Barcelona. Shop no 1 is closed at 11:30, well within its normal opening hours. The iron street blinds are down and there’s no message posted, so I walk across town to shop no 2. Yes, no problem, pay now and we’ll confirm the delivery date in a moment. The call comes a couple of hours [...]

Another sentimental tango from from Tio de la Tiza and the Bebabouched Moors demonstrates a firmly-rooted belief in 1891 Cadiz in the Decadence of the Nation, even before the disaster of 1898 and its long aftermath exacerbated the gulf between a diligently managed press and wild popular fears:
Una inocente niña llorando estaba
y con acento [...]

Daisy chaining: Cadiz declined after the War of Independence against the French and suffered the final blow with the loss of the last colonies in 1898, but, if it never achieved the notoriety of Barcelona, it was still an interesting mix of people. Here’s one of my favourite songs, from one of carnival’s great personalities, [...]

African-ish bands have been the talk of Andalusian ports since Cervantes. In 1935 the carnival association Orquesta Senegalesa didn’t win any prizes with this song:
Aquí está la Orquesta Senegalesa
que tocamos las notas con gran limpieza,
llegamos desde Londres en un tranvía
a visitar la tierra de la alegría.
Hemos visto mujeres a cual más bellas
y un vino blanco [...]

Siegfried Anton den Boer/Siegfried Andre Den Boer Kramer/Anthony van den Boer/Tony Ronald/Tonny Ronald etc, born Arnhem 1941/1943/1944, permanently resident in Barcelona from 1959/1960, recording nevertheless in Holland in Dutch and German until 1963, either has the best or the worst memory in the world. Here’s his 1971 summer hit, Help!, in Spanish:

… and in English [...]

Ah! “Oranges, golden oranges of Spain, the daughters of the sun!” on a promo disc intermediated by David Noades.
The campaign was, according to this auction site, actually late 1960s and featured some revolting children and serving suggestions on the inside cover and some rather alarming dwarves on the outside:

… but here anyway is Arturo Barea, [...]

Apparently some ladies & gents with whom I sing when the big geezer is off doing other stuff are going to be on the telly quite a lot.

Apart from the odd bit of arranging, the barrel organ is the thing at the moment, when I get time. It’s a somewhat more lonely path, but I’m [...]

Graffiti of Camarón de la Isla and guitarist, somewhere in Barcelona, I think in Carmelo, so overlooking the place where he died:

More here.
Kabe-Otoko/Wall Man, neither human nor demon, observes the world from within walls:

Easy: in a country prone to civil war it’s important to have something everyone can agree on, regardless of their local ethnic and linguistic allegiances. The Balkans form the obvious comparison: chronically incapable of even vaguely democratic self-government, they imported German princes in the nineteenth century and are now erecting statues of Bob Marley. So [...]

The Emperor Wu is very pleased with his new toy. Now all that needs to happen is for someone else to enter all the walks we actually do and correct the details of the ones already in there.
The purpose of this kind of stuff is to enable inclusion of walks and similar activities run [...]

Here. They only let you download five daily. (Debussy never dreamt that l’après-midi d’un faune would become a tech joke.)

Re John Chappell’s smack toddler, here’s Thomas COW from Bangor, County Down, Northern Ireland singing “Bottle take effect” by Jim Reeves:

There’s a photo out there somewhere of my father helping me drink Guinness out of a bottle, aged 3. I think we’ll be able to pull statute of limitations on that one.
(Via Clinton McClung [...]

Mr Hammond is looking for sponsors for his 24-hour (church) organ marathon (with webcam) next Tuesday at St Edmund’s (that’s the king), Northwood, Middlesex. Lohengrin is somewhere after three in the morning, Italy at five, and fortunately there’s no Spanish repertoire. A month ago he was having the odd problem with Widor.

Homosexuallord Fields votes for Los Shakers from Montevideo. Scroll down the post for MP3s.

Over at WFMU, probably the best music station in the world. Not much from this neck of the bosque, although they’ve got Los desechables, who I didn’t know, and the vile Eléctrica Dharma, who I do know and whose only merit is in having given rise to our freestyle pakrock outfit, Eléctrica Shoarma.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

“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.

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 [...]

