If you’ve got Bombay the Hard Way, Dan the Automator’s album of remixed songs by the classic ’70s Bollywood composers Kalyanji-Anandji, you might recognize the soundtrack of Bombay 405 Miles. Like their other work, it’s great, funky stuff, but something that confuses me is why Automator missed out on the best part of the soundtrack. From what I read about the movie, which I haven’t seen, Zeenat Aman, the hottest babe in ’70s Bollywood (and all Bollywood ever; incidentally, also the babe up on top of your screen), is distracting some bad guys by making them think she’s coming on to them. I mention this because otherwise you’d think this song was from a porn soundtrack. She (or Hemlata, the playback singer) sings (my translation):

No no no no no, what have you begun to do?
You’ve started to cross the borders.
Where have you brought me?
You made a promise of somewhere else,
But now you’ve brought me here.
Get out of here! Get out!
Leave me!
Oh, my heart’s begun to pound here.
The dream of love that I’ve seen -
Aren’t there thorns in it?
I’ve just seen a rose and nothing else,
For making love, there should be a parade of stars,
A serene night,
A bed of flowers.
Then - there could be something like this, right?
Right? Ohhh.
Hm! Oh, hmmm!
Let me go! Ha ha ha!
Don’t you… trust me?
My love is for you!
But… not right now.
When we’re tasting intimacy,
We’re both restless,
There’s fire on both sides of us.
Let me look at you.
Oh, stop it! Don’t! Ahhhh…
Oh, God! You’re very stubborn.
You want to step forward.
The body burns like an ember,
My breath is escaping me.
Leave me alone!
Don’t take relationships by force.
What about honor, the norms of society?
Don’t do it like this
Leave me, leave me, leave me, leeave me!
Ahh, ha ha ha, ohh, oh God!
Ha ha ha!
Naughty boy!
Ahh, ahh.

Hemlata - Na Na Na, Yeh Kya Karne Lage Ho

Hey, so I haven’t really updated this thing in an extremely long time. I’ve been in Lucknow, India, studying Urdu, and haven’t really had time to update. So I’m sorry about that. On the plus side, I’ve heard a bunch of great tunes in the last year or so since I posted, so I’ll try to get through some of them. I’m starting grad school at Berkeley (where I also did my undergrad) in a couple months, but I hope I’ll have the willpower required to force myself to play on the computer every so often.

Let’s see if I can play against type and not just post some Indian thing. My friend Alex, who follows all the phenomenal music that comes out of Scandinavia much more closely than I do, gave me this album called 8BP050, which is a chiptune compilation, basically dance music made with Gameboys and other low-fi beepy things. One of my favorite songs on the album is “Switchblade Squadron,” by Covox, who appears to be a Swede named Thomas Söderlund. I never had a Gameboy, or even any other kind of video game platform, making me probably the only American born in the ’80s who doesn’t know all the names of the different characters and bad guys in Mario Bros. Nor do I think of myself as someone who really likes electronic stuff all that much. Regardless, this is a hell of a catchy, upbeat, beepy little song, and a bunch of the other numbers on the album are pretty good, too. The whole thing is a great driving soundtrack, especially now it’s summer, and you can tool around with the windows down, thinking about how cool you are for listening to music that little 8×8 characters would dance to if they were at a little on-screen nightclub in 1989.

Covox - Switchblade Squadron

The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N is a charming, short novel from 1937, by Leonard Q. Ross, actual Jewish name Leo Rosten, who taught ESL in New York. It has no real plot - I think it was originally a series of short stories - but each chapter is another episode from the tribulations of Mr. Parkhill, who gamely tries to teach English to a bunch of my very distant cousins. His most remarkable student is H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N, as he invariably writes his own name, in crayon, with blue outlines around the red letters. Mr. Kaplan’s English never seems to improve, but he loves class anyway:

“No, sir!” cried Mr. Kaplan impetuously. “‘Good, gooder, goodest? It’s to leff!”
“We say that X, for example, is good. Y, however, is–?” Mr. Parkhill arched an eyebrow interrogatively.
“Batter!” said Mr. Kaplan.
“Right! And Z is–?”
“High-cless!”

