Monday 25 August 2008

Help!

Friday night we met Aurora, the Italian Linguistic Anthropology professor, for dinner in Bairro Alto. I had duck a la orange, which was perfect, and we shared a few pitchers of the house wine and clam apps. The night was quite odd. Mario, the only Asian from our class who joined us, asked if we wanted to join him afterward at a Karaoke bar in my neighborhood (Martim Moniz) with a few friends. A few of us agreed and I went alone with Mario to catch the metro to MM. En route he started to make some phone calls in Cantonese and over the course of our journey I discovered that we weren’t going to a Karaoke bar, but rather a rented room in the Asian district of the Socorro freguesia that specialized in private Karaoke in Chinese. First he told me that the “bar” was about a half hour walk from the metro stop (it was literally 30 feet away), and that it wasn’t a bar per se, but a room, and that there were no songs in English, and the phone calls he was making was to see if he could invite a few extra people. He tells me then that he plays in a band and I say, “like what, rock & roll?” And he doesn’t understand. He then asks me if there are any American musicians that are famous and before nearly fainting I say “have you ever heard of Elvis?” Negative. “How about the Beatles?” (I realized after a sober pause that they weren’t American but decided not to correct myself) Again, no. Then, as my head began to reel out of control, I asked him to please tell me the American bands he has heard of. He mentions the Backstreet Boys. My heart is palpitating and the Largo de Chiado is spinning around me as I try to digest all of this new information about my friend Mario. I am a bit speechless.

We get to Martim Moniz and he starts to walk to the Karaoke “bar” when I ask him, “shouldn’t we wait for the others?” Apparently he only asked his group if I could come and then Aurora pulls up with her boyfriend who also speaks Cantonese. He tells them they can come after all and when we arrive to the Karaoke spot 30 seconds later. We pass two Asian massage parlors going up one flight of stairs. Mario took the elevator. We meet him and walk in to see 7 Asian girls and one Asian guy singing (Sinatra’s version--obviously in English) “My Way”. So this is already three lies Mario has told me in the span of one hour. Most of the girls have some sort of headband with either leopard, cat, or Minnie Mouse ears attached and are dancing on the couch while singing a pretty accurate version of “My Way”. They immediately hand me the microphone because they said I looked like a young Sinatra. I, of course, immediately do the Sid Vicious version and they loved it and asked me to do another. I look at the table and am astonished that everyone is drinking canned tea. No drugs, no alcohol, no cigarettes, just tea and dried fruits. I guess Karaoke was originally a fairly healthy event, and upon being exported to America it took on the format as another way to express oneself as a decadent, out-of-tune, lush.

The Asian girls sang two songs reading from a series of subtitles in characters I found incomprehensible. Then they asked me to pick a song. The only one I immediately recognized was “Hotel California”, which apparently is completely out of my range. You see, when I do Karaoke, I usually do songs I can perform spot on, like Rolling Stones songs, but this Eagles song (although I knew it backwards and forwards—enough to ignore all the misspellings and incorrect words written on the screen) was a real challenge for my vocal chords. I wasn’t asked to do another song for a few hours and so I tried to see if I could decipher this language as the characters flashed before my eyes repeated in front of images that I imagined were conveying the meaning of the song. I realized later when I was finally asked to do another song that the images had nothing to do with the lyrics. I did “Unchained Melody” and the whole time the video that accompanied the Righteous Brothers masterpiece was filled with skiers wiping out. I thought about it for awhile and still haven’t been able to make the connection. Immediately after, I guess as a masochistic novelty act for those present, I was forced to do “Venus”. I didn’t know how the verses of this song go, and I still don’t. Then I was forced to do “Let it Be”, and I told Mario then that this was a Beatles song, which caused some confusion in the room. Halfway through this song they finally took the microphone away from me and gave it to Aurora and her squeeze to finish. Apparently there is no room for artistic interpretation in China, even for artists they don’t know of. Or perhaps I was off key, but that is unlikely.

On Saturday I went to the beach with Josue and his Dutch/Portuguese friend Pinto. Josue had just got back from a trip to Rotterdam to go to his grandmother’s funeral. On the day Pinto came to visit him he was already on his way out of Lisbon. So for one week, we had a replacement Dutch. If this place were the setting of a sitcom that I was watching, I think I would have figured that the actor playing Josue was in a contract negotiation or rehab and so the producers had to find someone to take his place. As soon as Josue got back a couple days later Pinto has to leave. So anyway, Pinto Leite (his name in Brazilian Portuguese means Dick Milk) told me his niece might come to visit us before he goes. And I told him he seemed young to be an uncle, and he replied that she is his aunt. And I paused to consider the math involved in the incestuous relationship that would result in a person being your aunt and niece at the same time. And so I asked him, “so let me get this straight…your brother had sex with your grandmother and the child they had was your aunt and niece?” He told me that this wasn’t the case, but rather she is his father’s sister’s child, and I was still confused and stuck on incest and asked, “so your father had a child with his sister?” And he said, “what’s wrong with you? My father’s sister married another guy and had a child, my niece”. So then I realized he had his terms mixed up and I told him he meant that she was his cousin and we agreed that that was what his relationship to her was. Apparently in Dutch cousin is translated with two genders and is the same word as niece for a girl, and nephew for a guy. I guessed he liked the way I thought anyway and we got along well after that, so I told him the meaning of the word chrononecroincestiofilia.

1 comment:

Ryan said...

...hadn't heard of Elvis?? I thought Elvis was, like Michael Jackson, someone any starving child in some third world gutter had heard of. Amazing.