Organ-grinder tweets for November 2017
More monkey mess from the peripatetic Homerton/Hackney barrel organ.
Tag: saint Petersburg
London organ-grinding tweets for October 2017
Lukewarm barrel organ-ish ephemera from Hackney, London and thereabouts.
On the French penchant for inventing things already in existence elsewhere
François Dominique Séraphin, Bourbon favourite and reputedly the father of ombres chinoises (shadow puppetry), began operating 15 years later than is generally thought, and may have copied his techniques from an itinerant Italian or a London Alsatian. Featuring the memoirs of the valet to the later Louis XVII, early descriptions of the delights of the renovated Palais Royal (including a pygmy show), jolly old Baron Grimm on the lamentable state of French opera, shadow plays, and marionettes, and William Beckford’s favourite designer of theatrical perversions.
I know where your house lives, but sometimes the front door’s a struggle
Featuring Abel and Marguerite Chevalley and their Concise Oxford French Dictionary.
Where did Petersburg’s organ-grinders go in winter?
I fear only some of them migrated with the swallows. Featuring Boris Sadovskoy, Yuri Norstein, Aleksey Batalov, Rolan Bykov and Gogol.
Donald for Dalai Lama, or Pope, or Caliph, or something
A Trump Taj Mahal Casino multitrack jukebox, to help make religion rather better than it has been, again.
A sensational 1810 Parisian fire scene on top of an 1840s Russian barrel organ
But who are the three noseless Austrian ladies?
¡A por los títeres!
La feria madrileña imita a Petruskha.
So where does Silvio Berlusconi stand on organ-grinders?
Unfortunately Alan Friedman’s excellent authorised bio, My Way, leaves us none the wiser.
