An etymological hop from kite-flying with Juan Marsé back to Concha Piquer’s greatest hit.

From saviour to saved to savoury: the de-/remystification of bodily imperfection.

I wondered here whether pew-beating as a means of reliving medieval pogroms was a nineteenth century invented tradition. It was a rather naive question, and confirmation that the practice was already popular in Barcelona in 1848 is to be found in this Libro Verde entry for today, Holy Wednesday.

A British soldier’s hazy recollections of civil war in Portugal.

Is Silvio a cyborg?

Arthur Thesleff seems to have burnt most film further east, but there’s a nice snap of some early Andalusians.

“They will respect neither the putrefied corpses of high whores nor the imbecilic devotion of the wage earner to his master’s money.”

Moreto’s El desdén con el desdén and Reznicek’s Donna Diana: Vicky Christina Barcelonas of yesteryear?

If you haven’t got a head, you’re going to need some legs.

Statues are designed to be bird-friendly on the orders of a mysterious avian deity, which may have held sway over Luis Buñuel.

RMF over at Fum i estalzi quotes Josep Pla (”Notaries live in central locations and tend to occupy spacious apartments with very high ceilings”) and links to a business listings map of Barcelona notaries. I suppose if you hacked the streetview feature you could check out the high ceilings bit.

A conversation between Uncle Sam and Senyor Ambrós throws new light on notions of linguistic hegemony.

Local “anarchists” showing Nestor Makhno, paysan d’Ukraine this Friday.

So they’ve posted a report alleging Sir John Moore’s defeat by the weather, 200 years ago. It’s snowing a bit in Spain at the moment, but no signs of it turning into a repeat of 1829-30, when the Ebro froze, 1835-6, when eggs froze in their shells in Palencia, 1836-7, when it snowed on the [...]

JD had a bit more Time than I did and kindly sent me an article from 1930 which turns the tables on the filthy Swedes discussed this morning. It seems that towards the end of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship the Spanish postal service issued a stamp of Goya’s unshaven maja desnuda. Time writes:
The stamps (29,800) [...]

People in Barcelona have started relating the apparently low mortality rate among Chinese residents to identity theft in the way they did in London a few years back, but we’re never going to get back to the good old days before forensic tools like DNA testing, finger printing and ubiquitous photography.
There’s an entertaining story [...]

In my mail this morning: someone calling himself Miguel Yasuki Hirota is giving a talk on complementary currencies for sustainable development at 19:30 on the 15th at Argentona 11. Gugel reveals that “Miguel” is a fan of the author of The natural economic order, of whom almost everyone’s favourite (since last month, anyway) liberal fascist [...]

As well as dancing the old fandango, being a brigand on the mountains, etc. His father was a something from Barcelonia. Here. Can anyone make out the entire text? (This isn’t Funiculì funiculà.)

Josep Pla, El quadern gris, November 6 1918:
Coromina and my brother–a chemistry student–get entangled in an endless discussion about science. Coromina attacks–to my great surprise–my brother’s rooted conviction of the absolute priority of science in any system of human knowledge. Like all anti-rationalists, Coromina creates beautiful, brilliant phrases: he says, for example, that the discovery [...]

The Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901 is now remembered mainly for the assassination of McKinley by a Polish-American anarchist follower of Emma Goldman. However it was yet another triumph for Thomas A Edison, Inc and its electric chairs, X-ray machines (McKinley might have survived had an Edison X-ray machine been allowed to locate the [...]