I humbly draw your attention to a new minisite–fear of public shame may help me get round to doing it. Meanwhile the Barcelona historical almanac continues to progress, although the timeline and feed and various other stuff need fixing.
The beautiful and the damned Is is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less moth-eaten man who grinds…
This is not Bert Gilbert, the actor, wife-beater and adulterer (although possibly solely for the purposes of the decree nisi) who starred as ‘Arry Wilkins in the 1906 demonstration at the Hippodrome of the effects of The flood on London, of which was wrote: Three hundred thousand gallons of water sweep away the bridges, pull…
QE1 once sent an organ avec grinder but sans monkey to Sultan Mehmet, but I don’t think anything good came of it–at any rate, there’s not much Orlando Gibbons being played in Istanbul these days. Biciclown, the excellent Álvaro Neil, is in Istanbul at the moment. Here’s one of his promotional videos: And here’s de…
I thoroughly approve of Reactor‘s carriage propulsion concept: But will I be able to find such people to draw me across Europe? On balance, bicycle may still be best.
Meet El Novio de la Muerte/Death’s Groom, back from the tomb (he wasn’t human anyway), and his angel-wolf Canute: Hear him sing “Agua de los ríos”: More here, including ¡how Canuto saved Death’s Groom from serpents! ¡the treasure and the skeleton’s ring! and ¡El Novio’s unfortunate relationship with the head of the bað̞a’xoθ paddleboat fleet!…
This may just be one of those hateful things people here say about the capital, but someone the other day told me that, in the first part of the C20th, the number of barrel organs per head of population in Madrid far exceeded that in Barcelona. Armando Palacio Valdés’ autobiographical La novela de un novelista…
I was cycling to a barrel organ meeting last night when I passed a group of Moroccans, one of whom threw something at me while another shouted “Nigger!” If I’d been slightly more awake, I’d have done a bit of ironic chromatic inversion on Blake.
Nightfall in Madrid, which was apparently notorious (Pérez Galdós, Rosalía, ca 1872): In the house a sepulchral silence reigned, but outside the noise was unbearable: carriages came and went without cease; a girl cried the lottery every five minutes, informing the public, “Tomorrow’s the last day to get your tickets. 10 reals for a décimo…
Shop deliveries free on foot in Leeds LS1-8 & LS13. Dismiss