Best Foreign Covers & Foreign Versions Mix

A week or so ago I set myself to task: make a mix of my favorite covers or non-English versions of popularly known songs.  This was inspired by a powerful Khmer version of "House of the Rising Sun" by the Cambodian Space Project. Unfortunately, it isn't on their awesome album (2011: A Space Odyssey, which is great--absolutely solid--if you get a chance to buy it) but I was still able to get a copy--and it is on the mix.

Like all "best of" mixes, though, a lot did not make the cut.  Some great songs that didn't include Adriano Celentano's cover of "Stand By Me."  Then there is Johnny Hallyday, the great French pop singer, and his cover of "Sweet Home Alabama" (called "Postcard from Alabama"), but it is hard to beat Siniestro Total's Spanish cover version--and French is already over-represented.  And the Japanese band, Shang Shang Typhoon, and their cover of the Beatles "Let It Be" didn't make it on here, either (again, a video is below).  Shonen Knife was just too easy.  One song I sort of regret not putting on there is a version of Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs' "Wooly Bully" by Ros Sereysothea and Sinn Sisamouth from the Cambodian Psych-Out LP.  I've included a YouTube video below of a version just by Ros Sereysothea that isn't quite as good  It is a bit eery, in a way--neither Ros Sereysothea and Sinn Sisamouth, the most famous musicians in the country at the time, survived the Khmer Rouge. 

A few of these appeared on other mixes.  "Marie Douceur-Marie Colère," Marie LaForêt's cover of "Paint It Black" has gone onto numerous mixes over the years, and "Le Grand Amour" which is Nicoletta's French cover of "Son of a Preacherman" was on that wonderful 2009 Valentine's Day Mix (still one of my favorite mixes of all time). 

A couple of these songs--the Johnny Cash and the David Bowie tracks--are actually not covers, since, well, that is Johnny Cash and David Bowie singing.  Bowie actually has a lot of foreign language recordings--even in Mandarin.   I have a version of "Seven Years in Tibet" song in Mandarin.  Since I didn't include it--doesn't really fit--I have embedded the video of it below for you.

And a final video below (because I don't actually have this song, and you can't buy .mp3s from Amazon abroad) is Die Ärzte performing "Gehn Wie Ein Ägypter"--that's right: a German cover of The Bangles’ "Walk Like An Egyptian."

Here is the track list.  The actual files will include more information, including, often times, the foreign titles, in a zipped file with a .m3u playlist, and all the files are in .mp3 file format (which I hope works).  As usual, I wrote them at 128kbps which isn't the highest fidelity, but as always--if you like what you hear, buy an album.  Let me know what you think, and if you think I missed "the best foreign cover ever" let me know!  And usually I don't keep my mixes up indefinitely, so better get while the gettin's good!  And hey--everyone should have an Arabic cover of "Rocking the Casbah!"  Click on the title below to download the zipped file.

Same Same But Different Mix

1. 

   Hotel California - The Gypsy Kings (Spanish)
2. Paint It Black - Marie LaForêt (French)
3. Miña Terra Galega (Sweet Home Alabama) - Siniestro Total (Spanish)
4. Happy Together - Frank Alamo (French)
5. House of the Rising Sun - Cambodian Space Project (Khmer)
6. I Walk the Line – Johnny Cash (German)
7. Son of a Preacher Man - Nicoletta (French)
8. Kung Fu Fighting - Frederik (Finnish)
9. All Day and All the Night - Lionceaux (French)
10. Beautiful Girl – Prep Sovath (Khmer)
11. Rocking the Casbah - Rachid Taha (Arabic)
12. No Woman, No Cry - Nenne (Japanese)
13. Walk on the Wild Side - Albert Pla (Spanish)
14. Norwegian Wood - Cornershop (Punjabi)
15. Space Oddity – David Bowie (Italian)

Sanskrit, Samovars, Kant, Cambodia and Hillbillies: Welcome to My World

Kokohead Botanical Garden, Hawai'i

Well, I've been here in Cambodia just less than three weeks now and quite comfortably settled back into a routine of working and relaxation.  We don't plan to do much traveling outside of a trip to the coast that may get extended to a visit to the Cardamon Mountains.  I think we might work our way from Sihanoukville west through Kampot and Kep.

