I am burning with desire to teach the Spaniards how Nordic women can love

“This incendiary message was broadcast from Berlin to hot-blooded Spain by dazzling, blonde Brita Brager. It had a coldblooded purpose: to persuade Spaniards that signing up for work in German munitions plants would be a short cut to a life of opulent lechery.” According to this Time story from 1943, Ms Brager was the 23-year-old…

Bologna baloney: Barcelona student protestors are either mad or stupid

Barcelona students are occupying universities and fighting with police in a titanic life and death struggle against the prostitution of universities to Capital. Meanwhile Google UK news produces only five ghits for “Bologna Declaration“, three of which are in English, one of which concerns the accord signed in 1999 and designed to make it easier…

Nerd riot

IT a profession for generally peaceful, libertarian innovators sans frontières? Not in Andalusia, where they’re demonstrating with the ultimate goal of excluding those without the correct government diploma. The OECD wants flexible labour markets. Spain wants guilds. Yet I’m sure this kind of thing must happen somewhere else–Gordimer would surely have had some if there’d…

Macbitch in Paris

CC says that Telva says that Jaume Plensa is simply panting to design some sets for Verdi’s Macbetch. I blame Telva’s legions of copy editors this time–they get Toulouse wrong too–but there’s no reason why not: “So this is the story of Lady Macbitch and her husband. The Queen stimulates herself with the props of…

Hot chicks in Cornell

Geo-sensitive porn chat ads cope as well with multi-key characters as the average wanker. I doubt not that Cornell University is a chattering of cheeky chicas, but at this time of year the weather’s rather better in Cornellá, Barcelona. Not that I’m in Cornellà, but you get the picture, and if you don’t then I…

Fines for “incorrect” language use

As we go into recession the governments of two mini-“nations”, one with a state, the other with considerable autonomy, both worse afflicted by the downturn than might reasonably have been expected 20 years ago, have, within days of one another, rediscovered vaguely Biblical and distinctly 1930s strategies to disguise their failures of economic management: blame…

“The Virgen Moroneta”

A moreneta is a little black woman. English speakers might assume that the moroneta Julià Travel is going to take you to visit is a stupid little woman, but Base de bandades says she is the patron saint of all Catalonia’s Moroccans. (There’s no direct attribution to Julià Travel on the site, but the texts…

My favourite Barcelona menus: Ca la Flor, Secretari Coloma 10

For a long time I’ve avoided the centre of town, where the keywords are minuscule and mediocre, but even in quieter districts it’s difficult to find a decent traditional menu for a sensible price. Ca la Flor (Secretari Coloma 10, metro Joanic) is just the job: €8.50 for three generous home-cooked courses with free-flowing booze,…

LIFE archive photos of Barcelona

PATIO ANDALUZ, conde del asalto 120, PRESENTS SPANISH FOLKLORE if you want to see the come along BEAUTIFUL GIRL’S will sing an dance for you… slow prices. A human adboard, but no pictures of US sailors sloping off into alleys with Spanish prostitutes on the 6th Fleet’s historic visit in 1952, although Bagdad was the…