Mr. Kaplan always has the last word:

“Maybe isn’t ‘Heng yoursalf in resaption hall” altogadder a mistake,” Mr. Kaplan murmured dreamily. “If som pipple came to mine house dat vould maybe be exactel vat I should say.”

Rich recommended I read Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America, which I think he got from Froyo, so when I saw it for $6 in Boston, but a few T stops from Boston College, where the author, Steve Almond, beats grammar into freshmen, I snapped it up, even though it was hardback and I prefer paperbacks. It turned out to be a very entertaining, breezy account of every aspect of Almond’s obsession with candy. From the prologue, “Some things you should know about the author”:

3. The author has between three and seven pounds of candy in his house at all times.
Perhaps you think I am exaggerating for effect.
I am not exaggerating for effect.
Here is a catalog of all the candy in my apartment as of right now, 3:21 p.m., July 6, 2003:

• 2 pounds minature Clark Bars
• 1.5 pounds dark chocolate-covered mint patties
• 24 bite-size peanut butter cups
• 1 pound Tootsie Roll Midgets
• 4 ounces of Altoids-like cinnamon disks
• 6 ounces cherry-flavored jellies (think budget Jujyfruits)
• A single gold-foiled milk chocolate ball with mysterious butter truffle-type filling
• 2 squares of Valrona [sic] semisweet chocolate (on my bedside table)
• 3 pieces Fleer bubblegum

I am not counting the fourteen boxes of Kit Kat Limited Edition Dark, which I have stored in an undisclosed warehouse location, nor whatever candy I might have stashed, squirrel-like, in obscure drawers.

So you can tell that he’s serious about candy. He mostly talks about all the candies he’s ever eaten, the ones he’s heard about but hasn’t eaten, the ones he used to eat that don’t exist anymore, etc. The meat (or nutmeat) of the book is where he goes on a cross-country frenzy of visiting the small regional family candy companies that still make Twin Bings and Idaho Spuds and Abba-Zabas and Five Star Bars, which he claims, convincingly, are the single greatest candy bar in existence:

There was caramel, obviously, but also roasted almonds and nuggets of dark chocolate. It was draped in a thin layer of milk chocolate. The interplay of tastes and textures was remarkable: the teeth broke through the milky chocolate shell, sailed through the mild caramel, only to encounter the smoky crunch of the almonds, and finally, the rich tumescence of the dark chocolate. You almost never see milk and dark chocolate commingled, but the effect in this bar was striking: The sweetness of the milk chocolate rushed across the tongue, played against the musky crunch of the nut, then faded. The bite finished with an intense burst of dark chocolate, softened by the butter dissolution of caramel. What I mean here: there was a temporal aspect to the bar, a sense of evanescence and persistence.

There’s also a lot of interesting history and background and whatnot, plus some sort of distressing introspection about why he likes candy so much: basically, because his family didn’t love him.

The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear is the most exciting book I’ve read in quite a while. The book itself is very exciting, but what I really mean is that it gave me the visceral thrill of reading more than any book since maybe The Golden Gate, Vikram Seth’s stunningly gorgeous novel in verse. I can’t read Russian, but if the translation I read is anything to go by, I think Golden Gate is better, even, than its forerunner, Eugene Onegin. One of my favorite half-sonnets goes,

O loveliness, contrained and free!
Ah, Mozart, prince of music makers
Who (for the miracle you gave)
Lie buried in an unmarked grave!
Now the world movers and world shakers
–Archbisops, stewards, counts, and kings–
Rot voiceless, you still lend us wings.

Anyway, that has nothing at all to do with Bluebear. I just like to hype Golden Gate, which for some reason doesn’t get as much attention as Seth’s other books. From Heaven Lake is also too ignored - it’s a wonderful travelogue about hitchhiking from Nanjing to Calcutta through Tibet.