It is hot here and still dry and dusty.  The monsoon rains are just beginning to fall, so most evenings we have rain but not yet the deluge I know is waiting for us in the following two months.

Life is quite domestic.  I sleep relatively late each day, wake up, do my work, exercise--it is wonderful to be able to move again, and I'm working hard each day to get back to a circa 2009 fitness level--and then retire into the world of books.  My niece and nephew are living with us.  My sister-in-law is thinking of going back to Phnom Pehn to work in a coffee shop where she has been offered a job, but if she goes the kids will stay with us (as long as we are here) so that they can stay in school here and continue their evening English classes as well.

I should not make it sound as though I am being overly cerebral, however.  I've been watching Aqua Team Hunger Force episodes daily and a lot of wildlife/underwater documentaries.  Of course, I enjoy my cartoons, but I think I especially like that they are so short that I can take just a break and watch them.  I do have a number of films lined up to watch, though, like Jafar Panahi's The Circle and The White Balloon (I figure since he has been imprisoned and barred from making films for life in Iran, I should see his work).  I also have several Tarkovsky films to watch again, as well as the only film associated with him I've not seen--a documentary called Voyage in Time shot while he was in Italy making Nostalgia.

The kids accidentally deleted the zombie shoot'em up game I was playing in Peou's iPad, so that removed one potential waste of time.  I'm also (still) working on the novel, and have gotten 10,000 more words written since I got here.  I think I still have about 30K more to go, judging on where the story is at, so I'm optimistic that this third and hopefully final version will be completed by summer's end.

A Russian Samovar

I've also been wasting time looking at samovars, mostly on Ebay, and reading about Russian tea culture.  That also spun off into wasting a fair amount of time looking at Middle Eastern and North African tiles . . . yes, tiles.  Of course, they are beautiful, and I have this vision of a sort of Byzantine room in that future house.  Nothing like the Doris Duke Mansion, of course, but still . . . wouldn't I love to have something like the Syrian Room in my house!  Anyway, I am just waiting until I see the perfect samovar . . .

My last few weeks in Hawai'i were manic--getting papers written, packing, moving, working amongst it all and the what not--a lot of work and very, very little sleep.  I did finally get some shut-eye, though--I slept all the way to South Korea, had three beers in the airport (which I think cost $19) while talking to a fellow from Atlanta, and then I slept the rest of the way to Siem Reap.  I'd planned on reading an article on the way, but I wasn't awake long enough to get through it.

Teddies for Sale at the Road Side, Cambodia

My "intellectual vacation" officially ends Monday, which means basically I resume language work (Sanskrit, Pali, Khmer and brushing up on my Bahasa) and more serious reading.  I was planning on taking Khmer this coming year, but the all-star professor is on sabbatical, so I decided to take Indonesian instead.  Saya boleh bercakap setikut sudah. 

There are some selections of the Nyayalilavati of Vallabhacharya, a 13th century Sanskrit text, I'm going to work on translating as they could be very helpful in future dissertation work.  It will be a slow process, but a section addresses similarity that might be important.  I don't think it has ever been brought out in English.  My work on the Arthasastra has sort of fallen to the side since, because of my injury and surgeries, I did not have all the spare time I thought I would this past semester.  And considering I can work on doing some translations hopefully related to my dissertation proposal now, I think that is probably the best use of my Sanskrit hours.  

Just another personal note--most of the feeling has come back to my lower jaw/chin.  There is still a lot of nerve pain, particularly in my lower lip, and it will still be some time before I can eat tough foods.  The worst thing is that my mouth simply does not open very wide, so taking a bite out of a sandwich, for example, is not an easy affair--to put it simply, I can't.  So, I'm a very messy eater at present unless I can cut my food into tiny pieces.

