Hungary – Leeds's Singing Organ-Grinder

Organ-grinding tweets for February

More untruths & idle opinions.

The Singing Organ-Grinder’s tweets for October

More rubbish.

Organ-grinder in courtyard - Bruno Schulz illustration to his story Księga, The Book, 1937.

London organ-grinder tweets for September 2017

Barrel/street organ stuff.

Napoleon as Harlequin, tumbler, fraudster, monkey (?): Come, come, honest gents, have you ever seen a comedy like that!

Viktor Orbán 0, Shakespeare 1

Mr Fido, who compensates for a distinct lack of charm with cunning a-plenty, has a piece in the Frankfurter Allgemeine. Called “Are you against peace?”, the customary response to awkward questions of Communist officialdom during the Soviet era and of EU officialdom now, he says that we should be worrying rather less about the future…

Anti-colonial cannibal propaganda

I want to sing the Mau Mau verse in Allan Sherman’s Hungarian Goulash No. 5.

Run like a gypsy

With Imanol Arias as El Lute, retired generaliser George Borrow, and walking and running style as social differentiators.

The Turks' gypsy hangman on the point of giving the Greek hero a new walking style in a scene from a Greek shadow puppet play (<a href='http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database/search_object_details.aspx?objectid=3291073&partid=1&fromADBC=ad&toADBC=ad&titleSubject=on&physicalAttribute=on&numpages=10&images=on&orig=%2fresearch%2fsearch_the_collection_database.aspx&currentPage=6'>British Museum</a>). An Ottoman custom? A Barcelona cop tells me that his Algerian colleagues stamp on the ankles of bagsnatchers, making them easier to identify and capture next time.

The storks of war

A fragment from Italo Calvino’s quasi-17th century folk romance, Il visconte dimezzato/The cloven viscount, uses storks as a portent of battle. Several unconnected 2nd century Greek accounts might appear to do the same, perhaps particularly if one’s a lazy sod and doesn’t read anything but scraps of stuff on Google Books.

Early 20th century photographs of European gypsies

Arthur Thesleff seems to have burnt most film further east, but there’s a nice snap of some early Andalusians.

Mexico City’s organ-grinders

On the same day the Enola Gay dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, a small Mexico City pharmaceutical manufacturer offered the distinguished Hungarian Jewish contract bridge player, George Rosenkranz, work synthesising progesterone from inedible yams. He fell in love with the city immediately: I saw the blue sky, the volcano, and heard this music outside my…