Getting back to the best children’s book since Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: while waiting for my Indian visa, I was killing time at Green Apple Books, my current favorite bookstore, on Clement Street, one of my favorite streets in San Francisco. You know those little cards where stores tell you what’s good? Green Apple might as well be wallpapered in them, and as far as I can tell, every one of them is right on. Everyone who works there seems to have really good taste. Bluebear was one of these books, and boy, am I glad I took the gamble and got it on top of English, August (see below), which was the book I was actually looking for.

Apparently, Bluebear was some huge bestseller in Germany, a country with notably good instincts in the realm of children’s books, the land of Struwwelpeter and The Neverending Story, which, let me tell you, is an incredibly rad book, and probably 9 times better than the movie, which is also awesome. It’s by some dude named Walter Moers, who seems to have written a bunch of these types of books. I ordered another one, but messed up the shipping, so hopefully it’ll get to me before I leave for India on Sunday. Bluebear is, as you might expect, a blue bear. You may not know, though, that bluebears have 27 lives. This is the story of his first 13½, told as a memoir. Bluebear doesn’t know how he was born, but he showed up as a tiny baby bluebear, floating in a walnut shell, about to fall into the fearsome Malmstrom, a vast whirlpool. Luckily, the Minipirates rescued him, and he spent a happy youth singing pirate songs with them and futilely trying to attack ships that never heeded the tiny corsairs. Eventually, he grows too big, and the Minipirates tearfully set him ashore on an island with a stock of coconuts, but he eventually dies of thirst. The next 12½ lives, though, are considerably more eventful. The book’s very reminiscent of The Phantom Tollbooth, one of my favorite children’s books, in that the hero visits all sorts of different lands and meets a lot of strange people, but Bluebear is probably even more inventive, plus it has more pictures and maps. It’s actually sort of odd to even call it a children’s book - it has a lot of hard vocabulary, and measures a satisfying 703 pages.

The next few posts have nothing to do with music - I just read a few books that I liked, all in a row, so I thought I’d write up a little something about them, one at a time, in the order I read them:

English, August: An Indian Story was a big hit in India when it came out in 1989, but never got any attention in the US. I don’t think it was even available here until this year, when it was published in the superb New York Review of Books series of reprints. It’s wonderfully unpretentious - not to suggest that Indian fiction has a tendency toward pretension, but the books that get famous over here, Midnight’s Children (great), A Fine Balance (sucks) and A Suitable Boy (pretty great) often have this big task of trying to encompass all of what supposedly characterizes India - every caste, every religion, every time, every place. Of course Indian literature, in English and other languages, is terrifically diverse, but that sort of omnivorous narrative is what’s sells here, I guess. English, August is not that kind of book. Much like the author, Upamanyu Chatterjee, the main character, Agastya Sen, is an educated, well-off member of the Bengali bhadralok, stuck with an obscure Sanskritic name, doomed to a dull and lonely civil service job in the hinterlands. He mostly spends his time masturbating, smoking pot, and reading Marcus Aurelius, and making tentative friends with the other outsiders in his own personal backwater. Chatterjee doesn’t shy away from the plain tedium of the Indian countryside as a lot of his contemporaries do, but neither does he lambaste it as many an urban litterateur does. The book is funny, yeah, but it’s also beautiful:

While Manik chatted with Pultukaku and elicited from him a few misanthropic monosyllables, the familiar feeling of the absurd, as much a part of him as his names, overwhelmed Agastya, and he wondered whether, when married, he would be able to exercise in front of his wife, and what he would do if, just when he was lunging for a push-up she were to say, For someone who exercises so much you’re in awful shape. And suppose she stole his money? And the all-important subject of kinky sex - she might not like sharing each other’s used underwear, then?

Eventually, he knew, he would marry, perhaps not out of passion, but out of convention, which was probably a safer thing. And then in either case, in a few months or years they would tire of disagreeing with each other, or what was more or less the same thing, would be inured to each other’s odd and perhaps disgusting ways, the way she squeezed the tube of toothpaste and the way he drank from a glass and didn’t rinse it, and they would slide into a placid and comfortable unhappiness, and maybe unseeingly watch TV every evening, each still a cocoon, but perhaps it would be unwise to be otherwise. And his once-secret life would be entombed in a mind half-dead to an incarcerating world, and he would remember, with a sense of bemused embarrassment, and in epiphanies flashes, brought on by uncontrollable jolts to his memory through a smell of some unexpected sight (perhaps the view from a train or an ad on TV), his this experience of Madna, that once the restlessness of his mind had seemed the most important thing in this universe, and that he had once been shaken by the profundity of an ancient Hindu poem.

