It has been one of my favorite songs for more than two years now, though I must admit that until recently the lyrics made very little sense to me. The words “cielito lindo” roll nicely off the tongue, though I couldn’t imagine why anyone would talk to a pretty little sky; and all the talk of contraband eyes rolling down the mountain and moles telling you not to touch them really had me confused. I honestly did not guess that it was a love ballad– if I had not done any research, I would not have known how to translate it. The English translation of the two well-known verses and the chorus is as follows:

Coming down from the brunette mountains
Are two dark eyes like robbers,
Pretty little sky

The mole you have beside your mouth
Do not give it to anyone, for it touches me,
Pretty little sky.

Ay, ay, ay ay
Sing and do not cry
For singing makes hearts happy
Pretty little sky.

The story goes that Quirino Mendoza was visiting the Andalucía region of Spain when he saw a beautiful girl with a beauty mark next to her mouth, and was inspired to write the song. In the first verse he borrowed a metaphor which had been used in local Andalusian folk ballads for many years. The Sierra Morena, or Brown Mountains, were in times past a favorite hide-out for gypsies and thieves, who according to contemporary accounts would descend upon hapless travelers and rob them of everything they owned. From here comes the comparison to the eyes of a girl, coming down from the mahogany mountains of her hair, ready to steal a man’s heart away.

The first time I can remember hearing this song in Mexico, was from a group of about ten older men and women, stopped by the side of a trail in a canyon, singing along with a guitar. This is how I will always remember it– as an uplifting ballad that is meant to be sung and not listened to, that invites people to sing out loud and take a more sunny view of life. I never found it necessary until now to actually have a recording of the song.

In listening to samples from over a hundred different recordings of Cielito Lindo recently, I quickly found out that there were many of them that I do not like. A large number of these recordings are very mariachi-fied, with a prominence of fancy trumpets and such that I really find gratuitous. Other singers try to mess too much with the rhythm of the words or the melody, thinking that somehow they will make the song newer. Still others over-interpret with very slow, wistful singing, as if somehow it were a very sad or tender song– which it is not. It is a teasing, upbeat love song, and it should be sung that way. Also amusing are a considerable number of gringo-rific recordings by North Americans trying to pronounce Spanish.

Mexico has been on my mind recently, but this is not the main reason I wanted to share this song. As the Spaniards, Cubans, Argentines, and even the goofy North Americans who have recorded the song prove, Cielito Lindo has meaning for everyone; and it can belong to anyone who carries the melody in their heart.

You may also be interested in reading the complete lyrics and translation, or Cielito Lindo haiku. I would also like to give credit to Arturo Ortega Morán from El Porvenir for his article on the topic. You can read an English translation of that article here.

It is like the building excitement you feel growing bigger inside you as you wait to finally live out that one big dream– except that this dream is a nightmare and it will bring down you and your whole house if you ever let it loose.  Anger can be forgotten, too; you can let it go and think that it has floated gently away down the stream– but when new anger is triggered, you will find the old anger is still there, like a bad dream that visits when you sleep but fades with the light of day.

It is amazing to me the disturbance that can be caused merely by my choice of a wife.  I am not the only one who’s getting married.  Why can’t people be happy for me, too?  I hope there would be a similar reaction if some joe married a Colombian Catholic– because everyone knows that most Colombians and most Catholics are terrorists.  So that would at least be consistent.  But since when was bigotry fair?

Really its not being pulled from a desirable job position, or barred from beneficial training, that begins to get to me.  None of those things are important.  It is the stone wall of silence, the implied whispers, the strong implication that all things considered I am worth nothing more than a bag of shit.

Underneath it all, stoking the flames, is my fear.  Fear that all is not what it seems and that the worst may be yet to come.  Because hate them or love them my fate is now tied to the whims of my company’s leadership.  I have not married yet.  The most precious thing in the world is still thousands of miles away.

It is this same love that saves me in the end.  Because no matter what hateful passions flow through my body and pollute my mind, they can never be more important than that sweet promise of a lifetime filled with family; the tender smile which lifts my heart; the great devotion which guides my days; the delicious anticipation of that second first kiss.

Still, some days I wonder if my love will always be stronger than my hate.  Sometimes I forget about everything except my hatred.  Even when I am among friends, and having a good time, it is still there.  When the friends leave, and the fun subsides, hate takes over.  I can bury it, I can juggle it, I can philosophize it and explain it long-hand to the nth degree.  I can wait longing for the day when I can finally drop it, let it go and watch it float down the stream.  But I cannot let it out.  Because its not only me I have to fight for.

As for philosophy, I think one wise man put it best, when he said: you pay to play, man.  You pay to play.

I would like to offer a tribute to all those Korean slash Japanese slash Vietnamese restaurants in our town, who can give you cuisine from their own or any other Asian nationality in about 10 minutes flat, even if you order tempura and squid in a Thai place. If they are only open three hours a day four days a week, or if they never close up but I never see anyone eat there– then far be it from me to accuse them of anything underhanded. Chicken teriyaki is delicious.

