Check out the excellent Mr Butler on how our “socialist” government is handing over, more or less for free, a substantial stake in a nominally Spanish energy business to a Russian oil business with allegedly major mafia participation in order to save a big construction company and hence rescue the domestic financial sector from overt…
It now seems that Iceland has defaulted, apparently believing Russia will be foolish enough to attempt to protect what’s left of its cod against ETA trawlers from Bilbao. Spain is not going down that road, at least not yet, but one of the more-quoted papers on the subject (De Paoli, Hoggarth & Saporta, Cost of…
Señor Coconut was a timely reminder to those who needed one that the best performers of Latin American music have always been Central Europeans. Here’s der Onkel Bumba as immortalised by the Comedian Harmonists: Their life made impossible by Mr Goebbels, half the Comedians ended up in the States, but an even stranger fate awaited…
Petrushka, accordeons and theatre lead inevitably to the best film ever: The tranny plumping up his chest to make the wedding guests smile for the cameraman remind me that this show needs tits. My pink dress–made by Lou B–has suffered over the years. If I knew where she lived I’d try to get her to…
If you’re interested in organs and theatre, quite soon you will visit Mr Stravinsky & Co and their lenten feast. Some background: The play Petrushka seems to derive from a native older Russian buffoon and minstrel tradition and the Western European puppet theater tradition with its roots in the Italian commedia dell’arte. Possible evidence of…
Thanks all for kind wishes. Cake under attack from fish: Afterwards I got to go walkies, and chose one of the old junkie trails to Can Tunis, made vaguely notorious in rather different form (before they built the freaking motorway and destroyed the old port and beaches) in Juli Vallmitjana’s interesting (he helped Picasso get…
The 2006 PISA report is a tribute to the success of Spanish regional and national governments and teaching unions in maintaining high levels of popular illiteracy and innumeracy–one wonders how many new property owners understood anything of the mortgages they contracted during the construction boom; see also ADN, which believes there’s a 1 in 20…
Low, horizontal view into a shop window just up from Mokkabon, with a serendipitous reflection of the façade of the building opposite and some Martian doodling top left. It reminded me of a Russian neo-folk piece from the 1920s I saw ages ago featuring Caucasian horsemen chasing across a rug of brightly coloured, irregular horizontal…
Apart from the end of the English Shadow, last night I read JM Castellet’s Els escenaris de la memòria. JM was a literary critic, which is French for vulgar gossip, whose occasional qualms regarding the persecution of Jews and sexual non-conformists in Russia don’t seem to have stopped him attending any number of well-catered Soviet-sponsored…
