Sandie Shaw and hoopoes

Her 1967 song “puppet on a string” is quite well-known...but today I got to know that the German version is something else. I wondered whether it was the same song...”Wiedehopf im Mai” (Hoopoe in May). What do hoopoes have in common with puppets and strings?...and merry-go-rounds???? I tried to find whether “Wiedehopf im Mai” was some kind of idiom...or to see if hoopoes did anything special in May. What an odd translation... Unfortunately I’ve not listened to the German version and wasn’t either lucky looking for the lyrics...

I don’t know why did I end up finding the title of that song in German, and I don’t know why did I decide to look for some information on Sandie Shaw. Besides the “Hoopoe” thing, I found out that Mrs. Shaw has not leaded a life of a typical 60es pop singer.

Die fliegende Trabis und die Pechvögel

Himmelblauen Trabis fliegen wie Trabanten und zeichnen Kreise aus mehrere Farben über mein Kopf. Himmelblau, hell grün, weiß, gelb. Nur ein paar Farbe entlang der Wegen der Wolken. Fliegende Trabis, die ich versuche zu folgen, aber Pechvögel haben wenig Kraft und es gibt immer etwas, dass sie schießen würde. Bang! Und weg oder Wunde, Wunde, Wunde. Wie ein trauriges Lied, fast alles ist schwer zu erreichen, und fast alles läuft mit den Trabis und wird entfernt. Aber...aber ich kann doch einen Planet erfinden und bauen. Auch kann ich Trabis und Trabanten aus Papier machen. Mit geschlossenen Augen werde ich reisen und, irgendwann, irgendwo, irgendwie, etwas neues entdecken, innen und draußen. Ich vermute, dass es etwas neben meinem Herz, hinter meinem Kopf, im Mittelpunkt meines Gehirns, ein tanzendes Etwas in meine Augen gibt. Und irgendwann bin ich keinen Pechvogel mehr sondern jemand oder etwas, wer mit einem fliegenden Trabi fährt.

All is full of birds

No matter when you have a look at your watch, at any clock, no matter what you might be doing at a certain point of time, there might be a bird observing you. Invisible or visible birds. Birds always seem to be observing something accurately...and when they chirp, it’s as if they were doing comments on reality and maybe conspiring. Agile creatures that, like happiness and illness and death and good news and new acquaintances and friends, come across our way, all of a sudden, on the ground, above our heads, in some balcony we decide to look at. Birds are not birds, but something else. They make me notice some other world flowing, happening alongside my steps, the path I end up following. And as I make paper birds, that other world seems to be invading the world I always thought was the world, till some moment in time, and still from time to time. Everything becomes filled with colour paper birds as everything is emptied of its sense or meaning. Maybe some other birds are meanwhile looking at Prosikito saying “vámonos de fiesta”. Reality and unreality and transreality and interpretations of the 3 dimensions.

siempre suaves!!!

Hoy, de nuevo, uno de esos días en que la necesidad de tener una sobredosis de música de los Suaves no se puede evitar (otras veces ha sido de Gammaray, Marea, Kiss o AC/DC..o incluso melodías darkwave de BlutEngel). También la necesidad de recordar aquallos conciertos de rock, en especial, claro está, el momento apoteósico en que los Suaves (Yosi con la melena cana y la guitarra), en un concierto en Badalona...junio de 2004 (con Rubén y compañía, con la gran ausencia de Verónica), cantaron hacia el final "Dolores se llamaba Lola" (para entonces estábamos ya sólo Rubén, su amigo heviata auténtico, el otro amigo con la camiseta de Iron Maiden...y el chico extraño salido de la nada). Grandes canciones, incluyendo la manera cruda y realista de ver las cosas. "Maldita sea mi suerte", "hotel", "ese día piensa en mí", "dulce castigo", "si pudiera"...

Y hoy es además de muchas cosas, el cumpleaños de mi amigo Juanma (eiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!!! boas! txipirón gran reserva del 81!)..así q le dedico "si pudiera", una de las canciones más positivas de los Suaves, con sabor a himno. Dedicartela me alegra el día...y también saber que tendrás una celebración tras el trabajo (si es que no te transtorna eso del genba con los chicos del bronx..suena a peli del gran Jackie Chan)!!!!

CORVIDAE and UPUPIDAE

Today, again, i was trying to find the name in Tibetan for hoopoe. But again i was unsuccessful... which means that i'll have to ask a professor, who once said that in class of Tibetan language. However, i was lucky in the sense that i found something precious for me. First i found some website about crow augury, in other words, how to fortell future events from the behaviour of crows, taking into account different moments of the day. I read that such method is used in Tibet (Bya-rog-gi skad brtag-par bya-ba...i can't paste tibetan script here, so just Wylie) and has its origins in India. I'm keen on ornithology and i like crows, so that website, http://www.jcrows.com/crolang.html , was really interesting to me. There's also information on crows, for those with no interest on divination and such arts.

On some other website, http://7thcrow.com/crows.html , i found more things on legends, myths regarding crows. That time what i read was about counting crows, nothing to do with their behaviour. There were some verses talking about events related to different numbers of crows. Here i reproduce 2 groups of verses:
1) Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable is:
One's sorrow, two's mirth,
Three's a wedding, four's a birth,
Five's a christening, six a dearth,
Seven's heaven, eight is hell,
And nine's the devil his old self.

2) Counting Rhyme (from The Folklore of Birds, by Laura C. Martin, 1993)
One for sorrow, two for mirth,
Three for a wedding, four for a birth,
Five for silver, six for gold,
Seven for a secret not to be told.
Eight for heaven, nine for hell,
And ten for the devil's own sel'.

It's not easy to spot crows around here, unlike what i've been told about Singapore and Tokyo...but i think that i'll pay attention to their number. I did like the rhyme (i read somewhere else that it was a nursery rhyme). I hope you too (or a few of you) liked this. Maybe some of you have already heard about this kind of things. ah.....if i hadn't heard the word in tibetan for hoopoe and, afterwards, having forgotten it, i wouldn't have had the chance to come across crow divination and the rhymes above. I'd not have looked for such word by myself, spontaneously since i wouldn't either have thought spontaneously about hoopoes. I'm thankful to that professor...

Plastic People of the Universe

aaah....A couple of days ago i couldn't help having a drawing-need attack. My hand moved unconciously and started drawing, like some time ago. I've always loved drawing and i've never given it up (although it means sometimes drawing in books, which i could never lend to anybody, to reuse them...sorry). The picture above of the consequences of my having-to-draw that day. He's a Professor at University. uhm...i don't know whether i should give names here. And why drawing him? spontaneus drawing impulse (SDI). Since there’s not much to say about this SDI, I’ll build, this time, a multi-topic article, with no connections between topics.
Wanting to be like Beckham or so??? Beckham ist Quatsch mit Soße! (¡naranjas de la China!..nonsense in English, but it's not as funny, that's why i didn't write it first in English). Beckhamhood and all related fashiondelamuertehood is something temporary. Oh! tree leaves turning yellowish and falling sadly onto the ground of drowsy parks and forests, when the night has told stories about the coming hard winter. That's the death of beckhamhood.
By the way, Plastic People of the Universe (Milan Hlavsa,Josef Janíček, Vratislav Brabenec, Jiří Kabeš) was a band from the former Czechoslovakia. I once (quite a long time ago) heard about it in some TV report (i think it was in "sputnik", on canal 33) about music and political events. They talked about these people (they made interesting music, with mysterious sounds...some kind of rock, close to psychedelic rock, sometimes), Václav Hável and the Velvet Revolution. I liked the name of this music band.