Spanish Lesson: Vuelve A Mi by Hombres G

Today, and from now on, I'll be your Spanish instructor using songs that I love in Spanish. The two or three people who read this blog will benefit from my lessons every once in a while. You can't deny that Spanish lessons + good music ain't a good thing, eh?

Here's the original song. I wrote the lyrics in Spanish under, followed by the translation.





Hombres G - Vuelve A Mi
(By the way, the G in Hombres G, or Men G, is not for "gay", but if it was I wouldn't mind. Their name came from a very old spy movie called The Men G, or The G Men, or something like that).

Recuerdo que las cosas
se estaban poniendo mal
después de tanto tiempo
nos dejamos de hablar
sólo por que soy bajito
y no se bailar break-dance.

Recuerdo que llegabas
siempre tarde a nuestro pub
y yo por llegar antes
me quedaba sin merendar
ahora no como nada
porque sin ti no puedo estar.

Por favor vuelve a mí
nos iremos a bailar
de verdad, he aprendido
a bailar break-dance
por favor, llámame a la hora de comer
ya lo sabes, estoy aquí
pregúntale a quien quieras
por mí.

Te dirán que estoy sentado
apoyado en la barra de un bar
deprimido y amargado
sin beber y sin hablar
cómo pudistes hacerlo
irte con otro sin avisar.

Aún no he comprendido cómo te fuistes con ése,
él será más guapo
pero yo tengo mas mala leche
y aun que soy pequeño
valgo yo más quinientas veces.

Por favor vuelve a mí
nos iremos a bailar
de verdad, he aprendido
a bailar break-dance
por favor, llámame a la hora de comer
ya lo sabes, estoy aquí
pregúntale a quien quieras
por mí

Vuelve a mí...

Translation

Men G - Come Back To Me

I remember that things
were getting bad
after so much time
we stopped talking
just because I'm short
and don't know how to break dance.

I remember you arrived
always late to our pub
and since I wanted to be early
ended up not having lunch
now I don't eat anything
because I don't want to be without you.

Please, come back to me
we'll go dancing
it's true, I've learned
how to break-dance
Please, call me at lunch time
now you know it, I'm here
ask anyone about me.

They'll tell you I'm sitting down
leaned against the bar
depressed and bitter
without drinking and without talking
how could you have done it
left with another without telling.

I still haven't comprehended how you left with that one
he may be more handsome
but I have more bad milk (bad milk is a slang which means bad luck. Milk is a reference to sperm)
and even though I'm small
I worth 500 times more.


Please, come back to me
we'll go dancing
it's true, I've learned
how to break-dance
Please, call me at lunch time
now you know it, I'm here
ask anyone about me.

Come back to me.

USELESS THOUGHT OF THE DAY XVIII: It's Only Rock N' Roll

Originally posted October 1st, 2005 at 9:02AM

I was sitting by Micheal's front door smoking a cigarette, when Megan, the cute unstable stripper blond who was supposed to be our singer, arrived. Michael was inside with Almasi playing with some of the equipment we had. I could see that she wasn't happy. Actually, I knew she wasn't happy. After exchanging a few words with her she started kicking and scratching me, while I was trying to protect myself on the floor the best I could. Michael probably heard the commotion and came out, and got her off me. My shirt was ripped and had lots of blood on it. After Megan left we decided to go to my place so I could clean myself and get another shirt. When I got to my car I discovered that it had this white powder all over it. It was sugar. I imagine that Megan had tried to put sugar in my car's fuel tank, but because it was key locked she got frustrated and poured all the sugar all over my car. Once at my place, I was examining the wound Megan had left on my neck in the mirror. It was a deep long scratch. All this happened only a few months after arriving from boring Caracas. I remember looking at Michael and Almasi from my bathroom, smiling, and saying: "Damn, that was really rock n' roll!".

If I ever become famous enough to gather enough interest in the world for me to write an autobiography, that first paragraph is how it will begin.

The last eight days have been some of the most intense and emotionally exhausting days of my life. Yesterday I thought I was living the worse day I've ever lived. If you wonder what happened, you're probably going to keep wondering, because I won't write it here. It will take me at least two hours just to talk about one of the problems I had to face. So invite me for coffee, and perhaps I will talk a bit about some of the events. What happened during those eight days is what one normally lives in six months. I can tell you about some of the stuff that came out as a result of all the drama and some of the other odd things that happened at the same time everything else was falling apart. The support and loyalty of some of my friends was tested, my own support and loyalty toward some of my friends was tested, I gained good new friends, some of which got to see a side of me that normally would take years to discover, and angel who barely knows me got to hear me cry over the phone when she called me to inform me about something unrelated she was doing for me, a cute little girl in the middle of America who knows nothing about this, or about me, said she wanted to visit Texas and hold me, narcotics were abused to deal with the anxiety, an old friend decided anything I said was intended to hurt, I listened to Hard Candy by Rialto around a thousand times, I discovered the magic healing powers of touch. Those are just a few, because I cannot remember them all.

