Is the Cibber piper in the V&A a notorious plague-pit drunkard?
Featuring O du lieber Augustin, the Thomases Dekker and Middleton, Daniel Defoe and various disreputable beggars and foreigners.
Tag: hackney
Organ grinders and monkey and marmot migration
Any proto-ecologists don’t seem to have cared very much.
Brenda strikes back
“Don’t waste your time on obscure contemporary composers, John,” she said.
¡A por los títeres!
La feria madrileña imita a Petruskha.
Barrel organ available for losing bettors on the Iowa caucuses
Exemplary punishments from the 1892 US presidential election.
Tweets for January 2016
Christmas carousels
Impossible automata for my street organ this holiday season. Featuring Georg Büchner, Ignaz Bruder, German Christmas pyramids, dancing Hasidim, Lieutenant Kijé as you’ve probably never seen it, Le Tigre, and a crustacean.
Protected: Seniorita’s sauna and massage parlour, Chatsworth Road, Clapton, London (This post started elsewhere as a bit of linguistic jokery about George Formby, Al Jolson and Balkan turbo-folk, but unhappily became a focus for daft, drunk men looking for prostitutes. To read it please enter the German version of the first name of the translator of the Bible into Middle English)
Hackney Brook restoration scheme
Iain Sinclair wrote of when “global warming rolls a warm sea [up] the course of the old Hackney Brook.” The flow’s going to be the other way. Let me explain.
My top 10 boxing songs
All-star bill featuring Dan Mendoza aka the fighting Jew, manly Victorians, Joe Louis and the Dixieaires at the Battle of Jericho, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, Rocky Graziano aka the Maharishi Yoghurt, Bob Dylan and Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, Muhammad Ali and over-reliance on computer technology, Rich Hall and the George Foreman Grill, Wesley Willis and Batman, and Ivor Cutler.