Returning to possibly even more mundane matters than my inability to eat sandwiches, I made good use of my Kindle this trip.  I only brought three books in print--Deshpande's A Sanskrit Primer, Phillip's Classical Indian Metaphysics and the full translation of the Chinese envoy Zhou Daguan's A Record of Cambodia, the only first-hand account of the Angkorian civilization, written in 1296-1297. Even my copy of the Nyayalilavati is a .pdf (my reason for getting a Kindle was mostly to read .pdf files).  I do notice I have a tendency to try and touch the screen after having used the iPad for the last few weeks.  For the record, I do not like the Kindle Touch because of its lack of features related to reading .pdf files, and I do not think it is very user friendly.  I am much happier with my Kindle Keyboard.  And as a PC user, I am not much impressed by the iPad either.  It is not a production device--it is a consumption device.  The lack of a file system without addition aps is such a pain!  I may get myself a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 or the like once I am back in the USA.  I'd planned on getting an Apple Pro in the fall, but that probably isn't going to happen (thank you, Uncle Sam).  I have about a dozen books here in my house in Cambodia I want to bring back when we re-locate back to the States. 

My summer reading is largely things I wanted to read this past semester and was not able to:  finishing Mira Albahari's Analytic Buddhism, reading Metzinger's The Ego Tunnel, Waldon's The Buddhist Unconsciousness, and of course Phillip's Classical Indian Metaphysics.  I've also got an assortment of articles on Islamic law and legal reasoning to tackle, and those should all be fun.  I'm also going to finally read Gödel, Escher, Bach, pleasure reading which I am embarrassed to say I've not read yet.  I'll finish My Name is Red this weekend and I've started Anthony Harkins' Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon .  I'd like to focus more reading on Appalachian culture and issues, but that will have to wait until I am back in the USA and have access to a library.  I was also hoping to make it through Greek, Indian and Arabic Logic (the first volume of The Handbook of the History of Logic) but I am afraid I am being too ambitious but perhaps I will read the Arabic sections.

Kant

And then the final goal for summer is to read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason with the help of Graham Bird's Companion to Kant, The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy and the Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason.  Of course, I have read most of the first critique already, but basically I'm preparing for my canonical exams which I will take next spring.  I really regret not having brought a physical copy of Kant, and I don't think I'll be able to find the him in the couple odd bookstores here in Siem Reap.  That will be work.  Kant is a fine philosophy, but reading him is torturous.

I guess there is one more goal, and that is to write a paper on the ontology of similarity from a purely Western perspective.  That may or may not get accomplished, but it would help me prefigure some thoughts, and I think I could do it justice. 

So, welcome summer!  Let's see what happens.

Life Piling Up?

     My life keeps piling up

in the one place I keep clean for It

on the edge of the desk

where everything else sits

                waiting to be tended to

                waiting to be done

and then

      (there are always “and thens”)

It spills out beyond

Its bounds and

inexorably

It becomes a burden

                Until such chance that I

find a moment

with which to shred It,

putting It 
page by page

through the machine

And if listening to the teeth's maw

                I should happen to say to myself:

      “It did have my full name 

     & address on it after all.”

