War and amusements – Leeds's Singing Organ-Grinder

Karlheinz Stockhausen, “one of the most important … composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries”?

The computer says no.

Whenever I see The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, I think of Alphonse Laurencic

And here. I would dearly love to find out more about Alphonse and his creations. Someone once showed me a magazine with a few relevant pictures, but I’ve forgotten who/what/where. All but the blind will have noticed my background tribute on this blog’s front page to Robert Wiene. The OpenFlix/YouTube publishing of Dr Caligari is…

Manga monster in a Tarragona wood

Pity you can’t see it from the motorway. Or perhaps not. (H/t Abandonalia)

The new geography of X is not Y

Berlin is not Bonn, Bonn was not Weimar.

¡España británica!

Why impose disastrous Spanish policies on thriving Gibraltar when British colonisation of Spain would have so many advantages?

Vitoria: Wellington could have had it all.

Best ever portrait of June Caprice?

This original drawing with its delicious absinthe blue is by one Emili Vilà Gorgoll (Llagostera 1887-1967, who he?) & is up for auction at Balclis on Wednesday. Here’s the competition. I go basically for the munchies and the odd curiosity. I sense an inverse relationship between price and personal preference – the expensive stuff seems…

Crisis, what crisis?

Rodolfo de Angelis’ great 1930s hit explains how to get ourselves out of the mess we’ve got ourselves into.

Gaudí Sands, a retro slave colony?

Gaudí’s work was financed from the fortune built upon Joan Güell’s Cuban slave empire, so if Eurovegas is going to come to the marshes of the Llobregat, what more appropriate way to staff it than by shackling and transporting some of the tens of thousands of locally unemployed Africans?

Needed, a ballad for the Olli Rehn empire

Featuring Umberto Eco on Orgasmus, an obscure Restoration Scottish nationalist on London, Mexico’s revolutionary and narco-corridos, and Italian Renaissance bandit- and Camorra-praise poetry, all for the benefit of the European Union’s commissar for provincial affairs.

Category: War and amusements