And God bless the Korean wives, because without them we would all have to learn how to sew. And who else would think to offer a free neck massage with each haircut? And this may be a half-way podunk town, but I’ll be darned if we don’t have some good sushi places. I still get all my sushi straight from the supermarket. But I like having the option.

The lyrics for “El Relámpago” are actually missing from all of the song lyrics sites, so these, with their English translation, are the first ones on the net.

It is probably not even clear to most Party members that, while they are pledged to defend the ideals of the American way of life, they are on a giant socialist and totalitarian island in the middle of our free capitalist paradise. It seems odd to outsiders, but for many members the social justice and iron-fisted rule of our Party feel very… reassuring. Personally, I can say that in spite of job security and free fitness club membership, I definitely have my gripes.

But even on days when job-related craziness is really getting me down, I can always take comfort in the thought that really, it’s getting everyone down, even the top leaders. There’s no one who doesn’t feel oppressed by the system, because the system is bigger than everyone. Our Party isn’t much different from any other large beauracracy, based on the principle that none of us can be as stupid as all of us, but every once in a while we’ll all get something right.

So on days like today, I can sit on my bed and thank America for inventing the 2-day weekend, and the foreign Communists and all our other enemies for giving me the chance to experience this alternate mini-society. At least until the time comes to cut ties and venture back into that jungle we call the free world.

A more famous Colombian musician is Shakira, known throughout the world for her bilingual singing and her hip-shaking music videos. She is also known in the Middle East for her Lebanese roots. She grew up in Barranquilla, on the Caribbean coast of Colombia about half an hour from the sea. I was there a few years back when she gave a home-coming concert– I missed the show, but I remember the traffic jams that spread through all the major roads in the city. Barranquilla is a large, flat, dusty city; almost all of it is laid on a regular grid with some eighty streets and eighty avenues (”calles” and “carreras”). The Arabs there live in one of the established well-to-do areas of town.

In the central part of town, packed with street vendors, you can hear Shakira’s music blaring from the CD stands, along with all the other popular tunes. In more open, residential parts of the city, the music plays at gas stations and at the corner store. So I did not feel very left out when I missed the big homecoming concert. Shakira is talented of course, and pretty– but before she flew into her hometown, and after she flew out a day and a half later, she was already a part of the daily rhythm there, and in crowded markets across Latin America.

The concert I do remember being at was one that took me by surprise in the street as I was walking back to my hotel one night. The place I was staying was almost in the very center of the city, a couple of blocks south of the main government and bank buildings, near the main market. It was not a good place to be walking at night, but I was crazy. During the day there were lots of fruit-selling stands just outside the door, and I would often buy a bag of mangos or mandarins to take back to my room. The hotel was on the second floor above a fabrics store. The hallway that led back to the rooms was open to the sky, and at the end of the hall was a balcony with a clothes-wringer. I remember that there were chickens pecking in the lobby. It was called the Hotel California– though in Colombia they pronounce “California” more like Governor Schwarzenegger would.

The weirdest thing I ever saw there in the middle of the night there was an escaped cow standing across the street on a corner, bathed in moonlight, discarded plastic bags rustling at its feet. It watched me as I walked by, probably to see if I would try to catch it. But the night of the concert, as I walked the eerie quiet of the streets filled gradually with the sounds of music. When I got to 44th Avenue, a major thoroughfare which bisects the city from east to west, I found it packed with the anniversary celebration of the city’s birth.

The street was packed with people, armed policemen all around the edges, and big stages in the middle of the street. Not two or three stages, but close to a dozen, each with a band playing a different kind of music traditional to the city. Vendors everywhere sold drinks and food and the middle of the street filled with couples dancing. I walked down the line of stages and listened to the different bands, and wherever I walked everyone was shouting and having a good time.

For a while I stood near the edge of the police line, with several other single men who were dancing by themselves. These were older, unmarried men; I did not know them, but I knew others who were living long-term at my hotel. They worked odd jobs, sold merchandise on the street, and made ends meet, alone. On Sundays they would not know what to do; sometimes they would hang around the lobby, watching the TV. One of them had bought an old boombox and spent his Sundays in his room, with his old time music turned up loud, playing the air-marracas and drumming his fingers on the table. But at the concert these men did not seem so old. They stood on the margins of the crowd at the concert, drinking beer and aguardiente, moved by the music of Joe Arroyo and all the other greats to step and spin in spotless coordination with their imagined, Shakira-esque partners.

When we first went up to the loft, and stood on the stairs, there was a man who left the microphone and paced the floor, as he told a story, maybe true, and his friend strummed the guitar.  He told of how he and a buddy had been stranded in a strange rural town in the deep south in the 1970s.  They walked into a convenience store to see if they could get a ride.  Both of them were black; the store owner told them that they had better move along.  So they began to walk along the highway, away from the town.  When nightfall came, they were afraid what would happen if anyone from the town would find them.  Just as they were preparing to lie down and sleep in the ditch beside the road, they saw headlights coming from the direction of town, and the store owner rolled up, and told them to come with him.  He drove them back to his store and gave them food and cigarettes and a room to sleep.  All he asked was that they be gone before the sun came up the next day.