All I can say is that I'm probably partly responsible, but we all are. It would be unfair of me to say I'm the good one, but nowadays you don't have to be the good one to be the hero of the story, so it doesn't worry me. I chose to live this life, and who wants a normal life anyway? Today everything feels distant, like something I read in some of the crazy biographies I like to read. I cannot even say this is the end of all of this. There might be an encore, or even a second part. This is only rock n' roll, and I like it. Nothing will stop me, I know that, and even when in the end we all take the risk of losing, there is always going to be a winner: music.

Right now I'm shirtless, drinking coffee, alone, smoking a cigarette, about to watch a Suede DVD a friend gave me. Yesterday I was depressed because of everything that happened, and now I'm just sad because Kroger didn't have my dear Half Baked Ben and Jerry's ice cream.


Cesar

Guitar Zero

Many good things have been said about video games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero, and I can see how they deserve merit for becoming such massive hits in a medium where violence, crime, sex, drugs, blood and destruction have an overwhelming presence. I must say that I have nothing against violent games and when I was playing video games I loved them. I don't think I acquired violent tendencies for playing those types of games, or watching violence on TV or horror movies for that matter. I was playing with rubber snakes, rats, and spiders and had a fascination with monsters by age 3, so you can imagine all the things I've seen or read about since due to my obsession with the dark side. I'm still a cuddly sweetheart. But this is my case, so I can't talk for the rest. Maybe it was because I was also interested in other more educative and positive things. In any case, I think it's good that Guitar Hero and Rock Band have managed to grab kids attention with a more constructive theme.

"So what's your point, Cesar, explain us", you two or three readers I have might ask. Well, I just don't like those Guitar Hero or Rock Band. I mean, as games, they are great and all, but playing them doesn't makes too much sense to me. I guess saying I don't like those games is not accurate, maybe what I really mean is that I think the people playing these games all the time are doing something stupid. I'm sorry, but I do. Let me elaborate, don't hit me just yet.

You see, when you play Guitar Hero, you are not doing anything remotely close to playing a real guitar. However, to master the game, you must invest a considerable amount of time, which had you invested it in practicing on a real guitar instead, you could have learned quite a bit, to the point where you could have been able to play a few things and wanted to keep getting better. If you are just a casual Guitar Hero/Rock Band player, then yes, you will (probably) enjoy the game more than the first few guitar lessons, so play, knock yourself out. But if you're playing 4 or 5 days a week, 30 minutes or more...

Now, don't say "I tried to learn how to play guitar once and I sucked, I'm just not musical, I wasn't born with that talent". Don't say that because I will slap you, and I don't mean that kind of slap. No one is born with that talent and everyone is capable of learning how to play any instrument, end of discussion. It may be easier for some more than others, but not by much. It's true, all you need is some discipline, like sitting down and practicing 4 or 5 days a week for, hmmm, 30 minutes.

You might already know I'm a musician, and that I play guitar and sing in The Watermarks, and you might think that it's easy for me to say this since I was born "talented". Where did I get this talent from then, because I don't know. No one in my family that I know of plays anything or can sing to save their lives, in fact, they are all tone deaf. Well, not all. After I started with the guitar, my brother started playing drums and became an excellent drummer, and I have a younger cousin who years later also learned how to play guitar. Even more incredible is the fact that I sing. I had tried many times to sing and you don't want to know how much I sucked. I have recordings of me attempting to sing that were very discouraging, but when on my previous band we got tired of looking for a singer, I decided I was going to do it. It wasn't pretty at first and I can tell you, with all honesty, that I sucked donkey balls, but I kept doing it, and even though I don't think I'm that good now, it sounds a whole lot better. So shut up, you can play guitar, I'll even teach you, if you want (I actually became a guitar teacher for a little while after taking lessons for two years). I need work anyways.

So, if you find yourself playing Guitar Hero quite a bit, do yourself a favor and get a cheap guitar and start practicing. If you think that playing the "musical" video games  is fun, you'll be amazed as how much more pleasurable is to be able to play a song you like from beginning to end on a real guitar. And if you ever get together with other musicians to play songs that you like together, it will blow your fucking mind away. It feels awesome. I remember when I used to play with my brother, when we lived in the 10th floor of this condo in Venezuela, and the neighbor downstairs always came upstairs and banged on our door to complain. It was pure adrenalin.

Joe Perry couldn't have chosen better words the night when I had the fortune to see Aerosmith on a recent trip I made to the fantastic Abu Dhabi. "There ain't nothing like the real thing", he said, referring to the video game that features the music of his band. Now, can you imagine try to use Guitar Hero's tiny guitar as a phallic symbol? You'll be laugh at. Guitars are just plain sexy.