Ever since I was a little kid, when I thought “Leader of the Pack” (vrrrm! vrrrrrrm!) was the greatest song in the world, I’ve loved girl groups. They never seem to get too much respect, probably because they didn’t write their own songs, and they were mostly just manufactured by their producers. So? When the producer was Lou Christie, who cares?

The Tammys were one of Christie’s first groups, and I guess he went all-out on them. As much as I love the Bangles’ hit “Walk Like an Egyptian,” nothing can stop the Tammys’ “Egyptian Shumba” from being the greatest ancient Egypt-themed pop song of all time. Don’t even talk to me about that Steve Martin song. “Egyptian Shumba” is so bizarre that it’s almost a parody. The first squeaks at the beginning of the song sound like some Austin Powers thing, but nope, it’s a legit, amazing girl-group song, replete with screams and sighs. Handclaps must not have been invented yet by 1963, because this is such a perfect song that if rhythmic handclaps had existed, they would have been all over this song.

I first heard this song on Girls Go Zonk!, a nice one-disc compilation, but you can also get a whole CD of just The Tammys, called Egyptian Shumba: The Singles and Rare Recordings 1962-1964. The best idea, though, is to invest in the mondo box set One Kiss Can Lead to Another. It’s packed with about 75,890,279,852 amazing, unknown girl-group songs, from favorites like the Shirelles and Petula Clark and unknowns, as well.

This has nothing to do with “Egyptian Shumba,” but I may be posting less often here. I’m about to leave for a year in India, studying Urdu in the northern city of Lucknow. I’ll have an Internet connection, so I’ll try to continue to post songs. I might also start writing about my travels, here or somewhere else. We’ll see.

The Tammys - Egyptian Shumba

OK, I’ve had way too long a string of namby-pamby, nicely-nicely instrumental songs here recently. Here’s Nina Hagen, to change that with new wave beepy screechy (she belongs to the Neue Deutsche Welle, or German New Wave, but the name’s also a play on the German national radio station). According to my old German textbook and the German Wikipedia, she was born in 1955 to an actress and was partly raised by her composer stepfather, Wolf Biermann. She escaped from East to West Germany, via England, in 1976, when she was 21. She described herself as, “Nina Hagen, international punk star, UFO specialist, passionate mother, engaged protector of animals, dwelling: Berlin, Hamburg, Ibiza and the rest of the world.” You can hear the animal thing in “Don’t Kill the Animals,” a duet she did with Lene Lovich, who wrote “Lucky Number.”

Lucky for you, dear reader, Hagen’s cover of that song, “Wir Leben Immer…Noch” (”We Always Live… On”) doesn’t have lyrics like, “Animal testing is a dangerous game, / Our systems are different, we’re not the same.” Instead, it has crazy orgasmic screaming and possibly Lotte Lenya-inspired hammy vocal gymnastics.

Her children are named Cosma Shiva and Otis.

My German’s not so hot these days, but let’s see if I can give it a shot without risking an excessively accurate translation:

Wir wandern bloss und nackt in die Unendlichkeit,
We wander [something] and naked in the unendingness,
Wir schweben auf dem Pfade in die Ewigkeit,
We [something something] in eternity,
Wir glauben was wir wissen und wir fürchten uns,
We believe what we know and we fear ourselves,
Wohl weil wir sterben müssen das beängstigt uns,
It frightens us that we must die,
Wir sind die Lebenden,
We’re the living,
Nach Leben strebenden.
Striving after life.