The storyteller said he always remembered the store owner’s kindness, and the fact that he hid it.  He was unable to show what was inside of him, the storyteller said, because of the environment that was around him.

The storyteller also chastised someone in the audience who had been talking loudly during one part of the song, and told him if he wanted to flirt he should whisper in her ear, and then said that all that loud talk was just like George Bush, and blamed the loud talker for getting that man elected.

Dinner today was an occasion for happy announcements; it was made known that both I and a friend of mine are getting married to Muslim girls.  This wasn’t the first word on the subject, of course– I had heard the rumor about my friend months ago, and I had been perpetuating it ever since, thinking it was false.  I consider him an old friend.  He met his girl in the Philippines and liked her immediately because she didn’t want to talk to him.  We have concluded that her father, an importer-exporter, without a passport, who makes business trips to Indonesia and Malaysia traveling at night on speedboats, is probably a terrorist.  But it takes all types.

Our friend wooed her, stole her away from her long-time fiancee, won over her family, and can now look forward to a hefty dowry payment.  And he seems completely happy.  Our friend is not one of those who could not have gotten a girl until he stumbled across some needy foreigner.  He is short, and hairy, and cross-eyed, but he made himself notorious for finding attractive girls just about any time he wanted.  He knows people.  Some of my other friends say he is throwing away a great gift, but he seems confident that he is finally putting it to good use.

So people will find out when they find out, and they will think what they think.  I’m sure it won’t be as awkward as he expects.  After dinner I treated the group to dessert at my favorite Turkish grill.  We ordered a big plate with different kinds of baklava, and everyone had either coffee or tea– I had both.  Turkish coffee is strong and comes in a very small cup with about a quarter inch of pure coffee grounds in the bottom of it.  The restaurant is run by a Turkish man and his tall, out-spoken Greek-American wife.  He was a New York taxi driver and she was a waitress.  They are both very friendly and make even new customers feel as if they are invited guests in somebody’s home.  And their Baklava has plenty of walnuts.

The disaster was highlighted at the height of the fighting, while US and British warplanes and commandos were being called in to try and salvage the operation, when Al-Maliki was forced to evacuate his headquarters because it was being subjected to intense enemy fire. This is in addition to a vigorous uprising by the Mahadi army throughout the rest of the south, as well as in Baghdad where as usual US forces did almost all of the fighting. Indeed it appears that if US forces did not have an overwhelming presence in the country the current government would be swept away very quickly.

The worst part is that we saw this before in 2004, when native Iraqi units either defected or fled during Moqtada Al-Sadr’s first uprising. At the time it was an unpleasant surprise, but what could we expect? This time they did a little better but– come ON. Four years later and this is it? The improvement is underwhelming.

What we really should be asking ourselves is why Iran’s pet militia is so much better than our pet army. But that is a question for another day.

This reminds me of a joke I used to have with some of my friends about Baghdad International Airport, also known as BIAP. Originally it was called Sadaam International Airport (SIAP), and we always said that after the US left it would be SIAP again. Best-case scenario– Sistani (Ali Al-Sistani, Iraq’s senior Shia religious leader). But more likely– Sadr.

In other news, 72 Australian scuba divers have evidently set a new world record for underwater ironing, taking their ironing boards and their clothes into 10-foot-deep water off the coast of Melbourne. The group beat a previous record of 70 Australian scuba divers ironing their clothes in a swimming pool. Also, I’ve posted a new review for a book called Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. The book has gotten excellent reviews from everywhere and won a couple of awards, and frankly I think it is deserved. I can’t help but admire Diamond a bit, as a guy who really got out there, in remote, unusual and uncomfortable parts of the globe and learned through experience about the human condition. As he says in his prologue it was this trekking as much as his decades of diligent scholarship which gave him the perspective to write such a compellingly relevant book.

This site is a little different from my first idea, of course. At first I had the idea that I would make this site called “Al-Jazeera Watch”, which would play into people’s fears that Al-Jazeera needs to be watched. I planned to compile summaries of opinion articles from AlJazeera.net and post translations and analyses every week. I actually kept up with this workload, more or less, for several consecutive weeks. That was when I realized, that what I hadn’t thought about, was that I was asking for a big chunk of invested weekly time, and that exclusive reading of Al-Jazeera editorials eventually gets a bit dull. So that project is on the other burner for right now, but if anyone asks– I thought of it first.

I’ve been trying to read more lately, so I hope to keep the book reviews coming, and I’m sure I’ll have a few translations to post from time to time.  More than anything, I’d really like for this to be a site about getting outside your comfort zone and trying to figure stuff out.  That’s not all there is to life, of course, but it’s one of the things that’s worth talking about.