Michael Gilleland believes it was coined by Ezra Pound (“It occurs in one of the Pisan Cantos, dated 1948”). I wonder if the Spanish-speaking peoples, who have considerable experience in the field, may not have been first. José Ortega Munilla’s Chispas del yunque were published in ABC 1920-2, and in GBS’ useless snippet view he…
Sez our foreign correspondent of Bar Agujas d’Ouro in Estremoz, Portugal. Its radical eclecticism picknmixery suggests the architect may have mistakenly interpreted the lack of aesthetic coordination in many cathedrals and other large, old, respectable buildings as the result of a synchronic design choice rather than the typical diachronic process in which committees regret the…
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…
One of the first times I played in public as a kid was at the local Polish club, and I remember trying to figure out what all these old folks were doing in this neighbourhood, amid numerous refugees from newer tyrannies in Asia and Africa and Latin America. After that it was a short conceptual…
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.
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…
Raquel Meller, the most successful Spanish artist of the 20th century, struggling with pitch and pace in 1914: Sara Montiel, who made her name in the 50s singing old Raquel Meller songs, only much better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uwvaa-qZVy4 Rudolph Valentino, who would have struggled to compete with barnyard animals had films not been silent: Maybe the X…
From the often superb BBC WWII site: As France fell my great uncle Ioannis (John) Colentzos was captain of a Greek freighter berthed in Bordeaux. He a did not wish to remain in the port as he was uncertain of what the outcome might be for his vessel once the Germans got there. Greece was…
Sez No Good Boyo: “If you’d known who he was, would you have killed him?” “Of course. He was fifth-columnist, Trotsky-Maxtonite traitor to worker class. My boys would have tattooed hammer and sickle on his head with bullets. We had many. Soviet economy strong.”