Karl Marx condemns organ-grinders!

“Vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars”

Membres de la société de secours du dix Décembre, dans l'exercice de leurs philanthropiques fonctions.

Paintings by Yefim Ladizhinsky of street organs accompanying shows

A guy winding a handle isn’t much to look at, so it was cool to find this site dedicated to Yefim Ladizhinsky (1911-82), whose work I really like, and who shows Odessa organ-grinders working with other performers. Re Spectacle (organist bottom left) he writes: A street-organ is a musical chest the size of a small…

Accompanying the big A

In which I proffer my experience in the service of the East European mafia as a model for helping us help the Aricept generation.

Cover of The World magazine of Jan. 18, 1914 featuring Francis Grierson as Psychic Pianist. Public Domain over at <a href='http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Psychic_pianist.jpg'>Wikimedia Commons</a>

Eastern Black Sea Tour, Tunisia

TravelShop Turkey‘s bus doesn’t actually take you to Istanbul or Tunis, but love those krazy keywords (and of course even Trabzon isn’t that Turkish any more anyway).

From cooked to raw in Almería

It would be Å vankmajer-nice to think that the wide-scale conversion of Spanish country restaurants into brothels is the logical, albeit unexpected consequence of a social craze for abandoning what is feared to be cultural in favour of what is assumed to be natural. However, the replacement of cooks by pimps means that we have not…

Stereotyping at Puticlub [ie Brothel] de Luxe

… where, it seems, very fat men with beards and skirts are DJs, very thin men with beards and skirts are gogos, and semi-wrapped Egyptian mummies with not very much hair at all are barmen. Since it seems increasingly unlikely that I will ever be a daddy, maybe it’s time to ditch the dress and…