Shite so cheesy it’s amazing the BBC didn’t beat PBS to it:

(Yes, head cheese, but shite cheese or cheese shite, probably not.)

No mention of heroin, but presumably it is only a matter of time before inspectors start banning players for risky rasgueado and closing all those nasty cellars lacking in natural light. Camarón might still be alive if he had been given a cubicle and regular coffee breaks.

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 Béla. Born of a Jewish-Russian-Hungarian family in Kiev, he became a star in pre-war Berlin playing tangos and then fled via Paris, London and Vienna to … Buenos Aires, where his success continued. One suspects that if he had been a coal merchant his grave would be on the banks of the Tyne. Here’s his orchestra playing “You look absolutely scrumptious again tonight, my dear lady”, and, ahem, doesn’t she:

What about Xavier Cugat? Well he was a Polak, of course…

Posting may be light over the next few weeks due to my old friend Mr Mammon.

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 from June to August 1944 or the events further east in May 1945. The French do (did) have maypoles (in September), of course, because they are actually Germans, curse their dark and devious souls.