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 Dajos […]

Something puzzling me on V-E Day on May 8 last week: no one seems to have noticed that Ben Shahn’s Liberation is a French maypole scene. Here it is:

I believe from the MOMA@NY blurb that it draws on a Cartier-Bresson image, but I can’t remember whether this was intended to represent the liberation of France […]

This excellent piece by Mr Butler provides background to Deutsche’s warning on Spanish mid-table banks and illustrates the eternal perils of investing in real estate in Andalusia–unless you happen to have Manuel Chaves’ mobile number. It will be ghoulishly interesting to observe whether interventionist regions fcuk up better or worse than the ones that still […]

George Sandford has left a fascinating comment on this post, which deals with an amusing 19th century literary-historical hoax–purported correspondence between Ferdinand the Catholic and an esoteric global selection of fellow-monarchs.
George is family of the alleged editor, Brother Antonio the Goth, and thus of the Christian clan kidnapped by the Moors when they invaded […]

Edward Fennell writes: “Looking ahead to the height of summer, I must commend to sunseekers a place at the specialist course that the City Law School is to run in Barcelona… Those who successfully complete the programme will be awarded a certificate of achievement. Those who fail to complete will earn a suntan (cum laude) […]

Didn’t expect this one: “Not inviting Catalan authors writing in Spanish was, in my opinion, a big error. They should have positioned the Catalan culture as an open culture with excellent contributions in our mother tongue and also in other languages like Spanish. They could have even tried to find Catalans who write in other […]

When I’m in Barcelona we often go and have a Sunday lunchtime beer on a bar terrace near Park Güell, ethnic Andalusian with scatterings of La Mancha and the Maghreb. The other day there was a new guy, well-dressed, which is uncommon here, and reading El país, which is even less usual. I’ve never heard […]

All praise to Lenox over at Spanish Shilling, who got the shot without getting his head punched. “During the second half, perhaps inspired by a herd of goats being led past by a dusty looking old shepherd and a couple of dogs, the Cabras rose to even greater efforts and by the final whistle (and […]

Today in 1565 the True Cross was taken and dipped in the sea in order to assuage the great drought. Doesn’t look like that’s going to be needed this year after all. (Kalebeul’s History of Barcelona now does moveable feasts, although not quite in the way it would like. It is also unsure to do […]

Quite a lot of the Barcelona mapping at OpenStreetMap.org is already more detailed and reliable than some commercial products I’ve seen, although I briefly thought Plaça dels Angels had been mapped by skaters. Whatever happened to the UPC Barcelona mapping party?

L helped a cause.
L joined FACEBOOK EN CATALÀ!
6,121 members - $0 raised
People, get your wallets out.

Watching Helen Mirren last night. Quoth the people of Spain: Elizabeth -> Bess not Beth because it was given her by her Andalusian seseo-masters. And one was snoring too hard to disagree.

Stricken by Barcelona belly, I’ve been trying out this 19th century cholera cure. It’s better with rice, but I’m still surprised more people didn’t die. (Sublimated sulphur is used by modern-day lepers, says the chemist, so that wasn’t a problem.)

Montjuïc cemetery publishes a little map which, interested in historical renown, guides you past the generally terribly tedious tombs of well-known Barcelona citizens (good, bad, ugly) and thus omits the quite extraordinary artistic achievements of some of its less well-documented residents. Here is one of the finest funeral monuments, built by people who have clearly […]

And here’s a fine slash-and-burn assault on the show trial in a Barcelona court of some dirty bloody foreigners. Perhaps the most extraordinary wrongdoing in the whole affair is that over a number of years the police, which is to say the mayor, tolerated a squat run by a psychotic whose raves kept a densely […]

Asks Mr O’Brien: “[A]re foreign funding agencies getting any smarter about how to get more of their countries’ literary works translated into English? The answer is “not much,” or not at all. The country that has made this easier, for Dalkey Archive at least, is Japan. Other countries are on a kind of cusp: Romania, […]

“José Lone, natural de Madrid, casado con Francisca de San Pedro, de la que tenía un niño de 7 meses, de oficio tendero en la plazuela de Santo Domingo, núm.6, faltó de su casa desde el dia 2 de Mayo á las cinco de la tarde: su madre María Riscos dijo que tenía la […]

Vicente Carballido has Ctrl-C/V-ed a piece by Anna Rosa Cisquella, exec producer at theatre company Dagoll Dagom. Cisquella is frustrated by the relative lack of success of their excellent production of Boscos endins, the translation into Catalan of Sondheim and Lapine’s Into the woods. A birdie unassociated with the production tells me that the show […]

This non-authentic version of Paquito chocolatero is by King Africa, who is, according to Wikipedia, actually kind of American, and John Major’s favourite artist to boot:

Now an authentic version from Mike Oldfield, which doesn’t involve the mass simulation of anal sex popular down south:
The next three most favourite tunes are also pasodobles, namely Viva el […]

This is the anarchist serial killer who, according to a good series of articles by Josep Maria Sòria in La Vanguardia in 2003,

in April 1936 shot dead Miquel Badia. (To be fair, Badia had it coming, as he himself acknowledged: failed regicide, fascist bootboy and strikebreaker for “our caudillo” Francesc Macià, head of security under […]

Lucanus cervus (Ciervo volante) on the hills above San Juan de Plan in the Pyrenees of Huesca:

Proyecto Ciervo Volante writes:
Flight abilities seem, in principle, well developed. Fight speed reaches 6 km/h (D’Ami, 1981) but dispersal abilities are unknown. There are XIX century tales about mass movements (Darwin, 1871; Lacroix, 1968; Paulian & Baraud, 1982). […]

James Howell, Epistolae Ho-Elianae: Familiar Letters Domestic and Foreign (1754):
I am now in Barcelona; but the next Week I intend to go on through your Town of Valencia to Alicant, and thence you shall be sure to hear from me farther, for I make account to winter there. The Duke of Ossuna passed by here […]

One of the first times I played in public as a kid was at the local Polish club, and I remember trying to figure out what all these old folks were doing in this neighbourhood, amid numerous refugees from newer tyrannies in Asia and Africa and Latin America. After that it was a short conceptual […]

–Hola, buenos días, ¿tienes ex-votos?
–Yo nada de botos señor, pero la suegra se ha dejado hacer las domingas y están bastante bien.
//
Later, someone is getting on the bus driver’s nerves. So:
–¡No me toques los botones!

Sylvain Gouguenheim’s ‘“Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel” (Editions du Seuil), while not contending there is an ongoing clash of civilizations, makes the case that Islam was impermeable to much of Greek thought, that the Arab world’s initial translations of it to Latin were not so much the work of “Islam” but of Aramaeans and Christian Arabs, […]

Não é desgraça ser pobre, there ain’t no shame in being poor, and sometimes it’s better only being able to afford one tranny hooker.

By Amália Rodrigues, who I only discovered the other day.

When I saw this first I briefly thought it was Montjuïc viewed from Maians Island, where Quixote first saw the sea. But the sun sets west, not south, and those are mountains in the background, not clouds. So it must be Italy, somewhere. Here’s the text.

Mr Clarke blogging at It’s Probably The Pox, My Son links to a typical bit of mendacity, or gross ignorance if you are feeling charitable, from John Hooper at the Guardian:
Silvio Berlusconi, who won a general election earlier this month, welcomed the latest evidence of Italy’s leap to the right by declaring: “We are the […]

Apparently it’s quite well-known, but I only found it this morning in HG Bohn’s A hand-book of proverbs (1855), in the household reading room:
To build castles in the air. Far castelli in aria.–Ital. The French say, Faire des chateaux en Espagne.
It is tempting although perhaps erroneous to believe that this derives from Frankish experiences with […]

Peret’s (Catalan-language) recording of El mig amic is from Spanish telly in 1969, when, as Wikipedia continues to remind us, the “use of Catalan in the mass media was forbidden.” Such claims have decreased considerably over the last five years due solely to kalebeul’s relentless and fearless campaigning. One important defeat for the inventors of […]

Generic Manu Chao-ist dumbagogy in Che Sudaka’s latest ¡uf!re, but a nice little Raval puppet theatre by Marta Pujol & Joan Picó:
Something with a bit more musical class (tho in playback) from pioneer Peret, Mataró-born and hence the only sensible reason why the genre is called rumba catalana instead of barcelonesa:

I sometimes wonder what would […]

The proceedings of the Old Bailey are now searchable to 1913. Apart from anything else they are an interesting source of information re the misfortunes of London’s Spanish population, from the refugees from Fernando VII to the anarchist trials in the 1890s. The following testimony to the traditional linguistic handicap of the Iberian tribes was […]

–¡Alfonso primero!
–¡Alfonso XIII!
Probably one of those time-space-specific things. Alfonso XIII strikes me as an infinitely superior as far as witless losers go, but I wasn’t there at the time.

John Chappell links to an old piece from the Stephen Roth Institute in Tel Aviv which claims among other things that “reports about Israel occupy a disproportionate amount of international space in the Spanish media”.
If their frame of reference is countries in a similar situation to Spain and and with a similar relationship to […]

“I have in my mind the most masterly farts which, however, would be impossible to reproduce.” The farting policeman explains nevertheless how to perform the “Imperial”, the “Terminator” and the “Saturday Night”, which may or may not refer to the comparable artistic frustrations no doubt suffered by the admirable Mr Travolta.

San Jordi in Barcelona, and millions of females who would be perfectly happy eating hay are receiving roses from males who have problems reading a football shirt, never mind the book of 500 Catalan jokes they will get in return for their floral investment. We ecolefties disincline naturally from needlessy fucking up Lake Victoria and […]

Ta meao, pissed on, one rendering of the Generalitat’s €400,000 exercise in vanity publishing.

La Vanguardia, 2008/4/21: “Piratas somalíes secuestran un atunero vasco. El ‘Playa de Bakio’ lleva 26 tripulantes, trece africanos, ocho gallegos y cinco vascos. Anoche, una fragata española acudía desde el mar Rojo a auxiliar al barco.” Victims from north of the Mediterranean are dissimilated on the basis of their autonomous community, while victims from the […]

Eurotopia–a Europe consisting of a host of regional statelets–is actually 15 years old, and was produced by historian Henk Wesseling on request of beer magnate Freddy Heineken as a systematic response to the gradual decline in the efficacy of large (multi-)nation-states. He’s not proposing new, mini-nation states as desired by the less crazy Cataloonies, and […]

Raquel Meller, the most successful Spanish artist of the 20th century, struggling with pitch and pace in 1914:

Sara Montiel, who made her name in the 50s singing old Raquel Meller songs, only much better:

Rudolph Valentino, who would have struggled to compete with barnyard animals had films not been silent:

Maybe the X Factor isn’t so bad […]