Great tunes, great doggerel, small simians
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.
“Rhinoceros of the highlands / Beast coming from the South, it comes along steaming, / It comes from Pompi and from Kgobola-diatla.” With excerpts from oral poetry about cattle and other domestic and wild animals, marijuana, bicycles and the 2nd Boer War; with Kipling and other European South African railway poetry; and with Hugh Masekela as uitsmyter.
Cranking it up along the River Lea.
The latest barrel organ news from Hackney, London.
Another abundance of redundance. Featuring Russian, German and Italian puppetry, organ-grinding, and other nonsense.
More inanity from the Hackney organity.
Lukewarm barrel organ-ish ephemera from Hackney, London and thereabouts.
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.
Translations from Welsh and Yiddish revealing ornithomancy amongst the 19th century north Welsh and Jewish Lithuanians.
Featuring Abel and Marguerite Chevalley and their Concise Oxford French Dictionary.
