Lunch topics: Marianism and genital iconography, as in The Virgin Mary is a hairy vagina. Conclusion: this one smells of red herring–she actually belongs to the sun. The inability of “artists” to fit a proper fanny and a proper face into the same screen. The three best known forerunners of Bob Guccione-style gynaecology, Courbet’s stilled…
The Google Earth version of ancient Rome is a bit like a collection of faked-up trainspotters’ notebooks. Until they find some way of populating it with exfoliant opera, our best bet as responsible amateur social historians is the porn industry: European production company Daring Media Group will release its first movie, Roma, in October at…
An interesting piece by the always interesting Ilan Stavans in a new French literary mag on the doormat describes briefly how in the States, with the success of Junot Díaz’s killer novel The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao and other stuff, Spanglish has moved from the rebellious, designed-to-be-misunderstood fringe to the mainstream. What we…
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,…
Someone commented that penícula is probably not a gypsy neologism for a film dealing with the sorrows of life but a childish l/n swap, the fruit of orthographical panic caused by a relatively unfamiliar word. Although we’re clearly dealing with a different level of literary accomplishment, I suggest that Finalcial Times falls into the same…
The Spanish DVD is poorly produced but this error was probably planned: George finds sanity through lunacy, monarchy through dethronement. The film is as fine in its own way as the original play was, and Nigel Hawthorne is divine. Handel was George I and II, not III, but period films normally inflict far greater musical…
