Patricia Metola is a fine illustrator who’s had enough of people ripping off her work for profit or not. This contempt for intellectual property is an overwhelming concern for designers unable to afford lawyers, and is a major factor in limiting the availability of products online, where ripping is easy as plum pie. I’m particularly…
As well as dancing the old fandango, being a brigand on the mountains, etc. His father was a something from Barcelonia. Here. Can anyone make out the entire text? (This isn’t Funiculì funiculà.)
The Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901 is now remembered mainly for the assassination of McKinley by a Polish-American anarchist follower of Emma Goldman. However it was yet another triumph for Thomas A Edison, Inc and its electric chairs, X-ray machines (McKinley might have survived had an Edison X-ray machine been allowed to locate the…
There are various explanations of Spanish anti-Americanism. The post-colonial hypothesis is popular: Spain is bitter about its loss of empire, its defeat in 1898, its not being invited to the G-whatever. An alternative hypothesis is that anti-Americanism is frustration arising from the idea that an implicit bilateral dollars-for-favours deal has been violated. In Luis Berlanga,…
César-Javier Palacios reports on the cyclist, shot dead by a hunter who mistook him for a boar. When in death’s dark vale loud singing usually suffices to drive off hell’s hunters. Hunters know this too. In his romance, Count Arnaldos, hungry hawk in hand, falls prey to a sailor (love, glory or death, true or…
An extreme nationalist Basque group, ANV, was recently banned for being the latest in a succession of ETA front organisations. In Navarre their political representation promote Anschluss with the Basque Country proper, and in a small town called Villava their councillors hung the Basque flag (representing the race, the feudal laws, and the Catholic faith)…
Another sentimental tango from from Tio de la Tiza and the Bebabouched Moors demonstrates a firmly-rooted belief in 1891 Cadiz in the Decadence of the Nation, even before the disaster of 1898 and its long aftermath exacerbated the gulf between a diligently managed press and wild popular fears: Una inocente niña llorando estaba y con…
African-ish bands have been the talk of Andalusian ports since Cervantes. In 1935 the carnival association Orquesta Senegalesa didn’t win any prizes with this song: Aquí está la Orquesta Senegalesa que tocamos las notas con gran limpieza, llegamos desde Londres en un tranvía a visitar la tierra de la alegría. Hemos visto mujeres a cual…