Peter the Great’s April Fool’s jokes
Of dwarves, arson, stammerers, and binge drinking.
Tag: saint Petersburg
July tweets from London’s Singing Organ-Grinder
Top 10 Russian football songs: No. 5: Match (The Match) by Splin (Splean (spleen)) (2006)
Yet another Anglophile.
Top 10 Russian football songs: No. 7: the unofficial anthem of FC Zenit St Petersburg (1981)
It takes its tune and several lines from a 1960s song evoking the Siege of Leningrad and a verse and style from Liverpool fans’ 1979 performance against Dinamo Tbilisi of You’ll Never Walk Alone.
Top 10 Russian football songs: No. 9: Okolofutbola (“Round Football”, ahem) by Feduk (2013)
The hiphop theme of a cinematic tribute to Spartak ultras: “Stand in line with your brother and don’t take one step back / Russian brigades, like a bumper, ram our opponent.” Extras: Russian football hooliganism’s English roots; Anglicisms in a Russian hooligan lexicon; and use of “hooligan” in Russian before English, in an 1892 decree issued by a Petersburg mayor of Scottish descent.
Organ-grinding tweets for March 2018
The latest barrel organ news from Hackney, London.
The Singing Organ Grinder’s tweet archive for February 2018
Another abundance of redundance. Featuring Russian, German and Italian puppetry, organ-grinding, and other nonsense.
How to perform El retablo de Maese Pedro aka El retablo de la libertad de Melisendra in Don Quixote with one puppeteer and a narrator/bottler
Whether Cervantes saw it or not, it is possible as he describes.
The secret life of organ-grinders
Speculation in French revolutionary fiduciary currency, the murder of the great British ballad-singer, & a revised date (1802) for the start of the supposedly post-Napoleonic emigration of Italian puppeteers & organ-grinders
Whatever became of Christian Lehmann, pioneering Petersburg Shrovetide zookeeper, Pierrot, illusionist, showman?
Newly uncovered evidence shows that, following the fire which destroyed his Russian theatrical business in 1836, he and his family pursued a career in London and Europe, before repeating their Petersburg triumphs in the USA and Australia. Also, a very curious copyright case.