I'd really not feel so bad
thinking I was to erase
the acrid smell of myself
from history.  But these things
can generally only be done
in poetry.

 ~~~~~

A Tamil Nadu beach coming back to life after the Indian Ocean Tsunami
through chain link

It isn't often I write poetry, but each and every time I do it is with my friends Shannon Pugh, Shoshana Gross, and Shane Goodpaster in mind.  With more than anyone else poetry and metaphor became a real way of communicating between them.  My friends know and draw on this.  Meeting them is always exciting.  They are always on the cusp of something, and that is what you feel when you talk to them--on the verge of something wonderful.  When I see them, I want to play a round robin game of Magnificent Corpse with whomever is around and then spend the evening analyzing the group consciousness and Jungian archetypes in the pictures we produce.

I'm taking a break from working on a paper, but I'm sure many of you know this metaphor of the world being on fire: the world is on fire with suffering.  But there is another more positive idea of fire--that of illumination, of lighting the path.  It is self illuminating.  

Those are not inseparable concepts, though.  The path to true knowledge is said to be plagued with affliction and suffering.  Suffering is not necessary to fire, though, as self illumination is.  Let's try to be alighted in ourselves a little while each day.  Let's all write a poem each day.  The path is long and there is just vinegar to drink.  Let the wine come from us, then.

Let's not just put pages in the shredder.

Bucket List

I want this to be an "interactive entry" in as much as it can be.  I want you to think about this, come back, and share YOUR bucket list as well.  Use the comments, Facebook--whatever.

So, turn on some music (below!) and read what is on my bucket list, and then think about what is on yours.

Remember, the only thing that makes dying worth it is living.

Thirteen Things I Hope to Do Before I Die

The Blue Corner Wall in Pulau, Micronesia

1. Go hunting out west or up north with my father 
2. Take my family to meet the rest of my family in Cambodia and Vietnam
3. Scuba dive off the Blue Corner Wall in Pulau, Micronesia
4. Climb Gunung Tahan ("Tall Mountain") in the Taman Negara (National Forest), Malaysia
5. Walk/paddle/ride across Borneo from Pantianak to Sandakan
6. Do a long temple tour throughout southern India--on foot/bicycle
7. Drive across Russia
8. Island hop throughout the South Pacific
9. Spend a summer and fall living in Eastern Europe
10. Go on an African safari
11. Ride a motorcycle from Kashmir to Vietnam 
12. Design and build a house
13. Have kids!

And now--your bucket list!  Keep it to thirteen, though!

And just FYI, the song you are hearing is "Picking Flowers" by Lei Qian's two CD album "Chinese Traditional Erhu" that also appears on the collection "Music from the Tealands."

Three Scars

It isn't as though I have a lot of scars. My body has not been disfigured by any incredible accident, maimed by fate or man. As I've moved this body through life, though, it has been damaged, cut, injured, the mark of which still endures, a visible reminder of that exact instant, that time when my flesh was opened up, red lips yawning, and my living body spilled out of me. Scars are like memories but etched into our flesh rather than our minds.

On my arm, barely visible any more, covered in blond hair once again, is a small, round scar. A Chinese girl in a bar on Lebuh Chulia in Georgetown, Penang once marveled at the hair on my arms, telling me I had hair of gold. She also told me I looked like Jesus. It had to be one of the strangest pickup lines of all time. I remember when the scar was hairless, purple. It was a self-inflicted scar, an attempt to use physical pain to blot out emotional pain. It was back when I was maybe 18, or maybe even 17. I don't remember now—not without a journal to refer back to, or some other milestone to orient myself. I've never been good with time or order. The past . . . well, when something was in relation to now has always seemed murky to me. I'm much better with "where" than "when". This "where" was a farmhouse in Hogtown, Kentucky—also known as Elliotville. Actually, it was several, several miles from there. I often walked there to the country store, in the cold of winter--I lived there through a winter, before coming to college, reading philosophy and living wildly.  My walks to the store were mostly for cigarettes or even rolling tobacco. Times were tough then, and I lived off of just a few hundred dollars a month. I was broke most of the time. I put one of those cigarettes out on my arm. I'd just found out my girlfriend at the time had lost her virginity to my best friend, maybe a few weeks before. I'd hoped that by extinguishing the cigarette on my arm it would extinguish the pain in my heart. I learned, though, that things don't work that way. Pain only dies out if left untended, like a fire in the night. Unlike fire, it cannot be extinguished in a moment.

