Pop songs and such

I was just thinking yesterday. Yes, thinking, me. Who knew? About how at certain times, like yesterday, for example, certain media speak more strongly to us than others. I am movie-saturated with this film course, though I must admit, I love watching several mentally challenging films a week, and speaking of saturated, the film I watched today, Ripstein's "Lugar sin límites" was so heavily saturated with red, it was almost overwhelming, but somehow quite appropriate for the film. But it always the radio that gets me. I can't explain it, ever since I was a little girl listening to the top 40 in my bedroom for hours on Saturday mornings, draped gymnastically over the edge of my bed, hanging upside down. I have been listening to NPR for five minutes each morning. And in the afternoons, if I drive. I have been stripping the gears of that poor Toyota, but perhaps soon will not have to do that. I actually broke down in tears as the morning edition reporters reported on a little girl, seven, was tortured, starved and ultimately beaten to death by her mother's boyfriend. I. sat quietly and listened. They were very matter of fact, not at all sensationalist, which is the only reason I can actually listen to the news, but as I was getting my little one out of her car seat and holding her hand as she clutched at mine, shivering in the morning frost, she caught me, "why are you crying Mommy?" "I'm not," I try to wipe the tears from my face. "Yes you are. Are you sad about that little girl?" "Yes." "That's horrible, somebody should have helped her." "Yes." "Mommy? I love you." "I love you too baby." "So much?" "So much." "You should have turned the radio off, Mommy. I shouldn't be hearing those things."

I agreed, and after I walked with her through the breakfast line and sat her at the long institutional cafeteria seat, opened her sealed utensils and poured her milk, I walked back out through the double doors, turned, like always to wave and she was searching for my eyes too, we made one last moment of eye contact, I changed the channel to a pop radio station. And everything still made me weep. No luck. Isn't it funny? There is this Ani song from her Dilate album where she says "And every pop song on the radio, is suddenly speaking to me. Yeah art may imitate life, but life imitates TV." And then I tripped over this lyric en francais:

L'étrangère:
Il existe près des écluses un bas quartier de bohémiens,
Dont la belle jeunesse s'use à démêler le tien du mien
En bande on s'y rend en voiture,
ordinairement au mos d'août,
Ils disent la bonne aventure, pour des piments et du vin doux;
on passe la nuit claire à boire, on danse en frappant dans ses mains,
on n'a pas le temps de le croire, il fait grand jour et c'est demain.
On revient d'une seule traite, gais, sans un sou, vaguement gris,
Avec des fleurs plein les charrettes, son destin dans la paume écrit.

J'ai pris la main d'une éphémère, qui m'a suivi dans ma maison
Elle avait des yeux d'outremer, elle en montrait la déraison.
Elle avait la marche légère, et de longues jambes de faon,
J'aimais déjà les étrangères quand j'étais un petit enfant!
Celle-ci parla vite vite de l'odeur des magnolias,
Sa robe tomba tout de suite quand ma hâte la délia.
En ce temps là, j'étais crédule, un mot m'était promission,
Et je prenais les campanules pour des fleurs de la passion..
Quand c'est fini tout recommence, toute musique me séduit,
Et la plus banale romance m'est éternelle poésie..
Nous avons joué de notre âme, un long jour, une courte nuit,
Puis au matin: "bonsoir madame", l'amour s'achève avec la pluie.
--Paroles: Louis Aragon. Musique: Léo Ferré

And instead of making me sad, it made me smile like a damn fool. Now, if only my French were better, I might not feel this way, but it is indeed odd, or perhaps not so, that the expression and scope of human emotions is not a culturally unique sensation, but rather quite universal. Ah, the beauty, of course, of the internet is that you can piece together meaning with the aid of instant translators, absolutely unsatisfactory for any sort of real work, but just fine for those few words of which you have no knowledge; it often helps to translate into various languages and from them to others (that is if you count yourself as, albeit partially, multilingual, because then you get a more shaded meaning...) Now the daunting task is the book I have to read on Ladino for research purposes that hasn't been translated into either English or Spanish. And the professor says, oh, you'll have no problem, it is all technical language. Ah yes, I am not a "linguist" either, so it will be equally unintelligible for me in any language is what he must have meant. Ach. I will try, and feel a little proud of myself if I actually acheive extracting any meaning whatsoever from the (happily) diminutive tome.