If we can find a couple more hotels or cantinas with functioning pianos, we’ll be touring Mexico this summer with our repertoire of Ibero-American classics. Here’s Ramón Moreno playing an item from our repertoire, La puerta se cerró detrás de ti, with as a coda the nemesis faced at one time or another by every pianist:

10 more Latino faves from the 30s, 40s and 50s:

1. La borrachita
2. Eclipse de luna en el cielo
3. Esto es felicidad
4. Mi viejo amor
5. No me hagas recordar, aka No me platíques
6. No vale la pena
7. No me vayas a engañar
8. Para Vigo me voy
9. Pecadora
10. Soy un extraño para tí

The career of Luis Miguel is based around this kind of sublime crap. I must say I prefer his bank account to his style.

Barcelona was taken by the Vandals, but the local press managed to contain its curiosity. Barcelona council and the Catalan government have decided that Barcelona is a beautiful, happy, loving place, and he who pays the piper calls the tune, whatever the long-term costs of maintaining a disjunct between perception and reality. On the same theme: the political strikes against politically-controlled Telemadrid, and the new Galician government’s hilarious statement that it is to stop paying the media for political favours and instead subsidise those that maintain “quality and employment”.

Meanwhile, Almodóvar has turned round and bitten the hand that made him, but that’s personal. I’m told Mujeres al borde vs Mujeres desesperadas is a sorry mismatch. OK, I watched them both.

The NY Times thinks the Italians may be catching on to Berlusconi, and, unlike El País, which makes a mint out of prostitution ads, the Italian left is standing up for traditional values:

“Things are completely turned upside down,” said Gianluca Nicoletti, a commentator for Il Sole 24 Ore radio. “Those who always represented the family and faithful couples are happy to justify hanky-panky,” he said. While some on the left, “which always professed a belief in total sexual freedom, are now like inquisitors with their fingers wagging.”

I think Trimalchio’s still in with a substantial chance in a country where it’s reasonably OK for brides to elope with best men.

Repeats: Spanish unions are backing the haves, the Catalan government doesn’t like free trade, Paul Day@Reuters says Zapatero’s stimulus plan is about rearranging the deck chairs on a Titanic labour market, and if the Tories are going to espouse social and economic liberalism then they probably shouldn’t be looking to Spain for allies.

Tags: Barcelona, Berlusconi, Catalonia, Galicia, Italy, Luis Miguel, pianists, Telemadrid
Categories: Empires, rulers and warfare, Les bourgeois, Music, The family

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