Month: May 2008
My dream barrel organ sound
My uncle Bumba from Kalumba dances rhumba (and he’s German)
State responses to the Spanish construction slump
Kettledrum of potatoes with broken eggs and creaking ham
In praise of toads
Ben Shahn’s maypole
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The worst machine translation on the market couldn’t achieve results as bad as this. How? Why?
La Java Viennoise played at Les Primitifs du Futur: That looks like Fay Lovsky on musical saw, and yes, that is Robert Crumb in the background. You are going to do something by Ms Lovsky, asks S. Well, of course. I tend to prefer what I imagine are her B-sides, and unfortunately they don’t seem…
Señor Coconut was a timely reminder to those who needed one that the best performers of Latin American music have always been Central Europeans. Here’s der Onkel Bumba as immortalised by the Comedian Harmonists: Their life made impossible by Mr Goebbels, half the Comedians ended up in the States, but an even stranger fate awaited…
This excellent piece by Mr Butler provides background to Deutsche’s warning on Spanish mid-table banks and illustrates the eternal perils of investing in real estate in Andalusia–unless you happen to have Manuel Chaves’ mobile number. It will be ghoulishly interesting to observe whether interventionist regions fcuk up better or worse than the ones that still…
Here
George Sandford has left a fascinating comment on this post, which deals with an amusing 19th century literary-historical hoax–purported correspondence between Ferdinand the Catholic and an esoteric global selection of fellow-monarchs. George is family of the alleged editor, Brother Antonio the Goth, and thus of the Christian clan kidnapped by the Moors when they invaded…
Something puzzling me on V-E Day on May 8 last week: no one seems to have noticed that Ben Shahn‘s Liberation is a French maypole scene. I believe from the MOMA@NY blurb that it draws on a Cartier-Bresson image, but if it’s a maypole it must surely be celebrating the end of the war in…
Edward Fennell writes: “Looking ahead to the height of summer, I must commend to sunseekers a place at the specialist course that the City Law School is to run in Barcelona… Those who successfully complete the programme will be awarded a certificate of achievement. Those who fail to complete will earn a suntan (cum laude)…
Didn’t expect this one: “Not inviting Catalan authors writing in Spanish was, in my opinion, a big error. They should have positioned the Catalan culture as an open culture with excellent contributions in our mother tongue and also in other languages like Spanish. They could have even tried to find Catalans who write in other…
When I’m in Barcelona we often go and have a Sunday lunchtime beer on a bar terrace near Park Güell, ethnic Andalusian with scatterings of La Mancha and the Maghreb. The other day there was a new guy, well-dressed, which is uncommon here, and reading El país, which is even less usual. I’ve never heard…
Great tunes, great doggerel, small simians