Jeder neue Tag kann gut und böse sein,
Every new day can be good and bad,
Wir stellen unsere Viberationen selber ein,
We make our own vibrations,
Und wenn wir morgens früh an unser ende denken,
And when we think about our end in the early morning,
Dann kann uns dieses wissen durch die Tagzeit lenken,
Then we can [something] know this through the daytime,
Weil wir leben können,
Because we can live,
Und uns das Sterben gönnen.
And death [somethings] us.

Wir vegetieren und wir rasen durch die Lebenzeit,
We vegetate and and we [dunno] through our lifetimes,
Wir verblassen und verpassen die gelegenheit,
We [no idea],
Wir haben keine Zeit, tun uns selber leid,
We have no time, to say sorry,
Wir vegetieren und wir rasen durch die Lebenzeit.
We vegetate and we [something] through our lifetimes.

Wir verstecken unsere ängste in der Zwischenzeit,
We [mumble] our fears in the interim,
Wir zittern immer noch vor der Vergangenheit,
We always shiver before the past,
Wir entwickeln uns nicht weiter, weil Erwachsen sein,
We grow[?] broader, because we’re awake,
Uns einzwängt in die Zwänge der Gesellschaft,
[Something something] society,
Nein, so wollen wir nicht sein,
No, we don’t want to be like this,
Oh, nein dass muss nicht sein!
Oh no, it can’t be!

You want accuracy? Use Babelfish.

You can get the song as a bonus track on the bargain $10 ’80s bathhouse fave Nunsexmonkrock, or in its original context on the slightly more expensive Unbehagen.

Nina Hagen - Wir Leben Immer… Noch

Vieja Trova Santiaguera (Old Santiagoan Trova) is a quintet of spry old men, all from the eastern Cuban city of Santiago, an important city to Cuban music and the birthplace of trova, a genre that developed among poor, itinerant, self-taught troubadours (trovadores) in the late nineteenth century, growing out of cancion, urban music that grew out of the mixture of Cuban folk music, European popular song and influences from Mexico, Venezuela and Colombia.

Vieja Trova formed in 1994, naming itself in contrast to the politicized, eclectic “Nueva Trova” (new trova) movement that emerged after the 1959 Communist revolution. Though the members are apparently devout Communists, they didn’t have much truck with the innovations of their juniors. Although Buena Vista Social Club was still a few years in the future, Vieja Trova was founded on basically the same principle, of reviving the musical traditions of the past before all their practitioners died.

“El Tren” (”The Train”) is a whimsical song with wonderful vocal sound effects and onomatopoeia, from their self-titled album. The rest of the album is okay - there are a couple of nice standards (”Lagrimas Negras” (”Black Tears”) and “Son de la Loma” (”They’re From the Hills”) and a lovely song called “El Huerfanito” (”The Little Orphan”), but the rest is undistinguished. If you want to know more about trova and the whole history of Cuban music, I recommend The Rough Guide to Cuban Music.

Vieja Trova Santiaguera - El Tren

If you’ve heard of Cab Calloway, you probably know his hit, “Minnie the Moocher.” You might not know, though, that there’s a terrific and bizarre cartoon of it, starring, incongruously, Betty Boop. Before I saw the video, I’d always assumed that Betty Boop was just a boring, ditzy character. Maybe she got stupid later on, but the awkwardly drawn girl in this cartoon is as far from bland as she is from conventionally erotic. Also, who knew Betty Boop was Jewish?

The actual story of this cartoon has little to do with what makes it worth watching. Betty Boop and her doggy friend Bimbo run away from home, and then the insanity begins. Their host to psychedelia is Cab Calloway, the walrus: he’s rotoscoped over the earliest known footage of Cab Calloway. Calloway, it seems, was a dance phenom, as well as the inventor of David Byrne’s big suit and the best-dressed man before Andre 3000. There’s a wonderful variety-show movie from 1943 called Stormy Weather that features some great dancing and singing from Cab Calloway, Bill Robinson (a.k.a. Mr. Bojangles), and a whole lot of other greats; it’s well worth checking out. You can download other Boop/Calloway collaboration, or get them on DVD. “Snow White” is especially strange and wonderful.