testigo a MaraJade.

"The Man I Love"
Ivri Lider



Some day he'll come along,
The man I love
And he'll be big and strong,
The man I love
And when he comes my way
I'll do my best to make him stay.

He'll look at me and smile
I'll understand;
And in a little while,
He'll take my hand;
And though it seems absurd,
I know we both won't say a word

I know I shall meet him Sunday
Maybe Monday, maybe not;
Still I'm sure I'll meet him some day
Maybe Tuesday will be my good news day

He'll build a little home
Just meant for two,
From which I'll never roam,
Who would - would you?
And so all else above
I'm waiting for the man I love.

Be water

Últimamente se ha hablado mucho del agua. El día 22 de marzo fue el día mundial del agua. Y yo me pregunto, ¿qué ganamos? ¿qué conseguimos con ello? Nada, al igual que no conseguimos nunca nada con los días-de, porque esos días intentamos tener más consciencia sobre ese tema pero nada, al día siguiente, se nos ha olvidado todo.

Pero no sólo por eso, también las lágrimas de la Semana Santa, y no me refiero a las de Nuestra Señora de los Dolores, sino de los Nazarenos, tristes por no ver a sus Cristos, Vírgenes y Santos salir a causa de la lluvia.
Y en otras partes del país, se llora por las inundaciones. Por el agua que corre pero no lo suficiente, por el agua que se queda. Pero por suerte, hay gente que está contenta, porque llueve en sus tierras que hacía tiempo que no caía lo suficiente. La tradición popular dice que "nunca llueve a gusto de todos", y es cierto. Pero yo no quiero hablar de cosechas, hoy. Quiero hablar de ríos. De ríos y embalses a punto de reventar.
Oigo en la tele "Sí, porque queremos hacer un desvío del río..." y recuerdo Biescas y otras tantas ocasiones. Y pienso, ¿por qué? Y se ve que hay peligro de que se rompa una presa en Aragón y provoque una catástrofe.
¿A qué estamos jugando?
Siempre se ha dicho que la naturaleza es muy inteligente. Yo nunca lo he dudado. Si el río Ebro tiene que ir por ahí, ¿por qué le cortáis el paso? ¿No hemos aprendido todavía? ¿A qué estáis esperando para parar?
Entiendo la necesidad de las presas, porque necesitamos el agua. Pero no entiendo como podemos desperdiciarla de esa manera. Campos de golf y piscinas cada tres casas.
Jugamos a ser Dios en muchos aspectos, pero la naturaleza siempre gana. Se ha de tener cuidado con Ella, porque en un zas se deshace de nosotros. En cuanto se canse, adiós a la humanidad. Si no lo ha hecho hasta ahora es porque no ha querido.

Cuida la naturaleza. Protégela y respétala. Sobretodo respétala.

Escuchando: "Writer's Block" por Just Jack – "Overtones"
"... It was pouring with rain and I thought: oh God, you know, good old England"