Do you want to be a real guitar hero or do you rather be a guitar zero? It's up to you.


Until next time, kids. Ah! And don't forget I love you like a hurricane,


Cesar

I Miss Conversations

I can't remember the last time I sat down and had a long and interesting conversation with a friend, it's been months. But it's even more depressing that it's probably been years since I had conversations with friends on a regular basis. There are many reasons for this, I suppose. Is it my own fault? I don't know, I think during the past few months I've been doing my best to get out of my cave to socialize, communicate, and connect with people. The key word is "connect". It's not happening anymore.

While thinking about how strange life has felt lately, and noticing that conversations have been gone for quite a while, I also noticed that even e-mail or social-media-messages conversations were gone. Long blog conversations and arguments are gone too. Is it just me? Have I isolated myself to the point where I'm having to start from zero again? Shit, well, are you noticing the sames things I am? And who are you, by the way? Next time knock the door.

When MySpace was the shit, and people were excited about it and discovered that it was a great way to find people with common interests (and stalkers, perverts, and people looking to get laid), things were really good. I actually met and became friends with lots of people who I still talk to (briefly) today. MySpace messages conversations with people I didn't know happened all the time, and I loved it. Then the blogs came and it got even better. I invested plenty of time on my awesome blog to talk about the useless shit I think about all the time, and then I subscribed to any of my friend's blogs who wrote anything mildly interesting. "I'll be your magazine, you'll be mine" was my motto. It was a time for discussions and opinion exchange, the Renaissance of the social media era. I remember so many passionate-ultra long arguments on my conservative friend's blogs and on my own. It felt great to think, and to write, and to read, and to talk shit, and to get insulted, and to be a smartass, and to get home to read all the comments and start all over again. Fun, fun, fun. I think about it and I smile because it was so pleasurable! Where did it fucking go?

Then, the "more mature" and sleek Facebook came along at some point. All they did was to take away the freedom to make your own shitty profile that people enjoyed on MySpace, and because its default settings made your profile private from the start, women stopped getting those 4 or 5 daily messages with pictures of guys genitalia. They were also not getting a million bands' friend requests, and it didn't seem to be full up to its ass of raunchy ads. The migration began.

The reason why I didn't like Facebook then was because there were no bulletins and blogs were called (and are still called) notes, and it was confusing to go around your friends' blogs and discussions. Then, when the almighty Twitter came, Facebook, then MySpace, adopted the status-based method of "telling your friends what you're up to". Hey, even I was converted, making Twitter and Facebook my default sites for cyber-socializing. I still have my MySpace, but I check it way less frequently than I used to.

I believe that this new status-based communication allows you to actually get to know someone better than the early MySpace way, since it's all based on "me" and it's written for "me", you don't have all the bullshit and fictional personas that people on MySpace used to create of themselves. You actually get to read what someone is doing instead of reading how awesome they think they are or their dramatic blogs begging the world for attention. But the statuses, and their comments and "likes", killed the conversations. It's instant gratification at all times, getting to know what everyone is doing all the time. Short and sweet, or bittersweet, in my case. I follow you and read what the fuck you're doing, that's it. There's no more "tell me who the fuck you are" and then waiting for that long message full of bullshit to appear in your inbox. So sad.

You know, like I said before, I have been trying to go out and connect with people. Yes, I'm a picky motherfucker sometimes, and most people bore me to death, but I know there's plenty of people I'd like to have a conversation with out there. However, just like in the social media world, real life seems to have shifted to the status-based mode. It's like everyone has their own agendas with no place to take the time to get to really know you. Short and sweet. Everything seems short and sweet. There's no depth. Once again, it could just be me, maybe I'm just fucked. And I'm not the kind of person to force myself on anyone. I will go out of my way to let you know somehow that I'd like to talk to you once, or maybe twice, and you'll know, there aren't any interpretations to be made. But if I get no feedback or no interest from you, I won't fucking bother. I retired from professional time-waster long ago. I prefer having a great conversation with one person than going out, getting drunk, and saying "hello" to the one hundred people that I "know".

I don't know, I might have lost my mojo, perhaps I should accept it and carry on. Nah, I hate giving up, so don't worry about it (not that you will), and you'll hear me whine and complain about this again.

I'll keep putting myself out there, hoping for something but expecting nothing. And just in case, I'm going to re-write here one of the first things I wrote when my cyber-social life began, and it's still there, on the front of MySpace profile:

"If you really want to get to know me (or to start to), you will have to at least have a conversation with me face to face. I love coffee, so feel free to invite me."

If you don't want to, then that's OK too. The truth is that if you don't care, I don't care.

Don't look at me with that face, you're creeping me out.


I'm glad I got that out of my chest, it's been bothering the shit out of me.

Until next time... or not!



C