This delectable flor del mal from Barcelona’s Poble Sec district is a daisychain from A Nun’s link to a review of a book dealing with degradation and deviancy in the same neighbourhood. New York, April 26 1926:
Ushers with tall combs and white mantillas stole back up the aisles as the house lights faded out. The [...]

I humbly draw your attention to a new minisite–fear of public shame may help me get round to doing it. Meanwhile the Barcelona historical almanac continues to progress, although the timeline and feed and various other stuff need fixing.

A flamencocrat says goodbye. I thought nation branding was the kind of thing undertaken only by scoundrels like Tony Blair and Andrei Zhdanov, both of whom were capable of presenting their villainy with slightly more tact.

Uliczkę znam w Barcelonie, by the great Sława Przybylska, who has no English-language Wikipedia entry, and who I first got to know during a dissolute spell in a village near Breslau, or whatever it’s called these days. I have no idea who sang the original or who wrote it–I’m guessing it wasn’t a Pole, since [...]

Meet El Novio de la Muerte/Death’s Groom, back from the tomb (he wasn’t human anyway), and his angel-wolf Canute:

Hear him sing “Agua de los ríos”:

More here, including ¡how Canuto saved Death’s Groom from serpents! ¡the treasure and the skeleton’s ring! and ¡El Novio’s unfortunate relationship with the head of the bað̞a’xoθ paddleboat fleet! Extremadura has [...]

I rather liked this interview with Andalusian import ethnomusicologist Gerard/Gerhard Steingress. Spaniards cheerfully call each other Nazis all the time, but when an Austrian uses the word it carries rather more weight. It will be interesting to see whether institutions down south continue to publish his work. Google him (with the h)–he’s distinctly more impressive [...]

One of the many etymologies of flamenco is rather curious. From the typically poor Spanish-language entry in Wikipedia:
Durante el siglo XVIII el asistente Olavide pretendió combatir el bandolerismo instaurando colonias de catolicos alemanes y flamencos (tenidos por disciplinados y laboriosos) en el Alto Guadalquivir. El fracaso de adaptación de muchos de ellos engrosó las [...]

Items:

Shasha: worn-out palm-broom. (Pott, Doppelung (Reduplikation, Gemination) als eines der wichtigsten Bildungsmittel der Sprache, beleuchtet aus Sprachen aller Welttheile (1862))
Gananciosa took a new-palm broom, which she found in the house, and with scratching it, made a sound, that though it was hoarse and rough, agreed well enough with [Escalanta's] patten… Rinconete and Cortadillo being surprized [...]

France’s finest trip over their own testicles once again, here alienating the trombone vote. Possibly.

(Mercy buckets, Dr Pete.) (Normal service to be resumed soon, so watch yer dirty mouth Manuel. Yes, you. They don’t call me Purple Boner for nothing.)

He claimed to be travelling around Britain and submitted his travel expenses based on fares listed in a British railway guide. A slight difficulty was that he did not understand the pre-decimal system of currency used in Britain, expressed in pounds, shillings and pence. He was unable to make sense of the British monetary system, [...]

Found whilst burning a pile of flyers. Maybe Soulside will tell us if this was a conscious tribute to the rock-dotted “n” in “This is Spinal Tap”.

From Manuel Fraga’s dreadful Nuevos diálogos, found yesterday on the street (it’s becoming a habit):
An old French song reminds us that “the pleasure of love only lasts a moment, while the sorrow of love lasts for ever.”
A pragmatic English take, probably also old:
What’s the difference between love and herpes?
Herpes is for ever.
You kind of wonder [...]

I’ve only ever been a witness of vomiting and fighting at midnight mass, but none of this is new. One of today’s Libro verde items records that until a few years [before 1848], mass was sung at one in the morning, but that the irreverences of the ignorant made it impossible. Henceforth it was celebrated [...]

The 2006 PISA report is a tribute to the success of Spanish regional and national governments and teaching unions in maintaining high levels of popular illiteracy and innumeracy–one wonders how many new property owners understood anything of the mortgages they contracted during the construction boom; see also ADN, which believes there’s a 1 in 20 [...]

This afternoon I have been booked to appear as the Bishop of Myra. This is one of the songs I will not be singing, zoophilia being out of fashion in Barcelona’s Dutch community (but for how long?): Sinterklaas kapoentje, geef de kat een zoentje, geef de kat een likkie, trek hem aan z’n pikkie.