Não é desgraça ser pobre, there ain’t no shame in being poor, and sometimes it’s better only being able to afford one tranny hooker. By Amália Rodrigues, who I only discovered the other day.
When I saw this first I briefly thought it was Montjuïc viewed from Maians Island, where Quixote first saw the sea. But the sun sets west, not south, and those are mountains in the background, not clouds. So it must be Italy, somewhere. Here’s the text.
Mr Clarke blogging at It’s Probably The Pox, My Son links to a typical bit of mendacity, or gross ignorance if you are feeling charitable, from John Hooper at the Guardian: Silvio Berlusconi, who won a general election earlier this month, welcomed the latest evidence of Italy’s leap to the right by declaring: “We are…
Apparently it’s quite well-known, but I only found it this morning in HG Bohn’s A hand-book of proverbs (1855), in the household reading room: To build castles in the air. Far castelli in aria.–Ital. The French say, Faire des chateaux en Espagne. It is tempting although perhaps erroneous to believe that this derives from Frankish…
Peret’s (Catalan-language) recording of El mig amic is from Spanish telly in 1969, when, as Wikipedia continues to remind us, the “use of Catalan in the mass media was forbidden.” Such claims have decreased considerably over the last five years due solely to kalebeul‘s relentless and fearless campaigning. One important defeat for the inventors of…
Generic Manu Chao-ist dumbagogy in Che Sudaka‘s latest ¡uf!re, but a nice little Raval puppet theatre by Marta Pujol & Joan Picó: http://www.veoh.com/videodetails2.swf?player=videodetailsembedded&type=v&permalinkId=v6538025ABKFWbSr Something with a bit more musical class (tho in playback) from pioneer Peret, Mataró-born and hence the only sensible reason why the genre is called rumba catalana instead of barcelonesa: I sometimes…
The proceedings of the Old Bailey are now searchable to 1913. Apart from anything else they are an interesting source of information re the misfortunes of London’s Spanish population, from the refugees from Fernando VII to the anarchist trials in the 1890s. The following testimony to the traditional linguistic handicap of the Iberian tribes was…
–¡Alfonso primero! –¡Alfonso XIII! Probably one of those time-space-specific things. Alfonso XIII strikes me as an infinitely superior as far as witless losers go, but I wasn’t there at the time.
John Chappell links to an old piece from the Stephen Roth Institute in Tel Aviv which claims among other things that “reports about Israel occupy a disproportionate amount of international space in the Spanish media”. If their frame of reference is countries in a similar situation to Spain and and with a similar relationship to…
Shop deliveries free on foot in Leeds LS1-8 & LS13. Dismiss