On my left ankle, just above my tanned foot there is a scar that looks cosmological, or perhaps like some amoeba spread out, pale against the color of my browned foot and leg. Sometimes, I run my fingertips across it, feeling its contours, the contrast with the surrounding skin. It is now partially obscured from an anklet I bought for $1 in the Psar Chas in Siem Reap, but its memory is obscured by nothing. It was a break from studies; I was a student at the Universiti Sains Malaysia at the time, and I and two American friends had gone to Sumatra, to Tuk Tuk on Danau Tobah on the island of Samosir. We'd decided to rent motorbikes and go across to the other side where there were some volcanic hot springs. I had a friend on the back, and not long after starting I hit a patch of gravel, wrecked the bike and mangled my ankle. Picking the gravel out of my flesh while waiting for an Indonesian man to repair the bike—it was only the footrest that was bent—I could not but think of the Hemingway short story, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in which the protagonist is dying from gangrene in his leg while on a safari—the result of a mistreated thorn. We continued on our journey, though.  I was not able to get into the hottest pool, but dipped out water once we reached the hot springs to wash my wound. I remember the smell of sulfur from the nearby vents.  On the way back, children tried to touch as as we road by, and some even through rocks.  Later, while the wounds were still open, we climbed Gunung Sibayak outside of Berastagi. My sandals—a pair of Birkenstock's I'd bought at a yard sale years before—broke. I climbed the volcano up and down barefooted.  As I think back about it—and the days of limping around, the discomfort of the wound, it was the embarrassment that hurt the most. That was another lesson—some scars of the body can remind you of pains of the mind, and these can smolder long after you think the fire has died.

On my right ankle, in nearly the same spot as the scar on my left, is a more subtle scar, one that may fade over time. It was an unexpected scar, a scar that materialized without the red smile of a cut. When I touch it, it feels alien, numb, as if I were touching the ankle of someone else, a foot of parchment leather, not my own living skin.  It is less than a year old. I was with my family on the shores of the South China Sea, at Ochheuteal Beach, Cambodia with my wife, her mother, father, aunt, uncle, and nieces and nephews. As they prepared to get in the water, I scanned its depths and spied jellyfish there. There were small jellies, but then also huge ones, their tentacles trailing far behind them. Soon I saw some beach boys, their skin black and taut from long hours in the sun, using nets to fish some of the big ones out of the water and throwing them on the shore to slowly melt away.  These were box jellies. Because of the jellyfish, I did not let the children get into the water. But as we played together, with the water just coming to the edge of our sandcastles, I felt two stings—one on my ankle, and another on my knee. There were no jellies to be seen—it must have been a detached tentacle that brushed against me. I got limes and rubbed them across the stings (acid can neutralize the poison) and forgot about it. The pain faded—it had not been intense to begin with. However, within a few days my ankle (but never my leg) looked as it is had been badly burnt, erupting, the skin bursting open and peeling away, and the foot swelling and too painful to walk on. It was only days later, after applying a traditional poultice of a tree root, that I was able to walk again.  It must have been a box jelly tentacle that brushed against me, and as I look at this scar—still, slightly purple unlike the white scar of my motorcycle wreck, I am happy. Box jellies can be lethal, sometimes triggering anaphylactic shock, and it was wise we did not go into the water that day.  This was yet another lesson—some scars can remind you that things could have been worse than they were, and that a burn may save you from a conflagration. 

There are other scars, of course. There is the bump and jagged line that runs down from my hairline on the right side of my forehead, from getting pushed down a flight of stairs in Chinatown, Honolulu four years ago. I've got two new ones within the past two weeks, my most pronounced ones yet—one, nearly from ear to chin, the other across the bottom on my chin, from a surgery to put my jaw back together after being jumped by four men in Moiliili in Hawai'i. And there are other scars I bear—from a pair of clippers held under my arm, from a rusty nail sticking out of a barn, from a chickenpox scar I picked too much, from a ragged metal edge on a toy box.  And like all of us, I have other scars, the scars I've not spoken of here—the ones that you cannot see.  But those are the scars that, even though they are invisible, we seek to hide—not hide from others, but from ourselves.  As Cicero wrote in his exposition of Epicurus, "Mental pleasures and pains [compared to] bodily ones . . .are more powerful, as they embrace past and future [sic]."

We all have scars, and they all have stories. They speak to our fragility and to our impermanence as well as to our resilience and to our endurance. They are simultaneously reminders of our past and our futures, of our lives and our deaths, our strength and our weakness.

They are, above all, testaments to a life lived.

This has been the story of three of my scars.