Hungary – London's Singing Organ-Grinder

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!

The Singing Organ-Grinder’s top 10 pig songs

Sincerity meets spam.

Pig-shaped terracotta rattle, Cypriot 3rdC BC-2ndC BC.

More consonant-thicket dyslexia: Joan B. Culla and “Augsleich”

Sorry, transcription again, not translation. No idea how Joan Culla finds time between his telly and radio gigs to teach contemporary history at the UAB; perhaps “contemporary” doesn’t reference the C19th; and maybe Barcelona historians don’t need any German. But if Central European Ausgleich is your premise, then you should really be able to spell…

Anti-colonial cannibal propaganda, anyone?

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

But is that acorn-fed Iberian black pig or shoe leather you’re chomping?

Christmas time is ham time. It’s also a time when, knowing that some of you may have had one or two bottles too many, some tapas bars and restaurants will flog you cheap ham as something rather better – cat for hare, as the Spanish say. In the run up to Christmas last year the…

Black Iberians ranging free-ish, Sierra de Aracena, Andalusia, Spain.

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.

A tribute to the Valencian work ethic

Featuring my draft recording of “El dilluns jo no treballe”, with various other European “7 days lazy” songs.

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.